Meet the farmer

Meet the moo-man, a farmer with an inspirational attitude to his animals and the food they produce. This blog is all about the issues that arise as I make our film “the moo-man”; the story of Steve, a raw milk dairy farmer, Ida, Kate and the 53 other cows he works with on the Pevensey Levels of Sussex. It’s a film about the difficulties of running a farm in a way we’d all to love to see yet which seems so difficult in a world where the supermarkets call all the shots.

Steve (centre) with Paul

Life’s not easy for the small farmer. There are ways of doing things that are good for the land, good for the animals and give job satisfaction too. Yet most farmers have to do what the supermarkets and the big dairies want, that means keeping herds of several hundred cows and pushing the animals hard. That way the farmer hopes he can stay competitive and remain in business.

Alternatively you could keep just 55 cows but know them all individually. Why not farm organic?  You could go further and produce raw milk. Unadulterated, straight from the cow, winning the hearts and minds of local people fed up with their food being meddled with. Thing is your milk yield will half but you’ll have happier less stressed cows. You’ll have to deliver the milk personally door to door because raw milk is illegal for sale in shops and banned across most of Europe and the States. A difficult path?

TB or not TB

Ouch, yes I know, a real howler of a title, yet irresistible. It’s TB testing time on the farm which must bring any British farmer out in a cold sweat, even if the temperatures here are still way in the minus. Peter the vet gave the cows their TB injection and will come back in 3 days to see if any have reacted to the inoculation. A scary time for any farmer, however if you produce raw milk then it’s probably Armageddon. Steve has never had TB on the farm but only 10 miles away, near to Lewes, the disease is endemic. Luckily Longleys farm is flanked by rivers, and having a closed herd means the disease will never come through an introduced cow. But that brings us on to badgers.

Seems badgers are a prickly point. In the South West of England many, many are infected. They move around a lot and infect their own kind as well as cows. Although there is a government programme to cull TB infected cows, the same is not the case for badgers. It’s a real sore point. Both farmer and vet see it as one very sorry state when a government is so unwilling to act and can condemn thousands of cows to useless slaughter every year. The vet told me most other countries can control their TB and it’s not an issue – it’s here in the UK we seem incapable of acting.

What do you think?

Cold snap

Filming resumed after the Christmas and New Year break. Not that Steve had much of a break, t’was me was the Xmas slacker. Meanwhile the severe weather has made things tough on the farm though. Frozen water pipes means many of the water troughs freeze up, buckets of water delivered to the animals by hand are the only way. The water supply in the milking parlour is frozen too. Outside the cow pats and cow pee freeze and form lethal adversaries to man and beast. They lie in the dark, waiting, getting ever more precarious, patiently waiting for unsuspecting cameramen…Yes, they found their target.

However, it was also incredibly beautiful down on the farm. There’s no snow but the frost is so severe that it creates incredible thickly layered patterns everywhere. The flooded marshes have frozen and become a winter wonderland. Everything might look great but my fingers are so cold I can’t operate the camera or microphone, neither of us are particularly chatty either. It’s getting toward -10ºC, my fingers are falling off . Hey ‘it looks great!’ except I’m so numb I can’t even press the record button.

art and reality

I popped down to the farm yesterday to see the originals of the artwork Veronica had painted for the cow calendar. They’re striking, and it’s incredible how statesmanlike the older cows look. The twin Kates are the old girls, the matriarchs of the Longleys herd. Their individual portraits really do reveal this, incredible. I’ll post them up here as soon as I can.

I popped into the farm kitchen after the art visit for an unexpected emotional contrast. The big table was stacked with big see-thru sacks full of meat. The cow from whence it came was a free martin; that is a female cow born as a twin to a bull calf and so always infertile. She could never join the milking herd so was raised as beef and at two years of age was sent to the abbatoir. The carcass was then hung for 21 days and today she came back, butchered and sitting in a dozen bags. Somehow gruesome yet I would a thousand times over rather see this, be aware of it, see the cycle of life, know the animals history rather than buy a prepackaged anonymous cut on a supermarket shelf.

Wagons roll…

Every film is a bit of a journey, hopefully for the filmmaker as well as the audience. That’s certainly going to be the case with “the moo-man”. I’m making this film because I find Steve’s farm and his cows fascinating. He manages to buck so many trends, many of which I’ve always seen as very negative aspects of modern farming.

Okay, I better come clean right at the start. I’ve been a veggie for 25 years. That’s enough time for ‘no meat’ to be completely natural but also to take for granted some of my presumptions about the business of meat and animals. There is an unfortunate inverse relationship between the bottom line and animal welfare, and the animals are usually the losers. It’s something I always felt uncomfortable about, so avoided mammal meat for all them years. I’m not squeamish though, I’ve never had a problem with popping a fish on the head, gutting and eating it. In fact I’m very grateful to the many trouts who’ve providing me with lovely meals.

Thing is when I first visited Steve’s dairy farm back in February, many of my meat presumptions were turned on their head. I’m no spring chicken, I know that meat and milk have an umbilical connection. I’m uncomfortable with this, I can’t pretend that drinking milk is not an essential aspect of the economics of meat. However, the revelation to meet a farmer who gave me enough confidence to make me re-consider a 25 year flesh fast and question my ‘belief’. This was a big deal but I also thought that if it rocks my ideology so strongly, then somewhere in there, are probably the bones of a good film and an excellent story, a journey even.

So…I’ve spent a good deal of the summer and autumn down on the farm, researching, filming tests and trying to appreciate some of the complexities of a small dairy farm.

It’s now December, the days are short and the camera doesn’t really like the low light levels. But the farm is  full of interesting stories, so I’ll say ‘cameras roll’ and let the journey begin…

Legalise raw milk?