The Hacknell Chronicles

Down on the Farm - Higher Hacknell May News

Its been an adventurous month, travelling up to London (via River Cottage’s Park Farm where I dropped off a pig en route!) to The Real Food Festival at the Southbank. I really saw the sights from my white butchers van; Hyde Park Corner, Buckingham Palace and the Mall, as I missed a turning and took a circuitous route! With the London Eye on one side and the Houses of Parliament across the River Thames, it was a very different view from the usual rolling fields of Devon. Our stall was directly under the railway bridge coming out of Waterloo which made it rather dark and noisy! With over 100,000 people there, and sunny weather, it was pretty busy and I sold a lot of sausages for Bank Holiday barbecues.

It was nice to get back to Devon again where in the days I’d been away, the bluebells had come out and the beech trees opened their luminous green leaves. But growth is very slow and most plants are about a month behind. Our vegetable garden looks more like it does in March, with barely any seeds germinated and only broad beans just coming through. Looking back at some old photos of our daughter Rosy’s first birthday, on May 25th, our vegetable garden had waist-high flowering peas and so much growing there’s virtually no bare earth to be seen. Although we’ve now got spinach, lettuce and plenty to keep us going in the poly-tunnel, it’s depressing to think that 25 years later, the future is about growing food under plastic! The weather patterns are seriously concerning, and our crops are suffering. The spring wheat Tim planted around March 15th, which would normally be the ideal time, lay dormant throughout the cold and dry April and now is deluged by rain. Without chemical seed dressings the birds really had a ‘field day’ or more like a field month, feasting on our incredibly expensive organic seed rather than our neighbours non organic varieties.

The ewes and lambs are doing well, despite the fact that grass is growing so slowly; calving has been good so far, and our new bull has proved a success! We planted the potatoes (that we grow for topping our cottage pie ready meals) just before I disappeared up to London; Tim on the tractor and me and our friend, Trevor, on the planting machine which is probably about 75 years old and still going! Hope we’ll keep going that long!

The next bank holiday will soon be here, and if you are having friends or family round for a party, our barbecue boxes are a brilliant choice, still at £75 only. It’s great value with genuinely good values!
Do check out our website at www.higherhacknell.co.uk for all our seasonal offers and full range of meat cuts. If you order by 6pm on Sunday you get delivery the following week on a Thursday or Friday, your choice.

Hope we all get some sun shine.

Best wishes from

Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

Spring arrivals at Higher Hacknell Farm

In the last month all but 1 of our 300 ewes have given birth so Spring has very much arrived! There are ewes and lambs in almost every field now, bleating and baaing and doing what sheep do! It’s not been an easy time, especially compared with the last few years when we have been basking in hot sunshine at this time of year. The weather was terrible at the start of lambing, wet and windy and we kept the ewes and newborn lambs in barns as long as we could; then turned them out into the most sheltered fields, protected from the bitter east wind, where they could huddle behind the hedges. They have done amazingly well, surviving one of the worst Springs we can remember, and we’ve had good lambing percentages with mostly twins, some singles and quite a lot of triplets. The main difficulty now is waiting for the grass to grow; a week ago it was yellowy brown and burnt dark purple at the tips from wind and frost and it looked like the Siberian tundra, but recent rain has softened the ground and its slowly greening up.

However in terms of the weather, Spring is well behind. Usually there’s early pear blossom in the orchard by now and they say by April the winter wheat should be high enough to hide a hare, but the oats Tim sowed last Autumn wouldn’t even cover a field mouse! We saw the first swallow arrive last Saturday, 13th April and on checking the diary it was 1st April last year, so hopefully they are a sign warmer weather is on its way. The new bull we bought at the South Devon Herd Book sale this time last year has proved himself and we’ve had about a dozen calves born in the last couple of weeks, one just half an hour ago and another calving as I write, which we are keeping a close eye on. So far, so good, and they have calved unassisted, apart from one which we had to help just before going out to a party, where I arrived a bit late with the calving ropes still in my pocket!

