Animal farming

My son recently spent a month working on a dairy farm in Devon.

He’s worked there before and this time he was asked to help during the calving season, which meant long days – and sometimes nights – in the fields.

Before he went to Devon he said he might write an article about the experience and offer it to The Spectator. Eight weeks later the notebook style piece has been published in the current issue and is surprisingly poetic about a job that combines hard labour with long hours in occasionally biblical conditions.

He quotes, for example, from ‘Into Battle’ by Julian Grenfell, a poet and soldier who died shortly after writing this celebrated World War I poem:

One morning, as I go to herd the cows for milking, the ‘naked earth is warm with spring,/ And with green grass and bursting trees/ Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying,/ And quivers in the sunny breeze;/ And life is Colour and Warmth and Light’. After evening milking, I shut the cows in their field, walk back to the farmhouse and watch the sun set over distant Dartmoor.

The article also features quotes from On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin, Thackeray’s Redmond Barry, and boxer Mike Tyson. The Tyson quote (‘my back is broken’) is less poetic than that of Grenfell or Barry (via Thackeray), but no less relevant.

If you have a subscription to the online edition you can read the full article here - ‘What no-one tells you about diary farming’.

Later this year Ruari starts a 12-month pupillage as a pupil (or trainee) barrister. I can’t imagine two more contrasting occupations but perhaps one is the yin to the other’s yang. Either way, I look forward to reading about it.