Skip to playerSkip to main content
GrB1
  • 1 day ago
Landward episode 23 2025
Transcript
00:00This time I'm going in search of gold in the Scottish countryside. Welcome to Lambert.
00:30Hello from King Craig in the heart of the Cairngorm National Park. It's National Tree Week so I've come for a walk through the native woodland of birch, oak and alder.
00:42But hiding away is a rare tree species that's shining bright right now so it should be easy to spot. More on that later. First, here's what else is coming up.
00:53Shabazz is tracking down beaver using DNA.
01:00Rosie tastes the best from Scotland's farmhouse kitchens.
01:04Are we allowed to dive in?
01:05Yes, let's do it.
01:06And Cammy experiences a farm diversification on another level.
01:11Please don't put this one in the thing like that.
01:13Come on!
01:19First up, there are just under 800 dairy herds in this country producing 1.5 billion litres of the white stuff every year.
01:28But how do you increase production without impacting animal health?
01:32Arlene's in Stirlingshire now, meeting the woman that's brought the creme de la creme to one business.
01:38Just outside Stirling, at Maines of Bohwan Farm, a herd of 250 Jersey cows produce 7,000 litres of milk every day.
01:53It's the holy grail for livestock farmers to have a herd you get the most out of and healthy animals.
02:00When Leanne Bertram got the job as herd manager with Graham's Family Dairy, she had that ambition in mind.
02:10She took her time, really got to know the cattle, and two years on, she's transformed the herd.
02:18When I took over, herd average was 19 litres.
02:22Is that per cow?
02:23That's per cow per day, and now we're at around 29, so more than 40% increase in milk yield.
02:32Oh, that's impressive work. You're some kind of magician.
02:36No, it's very much been a whole team effort and just a real focus on attention to detail and herd health and welfare.
02:45And a large part of that huge increase in milk production is down to the choice and preparation of what the cows eat.
02:54We feed a total mixed ration, so we are feeding a grass silage that we grow on farm.
03:00We're feeding some super grains, which is a distillery by-product.
03:04And then we feed some minerals, a little bit of molasses.
03:07Can you smell that?
03:08And some fat, that's all that's in.
03:10And Leanne has worked out the exact serving, around 30 kilos per cow per day, that will be appetising to even the pickiest eaters.
03:21Because jerseys are so fussy and they like to sort their feeds, we mill that blend into like a flour so that it completely mixes through and the cows can't sort it.
03:32So what they do eat is like a full mouthful. They can't push the silage out, they can't just sort the sweeties, basically.
03:41This massive bigger picture is largely driven with nutrition.
03:47Leanne's high standards for the herd required a great team.
03:52She knew exactly who to call to be her assistant, Ruby Pring.
03:56Ruby and I met in a previous job.
03:59She was really new to the industry.
04:01She had no preconceived ideas, no bad habits and was just a sponge for knowledge.
04:07And Ruby has certainly mastered the high-tech robotic milking system.
04:12Every cow has their own collar and on their collar is their transponder and that pings to our antennas which tells us on the computer who they are and it pings back to here.
04:22So we've got cow number 31, she's called Treacle.
04:26Treacle.
04:27Yes, all our cows have names.
04:28And this cow is on her third lactation and here it tells us that she's 21 days calved.
04:34So I guess the data is so meticulous that you can tell very easily whether a cow is well or not from the data.
04:42Yes, we can work it out from the data.
04:45It gives us everything that we could possibly want on one screen which is absolutely amazing to let us figure out the bigger picture of why this cow is so good but also why is this cow failing.
04:56All that attention to detail and hard work is paying off and not just in the milk yields.
05:02Leanne and Ruby recently scooped Dairy Farm of the Year at the Scottish Agriculture Awards.
05:08For Leanne, the winning formula is simple.
05:12Any farm is only as good as the team around them and I'm very fortunate in that my team are really invested in my protocols and my sort of vision for investing in the future of the herd.
05:24We are ensuring the herd health right through our herd in years to come.
05:32This weekend marks the start of National Tree Week, a celebration of all things arboreal.
05:45And there's a tree species to be found here on Speyside that's well worth looking and listening for.
05:54It's the unmistakable aspen.
05:57At one time these trees were commonplace across Scotland but now only exist in isolated pockets.
06:04Kirsten Brewster is from the charity Scotland the Big Picture.
06:09They promote rewilding and want to spread awareness of the problems aspen face in the hope that the trees themselves will be able to spread again across the country.
