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Our beef

Valley Farm Pasture Fed Beef is proper beef. It is tender, succulent and flavoursome - you can really taste the difference between our pasture fed carefully managed beef, and the mass market product. 

The quality comes from a combination of the breed of cattle, their diet, our approach to their management, and the way the beef is hung and cut. ​Pasture fed cattle take longer to reach their finishing weight, which means that their meat has time to develop a depth of taste and texture.

 

The cattle

Having previously run a dairy herd until 2012, alongside rearing beef cattle, we have been a completely closed herd since 1993. We don't run a bull, but use Artificial Insemination (AI) on our cows to choose the best breeding options. On folding the dairy herd our beef and suckler herd has now grown, made up predominantly of Aberdeen Angus, though we have been introducing Beef Shorthorn into the mix which are proving to be very successful. 

 

 

Aberdeen Angus & British Shorthorns naturally lay down intramuscular fat, giving wonderful, succulent, flavoursome meat.  As a hardy, native breed they can go through to finishing weight on a pasture only diet, which is good for the flavour and composition of the beef. ​All of our cattle are reared to the highest animal welfare and environmental standards. Our cattle are always allowed to mature naturally, grazing only on a grass-based diet which is never supplemented with artificial, unregulated fattening feed.

 

How we rear and manage our cattle

Our cattle are reared outdoors and live an active life with freedom to move. We have recently introduced rotational grazing, with a focus on regenerative farming moving forward. Fields are split up into paddocks using solar powered electric fencing, normally grazed for 1 to 3 days depending on the grass growth rate. The cattle then won't return to these paddocks for approximately 40 days, allowing the pasture to recover and encouraging far more growth than found in a traditional grazing plan. We decided to go down the route of regenerative grazing as it has been proven that the benefits to the environment and soil microbiology. Where a more holistic approach to grazing has been used it transpires that cattle can actually be beneficial to our world rather than a detriment.

The Valley Farm Herd grazes on herbal leys – a mixture of high quality grasses, clovers and herbs. In the winter their diet is supplemented by home produced haylage. The beef has a meatier, more complex flavour than cereal fed beef. 

We calve predominantly in Spring but with a small batch in the Autumn as well. Calves are left on their mums for up to 10 months, before being weaned. All our cows and young stock are kept outdoors grazing our fields for 8-9 months a year. When it becomes so wet in winter that they damage the fields, they are brought into our barns and fed with our own silage and bedded on straw we bale from a neighbouring farm.

Transportation is kept to a minimum, and when ready to go they are taken to an abattoir chosen specifically for its high welfare standards.

Our approach to management minimises stress for the cattle. This is the right thing to do for the animals, and is also good for the quality of the beef. 

Our aim is to produce the best meat with happy cows fed on a diverse pasture, whilst helping the environment.

 

The Health Benefits of Pasture-Fed Beef

Being purely grass-fed, there is nothing in the meat that shouldn’t be in the meat — this is a natural product

• Lower total fat levels than meat from grain-fed animals.

• Lower saturated fat content.

• Higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids and a lower, more balanced (and healthier) ratio of omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids.

• Higher vitamin and mineral levels than meat from grain-fed animals

• Many of the health benefits associated with grass-fed meat decline after only a few weeks of being put onto grain-feeding.

• At Valley Farm, when we say grass-fed we mean 100% grass-fed.

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