The sexes are more defined in dairy than in beef cattle. The bulls are more masculine and aggressive than beef types and the cows more feminine. Jersey bulls are notoriously bad-tempered and have to be treated with a good deal of caution. What they lack in size they more than make up for in attitude. I could hear the bellowing of the young bull running with the dry cows at Wheelbirks before we reached the field with a big bale of silage on the tractor loader. When Hugh Richardson set down the half-ton bale to remove the plastic netting, the bull set about trying to demolish it, scattering silage all around and rolling it across the field, bellowing all the while. Hugh only managed to stop it by lifting what was left of the bale into the feeder with the loader.
The delicately feminine Jersey cows, on the other hand, are docile, sometimes nervous, and, even for cattle, inquisitive. They ambled up the field and crowded round; some tried to lick me, others, a bit pushier, rubbed their heads against me, and some stood and stared, trying to work out what this stranger was doing in their field. The best of the cows have the classic wedge shape, being deeper in the rear half, which is the business end. As Jerseys only weigh about 400 kg, they can be left to graze the fields longer in the autumn because they won’t cut up the fields as much as heavier breeds. They also tolerate the summer heat well.
The femininity of the cows and masculinity of the bulls seems to emphasize a kind of dualism in genetics that balances a particularly prominent characteristic in one animal by making its converse equally prominent and so creating the whole through a unity of opposites.
Jerseys tend towards a general shade of fawn, although they come in all shades of brown, from light tan to mahogany, almost black. Pure-bred animals have a lighter circle around the muzzle and eyes, a dark switch – the hair at the end of the tail – and black hooves. In the mid nineteenth century there was a fashion for silver-grey Jerseys, and a later vogue for whole colours as opposed to ‘broken’ or mixed colouring. Rich owners started to take an interest in showing their stock, and in 1879, at the London Dairy Show, Jerseys comprised the single most numerous breed, with 253 entered in the various classes. No other breed aroused such interest as an object of fashion.
Jerseys have a greater propensity than most breeds to suffer from milk fever, called hypocalcaemia, caused by a lack of available calcium in the blood, typically around calving. Unless the cow is quickly given intravenous calcium, magnesium and glucose, she will go into a coma and die. Fortunately the remedy promotes a miraculous recovery and she will be back on her feet within half an hour as if nothing had happened. Before intravenous injections were possible, the remedy for milk fever was to inflate the cow’s udder through the teat with a bicycle pump. I suppose they were trying to push back some of the calcium into the bloodstream, or something like that. It’s hard to imagine how anybody thought of doing such a thing.
There has been a remarkable reversal of fortune between the Jersey and its cousin, the other Channel Island breed, the Guernsey. In 1955, Guernseys comprised 5.3 per cent of the dairy cattle in England and Wales – about 130,000 cows. There were fewer Jerseys. In the last 60 years, the Guernsey population has dwindled to about 5,000 cows in the UK, while the Jersey has more than held its own.
Guernseys are bigger, stronger-looking cows than Jerseys – about 50 kg heavier – less deer-like and doe-eyed, and they have never been quite so subject to fashion as their cousins. They are mostly a yellowy fawn, a proportion broken-coloured, with a white belly, tail and margin to the muzzle and distinctive amber hooves. Their colour shows a closer relationship to the European Blonde cattle races than the Jersey and may also reflect a discrete crossing of improved Shorthorn in the early nineteenth century that increased their size and improved their carcase shape, making them more dual purpose than the delicate Jersey. Both Channel Island breeds descend, a long way back, from a sub-type of the Blonde races, of which the ancient Brown Swiss and the French beef (originally draught) breed, the Blonde d’Aquitaine, are the most numerous modern representatives. All Channel Island cattle were kept for draught as well as dairy and meat production. But it is their unique genetic inheritance from African and Asian cattle and preserved by long isolation, that sets the Channel Island cattle apart from every other British breed.
