Cotswold Seeds is involved in an EU funded project to reintroduce forage legume sainfoin and recently conducted a survey among British farmers to explore opinions and usage. Sainfoin, a perennial forage legume, was introduced into British agriculture in the early seventeenth century and was an ...

The period from late March through to April is the prime time for sowing fodder beet which can be a very useful livestock food source, offering one of the highest yield potentials of any other arable fodder crop. The root can contain up to 13.5 MJ/KG of metabolisable energy so it can be utilized to ...

Studies have shown that the inclusion of Lucerne silage in dairy cow diets can improve forage intake, and increase output of milk protein, with no change in milk fat. The benefits together with lower forage production costs when compared with grass silage should help to improve margin/litre of milk ...

If there is one man who has inspired and influenced the work of Cotswold Seeds and guided our product development its Frank Newman Turner, a pioneering farmer and author who believed in ‘health from the soil up’. His books include, ‘Fertility Pastures’, &...

Companion cropping can sometimes be a difficult term to define, but a learned fellow farmer, Andy Howard, describes it as growing two or more crops together, and that’s a definition I like, because it means diversity within plant species (which I firmly believe in), encompassing complex ...