Our Farmer Ed's Working Belted Galloways

Buying our Christmas beef is one of the highlights of the year, every year, as the Head of Food & Farming at Field & Flower. It gives us an opportunity to highlight one farmer doing something fantastic, and truly connect them to all our customers. Next week I’ll be going and seeing our beef hanging for the first time, as it chills and matures in the carcass fridge before we break it into your orders. Butchering down thirty sides of beef is not easy, and I’ll be sharpening my knives this weekend in case I’m called to action, but in the meat game you learn that there is expertise and there is mastery. When push comes to shove at Christmas, it’s best to let the masters do what they do best.  

This year, we’re shining the spotlight on Ed and his fantastic Belted Galloways (affectionately known as 'Belties'), fifteen of them, up in the Hull valley. Officially, his family have been farming the grasslands just north of the ancient minster town of Beverly, East Yorkshire, for at least 200 years (though Ed said it’s more likely 400 years). His story is one of the connection between a farmer and his cattle, the draw of the native breeds that built out our landscape, and the good that they can do.  

Ed grew up on a more commercial beef farm than he runs now. But this upbringing firmly set him into the rhythms of beef farming, growing accustomed to the animals ways and enjoying the company of those doleful beasts. In the nineties, it was a struggle to be economically viable and they pivoted, as a lot of farming enterprises do, and began to farm poultry, growing ducks and letting their grasslands grow out. Ducks are great (just ask Chris Dibble, our duck farmer, and he’ll say they’re more than great), but they just couldn’t fill the hole that the herd had left. When some opportunities came to regenerate the local area with lightly treading cattle who don’t mind the elements, he jumped at the opportunity to buy some Belties and settle back into the early mornings and trudging walks of proper riverside cattle farming.

As soon as the herd came in they had their work cut out for them, tending to the overgrown grasslands of the farm and then grazing on commission for The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Ed’s growing herd of Belties got the job of restoring duck ponds, driving scrub back and grazing wherever needed the work. This was based on their hardiness in the elements, industriousness to dig out nutritious vegetation and instinctive ability to live and prosper as a herd in both highland and lowland. The wettest lowlands of the Hull Valley are unsuitable for any kind of farming or food production other than this low impact grazing, and over the last two decades the cattle have brought on a boom in biodiversity and habitat growth. While grazing the wetland areas, their feet create small divots in the soil, encouraging a whole new eco-system of invertebrates to become active and breed in the wet ground. This creates a food source for many local breeding birds and also migrating birds passing through the farm and stopping by the nature reserves to re-fuel. Ed said "I don’t know what people really mean when they say they are or aren’t regenerative farming, but we’re happy with what we do and know it’s going to pay dividends for decades to come". You don’t farm the same area for 400 years without your family picking up some handy sustainability practices. I’m so pleased that our customers love hearing about our beef as much as I love talking about it, and the numbers speak for themselves.

But when you get into the detail of what those 30 sides of beef produce, you’ll see why we are already selling out of some products. Of that 6 tonnes or so of beef, we’re only getting about 45kg of trimmed fillet; we won’t get much more than 100kg of ribeye and only 60 packs of our highly sought after Osso Bucco. A lot of this weight will come to you guys as Stock Bones, Everyday Beef Mince, Dry-Aged Belted Galloway Diced Beef and round cuts right through December as we break into the carcass, leaving the prime cuts aging in the salt-chamber until your Christmas orders come through. Carcass balance is an amazing thing, and it’s our job to make sure it checks out. Luckily Field & Flower attracts fantastic cooks and chefs, so we have plenty of orders for the lesser known cuts to counterbalance the fillets and sirloins. You may have noticed our beef neck bourguignon recipe on socials this week. At Christmas we make things that much more special by aging things a bit longer in the chamber, and making sure some of our cuts get extra special treatment so that they’re looking gorgeous on the big day. We brush tallow on our fillets to stop them shrinking too much in the aging process, and replenish the Himalayan salt to get the best possible bark to protect the beef. Trust me, we pull out all the stops to make sure beef like Ed’s is at its absolute best for you.

By the time the beef’s in my hands in December, we’ll only be finishing the job and sending it on to you all, because all the hardest work has been done on farm already.