Till the Cows Come Home Read online

  Not all the milkmen have disappeared from London. The enduring appeal of having fresh milk delivered daily to your door, guaranteed quality, and for older people, having someone call at their house every day has ensured their survival. Who knows, in these days of home deliveries of almost everything, the town milkman might even make a comeback.

  Although milking cows on the premises has disappeared, dairying in the metropolis has metamorphosed into a new way of providing Londoners with the goodness that is to be had from cow’s milk. From a very low point after the Second World War, when it looked as if we would go the way of the US into industrial, pasteurized, denatured cheese, there has been a renaissance in cheese- and butter-making in and around London. This owes a great deal to Randolph Hodgson, who started Neal’s Yard Dairy in the late 1970s to promote and revive what was left of Britain’s farmhouse cheeses. His powerful guiding spirit has inspired a loosely-connected web of artisan cheese-makers championing raw-milk cheese in a dogged and clever campaign for over 35 years against the commercial power of the big dairies and a Food Standards Agency determined to force all milk and cheese to be pasteurized. His support for small, high-quality cheese-makers has led to a revival of the demand for regional cheese and provided an alternative to the dispiritingly uniform products of industrial dairy processing. His shops in London and his wider influence all over the country have shown what proper cheese should be.

  One of the alumni of Hodgson’s academy at Neal’s Yard is William Oglethorpe. He makes cheese, yoghurt and butter at Spa Terminus under the railway arches beneath the main line out of London Bridge station, and sells it at Borough Market from his shop called Kappacasein. Oglethorpe has been an urban cheese-maker since he founded the dairy in 2008, and now employs 12 people, inspired by the alchemy of cheese-making: the magical transformation of perishable milk into durable cheese. Twice a week he leaves London at 4.30 a.m. to drive to Bore Place at Chiddingstone in Kent, where he collects 600 litres of raw milk, fresh from the morning’s milking.

  To save time, he cultures the milk in the churns before it starts the journey back and aims to have the still-warm milk ready to go into the copper cheese vat by the time he arrives. He produces a number of ‘un-tampered with’ (as he puts it) cheeses every week: nine 6 kg wheels of Bermondsey Hard Pressed, a bit like Gruyère, which is matured for six to twelve months, washed and turned twice a week; Bermondsey Frier, made to be fried in 100 g slices and a copy of an Italian Formaggio Cotto recipe that browns on the outside and remains ‘squeaky’ clean on the inside; and a ricotta, made by heating the whey left over after making the other two cheeses. He also makes natural yoghurt using his own starter cultures.

  Another alumnus of Neal’s Yard is Blackwood’s Cheese Company, which is an offshoot of the Commonworks farm at Bore Place. They make, among others, a ‘convict series’ of cheeses named after English malefactors who were transported to Australia in the nineteenth century for stealing cheese. Edmund Tew is a small lactic cow’s milk cheese named after a man who pleaded guilty to stealing a loaf of bread, some cheese and beer from the dwelling house of John Boot at Leicester. He was transported for seven years in 1829. Their other convict cheese is William Heaps, a fresh lactic cow’s cheese whose namesake was sentenced in 1838 at Lancaster Quarter Sessions, also to be transported for seven years.

  It is unlikely that there would have been the huge increase in the production and consumption of fresh milk without the revolutionary invention of the mechanical milking machine. Few innovations have had such an effect on farming. Before this, each cow had to be milked by hand, a laborious business that limited the number of cows that could be kept on one farm, unless sufficient people could be found to milk them. It was usually women who did it; they had a gentler touch and nimbler hands than men, and as a result, milking came to be seen as within the wife’s domain, part of the household management. Hand-milking is a pinch-and-squeeze operation that is quite difficult to master. The teat is held in the palm of the hand with the forefinger and thumb making a tight circle round the top of it, just below the udder. This closes off the top and stops the milk from being forced back into the udder. Immediately after the top is pinched, the three lower fingers squeeze the teat to expel the milk. Two teats are milked at a time, each hand alternately pinching and squeezing in a rhythm.

