Till the Cows Come Home Read online

  The milking robots cost ‘the price of three decent cars each’, said David Baynes, though he was reluctant to tell me exactly how much. (The current price is about £130,000.) They are manufactured by Lely, a Dutch company, and are astonishing machines that have transformed the milking of cows. There is no set milking time. The cows come to be milked by the machine when they feel like it, or they come for their ration of cattle cake and get milked. Their ration is measured by the computer, which has read the transponder in their collar, and is dispensed into a trough in front of them as they approach. If a cow has recently been milked and is only coming for cake, the computer will register this and she will get nothing. Some dominant or greedy cows refuse to move out of the way to let others in even though there is nothing for them to eat. In most cases they eventually get the message and move away, but if there is a hold-up, the computer will send an alert to whoever is on duty to come and sort it out.

  As the cow is standing eating her cake, an arm swings down beside her and holds her in position. Her udder is washed automatically by a spray, and then another arm swings under the udder, locates the teats and attaches a rubber cup to each one. If the cow kicks the cluster off – which occasionally happens – the machine will repeat the action until the cups are firmly attached and the cow begins to let down her milk. Each quarter is milked separately, so that when a quarter is dry, the machine will stop the vacuum to prevent harm.

  The robot analyses the quality of the milk in each quarter and if for any reason it is not good enough to be conveyed into the bulk tank for bottling (because it is contaminated), it is automatically diverted away to be disposed of. Colostrum for calf-feeding is directed to a separate storage tank. The system can detect illness in a cow, by reading her temperature or weighing her daily to see if she is losing weight. Mastitis, for example, can be spotted 48 hours before there are any obvious symptoms.

  When cows are at grass in the summer, the system can be programmed to direct them to a particular paddock, and if any cow has not been milked, she will be sent back into a holding pen to go round again.

  The Bayneses’ milk is pasteurized and bottled, either as whole milk, or skimmed with the cream bottled separately, under the Northumbrian Pedigree label. They deliver it themselves directly to smaller retail shops within a 60-mile radius of the farm and it sells at 90p a litre, in contrast to the farm-gate wholesale price, which currently hovers about 30p.

  Keen to capitalize on its quality, they maintain the naturalness of the milk by not homogenizing it, although they do blend the evening’s milk, which is higher in butterfat, with the morning’s. The emphasis is on feeding the cows as much of a home-grown (GM-free) diet as possible, based on grass silage with whole-crop wheat (cut and made into silage while it is still green), barley and some soya and rape meal.

  The Bayneses’ enterprise is a model of how a farmer can become independent of the control of dairy wholesalers, processors and, above all, supermarkets, and get a proper price for their milk. It is not easy to find and sustain a retail market and there is no doubt that without small shops they would have been unable to prevail against the power of the supermarkets. It is crucial that they deliver punctually and reliably and they put great effort into it. Their refrigerated vans cover huge distances every week, and hardly ever fail to get through, even in the worst of weather. The responsibility is relentless, from perpetual care for their cows, to satisfying their customers. They have few days off, but like most farmers, I suspect they can’t see the point when, like an artist, their life and work are so entwined. Where would they go when everything that gives meaning to their lives happens at home? The Bayneses are one of Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ upon whom we depend to put food on our tables. As Adam Smith rightly observed: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’

  CHAPTER 5

  The Channel Island Breeds

  WELL INTO MODERN times, there were three distinct Channel Island breeds, Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney, which tended to be lumped together and called Alderneys. The last of the true old Alderneys, the result of centuries of selective breeding for rich creamy milk, were killed and eaten by the German forces occupying the island in 1944. When A. A. Milne refers to the Alderney in ‘The King’s Breakfast’, he is almost certainly using it in the old sense of a composite for the Channel Island breeds; the cow was most likely a Guernsey:

  The Dairymaid

  She curtsied,

  And went and told

  The Alderney:

  ‘Don’t forget the butter for

  The Royal slice of bread.’

  The Alderney

  Said sleepily:

  ‘You’d better tell

  His Majesty

  That many people nowadays

  Like marmalade

  Instead.’

  When the fashion first arose for its importation, the Alderney was derided as being a cow for a gentleman’s park: ‘it is thought fashionable that the view from the breakfast or drawing room … should present an Alderney cow or two at a little distance’ to provide rich milk for his lady’s tea table.

  The modern representatives of the Alderney are the Guernsey and the commoner Jersey, both almost certainly collaterally descended from the ancient yellow and broken-coloured stock that populated the coast of north-west Europe from the Low Countries to Brittany. The French breeds, the Isigny from Normandy and the Froment du Léon from Brittany, are their close relatives. For many centuries the cattle of the Channel Islands had been isolated from both France and England and their distinctive breeding jealously protected by the islanders from adulteration by imported cattle. As early as 1789, it was made unlawful to import any cattle into Jersey, partly to protect their value, because French cattle were being imported into England via Jersey and reducing the value of the native beasts. A similar prohibition was imposed in respect of Guernsey in 1819. The Jersey embargo was only rescinded in 2008. There has long been a healthy trade in exports the other way, from Jersey to England, contributing substantially to the island’s income. Channel Island cattle were found in southern England as early as 1700. The historian of the Jersey breed, Eric J. Boston, writes that ‘the sloop, Jane, of Guernsey, was chartered on the 1st of September 1741, to proceed to Jersey and take on board eight cows for Southampton’.

