These are square barrels of meat with a leg at each corner, short neck, black nose, white legs and face bare of wool, and are very similar to the type Bakewell was aiming to breed, judging from pictures of his best rams. In fact, over the years, the old Dutch sheep that became the Texel is believed to have had an infusion of New Leicester at some time in its past. It is also said to have had the benefit of some Lincoln Longwool blood, but it is hard to see what effect it had because its tight medium-wool fleece is neither pirled nor lustred – nor long. Nonetheless they are probably the most popular modern meat sire for producing lean butchers’ lambs, although they have not managed to eclipse the Suffolk, and it is doubtful they ever will.
As if the Texel weren’t ugly and meaty enough, Beltex sheep were created in Belgium in the 1970s to provide the kind of lean meat the modern market expects, and almost every other attribute has given way to that. As its name suggests, Beltex is a portmanteau of Belgian and Texel and just about the most extreme manifestation of a meat-sheep that we now have. It takes Bakewell’s vision of the ideal sheep to surreal heights of meatiness that transcend all connection with its terrain. It has been bred to satisfy the urban consumer’s demand for meat, without compromise. It proclaims, ‘You wanted meat, well here it is! Beat that!’ There is a stark beauty in its brutalism. It is an honest sheep whose existence exposes the hypocrisy of a modern urban world that pretends it would like its meat to come from some lovable old breed.
It is like the residents of a charming market town resisting a Tesco supermarket that they say will ruin the independent shops, and yet as soon as it opens abandoning their wonderful butcher and fishmonger. It comes down to the perfidious pragmatism of the British that whenever they have to choose between standing on a principle that might be for the welfare of the people and making money, they invariably choose the money and convince themselves they are doing it for the best of reasons.
By the end of the last century the transition that began in the eighteenth century was almost complete. The value of wool declined to the point that it cost more to shear most sheep than their wool was worth. Progressive breeders, who could sense the way things were going, began to develop breeds, and types within breeds, that not only grew quickly to maturity but also needed less shepherding – particularly at lambing time. They recognised that the cost of keeping sheep was the crucial factor in determining profit because there was little they could do to increase the end price, either of meat or of wool.
One of these progressive breeders was Iolo Owen from Anglesey, who created a breed in the 1960s called, rather prosaically, the Easycare. He started with a type of Welsh Mountain (the Nelson), which he crossed with the Wiltshire Horn, our only native breed that sheds its scanty fleece in spring. He chose from within the Wiltshire breed rams that were naturally polled to ensure the resulting cross had no horns and did not need shearing. The ewes were easy to lamb and attentive and devoted mothers, and their lambs grew quickly from grass alone, without extra feeding. Strictly speaking, Evans created a type rather than a breed proper, because Easycare sheep are chosen purely on their performance rather than fixed breed characteristics. There is a breed society, but it discourages competitive showing because it fears it would lead to an emphasis on irrelevant points of appearance, such as shape of ears or colour of skin, and lose sight of what they believe to be the all-important intrinsic attributes that assessment by eye alone would never detect. The Easycare Sheep Society claims that the costs of shepherding are reduced by up to 80 per cent if you keep Easycare sheep. They have not caught on.
Another response to the declining value of wool and the increasing cost of labour is Andrew Elliot’s Chevease. On his farm in the Scottish Borders he has crossed his Cheviot ewes with Easycare rams. The purpose of the exercise was to get his flock to shed their coats (they can hardly be called fleeces) in early summer and avoid having to shear them. He claims that the new type – arguably not yet a breed – is less likely to die from getting on its back (and suffocating from bloat), and does not need dagging, treating for fly-strike or castrating, because the ram lambs mature so early that they are fully fleshed before they are sexually mature. When the sheep are moulting in early summer, the fields are strewn with locks of wool, like the aftermath of a rock festival, and the sheep look very shabby during the shedding process.
Since the very low point in the price of wool that impelled Andrew Elliot to breed it out, we have seen the beginnings of a world shortage caused by a reduction in global flocks, and thanks to that and the skill of the Campaign for Wool, begun by the Prince of Wales and run by John Thorley, the indefatigable former Chief Executive of the National Sheep Association, and the writer Nicholas Coleridge, the price of British wool has more than tripled in the last few years, admittedly from a ruinously low price. But wool is such a unique and valuable substance that it is hard to imagine the demand diminishing further. It therefore remains to be seen whether abandoning wool was entirely wise. It was certainly courageous, but if it ever became profitable again it would be hard to breed the wool back. On the other hand, wool will have to increase a good deal in value before Andrew’s decision will be vitiated.
These new types tend to be kept in pure-bred flocks with all their replacement ewes coming from within the flock. This brings the advantages of resistance to disease and acclimatisation to the terrain, but loses the benefit of hybrid vigour, which some breeders believe does not compensate for the advantages that come with the flock being acclimatised to its ground, such as resistance to disease.
