Farm Of The Week: A place of refuge for at risk breeds

Lyn Arrowsmith is leading a regional effort to protect and promote rare breeds. Ben Barnett visited her unusual animals.
Lyn Arrowsmith with her Irish Moiled cattleLyn Arrowsmith with her Irish Moiled cattle
Lyn Arrowsmith with her Irish Moiled cattle

Gourmet food is on the menu everyday in the Arrowsmith household.

Smallholder Lyn Arrowsmith can’t even bring herself to sample the meat served up in restaurants, so taken is she by the beef and pork she produces from her menagerie of rare breed animals in Raskelf near Easingwold in North Yorkshire.

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There can’t be many farms in the country that count four-horned Manx Loaghtan sheep, black and white feathered Crollwitzer turkeys and brown and white speckled Irish Moiled cattle among their livestock, but all are resident on Lyn’s land which is spread around nearly 30 acres in the Raskelf area, including two acres at Upper Town Farm, the family home.

As chairman of the York support group of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), the married mother of two rears unusual breeds to play a valuable part in protecting their genes while putting tasty meat on her family’s plates, and, by joining the Arrowsmiths in tucking into the meat from rare breeds people are helping their numbers to thrive. The more demand there is for rare breed products, the more commercially viable they are, a message which can be hard to get across, Lyn says.

“I do a lot of showing and it’s great talking to people about rare breeds, but they’re amazed when I say I eat my own sheep,” says Lyn.

“Generally the perception is that because they are so rare and they look so beautiful how can I eat them? But they’re also beautiful to eat.

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“Mum does a mean Sunday dinner. We do eat well, I can’t complain.

“I buy chicken from a supermarket but rarely. I find it difficult to go for a meal now and have to go for the fish. I’ve even had people ring up and say they went to this posh place and the meat wasn’t as good as yours.

“I haven’t eaten any lamb not produced here since we started with the Manx except at a wedding.”

Lyn believes that once you’ve tasted pork and beef produced on the farm, you’ll be hooked.

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“We can’t compete with the prices of supermarkets but you get a superior product and when people have had it once they tend to keep coming back. Traditional pork, for example, is so much better than the pork you get at the supermarkets. It cooks differently, it’s much more tasty and you don’t get lumps of fat round the outside.”

Lyn sells her home-reared meat to family members, and friends and friends of friends but hopes to break into the restaurant trade.

“What we would like to do, especially with the Manx because their lamb is so tender, is to sell it into restaurants but it’s taking the time out to do the marketing.”

Lyn, 43, has taken a very individual route into farming. Her family is not of farming stock. Her mother, Mary Horner is a seamstress and her father Gerry Horner, a joiner. Lyn’s husband Rob, 41, is headteacher of a school in Guiseley, Leeds, and the pair have two children, Thomas, eight, and Jack, seven.

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The family moved to Upper Town Farm from a nearby village when Lyn was 14 so she could keep horses. She used to show jump, break in and train horses, including for the Metropolitan Police, and only halted her jumping days after Jack was born to dedicate her time to raising their young family.

“I wasn’t born into farming. We got this place so I could get some horses originally and 22 years ago we got some Manx sheep to run with them.

“I thought there was a lot more point in getting a rare breed. If you’re only going to have a few, why not have a rare breed that needs help and that’s been my focus.

“I started with a breeding trio and now I have 30 ewes. There were some for sale locally from an elderly lady – it was by sheer chance that I got them.

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“The rare breeds work well with the kids as they are both involved with helping and rearing them and both show their own sheep.”

Manx Loaghtan are a primitive breed from the Isle of Man. Its meat is low in cholesterol and fat and its distinctive mousey brown fleece is used to produce high quality yarns woven into tweeds.

Lyn keeps three other rare sheep breeds, including the critically rare Borerays. There are only 350 left of the hardy breed, which is native of an island off St Kilda in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and Lyn has 11 ewes.

“They’re not commercially viable because they are tiny and take so long to grow but the genetics of these sheep is so important,” she said.

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The nine Badger Faced Welsh Mountain sheep that Lyn also keeps do indeed have strikingly similar facial colourings to the wild animals that lend them their name. They are larger than the Borerays and are more commercial.

Her flock of Devon and Cornwall Longwools meanwhile are one of only two in the North of England.

“They’re all situated in a certain area so if we get another disease outbreak like Foot and Mouth they would all be wiped out, so what we do as the RBST is create satellite sites for breeds.”

The Crollwitzer turkeys are specifically bred for family and friends’ Christmas dinners and beef from Lyn’s Irish Moiled cattle is slow grown and hung for at least 21 days to develop a distinctive flavour and is sold to customers. The cows live off a grass and hay diet.

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She also keeps two sows, a Tamworth and a Saddleback pig and their litters, but limits the pork side because of “horrendous” feed costs.

Lyn’s rare sheep breeds often compete in local agricultural shows. Along with her boys, she was showing at Driffield Show on Wednesday where she landed the Champion and Champion Reserve titles with her Manx Loaghtans in the Primitive Sheep class. The triumphs follow wins with the Borerays at the Three Counties Show in Malvern, for a second successive year.

“It’s definitely a way of life,” says Lyn.

“I wouldn’t want anyone to think you can do this and make their millions. Not everyone sees a rare breed being viable because they are slow growers but we show them and promote them to the public and try and win some prizes along the way.

“To do something like this you have to have family backing and helpers to catch the sheep. My mother always gets called in to help catch them.

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“Years back, this is how it was. People had small holdings and produced food for their community. Food didn’t travel like it does now and that’s why you had small breeds native to specific areas and I think what comes around will go around.”

For more information about Lyn’s products, visit www.raskelfrarebreeds.co.uk and for tweets from the farm, follow @rare_breeds