06:20Aspen is a tree that should be found all across Scotland. We find it in little sort of refuges, you know, in the islands and the highlands all the way down to the south of Scotland.
06:28But because it's such a palatable or tasty tree, it's preferentially browsed by many of our herbivore species.
06:34And so it means that we've lost a lot of our native woodland in Scotland. We're in quite a low percentage of native woodland cover.
06:40Aspen has been preferentially browsed even out of those places. So it is just these little fragments that we can find where it's clung on.
06:47And these Scottish aspens don't do themselves any favours when it comes to reproduction.
06:53We've got in front of us here, this is a beautiful aspen stand. So the mature trees, they have actually lost their leaves and that you can still see the kind of beautiful bark on them.
07:04So this is a, you know, fairly small stand in a huge forest as well. So how do they actually spread?
07:09What we would often see with with aspen trees and other places is that they would flower and set seed.
07:14We don't see that very often in Scotland. So it's actually quite rare and quite infrequent in Scotland.
07:18And what we see more typically here is actually aspen spreading from the root system and suckering up from the roots.
07:24And so you'll actually find, you know, with mature trees like this, there will be little suckers all around and we can see a really good patch in front of us.
07:31These new trees have grown from a root and not a sexually reproduced seed with a mix of male and female DNA.
07:38They are clones of the original tree. This makes the species as a whole less resilient.
07:45Survival of the fittest can't work when the saplings are identical.
07:50There is less potential to adapt to change. So if you think about, you know, sexual reproduction, you would get thousands of seeds from that, from just a single tree.
07:59What we do find is if it's just then a clone of a single tree, there is not that same potential for adaptation to things like climate change, diseases coming in.
08:07And so there's, you know, a bit more of a risk there essentially for trees that are not setting seeds.
08:12Aspens can reproduce in the traditional way, but the last major flowering for seed production was in 2019.
08:21And before that, it was 1996. Why does it happen so rarely?
08:27The reasons are still a little bit unclear actually, but we think there's something around the age of some of our aspen stands potentially ageing out of sexual reproduction.
08:36Likewise, if the stands that are left have come from root reproduction, the trees are only one sex.
08:43So when they do flower, they have nothing nearby to reproduce with.
08:48We've got a lovely bit here to have a look at.
08:51The trees aren't just good to see. They provide a useful habitat in the forest.
08:57These little diamond-shaped abrasions in the bark, these are the lenticles.
09:02They start to form almost like cracks in the bark, and those allow lots of other species to make use of aspen bark and actually colonise it.
09:08So we've got so many hundreds of species of lichen, of fungi, of, you know, bryophytes that actually make use of aspen.
09:14Kirsten's charity wants to get the message out about aspen with their Painting Scotland Yellow campaign,
09:21which shines a light on efforts to protect and promote the tree.
09:26So what we really want is for people to recognise aspen, to recognise the trees as they see them,
09:31but also to recognise the value of aspen in a woodland.
09:34And then I think that really, once you recognise the value of something, you can think about how can you do more for it?
09:39So is there just an isolated stand of trees and actually could that be expanded through protection or perhaps even planting aspen trees?
09:46That could be through sort of community woodlands such as this.
09:49It could be other landowners, you know, farmers, estate owners, all different types of land ownership,
09:54could be recognising the aspen on their land and thinking, how do they actually see more of that?
09:58So it's a bit of a challenge then?
10:00Yes, there's a bit of work to do, but it's, you know, what's fascinating about aspen conservation is it is something that we can do.
10:06We can turn the ship around and we can actually see more resilient woodlands with aspen in them.
10:11Now Shabazz is further down this bay investigating a technique, normally associated with forensic science,
10:27that's now being used for environmental projects.
10:30First developed in the late 1980s, DNA profiling revolutionised the way we investigate crime.
10:44Providing accurate evidence to identify individuals.
10:50And now scientists are using this technique to investigate what's out and about in the countryside.
11:00Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is life's blueprint.
11:09The unique genetic code in every cell that defines what and who we are.
11:16Here, on the banks of the River Spee near Aviemore,
11:21Professor Bernd Henfling is taking samples.
11:25He heads up a team at the University of the Highlands and Islands specialising in environmental DNA, or eDNA.
11:37If you look at a site like this, you might have hundreds and hundreds of invertebrate species living there.
11:43Fish, you've got mammals swimming across.
