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

One day a cow gave birth; it didn’t seem to be anyone’s job to keep an eye on it and hours later the calf was needlessly dead. Dad was angry and confused. He didn’t understand how this could happen. The boss’s elderly father arrived later and cursed at the dead calf lying on the concrete. It was obvious that no one was looking after these cows the way he had once proudly done. He said the men were ‘useless fuckers’, but he also seemed demoralized by this new system that had outgrown the former ways of caring. He was now too old to do anything to make it right. The men just shrugged and skulked off to another job. In my father’s eyes the work, the land, the cows and the people were all being devalued. Traditional farming people were being broken in spirit. A farmer’s pride in seeing and judging things carefully was dying out. When my grandfather had stood looking over a gate, he was figuring these things out by close and thoughtful observation. Managing animals the traditional way required specialist knowledge and judgement, and skilled people to care for them and understand their needs. These skills didn’t scale up easily for mass production; such farming couldn’t be uniform or predictable. Animals came in different sizes and shapes, and they matured at different times. Farmers slaughtered, preserved and cooked animal meat when it was available and ready, not every week. It was all a long way from the factory ideal of identical commodities all being ready for the shops at the same time. So, incredibly, farm animals had been made more uniform.

Some of the new super-intensive farmers were our friends. And when I talked to them in pubs or at agricultural shows it was clear they operated with an entirely new way of thinking. They were like a different species of farmer entirely. They applied science, technology and engineering to solve farming problems, and made it all work with industrial efficiency. They were the economists’ ideas incarnate.

Scientists working on animal genetics were able to identify and strip away ‘useless’ genetic traits, and that included some fairly basic attributes and instincts that animals had always needed in a semi-natural setting. The focus shifted to developing productive traits like speed of growth and body bulk, improved milk yield and feed efficiency. The bits of the animal’s body needed for movement, or foraging, or even natural reproduction could be shrunk with each new generation, and the parts that were valuable for human consumption could be grown. These changes to the physiques of farm animals didn’t come in one fell swoop, with a single magic ingredient – they came by the application of a whole suite of scientific disciplines and tools used in combination to find ‘marginal gains’, not unlike the way an elite sports team would be put together. But the transformation in how animals looked was remarkable and unsettling.

The greatest productivity gains were in pigs and chickens, which could be housed in great numbers, able to reproduce at very rapid rates, and selectively bred to convert cheap corn or wheat efficiently into meat. I read that since the 1950s the time it took to get a chicken from the egg hatching to slaughter in the most intensive systems had reduced from sixty-three days to thirty-eight days. The feed needed per chicken halved. At the same time these new pigs and chickens were being kept alive with antibiotics, fed heaps of protein and housed at constant temperatures. Farm animals have always been exploited (it isn’t considered a very nice word, but it is basically true – all cellular life depends on using other organisms), but in these intensively raised animals it had been taken to the extreme.

Large corporations engineered these changes and then ‘owned’ the genetics of the improved pigs or chickens, as well as the supply and processing chain. Chicken farming had been taken over almost entirely by big business, and small farmers disappeared or were reduced to farming pigs and chickens ‘on contract’ for the large companies. By the time I was twenty there were barely any chickens or pigs on any local farms, except on one or two giant industrial pig units a few miles away.

Many of our friends and family were dairy farmers, so we saw that world change at first hand. In my father’s childhood most dairy cows in our landscape were Shorthorns: red-and-white, or roan, thick-set cows that were fairly tough in all outdoor conditions and were ‘dual-purpose’ in that they produced beef and milk, at sensible, but not extremely high levels. Historic records give us a very accurate baseline for the productivity of a cow under the traditional farming systems. The Shorthorn yearbooks for the breed tell us that in 1954–5 the largest herd in our area (with recorded milk yields) had thirty-three cows. The Shorthorn Cattle Society awarded medals for the highest yielding animals, those that were producing three or four gallons of milk per day. Dairy shorthorns were first replaced by black and white Friesian cows between the 1960s and 1980s, and then by North American Holstein cattle from the 1990s. These heavily engineered cattle produced more than twice as much as the cows my father milked in my childhood: nine or ten gallons of milk per day. It is worth pausing for a moment to process that. It took 10,000 years of domestication and gradual selective breeding to create a cow that gave four or five gallons of milk per day, but in my lifetime that amount has doubled. Few people outside farming have registered how incredible this change is. The new highest performing cows often only last two or three lactations (milking cycles after each calf) before they are worn out – suffering from lameness, mastitis or simple exhaustion from being too specialized in pursuit