The Channel Islands were part of the kingdom of Normandy and under the suzerainty of the dukes of Normandy. In AD 960, Duke Robert settled some monks on Guernsey who brought cattle with them from mainland France, most likely from Brittany. A hundred years later, a further monastic settlement imported brindled cattle from the mainland and the Guernsey was on its way to the distinctive breed it is today.
The Jersey breed was kept isolated and pure for 250 years, from 1763 to 2008, because the States of Jersey closed the island to prevent any genetic adulteration. Guernsey did the same from 1819. However, it is recorded that zebu cattle were crossed with Channel Island and Devon cattle on the mainland between 1795 and 1805.
The Guernsey’s main attribute is that it produces milk unlike that of any other European breed, ideally suited to cheese production and giving health benefits that are only now becoming better understood. It has more solids than other milk, which makes for a firmer curd, and it contains 15 per cent more calcium, high levels of beta-carotene (vitamin A) and 33 per cent more vitamin D.
Despite the efforts of the processors and supermarkets to standardize it, not all cow’s milk is the same. Its taste and quality depend on the season of the year, what the cows have been eating, the stage of their lactation and even the weather. But there is another difference. Although most milk is water, the valuable part is in the roughly 15 per cent solids: butterfat, which varies with the breed and feeding and is between 3.2 and 5 per cent; protein, which is between 3 and 4 per cent; milk sugar (lactose) and minerals. The protein fraction is roughly 80 per cent casein and 20 per cent whey and is the part from which cheese is made. An increase of 0.1 per cent in the protein content of milk gives a 3 per cent gain in the amount of cheese produced.
While casein coagulates with the addition of the enzyme rennin, whey is unaffected and remains liquid unless it is altered by heat and acidity. Rennin is synthesized in the stomachs of mammals in the first few weeks of life, where it causes the maternal milk the young animal consumes to curdle so that it can digest its proteins. This is essentially the same process that has been replicated in cheese-making since the beginning of time. Originally the rennin came from cells in the dried stomach of a young calf, but as there are not enough young calves to go round these days, it is now mostly made synthetically.
Of the five types of casein in milk, kappa-casein is the key protein in cheese-making. It has three main alleles (genes), Kappa A, Kappa B and Kappa E, and each cow inherits one of these from each parent. So a cow with a double inheritance of Kappa B (code BB) produces milk that clots 25 per cent faster and will make 10 per cent more cheese that is twice as firm as that from a cow with an AA gene. The kappa-casein BB allele occurs most often in traditional breeds of cow, and the Guernsey stands out among them because 60 per cent of the cows carry the Kappa B gene.
But Guernsey cows are also unusual in that 96 per cent of them give milk containing another protein, beta-casein A2. When the beta-casein chain of protein was first analysed, it was given the code A1. Only later was it discovered that not all beta-caseins are the same. Some were found to have proline at the 67th amino acid in the chain, whereas in A1 milk it is histidine. Researchers also discovered that the A2 chain containing proline was the original and the A1 a genetic mutation that they suggested had occurred a few thousand years ago in European cattle.
This mutation is commoner in the big black-and-white breeds of northern European descent, such as the Holstein and Friesian, which are the breeds that produce most of the milk in northern Europe (excluding France), America, Australia and New Zealand. Friesians and Holsteins usually have alleles for A1 and A2 in equal proportion, whereas Jerseys and other traditional European breeds have about a third A1 and two thirds A2. Guernseys
are unique in having only 10 per cent A1 and 90 per cent A2.
Research by Professor Keith Woodford in New Zealand into the structure of beta-casein (explained in his book The Devil in the Milk, published in 2007) found that A1 and A2 beta-caseins react completely differently with enzymes found in the digestive system. When people try to digest A1 beta-casein, a small protein, beta-casomorphin-7 (BCM-7), can be released. It is BCM-7 that Woodford describes as ‘the devil in the milk’ because epidemiological research and animal studies in the 1990s in New Zealand found a correlation between consumption of milk with A1 beta-casein proteins and certain chronic diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes, heart disease, even schizophrenia and autism. The reason, he suggests, is that BCM-7 is strongly bonded to proline in the A2 milk, which prevents it from being released into the system, whereas histidine has a weak bond with BCM-7 and is easily released and imperfectly digested as it passes through the human intestine. BCM-7 is an opioid that doesn’t occur naturally in the human body, and when released, he suggests, it interferes with the human digestive system and affects the internal organs and brain stem.