  There are records of the breed’s importation since at least 1724, largely by gentry and noblemen who fancied them for their rich milk and to adorn the parkland around their seats. During the eighteenth century, the annual importation was about 1,000 cows and bulls. This increased in the nineteenth century to between 1,500 and 3,000 a year. In July 1819, it was reported in The Times that shipments to England ‘had completely drained the Islands’ of cattle. In 1834, the Jersey cow was distinguished from the other two by the Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society, driven by Sir John Le Couteur, a decorated soldier during the Napoleonic Wars who retired from the British army to his native Jersey and took a great interest in the breed. The society drew up a scale of breed points to encourage high standards. During the nineteenth century, Jerseys spread into every part of the kingdom: from Devon, where they were crossed with the native Devon breed to produce the South Devon; to Ayrshire, where both the ‘Alderney’ and the Guernsey contributed to the development of the Ayrshire breed; and into Ireland, where much of the Alderney blood found its way into the ‘poor people’s breed of little mountain or Kerry cow’ in County Cork.

  It is possible that the breed arose many centuries ago from a cross between some Norman import and a little native type in the Channel Islands that resembled the older forms of Kerry, Cornish, Welsh, Shetland and Ayrshire cattle that accompanied their Brythonic owners retreating before Germanic and Norse invasions from the east. One commentator makes the point that
these breeds were all found in places where there are prehistoric remains, and suggests a close connection with Bos longifrons, the little ‘Celtic cattle’. Trow-Smith dismisses this theory, saying that there is evidence of Alderney blood being introduced into the native cattle of these Celtic places. But in the light of recent research into the migrations of Brythonic people, even before, and certainly after, the Roman occupation of Britain, it would hardly be surprising if they took their cattle with them.

  There was a widely held belief that Alderneys were not hardy enough to survive in the English climate under ordinary conditions of husbandry. George Culley thought the ‘breed too delicate and tender ever to be much attended to by our British farmers’, but he could not deny the richness of their milk and the fineness of their flesh. Their extreme dairy characteristics make them look fragile, and there is some truth that the calves are susceptible to cold and wet; they have a greater surface area of skin relative to their body mass than other larger cattle, but they are hardier than they look.

  The Jersey’s value is twofold: their milk is high in solids, up to 4.9 per cent butterfat and 3.8 per cent protein; and they can be grazed more intensively than larger cows. In measuring the relative merits of breeds, it is the weight of produce that they give from an acre of land rather than the yield of individual cows that counts. Using this measure, the Jersey comes a long way up the scale. Brown Bessie, from Orfordville, Wisconsin, was a champion Jersey ‘butter cow’ that averaged over 40 lb of milk a day, making 3 lb of butter every day for the five months of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, held to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World. Mainstream Barkly Jubilee holds the record (twice) for Jersey milk production. She is the first Jersey to give over 50,000 lb of milk in a lactation. She gave 49,250 lb in her second lactation in 2006, after calving at three years and six months, and 55,590 lb in her third, after calving at four years and eight months.

  It is not only modern Jerseys that produce a lot of milk. Lily Flagg, reared in Northeast Huntsville, Alabama, was champion butterfat and milk producer of 1892 when she produced 1,047¾ lb of butter and 11,339 lb of milk. Her owner threw a famous party in her honour, painted his house butter yellow in tribute and described her as ‘a cow worth kissing’.

  Jersey (and Guernsey) milk is what used to be called ‘gold top’: high in butterfat, protein, minerals and trace elements and a much richer, creamier colour than other milk, due to the high concentration of beta-carotene, which the cows extract from the grass. It has 30 per cent more vitamin D than other milk. The best cows produce up to 30 litres of milk a day, with the average Jersey in the UK producing about 6,000 litres in a lactation.

  The effect of preventing the importation of cattle onto the island, apart from maintaining the breed’s purity, was to protect dairy producers and ensure continuity of supply to the islanders. In 1954, the States of Jersey set up the Jersey Milk Marketing Board, a producer-owned cooperative that buys and processes all the milk produced by all but one of the island’s 24 farmers. In 1981, the Board established a commercial arm to sell its dairy products under the brand Jersey Dairy. It is run, as the old MMB was, as a monopoly, finding a balance between paying the farmer a proper return for his effort and costs, and charging a fair price to the customer.