In the butchery we are preparing for a busy couple of weeks of shows and Food Festivals. Next weekend, 26th -28th April we’ll be at the Exeter Food & Drink Festival with a superb meat display and cooking our delicious 100% beef steak burgers. Find us in the big tent in Northernhay Gardens on stall 5-40, and do come and say hello. A few days later, I’ll be off in the van up to London for the Real Food Festival which is being held at the Southbank, near the Festival Hall on the bank holiday weekend 3rd -6th May. You might need to wake me up if I’ve fallen asleep behind the stall as It’s open from 12-9pm over the four days! Do pre order meat to collect on the day, or see what we’ve got on the day to tempt you. If we can’t, then maybe the live music and cookery demonstrations by top chefs such as Raymond Blanc can, and it’s FREE, so for more infomation checkout their website or our Facebook page.

I hope to see you soon, but all our meat can be ordered on the website www.higherhacknell.co.uk - Look out for our monthly special offers and excellent value Spring Meat Box.

Best wishes
Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm
p.s calf now born, all doing well.

Down on the Farm in March - nearly Easter time!

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Snowdrops, primroses and ‘lents’, as they call the wild daffodils here, are just coming out in the hedgerows and on a sunny day like today, you’d believe spring is on its way. But after a very cold and grey February, the land is still in its winter clothes looking anything but green. Usually the younger ‘leys’ of grass are growing by now, ready to turn out the ewes and lambs later in the month, but it’s been a hard winter and things are behind.
At least these last couple of weeks have been dry and Tim has been able to get on the land. First of all, muck spreading - which is probably the most important job of all for us organic farmers, putting the fertility from the animals back on the land, recycling waste. You might think I’ve been living in the countryside too long if I said how the muck smelled good the other day!! It must have been the positive feeling in the air that this was the start of spring cultivations, but when animals are kept properly on straw which combines with the dung, it really smells quite healthy, not the unpleasant stench of slurry which you get with intensively housed animals. However I did keep my distance when taking this photo just in case I got splattered! I think all these things affect the quality of our food and if it’s not farmed well, it doesn’t taste good either. Next it’s ploughing which is done by a local contractor who arrived yesterday and then Tim will harrow and work the soil before drilling the spring wheat. There’s plenty to do, but always weather dependent, if it rains now, the ground will be too wet to cultivate and plant, but then if there’s too little rain, the grass won’t grow either.

We still have plenty of lambs so there won’t be any shortage when Easter comes. Older lamb is often called hoggett, and is being talked up by food writers as being more mature in flavour and since we hang our meat well, also very tender. At this time of year when grass is short, the lambs graze root crops, tucking into turnips instead of bought in concentrate feed as we prefer that all our produce is fully traceable; even the food our animals eat is home grown.

Do get your Easter orders to me soon. Last delivery date will be Thursday 28th March with no delivery on the Friday that week as it is Good Friday, with last orders by Sunday 24th, earlier if possible. I do like a traditional roast leg of lamb at Easter but I’ll also cook a turkey and a gammon too as I like to have some cold and maybe a picnic or a pie. We are grounded in March and April during lambing time, and with family and extra people staying to help us, there’s lots of cooking to do. It’s Pie Week this week, so do check out some pie recipes on our Facebook page and post any good recipes you have too.

I hope you all enjoy Mothers’ Day this Sunday.

With best wishes

Jo and Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

Down on the Farm - February 2013 at Higher Hacknell

What an extraordinary month as the ‘horsegate’ scandal keeps getting bigger with further astonishing revelations unfolding in each day’s news. There couldn’t be more of a reason to buy direct from the farm rather than from the supermarket with its unfathomably complicated global supply chains!We are proud of the fact that we can trace every pack of mince beef and steakburger back to an individual bullock which has been born, raised and fed entirely on and from Higher Hacknell Farm. We transport our animals to the small, local abattoir in our own trailer to keep stress to a minimum and the carcasses then come back to our farm butchery for hanging and preparation. How different from the ‘burger’ which could contain meat from up to a thousand different animals - which we now know are not all cattle - produced in countries worldwide, then travelling through processing factories across Europe.

In a couple of weeks we have our annual Soil Association inspection, which is a rigorous, day long check of all our paperwork and systems for traceability and the organic integrity of what we produce and process here at Higher Hacknell. It starts by checking the records of each and every animal’s life cycle - how it was reared, what it has eaten, the fields it has grazed, right through to the abattoir (which must also be registered organic and inspected) and then how the meat products are processed, packaged and labelled. Each one of our recipes has to be approved by the Soil Association who check that the ingredients we use are from an authorised organic source. No system can be perfect, but the transparency and traceability of the organic certification gets pretty close.

