Dairy beef
Our dairy beef comes from a dairy cow crossed with a Limousin bull. The Limousin
is
renowned for its ability to produce well marbled quality
meat with a low proportion of bone and fat.
Unlike many beef producers, who slaughter their animals
at 16-18 months old, we rear our Limousin-cross
beef animals for between 24 and 30 months, allowing them
to mature and grow slowly, which improves the
flavour of the meat.
Our dairy beef has an outstanding flavour - many people
say it is slightly sweeter and it is very tender. There are many reasons
why our beef tastes so good:
● The animals grow slowly until they are 24-30 months old
● Our animals are gentle and don’t mind being handled
● We normally take them to the abattoir ourselves
● We use a small friendly abattoir that treats the animals with respect
● Our meat is matured (hung) for up to 4 weeks
David goes to enormous trouble to
make sure that his silage is made at the right time of
year – at Portnellan we make two cuts the first being about the end of
May and the second is approximately 6
weeks after the first cut. Every farm is
different – too early and there’s not enough for the
winter; too late and the quality isn’t quite right! Of
course, there’s the weather to contend with too and
sometimes that can mean that silage is delayed for weeks
as we watch it getting much too long and stalky – not
exactly what our cows need.
The pastures on Portnellan are
permanent leys – that means that they have been there
for a very long time and we don’t plough them up. Since
we went organic the clover has returned to the grassland
– clover is a nitrogen-fixing plant and it means that we
don’t need to use artificial nitrogen in the form of
fertiliser to make the grass grow. Where the clover is,
the grass is long and lush, using the nitrogen that has
been ‘fixed’ in the soil.
Our
meat is then matured (hung) on the bone for 2 to 4 weeks
in a chill store to improve the flavour and
tenderness. Only then is the meat cut and prepared by
our professional organically certified butcher at
Blackmount Foods in Biggar, ready to be enjoyed by you.
|
Limousin-cross
calves and (below) full-grown cows
The milking cows and the young beef animals feeding from
our lush pastures
A freshly cut field and ...
...the grass waiting to be converted into silage |
