The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  “I told her it was the bloody sheep,” says Willie, smiling now.

  “It was. And calves too,” I say.

  “Don’t talk to me—we’re sick tired of the same things.”

  We move into the kitchen and Deirdre puts on the kettle for coffee. We will sit and talk and share our news. The Heslins live in the next parish and so support a different football team and shop in a different store. To hear their news is to hear from another people.

  “How’s the calving going?” I ask as we sup our drinks.

  “Willie had a nice calf born last night,” says Deirdre as she lights a cigarette.

  “A bull,” says Willie.

  “Great stuff. Good calf?”

  “Our bull is breeding well. How’s your stock?”

  “Good now, but not as good as other years. One loss.”

  “You’ll have that,” says Willie firmly.

  “Had a lad touch and go with pneumonia, but he’s coming to again,” says Deirdre.

  I ask after Liam and tell Deirdre what news I know of him. He is busier now and we all don’t speak with him as much as before. He is doing well, though, and Deirdre is happy. Sharon, her daughter, is in Limerick finishing a master’s, and so their house is quiet.

  We talk of politics then, in which Deirdre is well versed, but she can offer no solid facts on which way the election shall go. The country is without a government and it shall remain so for some time.

  Biscuits and sandwiches are produced and we turn our attention to sport. The club football is in a resting period with only minor matches occurring. We talk of the rugby and the demise of the new Irish team. It is not the side it once was and it has saddened us. Willie keeps me abreast of the soccer, of which I know little.

  Soon an hour has passed and our talk has run dry. Willie walks me down to the shed to show me his calves. His weanlings are just about to go to the mart. I compliment him on them. Liam will not be a farmer, he has told me, so I do not know what Willie will do when the time comes. Right now, he has life in him yet and he knows no other work. He is proud of Liam and sees that he is making a living at something he loves.

  “How are the books going?”

  “The cows are more profitable,” I say.

  “It’ll all fall into place.”

  “I hope so.”

  I wave goodbye to them and promise to call again more regularly now that the bulk of the calves are born. We joke and laugh as I pull out of the driveway. They have been great friends to me in worse times. I have not forgotten that.

  A Bovine Revolution

  While the Americans were exploring their plains and allowing nature to produce the Longhorn and Cracker breeds, an agricultural revolution was occurring in Britain that would change the world forever.

  It began with the enclosures of the Tudor period, which put an end to the medieval system of open-field farming, which had seen large tracts of common land divided up for strip grazing and cropping. This system was feudal in its nature and did not make full use of the land. The enclosures had many knock-on effects, most notably the fact that landless laborers were forced from the commons, thereby creating a newly mobile workforce who would eventually make their way to England’s northern cities to fuel the Industrial Revolution.

  Private ownership, or the enclosing of the fields, also allowed for large farms to develop, and with that came improved farming methods, for with their title deed in hand, farmers could innovate freely. The process of enclosing the land faced opposition at first, but as agricultural output began to grow faster than the British population, disquiet became muted.

  The British agricultural revolution was not solely caused by the enclosures. Rather, a combination of factors came into play: the development of the crop rotation system, which allowed for more agricultural output than with the old system of leaving fields fallow; the use of improved plows and other farming tools; the establishment of a national market to sell the output (it was here that the self-regulating market concept took root); and finally, the success of selective breeding.

  Meadow Landscape with Cattle by Willem Roelofs, c. 1880

  It is to one man that the cow owes the next step in its history. Robert Bakewell may not be so well remembered today, but without him there would be no Charles Darwin and no Alfred Russel Wallace. Born in 1724 to Leicestershire tenant farmers, Bakewell traveled extensively through Europe in his youth and studied various farming methods before returning home to work alongside his father until the latter’s death in 1760. It is at this time that Bakewell the scientist was born, for he began to experiment with his whole farm, dividing and irrigating soil and fields, and pioneering methods of selective breeding.

  Up until this point, different farm breeds had traditionally been kept in close geographical proximity, and breeding was confined to local areas. This method of farming had produced regional variations, but certain characteristics belonging to a great cow or a superior breeding bull might be lost in the next generation. Bakewell began to separate the sexes, keeping male from female, and controlled the breeding process himself.

  This “in-and-in” breeding was a form of artificial selection: Bakewell bred bulls to cows he desired, and at times inbred bulls and daughters to preserve and thus promote particular traits. Bakewell was in effect wresting control from Mother Nature and selectively breeding his cattle and sheep.

  It was Bakewell who is credited with producing the first beef cow. The Dishley Longhorn was the result of crossing English Longhorn heifers with Westmoreland bulls. The new breed was able to meet the increased need for beef in the industrializing cities of Britain, thereby allowing in part for the workforce to grow in numbers yet again, to some 32 million by the beginning of the nineteenth century—a jump of over 26.5 million in two centuries.

  Bakewell’s in-and-in breeding program was so influential that his breeds and ideas were transported across the settled world, from Australia to North and South America. With this new program, the size of cattle was transformed too, and cattle weights on average doubled, to 380 kilos, within two decades.

