Farm of the Week: Former dairyman in the Dales restoring the traditional hedgerows of centuries ago

“This has always been grass, and only grass, probably since God was a lad. My granddad used to roll his eyes telling us he was made to plough in WWII and grow oats. ‘I could grow them,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t get the bloody stuff ripe’.

“There was a reason. We have north of four foot of rain here every year and first frost starting sometimes the last week in September with the last sometimes being as late as May. It’s not suitable for anything else but grass.

That doesn’t mean Anthony is a farmer stuck in his ways. He has always looked closely at his farming operation and acted accordingly.

Mearbeck was a dairy farm for many years until the family came out of dairying in 2000, something Anthony said took him a long while to get over, and that pigs were also on the farm until about a decade ago when Anthony and his brother Andrew went amicably their separate ways.

Anthony said it’s now solely about rearing calves on to store cattle and breeding sheep, and that he has looked back to look forward.

“When we came out of having milk cows I was heartbroken. I thought I’d milk cows until I dropped, and for a long time afterwards if I saw somebody else’s milk cows walk by it made my heart skip, but you move on.

“We’re still a grass farm and I’m using cattle and sheep to turn something we can’t eat (the grass) into something we can through beef and lamb.

“I buy dairy-cross calves all year round, mostly at Gisburn livestock market, at about two months old because by then they are taking some hard food, some roughage. I’m not having to feed them milk, they’ve a fully functioning rumen. If they come during summer I turn them straight out to graze, if it’s winter they’ll get a bit of silage and some hard food.

“I keep them a year and a little bit more. They are then of a size when they can go back into auction as store cattle and will generally go over to farmers in the Vale of York or anywhere east where they have their own straw and lots of feed wheat.

“I buy all year round so that I have continuous supply. If you’re an ex-dairy farmer like me you’re used to that milk cheque every month, so one of the attractions of having calves ready all year round is that you’ve always another payment coming in.

Anthony’s sheep are predominantly Lleyns, but he also likes his Mashams and other opportunist purchases.

“We have 170 breeding sheep at the minute with all lambs finished at home off grass. My target is 200.

“I quite like Mashams. They are as hard as nails and have just about discovered the elixir of eternal youth. They have a lot of wool, so if you put a fat lamb out of a Masham in the auction ring it looks woolly to the buyers, but the lads who know what they’re doing will still buy them.

“They’re usually a decent price to buy as shearlings because there isn’t the demand there was. I buy shearling sheep in autumn sales again opportunistically. I’ll go to Skipton or Gisburn and if a pen of sheep comes through that doesn’t look very fashionable they’re mine, because for some this business is only about certain coloured faces whereas I just want to produce a good fat lamb.

“I bought some Mules, which I’m not really a great admirer of, but they were too cheap to ignore, and I bought some Bleu du Maine-cross-Texels. They look different and were also too cheap to ignore. They’re quite big so they will be worth a bit as cast ewes.

Anthony’s tups come from Welsh breeding company Innovis.

“They are producing tups that are reared on nothing but grass and come through rigorous testing and are also hard as nails. All they want to do is eat grass and grow. They pass that on to their lambs.

“I have 2 Primeras and an Abermax. They are composite breeds with a modern twist. Innovis measure everything, growth rate, backfat, muscle. They’re doing with sheep what happened in the dairy industry from the mid-60s. It’s all now about measuring instead of guessing it’s a good tup because its ears stand up.

Lambing starts in mid-March and Anthony sells at Gisburn.

“I feed my sheep a little bit prior and after lambing, but the rest of year it’s just grass. The lambs just eat grass and their mother’s milk.

“When I take them to market I want them to weigh at least 40 kilos at home. Your first draw of new season lambs can make silly money, so you can take them a couple of kilos less if they’re well finished.

“I sell them at Gisburn, and occasionally Bentham, and some folk will buy them and keep them another month just get them a bit heavier.

Anthony is currently in a Farming in Protected Landscapes (FIPL) scheme and countryside stewardship. He also works with River Ribble Trust and is a member of Friends of the Dales. He’s finding that current regenerative farming thinking and such as putting in hedges are ways forward.

“I studied agriculture at university in the early 80s. When I came home and we were milking cows we were gung-ho, chucking nitrogen on every field we had, reseeding and putting in rye grass.

“I’m really interested in what works best today and some Welsh farmers, all in the same valley, looked at their field records going back 200 years. They had a germ of an idea that perhaps instead of using modern sheep breeds they should go back to old ones and to lambing outside. Their old maps showed them where all the hedges used to be. They decided they would stick the hedges back in for shelter and go back to lambing outside on a low input system.

“I liked what they were doing and I’ve now put in hedges and operate a rotational system of grazing. My stewardship has included the putting in of new hedges and fencing the three becks on our farm.

“I’ve done a lot of work with the River Ribble Trust. Their chief executive said: ‘I’m here to either save you money or help you make some money’. That sounded good to me and was the point at which you should invite him in for a brew and a biscuit, especially if he’s waving fivers at you. The trust has farm advisers that don’t charge because they want win-wins and to improve the quality of the River Ribble.