These findings prompted a group of entrepreneurs to set up A2 Corporation, to promote A2 milk as the healthy alternative to regular A1 milk and even (unsuccessfully) petition the New Zealand Food Standards Agency to require A1 milk to carry a health warning.
In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviewed the research (but did not undertake any of its own) and refused to find any connection between chronic disease and consuming A1 milk. This has not deterred a significant number of people from acting as if Woodford’s findings are true. They point out that most mammals, including goats, sheep and humans, produce A2 milk, as do traditional African and Asian cows, water buffalo and yak. Only those breeds that have been ‘contaminated’ by interbreeding with cattle carrying the genetic mutation produce ‘unhealthy’ A1 milk.
The older European breeds like the Brown Swiss, Guernsey, Jersey, Montbéliarde, and Gloucester have quickly come to be known as A2 breeds (although their milk is not exclusively A2), while the higher-yielding types with the genetic mutation, particularly the black-and-white breeds, are loosely referred to as A1 breeds, although they will still produce some A2 milk. These include the Holstein, Friesian and Ayrshire.
A group of Russian researchers took it further and found that BCM-7 passes undigested through the gut wall into the blood of babies fed infant formula, causing delayed brain-to-muscle development. Another report, published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2012, agreed with Woodford’s findings that A1 milk is a risk factor for certain diseases and psychological disorders. His opponents, which include most of the large dairy processors and modern industrial farmers, say the findings are little more than speculation because most of the research was done on animals, the diseases concerned have many contributing causes, and there is little evidence that animals suffer from autism or schizophrenia, which probably do not have an organic cause anyway.
One researcher, however, Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, has come up with Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAP or GAPS), a term she has trademarked, which describes a connection between the functions of the digestive system and various illnesses and behavioural disorders, such as autism and psychiatric afflictions. If you do drink milk she recommends it be unpasteurized and organic. And presumably the best option is to get it from Guernsey cows.
CHAPTER 6
The Black-and-White Revolution
THERE IS A story, partly verified by Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, that sometime about 100 BC, the Chatti tribe, occupying lands in Hesse, fell out amongst themselves. Unable to reconcile their differences, a portion of the tribe left to live elsewhere, travelling with their black cattle further west, to the shore of the North Sea, where they settled on the island of Batavia, in the delta of the rivers Rhine, Maas and Waal. Their neighbours were the pastoral Frisii tribe, whose cattle were pure white. In time the two strains interbred, creating a black-and-white type that came to be called the Friesian, renowned for its excellence. So valuable were the cattle that rather than the Batavians being conscripted into the service of the Empire, Rome considered that they would be more useful if they concentrated on cattle husbandry and paid tribute in ox hides and horns. For over 2,000 years they maintained the purity of their breed, which became renowned all over northern Europe for its remarkable capacity to produce large amounts of butter and cheese from the fertile alluvial soils of the polders.
This black-and-white ‘Dutch’ type has been known in England since at least the sixteenth century. From time to time they were imported into the east of England, as fashion and need dictated. A wave of importations during the 1880s meant that by 1900 there were 30 or 40 herds scattered around England. They were known as Holsteins, Frieslands or Friesians and were the kind of dual-purpose cattle – beef and milk – that filled the gap in the market that the original Shorthorn had once occupied. The breed was promoted by some able, rich and enthusiastic breeders, notably the Strutt family at Terling in Essex, who had started dairying on land abandoned by their tenants during the agricultural depression after 1875.
Early breeders would not accept any red-and-white animals, but as these were often exceptional milkers, breeders who were reluctant to abandon good cattle just because they were not black and white formed their own society in 1951. This eventually merged with the black-and-white British Friesian Cattle Society in 1985, and in 1999, the Holstein and Friesian societies merged to become Holstein UK. In reaction, in 1990 the British Friesian Breeders Club was formed to try to preserve the original dual-purpose, grazing character of the British Friesian, which was being lost in the Holstein-based rush for ever-greater yields of milk.
