One group of people who don’t have the luxury of what they eat, are the homeless.

As you may have read in my blog from earlier this year I’m keen to highlight the housing crisis problem across the countryside and the affect this is having upon sustainable food and farming. However, the problem is even more acute in our cities.

We’ve strived for many years to keep our costs and prices low at Rosewood Farm to ensure that sustainably produced, wildlife-friendly organic meat isn’t the preserve of the wealthy and that everyone can enjoy the benefits of a high quality diet.

This includes not wasting vast amounts of money on fancy (and unnecessary) packaging, or expensive marketing. But there’s only so far you can take this without sacrificing the business and your own well-being.

When you’re in a vulnerable position not being able to buy food, however, is just a small part of the overall problem: Without the knowledge and facilities to store and prepare fresh food your options are severely limited, making a healthy, balanced diet impossible to achieve.

For many years it’s concerned me that we couldn’t do more to help as changing eating habits have seen us selling fewer of the roasting joints and more steaks and mince.

You cannot just produce steaks on demand without utilising the whole animal, so this can be a limiting factor, particularly for small farms such as ours. This is known in the trade as maintaining ‘carcass balance’, and whilst larger processors can easily divert excesses into manufacturing or export markets, smaller farm shops and butchers have limited options.

In the Yorkshire Ings the traditionally managed floodplain meadows were also suffering biodiversity declines due to an overall reduction in cattle grazing. Our little Dexters are the perfect size to graze the damp grasslands without damaging these sensitive habitats, but the supermarket driven food system has increased the size of cattle, leaving processors paying next to nothing for small carcasses.

Under-grazing in the Ings wasn’t only reducing the quality of the meadows and the wildlife they support, but also represented a huge waste of food that could/should feed people efficiently, as it has done for thousands of years.

The idea of cooking up the surplus joints and providing homeless folk with a decent meal appealed strongly to us but it was also frustrating, as we lacked both the time and investment to do what was badly needed.

It’s an issue that troubles many farmers in the UK – we want to produce food to feed local people, but to do so at a price that people can afford is increasingly difficult.

Fortunately, I discovered last year that we aren’t alone and the rise in rough sleeping in the nearby city of York prompted a group of dedicated volunteers to start Kitchen for Everyone (KEY) which has grown to expand services to the homeless and vulnerable of the city. I got in touch to find out how we could help and get the beef rolling, so to speak.

Meanwhile, our friends at Greyleys Farm in nearby Elvington have been producing creamy Jersey Milk for over 50 years, and although dairy farms were once a common feature of the Yorkshire Ings, today they are few and far between.

In 2017 Greyleys invested in a milk vending machine to offer locals the chance to buy milk direct from the farm. Situated just outside York, in the village of Elvington, just yards away from where the cows graze from Spring through to Autumn, people come from all over Yorkshire to buy the milk.

As we were passing we decided to offer our customers in York and the surrounding area a delivery service along with our meat boxes, cutting down on food miles and saving them a trip out of the city. When I mentioned KEY to Helen at Greyleys, she was keen to help and immediately offered to send a regular supply of milk every week.

I wanted to do the same with the meat, but although raising our prices was one way to fund a regular donation I didn’t want to put more pressure on our regular customers’ family food budgets.

I knew that our customers would like to support giving more people the opportunity to eat sustainably, so I have started to offer ‘KEY vouchers’. You can now buy these vouchers along with one of our meat boxes and as soon as we have enough vouchers to make up a box we’ll deliver it direct to KEY!

We hope you’ll also support KEY directly via the website and ‘like’ their Facebook page too – while many people will have already ditched their 2019 resolutions, these guys are there throughout the year.