I’m very pleased that you can relax knowing where your meat comes from, but I can’t say that we are feeling smug about it! The recession has taken it’s toll and organic farming has received a lot of knocks lately, even from the Food Standards Agency itself! The economic pressures of such a rigourous and strict farming system has meant that many farmers who converted to organic farming methods a few years ago have now changed back to farming conventionally. We very much believe, with over 25 years of being organic, that it is the best and most authentic way to farm and are not going to give up. However it has not been easy and last year I sadly stopped going to the weekly farmers’ market in Exeter. It was not a decision I wanted to make as the market was very much part of my life and I had come to see the customers as my friends. But as people have been forced to cut back on their spending and would come less regularly to shop, I had to realise that I was losing money and it couldn’t go on.

When we started farming in 1985, we held the belief, maybe naively, that ‘small is beautiful’ as Eric Shumacher said in his book. But I think we were right - when things get too big - whether they are supply chains or banks, they get beyond our control. Our farm is not huge, we don’t keep thousands of animals and by having the butchery here on the farm everything that is produced here is fully traceable. But this isn’t the way to produce cheap food, and when people are faced with two products, seemingly the same, it’s hard to choose the more expensive one. When I see the price of a supermarket ready made lasagne or burger, I know that it is below the cost of production in my book. Our ready made meals do cost a little more but they take time to make, using home made stocks, local organic vegetables and genuine meat! As someone said on the radio the other day - ‘the cost of cheap food is that we don’t know what we are eating.’ I just hope that will now change!Sorry for this long rant, but we feel passionately about this!! Please keep your orders coming in and remember we can deliver every Thursday or Friday if we receive your order by Sunday, either on the website www.higherhacknell.co.uk or on the phone 01769 560909. We are also taking orders now for Easter, only a few weeks away. If you have any questions or concerns please call me anytime, and there is further information on our blog ‘The Hacknell Chronicles‘.

We are hoping for drier weather so Tim can get on with farm work but hey, pigs might fly! I’ll keep off the horse jokes, I think we’ve had enough of those.

With best wishes
Jo, Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

Down on the Farm - January 2013 at Higher Hacknell

Happy New Year! I hope you had a very festive Christmas and enjoyed all the feasting - I know we did, although I never got around to making a turkey and ham pie with the left overs, which is one of my favourite meals after Christmas. There are still a few turkeys available if you missed out, or if you would like to put a turkey by for Easter

Looking back over the last year, the weather has been pretty memorable! Somehow we got through OK with Tim managing to make the silage and hay in one incredibly long week, which was the only week of sunshine we had last summer! We also ‘crimp’ the barley which means it is stored by ‘pickling’ it rather than drying, so the moisture level can be higher when we harvest it. The future will be much more about using farming methods which are adaptable to our very wet climate, I think. But who knows what it will do?

Today Tim has brought the ewes inside the barn, where they will remain until lambing. It is a huge relief to get them off our muddy pastures into a dry shed. They have had rain on their backs every day for I don’t know how long and they need a break! It is a struggle for them outside and they don’t ‘do’, as farmers say. Most of the cattle are inside now as well, so there are a lot of mouths to feed everyday with hay or silage and sheds to bed down with straw. Outside it is a depressing picture with the fields gone beyond saturation point! Every footstep and you sink down through water! Hopefully they will get a chance to grow and recover before spring now the animals are mostly in. It’s mild and the birds are singing, so we’re hopeful!

The butchery is back to our normal routines after the Christmas rush. Now is a great time to stock up the freezer and our winter warmer slow cooking boxes are perfect for making big batches of tasty and economical meals. The latest evidence on dieting seems to be that fad diets don’t do any long term good and cooking from raw ingredients as opposed to using processed foods is the best way to keep the pounds off! January is a good time to be planning for the year ahead and budgeting to make some savings, so do check out our customer loyalty scheme which offers either 10% extra free meat or free delivery on orders of £100 per month. It also saves you time and hassle as we keep a record of your preferences and contact you when your monthly order is due.

We wish you a very happy and healthy year ahead.