11:46With eDNA, you're essentially just looking for the traces they leave behind in the environment.
11:52So how does the DNA end up in the water?
11:54Well, every organism sheds DNA in their environment.
11:58This happens just through skin cells, or in terms of, in the case of fish for example,
12:03breathing through the gills, doing poos in the water.
12:08It's a big source, actually, of eDNA.
12:11Of course, it has its limits.
12:15eDNA can't reveal precise numbers, but it can detect which species are present.
12:23The alternative way would be to either capture or observe the organisms directly.
12:28There are different ways of doing this.
12:29For example, for macroinvertebrates in a river, you would normally go out with a net,
12:34something that's called kick sampling.
12:36You just kick a few stones and just try to catch as many organisms as possible,
12:39compared to just taking a water sample.
12:41You can't really get less invasive than that.
12:47And that's a game changer.
12:51Repeated water sampling in one location can detect changes in particular species,
12:56useful for organisations like the Cairngorms National Park.
13:02We're heading down a river that flows into Loch Morlach
13:05and we're going to hopefully be able to find some beaver signs.
13:09Beaver project manager, Jonathan Willett,
13:12is closely monitoring the animals that were reintroduced here in 2023.
13:20You can see the beavers have been busy here then.
13:22Aye, aye, they have, yep.
13:23So they've felled this willow tree and what they're seeking to do
13:26is they're going to be eating the bark on the tree
13:28and that sustains them over the wintertime.
13:32Repeated DNA testing will give Jonathan a better understanding
13:35of the beaver's presence in this habitat.
13:39We're just really interested in trying to get a better idea
13:41of how beavers are actually changing the environment
13:44and because we know exactly when we release the beavers
13:46and we've got some baseline information,
13:48that will allow us to go and show how things change over time.
13:53The water samples come to the UHI Inverness campus,
14:01where Bernt's team do the analysis.
14:04So what is Dasha working on just now?
14:06Dasha is working on the more tricky part of the lab workflow now.
14:10Essentially she's now pulling out the minimum amount of information we need
14:15to identify all the different species which are in there.
14:19Only a tiny fragment of DNA is needed.
14:23Bernt likens it to discovering a famous line in a beloved novel.
14:27If you want to know what book it is, you don't need to read the entire book.
14:32You just pull out a particular well-known quote.
14:34That's what we're doing.
14:35So we'll be pulling out these quotes.
14:38They're also called the DNA barcode.
14:41And based on this we can identify individual species.
14:45A new chapter in how we read the story of life from the water.
14:51It's a method that's full of potential for conservation organisations.
14:55Faster, less invasive and sometimes revealing the unexpected.
15:01Have you ever been surprised by anything that you've found?
15:03Yeah, we usually find a lot more of certain species which are quite elusive.
15:11For example, water shrews.
15:13But we also find species such as red squirrels, for example,
15:18in areas where they hadn't been recorded for a while.
15:22We know now enough about to know the limitations and the strengths of this method.
15:26One of the particular strengths is that it can be upscaled to a level
15:29that we can really monitor biodiversity on a landscape scale.
15:33So we can monitor entire catchments,
15:35which is really very difficult with conventional methods.
15:43DNA profiling has transformed the way we solve crimes.
15:47Hopefully now it can reveal some of nature's secrets
15:51and give us a better understanding of our countryside.
15:59We'll see you next time.
16:04At the crack of dawn, the day's already well underway for our nation's farmers.
16:10And it's no different for our own Cammy.
16:13He's on a farm in East Lothian now, ready to get going.
16:17But it might not be what he's expecting.
16:21The farmer we're visiting today asked me to be here at 6am.
16:24And for some reason, he told me to bring a PE kit.
16:30Right, jackets off, anything you want to take off.
16:33We'll go in about 30 seconds.
16:35Like many agricultural businesses,
16:38Calaverop Farm has had to diversify to stay sustainable.
16:42OK, from there, we're running down to the bale.
16:45So, before the sun comes up...
16:47Let's go!
16:48Pete Eccles Farmyard, near Tranent, turns into a high-intensity workout zone.
16:56An on-farm gym might seem like a bit of a stretch,
17:00but it's strengthened Pete's business and his community.
17:04It's not for the faint-hearted, though.
17:07Please don't put this one in the free night of day.
17:10Pete's a fourth-generation farmer,
17:13taking over Karlavrok when his dad retired in 2023.
