Till the Cows Come Home Read online

  For Libby, who will understand better than most

  what this book’s about.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Dairying

  2. The Gloucester Cow

  3. The Shorthorn

  4. The London Dairies

  5. The Channel Island Breeds

  6. The Black-and-White Revolution

  7. The Miracles of AI and Pasteurization

  8. Raw Milk

  9. My Little Herd of Heifers

  10. To Hereford, to Hereford, to Buy a Big Bull

  11. Ruby Red Devons

  12. Scotch Black Cattle

  13. The Irish Breeds

  14. From Scotland to the High Plains of Colorado

  15. Feedlots and the Grazing Cow: the Maker of Fertility

  16. The Texas Longhorn: an Ancient Breed in a New Land

  17. ‘Rascals with horns goin’ straight out’

  18. The Spanish Fighting Bull

  19. Sacred Cows

  Glossary

  Select Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1.English Longhorn cows at Calke Abbey. Until the eighteenth-century agriculturalist Robert Bakewell ruined their milking capacity in the search for a beef carcase, Longhorns were the quintessential triple-purpose English cattle – traction, milk and meat – and found in nearly every part of the kingdom. Despite their formidable appearance, they were docile and gave a respectable yield of rich milk, ideal for cheese-making. They could turn almost any vegetation to their advantage over a long life, at the end of which they readily finished for the butcher.

  2.Gloucester cow and calf showing the characteristic finching along the belly, up the tail and halfway along the back. It resembles the Kerry with its lyre-shaped horns and delicate dairy frame.

  3.Gillray’s 1802 cartoon, ‘Vaccine-Pock hot from ye cow’, lampooning the widely held fear that introducing bovine tissue into human bodies would cause them to grow body-parts of cattle. Note the painting of the Golden Calf on the wall.

  4.The Baynes’s pedigree Shorthorn and Ayrshire dairy cows in their spacious, comfortable, airy quarters at Marleycote Walls in Hexhamshire. Note the slats in the concrete floor through which the muck and urine falls, thereby keeping the wide passageways clean. The muck is stored in underground tanks for spreading as fertilizer on the cropping fields. Here the cows are inside for the night having been out to graze during the day; they move around as they please, making their way to one of the milking robots when they feel the need to be milked, or fancy a feed of cake.

  5.The eighteenth-century sculpture built into the outside wall of the east transept of Durham Cathedral. It records the legend of the founding of Dunholme – Durham as it now is – and shows the Dun Cow, her milkmaid and the woman who directed St Cuthbert’s entourage to the place where the saint’s body should lie.

  6.The classic wedge shape of a superior dairy cow, with a capacious, well-shaped udder and medium-sized, well-spaced teats. Note the bulging milk-vein under her deep belly. She is from the Richardson’s Jersey herd at Wheelbirks in Hexhamshire.

  7.Slender feminine Holstein maiden dairy heifers before they have had their first calf.

  8.A Luing bull calf on his home territory on the Isle of Luing. Emanating from a cross between a Highland cow and a Beef Shorthorn bull, this breed is marvellously adapted to the climate and terrain of the north and west of Scotland, where its thick coat keeps out the cold and sheds the rain. It can extract energy from the poorest herbage to grow a superior beef carcase.

  9.A classic type of Hereford bull, just like my errant bull Jason. Note the finching running under the belly, up the dewlap and neck, to the characteristic ‘bald’ white face, the hallmark which the Hereford stamps on every breed it is crossed with.

  10.South Devon bull and cow. The Guernsey inheritance is evident in their creamy skin, while the beefy shape and docile temperament comes from their Devon ancestors.

  11.A breed ‘beautiful in the highest degree’ and unspoiled by the eighteenth-century improvers because it was unimprovable. This young Ruby Red Devon bull is from William and Richard Dart’s herd at Great Champson, which is founded on some of the oldest and best Devon bloodlines.

  12.This diagram from 1800 shows London butchers’ cutting names and proportionate prices of a West Country (Devon) ox, ‘supposed about Christmas as the fairest season for valuation’. It is addressed to Arthur Young ‘FRS etc. etc. etc’ for inclusion in the Annals of Agriculture.

