Bill and Cath Grayson have been running an organic livestock farm in North West England for over 30 years. Much of the farm is on nature reserves, where they graze their herd, giving them access to trees and hedges for food and shelter. We catch up with Bill to find out more about how they use agroforestry to support livestock health.
Our livestock farm is on the border between Cumbria and Lancashire, in the Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape. We’ve got a herd of around 70 red poll cattle. They graze the land, which covers every kind of habitat – woodland, salt marsh, fen, reed bed, scrub, grass, hay meadow and more. We farm around 500 hectares, most of which is rented from conservation organisations.
We’ve done virtually no planting, aside from one or two hedges and a few fruit trees. Other than that, we use what’s already there. We’ve seen lots of evidence of natural regeneration from all the common species on the land, such as ash, hazel, oak, hawthorn, willow… There are a tremendous number of trees growing. It’s quite nice to let nature take its course and see what emerges.
They’re fairly selective with what they browse on. They go for things like sycamore and elm. Lime is another favourite. They’ll eat those first before they bother with less desirable trees, like aspen, hazel and alder, which they don’t seem to favour as much. We don’t have the financial resources to do on-going testing to find out what minerals they get from these. However, the one thing we can be fairly sure of is that the trees they favour are far more palatable in early summer, when their leaves are young, soft and fresh.
As the season goes on, the trees try to protect themselves from too much damage by laying down tannins, so livestock are less inclined to eat them. The trees also try to defend themselves by having most of their leaves beyond the reach of the animals, so it’s only the lower ones that tend to get eaten.
I guess the trees are being asked to solve our biggest problem – climate change. Most attention is on the carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere. There are all sorts of other benefits too, like providing shade for livestock. Our cattle definitely like the shade from the trees. Flood management could also be a big issue in a lot of this area’s uplands. Trees have the ability to protect the soil and slow down the runoff from sudden inputs of water, which is very useful for communities and farmers living lower down the catchment.
From our point of view, the browsing is important, the shade is important, but it’s not something we can impose on them. Our strategy is to always allow the cattle to have that choice about where they go to rest and where they go to eat.
Yew is poisonous and grows abundantly here. Our cattle have shown that they’re really keen to eat yew but it hasn’t been a problem. When we walk them between grazing areas, they always stop at the yew trees. As far as we know, no harm has come to them from eating yew. We've always followed the guideline that they need to have choice. They know when enough is enough, at which point they simply move on to eat something else. And it may be that over the years they’ve learned to tolerate it better.
We heard about feeding tree hay to livestock years ago, but it took us a little while to employ it. We often find we need to do some cutting of live branches in the summer to take off growth that has got in the way. Having heard about tree hay, we thought rather than cut it and leave it, we’d take it, dry it out and use it as a supplement for winter feeding. As the years have gone by, we’re doing more and more of this.
It’s quite time consuming so we tend to do it in small batches from June until September. To have usable tree hay, it has to be done quite carefully and dried naturally in the air without getting wet. We do this inside our barn, where for much of the summer every available space is green with branches we’ve cut from nearby hedges and trees. We've noticed that the stuff we’ve cut earlier in the summer is much more palatable. If we leave it much later than August, the leaves contain a lot more tannins and less nutrients, which have been taken back into tree roots before the autumn leaf fall.
In the winter there isn’t much browse as the leaves have fallen off the trees, although we’ve noticed the cattle do spend a lot of time eating the top few centimetres of the bare twigs. Our system doesn’t rely on housing as most of the cattle are out all year, but at some point, some of them may need to be brought nearer to home and fed haylage, which will be supplemented with tree hay.
We don’t really know because I don’t think anyone has really investigated it in a controlled, scientific way, that we know of. However, I’m quite convinced that the amount of browsing our herd does now is far more then when we started out. The cattle that came with us when we began here 30 years ago hadn’t had much experience of browsing, so they had to learn. It may be because we keep a closed herd, always selecting the ones that perform best to remain in the breeding herd based on their health and vigour, so we've unconsciously selected ones that are good at browsing.
We have an extensive grazing system, with about 500 hectares and around 70 cattle, which makes for a low stocking density that suits the grazing needs of these different semi-natural habitats. At least, that’s the way we find it works best for us now. Most of our land is classified as rough grazing, so the carrying capacity is considerably lower than in a more conventional farming system. The cows seem to find the grass growing in the shade under the trees less palatable, preferring to graze open areas. However, they are also keen to seek out particular plants, like dog’s mercury, that favour more shaded areas, perhaps seeking specific minerals or trace elements.
As far as possible, we use the natural water supplies. It’s not so easy in a limestone area like ours but the limestone tends to be interspersed with lower-lying areas of moisture-retaining peat and clay soils, where the cattle often have access to a natural water source. We try to make use of these different landscape features to get water, but we sometimes have to use a towed bowser to carry water to sites where the pond or spring dries up in drought.
On some sites we also use this bowsering system to help with bracken control. We’re involved in Innovative Farmers non-chemical control of bracken learning network, as well as its trees for livestock health learning network. We’re testing how positioning a bowser and trough in an area of bracken can bring cattle into that area to trample it and open it up. In our case, both learning networks are complementary.
Maintaining this extensive, open-access approach to grazing is particularly important for delivering nature conservation objectives, because it produces a wider range of habitat conditions within a given area. This results in an intricate mosaic of longer and shorter vegetation where the patterns of alternating light and shade provide a much richer mix of ecological niches for animal communities to exploit.
Because of the diverse nature of these habitats, both in terms of species richness and structural complexity, we don’t do any formal monitoring using standard pasture-based techniques, such as a plate meter. And there’s no formalised way to record how tree-browsing impacts sward heights, because the cattle graze some areas much more closely than others.
Instead, we rely on direct observation of where the cows are spending more of their time and what they are choosing to eat, noting particularly when they start to run short of their preferred species and begin to eat more of things previously rejected. We also observe how their grazing and browsing are impacting insect communities, paying special attention to the diversity and abundance of butterflies and other pollinating insects that rely on the continuing availability of flowers as nectar sources.
It followed on from various other projects that we'd been involved with recently, including the Organic Research Centre’s REFOREST project. Knowing that this was coming to an end, I was keen to join a similar collaborative endeavour on the topic.
Now the Basic Payment Scheme is gone many farmers may be struggling financially. The easiest way of trying to redeem some of that lost income is to apply for one of the agroforestry options in the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI). I know farmers are likely to have been put off by the uncertainties that have dogged SFI, but if we don’t show enough commitment to the public money for public goods agenda the offer may be withdrawn.
It still feels a little bit on the margins, with so many farm businesses struggling to find the time and energy for developing new ways of working while being forced to concentrate on overcoming their everyday challenges. But I’m hopeful that this might yet change, as projects like REFOREST and Trees for Livestock Health gain more attention and gather more support.