Cows

Friday

Charles Cornish-Dale

‘Corporate agriculture’ is wrong about cows and methane

In the 1960s, scientists discovered that halogenated compounds such as chloroform and bromochloromethane could inhibit methane-generating microorganisms, also known as methanogens. This was important because agricultural scientists were trying to make livestock farming more efficient. Ruminants (cows, sheep, goats, deer, giraffes) produce the gas methane when they digest plant matter. Scientists reckoned between 2 and 12 percent of all the energy from feed was being lost as gas. If they could reduce methane production, they could increase yields of meat, milk and other products. In one experiment, feeding chloroform to sheep reduced their methane emissions by between 30 and 50 percent. The results were even more dramatic with bromochloromethane: a reduction of 70 percent.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

What should you call a ‘boy cow’ and a ‘lady dog’?

From our UK edition

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce introduces the question of whether ballocks is the only example of the dual number in English. In Irish English it is certainly used in the plural form with singular concord. Ballocks was in standard use up to the 17th century, after which it was seen as coarse slang. In 1885, the Oxford English Dictionary remarked that the word was ‘obsolete in polite use’. Now bullock may be going the same way.

Friday

The Spectator

Lawmakers debate milk in school lunches

The stakes were high this week as Congress’s dairy big cow-culation to allow whole milk back in cafeterias loomed. When push came to shove, Republicans and Democrats set aside their beef to allow kids the freedom to drink as they please. The broadly bipartisan bill, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, passed the House by a 330-99 vote — reversing Michelle Obama’s crazy push to ban whole milk from school lunches. “I am udderly in favor of whole milk,” Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told me, milking this vote for all it’s worth.

milk

Thursday

Deborah Ross

I won’t ever look at cows the same way again: Andrea Arnold’s Cow reviewed

From our UK edition

The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see cows all the time from the train and they just sort of lounge about, ruminating, don’t they? But this wants you to look, really look, at what it is to be a cow. And you do and you will invest. (Oh, Luma.) Arnold spent four years, off and on, filming Luma, a cow at a dairy farm in Kent. Luma looms from the dark background of one of the film’s stills like a Rembrandt. You’d look, really look, if she were hanging in the Rijksmuseum, Arnold seems to be saying.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Definitely the best cow film of the year: First Cow reviewed

From our UK edition

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow stars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’, who has a dewy face and big soft eyes. As Reichardt has confessed: ‘She is very beautiful and was cast purely on her looks.’ Evie is, thankfully, as convincing as she is beautiful, and this is a convincing and beautiful film. It is touching, tender, original, entrancing, definitely the best cow film of the year. Plus it’s also a quietly masterful thriller where a clafoutis (blueberry) will have you on the edge of your seat.