 We met at Exeter University where we were both studying ecology so we both got an interest in the natural environment and natural history. Bill went on to do a postgraduate education to do some teaching and I trained as a nurse. Our first main job where we combined keeping livestock and doing a bit of nature conservation was in Yorkshire where we worked in a field study centre. We acquired our first cow and some sheep and we moved around the country quite a lot. We went to Cheshire, to Gloucestershire, to Somerset, taking all these animals with us. This was all career moves. Yeah, yeah, trying I guess to find the perfect combination of keeping grazing animals and having sites that they could do some really good work on. That's how we ended up coming up to Bankhouse Farm because that was exactly what the wardening combined with the small farm as well gave us that opportunity. We came in 1992 just before Christmas. The idea was that the tenant would do some part-time wardening for the trust and also work towards putting some of the livestock from the farm out onto other areas that the trust was managing for nature conservation. In the late 80s people like the National Trust and English Nature who was back then now Natural England, the Wildlife Trust and the RSPB, they had all managed to acquire these lovely nature reserves largely because they'd been abandoned by farmers. It was a very difficult job when they finally woke up to the fact that without grazing animals all this what had been lovely open limestone grass was turning into secondary woodland and scrub and bracken. I guess the thing that has probably made the biggest difference was the arrival of the stewardship schemes, agri-environment schemes, which luckily for us came in just when we got here in 1992. So there was the ESA was already underway in the Lake District and then something called the countryside stewardship scheme came in operating everywhere. I think we've got 16 different landlords so there isn't a one size fits all. We can claim what's called basic payment now, the area payment that's intended for supporting farming activities and the landowner or the site manager, the conservation organisation can claim the agri-environment scheme payments. And that sort of division of the spoils makes for a very stable and equitable relationship. Both sides need each other and so we do have a stable source of income because the areas of land that we're providing this grazing on are quite large then it kind of underpins pretty well everything we do. The breeds that we have are all native breeds. They do much better than any of the sort of continental breeds out in the sort of more remote areas. So we've got mainly red poles, we have a red pole bull and we've got five or six beef short horn cows but their calves are all crossed with the red pole bull. And we also have got a few blue grays that we have left. The youngest calf was only born yesterday morning. I guess the main difference is that the focus of our business is not meat production. It's about using them as conservation volunteers. So whilst we do produce beef and lamb at the end of their useful time on these reserves, that's not the main purpose. And I guess one of the big differences is that the cattle certainly are a lot older than any commercial beef enterprise would allow them to be, largely because in order to graze some of the sites like Ingleborough over in the Yorkshire Dales they have to be mature. They have to have developed a really good mature rumen. It's harsh conditions out there, especially in winter. It can be harsh here too. I forgot my coat as well. We make our own hay, as you can see. So we have a few hay meadows which we wouldn't use any artificial fertilisers on or improve in any way. Other than using, on a fairly sporadic basis, the muck that we accumulate, which isn't a huge amount. For most of the animals, it's almost totally dependent on what they can get from the particular land that they're on. We are the more convey conservation grazing company and the key word there is grazing. So the animals are meant to be doing that work and that's how they deliver the conservation benefits. So we would be failing quite significantly if we had a system that depended on feeding them artificially. So the hay is really just back up. The other element to it is that the meadows where this material is made are themselves a conservation feature. So when we first came to Bankhouse Farm at Silverdale, the National Trust were very keen that the meadows there could be made more species rich. Having gone through a period where they were fertilised and receded with a very small number of species. So one of the things that we particularly wanted to do was to increase that species richness in these meadows. And although we're not at Bankhouse Farm any more, we still have other meadows, other people's meadows that we manage in the same way. And so hay making is a kind of long standing element of the whole system. And in our minds it's just as valid as the nice bits of limestone grassland and heath and other habitats. They manage the grassland. So where you have grassland in its own right, the grazing will mediate the kind of plant community in a way that just tones down the dominance of the more aggressive species, particularly the grasses. And that will allow the more sensitive, the smaller, less vigorous things to compete. And so that paves away for a more just a richer variety of things. But that diversity brings flowers, brings diversity of insects. This fodder that the cows are tucking into is very rich in different species. It's not just the standard ryegrass clover mix that most dairy farmers would. So it has lots more species in it and that's good for nature conservation. It's also good for the cows. A lot of farmers would look at this stuff and they'd say, well it's gone bad because it's all turned black. The black in it are the herbs, the flowers in effect, and the chemistry of these plants just makes them do this because they're full of antioxidants. And antioxidants are one of the things that we now know are good for us because they protect us from diseases and cancer and that kind of thing. And we noticed quite early on in this that the cows actually seemed to be looking for the black bits. They would come in and if they saw us putting some feed out in front of the barrier like this and it had a lot of this stuff in, they would push each other out of the way to be the first to get to it. We're organic so in terms of the use of medications and things that we can use to deal with parasites we're fairly strictly controlled by that. Because the cattle are outside the year round we have very few problems with external and internal parasites. The density of stock on the areas is relatively low so we don't have those kind of problems that intensive systems have. If an animal does need any kind of medication then obviously the animal welfare is a priority and we can use antibiotics if necessary. And our main problem would be something called liver fluke which they pick up just in certain situations where the ground is very wet and favours the development of the snail that acts as an intermediate host