White Park cattle on the menu to revive at risk breed
27 May 2021 |
Numbers of White Park cattle plunged as low as 60 in 1973, but have since recovered to 950 breeding cows
An online meat company is using an innovative funding scheme to help the revival one of Britain’s rarest livestock breeds, the White Park cattle.
North Yorkshire-based Farmison & Co has bought a herd of the rare breed, which were once associated with Druids and Celts.
The herd and their young calves are now grazing on a farm in Wensleydale, and under the scheme the farmer will pay for the livestock over 18 months.
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LAND managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – a plant they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold. “Local people have really taken to hazel dormice,” said project officer Phill Hibbs. “School children at Bainbridge studied them during lockdown, so they’ll know that the dormice are about to wake up from their winter torpor, while local landowners – particularly Stuart Raw at Hollins Farm and Tom Orde-Powlett of the Bolton Estate – have enthusias
Hazel dormouse in hand. Picture: Clare Pengelly WOODS and hedgerows across a 9.5 kilometre stretch of mid-Wensleydale have been connected to create an ideal home for the endangered Hazel Dormouse. Land managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – plants they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold.