Until the cows come home

Reintroducing native cattle to the Galloway hills might be a noble and sustainable ambition, but, as farmer Patrick Laurie soon discovers, it’s a hard, lonely and often downright dangerous business

Galloway farmer Patrick Laurie explains why hardy native cattle belong on the open hills

THIS magazine has often championed the value of British livestock. From the Gloucester cow to the Large White sow, there’s an enduring value in native breeds wherever they are found, and it’s great news that so many consumers are wising up to traditionally reared farm produce. It’s always exciting to see farmers jockeying for ascendancy in terms of provenance, succulence and doing things ‘the old-fashioned way’. The more producers who turn away from the mainstream, the greater variety and choice is available to the consumer.

There’s only one kind of livestock where I farm in Galloway. Cattle have shaped the way we do business over the past three centuries and it’s a matter of delirious pride for those of us who live and work in southwest Scotland to see Galloway cows being celebrated across the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact these animals have had on our culture and history.

In the late 17th century, Galloway was a poor and slender place. The union between Scotland and England opened up an enormous market for beef and we were well positioned to take advantage of hungry English bellies. A century later, 30,000-head of cattle were being driven out of Galloway and over the border to meet insatiable demand for beef at London’s Smithfield Market. English demand drove a miniature revolution in a quiet and often-overlooked part of Scotland and black cattle would soon become the bedrock of our prosperity.

Galloway cattle were designed to flourish on rough moorland grasses that prosper in this part of the world. Over time, cattle brought our wide hills to heel and created a wonderland for wildlife in the process. Black grouse and curlews rose to extraordinary numbers, riding on the coat-tails of agricultural progress. The hills were carefully worked for grazing and productivity— we only have to look at game records from the Victorian age to see the abundance and prosperity of wildlife that thrived in the wake of hairy beasts.

Scientists now understand many of the mechanisms that drove this boom in biodiversity. Cattle smash up tussocks of poor grass and allow a wide range of other plants and insects to flourish. Studies have shown that careful cattle grazing can, almost singlehandedly, drive the breeding success of moorland curlews and plovers, and perhaps it’s no surprise that, as cattle have been withdrawn from the hills over the past 20 years, birds have declined in their wake.

Foot-and-mouth disease wiped out many of the old and famous herds in Galloway and falling carcass values saw off the survivors. Yet policy makers and ecologists now agree that we need to restore hill cattle and the animals we lost are not easy to replace. At the same time, it’s hard to incentivise farmers to return to the hills when the work is often hard, lonely and potentially dangerous. Many of us have forgotten how to manage hill cattle in the intervening decades—putting cows back on the hill is doubly tricky because access tracks have overgrown and the hills are rank and daunting. Farmers nurse residual memories of livestock being killed by tickborne diseases and the fear of losing animals in deep ditches and mires. It takes a certain degree of courage to take on this challenge —there’s a nagging risk of loss and fatality in the hills.

Galloway cattle are uniquely suited to do this work. Hard coats and independent characters were bred into these animals over generations of careful husbandry. However, it still takes a leap of faith to restore them to some of the wilder, rougher pieces of hill ground. We have to trust them to thrive in an environment that could easily kill a more commercial animal. It doesn’t help that it’s only by grazing that the place becomes safer to graze again. Cattle soon learn to avoid treacherous bogs and gaping drains and they pass that know-how down to their calves. The longer they’re back, the easier it is to manage them, but there’s no denying that courage and trust play a major role in getting started.

The union between Scotland and England opened up an enormous market

Few breeds are so closely bound to their place of origin

Native cattle breeds offer more than a novel product at the butcher’s counter. A few breeds are so closely bound to their place of origin that the essential atmosphere of the landscape is lost without them. Black grouse have declined so gravely in Galloway over the past decade that they will soon be little more than a memory here. Part of the reason for their decline is a loss of cattle and once you begin to see how wildlife and agriculture overlap in a moorland world, you start to realise that this kind of work is about far more than food production.

It’s always spectacular to catch a glimpse of hill cattle on some far-flung moor. It hardly matters if they’re black Galloways, red Highlanders (left) or doughty Bluegreys. Cattle are so closely bound to the heart and health of the hills that their beef is almost a by-product. www.gallowayfarm.wordpress.com/about