  13.A ‘vast plateau of roast beef’ with ‘beef to the root of the lug’. This Aberdeen Angus bull from Andrew Elliot’s herd at Blackhaugh, Clovenfords, Galashiels, shows the best of modern Scottish beef breeding. Note the small head relative to the deep, long, square body, with weight in the hind quarters where all the valuable cuts of meat are to be found.

  14.Prize-winning young Cumberland White Shorthorn bull being made ready for sale at Carlisle market. The first cross with a Galloway cow produces the wonderful Blue-Grey, a superb hybrid suckler cow for marginal land. The breed is local to the hard moorland of the Scottish Borders and a testament to the instinctive skill of stock-breeders in the Border country.

  15.Galloway cow with Blue-Grey calves, the offspring of a Cumberland White Shorthorn bull that appears in the photograph above. The heifers fetch a premium for their hardiness, longevity and capacity to rear a fine beef calf from some of the poorest land in Britain.

  16.Black and Dun Belted Galloways doing what they are bred for, turning indifferent moorland herbage into milk and meat and cow muck, balm to the soil, without which our marginal grazing would be much the poorer.

  17.A plucky little Kerry cow with the breed’s characteristic lyre-shaped horns with black tips.

  18.The North American buffalo, ‘the finest grass-eating creature on four legs’. Over millennia its dung made the American prairies some of the most fertile soils on the planet and its grazing created the thick mat of vegetation that stabilised the soil and protected it from drought, tempest and frost. At their most numerous, there were estimated to be a hundred million buffalo ranging from the Atlantic seaboard to California, from the Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of Mexico.

  19.A blasted cottonwood tree stands beside the remains of a nester’s sod-walled cabin, poignant witness to broken dreams in ‘an immensity of grass’ on the High Plains of Colorado in June. It is almost beyond imagination what the hundreds of thousands of people must have suffered who trekked into this wilderness in the hope of making a new life for themselves.

  20.A ‘mama cow’ from Kit Pharo’s Red Angus herd. These cows live as naturally as possible, like their precursors the buffalo, from the grass that clothes the prairie. They calve when growth begins in spring and their calves are weaned as it declines in the autumn.

  21.A Red Angus bull on Kit Pharo’s ranch. With a thicker, hairier pelt and small horns he could easily pass for a buffalo. The Red Angus absorbs less sunlight than his black cousin and so endures extreme heat better.

  22.One of the feedlot pens at Burlington Feeders Inc. in early June, when the bare earth floors are hard and dry but the stink is still there.

  23.Taken from 25,000 feet, crop circles in Kansas created by centre-pivot irrigation drawn from the Ogallala aquifer. Each big circle fits into a square section, with the smaller ones half- and quarter-sections.

  24.The morning Longhorn cattle drive from Fort Worth Stockyards. A combination of ‘living history’ and religious rite, the twice-daily ritual keeps a perpetual memory of the myth of the cowboy, so potent in the American psyche.

  25.An ‘80 inches TTT’ cow in
the Wampler T-Bar-W herd. She has distinctive Longhorn marking, slightly down-sloping ears hinting at Bos indicus ancestry, and the hind quarters deficient in beef that caused ranchers to be so disdainful of the Longhorn breed.

  26.Pippin Star, one of the Wampler’s young heifers.

  27.The Wampler’s stock bull about to serve an impressively horned cow.

  28.The Osborne bull, now a cultural symbol of Spain, looming over an evening hillside in Andalusia.

  29.A young Miura bull in the dehesa in December. ‘Muy peligroso!’

  30.A representative sample of the numerous bulls’ heads mounted on the walls of the Restaurant Postiguillo in Seville. Each bull has his name, date of death, his breeder and the matador who fought and killed him inscribed on the brass plaque below his dewlap.

  31.White Park cattle in Jonathan Crump’s herd. Note the black ‘points’ on the feet, muzzle, ears, round the eyes and the tips of the horns. This breed is of ancient British origin and would once have been found in most parts of the British Isles.