  Selective breeding or artificial selection was to play a profound role in the culmination of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Writing some sixty years after Bakewell’s death, Darwin cited the agricultural pioneer’s work directly, stating that artificial selection showed variation under domestication. In other words, Bakewell demonstrated evolution in action, by identifying and breeding certain traits and characteristics, thereby leading to the creation of new subspecies. Bakewell had done in his lifetime what nature had taken millennia to achieve. It is thanks to Bakewell and his cows, as much as to Darwin or Russel Wallace, that we owe the origins of our now accepted views on evolution.

  So profound were Bakewell’s influence and ideas that new cattle breeds began to appear around the world, including the Charolais in France and the Shorthorn in northeast England. Interestingly, a century later, the British Hereford and Aberdeen Angus were bred smaller, using selectivity to suit market demands—so small in fact that a full-grown Aberdeen Angus reached only to a man’s belt buckle. The breeds have since been bred up again and now stand at nearly twice their nineteenth-century size.

  Sadly, not all of Bakewell’s new breeds of cattle and sheep have remained popular, including the Dishley Longhorn, which is a rarity today. This perhaps has more to do with changing preferences and taste in cow breeding as with beef production. Like the great fashion houses of Paris, even farmers are victims of trends.

  The cows of my childhood, the cows of our farm, we owe to Bakewell, that quiet champion of change. It is easy to view our cattle as wild animals domesticated, but in reality they have been carefully bred and nurtured to shape our needs.

  Spin

  The day of the big charity cycle race has arrived. I have been training for several weeks and feel strong and ready. I will do the seventy-kilometer event; it is a longer route but the challenge will test me. Da has said he will drop me and my bike in the loc
al town at the start line. Cyclists from all over the midlands have come—farmers, tradesmen, professionals—and we are all here together to race and salute the man who died founding it. I soon find fellows that I know and we talk and laugh and discuss the race.

  We take our positions and I band together with an old school friend I have not seen in years. The race begins and we pedal off. We will travel across the countryside and into the next county of Leitrim. The weather is fine and bright. There is a briskness to the air, but we do not mind, for soon we will be hot and the breeze will cool us.

  “How are the cattle, John?” my fellow inquires.

  “They’re alive and kicking. And your own?”

  “Grand now. It’s been a long winter,” he says.

  “It has at that.”

  We cycle harder now and move from the motorway to country roads; we talk of sport and women and history. It is a good chat.

  “We haven’t seen you down the pub in a long while,” he says.

  “No, I stopped drinking,” I say.

  “Good man. I’ve often thought of doing that myself. Has it been hard?”

  “Not so hard when you put your mind to it,” I say.

  “And how are you after everything last year? You’re feeling well?” he inquires.

  “I’m in good health again and glad of it.”

  “You can say that again. I thought it was good that you were open and spoke about it.”

  “It hits many families,” I say, and, happy now that I am OK, he leaves the subject to one side.

  At Cloone, part of the race group breaks off to take tea in the village hall. By the football pitch the men have arranged the letters of the scoreboard to wish us luck. People line certain corners and wave and we return their smiles. I have brought biscuits and share them with those around me to keep our energy up. And then we’re off again. As we reach Mohill town in Leitrim, my fellow racer tires, for he has not trained so much, and I slow and keep pace with him.

  “You can go on,” he pants. “I don’t want to hold you back.”

  “We started together, we’ll finish together,” I say.

  “That’d be good.”

  Leitrim is the home of the small farm. It is a small county and the land is poor, but through that pressure they produce some of the country’s best cattle. It boasts five livestock marts for a population of but twenty-five thousand. It is positioned perfectly between the Republic and Northern Ireland, and so traders from Belfast and Derry come here to buy cattle.

  We turn now for the rugby club and the finish line. Our talk has become less, for our bodies are worn. We look forward to the food that will be waiting for us. We talk of Terry, the man who is not here, the man who started the day.

  “He’d have enjoyed this crowd,” someone says.

  “He’d be in the leaders’ pack,” another answers.

  “The good are taken too young.”

  We lament and mourn. We do it in the way the old ones have shown us; though we may have iPhones and listen to dance music, we are still countrymen with country rituals. In our every pedal we remember the dead, in our every pedal we celebrate life. I am glad to be alive. I am glad to be well.

  The clubhouse is full of racers when we return. We have two and three helpings of curry and then I cycle home, waving goodbye and farewell.

  “We’ll meet at the next race,” I tell them.

  “We will,” they reply.

  Black Cowboy

  I remember meeting my first cowboy. In Australia, farms are called stations, and cowboys are known as jackeroos or drovers, but the settlements are just as vast, the terrain as unforgiving and the weather as harsh and strong, as in America.

  Old Jack was a retired drover, an Aboriginal man who had spent his youth working on cattle stations throughout northern Australia. He was a member of the Gurindji tribe, a nomadic group of desert people whose traditional lands comprised over three thousand square kilometers in the Northern Territory. In the 1850s, the arrival of British settlers and cattlemen brought with it increased competition for water, as well as brutal massacres. Faced with such odds, the Gurindji took to settled life, working on the white-owned cattle stations.