  It can do this because Jersey is functionally independent from both the EU and Britain and is free, to an extent, to make its own rules. The Jersey Milk Marketing Board has the characteristics of the ancient idea, decried by modern free-market economists, of the ‘just price’. It is interesting to contrast the effect on Jersey farmers and consumers of using the Board to establish a fair price, with the free-market experience of dairy farmers across the Channel in the UK. The principle of the just price was attractive to medieval Christian scholars, prominently Thomas Aquinas, who built on the ideas of the ancient philosophers, trying to strike an economic balance between a producer’s monopoly, which has the consumer at his mercy, and an unregulated market, which leads alternately to gluts and shortages, and imperils a reliable supply.

  The result for Jersey is that its dairy farmers are not going out of business in droves; rather they are making a secure living that gives them confidence in the future. They do not have to increase the size of their herds, or try to put their neighbours out of business to further their own, nor do they have to become involved in retailing or processing their milk. Instead they can concentrate on looking after their cattle, which is what they do best.

  On the customers’ side, there is a reliable source, at a reasonable price (currently about £1.10 a litre), of fresh clean milk that has not travelled further than a few miles across the island. The land is not being ravaged by large amounts of artificial fertilizer and chemicals, and there is not one enormous industrial mega-dairy with cows that are never allowed outside. From the cows’ point of view, they live longer and they have the sun on their backs.

  The Richardson family have been milking Jerseys since 1925 at Wheelbirks Farm, just south of Stocksfield in Northumberland. They make Jersey ice cream as a commercial response to the poor price of liquid milk and have an increasing market for unpasteurized Jersey milk. Wheelbirks is probably a corruption of the Old English weald, meaning ‘open country’, and birks, which is Old Norse for ‘birch’.

  The Richardsons were Quakers, originally from Whitby, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a considerable tanning works on Tyneside. David Richardson, the great-grandfather of the brothers who currently own the farm, bought it in the 1880s and set about turning it into a gentleman’s estate that he could use as a retreat, for his own family, but also for his staff and their children. He rebuilt the farmhouse and cottages, set out watering places in the fields, built capacious modern farm buildings and bridges, and about the turn of the century even constructed a sanatorium for his tannery workers, who were prone to contract TB. It’s built on stilts over a gully in a cruciform shape, with walkways like drawbridges leading to it from the higher ground around. It was never used as a sanatorium, partly because it was never finished. Finney Seeds of Tyneside used it for a while as glasshouses for testing their seeds and growing cut flowers for the local city market.

  During the course of the renovations and building work on the estate, Richardson had aphorisms and verses carved onto stones built into the walls. Over the cow byre, now turned into a milking parlour, is inscribed the enigmatic line: Be sure your work is better than what you work to get. Dere Street, the Roman road from York to Corbridge, crosses the farm, and where the ancient road dipped down to Stocksfield Burn, Richardson built a fine stone bridge, on the parapet of which appears the first line of a poem by Christina Rossetti, ‘Up-Hill’:

  Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

  Yes, to the very end.

  Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

  From morn to night, my friend.

  In the wall of one of the cottages is A stone that is fit for a Wall will not be left in the Way. On another wall, enclosing some wasteland, is the exhortation to mankind in Genesis Be fruitful and multiply; Replenish the earth and subdue it.

  Two large branches of dried-up holly hang from the rafters in a cattle shed at Wheelbirks. Hugh Richardson told me it was male holly (it has to be male, apparently) to counteract ringworm. Apparently the spores of the fungus prefer the holly and leave the cattle alone. Ringworm is a highly contagious spore-forming fungus Trichophyton verrucosum. It affects all species of mammals, including cattle and man, and forms circular scaly lesions on the skin. The scab in the centre of the lesion tends to fall away, leaving a series of rings. It was once common when cattle were housed in old buildings, where the spores can survive for years in woodwork and crevices. The animals would become infected when they were brought in for winter, and unless they were treated, the ringworm would stay with them until the following spring; when they were turned out to grass, it was killed quickly by sunlight. Young cattle are worst affected because some degree
of immunity is conferred by becoming infected.

  I once asked a French farmer whose calf sheds were festooned with holly branches if it worked. He replied, ‘I don’t know, but we’ve had no ringworm on this farm since we started hanging up holly over ten years ago.’

  The Richardsons use genomic sex-selective insemination for the first AI service on all their cows to ensure that all the calves born are female, because Jersey bull calves are almost worthless unless they’re wanted for breeding. If a second insemination is needed, they use a Belgian Blue to try to put some beef into them. The calves are then sold on at three months or so for beef or veal. The herd is closed, which means that no stock is brought onto the farm. The clever way of breeding bulls is to use fertilized male embryos from selected cows and bulls with desirable characteristics and implant them into their own cows. The resulting bull calf will not be related to any cow on the farm and can be used to run with the herd to sweep up any that do not take with AI.

  Each cow wears a device on her ankle, like the tags the courts sometimes make criminals wear to keep track of their movements; it records the number of steps she has taken during the day, on the principle that a cow in season will be restless, moving around when the rest of the herd is lying down or cudding or just quietly grazing. A signal from the anklet will trigger an alert when she comes in for milking, at which point she can be separated from the herd for artificial insemination.