Those breeders who were attracted to the Wiltshire Horn for its wool-shedding property, and its remarkable ability to survive all year on grass alone, got the added bonus that it has a strong natural tolerance to internal parasites, particularly worms. Tim White, who keeps 800 of them on the chalk plains around Monkton Deverill, in the depths of Wiltshire, has redis-covered this quality after trying all manner of eclectic breeds in his search for a low-maintenance grazing animal.
Over the years, many things have been tried to control parasites, including arsenic, mercury and nicotine, but it was not until pharmaceutical companies developed sophisticated wormers (‘anthelmintics’) that it became easy to kill them. But these medicines quickly became an expensive necessity, with sheep losing any natural resistance and needing to be ‘drenched’ (given a liquid dose) at least twice a year to control their ‘worm burden’. Flockmasters did not know whether they were breeding from resistant animals or those that only survived because of the medicine. But Tim has taken a more radical approach. He does not aim to eliminate worms entirely, but to breed animals that have a high natural resistance to infestation. He tests their dung for the presence of worm eggs and culls those with a high count. Resistant animals will have about ten worm eggs per gram of faeces, whereas heavily infested animals will pass between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs per gram. By selecting from those that have the capacity to resist infestation he is creating a flock of natural survivors that cost as little as possible to keep and give the best return.
Being a grazier, Tim neither owns land nor is a tenant of any land for a term longer than a season’s grazing. He simply rents grazing wherever he can get it and is proud that, apart from his flock, his only equipment is a battered pickup and trailer, a set of mobile sheep handling pens, his dogs and his hand-held computer, the ‘black box’ that contains all the ovine records which he uses to select his breeding stock. The great value of the Wiltshire, in Tim’s eyes, is that they can look after themselves. He only goes round his lambing ewes twice a day – ‘the less you bother them the better’ – and he has virtually no lambing complications because there are no oversized, overfed cross-bred lambs to give trouble at birth. This is one resourceful man’s way of making a living from sheep farming. He might be criticised for harking back to a breed many thought outmoded, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in his ingenuity in finding land to farm and his low-cost system he is pointing firmly to the future.
There is another way
of facing the future, but it points in the opposite direction. It’s about 150 years since sheep were last milked in Britain – to make cheese. The last commercial milking flock is said to have been a Hill Radnor flock near Sennybridge, and before that Cheviots had been milked in the Borders well into the nineteenth century. But the guaranteed high prices paid for liquid cows’ milk by the Milk Marketing Board after the First World War put paid to milking anything other than cows.
So when Crispin Tweddle set up his sheep-milking enterprise, fourteen years ago, at Orchid Meadow Farm, just south of Shaftesbury, there was not much competition. He and his wife only intended to buy a field to preserve the view from their country retreat. But they found themselves buying the whole of 180 largely derelict acres. He was not happy to accept the depressed returns from the dairying that was traditional on these damp valley farms with small steep fields, mild winters and early springs. Milk quotas, the ruinously low wholesale price and the throttling grip of the supermarkets meant there was little profit in milking cows.
Whenever dairy farmers struggled to survive because they were not getting a proper price for their produce, DEFRA’s usual advice was to ‘diversify’. But, for a farmer, diversification was like advising David Beckham to try rugby if his football wasn’t going too well. Most diversification amounts to little more than persuading the farmer’s wife to take paying guests. But milking sheep is a different matter. That is diversification.
There was only one drawback. The grinding servitude of twice-daily milking, and the dairyman’s dependence on a monthly cheque, makes him not as free as the corn grower who, at least in theory, has enough capital to see him through a whole year. The cow keeper is like a wage-slave whose spirit is stunted because he can’t lift his head long enough to see beyond the next milking. So, just as the corn grower despises the cow keeper, who looks down on the pig farmer, who patronises the battery egg producer, they all look down on the man who milks sheep. Milking sheep! How servile is that!
But the beauty of being a newcomer to farming is that he is either unaware of this subtle pecking order, or, like Crispin Tweddle, is rich enough not to give a damn about it. Also the newcomer has not had his enthusiasm dampened by knowing that one of the easiest, and often the pleasantest ways to lose a great deal of money is to put it into 200 acres of English farmland. It can be just as if you had opened up a shaft in the earth and were trying to fill it with money, there is simply no end to how much it will swallow. But the Tweddles were too shrewd to fall into this trap. Their timing was impeccable, getting in at the bottom of the market, both for land and for livestock.
They started milking 200 Dorsets because they were the local sheep and would breed at almost any season of the year. Having them lamb in three batches ensured a steady supply of milk throughout the year. Then they crossed the Dorsets with East Friesland rams and immediately increased the output. The flock is now nearly all Friesland, yet another of those breeds of livestock from Holland (or nearby) that have revolutionised British farming. They produce a lot of milk if they are fed large amounts of grain and the best hay or silage, but they most emphatically do not live off the land. They would breed at nearly any time of the year and their milk has a greater proportion of fat to protein, which is good for making yoghurt. Their delicate femininity belies a sturdy constitution. Interestingly, they owe their remarkable powers of milking and fecundity to an early cross between the East Friesland breed and Bakewell’s New Leicester.