  It is important to strip out properly all the milk from a cow’s udder at each milking. This encourages her to produce milk and discourages disease. So it became the practice, rather like moving seats at a dinner party to reanimate the conversation, for hand-milkers to move their stools around the shed after they had milked their own batch of cows, and try to milk out the ‘strippings’ from their neighbours’ animals; sometimes bonuses were paid to those who could milk out the most.

  But as yields increased, each cow took longer to milk; even an experienced milker could manage no more than five or six cows in full milk in an hour, having to rest their hands every half an hour or so and sometimes hold them against a cold stone to relieve the pain from strained sinews. There was a crying need for a serviceable, reliable machine to liberate the cow-keeper and milkmaid from twice- (or even thrice-) daily drudgery. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, many inventors tried their hand at making a workable machine. Scores of patents were issued for contraptions of dubious utility. There were those that mimicked the pressure applied in hand-milking and used various types of catheter that had to be pushed up the teat past the sphincter that sealed it from the udder; others mimicked the calf’s sucking by creating a vacuum at the end of the teat.

  Many dairymen would have nothing to do with the insertion of tubes into the teats, claiming, with some justification, that the practice introduced disease, damaged the udder and was painful for the cow. On the other hand, there was much reasonable objection to the sucking machines because they were thought to deform the cow’s udder and also cause disease. The main problem with sucking was that it used a continuous vacuum, which bruised the tissues in the udder and inflamed the teats by drawing blood into them. One ingenious but unwieldy invention was a large latex bag that fitted over the whole udder and, by creating a vacuum, drew milk from all four teats at the same time. This was unsatisfactory because it tended to spread disease from one quarter of the udder to the others, took no account of the varying amounts of milk in each quarter, was hard to keep clean and was painful for the cow.

  Some progress was made with the invention of an assortment of machines that had individual latex teat cups for use with a vacuum milker. But they all had the fatal defect of using a continuous vacuum, which applied constant pressure to the teats, damaged their tissues and tended to cause disease.

  Eventually, in 1895, Alexander Shields of Glasgow solved the problem when he invented the pulsator, a device that regularly broke and remade the vacuum. Its pulsing mimicked the natural squeezing and releasing involved in hand-milking, and caused the milk to flow intermittently from the teat while massaging it at the same time. He installed this in a Thistle Mechanical Milking Machine, powered by a steam-driven vacuum pump. Proving how silly experts can be, when the Thistle machine was demonstrated at the Hamburg Exposition in 1898, it was reviewed by a Dr Benno Martiny, a self-important dairy scientist of the time, who dismissed the device because, as he observed through the glass inspection tube inserted in the rubber pipe, it caused the milk to flow intermittently. He failed to see that the pulsator was the single most important invention in dairying, which led to a properly workable milking machine.

  The first machines collected the milk in ‘units’, portable stainless-steel buckets with a sealed lid like a Kilner jar, to which the pulsator and a cluster of four teat cups were attached. The milker connected a rubber tube to a tap on a metal pipe, which provided the vacuum and gave the suction. When the unit was full, it had to be carried into the dairy and the milk poured through a cooler, which was a kind of radiator with metal ribs, with cold water running through the inside. The milk flowed into ten-gallon aluminium
churns with chamfered mushroom-shaped lids attached by chains. (The shape of the aluminium milk churn was derived from the old plunge butter churn.) Milk churns were phased out in 1979 – largely superseded by refrigerated bulk milk tanks and refrigerated tankers. By then there were fewer small farmers milking cows in out-of-the-way places, and fewer farms not connected to mains electricity.

  I well remember how nearly every farm in our area when I was growing up had a milk stand at the roadside, from where the full churns were collected by the Milk Board and empties left for the next day. Full churns were heavy and had to be left on a raised platform at the same height as the bed of the milk lorry so that they could easily be transferred onto it. On hot summer days the milk would heat up in the aluminium and be none too fresh by the time it was collected. Every farmer was entitled to have his milk collected and paid for at the going rate, no matter how many cows he milked.

