English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

The farmer turned up and was defensive, said our cow wasn’t in there. Dad told him to stop being bloody ignorant; she would come out when it was emptied. He told the man that if he’d done any fencing our cow wouldn’t have got this far. He should get a safety barrier around his slurry pit before some kid fell in it and drowned. On the way home he ranted about the mess on some of the farms now, and how dangerous they were. ‘Those places are bloody lethal,’ he said. It was like we were all being sucked into a whirlpool, and although we might try and swim faster and faster, we were all slowly becoming exhausted and being drawn into the darkness.

~

We were standing on the roof of a small shed, ripping the timber boards off the barn with a claw hammer and a crowbar. It was a mild cloudy day and the boards were dripping with condensation. Steam escaped from the hole we’d opened. We were desperately trying to let more fresh air in after an outbreak of pneumonia, which throve and spread in warm damp places, like our overcrowded cattle sheds. Each autumn my father bought year-old ‘store’ cattle in our local markets. In summer they would graze out on the fields, and in winter they would be housed in barns like this one and bedded with straw. They were new ‘Continental’ breeds that grew fast and produced meat quickly. Red and black Limousins that were as wild as hell. White Charolais cattle that stood about a foot taller than some of the old native breeds and piled the weight on if you fed them well. Black-and-white Belgian Blues with extreme double-muscled backsides. Dad grew them, wintered them, fattened them, and sold them to butchers. After a while we converted the disused hay barns into a loose shed for cattle and fitted gates so that they could reach through for silage and bought-in feed. And every year we had more cattle and less space, because the margin was shrinking with every passing year, so we had to cram more and more cattle in to earn the same return. But this brought its own problems, because too many cattle in a barn would get dirty as they trampled over their own bedding; and in those badly ventilated converted buildings, where the air could quickly become stale, they would get diseases that spread in cramped conditions. Sometimes we would have a disaster and lose two or three bullocks and the profit on the whole lot would vanish. As good as these cattle were – and they were beautiful and amazingly productive – they weren’t as tough as the native breed cattle we had kept in the past.

We also kept two or three times as many sheep as my grandfather had. My mother and I lambed them when my dad went to work on what had been my grandfather’s farm. We shifted to more modern ‘improved’ breeds that grew quicker, with better and more valuable carcasses, but they were lousy mothers, ate more shop-bought feed and often died for no apparent reason. At lambing time, there were not enough hours in the day. The barn was divided up into pens made of straw bales and pallets held together with bale string. Mum would rush around them, making sure any weak lambs were fed, filling water buckets, giving them hay and bedding them to try and keep them clean, but there were always too many in the barn, and not enough of us. Then, when the rain stopped, we would lead the strongest ewes and lambs out to the fields in a trailer and make sure the young ewes mothered them properly. I would help Mum catch any ewes giving birth, grabbing them, because she had a pin in her ankle from a bad break years before and after a hard day she would be lame. My father would make her angry by coming home tired and hungry and critical of our work with the sheep, saying the weather was worse in the fells. He would sit at the hurriedly laid supper table and say, ‘I haven’t got a fork’, and my mother would look as if she might stick one deep in his chest.

~

It was becoming clear to me that the way we thought about and interacted with our animals was changing. Our farm animals had never been pets, and we were rarely sentimental about them, but there was a lot of care involved and a kind of intimacy that vanished as things got bigger and more industrial. The farm animals’ characters were well known to us: they all had backstories. To earn the title of ‘stockman’ or ‘stockwoman’ we were expected to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all our cows and ewes. But on the growing modern farms something had changed: it wasn’t necessarily that animals were ill-treated, I didn’t see much of that, but more that they had just become units of production.

For most of history, animal products like meat, milk or eggs had been expensive because they couldn’t be produced with industrial efficiencies of scale. The logistics of feeding thousands of pigs or hens, or cattle, would have defeated a farmer prior to the modern age. Most of what animals ate was grown on the farms, and for most of the year was harvested by the animals’ mouths. This limited the scale of the livestock farming to the animals that the farmers were able to keep through winter, either on the hardy crops they could grow like turnips, or on the harvested crops they could store in the barns like barley, oats and hay. But now there was no limit, as tonnes of cheap feed were only a phone call away. Farmers could readily scale up using massive buildings where environmental conditions could be