Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  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 Laurel Farm, Brooms Green, where he stood in the farmyard and made the winning bid at the auction. You could do that in those days. There were hundreds of small farms sold by auction up and down the land for a price commensurate with the profit you could make from them, which allowed young men with enterprise to get into farming. People weren’t buying farms then to split them up and sell off the buildings, or for the subsidies that came with the land for doing nothing.

  After Martell had acquired his few acres of fields and orchards and the run-down house and buildings, he had no money left. With a wife and two small children to support, and no income, he found work driving a lorry, sometimes walking the five miles to the depot to start his day and back home again in the evening. Losing the job after a year turned out to be a godsend, because it propelled him into selling cheese at markets around Somerset, Gloucestershire and beyond. He soon realized he could make more in a day from his cheese stall than he’d earned in a week driving lorries. And that gave him the start he needed.

  He might have understood the principle of livestock-keeping, expressed in William Youatt’s great aperçu that ‘the grand secret is to match the breed to the soil and the climate’. Or he might just have been an idealistic romantic. Many young people were back then; it came with hippies and flower power. I was one myself for a couple of years until I woke up to reality. Whichever it was, he thought native Gloucester cows would be the right breed for his little farm: he would be saving an almost extinct breed, and it would give his farming some purpose beyond the merely commercial and utilitarian.

  But there was a more hard-headed reason too, otherwise he would not have survived. Gloucester milk makes good cheese, better than milk from most other breeds because of the fine balance and quality of the fat and protein. The fat globules are small, so the curds separate more easily from the whey, and the greater milk solids means that more cheese can be made from each litre than from ordinary milk. That is why milk yield is recorded by weight rather than volume. A gallon of cow’s milk weighs between 8¼ and 8¾ lb, depending on the breed and the way the cow is fed. Gloucester milk contains between 5 and 6 per cent butterfat, and solids-not-fat (protein and milk sugars) of 8–9 per cent. By contrast, the milk from high-yielding Holstein cows has about 3.5 per cent fat and about 8 per cent solids-not-fat. The rest of the milk is water. And once the cream is skimmed off, it’s over 90 per cent water.

  Broadly speaking, the dairying counties of England overlie a band of Jurassic Lower Lias limestone that stretches from the North York Moors through Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Somerset and Dorset, with outliers in Cheshire and Glamorganshire. Stilton from Leicestershire and Cheddar from Somerset are probably the best-known English cheeses, although Cheshire, Caerphilly and Gloucester are not far behind. All these counties are on limestone and have been renowned for their cheese for centuries.

  In each of these places distinctive types of cattle evolved that could make best use of the terroir and produce milk that was suitable for cheese-making. They were not breeds as we know them today; rather they were types that had acquired a degree of genetic uniformity influenced by topography and climate, much more the products of the soil they lived on than modern breeds of cattle. Most of them would be the offspring of a bull that had only walked from the neighbouring parish rather than been flown from the other side of the world as a straw of semen. Modern cattle are generally mated according to measured performance, but these types were created using the observations of breeders who had little to go on other than evident secondary characteristics such as the thickness of a cow’s ‘milk vein’, or the width of her muzzle, or the colour of her hooves or coat. Not that these were necessarily unreliable indicators of productivity, but they were rather hit-and-miss compared with modern methods.

  On either side of the Severn estuary, extending into the country east and west, a particular sort of dairy cow arose, broadly called the Severnside type, kept for cheese-making. Gloucestershire was right in the heart of this country. There, cheese-making has been concentrated in the vales of Berkeley and Gloucester since at least the thirteenth century and almost certainly much longer. The earls of Berkeley had a substantial dairy as early as the twelfth century. Cheese and butter markets were well established at Chipping Sodbury and Gloucester by the thirteenth. John Leland in 1535 said that Alney Island, just to the west of Gloucester, where King Edmund of Wessex and the Dane Cnut had met to divide up England in the summer of 1016, had ‘goodly medow ground … cheese there made is in great price’.

  The old Gloucestershire cattle, whose milk made this cheese, were similar to their neighbours from Glamorganshire and closely related to the ancient dual-purpose Castlemartin type established along the coast of south Wales through Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and south Cardiganshire. They all were distinguished by their white finching combined with a darker coat colour. The Gloucesters were mahogany, the Glamorgans slightly lighter and the Castlemartins (which became the modern Welsh Black and lost their dairying capacity) pure black.

  Finching describes the contrasting white markings that certain breeds carry and is an ancient characteristic th
at takes different forms in different breeds. In the Gloucester it is a stripe along the back, under the belly and along the tail. The Gloucester’s white stripe does not extend to the head, whereas the Hereford, native to the next-door county, has a white head, shoulders and dewlap, with a white switch to the tail, as we shall see in chapter 10.

  Finching can run down the legs and flanks in a ‘colour-sided’ pattern, as for example in the English Longhorn and the Irish Moiled (hornless) cattle. In some breeds, colour-siding makes the cow look as if a white sheet has been thrown over its back and down the flanks, as in the now extinct Sheeted Somerset and the very much extant Belted Galloway. Colour-siding can also be seen in cattle whose body, ears, nose and feet are dark and the rest of the animal light-coloured. An extreme pale form of colour-siding is where the light colouring covers most of the body and the dark colour is restricted to the ears, nose and feet, leaving most of the animal white, as with the various types of white cattle, particularly the Chillingham (see Chapter 19) and the White Park.

  By 1834, when William Youatt was writing, the Gloucester was in danger of being lost due to crossing with other breeds, first the Longhorn then the Shorthorn. Although he detected traces of the old breed in the first crosses, few native Gloucesters remained unadulterated. Crossing with Longhorns – particularly Robert Bakewell’s1 ‘improved’ variety – had become so common that although the cattle had gained some size and beefing qualities, it was at the expense of milk yield and quality of cheese. By 1900, the Gloucester seemed doomed to extinction.

  It has been suggested that the feudal practice of heriot, by which upon the death of a tenant his heirs were required to surrender his ‘best beast’ to the lord, led to a concentration of good cattle in the hands of the landlords and hastened the demise of the Gloucester because ordinary farmers were forced to look to other breeds to stock their dairies. But that is more a swipe at the landlord class than a point with any substance. The beasts handed over to the landlord represented a fine or fee that the tenant’s heir had to pay to secure the continuation of the family’s occupation of their land. In many cases the beast would be valued and the heriot paid in cash, or it would be put up for sale by the landlord and the tenant could buy it back. Landlords would receive numerous cattle as heriots and they would be unable to keep more than a few of them. There were so many cattle in the dairying parts of Gloucestershire in the sixteenth century that the vicar of Berkeley received up to 130 calves a year in tithes, notwithstanding that farmers who had fewer than six calves a year paid nothing. Bearing in mind that the size of a herd in the two hundred years between 1518 and 1713 was between nine and eighteen cows, and not every cow had a calf every year, there must have been hundreds of farmers keeping cows who did not have to part with any of them.