for the liver fluke parasite. So we know that if we have to put the animals in those situations they're quite likely to pick up the liver fluke but we don't rush to treat them anyway. We wait to see if they begin to show signs. Usually they stop putting on condition and with sheep they'll get a bit anemic and so if you're looking for those symptoms then you can spot them in time and treat just those animals. Because we have a closed herd so all these animals are familiar with the places that they go to they build up an immunity so we know that probably the cattle are carrying liver fluke and we've found that because we've done tests and found that they are but they're perfectly fit and healthy. Ticks are another massive problem here. Cattle come down from wheat barrel absolutely covered in ticks but none of them appear to pick up any of the tick-borne diseases. The only time we ever had that was when it was a cow that we bought in a long long time ago before we had a closed herd. We've never taken animals to markets, auction markets or anything like that so when they've left us they've gone straight to the abattoir. Places like Ingleborough where we've got quite a large number of cattle because it's a big site. There tend to be cohorts that are already about the same sort of age, six, seven, eight years old. So they would probably go as a group as an organisation that markets organic meat so they would go off there and because they're older they tend to go into the sort of organic baby food or pie processing. Rather than sort of prime steaks and things like that but by that stage they're very big animals although they've been slow in getting there. So although they don't get the premium for being a bit over age they do get a reasonable price for being organic and just by sheer weight of them as well. We have a relatively small customer base of people that are interested in buying locally grown meat and they know the provenance of it. So we maybe do about three animals a year and some lamb and mutton that we can supply locally and that's usually sold just in sort of relatively small freezer packs. The signs are that the demand is building as a result of COVID. Certainly since lockdown things have got much more interesting in that quarter. There's a choice to be made though. Do we invest more time in marketing the products directly which is very time consuming but provides a better sort of financial return? Once you've got your market or do we use our scarce resources just to concentrate on the grazing management and then allow the animals to maybe go into what I think we'd have to admit was a less sustainable market. But the other side of it of course is that our costs are very low. Where we are delivering these agri-environment scheme payments for the landlord then the rent will be correspondingly low because most of the money that we're facilitating is through the agri-environment scheme. Our input costs are very low because we're not buying fertilizer, we're not buying loads of feed, we're not buying loads of medicines. The main costs are really our time. The sites are quite widely scattered so there's a lot of transport costs but it stacks up. The methane question certainly become a big issue and of course it isn't just about methane now, it's also about the land that these animals are occupying and whether it could be better utilized for growing trees or for rewilding. There's such a lot of debate about the role of livestock, red meat, ruminant production. We first became aware of it as an issue that we were going to have to confront probably in 2005, 2006 and our first response was it doesn't affect us. We're just doing a form of livestock production which reflects what nature intended with no inputs based on the grazing management, operating at stocking intensities that are in line with what the land can support. Given that that would be not so different to what was happening when there was no farming, there would still have been ruminant animals grazing these landscapes, producing methane and as far as we know it caused no global warming. So as long as we could stick to those principles we thought we ought to be able to say we weren't part of the problem but these things don't play out quite as you think they do sometimes as they ought to. And very quickly the argument focused on extensive grazing because the animals take longer to finish so they're hanging around producing more methane during their lifetimes. Other systems for calculating the carbon footprint of livestock take much more account of what the landscape is doing that is associated with these livestock. So when you include the carbon that's being sequestered by the soils and the trees and the habitats if you like then you will get a very different result. All the evidence that's being gathered at the moment by researchers show that meat that's produced from a primarily grass based diet is much richer in essential fatty acids that people need to maintain all aspects of their health. A lot of the sites that we do graze have got trees on and we really see the benefits of agroforestry and combining the grazing and browsing and the animals choose themselves. We see them going to plants that you would think the kind of perceived wisdom is they shouldn't be eating you because it's poisonous but actually they tuck into you quite happily because they know how much to eat. And we gather tree hay which we can take out to them as well and they really show preference quite a lot of the time for going for leaves. If you can combine the trees with pasture then it's a win-win situation because you've got the best both worlds. There's some evidence to suggest that cows that have access to browse actually produce less methane because the tannins in tree and shrub leaves mediate the processes of the rumen, the bugs, it's the bacteria in the rumen that are producing this methane. There's always been a lot of interest in what we're doing. Most of the time we've been here I've been asked to go and give talks. For a long while now I've done this at the university and I talked to the students about conservation grazing and I was being asked by individual students whether they could come and help. So we had a couple of students who would just come and do that and one of them was very keen and stayed on and then eventually he found employment elsewhere and went on to have a career in environmental management. So that's when this whole apprenticeship idea started and I think yes probably they had for us. There's usually been outside funding available so that we didn't have to pay their wages that was supplied from outside sources but we would dedicate the time to showing them ropes and they got training at college for particular skills that they would need to go on and do it professionally in their own right. We're also members of Cumbria Farmer Network who hold regular meetings and you've delivered talks there and various interest groups that we participate in. I think within the realms of nature conservation there is a willingness to share experience and knowledge and to make sure that people aren't constantly having to re-infend the same way. So we're just part of that culture.