Wild Dartmoor Devon is a county filled with landscapes: rolling green hills, criss-crossed with hedgerows; miles of wonderful coastline and cliffs, both north and south and forming the centre of it all – Dartmoor - a massive granite plateau (368 square miles/95,300 square kms) covered in rough grassland, heather and gorse, rising to 621m at its highest point. Dartmoor is one of England’s National Parks, areas of remarkable natural landscape that are protected to preserve their unique character but which are also home to many people engaged in farming, forestry and leisure activities.
Chagford is a pretty market town with a strong sense of community, situated on the eastern side of the moor where the transition between open moorland and enclosed fields is clearly delineated by the change of colour in the landscape and a web of granite walled fields. The higher hills beyond the town are virtually treeless and, depending on the season, either purple with heather or rusty with bracken and during the winter, often shrouded in mist and rain. It’s colder up here than in the clement lowlands of Devon and has a high rainfall in excess of 90” (check 130cm), twice the regional average. It’s a hard place to make a decent living by farming alone though generations of families have done so, running cattle and sheep on the open moor in the summer, bringing them down to their home farm during the winter months.
Incomers Richard Vines, a former army officer, bought a house in Chagford in 1979 whilst still working in London. By 1992, having been made redundant from his second career (in the brewery industry), he had moved down permanently and started his own small business, raising just 20 cattle in the first year and selling the resulting beef. A few years later his wife Elizabeth joined the company and together they now produce and market 110 bullocks a year from their newly built farmhouse a couple of miles from Chagford. Richard was determined to make a living from the land and has worked hard to create a product with its own unique identity. ‘The name “Wild Beef” really does tell a story’, he said, ‘Our cattle are a product of the landscape and are reared as naturally as possible. The meat sells itself by flavour alone and I think it is fair to say that we have changed people’s expectations. You won’t find anything so distinctive in a supermarket – and never will!’
Breeding ground The Wild Beef herd are made up of purebred Welsh Blacks and South and North Devons, the latter both indigenous breeds. Richard then crosses the breeds, using his own bulls, to get the desired confirmation and hardiness of animal best suited to the environment and climatic conditions. ‘I call them mid-Devons’, he joked, ‘But we know that they look good and do well on what is relatively poor grass keep even in the winter.’
The Vines have just 20 acres of their own around the farm but like most farmers in the area have moorland grazing rights. In addition, land is rented near the town, in East Devon and latterly even as far afield as Hampshire and Wiltshire, where ‘Wild Beef’ play an important part in the conservation of organic chalk downland. The reason for all these extra pockets of land reflects the growth in the business and the necessity for good grazing to finish the cattle off before slaughter. Richard has always used a small family-run abattoir in Ottery St Mary, another market town in East Devon where he can be guaranteed humane conditions and the carcasses are hung for a minimum of three weeks. Although this method is out of fashion with profit driven retailers as the carcasses lose 30 per cent of their body weight during this period, Richard maintains that the meat matures better on the bone, giving it more succulence and flavour.
Going to market Wild Beef has always been sold directly, so Richard is well aware of who his customers are and what they want. The renown Gidleigh Park Hotel, just a few miles away places regular orders as does the busy convenience store in Chagford itself but the local population is too small to support the amount Wild Beef now produces and Richard has expanded the marketing operation to include mail order and farmers markets. They are also part of Meat Dartmoor, a loose cooperative of other local farmers producing good quality meat.
‘We started selling at local farmer’s markets in 1997 after concentrating on home deliveries. These are still our most important outlets though we now attend three London markets every week as well,’ explained Richard. ‘This is partly because everyone else is catching on down here and it’s getting more competitive to a point where we couldn’t make a living from just selling within a 20 mile radius. In London nobody produces beef of course and there are plenty of customers who really appreciate the quality and can afford to pay realistic prices. There is a genuine interest in the welfare of the animals as well as the demand for an excellent piece of British beef. Some of our regular clientele include top chefs who buy it to eat themselves!’
Richard and Lizzie also attend a growing number of food festivals, which are increasing in popularity every year, like Henrietta Green’s Food Lovers Fair in Covent Garden and more locally, Exeter Festival of Food and Drink held in March, which was attended by over 10,000 visitors in 2005.
The future of hill farming ‘We’re lucky to be doing what we are doing now’, said Richard. ‘Being new to farming I wasn’t stuck in doing things the way they had always been done. I see young farmers around us now struggling to make a living and I encourage them to “take the bull by the horns” and go out to meet the demand rather than be tied into a supply chain over which they have no control.’ The farm is in simultaneous conversion to organic status and benefits from hill farming and Organic Entry Level Scheme subsidies. A full-time herdsman is employed to check the cattle in East Devon, whilst Richard looks after those closer to home with some part-time help for stock keeping duties and fulfilling orders at the farm plus Lizzie who attends the markets and does all the other chores.
‘I believe we produce some of the best beef in the world,’ Richard exclaimed proudly, ‘And I know that our customers understand and appreciate that our cows are allowed to live as natural a life as possible. Some of our breeding stock is 14 years old and still doing well. Wild Beef is a celebration of our native breeds of cattle and old-fashioned farming methods. You can’t force nature when you live in such close proximity to Dartmoor and I wouldn’t even try.’
Richard and Lizzie Vines Wild Beef Hillhead Farm Chagford Devon TQ13 8DY
