MANOR HOUSE FARM
The tender
touch of
rose veal
Chris Berry talks cattle with Andrew
Hall at Manor House Farm, Strensall.
Cattle are all Andrew Hall
has ever known - and all
he has ever wanted to be
involved with at Manor
House Farm, Strensall,
where he farms 300 acres
of nearly all grassland.
“I’m the third generation
to have farmed here under
the company name of Albert
Hall Farms - Albert was my
grandfather,” he explained.
“We graze cattle, fatten cattle
and buy and sell cattle and
young calves. The only thing
that has changed over the
years is that we used to deal
in dairy cattle, but we now
concentrate wholly on beef.
“Every week we buy anything
up to 200 young calves at
two to three weeks old and
rear them on to 12 weeks old.
Around 90 per cent of them
will be bull calves. We then
either sell them as weaned
calves on to other farmers
for finishing or we finish a
proportion ourselves.
“The cattle we finish are
predominantly Aberdeen
Angus Cross keeping 300-400
a year until they reach around
600 kilos. They are grazed for
Chris Waite Transport
around 18-24 months, usually
offering them two summers
and wintering them on silage.
We then give them a finisher
blend at the end.”
The majority of Andrew’s
purchases come from the dairy
producing areas’ livestock
markets, particularly Skipton,
Bentham, Brockholes, Gisburn,
Lancaster, Penrith and
Carlisle.
One of the up and coming
meats, thanks to TV chefs, is
veal. It is a market that Andrew
feels will grow even further in
the future and rose veal is the
current winner.
“We don’t generally produce
white veal in the UK. That is
when the calves are just fed
milk and slaughtered at 20
weeks. Rose veal is that in
between meat, rather like wine
between red and white you
have rose. The cattle are fed as
a beef animal would be fed and
slaughtered at a slightly older
age of between 10-11 months.
To all intents it is a