Happy New Year
A Happy New Year to you all from Conker’s. We hope you had a good one. Life has been busy before and after Christmas for us here. We had fun decorating the Christmas Tree in the Holiday Let for our Christmas guests to ensure a bit of festive cheer!! However shortly after Christmas we were all struck down by Covid but now all clear and back to normal. It was a long few weeks!!!!
We have been busy putting up a new High Health Animal Unit on the farm which we hope will help us move to a more sustainable way of farming. This unit is a specialist shed specifically for looking after calves with a slightly different design to the usual ones you encounter. It has a much lower roof which aids in reducing pneumonia in the cattle and thus need for antibiotics etc (you’ll have to ask Edward how this works but it’s something to do with the movement of stale air above the calves).
We hope to have our first batch of calves in the new shed in the Spring and then will rear them all year round. We have a very good working relationship with a company called Buitelaar who we supply most of our cattle too. They have been going for over a hundred years now and produce high quality meat with a vision of making their meat as sustainable as possible.
Sustainable ways of producing meat and products are now at the forefront of many people’s minds. We have already put “herbal leys”(grasslands made up of legume, herb and grass species) and wildlife corridors in many areas of our fields to encourage animal and insect diversity and the creation of habitats. We hope the high health animal unit will complement this as well as outdoor rearing our animals as much as possible. We will be converting some of our arable land back to grass land to enable this.
The best thing anyone can do regardless of being meat eaters, vegan or vegetarian is to eat locally produced, locally sourced and in season produce.
If you come and stay with us at Conkers’ David or Edward will happily have a chat to you about any of our projects! Check out our calendar for availability and send us an email!
