Cowless

Paul and Valerie arrived with piercings and a love of heavy metal. They were so unlike the other volunteers we had hosted up until this point via WWOOF UK. Where our previous WWOOFers had been mostly vegan, quiet and earnest, but without many practical skills, Paul and Valerie were talented carpenters. They would blast Die Antwort as they built all manner of useful farm structures — woodsheds, fences, gates amongst them. Every day, Paul would text Kevin a list of materials to buy and he’d stop at the lumberyard on his way home for the next day’s project.

In return, Paul would eat a slabs of butter as thick as cheese on fresh bread. He could easily devour an entire loaf of bread and a block of butter in a sitting to fuel his hard work. I was forever adding “don’t forget butter” to Kevin’s daily shopping list.

This was 2018, pre-Brexit, a different life when farm help was easy to come by, Pandemic was a board game and food shortages were something that happened in other places. Late one night during their stay, I read an article about the impact the UKs withdrawal from would make on dairy supplies here in the UK. The newspapers were predicting shortages of cheese and butter and I couldn’t imagine a worse thing (haha - how naive pre-Brexit/pandemic Kat was).

We’d toyed with the idea of adding a cow to the smallholding before. Goat’s milk is amazing for drinking and making chèvre, but its structure makes it slightly less useful for things like butter and cream. A cow wouldn’t be *that* much more work than goats, my friend Angela told me. “Jersey’s are so docile you could tie them up with a ribbon,” she said.

I could feel the worry (rightly or wrongly) about our future food security take root in the pit of my stomach and that night I immediately texted our friend Colin, cattle trader extraordinaire, and asked if he could find me a Jersey cow.

Two days later, Petunia the Jersey arrived in the dark.

Every day for over 3 years, we would head out to the barn to milk. First Petunia then a year later, Honey, gave us gallons of milk and cream every day. I felt like a prepper as we stockpiled dairy. Our fridge was a game of Jenga as we tried to fit the jars in. We made butter and cheese and cream and drank milk as fresh as it comes. We were so rich in dairy products, I had an entire refrigerator dedicated just to cheese.

The cows’ contribution was far more than just their dairy for us. We fed pigs and cats on our extra milk. They mowed our grass. Their manure was the basis for our compost in the garden. Hundreds of visitors met them on farm tours where they learned about calf at foot dairying and the importance of ruminants in regenerative land management. They even visited our neighbour’s 3 miles away one dark night when a holiday maker left the gate open, becoming the talk of the village for a good month.

That ended this past week when we sold the cows. After just under 4 years of cow ownership, we decided it was time. In the list of things we could do in a day, maintaining the cows was just too much. We struggled with keeping enough grass this year and repeated mastitis had meant we hadn’t taken milk from Honey for a few months. Her age and a grain intolerance also saw her lose condition on hay alone and we knew she needed a new home as much as we needed a break.

And so late on Tuesday night, we loaded up the cows in a trailer to live out their lives over in Angus as starter cows for other smallholders wanting to be more self sufficient.

All week I had been fine with it, knowing they were going. On Wednesday though, when the new owners texted pictures of them in their new field, it hit me and I had a good cry.

It wasn’t because I regretted the decision, I knew that it was the best for us and our increased human related caring responsibilities. I cried because I didn’t want to let go of the idea of what I’d wanted for this life and this corner of land.

I loved cheesemaking. I loved having fresh cream every day. I loved the big vats of crowdie I would make once a week to schmear on my toast and sandwiches. I loved going out to see the cows with my mid morning cups of tea. I loved the black gold of the compost we could make with their manure. Owning those cows made me feel both the richest and poorest I’d ever felt.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to let go of the work of all of those things, but sad to lose the idea of them.

I have learned to recognise what I was feeling as a type of grief - not the same grief as a death, but the grief of losing what might have been. For a long time, I confused this grief with failure - sometimes it was, but most often the emotion arose from the space between what I hoped would happen and the reality. I had a set view of what my days would look like and how this little farm would operate and then all of the sudden there was a gap between what I’d wanted and what is.

It is an emotion I have become intimate with in the last few years. There have been so many times I have made a plan, planted a crop, built a part of the business that then, in practice, turned out not to work. And not just in homesteading— raising kids with additional needs is a constant reminder of of the gap between what we thought parenting would be and what it looks like for us in reality.

My dad has a saying “You can have anything you want, just not everything.” I repeat it to myself in these moments, a steady reminder that in choosing to do what we do well, it often means letting go of other things - even if it’s just the idea of them.

Butter and cheese have been added back to our weekly grocery shop and rather than begrudging the fact I am no longer making my own, I have to admit the ease of it all is enchanting. We only have to do 2 loads of dishes a day, rather than the 4 or 5 on cheesemaking days. Instead of dairy wealth, I am time rich, which is exactly what we needed in this season of caregiving.

I have been squirrelling away blocks of butter in the freezer. I fear my dairy hoarding tendencies might be the hardest part to get over.