HOW WE’RE MILKING OUR COWS TO DEATH
TAKING STOCK: A JOURNEY AMONG COWS by Roger Morgan-Grenville (Icon £18.99, 368 pp)
There’S little point chasing after a herd of escaped cows. They like to go in a circle, so will almost always come back to where they started sooner or later.
If you do chase after them, you will spook them and leave them stressed for hours afterwards.
Many such insights come from the great Dr Temple Grandin, the American scientist whose severe autism has helped her understand animals far better than most of us do. Somewhat like people with autism, cows dislike loud noises, bright lights and flickering shadows. They are most contented when simply left in peace, to potter around their familiar fields.
roger Morgan-Grenville adores cows, explaining that he loves nothing more than leaning against a gate and looking at them for hours.
‘Sometimes I feel that, along with eating digestive biscuits, this is what I have been put on earth to do,’ he says. In Taking Stock he explores the whole business of cows and cattle farming, so perfectly suited to our islands, which have perhaps the finest natural grazing in the world (mild climate and all that rain off the Atlantic). It makes for a funny, insightful and hugely informative book.
DNA studies show that British cows have quite a bit of Spanish in them. They also share about 80 per cent of their DNA with us, although geneticists nowadays caution against over-interpreting this. We also share 60 per cent of our DNA with bananas, although that doesn’t make us bananas (well, not most of us anyway).
By 3,500 BC, we were already using cows to pull our ploughs in Wiltshire. Today, we breed and farm our livestock to maximise production — cows that until recently weren’t expected to produce much more than 15 litres of milk a day are now pushed to produce 60. But it comes at a cost: their lifespans are much shorter.
And the many different breeds of hardy, appealing, but lower-yielding British cow, including the Jersey, Ayrshire and Dairy Shorthorn, have mostly been replaced by the ‘standard euro-blob holstein Friesian’.
But there is much here that is heartening — and enjoyably educational, with the author like an amiable schoolmaster.
he visits various small farms around england, talking to farmers in rebellion against the bullying supermarkets by producing high-quality foods and selling directly to customers.
At one farm, hollis Mead Organic in West Dorset, they only milk their cows once a day, rather than the two or even
three times favoured by agribusinesses, and they sell their cheese online. It so happens that I tasted some Hollis Mead cheese at our local market the other day, and it was unbelievably good.
Lower productivity for higher quality also benefits wildlife. Fields revert from bright green rye grass to ‘herbal leys’, rich in red clover and lucerne, and therefore bees and butterflies, barn owls, kestrels, dung beetles... And who needs to
buy in expensive foreign fertiliser when a native beef cow can produce the finest fertiliser known to man: a magnificent, steaming 25kg of manure a day?
Morgan-Grenville is withering on the alternatives, for example, a cheap burger from a fast-food chain. McDonald’s doesn’t even pretend not to be involved in deforestation; its own Impact Statement boasts ‘our commitment to eliminate deforestation from our global supply chains by 2030’.
Another eight years of deforestation then? So yes, says Morgan-Grenville, you can buy one of their burgers for anything from 89p to £4.39 — but you’ll have to pay as much again in tax.
Intensive farming gives us cheap food, while also polluting our rivers on a massive scale, which we the consumer have to pay to clean up. It’s bonkers.
But in case this makes the book sound too much like a politico-economic harangue, it isn’t. It’s essentially a love letter to the cow, that beguiling creature which appears in our folklore as a figure of placid wisdom and fecundity.
In medieval Germany ‘you were likely to find a cow among the mourners, as they alone understood the route to heaven’; in Ireland they would tie a candle to a cow’s tail to deter fairies from stealing the butter. An unlit candle presumably — given the methane . . .
Taking Stock is a charming book by a reflective, funny, sometimes angry man who loves eating beef and loves cows, and it offers much nutritious food for thought.