Bill Grayson

After training and working as a field ecologist and educator I switched to a career in practical land management and nature conservation at a time when many nature reserve managers in England were struggling to get animals to graze their sites appropriately. This was because farmers generally were unwilling to graze such rough and unproductive sites. However, after a spell working on various livestock farms I was able to get a job with Somerset Wildlife Trust managing their Mendip Hills reserves, which included looking after a small sheep flock used for grazing these sites.

In 1992 we secured a tenancy on a small organic livestock farm on the edge of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, where our landlord, the National Trust, wanted its tenant to graze several of it’s own nearby nature reserves according to their Stewardship agreement’s prescriptions.

This small farm’s limited financial prospects were boosted by selling, our beef, lamb and pork directly to local customers, a strategy that certainly helped improve the economic return from the limited numbers of animals we produced each year. I also earned additional off-farm income from undertaking advisory work for DEFRA’s Organic Conversion Information Scheme and English Nature’s Grazing Animals Project. 

Explore the Agricology profile for Bill and Cath Grayson here.

Listen to Bill on the Agricology Podcast.