Matt Chatfield explains the importance of silvopasture to Six Inches of Soil
Matt Chatfield’s ewes happily grazing the woodland on his farm
We recently took The Cornwall Project’s Matt Chatfield and Farm Carbon Toolkit’s soil expert Hannah Jones to meet our film principal Ben Thomas, to discuss all things soil, biodiversity and silvopasture. Our film publicist Kate caught up with them to discover why nature friendly farming and soil health are vital in the fight against climate change.
Big congratulations to Matt who has today (12th August 2022) been shortlisted for British Farming Awards “Sheep Farmer of the Year”. In this first blog with him, we discover how, after spending several extremely successful years providing a link between Cornish meat suppliers, including Philip Warren Butchers and top chefs working in some of London’s finest restaurants, Matt made the shift to transforming his family farm into a wildlife oasis using silvopasture techniques. His Cull Yaw meat has been a huge hit on the London restaurant scene and here he explains how this came about and how grazing his elderly ewes in a rotation with zero artificial inputs has been the key to regenerating his farm in just three or four years. Keep your eyes peeled for our blog coming soon, where Hannah explains how farmers can examine the life in their soil and the huge importance of soil microorganisms.
Matt, you’re famous for producing Cull Yaw meat, how did that come about?
I was delivering really high-quality meat to chefs in London, getting their reaction and discussing flavour at great length. Our distribution guy, a chap called Gavin Hicks came up with the idea of fattening up sheep that are no longer fit for breeding. Most sheep have doubles (twin lambs) so when they finally go to the abattoir they’re very thin and frail, which is why mutton has got such a bad name. All they need is some decent grass and they recuperate really quickly. Back in the day we had a huge mutton culture and it's having a bit of a renaissance. At the time, we had a residency at the Adam and Eve pub in London and when we put this on the menu it went crazy.
Following this, before I went back to the farm, I spent some time in Extremadura with the Jamón Ibérico producers. We consider jamon to be the best meat in the world and if you want world-class meat you need animals that have walked a long way because the more the muscles work the more flavour there is. This allows the animal to put on a new layer of fat and when the meat is dry aged, the fat flavour permeates into it. This is why jamon is so fantastic, the pigs get to about 18 months old and after walking many miles they weigh about 80 kilos. They then go into the acorn fields and double their weight in four months. I realised that if you want an animal to walk a long way there’s none that walks further than sheep. The jamon pigs are only 18 months old but my sheep live up to 12 years of age.
The dry ageing process takes place over a three-week period at Phillip Warren’s facility, which makes the meat incredibly tender. Sheep glands produce lanolin, which naturally waterproofs the sheep. When you eat lamb you can get that slightly tacky fatty flavour, which is the lanolin. After about five or six years they stop producing it, or produce very little so you don’t get that. With mutton you’re expecting something tacky and tough, but you get the exact opposite. We’ve got some of the best chefs in the country raving about it, so it clearly works.
Do most chefs know where the meat in their restaurant comes from?
When we first started, chefs were getting fairly generic meat. When we came along, totally by accident, there was a new generation of chefs that were very ambitious and very diligent. A lot of them went to Noma and came back to the UK at a similar time. They were very interested in where the produce came from, so we ended up taking them to Cornwall.
Do you think chefs still have that same desire to know where their produce has come from?
Because of Covid lockdowns the restaurant industry has really struggled and there are a lot of pressures on them. Sadly, I’m not sure if that’s so much a priority now. The restaurants we’ve worked with have been great, but I fear the more up and coming chefs and people coming through are not quite so conscious about it.
Can you tell me about your family farm and why silvopasture grazing is so important?
Four months before I started farming, I was doing a lot of research. I went to the Oxford Real Farming Conference and I just happened to see a talk by a chap called Steve Gabriel. He had an environmental background that was similar to mine and had written a book on silvopasture. He had started out farming in upstate New York and had loads of sheep that were really struggling with nothing growing. He decided as a last chance saloon to let them graze in the woods and about a month later they came out looking absolutely stunning and fit as fiddles.
I discovered that the woodland on my land was a major part of our farm 300 to 400 years ago. Since then, it hadn’t been touched, all the water that drained off the land had gone in there and it had just been forgotten about. We know the climate is changing, we're getting very wet autumns and winters and incredibly dry springs and that’s been the case in the three years since I started. The land is really drought resistant and I thought if my fields dry up, I need to do something. I went and met a really inspiring farmer called Chris Jones (Woodland Valley Farm) and he said, I can sum up everything I’ve learnt about farming in 50 years in one sentence - if you farm for nature then flavour looks after itself. That had two big meanings, because I was obsessed with nature, I knew that was something I could do and because I’d dealt with chefs I knew how to think about flavour. Before that I was really uncomfortable about farming I thought there was no way I could do it but after hearing those words, in three or four years I’ve never had a single doubt.
Now, my farm is proof that we can produce high quality food, have the happiest animals in the world, massively increase biodiversity and increase the amount of water we store in the soil, plus we can sequester huge amounts of carbon. The biodiversity has increased massively, all these things have increased and all I’ve done is grazed sheep. I always say that I haven’t done anything that anyone else couldn’t do. Just by coppicing a few trees and putting in sheep when it’s right, my farm is probably one of the most productive per-acre farms in the country.
Can you explain how having the sheep in the woodland increases biodiversity?
Thousands of years ago the UK would have been a savannah there would have been elephants right where I’m standing now. We had huge herbivores smashing through the woods and we had beavers, which meant there were wide open spaces. Now we perceive a woodland as being covered and shaded with carpets of bluebells growing under trees, but that isn’t natural. I’ve got a bit of wood like that and if the leaves fall on the ground and stay there for six months then to me that bit of wood is dead. What woodlands need is light and sheep poo. If you don’t worm sheep, when they produce their poo dung beetles appear, they go through the poo and produce a substance that feeds the fungi and the fungi then feed the system. To me that’s the most special substance on planet earth. And for people to now turn around and say that’s what’s destroying the earth is the most ridiculous thing.
When I was young, I used to go worm fishing for salmon. To find worms you have to go out on your lawn at night with a torch because they come up to feed on vegetation and to look for a mate. Because we’re now getting dry summers there’s very little worm activity because the soil is too hard. When I was a boy in November the ground would freeze, and we’d be fully in winter. Now it’s totally the opposite, all the worm activity happens in the winter. It’s more difficult if you’re grazing cattle in winter because they’re so heavy but sheep are light on their feet. No one is talking about this. My land has transformed beyond recognition in just two years.
I’m convinced the main reason it’s transformed so quickly is because I’m feeding the worms during the winter. When I took over the farm we had one tiny patch of clover on about 30 acres of fields and now around half my fields are clover. I haven’t planted any seed, the seed has been sitting in the ground for the past 50 or 60 years, before my grandad planted rye grass. Clover needs alkaline soils to grow and if you add fertiliser the soil becomes too acidic. When the soil goes through a worm it produces a cast, that cast becomes more alkaline. On my land if you go out in the winter every night there’s thousands of worms. I haven’t used a tractor to put lime on, the soil has become more alkaline just from the worms. So now half my fields are covered in clover and clover fixes nitrogen in the soil, so I have no reason for chemical fertiliser. Once the clover pops up everything else pops up around it then nature just takes over. Nature responds so quickly.