17:16We'll drive it over, excellent.
17:19Right, let's go down.
17:21I've been practising that one.
17:23The gym was a perfect fit
17:25when the former rugby player decided he needed another revenue stream.
17:29Let's go, let's get in, we've got five seconds!
17:31Beyond his 150 acres and herd of Hereford's.
17:35Good job!
17:37So, Cammie, one round in, how are you feeling?
17:40I'm getting flashbacks to the man I used to be.
17:43Before mid-life got me.
17:46We'll see how you feeling, two more rounds.
17:47I was about to say, two more rounds? Somebody said one more round.
17:54He's a hard taskmaster.
17:56So, keep going Cammie, drive the arms.
17:57And the 45 minute workout leaves me wishing someone else got the give.
18:03Dougie must be away at his part-time job.
18:07Three, two, one!
18:10Great job everyone, well done!
18:12They phoned Dougie but he was busy.
18:14Can they come?
18:16Guys, I've just got a wee thank you for Cammie for coming along.
18:18So, just a wee, now you're a member of the team.
18:22Thank you guys, it's just my colour.
18:27With the class over, Pete can tell me how the Farm Gym came about.
18:32Fitness for me has always been a big part of my life.
18:35I used to play rugby and when I finished up a few years ago,
18:39I sort of felt a bit lost.
18:41I kind of lost to kind of the team sort of camaraderie
18:44and then also just not training regularly and getting exercise.
18:50I just, you know, started to struggle a wee bit mentally.
18:53I started to recognise I wasn't myself anymore.
18:56And I thought, hey, why not start a gym?
18:59Yeah, yeah, as you do.
19:01It's that interaction with folk and just, you know,
19:04connecting with people, being active and then I can get on with my day.
19:08You've already had your win for the day before the sun's up.
19:10That's it, you've already achieved by 7am.
19:12Yeah, brilliant.
19:14Pete runs classes in the mornings five days a week
19:17and has more workouts two or three evenings a week.
19:20With that number of classes on the go in the farm buildings,
19:23there was a change of lifestyle for his Herefords.
19:28I love animals and I like seeing them in a natural environment.
19:31I like to see them calving outside where it's clean and healthy
19:34and they don't have the stress of having to be calved in a shed.
19:37So that frees me up to focus on the gym in the mornings.
19:39And with them being foragers and a bit lower input, being outside,
19:44frees up some buildings.
19:46Absolutely. Some of these older farm buildings just aren't really functional
19:49or have a purpose in modern agriculture now.
19:52So it's just how do you make a use of them and what can we do
19:55that's going to make the most of that asset and create another revenue stream.
19:59The gym has allowed me to invest in the buildings and get a return on that
20:02that doesn't involve having to muck the sheds out.
20:07By hand. There's another workout.
20:10But Pete's farmyard gym has become about much more than money.
20:15I think it's challenged me. It's taken me out of my comfort zone.
20:18It gives me a break from the sort of stresses and strains of everyday farming.
20:22Everyone comes to the gym with different goals or aspirations of what they're trying to achieve.
20:27But the sort of changes I'm seeing in people varies on the individual depending on what their goals are.
20:33But it can be fat loss to mental health benefits to just being able to do their job better.
20:40As a farmer, you know, I'm flipping over ring feeders a lot easier than I used to.
20:43Yeah, yeah.
20:44Well, an absolute pleasure, mate. Same time next week.
20:47Well, at the same time tomorrow morning, Cammie.
20:49No, I need at least a week to recover.
20:51In fact, just delete my number, please.
20:58Here on Landward, we love to shout out about the amazing array of food produced across the land.
21:03And over the next few programs, Rosie is on a mission to get us into the kitchen and using some of those fantastic Scottish ingredients.
21:14Just like generations of her family before her.
21:18My great grandfather, Alexander, was a baker, famous in Bucky as Valentine the Baker.
21:26And his passion for cooking has made its way down the family to me.
21:30These are his treasured notebooks, the secrets to his best bakes.
21:37He loved hearty homemade food and so do I.
21:42So I'm leaving my kitchen and heading to farmhouse kitchens across Scotland,
21:47meeting the farmers who produce the ingredients and seeing what they do with them.
21:52This time I'm starting at Lucy and Robert Wilson's farm near Kelso in the Borders.
21:57So this was an old stable block that we converted to host our meals in and people come to enjoy our produce.
22:07That's a great setup you've got.
22:09The food miles are low.
