About Fromant & Sanders

The farm at The Elms, Kislingbury, Northampton is a traditionally run family farm with cattle, sheep and arable enterprises. It is based in the rolling countryside and river meadows to the west of Northampton.

Our beef animals are reared on the farm by a welfare-friendly, extensive rearing system using traditional grass meadows for summer grazing and home-grown cereals and silage for their winter feed. Using this system, the animals have acres to roam over in the summer and are not crowded or rushed when they are housed in the winter.

All animals are sent to a long established, local family butcher who ensures that the meat is hung for the optimum time in the traditional manner to develop perfect taste and tenderness to enhance the eating experience.

The farm is 1200 acres, with the main buildings in Kislingbury. We have 650 acres of arable crops, growing oilseed rape. Oats, wheat and barley are grown to feed our livestock.

Harvest normally starts at the end of July, with the barley ready first followed by the oilseed rape oats and then wheat, last year(2006) we finished combining in late August; sometimes it can be into September. All the straw is baled and stored near the buildings ready for use in the winter, most is used as bedding, some is chopped and included in our home produced and mixed feed. The straw is high in fibre; fibre is important in the rumen to encourage good digestion.

The crops are all winter sown. The oilseed rape is planted in August, followed by the wheat and oats and finally the barley in October.

We have a flock of 250 breeding sheep, these are lambed in early February; this is relatively early, the lambs however thrive in the more sheltered and undulating fields. We have a herd of 180 cows; these start calving in March and have largely finished calving by July. The cows are kept in the buildings during the winter, to avoid poaching of the ground and to give the grass a rest.

As the cows calve, they are turned out to the fields with their calves, where they remain all summer. In October the calves are weaned and housed. The cows are left out at grass until the ground becomes too wet. Last year some of the cows where out until Christmas. The calves are kept indoors until turn out in the spring, they are then kept out at grass for the whole of the summer before being housed again, as the weather becomes inclement.

In the spring of 2005, we bought 12 pedigree South Devon's. They were put with one of our pedigree South Devon Bulls (Homer). The intention was to keep the female calves to go back into the herd as replacements. At calving in spring 2006 we only had 2 heifer calves, the rest were male!

In the spring 2006 we bought another 38 pedigree females – hopefully in 2007 we will have a much higher proportion of females born! The rest of the cows are of various breeds including Longhorns, Shorthorns, Herefords, Limousins, Simmentals, Charolais and Angus.

With our system of rearing beef we pride ourselves on having full traceability, and an excellent environment for all out animals. We know who the calf's mother is, we know when the calf was born; we know that all the cereals and forage eaten by our cattle is produced on our farm; we aim to maintain as stress free an environment as possible for our animals. Not many animals would spend their whole life one one farm.

We decided we wanted to do more than just rear an animal to load it on a lorry and never get any feed back on how it turned out. We found a local family run butchers, who have been most helpful to us, as we have begun to retail our beef directly to the customer.

There is a dedicated morning for delivery of animals to the butchers premises. This is a Tuesday morning; which requires a 5 o'clock start, to try and be first in the queue of the land rovers and trailers, ready for unloading.

Here the animal is hung for the optimum time before being cut to our customers' individual requirements.

Many questions are asked about how best to cook specific cuts of meat. Both Bridget and Caroline are well placed to offer advice on specific and general enquiries (both being excellent cooks).

The most common mistake appears to be that people don't relax the meat between cooking and eating.

Please do ask at our stalls or by phone for any cooking advice, as we have tried almost everything!