AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: Having a farm does change the way one sees animals. I can remember in my pre-farm academic days in the early 70’s living on Phyllis Curtin’s estate in the middle of Forrest Shaw’s dairy farm in Great Barrington. The only way in or out was a one-lane unpaved track through the Shaw pastures to Alford Road. My kids affectionately called the track “Lumpy Lane.” We shared Lumpy Lane with Forrest’s 150 Holstein dairy cows, who daily trooped along it either coming from or going to the barn at milking time.
In those days, I saw the cows in two ways: first, as picturesque adornments on the landscape; and, secondly, as bothersome impediments preventing me from getting back and forth quickly between my carriage house and Simon’s Rock. I quickly learned that trying to motor through the cows was a big mistake since it risked having them rear up and plant their hooves squarely on top of the car. Mr. Shaw’s cowherd very quickly put me right on this issue by kindly explaining that it was better and safer to come to a full stop and patiently wait for them to pass. I guess I also found the cows a constant source of amusement, particularly when one beautiful spring morning, I was aroused from my bed at dawn by all kinds of strange trampling and lowing noises coming from the lawn below. To my amazement, I found myself looking down on a good part of Forrest’s herd of cows, which, apparently, having smelled the intoxicating lush, green grass of Phyllis’ lawn, had bolted down Lumpy Lane (leaving the cowherd scrambling behind), loped into the estate drive, and, in joyful appreciation of their lucky windfall, began madly cavorting on the grass, kicking up their heals, and leaping into the air with joy. It was like a scene out of the mythological past—a sort of Eureka Europa.
Now a common cowherd myself, I look at cows from quite a different point of view. Tommy, our bull, is, on the one hand, a magnificent-looking animal but on the other hand, I see him as a manmade creature, which, through centuries of selective breeding, has been transformed into the ideal progenitor of the kind of cows that will satisfy man’s mercantile and culinary needs. How manmade? Tommy has a proportionally small head and very short legs given the bulk of his body. Indeed, his meaty, muscular body forms roughly a large rectangle standing on four short supports. This, if one thinks about it, is odd, since herd animals, which cows are, typically defend themselves by fleeing. For such a defense long legs would be an advantage and short ones a decided disadvantage. Obviously, mankind has, over the centuries, had ideas very different from nature’s when it comes to cows.
So, why the small head and short legs? If one looks at the animal from the vantage point of the slaughterhouse, the head and legs are the least productive and hence least useful parts of the animal. With the exception of the tongue and shanks, there is little from these parts of a cow that finds its way to the supermarket meat aisle. The source of the roasts, steaks, ribs, and ground meat is the bulky, rectangular body. So, in their body conformation, Tommy and his progeny are the cow reduced to its most edible parts. In the transformation of the cow from a wild herd animal to a farmyard herd animal, meat productivity was obviously a major consideration. This concern has not only shaped the cow as we know it, but also continues to play a role when choosing a beef cattle breed—a small-boned as opposed to large-boned breed. Maximum meat productivity is achieved if the animal has a high meat to bone ratio. Thus, in beef operations, the relatively small-boned Black Angus, with its higher meat-to-bone ratio, is favored over a large-boned Simmental (below).
While my way of seeing a cow has greatly altered in the last ten years, it can in no way compare with the discerning eyes of someone who has spent his entire life dealing with them. Julius Reuchel, writing in Grass Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef, describes what he sees as the ideal bull: “…wide shoulders, a deep chest, thick curly dark hair on the face and chest, thick skin, a wide jaw, and a big gut….and a well fleshed, muscular rump…” He goes on in greater detail but this is enough to suggest the wealth of detail my image of the bull still lacks. I became aware of this when Mark and I recently visited Herondale Farm to choose our new bull. In trying to evaluate the three bulls we were considering there, I realized that my image of a bull is still little more than a roughly drawn, hazy outline. —Peter DaviesFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
