When a TV cook in a margarine advertisement sits on top of a cow and says, in effect, that he cannot tell marge from butter, it doesn’t say much for his cooking. He is relying on ‘food manufacturers’ who, given enough additives, can concoct ‘food’ out of anything.

The only ‘food manufacturers’ we allow up here are cows, sheep and, sometimes, pigs. These animals consume the stuff that we don’t want to eat, like grass and roots, and they manufacture stuff we do want to eat, like milk and meat.

So here’s to our neighbours: the dairy farmers, the shepherds and all who raise animals! And down with ‘food manufacturers’ and TV cooks who can’t tell marge from butter!

What’s more, when we see cows and sheep grazing in the fields today, we are seeing the natural ecology of this planet as it has been from time immemorial. The fossil record shows that, for hundreds of millions of years, life on Earth consisted of innumerable animals, dinosaurs and the like, grazing endless stretches of pasture.

Of course TV programmes concentrate on their predators: the more glamorous carnivores, like Tyrannosaurus Rex. But it was the herbivores who did the work of turning vegetation into meat, and it was pictures of herbivores that our ancient ancestors painted on the walls of their caves. To this day, they say, the most popular landscape paintings world-wide are those featuring animals peacefully grazing; the paintings of people like Poussin, Rubens and Claude Lorrain.

Other ways of raising animals without pasture, involving zero-grazing and imported feed, are not sustainable, and are unfair to animals. For us they lead to John Betjeman’s empty countryside, with no animals at all – just “workers’ flats in fields of soya beans.”

While we’re on the subject of animals, the Mosleys raised pigs at Crux Easton – and thereby hangs a tale. Mosley was summonsed to appear before Newbury magistrates, charged with starving his pigs. They were certainly too thin. But, in summonsing Mosley, the local Wartime Agricultural Committee underestimated their man. He was forceful, he stood six foot three, he’d been a Cabinet Minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government, and he enjoyed a fight; most importantly, he was rich. He hired a top vet who found a virus in the pigs. Case dismissed.

Agricola, June 2025