Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  In 1523, John Comyn of Aberdeenshire received ‘unum bovem nigrum hommyl’. Hornless stock is known from archaeological remains in Roman Border settlements. And it is probable that a hornless strain of the Galloway and Angus breeds was selected to create the modern polled breeds. Polling was encouraged by the Scottish drovers because hornless cattle did less damage to one another and to those looking after them, and the breeders responded to the demand. It is desirable in cattle that are housed or fed in confined spaces and it obviates the need for de-horning, which is a routine operation in calves of horned breeds.

  Very few remains of naturally polled cattle have been unearthed in Britain. One skull with no trace of horn cores and a prominent forehead, very like the head of a modern Aberdeen Angus, was discovered at All Cannings Cross in Wiltshire in a late Bronze or early Iron Age village dating from about 500 BC. Polled skulls of both the prominent-headed Angus type and the flatter-topped head of the modern Galloway were found during excavations at Newstead (Trimontium) near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, which suggests that the Scottish polled breeds are of ancient origin.

  Cattle from Aberdeenshire and Angus had for centuries made up an important element of the hordes of ‘Scotch black cattle’ that were driven down to the graziers of England to feed on English pastures. For centuries in Scotland they represented a form of currency, making up for the lack of coin in circulation, and a store – often the only store – of wealth. At first there was little to distinguish between the Angus type in the east of Scotland and the Galloway in the west. They were both ‘black Scotch beasts’, and in fact the hairier Galloway seems to have been the more favoured due to its supreme hardiness and the finely marbled and highly flavoured flesh its carcase produced at about five years old after a summer on English pastures.

  As the demand for flesh grew from the enlarging towns and cities, the more forward-looking breeders saw an opportunity for their superior beef cattle, which could use grass economically to produce a high-quality carcase. Hugh Watson (1789–1865) of Keiller in Angus was one of the first to see the potential in the type of cattle native to his part of the county, originally called the Keiller after the farm where he had become tenant in 1808. He is considered the founder of the Angus breed. The bull that started his line was Old Jock, born in 1842, the son of Grey-Breasted Jock. Old Jock was the first animal registered and therefore No. 1 in the Scotch Herd Book when it was founded in 1862. Another of Watson’s notable animals was a cow, Old Granny (they weren’t too imaginative with names), which was born in 1824, lived to be 35 and produced 29 calves. The pedigrees of the greater part of Angus cattle can be traced back to these two animals. They were better milkers than the modern Angus, which will do little more than rear her own calf. Watson described in a letter to the Highland Society in 1831 how he used his Angus cows to suckle five calves during a lactation: the cow’s own calf would be born in January or February and suckled together with a bought-in calf until they could both be weaned onto hay, potatoes and gruel before being put out to graze on 1 May. The dam was then given two more calves to rear for three months before they too were weaned. Her lactation ended with her being given a fifth calf to suckle for veal.

  Later, William M’Combie, MP (1805–80), of Tillyfour in Aberdeenshire, is credited with fixing the characteristics of the breed by blending the Angus with the neighbouring Aberdeen type into a superior beef animal. In doing so, he inevitably sacrificed the milk yield of the Angus to the high-quality early fleshing of the Aberdeen. M’Combie was a typically enterprising Scotsman, from a family of graziers and stockmen, who by the age of 19 was dealing in cattle on a considerable scale. He used the Bakewell method of line breeding, or ‘close breeding’ as it is called in Scotland, to establish an outstanding type that met with great success in England and, interestingly, France.

  The ‘strong black loam on the granite’, as H. H. Dixon describes the land where M’Combie’s best pasturage was situated, contributed to the quality of his cattle. Dixon describes being introduced to M’Combie’s prize-winning ox in 1863: ‘a little man would not be able to see him without assistance’. Lacking a ladder, M’Combie suggested they climb onto his manger to get a view of ‘the vast plateau of roast beef’. ‘Have you ever looked over more pounds?’ He was ‘beef to the root of the lug’. These fatstock farmers travelled huge distances to shows all over Britain and into northern France with their best animals. This particular bull travelled some 2,000 miles, won first prize at Garioch, and £40 and a gold medal at Poissy. At Liverpool, Aberdeen and ‘on the grand tour’, he took £130 in prizes over 132 weeks of peregrination. And he made £80 when he was sold for slaughter.

