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Farmer Stories

Elise Sutton - Conservation grazing, hay meadows and herbal leys

England
Case Study
conservation grazing
Livestock
new entrant
herbal leys
direct selling

All imagery: Joanne Coates © for the Nature Friendly Farming Network

For some farmers, working hand in glove with major conservation or heritage organisations would be a challenging prospect. For Elise Sutton, it is pretty close to her dream job.

Elise is a stockperson at Cherry Lodge Farm in Wiltshire, which is home to Parsonage Down National Nature Reserve. She manages the herd of English Longhorn cattle that graze 650 acres owned by Natural England on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain, a prehistoric-looking “Stonehenge landscape” of open chalk grassland.

It’s a job that brings together Elise’s twin passions for conservation and livestock farming. Initially intending to pursue a career helping nature, Elise failed her A-levels and ended up heading to an agricultural college for a course in countryside management. A summer placement helping a National Trust grazier gave her a love of farming, and during her degree, she was able to spend a year doing conservation grazing at a Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) reserve.

Nature and farming don’t have to be two separate entities.

Elise Sutton

“I absolutely loved it,” she said. “Longhorns are my passion, and I just fell in love with those guys. At WWT, I had a really nice balance between running a herd of cattle and conservation, understanding the management needs of a herd for breeding lapwings and other wading birds.”

Having found her ideal place in farming, Elise got the job at Cherry Lodge Farm around three years ago. The site is split in two, with 420 acres of SSSI chalk grassland and the other 230 or so acres gradually being turned from more intensive arable farming to a mosaic of herbal leys, newly-created hay meadows and semi-improved grassland. Over the last few decades, the idea has been to stop thinking of the SSSI pasture and grassland as separate entities and to run a 100% Longhorn, nature-friendly farm.

The farm has a low stocking density with around 65 sucklers and a total of just under 148 animals. The Longhorns do most of the maintenance grazing on the NNR, with stores and sucklers as two separate groups. The cattle spend most of the year outside, with just the young stock eating herb-rich forage in the sheds in winter, which ensures they get plenty of proteins and sugars for growing. Rotational grazing keeps the animals moving across the NNR to prevent the sward from becoming rank and maintain the chalk grassland’s rich biodiversity. Elise says benefits have already been seen with the calves gaining weight faster from this grazing approach. In winter, sheep are brought from an RSPB site in Wales to spend around five months grazing the reserve.

The grazing is full of natural wormers, while the chalk also helps naturally wear the cattle’s feet down. “They live a very naturalistic life, exhibiting behaviours they would in the wild,” Elise says. “When you get them in for pregnancy scanning, it’s like being on the Serengeti with big mobs of cattle coming across the open plain.”

The landscape changes colour with the seasons, from a carpet of yellow in April with buttercups to a phase of white flowers to a beautiful phase of flowering purple in September with devil’s bit scabious and knapweed. 

The farm converted to organic in 2019 and Elise was heavily involved in converting formerly-intensive arable land into herbal leys and ensuring the site was fully organic. She describes being able to sell the Longhorn beef as organic as “a major USP”, and the farm has recently begun working towards getting Pasture For Life certification.

Unsurprisingly, given that it is a National Nature Reserve, Cherry Lodge Farm is rich in biodiversity. Great bustards have been reintroduced to Wiltshire and have been seen on-site, along with good populations of breeding farmland birds and overwintering species like redwings and lapwings. In autumn, linnets and goldfinches flock in numbers to feast on plants like chicory, which are left to go to seed. The farm is also home to butterflies, including the rare marsh fritillary and even rarer burnt tip orchid.

Elise is working on building up the farm’s sales of its organic native breed grass-fed beef from animals killed at around 30 months old. She is keen to set out why the Longhorns work so well. “They just suit the landscape down to a T, and they don’t need anything other than the occasional horn or hoof trim. They do the conservation grazing well, and they convert the forage into quality beef,” she says.

The farm now has more than 80 customers for its beef boxes and delivers all over Wiltshire. This has been built up almost purely through word-of-mouth, and Elise is hoping numbers and sales will increase further with the launch of a website.

Elise’s work, bringing together food production and biodiversity, has influenced her view on the future of nature-friendly farming. “Nature and farming don’t have to be two separate entities,” she says. “We’re not going to save the planet or feed the nation without bringing the two together. Whether it’s one or 1,000 acres, farmers and conservationists can work together to improve the land.”

Being primarily a nature reserve owned by Natural England, the NNR is funded to benefit nature, but as a farm, it still needs to run a tight financial ship. Elise says: “We want to be open about the financial implications of farming this way and feel responsible for spending taxpayers’ money as efficiently as possible. This means maximising all income streams that also benefit nature.”

The farm grows wildflower seed for a local company, which harvests it and creates mixes for farmers to create new species-rich grassland. It has reduced energy costs by putting solar panels on the roof of its biggest shed. Most of the income, however, comes from the Longhorns, selling beef directly to customers or from the sale of pedigree breeding stock and organic stores. 

As someone setting out on her farming career while working in a non-intensive way, Elise is keen to support more new entrants and says that new ideas are welcome in the sector. “You don’t have to be from a farming background to get into farming, but you do have to work a bit harder sometimes,” she says. “I didn’t feel unwelcome. You see all the old boys in the pub and think, do I belong here? But I’ve had really good conversations, they’ve wanted to talk about my farm and ask why I do things and I question why they do certain things. I go back to college and university to lecture on how I got into farming. I would happily talk to 16-year-olds and tell them to be a farmer.”