Best wishes
Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

[email protected]
www.higherhacknell.co.uk
Phone 01769 560909

Online Retailer Gold Award - SW Flavour Awards

We have won a gold award for online retailer at the the SW Flavour Awards promoted by Taste of the West! 
The judges said -
"This is a nice looking site in terms of colours. It is a fairly basic OS Commerce site but they have done well with what they have used. The site looks inviting to the eye when you first hit the homepage. It's nice to see
that they have made the site interesting with stories, photos, recipes and a blog - it makes the site. The commentary about each product is great. They have taken the time to tell a bit of a story about each product which pads
out the site nicely."

It’s nearly Christmas down on the Farm - December 2012

Thank you for all your Christmas orders, which we are busy organising; counting up chickens, geese, turkeys and ribs of beef on an hourly basis as the days go by. If you’ve not put your order in yet, don’t worry, there are still a few days left to do it, but gammon joints and turkeys are nearly sold out, so please don’t leave it till the last minute. For our full range please go to our website or phone me on 01769 560909 if I can help with sizes or cooking suggestions.

Life on the farm is quieter at this time of year, and Tim and David are in winter routines of feeding the cattle and bedding them down with straw as they have come inside now. The rams have done their work for the year, with the ewes well marked with the ‘tell tail sign’ of raddle to show they have been served. There are very strict regulations now with all sheep having to be tagged with a long number and every movement recorded, so Tim is making sure everything is up to scratch in case the government inspector calls! We are probably going to get a hand held scanning machine to make the job easier, as reading the small numbers on each sheep’s ear-tag is pretty hard on the old eyes.

It’s certainly getting colder, there was a sprinkling of snow on Exmoor, which we can see from here, but I’m snug in the office thanks to our new wood fired boiler (Tim is having to spend quite a lot of time getting wood and feeding logs into it!)

I hope you are all beginning to feel festive this December. The last date for delivery of Christmas orders is Friday 21st December. As usual, let us know by phone on 01769 560909 if you have any concerns - I only hope there’s no snow on the way this year, or not until after Christmas. You can also collect from the farm on Friday 21st December or Monday 24th or from Crediton Farmers Market on Sunday 23rd. We will be closed until the New Year, delivering again on 4th January. Do get your orders to me in the next few days, there’s still time- just!

Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas,

With best wishes from

Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

[email protected]
www.higherhacknell.co.uk
Phone 01769 560909

Counting down to Christmas - November News

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November starts off with our annual cider making. We have a bunch of family and helpers picking up the apples and building the ‘cheese’ , layers of apples and straw on the ancient press. Luckily they all seem to know what to do as this year Tim was planting the winter oats. It was forecast to rain the following day so he just had a small ‘now or never’ opportunity to get the crop in. They did a proper job, as we say here, although there were less apples due to the poor year and they were much smaller. My role is mainly feeding the workforce (they help themselves to cider!) and It makes me think what it must have been like in times gone by when the farmers wife had to cook breakfast, lunch and tea for so many people every day! So now that the Higher Hacknell farmhouse cider has been made for another year, the next celebration is Christmas.

It is only five weeks until we’ll be busily packing up and despatching the Christmas orders to you and I know that time will fly by. If you haven’t placed your Christmas order yet, you’ll find our full range of deliciously tasty turkey and goose, tender beef and all the festive trimmings on our website www.higherhacknell.co.uk. Just a few clicks and all that shopping hassle will be done and we’ll deliver to your door on Friday 21st December. Having just won a gold award for ‘On line Retail’ at the South West Flavour Awards, we aim to offer not only fabulous meat but an excellent and reliable butchery service too.

Catch a glimpse of Higher Hacknell lamb, beef and pork featured on T.V this week on More4 every weekeday at 7.30 pm (repeated on Sunday afternoon on Channel 4) as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and his River Cottage team cook some great dishes, which you can find here. The film company kept our butcher, Richard, very busy up till the last moment with various additions to their order just we were cleaning up the butchery at 5.30 and as I was about to jump in the delivery van! But as everything had to be in Axminster that same evening, Richard got back to work at the butchers block!

Down on the farm, the rams have been working hard as most of the ewes now have raddle on them to show they’ve been served. But it’s still depressingly wet, which makes everything much harder. Getting wood in and put by, usually no problem most years, has been almost impossible as even the quad bike is getting stuck in the fields. We have just put in a new wood fired boiler which heats my office here, so firewood has become all important. I am enjoying the cosy office though!