  M’Combie’s father had bought the 1,200 acres of Tillyfour in 1800 from the profits of his dealing in ‘lean cattle’. When he was a young man in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, he had journeyed far and wide in Scotland, up to Caithness, Sutherland, Skye and the Islands, and brought home large droves of Highland cattle. There were no regular markets in these wild places and so the dealers would ‘cry a market’ – publish that on a certain day, at a convenient place, they would buy cattle. Although they could make large profits, they risked heavy losses, especially in spring, when the cattle were ‘skin and bone’ and had not the strength to make the journey south. Many died in transit. One night, after swimming the Spey – for there were no bridges in those days – M’Combie’s father lost 17 ‘old Caithness runts’ when it came on a severe frost after the cattle emerged from the river and they froze to death. ‘Their bones bleached in the sun on the braes of Auchindown, for more than thirty years.’

  M’Combie senior carried on a very large trade at the Falkirk markets and had an extensive business in England. He had a salesman who went to all the great fairs, particularly in Leicestershire, and sold the multitudes of cattle he consigned with drovers from Aberdeenshire. In one year he sold 1,500 cattle at the October tryst at Falkirk. He made £3,500 in two years at Falkirk alone. Most of his money was made during the Napoleonic Wars, when the price of cattle (and everything else) was very high. When the peace came, many people made heavy losses. One well-known dealer, George Williamson, was passing with his large drove through Perth when news of the peace was being tolled by the church bells. ‘Old Stately’, as he was nicknamed, often said that ‘this merry peal was a sorrowful peal to him, for it cost him £3,000’.

  M’Combie made money at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, when the expense of droving large numbers of cattle was, as he described it, ‘trifling’. Drovers’ wages were 1s. 6d. a day. They received no ‘watching money’; there were no toll bars, and the roadsides and the commons ‘afforded the cattle their supply of food’.

  The breed was further improved by Sir George Macpherson-Grant, who had returned in 1861 from a Scottish upper-class education in England, at Harrow and Oxford, to his family estate at Ballindalloch, on Speyside, where he settled down to almost 50 years of dedication to the Aberdeen Angus breed. Macpherson-Grant also became an MP – for Elginshire and Nairn. He did not start from scratch, because he had inherited the oldest herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle in Scotland, which he improved with the purchase, in 1860, of a cow, Erica, from the Earl of Southesk’s Kinnaird herd; she became the founder of his famous Ballindalloch bloodline. Macpherson-Grant was recognized as one of the greatest promoters and exhibitors of the breed. He won prizes at all the major national and international shows, at a time when there was intense competition in livestock breeding between farmers and breeders of considerable ability and intelligence. He took first prize at the magnificent Paris Exhibition of 1878 – staged to express France’s recovery from her humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war seven years earlier – at which every leading British breed was exhibited.

  These early improvers, all from a small part of eastern Scotland, elevated the Aberdeen Angus above the already renowned black Scottish types, into one of the greatest, if not the greatest, breed of grazing beef cattle in the world, an animal
with a remarkable capacity to turn the flora of whatever pasture it finds itself eating into flesh. Extraordinarily thrifty, of medium size and vigorous, Aberdeen Angus bulls imparted pre-eminent fleshing qualities to every breed they were crossed with and were exported all over the world until well into the twentieth century. They established herds of first-quality grazing cattle on all the grasslands across the globe, from the plains of America, the prairies of Canada and the pampas of South America to the outback of Australia and the steppes of Russia. Black Angus is now the most ubiquitous beef breed in the US, and in Australia Anguses make up one in four registered cattle and a third of bulls sold at breeding sales. The breed is found in South Africa, Brazil, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain and Germany, and remains very popular in Britain, particularly as a cross with dairy cows.

