About Michael Blanche

Michael is a first-generation farmer on a tenanted farm in Perthshire, Scotland where he minces around with 750 sheep and 130 Angus Cows. He proudly does not own a tractor but this is really cheating because the cows are half owned by a person that does. He is a former land agent and agriculture consultant with SAC. In 2010 he did a Nuffield Scholarship on ‘The Farming Ladder’.

He is the producer and host of the popular farming podcast ‘The Pasture Pod’ and co-host – with Paul Allison – of the far less popular podcast “Cows and Effect”.

The Pasture Pod is usually very long with in depth chat about low input grass-based livestock farming systems, though Michael also did a documentary style series on Time in Farming, cleverly entitled “It’s About Time”.

Cows and Effect tries – weakly – to mesh science and farming, looking at research papers on the likes of plant diversity in swards, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and whether fashioning a human poo into a knife then freezing it can make a useful cutting implement.