Orchid Meadow now has about 1,000 ewes in milk at any one time, kept in five flocks that lamb in sequence throughout the year to ensure a regular supply of milk, which is sold either as liquid milk or to make yoghurt, through Woodlands Dairy in Blandford Forum, which the Tweddles also own. Some also goes for making cheese. Demand far exceeds supply because there are only about 15,000 ewes being milked in Britain and producers can almost set their own price, currently about a pound a litre, roughly in line with the French price.
The huge number of lambs (about 230 from each 100 ewes) are taken from their mothers at about three days old and reared on powdered milk – inside in winter and outside in summer, by a Polish milkmaid. I felt sorry for the hundreds of these forlorn little pink creatures, sucking rubber teats attached to buckets, with not a ewe in sight. I know their fate is the same as lambs that suckle their mothers, but the process seemed so brutally industrial, similar to battery hens in cages, reducing the creature to its function stripped of all sentiment and consideration of beauty. I struggled not to find the system depressing, then I told myself I was being sentimental. But on reflection I do not think my unease arises from sentimentality; rather I felt it a shame that sheep, of all our domestic animals probably the least suited to industrial farming, should be reduced to it in this way.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this even approaches the industrial farming you see in feedlots across North America, or the millions of chickens reared in vast sheds, but this is not the fluffy-bunny business that the name Orchid Meadow and the word organic might imply. This enterprise contrasts vividly with Tim White’s free-ranging Wiltshires because keeping large numbers of sheep in close proximity encourages parasites and disease. Foot rot and parasitic worms are the biggest problem. The bacterium that causes foot rot is more contagious in the warm (40–70°F) conditions in buildings and to control it the whole flock has to be walked religiously through a foot bath with a corrugated bottom (to open the cleats). But even more of a problem is that being organic precludes the routine use of drugs that would prevent the usual parasitic infestations, for example by the highly prolific Barber’s Pole worm, Haemonchus contortus, which can cause heavy losses where sheep are kept intensively, particularly in young sheep, if the weather is warm and damp after a drought,
Although organic sheep milking is an innovative response to the difficulty farmers face trying to make a profit, it remains to be seen whether it will stand the test of time.
But the second threat to the future of farming is new and much more insidious. It is something not easily vanquished because it springs from a pervasive ideology that has stealthily taken hold of Western society over the last century, and which I loosely call environmentalism. While it affects all types of farming, its greatest effect is on sheep farming in the hills and uplands, and its proponents intend to have even more. When an idea like this strengthens into a belief that morphs into common currency, it cannot easily be displaced.
The average age of farmers is now about sixty. Many older farmers readily admit that they were only able to get into farming because of the opportunities that arose after the Second World War and it would not be remotely possible nowadays: there are hardly any farms to rent, farmland is priced out of the reach of nearly everybody except those who already have it or are very rich, and EU regulations and subsidies have ossified rural land use and closed off opportunities that would once have been available. One Cumbrian farmer, whose son has become a solicitor, put it with characteristic bluntness: ‘They’ve taken the enterprise out of it. I can’t even plough one of my own fields without asking for a “derogation” from DEFRA.’ Many upland sheep farmers are now welfare claimants, prepared to jump however high the state tells them to, seduced by the easy money to be made from not farming.
Older tenant farmers cling on because they can’t afford to buy a house to retire into and be left with enough capital to live on. The stewardship schemes have made this worse because farmers can draw an income for not farming – especially in the uplands. Many farmers are receiving more in a year to caretake their own farms than they could ever make from farming, without the work and the risk. This income pays the rent (if they are tenants) and the bills and they often live in a beautiful place in semi-retirement. Why would they want to leave when all they could afford would be what one called a ‘street house’ in the nearest town?
Throughout the centuries keeping sheep has been one of the ways into farming for young people with enterprise. They could start small and fairly quickly grow big eno
ugh to make a living, renting land wherever they could and taking any opportunities to build up a flock. Nowadays it is much more difficult because so little land is changing hands. It is not so much that the land is held in too few hands, rather that the interference of the state in the working of a proper market in farmland and tenancies is having a stultifying effect. As the average age of farmers increases beyond normal retiring age, it will become ever more pressing to loosen up the transfer of productive land to a younger generation for the national benefit. To allow a body of ageing farmers and absentee landowners to keep a grip on farmland and prevent young blood coming in is likely to be as ruinous for national food production and the social fabric as the view of a recent chairman of the NFU, Peter Kendall, that the solution to the impending shortage of milk is to create ever larger industrial farms. Where are the shepherds and farmers and countrymen of the future to come from? And who will look after our farmland?
But there is an even more extreme threat to sheep farming. I came to Pikenaze Farm on the Woodhead Pass to see a White-face Woodland flock and found instead another reason why sheep are leaving the hills and came face to face with the challenge that they have to meet. Whiteface Woodlands, named after the Woodland Vale in Derbyshire, are part of that great tribe of shortwoolled, white-faced horned sheep that traditionally occupied the west side of England into Wales in a great sweep from the Scottish Borders to the West Country.
Counting Sheep Page 25