As farmers continue making changes to everyday practices to improve their carbon footprint, one beef farm has adopted a novel way of bedding cattle using compost. So how does it work in practice? Ruth Wills finds out.
The Roberts family team - husband and wife, Mike and Alison, and son Sam - are passionate about improving their business and working towards net zero at Blable Farm, Wadebridge, Cornwall. There are many factors which contribute to this on their 202-hectare (500-acre) beef farm and part of their move to a more circular farm economy is the use of compost for bedding, which was an idea Mike discovered on a trip to Holland.
Mike says: "It's very important for the beef industry, but I don't really want to be at net zero - I would rather be carbon negative (sequestering more carbon than produced), which is possible with the right practices. I visited a Dutch experimental dairy farm and they had all sorts of bedding - they were using woodchip in one shed, which I hadn't seen indoors before, as well as compost. We toyed with the idea and at the same time our friends at the Green Waste Company were using municipal green waste compost for bedding on their farm, taken from their site near Hayle. We heard how good it was and how it had reduced their fertiliser usage so I thought there's no reason it wouldn't work for us too."
Bedding
The Roberts family decided to try it and eight years later they are still using it, although they admit they found the perfect system for the compost by accident.
Sam says: "It was trial and error to start with and we didn't know how we should be putting it in the sheds - if we should put some in and gradually spread it out. We filled the sheds up, two to three foot deep to begin with, but we soon realised that wasn't deep enough. When we were scraping off about six inches at a time to get down to the dry stuff, it soon reduced the amount we had in the shed - when it's damp it stays muckier for longer and putting it in deeper means it will last for the whole winter.
"One year we had a lot of compost in the shed from summer and we were building an adjoining shed, so we just pushed it all back in a heap. Then we brought cattle in during the winter and they sort of scrambled on top of it and spread it around. It worked really well so now that's what we do - we just go in and scrape the top off every 10-14 days when it gets mucky."
Once the compost is scraped off it is spread on the fields, adding valuable nutrients which, Mike says, is a ‘great soil conditioner', spreading it on the grass or incorporating it into the soil for their reseeds. This year, the Farm Net Zero project, which works with the farming community in Cornwall to show the contribution agriculture can make to achieving net zero, analysed the compost, and tests revealed the dirty bedding has a nutrient value of £26.56/tonne, due to the availability of phosphate, nitrogen, potash and magnesium.
In financial terms, the compost costs £2/t and the pair use local contractors to haul it to the farm and it works out cheaper than their previous straw bedding.
Sam says: "All in all, it costs about £4-£5/t delivered to the sheds and throughout the year we have around 1,600t. We were buying around 1,000 round straw bales every year; at £15/bale that equated to £15,000 - so, we're spending about half the money we were."
They buy the compost in summer and store it in the cattle sheds, giving it time to dry and cool before using it in winter.
"It gets tremendously hot, so it cooks itself dry - particularly if it's not being rained on," says Mike. "We were warned against putting it next to straw, but apart from that it doesn't cause any issues; because it's moist the heat naturally dries it. The worst thing is the plastic - because the general public can be lazy when it comes to recycling so they chuck in things like bottle tops and bin liners, which are really difficult to get out."
Livestock
In another, earlier move towards improving productivity, Mike bought their first Stabiliser bull in 2005, moving away from Limousins and British Blondes. The family has been breeding Stabilisers ever since, recently producing beef for their own boxes.
Mike says: "They are easier calving and more vigorous than the others - when it came to finishing they reached their target weights quicker and were easier to get the fat cover over the ribs. We sell to St Merryn and Dawn Meats, but we would like to do more of the beef boxes - we have had customers come back year after year, which is great."
Moving away from a finishing diet of concentrates, they are now trialling their finished cattle on a diet of grass silage and wholecrop barley and have also started outwintering the spring weaned calves on deferred grass and bale grazing. The farm is part of the Good Beef Index, which has been designed to connect consumers and beef farmers and scores animals on a range of production, eating, welfare and environmental factors. The animals are scored out of 120 points, which includes things like environmental practices, animal welfare and eating quality.
Sam says: "It's about the environment as well as the taste and how the animal has been produced, rather than the usual EUROP grid - which just pays on volume of meat and fat. I like the idea that you know what the animal will be scored before it leaves the farm, it can be really useful."
Methods
Mike and Sam are passionate about not using intensive practices, and ‘do not want to be putting on any fertiliser', having reduced their use by half over the past year. This has been through a mixture of management techniques and reseeding.
Mike says: "There will be some fields which will suffer, like our permanent pastures, but we're putting in new mixed swards with more clover, deeper rooting grasses and herbs. Next year we should have half of our grassland in herbal leys and mixed swards."
They have recently started paddock grazing too, with help from James Daniels at Precision Grazing, with each made up with one strand of Kiwitech electric fencing.
Sam says: "We've been working closely with James throughout and now we have the whole farm in paddocks and 40ha of herbal leys. We aim to turn out at 3,500kg dry matter/ha. Every paddock is one hectare and there are normally six groups of cattle on-farm, so we move every two days as we're pretty dry. The steers and heifers have been out since February 25 and are only brought in to be weighed.
"Getting your head around paddock grazing takes time; putting in water pipes and electric fencing was easy but it's taking the time to really understand what's going on and get used to it."
Over the next few years, they will also be involved in some trials with Farm Net Zero and in the future they would like the farm to sequester more carbon than is being generated.
"We will be leaving some of the steers on a normal ryegrass clover ley and another bunch on a finer herb ley to see what, if any, difference there is in nutritional value in the meat," says Sam.
"Carbon negative is possible, it's just a change of mindset. "Instead of thinking ‘that field isn't looking too good, I'll put some fertiliser on that', think ‘I won't spend money on fertiliser; I'll work on making paddocks and putting in legumes, herbs and deeper rooting grasses, which will make the land more productive.'
"That in turn sequesters more carbon."
Farm facts
- 202 hectares (500 acres), including 24ha (60 acres) rented out for maize and barley, 20ha (50 acres) forest scrub
- Mike and Alison Roberts farm in partnership with their son, Sam
- 155 Stabiliser suckler cows, 35 of which are pedigree
- Achieving a deadweight of 300-320kg
- Part of the Farm Net Zero project