  As the twentieth century drew on, farmers needed a quicker and less laborious milking system than individual units to milk the bigger herds that were coming in. Thousands of designs were patented all over the Western world for labour-saving milking parlours using whatever technology was available at the time. There were abreast parlours, tandem parlours and herringbone parlours, all variations on a design intended to allow as many cows as possible to be milked by one milker standing in a pit between two rows of cows with their udders at about chest level. This did away with bending down to attach the clusters, even though the time saved was at the cost of standing in a pit and being splattered with cow muck and urine.

  In the 1930s, Henry Jeffers, an American dairyman, invented the rotolactor, a carousel with places for 50 cows – a bit like the London Eye laid on its side – which was timed to do a full revolution every 12½ minutes, long enough to wash a cow’s udder and milk her, although the speed could be altered up or down. Rotary parlours involve less moving about for the operator because the cows come to him and step onto the moving platform themselves, enticed by the promise of cow cake. When she is finished milking, her udder is dis-infected, the exit gate opens automatically, she walks out and steps off the platform and away.

  Large rotary parlours will accommodate about 70 cows at a time and can milk up to 700 cows every hour. Everything is automatic. Each cow is fitted with a collar containing a programmed sensor, which gives the computer the necessary information: how much to feed her, the drying-off date when her lactation is finished, and when she last calved. It even automatically detects when she is on heat and has to be inseminated. But the really clever thing is that the information is fed into the system which then operates various gates for sorting the cows after they come out of the parlour. Those that need to be served, for example, will be directed automatically into one pen, those needing treatment will be directed into another, and so on. But the cows still have to be milked – up to three times daily – which can take up most of the working day.

  So it was hardly surprising that some bright spark should invent the milking robot. This is an astonishing machine that uses every bit of modern electronic and computer equipment to milk about 70 cows a day without human labour. It is founded on the principle that a cow will decide when she wants to be milked and that being milked little and often will produce more milk than sticking to rigid milking times. Modern dairying has resolved itself into two competing philosophies, reminiscent of the differences that arose 20 years ago in baby-rearing: one maintaining that routine was the key to a contented infant, the other that baby-led feeding on demand would get better results. And just as with milking cows, each had its fierce devotees.

  With robots, there is never a time when you don’t need somebody on call; there might not be much to do, but you can never say that milking is finished. For this reason some farmers with large herds have tired of their robots and gone back to twice- (or thrice-) daily milking in large sophisticated parlours where the milker handles the cows every day, sees immediately if anything is wrong and deals with it. Cows in heat are spotted and separated, and lameness and other injuries are seen within a few hours. Having robots do the milking can easily lead to lazy cow management unless the herdsman spends more time with his cows than he does with his wife and children – as one disgruntled wife complained to me.

  This is all a far cry from our house-cow. When we moved to Picket How we found ourselves a couple of miles from the nearest shop, through a couple of gates, across three fields, at the end of a rough track. So in a surge of youthful enthusiasm for self-sufficiency I asked my cattle dealer friend to find us a house-cow.

  ‘Something quiet, easy to milk – and cheap to keep.’

  A few days later a little cattle wagon came rocking over the potholes in the lane, turned into the yard and disgorged a slightly shaken-up fawn-like red-and-white heifer. She stood quietly in the yard looking around, sniffing the air and taking in her new surroundings.

  My wife said, ‘She’s wondering what kind of place she’s come to. I think we should call her Alice. Alice in Wonderland.’

