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

we graze our fields: whether we graze in rotation around the paddocks, or permanently graze through ‘set stocking’. How heavily we graze, and how much vegetation we leave behind, and how long we let the field recover for: long enough to grow three inches of lush grass as conventional farmers would do, or longer still for orchids and wild flowers to flower and seed over thirty or forty or more days. We are now trying to graze to increase biodiversity and create healthier soil, and that is different to our old ways. It requires longer periods of rest between grazing, and a greater mix of animals doing the grazing. The sheep don’t always appreciate the longer older grass, liking the shorter sweeter stuff, so we need good fences and hedges to stop them wilfully moving themselves, like the escapees on the lane.

Choices like these matter. They determine whether this land produces healthy living soil or whether it is eroding, compacting and dying; whether we have wild flowers, insects, birds and trees on our land, and how many; whether the hedges are bushy or losing their tangled hearts; whether the becks and wetland are wiggly or straight. When accumulated together across whole landscapes, these choices determine what kind of countryside we get, and whether there is room for nature, or even people, within it. These very specific choices are rarely spoken of, shared or understood outside the closed world of farming.

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A buzzard circles above us in the blue, mewing to its mate. Isaac watches it ride the thermals to the hillside in the distance above our young cattle. They have their heads down grazing, and I can count seven of them and see all is well, so we don’t need to go closer. Five years ago, we started to keep cattle again, close to twenty years after my parents’ cattle were shot by a police marksman with a rifle during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. There is a lot of joy in building a new herd, in finding and buying the right foundation females, getting to know them, and seeing their calves being born and growing up. My father would have loved this, and I miss having his opinion, as he knew cattle better than I do.

We are building a herd of Belted Galloways – curly-haired black cows with big white belts around their bellies, from just across the Solway Firth estuary in Scotland. They can be seen from over a mile away with their distinctive broad white stripes. Cattle are a vital part of the farming patchwork that once existed throughout our valley; it had slowly been lost as we specialized and simplified our farming over the past thirty years. But I want my children to grow up with cows around. I want them to know about cows’ different grazing habits, which are necessary for some of our new wood pastures and the riverbanks.

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We travelled to meet a respected breeder and walk around her cows. Tom was on my shoulders. She told the children the name and story of each cow, and she scratched the cows’ backs as they gathered curiously around us. A large bull wandered about among the cows, bellowing and kicking up dust like a wild bison on a prairie, and sniffing at their tails. Tom’s little fist tightened on a handful of my hair. But the bull was harmless. He had been the champion at the elite sale at Castle Douglas the autumn before.

There was a strong sense in the field that the breeder would rather not sell any of them, but of course a farmer must. She offered us the choice between two beautiful in-calf heifers, and then quoted us an eye-watering price. It was clear the cows weren’t going anywhere unless the price was right. We went home without either of them, slightly demoralized and realizing that our herd-building would take a lot longer and cost a lot more than we had envisaged. But you can’t start a herd or a flock with poor females. So, three weeks later we rang and bought the one we liked and went to collect her. The following January she had our first pedigree calf named ‘Racy Ghyll Lily the 1st’.

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I had forgotten how much I love cattle – their clannish ways, their friendliness and their constant munching. I had forgotten how much a part of this place they are. Our Belted Galloways are properly at home in this northern landscape. They are square, chunky and hairy, with short broad heads and rounded chests and bellies (you need a bit around the middle to digest plainer fare). In their two-layered winter coats, with heads covered in curls of hair, they can endure our cold and wet winters. They have been designed by a long history of selective breeding and evolutionary pressure to be hard as nails. They require no fancy buildings or equipment, and little more than a handful of hay on the worst of days. They grow leaner through winter, but hold on to their flesh better than modern breeds that ‘melt’ quickly when they face hardship; they know how to find enough to eat in the toughest of times.

It has been a revelation to me how they shape the landscape – clearing rushes and helping plants like orchids to spread with their hoof prints. They have patchier grazing habits than our sheep, meaning that they leave some areas of the field at key moments of the spring and summer to get longer, allowing some plants to flower and seed, and graze other places shorter, benefiting other plants that like light. Ground-nesting birds like curlews seem to like this mix of habitats, and are often to be found nesting in the cattle-grazed land. Without the cows, the thuggish rank grasses would outdo the smaller, more delicate and rarer plants. The field where the cows graze all summer echoes with grasshopper song and grasshopper warblers, and is alive with clouds of moths and butterflies. Orchids rise in the grass in