Introduction by Andreja Lajh
Tom Jones supplies some of London’s finest kitchens, from St John to The Clove Club, Trivet and Camille. He supplied Lyle’s for as long as it existed. He has been farming native breed cattle in Herefordshire for two decades, watching an industry hollowed out by war, politics, disease and indifference. This piece is his attempt to explain why good British beef costs what it does, and why most people have no idea how close the whole thing came to disappearing entirely. Read it before you order your next steak.
Beef and Liability By Tom Jones
The View from the Field
No three things in farming give me more pleasure than the event of shearing, muck spreading, and observing my herd of cattle grazing on a warm July evening as the light makes the descent into darkness. All represent wealth. Old wealth of the textile commodity, which once made Britain a global superpower, new wealth of instant enrichment, and future wealth of the layered flavour to come.
It has to be a July dusk, and the curtain falls to a particularly sumptuous day, the kind that has burst you to the coast in spontaneous flight prompted by that still warm morning that precedes a scorcher. The cattle would not have done a lot of moving during the teeth of the day. They would have been on the hoof early, sensing the temperature to come, and grazed contentedly. And then when the warmth starts to fill in, they’d follow the shade of the inching sun cast by hedgerow and tree, chewing the cud in the shadows and engaging the autopilot lashes and tails to shoo the pesky flies.
Cattle, farmed properly and with care, are full of grass. To the brim. Like the lawn mower box of a lazy gardener. If you have ever seen the contents of a cow’s stomach during slaughter (no? You really must!), you will be aware of just how much matter scoops forth. At least four or five bin liners worth, for the record. So, on brilliant days when the smart money is to stay out of the sun, they have the wealth inside to see out the heat and ruminate. And then, as the horizon shares slivers of the sun with other lands, they rise and recommence with their pasture.
July is right because now the grass is established and thick, and your grand day of mucking in May is evident in all its glory. The light is right, the temperature is right, life is right. Yoyoing shocks of irritant insects kaleidoscope in the orange glow. If nature is synchronised, you should hear the dull rip of the grass, the low breathing of the beasts and the slice of song from the thrush. Trotting through the shadows, a fox hopes to pick off a blindsided bunny, both hungry with the cooler air.
But if I pull out from this micro view to panoramic, I understand that the cattle from here to the horizon are mostly gone now. Thirty years ago, there would have been cattle in fields dot to dot from the lowland here of Herefordshire to the high hills of Wales. Scenes like the one I lust over are increasingly reserved for old prints and paintings. If you don’t have the time to investigate a downturn in farming or a demise in food quality and need a one-word answer fast, always use money. For a deeper and fascinating history of Britain and beef, look to Ben Rogers’ Beef and Liberty. You don’t have to be a cow nerd, like me, to enjoy it. Read it if you have even dined on just a sliver of beef in your lifetime, and you’ll have an instant connection to our history with the cow.
How We Got Here: War, Subsidy and the Abandonment of Native Breeds
Most empires and institutions, once great and then gone, usually decline through a meandering complacency of care and a few seismic events. There is a lot to unpack in the aftermath of the Second World War. Understandably, many decisions were taken under the duress of starvation, fear and disorientation, but fundamentally, the British countryside would become much changed and ravaged. Farmers, by order of the management, were encouraged, well, told, to go hell for leather to produce food for a nation trying to raise itself from the knees of rationing. Money, in the form of a subsidy, was the reward. Woods and hedgerows, ancient to the root tip, were plucked and small parcelled, nature-rich fields were joined together like split mercury finding the nucleus. Bigger, broader, faster, more. Lovely big sweaty money tarted up as progress.
In amongst it all, the native breed farm animals, county champions like the Berkshire pig, the Ryeland sheep and the Hereford cow, were starting to look a bit puny, a bit lethargic, a bit past it. Slow in coming to the table, the weight for slaughter was smothered in fat when they got there. How bloody rude, how bloody inefficient.
Read Beef and Liberty and understand how testing Anglo-French feeling was for centuries, not only almost continually at physical war, but food war too. The French, thumbing their noses at the stodgy British fare, the British jagging back two fingers to the fancy thin pastry French. The Brits were so proud of and entrenched with their love of beef, roasted on a fireside spit and basted in the unctuous fat. Of course, they should have been, for there is no better way to cook beef. Consider too that it all came from native breeds, on nothing but established pastures and wild plants.
The abandonment of native breed perfection started to bleed in the 70s when the British beef farmer turned the two fingers into the open palm of ironic acceptance of French and other European cattle breeds. Bigger, broader, faster, more. More meat to bone ratio and in half the time of those daft native types. And look what we had in abundance: grain mountains of unforeseeable summits after a few decades of reap and pillage. Chuck it into these new European signings and watch them swell like watered couscous. Many British beef breeds were taken to the wall by an influx of Limousin, Charolais, Belgian Blue and Simmental. The near extinction of some native breeds is another story for another day. Fundamentally, cattle numbers were high, and beef farming was buoyant, despite the fact that the product was now inferior to what had underpinned British history. The beef was now only about the weight, and not, crucially, about the wait.