  Jack had flown in from his home to the regional town center of Katherine to attend some meetings. He was dressed in a cowboy outfit of check shirt and jeans, and he wore a battered Akubra hat. His accent was clipped and broken, for English was not his first tongue. We sat in one of the local pubs and talked of cattle and life and farming.

  The harshness of Australia’s interior scared off most white settlers, and so many of the stations hired Aboriginal stockmen and domestic help. They were cheap labor, working for little money and minimal food rations, and living in tin shacks, known as humpies, with no running water or sanitation.

  “Life was hard,” Jack told me.

  His face, as I can see it now in my memory, was lined and worn, but his smile was one of kindness that I had not seen in his white contemporaries. This smile perhaps came from his past, for he had taken part in the Wave Hill walk-off in 1966, during which two hundred Gurindji stockmen, house servants and their families went on strike. That was the start of the land rights movement in the Northern Territory and the beginning of Aboriginal people standing up for their own human rights.

  Wave Hill station had belonged to the Vestey family. Baron Vestey was a British cattle and shipping magnate who owned large tracts of the Australian outback, and who had been responsible for driving the Gurindji and other tribes off their traditional land. Not for the first time, the cow had been used as a means of dispossession.

  After a beer or two, Jack began to tell me of the walk-off. Its leader had been Vincent Lingiari, a stockman who led the workers to a sacred site nearby at Wattie Creek, where they began their seven-year strike. What had started as a movement for wage equality turned into a demand for the return of Aboriginal land from the Vestey company. The company, and later the Northern Territory government, attempted to buy off the Gurindji with bribes of cattle meat and wages, and later employed bully-boy and intimidation tactics, but eventually public support grew too strong and the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, himself negotiated with the Vesteys to return part of the homelands. In 1975, a handback took place and the Australian land rights movement gained its first major win.

  There are not many black cowboys anymore. Jack and his kind are the old fellas—they listen to country music, drive four-by-fours and swig a beer on a hot day, but the great cattle droves of their youth are over. The farms of the territory are run by helicopter and motorbike now, and for many of the free generation of Aboriginal people, welfare checks have replaced the need for work, and with that have come social problems.

  Today Jack is a rarity, and his life offers a glimpse into an older world. He told me he was still a pretty good judge of a cow, and we discussed the benefits of the Hereford and Brahman cross. He told me of the need for drought-resistant cows and laughed when I told him that in Ireland we must bring our stock inside in the winter.

  “It never gets that cold here,” he said.

  We shared a steak, which was cheap and plentiful in Australia, and bid each other farewell.

  That was a long time ago. I do not know if that black cowboy is still alive. He has stayed on in my memory, like the red dust of that place and the dry, cool nights. Once or twice I have thought of Jack on hot days here on the farm, when the earth has hardened and cracked and, for those brief few days of Irish summer when it does not rain, we think that we too are in the desert.

  Sting

  Another calf was born and all turned out well, so we have quietly agreed that things have turned the corner.

  In the week of the bad luck, I had a nightmare again. This time it was not about Red the calf but about aborted lambs. They were deformed and not fully grown; they cried out blindly and were covered in red fluid. I woke in fright that night. The image of those lambs has stayed in my mind, as has the loss of their real brothers.
/>   Da has come down with an illness. He was stung by a wasp several times on the leg, the wounds have turned sore and red, and he has been in bad pain with them. After the second or third day, it was agreed that he needed the doctor, and so Mam took him. It was a queen, the doctor said, for that was the only wasp that could be alive at this time of year. How she ended up in his trousers he does not know, but the queen’s sting can be bad. The doctor has put him on antibiotics to prevent an infection and given him some cream to bring down the swelling.

  He does not look well, and I have said that I will cover things until he is back to speed.

  “It’s not manic out here. I’ll cope,” I tell him.

  “If you’re sure,” he says.

  “I’m sure.”

  I do not like to see him laid so low, and it makes me think of the future, when old age will keep him out of the yard.

  “Cunt of a wasp,” he says.

  “A right bitch.”

  “There’s a few westerns yet you haven’t seen of them films I got. Stick one on and throw yourself on the bed,” I say.

  “Aye, aye, I might do that,” he says.

  I return to the yard and continue my jobs. I do not mind working alone and have become used to it over the winter. Despite it all, despite our fractious relationship, he has taught me everything I know, everything that I need to be a farmer.

  Lost

  I’m a lamb short. There were fourteen lambs on Monday and now there are only thirteen. I have walked the small paddock in front of my brother’s house four or five times. I have searched the ditches and looked in the surrounding fields but have found nothing. I am still working the farm on my own, so I have no one to consult with, but the lamb has been missing two days now, and, with no sign of a body, I have to face the fact that he has been killed by a fox.

  I call my brother, who is a good hunter, and ask that he keep a watch with his rifle over the lambs. He agrees that he will. He does not ask about the missing lamb, and I do not say. I do not like to admit my loss, not when I am running the farm on my own.