Rosewood Farms
Having seen the demise of the family dairy farm, brothers Paul and Robert Rose were determined to carry on the farming tradition, but in a more sustainable way - both environmentally and economically. Rosewood Farms was purchased in 2002 after 10yrs of farming rented land in the locality and is thought to be the first farm in the UK to use our pioneering High Intensity/Low Frequency (HILF) grazing system on a commercial basis.
This grazing system eliminates fertilisers, weedkillers, tractor work (oil) on our pastures, routine chemical worming and parasite control and grain feeding of the stock, which eliminates further tractor and chemical use on the arable land. Under this highly efficient system, most of the farm is fallow for 362 days a year, allowing wildlife to flourish undisturbed alongside maximum production.
How we sell
We have always sold direct via mail order, cutting out all middlemen enabling us to get full value for our produce, and give our customers a supermarket-beating price.
Robert's wife Natalie joined the team in 2009, meeting a kindred grazing spirit in Robert! Natalie had always wanted to DO something about the wastage of bull calves rather than just talk about it, so in 2008 she started rearing them for veal. However she quickly found veal did not give enough return, and was also deeply unhappy to send young animals to the abattoir at a maximum of 8 months of age. She set about trying to tweak conventional rearing systems via experimentation so that we could take them to the full 30 months a beef animal gets, without sacrificing Rosewood's eco-values. and JerseyBeef.com was born in late 2009.
We now believe we have now perfected the system, and produce 30 month old Jersey beef grain free, GM free and soya free which receives no end of extremely positive feedback from customers.
Natalie is also a keen ox trainer in her spare time - oxen are simply cattle trained to work, and can be ridden just like horses.
Jerseybeef.com
After training a few other breeds, Natalie purchased 'Ted' to train as the PR man for JerseyBeef.com. He was a born star, loving attention from the start and was taken into York city centre for a photo shoot to produce publicity material at just 4months of age, so it is Ted's face you see associated with JerseyBeef.com! He took all the city centre chaos in his stride, and has ended up in the papers 5times already! He is now 18months old and still has some growing and training to do before he can go out and meet the public, but when he's ready, we think the best way for people to start caring about jersey bulls, will be for them to meet one up close and personal, and there's no better ambassador than Ted!
What the money is for
We have big plans for JerseyBeef.com, as there are plenty of bull calves to save - the spare calves from just one of our suppliers could handsomely feed 12 families of 4 on sustainable beef for a whole year!
However, it takes 2.5yrs to rear a batch of Jerseys, which means we have to predict where we will be in 2.5yrs and try to rear batches of animals appropriate for then, and stump up the cash to do it NOW - which is where crowdfunding comes in! £40 buys a sack of milk, and milk is our biggest cost, the current bill being £4k.
