Till the Cows Come Home

The Story of Our Eternal Dependence

Philip Walling

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786493088
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Biological Sciences

'A vital, thorough and accessible history that everyone who cares about the past or the future should read.' Rosamund Young, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Cows
_______________________________ The story of the relationship between humankind and cattle, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Counting Sheep. To tell the story of the relationship between humankind and cattle is to tell the story of civilisation itself. Since the beginning, cattle have tilled our soils, borne our burdens, fed and clothed us and been our loyal and uncomplaining servants in the work of taming the wilderness and wresting a living from the land. There has never been a time when we have not depended on cattle. As human societies have migrated from the country to the city, the things they have needed from their cattle may have changed, but the fundamental human dependence remains. Blending personal experience, recollection, interviews with farmers, butchers and cattle breeders and studding the narrative with little-known nuggets of technical detail, Philip Walling entertainingly reveals the central importance of cattle to all our lives.

CHAPTER 1

Dairying

Believing agriculture to be well calculated to improve the virtue, and call forth the talents of men, I have taken every opportunity of showing its superiority to all other pursuits.

William Aiton (1731–93)

MILKING COWS IS a special form of slavery. The responsibility is relentless. Dairy cows, like all animals, are creatures of habit and they give of their best if they have a routine. They have to be milked at the same time, twice (sometimes three times) a day. Every morning the first thing you do is get up and milk the cows. It doesn’t matter what else is happening that morning; the cows have to be milked before breakfast. And whatever you are doing, wherever you are, you have to be back home by five o’clock for the milking, and unless you have help, you can’t take a single day off.

I had 60 milking cows, which took an hour to milk if I got a move on. I milked them in a byre converted into a milking parlour. Even back in the early 1980s, when milk fetched quite a good price, there wasn’t enough profit in it to employ anybody to help me. Every morning of the year, Christmas Day included, at half past eight, give or take five minutes, the milk tanker came to pick up the milk from that morning’s and the previous evening’s milking. It had to be cooled, otherwise the driver could refuse to take it. To get it down to the right temperature took about three quarters of an hour, so the milking had to be done by around 7.45, which meant that I had to start about 6.30.

On a summer morning, with the early sun creeping down the fellside and warming the still air, it was pure joy to plunge outside into the new day. But pulling on my overalls, stiff with cow muck, and dragging myself out of the house at six o’clock on a pitch-dark January morning, with freezing rain lashing the bedroom window, was less of a pleasure. Rolling over was out of the question; I simply could not fail to milk those cows. Illness had to be ignored because there was nobody else who could do the milking. There was no point in even allowing myself to admit to having flu, or a thumping hangover, or, on one occasion, food poisoning, because it just made the task even harder. Only once, when I was too ill to do it after I had suffered a welding flash, did my wife ask my neighbour from down the valley to milk the cows.

Once I got started, the milking had a way of creating its own momentum and I would lose myself in the mechanical repetition. I became focused on getting through it as fast as I could and tended to ignore everything but the diurnal work of keeping a dairy herd, with record-keeping and planning ahead falling by the wayside. I was particularly bad at recording when each cow had calved and when she had been served by the bull or artificial insemination (AI). And if I didn’t know how long a cow had been milking, I didn’t know when she ought to be dried off to give her a rest to prepare for her next calving and lactation.

Some farmers are suited to the routine and certainty of milking cows. They accept it as something that has to be done before the work of the day begins. And at one time it paid the bills, put a bottom in a farming business and was the financial salvation of many small farmers. But paradoxically, for many others, especially if they were one-man bands, it proved to be their nemesis. Milking became the focus of their day’s activity; once it had been done, they felt they could take it easy until the afternoon because they had made their money for the day. From being only one part of a well-run farm, the dairy herd began to consume most of their effort and attention.