Government Apathy, BSE and the Gutting of an Industry
The average age of a British farmer is, give or take, 67. When I speak to the old bow-legged, bashed-about farmers at livestock markets, they will unequivocally put government at the heart of the demise. Complacency and culpability at the very top. No investment, no safeguarding, no vision. Imports diluting herd profits as the British beef industry was left to drift in the 80s. The drip, drip of an institution ebbing away, and then the gutter punch of the 90s BSE crisis. More layered irony as the French didn’t want their cattle back deadweight, and global trust was eroded. The beef farmer was marooned by the politicians. No sympathy, no help. If the expensive-to-feed cattle were sellable, it wasn’t for much, and even that lovely postwar subsidy wasn’t papering over the financial cracks. A swathe of farmers ditched the cattle and found solace in arable or intensive factory farming. Those who had clung on covered their heads and waited for the bell.
Many could not survive the knockout blow at the start of the next round: the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. As I look to the Welsh border from where I sit writing this, I can see the site where a huge pyre of hundreds of upturned and headshot cattle burned. When the wind was coming west, it smelled of barbecue beef for days. The towel was thrown by scores of cattle farmers after that harrowing episode. Complete and total misery. A hollowing of soul and industry.
Take it as read that the money was up in smoke, but it was the identity of the farmer that was reduced to ashes. All of those early mornings, late calving nights, shielded faces against horizontal sleet, rain and snow tramping across a field to feed winter cattle, thin money yet thick with hope, the joy of birth, the nurture to market, the highs of pride, the ecstasy of hay days, the journey, the knowledge, the fight, the foundation: all on fire. And, frankly, no one gave a fuck. There was no clapping for the NFU.
Imagine being a young farm child or teenager on the cusp of a career, witnessing a parent or grandparent in tears of despair at the kitchen table or beating an inanimate object in the yard with a stick until the aggressor or object disintegrated. I wouldn’t have gone into cattle farming either.
The bitter catch-22 was this: if the farmer was unlucky enough to have the disease confirmed in their livestock, everything without exception was wiped out. A softener to the mental gouging was, for the time, impressive compensation, but plenty of farmers who had suffered the scenes did not reinvest in cattle. The farmers who were lucky enough not to have had their herd infected had only one route of trade: the slaughterhouses. Unable to journey to live markets through movement restrictions, those end-of-life firms had the farmers over a barrel. If the offered pittance was rejected, the only option was to hold out and wait at home with no income. When the dark cloud finally blew over and restrictions were lifted, those farmers sold out of cattle. They did not want to suffer a trade blockade again.
The Final Insult: Tuberculosis Testing
Jolly good, then. Where are we: war, misdirection, flooded market, abandonment of roots, government apathy, paltry returns, global humiliation, mass slaughter and a lost generation. That will do it nicely.
Oh, hang on. One more thing. Tuberculosis testing. Every 12 months, while all this other stuff is going on, we, the management, will turn up and drown the farmer in procedure and paperwork and maybe, possibly, very probably, kill some of your selected cattle, and then restrict your ability to trade again. If we deem that your herd has a serious history of offence, we will come every six months instead. But don’t worry, we will kill a few badgers to make it look like we care, and get the taxpayer who is funding all of this to look in the other direction for a bit.
When the vet arrives each year to test my cattle, I ask him how many fewer farms he visits now. Dozens, he says. Of those he still goes to, the numbers have been slashed. It is the reason that the steaks are so high, because the cow numbers have evaporated. The 67-year-old farmer who stuck it out through the grim times and still has their few cattle isn’t being replaced. The cows that take nine months to give birth to one calf have been decimated. Not only by disease and protocol, but since the 2020 pandemic, when beef prices for older cattle spiked and the farmers, still raw to terrible money and burning bovines, cashed in and shovelled cows into the abattoir. Young cows with potentially half a dozen calves in their future were slaughtered. Multiply the missing youngbloods across the island, and that is thousands of tonnes of beef that simply isn’t there.
Why I Still Do It
I have been an extremely fortunate cattle farmer. Too young to be tarred by BSE, too distant to be affected by foot and mouth, and too enthusiastic on my farming return in 2003 to let the negativity of the industry slow me down. My love has never been sullied. I see liberty, not liability, in my cattle.
I am increasingly alone in that.
I have a 1,800 kg, ten-year-old Angus steer that I keep as a pet. He is called Dark Side Radar, for reasons that are quite boring. Deadweight, he is worth north of five grand. If I were in it for the money, he wouldn’t have seen his third birthday. But he is gentle and herd-calming despite his size, and I can see worlds beyond this one in his global, deep eyes, and so he will stay here until he doesn’t wake up one morning. Then he will go into a massive hole with an oak tree on top. Who knows, maybe when that tree is mature, my children will stand in its shade and observe their own grazing herd on a summer’s eve.
Tom Jones is a Herefordshire cattle farmer and butcher whose native breed beef supplies some of London’s most respected kitchens. You can also buy his meat at SPA Terminus. You can find him at @farmertomjones on Instagram.
Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.