  And so that’s what she became. She was a newly calved Ayrshire heifer, with nicely shaped and well-spaced teats just right for hand-milking. Or so I thought. She had been milked a few times, but never by hand and I was far from used to hand-milking. I found it tedious and annoying – and above all tiring – to have to spend twenty minutes at either end of the day extracting milk from this nervous little heifer. She didn’t kick when I milked her, but she did not much like being milked by hand. She got fidgety towards the end if it took too long. And we found she gave far too much milk for our household needs. She was giving nearly three gallons a day, which is a hell of a lot of milk unless you’re going to make butter or cheese, which neither my wife nor I could be bothered to do. The dogs got quite a lot of it, but there was still too much, so we got two pigs and turned them into bacon, which was very good stuff.

  I persevered with her for a few months and she became quite well trained, coming to the gate at milking time and walking into the byre to be tied up, ready for her cake and standing to be milked. But she must have sensed my impatience with her and that I resented being tied to milking the cow no matter what else we were doing, every morning before breakfast and in the evening. She started a habit that eventually put me off hand-milking for good. As milking progressed she would flick her tail so that the hairy tip, with cow-muck hardened on the end, would lash me on the back of the head or round my neck or face. If there was soft cow muck or mud on her tail I would get splashed with the damned stuff. I started tying her tail on the other side of her body with a piece of baler twine, with a slip knot round her tail and a loop around her neck. I had to do this before I sat down on the milking stool because, if I didn’t, as soon as I leant my head and shoulder into her flank to start milking she would flick that bloody tail.

  She must have been irked that she no longer had the swishing of her tail as an outlet for her irritation, because she developed another trick that ended my relationship with her. She would allow me to take a pail of milk from her and just before I got to the strippings, she would lift up her hind hoof and plonk it into the full bucket. She didn’t kick, she just waited for the right moment and expertly put her filthy foot into two or three gallons of hard-won milk, making sure it would be undrinkable. Yelling at her and slapping her just made her worse and she got to be so nervous that she became nearly impossible to tie up in her stall.

  When she came into season I had my Hereford bull serve her and sold her in-calf, jolly glad to be shot of her. Poor Alice.

  It didn’t seem right to ask David Baynes, who produces Northumbria Pedigree Milk at Marleycote Walls near Hexham, if he had ever thought of giving up milking cows. But in fact he told me without my asking that he had been through many sleepless nights caused by the fear of debt, loss of his farm and that he would be unable to provide for his family. The Bayneses have farmed at Marleycote Walls since the 1860s. Their herd of Dairy Shorthorns have long pedigrees back to the 1930s and beyond, and are indigenous to Durham
and North Yorkshire. More recently they have added Ayrshires to the herd because it was hard to find enough good Dairy Shorthorns. The average life for a commercial Holstein dairy cow is two to three lactations – that means they are about four or five years old when they are culled, worn out by making industrial quantities of milk – whereas some of the Bayneses’ cows are into their tenth lactation and still going strong. This is a reflection of the ethos behind their farming. There is a tension in farming, as I suppose in any other creative activity, between doing it for love and doing it purely for money. These two are at either end of a scale, although one does not necessarily exclude the other. And somewhere in the middle, there is a point where happiness and success can be combined. That is what the Bayneses have achieved. But not without considerable effort, luck and risk.

  Father and mother and two sons and their wives run the farm. One son lives for the cows and the other runs the processing, packaging and deliveries. It was over a decade ago that they realized they had to increase their income if they were going to be able to support three families from the farm. They faced a choice: go all industrial, enlarge their herd and replace the Shorthorns with Holsteins; or find a way of increasing the income from their milk. They did not want to change breed, largely because Shorthorns are well suited to the land and climate of the north-east of England, but also because their milk is so much superior to the ‘whitewash’ that Holsteins produce, and – they dare say it – they love their cows. So they pushed the boat out and built an airy, spacious shed for 160 cows, with wide passages and soft-bedded cubicles and automatic mucking-out, and installed two robotic milking machines. Everything was done on a generous scale, with much labour-saving incorporated into the design. I felt that if I were a cow, I would be pleased to live in this shed, my every need satisfied, warm in winter and carefree in the tranquil summer. It was light and bright and the cows ambled at ease below the viewing gallery, from which every part of the shed can be surveyed without disturbing its residents.