For about ten years, maybe longer, after I gave up milking, I suffered a series of nightmares about the whole process. In fact I still have them now and again, but not as intensely as I once did. In one, I have forgotten to milk the cows for a long time – many days, maybe a week or more – and they are locked in their shed, where they haven’t been fed. Some have split and burst udders; others are lying in a khaki mixture of milk and their own liquid excrement, bloated and unable to get to their feet. Some are standing in agony with grotesquely swollen udders, milk streaming from their teats. Some are dead; one looks as if she died trying to give birth, a pair of hooves and a hideous head with grotesquely swollen and blackened tongue flopping from her vagina; pink froth like ectoplasm is congealed around its nostrils and cold dead muzzle. I am revolted by my criminal negligence and I do not know how to put it right.

In another dream I am milking eight cows side by side in the byre. I have attached the pulsing rubber cups, one to each of their four teats, and I can see the milk through the little glass inserts, coursing down the tubes up into the receiving jars. The dogs start barking and I go outside into the yard to investigate. A delivery van has arrived with a parcel to sign for. I take the parcel, sign the sheet and have a chat with the driver. When I get back to the cows, I find that time has played a trick on me and I have been away for more than an hour. During that time, the milking machines have milked the cows dry. Three of them are being sucked down into the teat cups; half of one cow has disappeared and the udders and bellies of the other two have gone. I rush to pull off the cups, but they have such a strong hold that I cannot remove them. As I am struggling with the first three, another cow is being sucked through the teat cups and down the milk line. The suction is too strong and the other cows are being hoovered up bit by bit to the rhythmic ker-plop … ker-plop … ker-plop of the milking machine, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I wake up in a desperate state. How could I have allowed this to happen? I am weighed down by terrible guilt that my neglect has caused such suffering to animals in my care, and I only gradually realize that it was a dream. Just as hearing the voice of his master after a slave has gained his freedom penetrates his soul and takes him back into a horror he can never leave behind, for many years hearing the sound of a milking machine took me straight back to the misery of that milking parlour all those years ago.

I’m not alone. Milking cows has driven many men mad.

One less than energetic local farmer, who didn’t enjoy early mornings or repairing his fences, or the work of mucking out his little herd of cattle, let them wander at will all winter over the whole farm. On dark mornings, when they were hungry, the herd would make their way into the farmyard and mill about, mooing, waiting to be fed. He solved this hindrance to his slumbers by carrying bales of hay upstairs and stacking them in his bedroom beside the window. When the cattle turned up for breakfast, he would throw up the sash window, cut the string on the bales and toss out the sections of the hay bales, frisbee-like, to the hungry herd before going back to bed.

After his wife died, standards slipped even further. He lived in his wellingtons and bib-and-brace overalls, indoors and out. Decades of Farmers Weekly, Farmers Guardian, British Farmer and Stockbreeder and the local paper were stacked up in the hallway. A full-grown sheep that had once been a pet lamb roamed at large through the house. One afternoon I was invited in for tea. The kitchen was carpeted with flattened cardboard boxes. When they got too dirty, the farmer simply gathered them up, burned them and replaced them with fresh ones from the supermarket where he bought his groceries. I sat at the kitchen table while he produced two tea-stained chipped mugs and filled them from a teapot he kept warm on the back of the Aga. He dropped a half-empty bag of sugar on the table.

‘Sugar?’

Before I could answer, the sheep had got its muzzle into the bag and was gobbling at the contents. The farmer recognized the rustling and without turning round said:

‘Just knock that yow’s head out of the bag if you want any.’

What saved many small family farmers from penury was the Milk Marketing Board. Formed in 1933 to protect them against market instability and the dominance of wholesale buyers, it put a bottom in the market after farm commodity prices collapsed following the First World War, leaving dairy farmers in dire straits. The MMB was legally obliged to buy every gallon of milk produced by English farmers. The other countries in the UK had corresponding boards. It rapidly became the largest milk marketing and processing organization in the world, which at its peak bought and marketed 13,000 million litres of liquid milk a year.

