Voucher: Herdwick Experience

Description

‘Yew Tree Farm is the home of Heritage Meats. We are producers of multi award winning Herdwick meat, endorsed by top chefs and Michelin starred restaurants around the country, and now suppliers by invitation to the MasterChef Gift Card.

We are immensely proud of the traditional, environmentally positive farming methods we use, methods which Beatrix Potter herself would still recognise. Beatrix famously bought Yew Tree Farm, understanding it’s environmental significance and passionately resolved on protecting that.

The Herdwick Experience is exclusive to Yew Tree Farm. It’s an educational farm tour where we talk about Herdwick sheep as a breed and how we farm them on our fields and fells. It has the added bonus of providing the opportunity to meet some unusually friendly and gentle Herdwick sheep.

Through running the Herdwick Experience I’ve become aware of how little opportunity people have, to talk directly to food producers. Many Herdwick Experience visitors really care about issues such as food production, animal welfare, soil health, veganism, rewilding etc and they want the chance to discuss these issues with an actual farmer.  Like many people, they rely on third hand info available via the general media and social media. This can result in information gaps and leaves people with lots of questions they want to ask. I can’t answer all of them, but I do my best!

Also most sheep, including most of our sheep (we have nearly 1000!), run away from people. They are happy being left alone to roam and graze over the farms 800 acres. So it’s a special experience for many people to meet my little flock of ambassador Herdwicks that come up to be stroked and hugged 🙂 The Herdwick Experience sheep are not bottled reared, they’re just odd sheep who every now and again are born with a natural tendancy to gravitate towards people. So I’ve removed them from the commercial flock and kept them as pets and they gradually evolved into an flock of Herdwick Ambassadors!’