Introducing our Adaptive Multi Paddock (AMP) grazing project

FAI Farms and McDonald's

Transcript

Claire Hill 0:08  
I'm Claire Hill, Regenerative Agriculture Director at FAI Farms. We've been working with McDonald's for 20 years on agricultural research projects. Our most recent project with McDonald's is looking at Adaptive multi paddock grazing in the UK, which is a regenerative agriculture practice. Regenerative agriculture is something that's coming to the mainstream, it's been practised for a long time, but maybe only in small sections of agriculture. With the pressures that farmers are facing with profitability, flood drought, farm resilience, farmer mental health, animal health challenges, regenerative agriculture looks like it could be a possible solution to some. McDonald's in the states are part of a large project looking at Adaptive multi paddock grazing on multiple farms, and we looked at that project thought it was exciting and wondered if it could work in the UK for McDonald's, UK and Ireland. So we're putting it in practice on a 1500 acre farm over here looking at whether we can get the benefits from a regenerative agriculture system that have been claimed, like healthier soil, better carbon locked down, healthier animals, better daily live weight gain, more grass grown, lower input costs, overall happier and more profitable farmers. That's what we're looking at. The main practical changes that we've implemented are to focus a lot more on our grazing planning, which includes out wintering and bale grazing and also focusing on rest periods rather than residuals of grass. We achieve that we sell grazing, but we've moved our animals into larger groups, and we're moving them on every one or two days, which means we're aiming for about a six month rest period on most of our grazing. In order to help more farmers with their own transition, the project is capturing over 60 different measures around soil health, animal health, farm profitability, environmental benefits, so that we can fully understand what an adaptive multi paddock grazing regenerative system looks like in the UK to help other farmers in UK and Ireland with their transition.

Harriet Wilson  2:02  
At McDonald's, we're serving 4 million customers through our restaurants each day, and we rely on over 23,000 British and Irish farmers suppliers with the highest quality food. This makes us one of the largest buyers of British and Irish beef. Due to our extensive grazing based systems, we have one of the greatest opportunities to address climate change and drive positive change in sustainable food production. We're really pleased therefore to be working with FAI farms to fund this research on adaptive multi paddock grazing. What are the aims of this project is to quantify the positive impacts of grass based regenerative feed production and also identified best practice that we can then share with our suppliers and farmers to bring about greater impacts across British and Irish beef industry.