During the Second World War, the Ministry of Food tightened the state’s control and made the MMB the direct buyer and seller of the nation’s milk. It also ran the National Milk Records service, under which it provided milk recorders to visit farms weekly to record the yield of each cow. This gave farmers the impetus to keep accurate records, which greatly increased production through higher-yielding cows.

At its height, the MMB employed 7,000 people in four separate businesses: the Milk Marketing Scheme, which promoted the sale of milk; Dairy Crest, through which it collected, processed and delivered milk; its Genus AI service; and National Milk Records.

After the war, the MMB continued to guarantee the price for all liquid milk, and fixed the retail and wholesale prices in consultation with buyers. By the 1950s, production had increased considerably, as many small farmers took advantage of the guaranteed income. When refrigeration and bulk tank collection reduced the labour of collecting the milk in churns from the roadside, production was boosted still further.

By 1961, a quota system was proposed to regulate the ever-increasing supply, but the MMB rejected it. As Britain negotiated to join the Common Market, it became clear to a few people that the MMB could not co-exist with European law and the European system of dairy cooperatives and import controls. Sooner or later the British model of price guarantees without import restrictions would have to go.

Rather than frighten farmers, however, and turn them against joining the Common Market, the European Commission allowed the MMB to keep its statutory monopoly until 1978 by exceptionally allowing the Board to negotiate amendments to the Common Market regulations. But the wolves were circling, and inevitably, in 1982, the MMB lost a challenge to its pricing structure by the European Commission in the European Court, and an Irish dairy company obtained damages from it for unfair competition under EEC rules.

Further EEC regulations attacked the MMB’s control of liquid milk prices and purchasing from one flank, while the supermarkets attacked from the other. The wounded MMB limped on, until in 1987 the European Court decided that the profitable Dairy Crest had to be separated from the MMB because it was contrary to European competition law. It became clear that the Board was doomed. The Conservative government in the late 1980s could do nothing to prevent its abolition, and in 1994, the minister of agriculture, John Selwyn Gummer (as he then was) announced the coup de grâce, disingenuously pretending that it was a British decision to privatize the milk market and ‘free it’ from the MMB’s monopoly.

The original European system of price support for farmers was based on ‘intervention buying’, by which the Commission bought produce off the market if the price fell below that which had been set for it. It was then to be stored until the price rose again, when it could be fed back into the market, causing the price to fall back to the level set. It was a typically utopian and dirigiste scheme that simply did not work in practice. It caused huge accumulations of dairy produce in ‘milk lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’, which the Commission could never feed back into the market because production kept rising. They ended up virtually giving it away, most famously to Russia and ‘developing’ countries. In turn, this dumping of cheap produce distorted local markets and damaged small farmers trying to make a living in these countries.

In 1984, the Commission came up with a bureaucratic and byzantine milk quota system designed to regulate the over-supply. Member states were set a national limit on dairy production; they in turn set a quota for every farmer who had been producing milk in 1981 based on his share of the national quota plus 5 per cent. Member states were fined if they exceeded their national quota, and each state imposed levies on its individual farmers if they exceeded their personal quota. But an individual farmer would avoid a penalty if the overall national production was less than a member state’s allocation, because the EU would not impose a national penalty. The catch was that this was based on a previous year’s national production, so farmers could never know at the time they sold their milk whether or not it would attract a levy. Fortune tended to favour the bold, and often, if a farmer took the risk that national production would not exceed the EU limit, he got away with going beyond his individual quota. Those who stuck honestly to their allotment lost out.

This was an unsatisfactory and risky way to run a business. Prudent farmers who knew they were going to exceed their quota found it safer to buy or lease spare quota in the market that had sprung up. The EU had made quota transferable only with the land to which it was attached, but in practice a short grazing licence was enough to legitimize the transaction. The buyer would rent some land with quota attached for a season and use the quota to sell that amount of milk to the wholesale dairy. Then at the end of the licence period he would simply vacate the land and neglect to transfer the quota back to the registered holder. The ‘rent’ was set by the value of the quota in the quota market. By this method, nicknamed ‘quota massaging’, large quantities of quota changed hands and became detached from the land to which it had originally been granted. This is an example of the policies of the European Commission leading to results it was unable to foresee.

