Farming

John Graham was born in Nazeing in 1929. He followed his father and grandfather into dairy farming. At Lodge Farm, he had a dairy herd of about 70 cows. In the 1970s he went in for beef cattle instead. Why did he make this decision?

Duration: 3 minutes
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Transcript

John Graham:
'Well because of government policy. They brought out… They wanted less milk produced and more beef. It was after we joined the Common Market in 1972. And there was a great ‘Milk to Beef Scheme!’ and you got paid a bit of subsidy for going out of milk and going into beef. But you had to keep so many cows, equivalent of what cows you’d had. So we had to have… I think by that time we were milking 70 cows. And we had to have the equivalent of 70 full units. When this ‘Milk to Beef Scheme’ came in, a calf was only a quarter of a unit and a sort of six-month old thing was halve a unit or something like that, you know. And anything over about 18 months was counted a full unit, if you see what I mean! So we probably had about 120 or 30 beef cattle to replace the cows. ‘Cause I had some sucler cows to start with, that’s why we had calves. Ah yeah, but then you had to buy in calves anyway because we bought calves from local farms that still milked. I used to get them from several local farms, you know, the bull calves.'

Carien Kremer:
'But it wasn’t a compulsory thing?'

John Graham:
'No no! It wasn’t compulsory. But it was government policy and we were paid to do it. Like I say, we got this small… I can’t remember how much the subsidy was, it wasn’t anything terrific, but it was an encouragement to it. But also, another thing, I mean I’d been milking cows a long while. I milked cows for 30 years or more. And that’s not counting…I mean I was over 50 when I stopped having them. No, that’s wrong, I was about…45 when we stopped having the cows, that’s right. Because I had a bad back at that time and I found it a problem milking them. And I only had one other chap that helped me, one stockman that milked, and eventually I said ‘well, they’ll all have to go Harry’. And anyway, this scheme came in and I thought this is an opportunity to get out of it. Oh, and also, we were still milking in cow sheds, which was getting outdated and we needed to spend…I don’t know, 20, 30 thousand pound on putting in a modern parlour and everything. And you’d still be working seven days a week. So decided not to do that and we sold the cows and went in for beef.'

Copyright. John Graham was interviewed by Carien Kremer on 20 January 2004.
Photograph courtesy John Graham. For access to full interview please contact the Museum.