Peter Davies is a dealer in world textiles and kilim rugs, particularly those from Turkey, a destination he knows well and for which he also is a travel consultant. His partner, Mark Scherzer, this week’s correspondent, has his own law firm, specializing in health law. For most of the past decade, the pair also have farmed on 39 acres in Germantown, NY. At Turkana Farms, Davies and Scherzer raise heritage-breed livestock—pigs, sheep, cattle, and poultry of every stripe, most famously their heritage-breed turkeys, and grow vegetables and berries, all of which they sell from their farm kitchen and from their New York City loft. This blog is adapted from the weekly e-mail they send to their customers. This week Peter gives us some background on their herd of British White cattle.
As you could tell from last week’s saga, we came to cattle breeding late, relying until recently on buying “feeders”—year-old steers that need just another year of fattening before heading to market. But buying feeders proved expensive. To make a reasonable return, we must breed our own cattle. We have bred our own sheep from the beginning, starting with a flock of four, that now, after eight years, is up to forty. But moving from sheep that weigh 100 to 150 pounds to cows that are in the 1200 to 1500 pound range was intimidating. To say nothing of dealing with a bull. Our experience with Daisy a few weeks ago (who, incidentally, is doing very well), exceeded our worst fears. But what is life, if not a learning experience? We started a couple of years ago with Black Angus. But after three break-outs in five days in the middle of a July heatwave, each requiring three hours plus of crashing through brush and woods to get them back, I washed my hands of beef cattle. Period. Then someone steered us to the British White breed. At Jeremy Peele’s Herondale Farm in Ancram, we were taken into the middle of a British White herd, so we could examine them. To my surprise, they neither shied away nor scattered, but, as we spoke, gently approached and began nuzzling us and licking my coat, which must have had some residue of grain on it. This behavior would have been unimaginable in a Black Angus. Furthermore, British Whites, I learned, are naturally polled—they never develop horns—and the bulls have the reputation for being as docile as the cows. The icing on the cake: the breed is beautiful to behold. It was love at first sight. For a history buff like me, the British White is a perfect fit. The breed was brought to Britain either by the Romans before 500 A.D., or much later by the Vikings in the 8th or 9th centuries (bovine historians—yes, there is such a thing—are divided on the subject.) The British White Cattle Association of America, of which we are members, leans toward the Viking theory. But all agree that the British White is probably the oldest breed of cattle in Britain. The first written reference to them dates back to the seventeenth century, when they were a great favorite among the nobility. Today the breed is prospering as never before: at last count (1996), there were 111 herds registered in Britain. The British Whites also have an interesting history in this country. In 1941, on the brink of what he feared would be a German land invasion of Britain, Winston Churchill, concerned about the survival of the breed, arranged to have five cows and one bull, named Old Ugly, shipped across the Atlantic to a Pennsylvania prison farm. It is from this small herd, with subsequent importation from Britain of a few pure-blood bulls, that all of the American herds of today descend. In our experience, the breed lives up to its reputation for being “thrifty" —it gives a rancher more pounds of lean and tender beef per acre than any other breed. At Turkana Farms, we raise these beautiful animals as nature intended, on pasture—grass in summer, hay in winter. The only grain they have ever tasted is what they manage to lick off my coat. We have no regimen of antibiotics (a necessity with grain-fed cattle); only when an animal is ill do we administer medicine. Rotating from pasture to pasture, our British Whites are free to explore their full “cowiness.” Every day, each consumes around fifty pounds of grass and, as they move about, scatter an equal poundage of manure, fertilizing the fields, thus establishing a sustainable cycle. They are the product of nothing but sun, grass, and water.—Peter Davies