  32.Landseer’s well-known painting of white Chillingham cattle in a romantic Highland setting that bears no resemblance to their home domain at Chillingham. The affecting tableau represents the ideal family and played strongly to Victorian sentimentality: the bull watches over his cow, while she nurtures their calf with tender maternal care. This painting did much to fix in the popular mind the erroneous claim that these were the noble remnant of wild cattle that were once the ‘unlimited rangers of the great Caledonian and British forests’.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As with the writing of any book, various influences and events, over many decades, have contributed to its final form, and many of them I have either forgotten or have not been conscious of their effect. It is easier to remember the people who have directly helped me and I must record with thanks the great kindness shown by all those I visited and spoke to. If I have unintentionally forgotten anyone, I beg their forgiveness.

  William and Richard Dart at Molland Botreaux and the Shinner family at Buckfastleigh in Devon; Jonathan Crump and Charles Martell in Gloucestershire; the Baynes family at Marleycote Walls and Hugh Richardson at Wheelbirks in Hexhamshire; Mark Gray at Broom House Farm in County Durham; and Don Antonio Miura at Lora del Río in Andalusia. I owe particular thanks to Simon Gray for his tremendous encouragement and friendship. I must also thank Charlie Bennett, in Northumberland, whose little herd of wild Dexters reminded me why my cousin advised me not to have anything to do with them.

  Until I went to America and visited the natives in their natural habitat, I had no idea how generous and welcoming they are. It’s a big country and it produces big-hearted people. I had never met any of them before I arrived in the US, but everyone treated me as if we had been friends all our lives. John and Rebecca Wampler spent two days showing me round the stockyards at Fort Worth, their ranch and their herd of Longhorn cattle. Rebecca was so generous with her time and enthusiasm, it is impossible to repay the debt; I can do no more than acknowledge how much I owe her. Russell Fairchild of the Longhorn Cattle Association, Gary and Kendra Rhodes in West, Texas, who made me feel so welcome, Kit Pharo and Tammy Fleischacker of the Pharo Cattle Company, with whom I spent a memorable summer day on the wide high plains of Colorado; the Yegerlehner family in Indiana, who impressed me with their quiet determination to farm against the American grain.

  I regret having had no space to include an inspiring visit to Preston Correll in Kentucky, one of the most learned and intelligent men I have ever met; and a day spent with the wonderful Joel Salatin and his family and interns, in Virginia, whose often lonely evangelism for honest family farming has done much to show how the ravaged soils of North America can be healed.

  My editor at Atlantic Books, James Nightingale, has been patience itself and I am grateful for his calm courtesy and wise advice. Jane Selley, my copy-editor, has done a sterling job, correcting many egregious mistakes; no doubt some will still remain, for which I take full responsibility.

  Philip Walling

  Scot’s Gap

  April 2018

  Preface

  WE ARE THE inheritors of a legacy of cattle breeding that stretches back into the ancient world. Without oxen to pull our ploughs and haul our carts, settled farming would have been impossible; without their manure, our soils would have been the poorer; without milk, our diet would have been deficient; and without their hides, we would have had no leather, or the myriad other things we take for granted. It is impossible to overstate the services rendered by the ox to the human race.

  But humanity’s dependence on cattle is not merely a thing of history. In many ways we are more reliant on them today than we ever were, although the form of our dependence has changed. As Western (particularly American) ways of eating have spread out into most corners of the globe, the demand for beef and milk has grown prodigiously. From modest beginnings in California in 1940, McDonald’s now has 35,000 burger outlets worldwide. This American cultural and culinary influence has been achieved on the backs of the millions of cattle slaughtered annually to satisfy the apparently inexorable demand for minced beef in a bread bun – and, of course, the cow’s milk that goes to make the processed cheese they put with it.

  As this demand for what cattle produce increases everywhere, and eating steak is seen as a badge of affluence, so the numbers of cattle worldwide must only increase in step, from the current 1,000 million worldwide. India has 300 million, with 225 million in Brazil, 100 million in China, 90 million in the US, 90 million in the EU and even 18 million in Russia, not to mention the 10 million in the UK.