  One of its most valuable qualities is resistance to extreme weather. The cows are good mothers, undemanding, adaptable and easy to handle, and the young cattle mature extremely early, with a high carcase yield of nicely marbled meat. A cross of the breed always improves the quality of the carcase of the offspring. Angus calves are small and thus easily calved, but hardy and lively. Until the colour was fixed as either black or red, it was indifferently black, brindle, dark red or silver yellow.

  We have all come across people who seem to be able to eat anything and never put on a pound. Angus cattle are the opposite of that, the bovine equivalent of those unlucky folk who only have to smell a piece of cake for it to find its way onto their hips. And this is decidedly not about calorie intake. Cattle breeders know that the stuff about calories is nonsense: some breeds of cattle, and even individual cows within the same breed, simply use the food they are given more efficiently. And some cows can extract more energy from different foods than others. It is the same with people. So next time someone complains that they have tried to lose weight but can’t manage it, have some sympathy; don’t secretly scoff and think to yourself that they are just greedy and eat too much. They might well eat a lot less than you and still gain weight because they are, like an Aberdeen Angus, better fitted for survival on short rations.

  *

  In 1862, in the US, the Homestead Act was passed to offer free land to poor emigrants from abroad and from the east of the US to encourage them to follow Thomas Jefferson’s dream of creating a land of yeomen farmers living on their own acres. They were lured to make the arduous journey by covered wagon (sometimes railroad) to stake a claim. In the west, there were 600,000 such claims across 80 million acres, much of which had been acquired under the Louisiana Purchase.

  Any adult could apply for a ‘quarter section’ (160 acres; a quarter of a square mile) and become a ‘nester’. There were certain nominal obligations: he had to occupy the plot for five years, plough a proportion for crops, and build a cabin of at least ten feet by twelve to ‘prove up’ the claim. Alternatively, he could buy the land for a nominal price of between $1 and $1.50 an acre.

  The poignant remains of the dreams of thousands of pioneering families are dotted across the High Plains, their decaying cabins desiccated by the summer winds and relentless sunshine and broken apart by the winter’s frosts, their impact on the land hardly greater than that of the Indian tribes they supplanted. A couple of cottonwood trees standing proud of the horizon and a grassy mound beside a damp place where there once was a creek are all that’s left of many homesteads.

  It is desolate enough driving out here across the miles of prairie in a modern four-wheel-drive pickup with air conditioning, but it must have sapped the human spirit almost beyond endurance to arrive on your allotted patch of wilderness, having tramped for hundreds of miles beside the horse-drawn wagon carrying your young wife and children, knowing that tomorrow was the first day of the rest of your life and this was your home. Unless you started to build your cabin – often with mud bricks, because timber was scarce and expensive – you would never progress from sleeping under the wagon or spending the winter in a tent. You had to feed yourself and your family from what you could grow or rear, and if you didn’t, you would all literally starve to death.

  Although much of the land had no surface water, the dry plains lay above the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground lake with an apparently inexhaustible supply of fresh water that had accumulated from melting ice after the last Ice Age. And fortuitously for the homesteaders, the self-regulating wind pump had been invented in 1854, providing a cheap method of raising the water. For about $75, a nester could buy a windmill kit; once he had bored into the aquifer, it would raise enough water to satisfy the farming needs of a 640-acre section without any power but the perpetual wind.

  After the Indians had been cleared out, there was a cattle boom that lasted a decade or two. But it soon turned to bust. And by 1914, when the Great War began, most of the nesters that remained were struggling to survive. So it is hardly surprising that they enthusiastically took the federal government’s advice to plough and grow wheat. This started an orgy of turning over sods that had never been turned before. The mat of grass roots was so thick that much of the ploughing simply tore a slice off the top, ripping the turf apart. But a virgin acre would easily produce 15 bushels of wheat of 60 lb each – just less than half a ton – which would sell for about $2 a bushel. It cost about 35 cents a bushel to grow, so the profit on a half-section of 320 acres was nearly $8,000, a fortune in 1915, when factory wages were $25 a week.

