Under Calf-Food Wood

Brussel sprouts plants looking a little worse for wear

“Nice cold, ice cold, fresh milk!” The catchy slogan from the 80s TV ad still trips off my tongue. I've been brought up to believe that cow's milk is healthy, good for our bones and for our bodies in all sorts of ways, and have been pouring it on my breakfast cereal and whitening my teas and coffees with it ever since.

Up till three weeks ago, that is. Since coming back to Wales I've begun an attempt literally to wean myself off it. Not just liquid milk but cheese too. And yogurt. Cheese and yogurt formed a staple part of my diet before, partly because they taste so good. I've even been avoiding things with milk in the ingredients, like most biscuits and cakes. Thankfully I'm not alone in this insane quest, as my girlfriend is joining me.

But why? What have cows ever done to me? One stood on my toe once, actually.

It's more to do with what the dairy industry is doing to our planet's health. And when I say dairy, it's the beef industry too. All the calves of the dairy cows who aren't lucky enough to become a dairy cow themselves (and that includes all the male ones) will become beef.

There's the pollution of watercourses with slurry. There's the methane emitted from each and every cow which is a powerful greenhouse gas and is one of the major drivers of climate change. And there's the huge amount of land used up by cows, not only pasture but also crops for their feed (including soy which is causing Amazonian deforestation). This land would be much better put to growing plants for human consumption, as the energy ratio is far lower (energy used to grow the food : energy gained in eating it), or simply re-wilded.

It's the sheer scale of animal agriculture that's causing such a problem. The film Cowspiracy is contentious but it does state the case for veganism very well, it's worth a watch.


We've been exploring milk alternatives. After trying oat milk and hemp milk, both of which were acceptable but quite pricey, I suggested we try making our own oat milk. We had a large bag of organic oats already. So we..

1) took some out (200ml-worth)

2) rinsed them

3) filled up the jug to over 1 litre

4) whizzed it up with an electric whizzing device

5) put the mixture through a muslin cloth into a jug

6) poured the jug into a bottle

7) put the bottle in the fridge

8) washed up!

We are enjoying our home-made organic oat milk. It takes a little more time to make than buying it at the Co-op, and needs a bit of a shake before use, but it's an awful lot cheaper! And we've been having fun experimenting with what to make out of the oat mash left in the muslin cloth - floppy chocolate biscuits and a thin lemon and raisin oatcake have been two innovative snacks we've come up with recently. Yum.

A Tale Of Two Cities And Two Conferences

Letting the damp out

One week, two conferences.

The first was in London so having only just arrived in Wales from Dorset a week ago, off I toddled back to southern England again. This conference was a weekend “activist” programme organised by Tearfund, a Christian relief and development charity, specifically for young adults.

Hang on, I can just about hear you mutter. Matt Swan might be an adult and may even be said to have a youthful outlook, but surely he can hardly still consider himself in the “young adult” category? I mean he's been alive the same length of time that light has been travelling from the half-molten exoplanet 55 Cancri e, and that's a long time.

The kale just about survived the winter

You're right, and the reason is I was there as a speaker not a delegate. My old friend Becca was the organiser and she decided to ask me to come and talk about how I'd changed my life from the days when I lived in London. I'd said yes a couple of months ago but as the event approached I became a bit nervous about how to express it in front of sixty people. I pulled together lots of photos and scribbled pages of notes which even as I stood up to speak I was half-tempted simply to read out.


But it all came out much more naturally, thankfully, as I flicked through the old photos projected onto the screen and only occasionally glanced at my notes. It was the first time I'd done this and it was a privilege to do it. I think I kept their attention for the forty minutes or so, and got quite a lot of questions afterwards as well as some “thank you's” for encouraging them to keep going with their gardening or their dreams for off-grid living. We all went for a “25-mile meal” afterwards at Lumberjack in Camberwell, oddly very close to where I used to live in London. De ja vu but with longer hair.

Brussel sprouts have been knocked about a bit

The second conference? Thankfully much closer to home, in Aberystwyth. And this time I was just an attendee. It was the Aber Food Forum, an afternoon focused on all aspects of local food. We got to learn about Welsh grain-growing which is a thing (it's not entirely sheep grazing here!) from a woman who makes and sells flour using an actual old water-mill a few miles further south. We heard from students who take “surplus” food from supermarkets and give it to charities. We saw a woman make sauerkraut (it's quite easy!) I was interested to hear from an organic veg grower who has his plot ten miles south of Aber. An MP said a few words. Katie Hastings gave a great summary of Edible Mach and Dyfi Land Share. We heard about the Food Assembly concept, which seems to be a web-based software platform that enables pop-up-style farmer's markets where the consumers have already bought the produce online beforehand, so the producers only need to bring what has been pre-bought. And a local livestock farmer (who also has an important job in the National Farmer's Union) gave some rather depressing thoughts on how Brexit might change things in farming (including the likelihood of many more mega-farms.)


Enough gallivanting for me. I've been back on my land digging in rotted horse-poo today.

Attempts at making our own oat milk have proved surprisingly successful

The Boy Is Back In Town

I'm going dairy-free. These are just two of the alternatives...

Depending on your point of view, I have now moved myself up to mid-Wales or the Earth has rotated beneath me bringing mid-Wales beneath my feet. Either which way, it's a bit chillier.

Great to be here again though, seeing the Dyfi Valley in its February incarnation for the very first time. The trees are really bare, the temperature is really refusing to climb above 4 degrees. Sometimes the sun shines forth and transforms the steep slopes and rushing streams into a landscape of startling beauty and colour.

Taking things a little easier between the muck-spreading of Pilsdon and the forthcoming muck-spreading on my own plot, I have nevertheless found time to move large amounts of firewood and organic compost around in my trailer.

The two loads of firewood were to repeat customers, having already burned up what I gave them in November. And the compost was the endgame of a long logistical dance orchestrated not by me, thankfully, to buy in industrial quantities of the stuff at wholesale prices to be split amongst a goodly number of fellow veg-growers in the area.

This is the first time this has happened, at least in my time here, and it's an excellent development. Rather than us all buying various different composts at retail price from shops or elsewhere, we can make significant cost savings this way. The compost itself, called Sylvagrow, is a new peat-free product that Which? Gardening gave a Best Buy award in 2015, so hopefully it will be good stuff. They were actually testing the non-organic compost so this new organic range is a bit of a gamble but it can't be worse than New Horizons which we've all tried in years past and often seemed to be more full of chunks of wood than actual compost.

Still it's the co-operative nature of the small-scale horticulture around here that I love. People helping each other to load the heavy sacks into their trailers. Someone had turned up with cake and tea to distribute freely. Apparently the last big delivery two weeks ago (of the non-organic stuff) the pallet-moving device had a flat battery so all the bags had to be passed out of the truck by hand along a human chain, which took an hour. 

Here's to a generous, sharing 2017. Forget all that news.