  Most people in the urban West have little idea about cows. They cannot identify the breed, let alone whether it is a beef or dairy type. For example, they do not know that a cow has almost the same gestation period as a human female, or that some dairy cows can give 30 times their body weight in milk in a ten-month period. Or that a bullock of a specialized beef breed can grow to weigh a ton entirely from eating grass. This book is an attempt to give a flavour of what our cattle do for us. It does not purport to be more than impressionistic; more is omitted than included. It is certainly not an encyclopedia. There are plenty of those. It is simply an account of one man’s recollection of his all-too-brief involvement with cattle.

  I was 13 when my grandfather died and left me 50 acres of land, but I couldn’t get my hands on it until I was 21. I wonder whether knowing that it was coming affected my attitude to schoolwork, and had something to do with my getting poor grades in my A levels. Who knows? Anyway, after messing about in a spoiled adolescent kind of way, and needing an occupation and an income, I bought an old Grey Fergie tractor and a tipping trailer for a few hundred pounds and started to do all kinds of jobs for anybody who would pay me. I accepted almost any work that was offered, but I found I had a particular talent for building dry-stone walls and got quite a bit of work. A few times I bit off more than I could chew and was nearly defeated by a couple of bigger jobs, but I reluctantly came to accept my limitations.

  One memorable job was building a wall around part of the graveyard of the Methodist chapel in the middle of Workington, just across the road from the bus station. This took me quite a long time. Every day I travelled the 12 miles there and 12 miles back on my old tractor (no cabs in those days), with the trailer loaded with sand and hundredweight bags of cement. I dug the foundations with a pick and shovel. In places my excavations were close to some gravestones, and one day I unearthed what I thought might be a human tibia – I remembered what they looked like from biology lessons. It was a bit creepy digging out half a decayed leg bone with a round joint on one end and a jagged break on the other. I wrapped it in a paper sack and stowed it under the tractor seat, intending to show it to the architect who was paying me to build the wall. Somewhere between Workington and home, however, it must have fallen off, because it was missing when I got back. I kept a careful lookout next morning on the road back to Workington, but I never saw it again. I’ve often wondere
d what happened to it.

  During the summer, a neighbouring farmer asked me to help him for a few weeks. I had little idea about farming, but almost immediately I realized I had fallen in love with a world that had been closed to me even though I had been brought up alongside it. Here was adventure, pitting my physical strength against the land; working with my hands; the excitement of braving the weather; living with the changing seasons; driving tractors and machinery; working dogs, lambing ewes, calving cows and glorying in the earth’s annual increase. I looked forward to every day and realized I had shed the melancholy that overwhelmed me as summer passed into the darkening days of autumn. I came to see why for pastoral people the new year is 1 November, when the rams go in with the ewes and the eternal annual cycle begins afresh. And autumn is sale time, when the year’s increase turns into money and you feel secure to meet the winter with enough to see you through. It had more meaning than anything I’d been told at school.

  Here was a world I could throw myself into; a world that ran along different lines from the one I’d been brought up in. I had stumbled upon a secret that had been there all along but that I’d never seen. Why were more people not desperate to get into this world? Why did people ever leave the land for those terraces of street houses I knew I could never have borne to live in?

  There followed ten years of almost undimmed joy in my love affair with the land that passed almost in a flash. I can’t remember where the time went. And with a lot of effort and a deal of good luck, I found myself owning my own farm. I kept beef and dairy cows, and had a milk round in the village; fattened lambs; kept hens and sold free-range eggs (until the trading standards people stopped me); reared and killed geese for the Christmas market; even kept a couple of pigs and made them into bacon and ham.

  Then one day, when I turned 30, I gave it all up. I think it was the twice-daily grind of milking cows that got to me. Either that, or some gnawing inner voice prevailed and convinced me that I had missed out on an education and had to make up the deficiency while I was still young enough. I didn’t know whether I would be clever enough to do a degree, but when I thought about the boys I had been at school with, most of whom had easily got into decent universities and were now doctors, lawyers or Indian chiefs, I couldn’t believe I could be much less clever than they were.