New River Cottage series!

[NOG]

Hi,.

just want to ask, how lond do the veggie seeds stay viable.?

If kept in the right conditions thousands of years. They have grown stuff from seeds found wrapped up with mummies. The national seed store tup 'orth is freezing the seeds for long time storage.

I would recommend getting seed that are foil wrapped and keep them cool..and they will be ok for a few years.

I keep mine in the shed and they last well past their sow by dates...I just find that less of them germinate. Why not give a friend £20 and email them when you are out in Africa to post you what you need.

[Snadger]

Not sure how my post came across....we only eat outdoor bred meat and my ideal would be that any other simply wasn't available!
My point is,how can Hugh one year lead a campaign to stop indoor chicken farming,yet this year relax his standards & say it's OK for calves???

Our Hugh appears to have went from Middle Class rich kid to Upper Class rich bloke in one single program and as such has to walk the walk and talk the talk!

[di]

Prefer his hair a little longer too!!!
Still really enjoy his programmes and my mates chrizzie pressie of a framed Hugh can stay,just left a little confused over his stance on indoor reared cattle....perhaps if he were to stumble upon this he'd like to explain it to me personnally...& Andi of course!
TEB...in answer to your question re what do you do with a dairy bull...sorry to answer with a question,but!!!What do you do with the cocks born into egg farms?
I can see all your points that the conditions of the rose veal calves were far better than the horrific veal factories in Europe,but in my mind still not acceptable!Sorry!

[Hilary B]

Sorry but I still can't get my head round that one Hilary? Milk and wheat cost money, if you have a field grass costs nowt!

Having the extra field costs plenty! Keeping them at grass means less milking cows (probably 1 less milker for every 3 calves reared at grass) and they grow slower as well, so far less saleable meat after the same rearing period.
You wouldn't have them in the same field as the cows, so that means more fields unavailable for hay/silage making. The practical difficulties are actually quite numerous.
I never kept milk cows, but I have kept beef sucklers (one of which I COULD milk, for household supplies), and I have kept goats for milk and reared some of the kids for meat.

[Hilary B]

Not sure how my post came across....we only eat outdoor bred meat and my ideal would be that any other simply wasn't available!
My point is,how can Hugh one year lead a campaign to stop indoor chicken farming,yet this year relax his standards & say it's OK for calves???

Because those chickens are BRED to be eaten, the calves are bred so their mothers will produce milk, and if rearing them is not commercially viable, they will continue to be disposed of as quickly as possible after birth, just as the cockerel chicks from commercial layer breeding places are.
He considers this system to be an improvement on simply killing them at a few hours old, so do I.

[Hilary B]

Prefer his hair a little longer too!!!
TEB...in answer to your question re what do you do with a dairy bull...sorry to answer with a question,but!!!What do you do with the cocks born into egg farms?

They are killed (I think by gassing, but not sure on that one) within minutes of hatching, and sold frozen, in the thousands, as feed for assorted carnivores in captivity (including the birds of prey at the Hawk Conservancy Trust). That is why so many commercial layers are of the 'sex linked cross' types, so they can tell them apart at a glance, and not waste feed on male chicks.


Further to the above. There IS a market for those dead chicks, I don't know of a market for dead new-born dairy bull calves (although I believe Jersey zoo at one time found them a good source of lion feed).
Disposal of unwanted carcasses is not environmentally a good idea. Burial is so hedged about with rules (to protect water courses etc) as to be unviable (if, indeed, it has not now been banned completely).

[di]

They are killed (I think by gassing, but not sure on that one) within minutes of hatching, and sold frozen, in the thousands, as feed for assorted carnivores in captivity (including the birds of prey at the Hawk Conservancy Trust). That is why so many commercial layers are of the 'sex linked cross' types, so they can tell them apart at a glance, and not waste feed on male chicks.

Exactly my point!What's the difference?

[Hilary B]

Exactly my point!What's the difference?

Calves WERE reared (by morally abhorent methods) until relatively recently. In some places abroad, they still are. No-one commercial rears the chicks, and it is a good many years since anyone did. There is NO method of rearing such chicks which will EVER be commercially possible, (even ones we would prefer not to contemplate) but it IS possible to rear calves as veal, by means that vary between the 'absolutely horrible' and the 'not ideal but really not too bad'. The rose veal production described comes at the latter end of the scale.
On a self-sufficiency scale, it is quite possible to rear the son of a house-cow for beef, or the cockerel chicks hatched when after layers for roasting, but that is because when doing that sort of thing, we don't notice what we are spending on their feed, nor have 'labour costs', and we usually don't consider the cost of owning the land in use.

[TEB]

We could always stop drinking milk - that would cure the problem

[HotStuff]

For all you HFW fans, he's guesting on Have I Got News For You next Friday (12/6/9).

[Snadger]

With chickens there are dual purpose breeds where the hens can be layers and the cockerels offer a supply of meat.

Surely there must be dairy cows that also make decent meat carcasses from the bullocks?

These could then be reared by traditional field methods!

With the technology we have and using hybridisation priogrammes this would surely be possible?

Or are the present breeds of cow used, just milk producing machines similar to battery hens being egg laying machines? If so, one regimes as bad as the other in my eyes!

[Alison]

Basically the breeds mainly used for industrial level farming aren't really suitable for the other purpose ie milking breeds aren't good for meat and vice versa. That's not to say that you can't get a perfectly good dual purpose cow, it's just that the big boys don't any more.

[di]

Sorry!I still don't get it!
To me you can't on one hand condem farmers that,supposedly through lack of funds,rear indoor chickens yet on the other hand condone indoor reared calves!(and whether or not he said he condoned it or not,the mere fact that he was prepared to butcher it,cook it & convince many to buy it,in my eyes he was condoning it!)
Yes,I know the conditions shown on the programme were a zillion times better than the appalling ones still used across the globe,but it's still not natural conditions for the cow!Just because it's better doesn't mean it's right...the "freedom food" barns that some farmers are using now are infinitely better than the atrocious factory farms,yet I don't see Hugh eating,nor really accepting those...nor would I want to!
And why are cocks born to egg farmers any different to bull calves born to a dairy farmer?
Sorry,but if you're going to get sentimental over a calf,then you should also a chook!

[Cloud]

As a big meat eater I like to think that the meat I am eating has been cared for humanely,not always in natural conditions.
I would eat veal without any qualms if I could get hold of it readily,which at the moment it is not.

[Hilary B]

Basically the breeds mainly used for industrial level farming aren't really suitable for the other purpose ie milking breeds aren't good for meat and vice versa. That's not to say that you can't get a perfectly good dual purpose cow, it's just that the big boys don't any more.

That sums it up perfectly, although it isn't the whole story. As recently as 20 years ago, a large proportion of the beef reared did come from pure bred Freisian (sp?) cattle, ones similar to those bull calves in the program, but those were 'indoor' reared to a large extent, and combined with the BSE thing, demand fell for beef not produced with at least one parent of a beef strain (they grow into good beef cheaper as well). Alongside this the dairy strains were getting further and further from dual purpose, with more and more emphasis on the amount of milk from the cow, and less and less financial viability for turning surplus calves into beef.