22:12The beef on the menu coming from their herd of 250 pedigree Herefords.
22:16Why did you choose Herefords in the first place?
22:21We've always had them as a family. So my grandfather, he had a few commercial cows and then went into Herefords in 1955.
22:31They were just a good suitable breed for the type of land we've got.
22:34And what is it that you really like about the breed?
22:39They're really easy to work with.
22:41For me, probably like a lot of guys working by yourself, you need someone that you feel safe around.
22:48On top of that, they're really good at turning grass into both meat and milk.
22:51Don't want to say it too loudly, but, you know, they're quite tasty as well.
22:56These girls are all in calf, so they're, you know, they've got a different job.
23:01They're okay. They're okay. Don't listen to them, ladies. You're fine.
23:04At what point did you want to introduce that food aspect to the business then?
23:08It's sort of been a gradual process. So we decided to go into agritourism in about 2018.
23:17And then when COVID came along, we had what we like to call a COVID pivot into more of a food angle.
23:27And dealing with the food angle is Robert's wife, Lucy.
23:31Hello, Lucy. How are you doing?
23:32Hello. Good. I'm just picking some of the last radishes.
23:35Adding seasonal ingredients from their garden.
23:39Is there something I can help you with?
23:41Do you want to just pick some of the little bits of purple kale?
23:44Just snap off the end bits. Of course.
23:47That'll be really delicious.
23:50So we have some beautiful looking veggies.
23:53Yeah, they look really colourful and fresh, don't they?
23:56They really, really do. What are we going to be doing with them today?
23:59We're going to cook some Hereford beef, some rump steak,
24:03and we're going to make a lovely stir fry with our beautiful fresh vegetables that we've picked.
24:10But the meat is the star of the show. The very big star.
24:15OK, so we're going to put a little bit of salt on it,
24:18which is going to give it a really delicious flavour when it's cooked.
24:22How long do you leave it on each side?
24:30Probably about two minutes on each side.
24:33And the really important thing is to not keep moving it and turning it.
24:38Once both sides are seared, it goes into the oven with an in-oven thermometer.
24:43It doesn't matter which oven I'm using or quite often we do this on the barbecues,
24:48which are obviously a different kind of heat.
24:50And if you do it by temperature, then it's always going to be the same.
24:55Straight into the oven.
24:56Lucy is aiming for 50 degrees, but you can vary that depending on how you like your steak done.
25:03If the vegetables aren't from Lucy's garden, she gets them from as near as possible.
25:08This broccoli is from a neighbour's farm.
25:11When you're using food that's grown locally, it generally tends to taste better
25:18because it hasn't travelled massive amounts of distance.
25:23And we've got so many wonderful producers locally,
25:26it's really not difficult to find, you know, good food anywhere in Scotland.
25:35Wow, that's an impressive bit of steak, that.
25:38Lucy flavours the veggies with soy sauce, garlic, Korean chilli paste
25:48and a sweet Indonesian soy sauce for an Asian vibe.
25:53The colours just look incredible and it smells so, so good as well.
26:05Are we allowed to dive in?
26:06Yes, let's do it.
26:07Let's go for it.
26:09Beef first, it's got to be, isn't it?
26:14The flavour on that beef that you managed to get.
26:17Stunning.
26:19Really tasty, local, seasonal Scottish food.
26:23That's the way to do it. Thank you so much.
26:25You're very welcome.
26:26Next time, I'm leaving the meat behind and taking the vegetarian option at a pick-your-own patch in Aberdeenshire.
26:34That brings us to the end of this programme.
26:39If you'd like to watch it again or catch up with some of our previous episodes,
26:42go to the BBC iPlayer and search for Lambert.
26:45Now, here's what's coming up next time.
26:49Planting trees to reach net zero.
26:53Trees are a wonderful solution to climate change.
26:55They take carbon out of the atmosphere and they store it in the trunks they grow.
26:58The Perthshire Castle getting a facelift.
27:02With the changing climate, with the increased rainfall, we're having to work a little bit harder to look after it.
27:08Oh, wow. What an amazing space.
27:11And Shabazz discovers how dry-stained daiking inspired this incredible art.
27:16Please join us for that and much, much more if you can.
27:21In the meantime, from all the Lambert teams around the country, and especially from me here in beautiful King Craig,
27:27thank you so much for your company.
27:29Bye for now.
27:46Bye for now.
Be the first to comment
Add your comment