Over the decades, American and Canadian breeders, chasing milk yield, had moved away from the dual-purpose ideal and concentrated on ever more specialized dairy animals with carcases markedly less able to make beef. To deal with the fact that the male calves are worth very little, they either use sex-selected artificial insemination to get female calves, or simply kill the bulls shortly after birth. Thirty years ago, when I used to buy week-old calves for rearing, I felt sorry for the little waif-like dairy bull calves brought into the auction and sold for next to nothing. Some only made £1 because they were not worth the cost of rearing. Many went straight for slaughter, their carcases to be ground up for pet food or fertilizer or animal feed. That is the dark side of breeding extreme dairy types for milk yield.
American farmers took to the Holstein, glorying in its capacity to produce more milk than any other dairy breed in the world. President William Howard Taft even kept a Holstein cow, Pauline Wayne, as the official presidential pet between 1910 and 1913, grazing the White House lawn and providing milk for the First Family. The breed’s tremendous production has been achieved without concern for the longevity of the cows. The average Holstein cow in the US now lives for less than five years, with an average of fewer than three lactations. Farmers compete to breed a cow that gives the greatest yield in a single lactation. The current US Holstein record is held by the rather inelegantly named Bur-Wall Buckeye Gigi EX-94 3E, which produced 74,650 lb (about 9,000 gallons) of milk in 365 days in 2016. (A gallon of milk weighs between 8.5 and 8.8 lb depending on the density.)
Across the world, from Canada to Russia, India to New Zealand, the Holstein is, by a significant margin, the highest-yielding commercial dairy cow, with a breed average of 18,500 lb (2,200 gallons) in a lactation. The fat content (about 3.7 per cent) and protein (about 3.2 per cent) is lower than traditional dairy breeds, but that is hardly surprising given the sheer volume of liquid the cow excretes over its short life. Individual Holstein cows are capable of phenomenal yields. Milking ability is roughly half inherited and half down to the feeding and general care of the cow. The half attributable to feeding is only achieved by heavy feeding of high-protein foodstuffs no cow would ever encounter in a natural grazing life.
Most of the protein now fed to cattle in the UK i
s from soya beans grown and shipped in from abroad. This has contributed to a surging worldwide demand for the ‘king of beans’. Eighty per cent of the world’s crop is grown in the US, Brazil and Argentina, and the acreage has increased 15-fold since the 1950s, with Brazil increasing production from 1.5 to 50 million tonnes on 30 million acres of what was once temperate savannah and rainforest. Whole communities have been displaced by the few huge corporations that control this highly mechanized monoculture. Hundreds of thousands of small farmers and their families have been induced to give up their land, with many reduced to the status of day labourers, while others have moved to the cities or are squatting in parts of the forest they have cleared for subsistence farming.
The crop in Brazil can only be grown by irrigating it with vast quantities of water drawn from the depleting reserves of the Guarani Aquifer and spraying it with large amounts of oil-based chemical fertilizers and herbicides. These are leaching into and contaminating the ancient underground body of fresh water. Perhaps more worrying is the routine application of the wonder herbicide glyphosate to soya plants genetically modified (GM) to be immune to its effects. Glyphosate kills all plant growth other than the GM soya. Some residue remains in the beans and the resultant oil, but it is claimed by its manufacturers to be harmless. The EU doesn’t agree and is considering restricting its use or even banning it because it is feared it is carcinogenic. In North and South America, by contrast, there are no restrictions on its use; they rely on it too much to give it a bad press. Ninety-four per cent of soya beans grown in the US in 2014 were from GM seed.
An example of the scale of the global trade is the huge importation at the end of November 2016 into Teesport, where Glencore landed 54,000 tonnes of ‘soya feed products’ shipped from their soya bean ‘crushing facility’ in Argentina, which is capable of processing 21,000 tonnes of beans every day.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 11