Quotas had to go, and in March 2015 the EU abruptly abolished them. The Commission justified it by claiming that demand for dairy produce, particularly cheese, had increased in Europe and across Asia and quotas were no longer needed, even though European farmers still generated more dairy produce than was consumed in Europe. The truth was that there was less incentive for farmers to increase production because they were no longer guaranteed the kind of prices that caused overproduction. The EU had turned to payments to support farmers ‘decoupled’ from production: in other words paying them for doing things on their land other than producing food, such as environmental schemes and social payments to sustain rural communities.

All this has seen a drastic reduction in the number of farmers milking cows in the UK – and to a lesser extent across Europe. In 1950, there were 200,000 individual farmers delivering milk to the MMB; by November 2016, this number had fallen to 9,500. The national herd decreased from 2.5 million cows in 1990 to 1.8 million in 2015, while the milk produced increased by a third. With a few peaks and troughs, the wholesale price of liquid milk has hardly altered in a decade and is now little more than it was six years ago – about 31p a litre, a few pence a litre less than the average cost of production. The price in mainland Europe is generally higher, particularly in Holland at 37p and Germany at 36p a litre. This goes some way to explain why British farmers find it hard to compete.

The loss of price support turned out to be a catastrophe that nearly overwhelmed farmers and brought the dairy industry to the verge of collapse. The market returned to its pre-MMB volatility. From 2000, the milk price fell 40 per cent in 18 months, and with it the value of cattle. Supermarkets quickly seized the power to squeeze the wholesale price below farmers’ cost of production and carried on charging their customers more than twice what they paid for it; in most cases they were selling milk more cheaply than bottled water.

Slowly it has begun to dawn on farmers (the more farsighted realized it a long time ago) that they are on their own and cannot look to their government to support them. If they want to continue milking cows, there are only two ways of doing it: escape the roller coaster of world markets and the stranglehold of dairy processors by taking control and selling direct to the customer; or borrow money, enlarge the herd and turn the farm into an industrial unit, spreading the cost over hundreds of ultra-high-yielding black-and-white Holsteins, the industrial cow of choice across the world for farmers chasing yield. But first, an ancient English dairy breed with a modern purpose.

CHAPTER 2

The Gloucester Cow

ON 10 OCTOBER 732, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, a Frankish army led by Charles Martel defeated a Moorish horde under Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, the Muslim governor of Spain. Intent on conquering Gaul for Islam, Rahman had crossed the Pyrenees, defeated Odo, Duke of Aquitaine, and advanced as far as the Loire, pillaging and burning as he went. Exactly a hundred years after the death of Muhammad, this was the culmination of two decades of seemingly unstoppable Muslim conquest of huge swathes of territory across North Africa, the Middle East and into southern Europe.

The Battle of Poitiers is arguably the most significant event in the history of the world, certainly of Europe, because the survival of Christendom hung on its outcome. Had Charles Martel not triumphed over the Moors, Islam would very likely have prevailed throughout Europe. There would have been no Charlemagne, no Holy Roman Empire; 1,500 years of Christian Europe would never have been and the history of the world would have been utterly different.

The modern Charles Martell, from Dymock in Gloucestershire, is reticent about admitting that he might be of the same lineage, but playing a crucial role in saving the Gloucester cow from extinction, as well as preserving hundreds of old varieties of apples and pears and inventing Stinking Bishop cheese, might show that some of the blood of the saviour of Christendom has trickled down the generations.

The present Charles Martell settled in Gloucestershire, near the border with Herefordshire, as a young man with little money, his heart set on farming a piece of his own land. His grandfather had left him a cottage, which he sold for £15,000, and in October 1972, with the money in his pocket, he came to Laur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 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
• A Note About the Author
• Picture Section
• Also by Philip Walling
• Copyright