English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

tightly controlled – and the conversion of feed into bodyweight, milk or eggs could be made much more efficient. No self-respecting modern farmer would keep an old or ailing cow the way my father had done with Old Blackie. The pigs, chickens or cows in those giant sheds didn’t exist as individuals and had become more like a crop, a mass-produced entity generating a ‘yield’. Perhaps it didn’t matter to most people, but I found it unsettling and alien.

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On the modernizing dairy farms that we knew, the cows no longer went out in the fields at all. Once a farm had more than around 200 cows in the herd, the logistics of them going outside became problematic. They took forever, holding up commuting traffic on the lanes and roads, ploughing up the field on wet days, and trampling and spoiling the grass through the sheer weight of their numbers. Mowing the grass and leading it to them in a trailer to the buildings was more ‘efficient’. The cows didn’t ‘waste’ calories on walking. Logistically it was sensible, almost inevitable, but my father didn’t like it. It was awkward to speak about it openly, because our friends did it. Supermarkets were advertising low-priced milk as part of a price war at that time. Dairy farmers couldn’t afford to stand still as the real price fell – the price of milk was lower than that of bottled water. These dairy farmers had to get bigger and intensify. They just about convinced themselves that it was OK. The cows looked well in the barn, they said, and they did their best. My father was no animal-rights activist – his own cows stood in stalls or barns in winter, sometimes they looked a bit dirty, and he accepted the realities of farming cattle – but denying cows the chance to spend their summers in the fields and that moment of freedom in spring when they ran off down the fields and played was a break with his ideas about what was right for a cow. But the new farming had created its own morality and ethics, and the people caught up in it had to change theirs, or get out, and things that initially shocked them soon became the new normal.

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The history books I read made it very clear that this wasn’t normal at all. Prior to the twentieth century, keeping farm animals in large numbers in one pen, barn or field for anything more than a short period of time was courting disaster. Housed animals failed to thrive or became ill, like our bullocks had done that winter, because the dirty conditions led to outbreaks of disease and parasites, and because they simply didn’t get the vitamins and minerals they needed. So now farmers trying to pursue intensive methods of animal production were prone to suffer catastrophic losses.

In the wild a lot of parasites live on animals like cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens, but their ability to devastate flocks or herds is minimized by the fact that the animals are spread out over the countryside and interspersed with other species (keeping the jump between host animals minimal). There is limited transmission of disease through saliva, urine or muck. Free-grazing wild animals tend to move themselves (or are forced to move by predators) away from land that is covered in their muck to find fresh pastures, so they have less exposure to parasites like intestinal worms. Traditional pastoral systems tended to mimic what worked in the wild: grazing cattle or sheep were healthiest when they were either herded around a range of habitats by a shepherd or cowherd, or left to their own devices to roam across whole landscapes. They help themselves to an extensive range of plants that gives them both the diet they need and also the minerals and vitamins, and in some cases the medication too.

The new intensive farming placed animals in surroundings that made them dirty, stressed and diseased, and then used medicines, particularly antibiotics, wormers, hormones and vaccines, to cure those problems. Animals could be kept healthy with antibiotics in crowded, industrially scalable conditions that would once have made them ill. Antibiotics were, of course, used to cure individual sick animals; but more worryingly they began to be administered to large groups of animals to prevent illness and, surprisingly, to promote growth. In 1950, scientists in New York had discovered that by adding tiny traces of antibiotics to animal feed they could increase the growth rates of animals. Thereafter they were routinely also used in animal feed, particularly in the most intensive American systems, for cattle, chicken and pigs, to improve feed conversion.

Behind the antibiotics and vaccines came a whole host of other medical products, such as anthelmintic wormers used as drenches, squeezed down the throat to expel internal parasites, pesticides to kill external parasites like lice, hormones to make animals grow quicker, organophosphate dips for sheep to kill wool and skin parasites. With these tools, farmers could now concentrate animals in confined areas on a scale that had never before been possible. Farms were becoming machines. It was farming by numbers, as designed by accountants. Critics called it ‘factory farming’.

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Dad would occasionally be hired by a big dairy farm to help with their grain harvest. He’d drive a giant tractor pulling a giant trailer, leading grain from field to the barn, and he saw how the cows were being farmed. He hated the sloppy couldn’t-care-less work ethic and frequently came home grumbling. He said the cows on that farm might give ten gallons of milk a day, but they were living on a knife-edge and giving far too much of themselves to be robust. Unable to cope with bad weather and disease, they had to be mollycoddled like thoroughbred racehorses. About one in ten was lame at any moment in time, with sores on their knees and hocks. They were lean as old crows, and hobbled about with huge swollen udders, prone to mastitis. The proud old cowman