Celebrating 5 years of Wild & Rooted
Five years have flown by and feels like a lifetime ago all at the same time! It feels like a really important moment for us to pause and take stock of what Wild & Rooted has become — we’re really proud of it.
It was a year or so into our conversion from arable crops to purely pasture, and becoming a solely livestock farm, when we decided to see how we would get on selling ‘just one body of beef’. It felt like a monumental task, as ‘one body of beef’ is a huge amount of meat when it’s in front of you. Like anything new, there is so much to figure out in the beginning. What cuts you can get, approximately how many you can get from one body of beef and what cuts will actually sell… oh, and how to market and sell it!!
We’ve experimented with different products, ways of working and different events along the way, but all-in-all we seem to have settled on a ‘set-up’ that works well for the produce we have available and the people who buy it.
We’re really proud that our initial motives and values stood us in good stead and are all still so relevant five years on:
We wanted to be in control of the price we get for our own produce – avoiding the commodity market
It’s important to us to be able to ‘wave the flag’ for cattle and showcase their absolutely vital role as grazing animals – cattle don’t deserve the bad reputation they get in the media
We wanted to provide a direct link to the producer for consumers, bringing back a little control within a very complicated food system.
This one certainly didn’t feel achievable in the beginning, but we’re very nearly there – selling all of the beef that we produce straight from the ‘farm gate’.
What’s to come
Much of the same set-up we have now. We’re really happy with the consistency of the meat we’re producing so it’s really just about refining our product range, where and how we sell it and creating on-farm opportunities for the general public.
We’re still fairly ‘inconvenient’ with our two-hour a week opening window but we’re working on that, a self-service operation for during the week is imminent!
Our latest addition is our own on-site butchery allowing us more consistency and freedom when it comes to processing our beef. This has been more revolutionary than we imagined and no doubt more benefits will reveal themselves as time goes on.
What we’re grateful for
Customers. Thankfully, we seem to have attracted the most patient and loyal of customers, who have played an integral part in Wild & Rooted’s success. They’ve supported a small-scale farming model that has so many benefits which, after five years, has now become a very viable little business – something that we weren’t convinced was possible, and that’s a huge win for farming. We love knowing that the food we’ve grown has made its way directly onto their tables, we enjoy hearing how they’ve cooked it, and we get so much from hearing their feedback. Our customers are also our biggest advert, often referring us to friends, sharing us online and generally waving our flag more times than we’d ever have expected.
The Herbal Leys. Sam’s continued dedication and learning in how to manage them successfully has really come to fruition, with plenty of growth to continue to feed the cattle through two extremely dry summers. If we were still grazing the cattle how we used to, they would have run out of grass in July. They would be back indoors, being fed on grain or making a huge dent in their cut grass, which is supposed to last them the whole winter.That would inevitably mean selling animals before they are ready, weaning calves off their mothers early, and other changes to how we look after the cattle that ultimately we wouldn’t ever willingly budge on.
Working with local businesses. We’ve met some wonderful people over the last five years who have helped us bring products to fruition, championed us and supported us however they could. We’re excited to continue these relationships and for the new ones that will inevitably come.
We operate a fairly small and simple system as a business and brand, but it has been immensely rewarding. It may be small, but it’s been incredibly mighty in its impact. Here’s to five years of Wild & Rooted Farming, and to all the seasons still to come.