  By 1917, the national harvest of wheat, from about 45 million acres, was more than enough to feed the nation. Two years later, 75 million acres were planted and the ploughing continued into the next decade on the ‘greatest, gaudiest spree in history’, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described it. Voices urging restraint were either drowned out or ignored.

  If the farmers had had to rely on horses, the plains might have been saved, but the tractor and steel plough sealed their fate. With mules or horses it had taken 60 hours to plough, plant and harvest an acre. A hundred years later it took three. Once the railroad came, there was no check on the spree.

  To complete the folly, the 1920s were unusually wet years. People who remembered the preceding droughts in the 1870s and 1890s were shouted down by the railroad men and the prophets of progress, who preached that rain followed the plough. Tearing up grassland caused atmospheric disturbance that would change the climate and make it wetter. And as if to prove them right, after most of the prairie sod had been torn up, lo! the rains did come – for a year or two.

  In the five years between 1925 and 1930, five and a quarter million acres of native sward were busted up, and by the end of the decade a hundred million acres had been turned over. And the US government encouraged the whole thing all the way to destruction. The Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed: ‘the soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up.’

  By the summer of 1929, all across the plains, piles of unwanted wheat lay beside railway tracks as the price fell steadily. But farmers could not just reduce production; they had loans to repay on land and machinery, and the only way they could think to do it, with wheat prices half of what they were, was to produce twice as much corn. So in the autumn of that year, they redoubled their ploughing efforts, tearing up another 50,000 acres of land every day on the southern plains, land that had been under grass for millennia.

  On 29 October 1929, the stock market crashed. It rebounded by the end of the day, but over the next three weeks lost 40 per cent of its value. The harvest that year exceeded previous years by some margin, and nobody wanted the wheat. It sat in heaps worth 40 cents a bushel, one eighth of its value ten years earlier. At that price it barely covered costs, so in order to try to keep going, once again the farmers applied the only remedy they knew: plant more wheat in more prairie than had ever been ploughed before.

  Then in September 1930, a black dust storm blew up out of Kansas and rolled towards Oklahoma. People had never seen anything like it. It carried static electricity and felt li
ke the swipe of coarse sandpaper on the skin. It was a harbinger, a straw in the wind, although nobody saw it; the beginning of the Dust Bowl, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in history, which destroyed a hundred million acres of some of the best land in North America.

  The roots of the short grasses, which might have looked brown and dead in winter or in a summer drought, struck down deep into the sandy loam and knitted together, holding moisture even in a drought. But once the turf had been broken, the land became a desert. The soil offered little resistance to the wind, and the land that had briefly yielded the greatest wheat bounty in history was simply abandoned – as was the crop it produced. With nothing to anchor it, soil that for tens of thousands of years had nurtured a profusion of prairie life blew away.

  The damage done in the Dust Bowl has never been repaired. It was impossible to replace the permanent grasslands that had stabilized the soil, fertile from 30,000 years of buffalo grazing. Nor was it possible to reverse the flight of the nesters from the land. There are fewer people living on the High Plains now than a hundred years ago, and not many more than when the Indian tribes ruled them. Mechanized industrial farming, consolidation of ranches and little alternative employment have caused an exodus to the towns that will never be reversed.

  Meanwhile, those that have stayed have had to adapt to try to live with the devastation of the Dust Bowl, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  1 Known as Kenneth I (810–58), who, according to myth, was the first king of the Scots and introduced an early code of laws.

  CHAPTER 15

  Feedlots and the Grazing Cow: the Maker of Fertility

  A prophet hath no honour in his own country.

  John 4:44

  THERE ARE SOME things once seen or done that can never be erased or forgotten. Just as Adam could not un-eat the forbidden fruit, so seeing a feedlot, and above all, smelling it, is something that I fear can never be wiped from my memory.