Keep warm and well and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes
Jo and Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

telephone 01769 560909
[email protected]
www.higherhacknell.co.uk

Down on the farm - October 2012

Rain, rain and yet more rain. What a year! We have never known anything quite like this. They say, ‘be it dry or be it wet, nature always pays its debt’ but this is the double dip recession of wet weather, the fields are sodden and the lanes round here have become rivers. The cows have come in early as it is just too wet in the fields now, so winter rations and straw bedding have already started. We just managed to harvest our barley and oats, but now it’s time to plant again, and it doesn’t look good. Tim had trouble buying new seed, due to the poor harvest everywhere, there is a shortage and very little has passed the quality tests. Now though, the seed has arrived and with this continual rain, the ground can’t be ploughed or sown, so we may not be able to get it in this season.

Nevertheless, it’s the start of another farming year, and even if we are finding it tough going, the rams have got a lot to look forward to as their moment of glory has almost arrived! In another week or two, as the days get shorter, the ewes will start their cycles and the rams will get to work! They are in fine fettle - especially since our newly qualified vet daughter, Rosy, came back home and said to Tim, ‘Dad, we’ve got to sort the studs from the duds’. They gave the rams a good check over and then went to a couple of specialist sales back in August to purchase 4 new studs to add to the bunch that passed their inspection!

In the butchery we are beginning preparations for Christmas. Its time to start curing the gammons and hams so they will reach perfection in time for the festivities and then dry curing the bacon soon after that. Our Christmas page is on the website at www.higherhacknell.co.uk, or do phone me to discuss what you’d like on 01769 560909. If you’re keen to get ahead, then do take advantage of our special offer on gammon joints for deliveries this month.

We also have a new feature on the website where you can recommend a friend and we’ll send you a ‘thank you’ gift with your next order when they make a purchase from our website. It’s always great to hear from you and now that Higher Hacknell Farm has a Facebook page, I hope we can chat, comment, and exchange recipes even more. I ‘ll be putting the recipes from our friends at River Cottage on it shortly.

It’s been exciting supplying all the meat for the new River Cottage TV series which goes out next week every night at 5 pm on Channel 4 if all goes to plan! Sam, the chef at Axminster said he made a dish of best end of (Higher Hacknell) lamb with almonds and squash and then our chuck steak with horseradish and roasted beetroot which both sound really delicious. I’m going to doing sausage tastings at the Plymouth River Cottage Canteen on Friday 2nd November as part of their ‘meet the producer’ day , so please drop in and say hello if you are around. We will also be showcasing our meat and cooking steakburgers at the Foodfest in Barnstaple Pannier Market on Sunday 21st October, which has become a great annual celebration of local produce, so its a busy month ahead!

See you there and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes

Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm
[email protected]
www.higherhacknell.co.uk
phone 01769 560909

Down on the Farm - September 2012

We are celebrating another win at the Organic Food Awards-this year for our organic South Devon beef which is a great honour. We’ve been farming our pedigree South Devons here at Higher Hacknell since 1985 and do our very best from start to finish, rearing all the animals ourselves to the final preparation in our farm butchery, so it’s amazing to receive this recognition and reassuring that the trust you put in us by buying from Higher Hacknell is well deserved! We are really proud that our meat is winning these awards year on year, our lamb was overall winner in 2010 and the Cottage Pie winner of best Ready Prepared Meal in 2011.

We are also celebrating the arrival of the sun here in Devon after the wettest summer we have ever known. The cattle have been hoof deep in mud for weeks, poaching up the fields, but today their golden coats are gleaming. The spring born calves are really quite butch and chunky looking now, expert at feeding from their mothers to the extent that their whole heads get covered with milk! The new grass seeds which Tim planted a couple of weeks ago, are coming up well so will be established before the first frosts arrive. They say round here that you need to get the grass seed in by Barnstaple Fair which is on 19th September. September is a great month, getting back to routines again and hopefully having enough time to pick a few blackberries from the hedgerows for a nice crumble, a perfect pudding to follow the roast beef on a Sunday!

If you you’ve forgotten how good Higher Hacknell beef tastes, which was described by the judges as ‘Lovely, very good quality with an explosion of flavour’, then do remind yourself by making the most of our September offer of 10% off our sirloin steaks and joints. If the weather holds then we might be in for some late summer barbecuing. Hope you’re enjoying the sunshine too.

Best wishes

From Jo and Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm