SOIL IS THE STRATEGY.
End of September The Little Beefy Box — Stabiliser Beef
£99.00
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End of September The Little Beefy Box — Stabiliser Beef
£99.00
Low stock
At least 8kg of mixed beef, including a balanced selection of steaks, roasting joints, mince, burgers, braising beef and slow-cook cuts.
Born and reared at Lower Blakemere Farm.
Finished nearby with our farmer friend Will near Tenbury.
Dry-aged, professionally butchered, vacuum packed and
labelled by Griffiths of Leintwardine.
Reserve This Beefy Box
Pickup available at Lower Blakemere Farm
Usually ready in 5+ days
Approximately 5kg of our farm beef — £99
All the Beefy Box goodness, just a bit less of it.
We love our original Beefy Box. But we also know that not everybody has a huge family, a huge freezer or £150 they want to spend on beef in one go.
So, meet The Little Beefy Box.
Approximately 5kg of proper, farm-direct beef from our Stabiliser cattle, born and reared here at Lower Blakemere Farm in Herefordshire.
You’ll get a really useful mixture of beef for everyday cooking and the occasional rather good steak night — typically including steaks, roasting joints, mince, stewing and braising beef and slow-cooking cuts.
Same cattle. Same farm. Same beef. Smaller box.
Perfect for couples, smaller households, smaller freezers, or anyone who wants to try buying beef directly from a farm for the first time.
Three Very Good Reasons to Buy a Little Beefy Box
1. You know where your beef came from
Our cattle are born and reared here at Lower Blakemere Farm and finished with our mate Will at Sutton Park Tenbury Wells.
Not just “British beef”.
Not an anonymous packet with a nice picture of a field on it.
Beef from an actual farm, with an address, that you can follow.
2. You get a proper mixture of cuts
Steaks are lovely, obviously, but there are only so many steaks on a cow.
A Little Beefy Box gives you a useful mix for roasting, frying, casseroles, curries, cottage pies, Bolognese and all sorts of proper suppers.
3. It fits in a sensible-sized freezer
Our original Beefy Box is brilliant value, but 8kg+ is quite a commitment.
The Little Beefy Box gives you around 5kg of beef without requiring the freezer capacity of a village hall.
Your box will contain approximately 5kg of beef, with a guaranteed minimum weight of 4.7kg.
We’ll aim to give you a balanced and genuinely useful selection, usually including:
Steaks
Roasting joints
Beef mince
Stewing and braising beef
Slow-cooking cuts
The exact cuts and individual pack weights will vary from box to box.
And there’s a very good reason for that.
Why Isn’t It Exactly 5kg?
Because cows don’t come in 5kg boxes.
We aim for around 5kg in every Little Beefy Box, and your box will never contain less than 4.7kg.
But when our butcher is dividing a whole animal into useful steaks, roasting joints, mince and slow-cooking cuts, the weights don’t magically land on exactly 5kg.
And we’d much rather give you a proper roasting joint than chop a perfectly good one in half simply to make the scales say the right number.
So one box might be 4.8kg, another 5kg and another a little over.
That’s the nature of buying real food from a real animal.
We aim for 5kg, guarantee at least 4.7kg, and concentrate on giving you the best and most useful mix of cuts we can from the whole animal.
Everything is professionally butchered, vacuum packed and labelled, ready for the fridge or freezer.
This animal was born here at Lower Blakemere Farm in Herefordshire.
It grew up grazing our fields, banks and permanent pasture with its mother, turning grass and forage that humans can’t eat into food that we can.
Our cattle are an important part of the whole farm.
They graze land that is difficult or impossible to crop, cycle nutrients, produce manure and help us build a mixed farming system where livestock and crops work together rather than existing as two entirely separate enterprises.
Eventually the cattle leave us and go to our farmer friend Will Morgan near Tenbury for the finishing stage.
They continue to eat forage, with barley and minerals where required, so that they reach the right condition for good eating beef.
The beef is then professionally butchered and aged, vacuum packed and labelled by Griffiths of Leintwardine.
Then it comes to you.
There’s a lot less mystery involved when you buy food like this.
There is something rather reassuring about food with an address.
This is one of the biggest reasons we want to sell more of what we produce directly from the farm.
The conventional food chain can look something like:
Farmer → processor → wholesaler → distribution centre → supermarket → you.
And along the way there are plenty of costs.
Processing.
Wholesaling.
Distribution.
Storage.
Transport.
Marketing.
Supermarket margins.
More transport.
More packaging.
More handling.
We’re trying something rather simpler:
Our farm → local butcher → you.
We rear the cattle.
Our butcher does the skilled job of turning the carcass into the cuts you actually want to cook.
And we sell the beef directly to you.
There are still very real costs. Rearing cattle certainly isn’t free, and neither are the abattoir, butchery, packing or getting chilled meat safely to your door.
But we’ve removed several layers in the middle.
More of what you spend stays connected to producing the food and keeping the farm going — and you get to know exactly who produced your beef and where it came from.
That feels like a much better food system to us.
And the more people who choose to buy some of their food directly from farms, butchers and local producers, the more of that food system we can bypass together.
There are only so many steaks on a cow.
There is, however, an awful lot more cow.
And if we’re going to rear an animal for food, we think one of the most important things we can do is value and eat the whole animal properly.
That’s one of the reasons we sell mixed beef boxes rather than simply selling all the steaks and wondering what on earth to do with everything else.
Your box might give you steak for Saturday night.
A roasting joint for Sunday.
Mince for cottage pie, chilli, burgers or Bolognese.
And braising beef for the sort of supper that sits bubbling away for several hours and makes everyone walking into the kitchen suddenly very interested in what time you’re eating.
That is nose-to-tail eating in a very practical form.
It reduces waste.
It gives proper value to an animal we have spent years raising.
It encourages all of us to cook a wider variety of meals.
And some of the supposedly less glamorous cuts are absolutely delicious.
Slow cooking can turn working muscles such as shin and braising cuts into some of the richest, tastiest beef you’ll eat.
A cow is much more than a sirloin steak.
Our boxes reflect that.
So What Does “Regenerative Farming” Actually Mean?
We use the word regenerative quite a lot at Lower Blakemere, so we think we ought to explain what we actually mean by it.
First of all:
We are not organic.
Organic farming has defined standards and certification.
Regenerative farming is different. There isn’t one universal recipe that every regenerative farmer follows.
For us, it is a set of principles and, perhaps more importantly, a change in mindset.
The starting point is pretty simple:
Look after the soil and build a farming system that gets better rather than poorer over time.
The main regenerative principles we work towards are:
Minimise disturbance of the soil
Keep the soil covered
Keep living roots growing for as much of the year as possible
Increase diversity
Integrate livestock
Farm according to our own soil, climate and circumstances
That last one is important.
What works here on a mixed Herefordshire farm won’t necessarily be the answer on an upland sheep farm in Cumbria or a vegetable farm in Cornwall.
Regenerative farming isn’t a recipe. It’s a direction of travel.
What Does Regen Actually Look Like at Lower Blakemere?
It means we have stopped ploughing and increasingly direct-drill our crops so that we disturb the soil less.
It means growing cover crops and more diverse mixtures, keeping living roots in the ground and trying not to leave soil sitting bare.
It means bringing livestock and cropping much more closely together.
It means changing the way we graze, moving cattle and allowing plants more time to recover.
It means using their manure to return nutrients and organic matter to our soils.
It means reducing our reliance year by year on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides rather than assuming another input is automatically the answer to every problem.
And it means experimenting with biology — compost, worms, Johnson-Su compost, Bokashi-fermented manure and the extraordinary community of organisms already living beneath our feet.
We’re also trying to create more room for everything else that shares this farm with us.
Birds.
Insects.
Earthworms.
Fungi.
Plants.
Wildlife.
And all the microscopic life in the soil that most of us never see.
There are more living organisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on the planet.
Once you start thinking about soil in those terms, it becomes rather difficult to regard it simply as dirt for holding a crop upright.
Soil is the strategy.
And No, Regenerative Doesn’t Mean “Chemical Free”
This is worth saying clearly.
We are not organic and we don’t pretend to be.
We still use conventional farming tools and synthetic inputs when we believe they are necessary.
What is changing is the question we ask first.
Instead of automatically asking:
“What can we put on this?”
We’re increasingly asking:
“Why is this happening, and can the farming system itself help us solve it?”
Can healthier soil grow a healthier crop?
Can livestock cycle some of our fertility?
Can a cover crop do a job we would otherwise have to pay for?
Can a better rotation help with weeds, pests or disease?
Can biology replace some of the chemistry?
Can we use less?
Can we make the farm more resilient?
Those are the questions we are asking.
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes it isn’t.
Some experiments work brilliantly.
Some don’t.
And occasionally there is Farmer Phil standing in the middle of a field looking at something we’ve tried and wondering why on earth any of us thought it was a good idea.
That’s farming too.
We are learning, changing and measuring as we go.
Regenerative farming isn’t about pretending we’ve reached some environmentally perfect destination.
We haven’t.
For us, it is about looking at soil, water, plants, livestock, wildlife and food as one connected system and trying to make decisions that leave that system in better shape.
Where Do the Cattle Fit Into Regen?
Right in the middle of it.
Our cattle aren’t separate from our regenerative farming.
They are one of the tools that make a mixed farming system work.
They can graze areas where we can’t sensibly grow human food.
They turn grass and forage into beef.
They return dung and urine to the land.
Their manure provides nutrients and organic matter that can go back into our soils.
Grazing can also be managed so that plants are given time to recover before the cattle return.
And, perhaps less glamorously but very importantly:
Cows poo.
On a mixed farm, that is an extremely useful quality.
Rather than viewing the cattle, crops, manure and soil as separate things, we’re trying to join the dots between them.
Meet our Stabilizer Cattle
Much of our herd is made up of Stabiliser cattle.
Stabilisers were developed using several beef breeds, including Hereford, Angus, Simmental and Gelbvieh, to produce efficient, maternal cattle suited to forage-based beef systems.
We like them because they suit the direction we’re taking the farm.
Our calves are born here and spend much of their lives grazing with their mothers.
They move through different parts of the farm and make particularly good use of areas which are difficult to crop — grass banks, permanent pasture, slopes, field edges and awkward corners where taking a combine would be considerably less sensible.
For most of their lives they eat grass and forage.
During the winter they come inside for shelter and eat forage grown on the farm, with a small ration of grain and minerals where necessary.
Later they go to our farmer friend Will near Tenbury for finishing, where they continue on forage with barley and minerals to reach the right condition.
We aren’t claiming our beef is 100% grass-fed.
It isn’t.
We would far rather tell you exactly what we do than invent a nice marketing slogan.
Why buy beef straight from a farm?
Because you can ask us where it came from.
And we can tell you.
You can see our cattle.
You can see our fields.
You can see how we farm.
You can see what they eat.
You can see what we’re doing with our soils.
And if you follow us for any length of time, you’ll certainly see the successes and the cock-ups.
We’re not asking you simply to believe some lovely words printed on the side of a packet.
We’re inviting you to follow the farm, watch what we're doing, ask us questions and make up your own mind.
When you buy a Little Beefy Box, you’re not simply buying “British beef”.
You’re buying beef from Lower Blakemere Farm, Herefordshire.
We think that distinction matters.
This is probably the bit we’re most passionate about.
If you’re spending your money on food, we think you should be able to
find out:
Who produced it?
Where did it come from?
How was it raised?
What sort of farming system produced it?
So follow Lower Blakemere Farm on social media and here on our
website.
You’ll see the cattle grazing.
You’ll see the calves arrive.
You’ll see Farmer Phil moving them.
You’ll see our crops being drilled and harvested.
You’ll see cover crops, worms, compost, Bokashi, muck, wildlife, drought,
rain, mud and probably more soil than you ever thought you wanted to look at.
You’ll see the things that work.
And the things that don’t.
Then, when your beef arrives on the doorstep, you’ll know rather more
about your supper than the name printed on a label.
That’s what farm-direct food should be.
One of the best things about buying a beef box is how incredibly useful
it is.
Put a Little Beefy Box in the freezer and suddenly you have the
beginnings of lots of proper meals.
Mince becomes cottage pie, Bolognese, chilli, meatballs or burgers.
Stewing and braising beef becomes casseroles, curries, pies and slow-cooked suppers.
Roasting joints sort out Sunday lunch — and, with any luck, Monday’s sandwiches.
Steaks need considerably less explanation.
Rather than reaching for another ultra-processed convenience meal when
everyone is hungry, you have proper ingredients in the freezer and you know
exactly where the main ingredient came from.
And beef itself has a refreshingly short ingredients list:
Beef.
Because we kept hearing variations of:
“I’d love a Beefy Box, but I just haven’t got the freezer room.”
Fair enough.
Our full Beefy Box contains at least 8kg of beef and offers brilliant
value, particularly for families and keen freezer fillers.
But it’s not right for everybody.
So this is the answer.
The Little Beefy Box gives you approximately 5kg of farm-direct beef for
£99.
It’s enough to give you a really worthwhile selection of cuts and plenty
of meals, but manageable for a couple, smaller family or smaller freezer.
It’s also a great way to try buying beef directly from a farm for the
first time.
And if you discover that having proper beef in the freezer is rather
wonderful, you can graduate to the whopping great Beefy Box next time.
Butchery, Packing & Delivery
Once ready, our beef is dry-aged and professionally butchered by
Griffiths of Leintwardine.
The individual cuts are vacuum packed and clearly labelled, making
them easy to store and freeze.
For customers close to Lower Blakemere Farm, collection is available and
we may also deliver locally.
For customers further afield, we offer nationwide UK delivery.
Your beef is sent chilled in carefully insulated sheep’s wool
packaging with ice packs, helping keep it safely cold during its journey
from Herefordshire to your door. The insulation can also be reused and recycled
and composted.
When the box arrives, put anything you plan to eat shortly into the
fridge and the rest straight into the freezer.
Then enjoy the rather smug feeling of knowing that the next time somebody
asks:
“What’s for supper?”
you’ve got a freezer containing proper food.
Product: The Little Beefy Box – Stabiliser Beef
Price: £99
Weight: Approximately 5kg
Minimum guaranteed weight: 4.7kg
Raised: Born and reared at Lower Blakemere Farm, Herefordshire
Finished: Nearby with our farmer friend Will near Tenbury
Typical contents: A balanced selection usually including steaks, roasting joints, mince, stewing and braising beef and slow-cooking cuts
Butchery: Griffiths of Leintwardine
Packing: Professionally butchered, vacuum packed and labelled
Maturing: Dry-aged
Diet: Predominantly grass and forage through their lives, with grain and minerals used where required, particularly during housing and finishing
Farming system: Mixed regenerative farming
Organic: No — we are not an organic farm
Storage: Suitable for freezing
Delivery: Collection/local delivery where available and nationwide chilled UK delivery
Packaging: Chilled with ice packs in insulated Woolcool packaging
Provenance: Lower Blakemere Farm, Herefordshire
A Little Box With a Bigger Point
Yes, fundamentally this is a box of beef.
Hopefully very good beef.
But it’s also part of something bigger that we’re trying to do at Lower Blakemere.
We want to farm in a way that values the soil.
We want livestock and crops to work together.
We want to reduce our dependence on bought-in inputs where we can.
We want more biodiversity.
We want to use the whole animal properly.
We want customers to know where their food comes from.
And we want more of the money people spend on food to find its way back to the farmers actually producing it rather than disappearing through layer after layer in the middle.
You certainly don't have to buy all your food directly from a farm.
But every time you buy something from a farmer, a local butcher, a grower or another good independent producer, you're choosing a slightly different food system.
We think that's worth doing.