Aiming to Mob Graze 365 Days A Year

Tell us about your farm - its location, size, altitude, climate, soils, enterprises; organic, Pasture For Life or another status?

Mill Barton is a small farm of approximately 100acres in mid Devon. Not all the land is contiguous: every part of it is going through a different phase of reversion from either intensive high input mono crop grassland, or high input fodder cropping. Like many farms in this area, we are lucky enough to have deep, generally unspoilt valleys (or goyles), home to closed canopy oak woods, alder and willow scrub, water courses of all shapes and sizes with the associated flora. The land rises from approximately 550 to 700 ft above sea level, which has its own challenges but it is also a huge advantage, above all, offering shelter. We farm to Pasture For Life and organic principles but are not formally accredited with either.

Give us a general description of the biodiversity on your farm - essentially above ground but reference to below ground, both flora and fauna

Since moving here in 2003, thousands of native trees have been planted to extend and connect established hedges, copses and woodland. Nearly all of this has succeeded to become healthy semi-mature woodland which we run our cattle through twice a year. There are nearly 6kms of hedgerows, some of which are newly planted and all of which are in a 10 - 20 year cut and lay rotation. Tall, thick, species-rich hedges are such a powerful tool to help mitigate the biodiversity crisis.

This spring for example, when we were subjected to cold temperatures and strong easterly winds, the hedges provided us with essential shelter for our livestock, foraging and nesting habitat to invertebrates and birds, and they were a corridor for mammals.

They retained water in the landscape and broke the wind. When the orange tip butterflies should have been out in the meadows foraging on the cuckoo flower, they were only able to fly in the leigh of the hedges. Moving forward we are keen to encourage the encroachment of the hedges into the fields, creating more scrub, and instead of using them as boundaries, we will focus more on using electric fencing to dictate the areas that are grazed and browsed or excluded.

What you do to encourage this biodiversity and the lessons you have learned/would like to share?

All through the spring and summer, the cattle are mob-grazed around the farm: we use single strand polywire to place them where we need them. We don’t write a grazing plan because we have learnt that we stray from this almost straight away!

We do aim to leave land for at least 50 days between repeat grazings. Instead of writing a plan, we respond to what we see in front of us: early in the year we need to keep them away from some of the wetter flushes, and later in the year we want to get the sward down really tight to allow us to hand-seed the ground behind them. We follow the cattle with horses - they cross graze extremely effectively and as a result, our parasitic worm burden is practically zero. We never worm any of our animals unless there is a clear issue, at which point we assess before administration. The horses also help in creating areas with an extremely short sward - suitable for oversowing and allowing seed fall - as well as leaving areas such as their latrines, which get much rougher. This is essential winter habitat and a good spring cache for the cattle.

High input grassland has pervaded the south west resulting in the near elimination of species-rich swards. Pioneering “weeds” such as docks have proliferated as a result. At Mill Barton we see their role as essential. With very few deep rooting perennials in the sward early in the process, these “weeds” are important nutrient cyclers, essential nutrient-filled forage in the early season and they provide food for birds, caterpillars and other invertebrates.

Over the past couple of springs, which have yielded very little grass growth, the cattle are provided with healthy, tannin rich fodder by leaving the docks, and, even when moved into new paddocks, they will not leave them. Fields that are further down the restoration road and have a far higher variety of species in the sward have generally squeezed these weeds out. White clover is another indicator of the compaction at Mill Barton and as a result it is a goal that we see its dominance decrease, however, for the time being it is another essential food plant both for the livestock and the bees and butterflies.

We leave as much standing forage over winter and through the summer as possible. Not only is this important fodder for the cattle that remain outside, but it also provides incredible habitat for invertebrates and over-wintering birds such as snipe and woodcock, which we see and hear from the early evening into the night eating from the dung of the out-wintered cattle.

The seed heads from the standing hay are invaluable to small birds - we have seen an explosion in the numbers of linnets and goldfinches over the past couple of years, as well as large increases in bull and greenfinches, gold crests and pied wagtails. The long grass has provided acres more habitat for voles, shrews and mice which has lead to increasing numbers of tawny owls and a stable family of barn owls.

"There is a symbiosis between the birds and the cattle."

Before the swallows arrive in spring, the mob is followed around the farm by wagtails and robins, as well as various corvids who sift through the dung before the soil warms up enough to allow the worms to get active. When the swallows do arrive they forage everyday, without fail, around the cattle.