CopperBeech
Member
- Location
- A Welsh man lost in England
These things never can be black and white, can they! There will always be extremes of systems - 6 months housed(!!) v outwintered on tiny amounts of grain - that will find holes in the standards. On a bell curve these alternative options would be outliers. The majority of farmers that are in the middle of the bell curve could transition to feeding less or no grain, if they wished. PFLA gives them the option to be recognised in the marketplace, should they so wish to go down that route.
Fundamentally, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that ruminants have evolved over tens of thousands of years to eat forage and roughage. You can never kill a working animal (ie feeding young or growing frame, etc) by over-feeding forage. However, you can kill them with too much grain and, even at lower amounts, it puts stress on the liver, causes digestive ailments, causes foot problems, etc, etc.
At very low levels of grain feeding, such ‘problems’ are asymptomatic or almost non-existent and, it’s true, there may be benefits in certain circumstances - a nutritionally poor moorland being a good example, especially when the practicalities of the site are taken into consideration too.
If they were my cattle and I wanted to pursue a pasture-fed diet for them, I would look to find a way of bale grazing them somehow. It’s amazing how powerful the human mind can be at finding a solution to a seemingly intractable problem!
Recognised in the market place how and by whom ...... and to what advantage ? Yer ...... none.