Beef Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture

Since the film camera first ventured into Britain's fields, farming has undergone a revolution.

Nothing was left untouched.

Home movies captured unique and very personal accounts of life on the land.

Farm machinery has been preserved on celluloid, so too has the livestock.

Cattlemen have faced huge changes in the last 80 years.

What they've done makes an extraordinary story.

How did we get from pedigree cattle reaching only to the stockman's waist...

to beasts up to a man's shoulder?

You can see it now, when I move into him.

How did we go from animals butchered behind the high street...

-What can I get for you, madam?

-..to supermarkets?

And why are the farmers who ploughed out the bracken looking to a new way to save hill farming?

There's probably where the future of British agriculture lies - clover.

This is the story of agriculture...

-Come on!

-..from the stockman's point of view.

All the stock is checked once a day.

This is a tale of cattle-breeding over 80 years,

and how it's influencing the beef that's reared today.

Robert Parker is checking a new arrival on his beef farm in Scotland.

He crosses two of Britain's proudest native breeds -

Scotland's black Aberdeen Angus

and the red and white cattle from Hereford.

Robert's calf is the product of a 20th-century revolution.

By cross-breeding Aberdeen Angus and Hereford cattle, he has transformed his farm.

Compare these films of Herefords back then and now.

Pedigree bulls have leapt in size from being only up to the stockman's waist to being at their shoulders.

The Herefords were originally large.

But over the years, breeders changed them down...

then up again.

The same happened to the size of the black cattle from Scotland.

Both breeds have been shaped by wars, changes in diet and government influence.

Robert's changes reflect the latest shift away from beef in bulk towards quality.

One of the best things about these two breeds coming together

is the calf vigour.

This calf is just an hour-and-a-half old.

It's been up, it's had a suck, it's on its feet, it's off with its mother.

I think it's great to see a nice calf running with a good heifer.

But, yeah, you see the pound signs going round too.

It's money every time a calf hits the ground.

Ah, see? You've got plenty of go.

We're going to discover how Robert, on his farm overlooking the ferry route to Northern Ireland,

has re-examined 80 years of cattle-breeding

to meet today's demands.

Just like Robert, Colin Wright,

here watching himself on a home movie,

is another witness to this cattle revolution.

Hello - this is the fella.

-This is the fella.

-This is when we lived in the village.

Colin's coming across to work.

In 1939, the Wright family took over the tenancy on Warp Farm -

220 acres of East Yorkshire near the River Humber.

-There we are.

-There's Colin on his...

This was just the time when the size of Britain's native breeds was being reduced.

-There's bull.

-There he is, look.

Just gone through.

Here is the lad.

He's just cracking the whip round.

-Look at that! That's how you should ride a horse.

-We know. We know.

One hand.

This is a piece of thin rib - an oven-buster.

Margaret is cooking the Wright family's favourite joint of beef.

That's sufficient.

The British love of the Sunday roast earned us a nickname.

The French refer to the English as les rosbifs

because the English did, traditionally,

eat very large quantities of beef.

It should be done now!

The Wrights have farmed here since 1939.

Then, it was a mixed farm, like so many before the last war.

Part of the mix on farms like this was animals for the butcher.

-Dad?

-Yes?

-Here's the bull.

This 1937 film gave cinema audiences a glimpse of life on a beef farm.

The new bull is making his majestic arrival.

A pedigree Hereford bull arrives to father next season's calves.

At the other end of the farmyard,

the year's crop of bullocks go off to market.

They are scenes echoed today at Warp Farm.

But Colin saw the 1937 world swept aside...

and the cattle change.

Getting the bullocks, or stores, off to market is always an exciting job.

This history of British cattle is told in the show ring by Mike Keeble.

..pedigree breeding as we know it in all species today.

In his commentary, he tells the story of the two breeds at the heart of this programme.

The black Aberdeen Angus...

and the red and white cattle from Hereford.

He's been part of the team at the Great Yorkshire Show for 15 years.

It's something I do every morning when I arrive.

When we're doing the Yorkshire Show,

judging starts normally at about 9.30.

The first thing I do is walk round what I call my parish,

round all the cattle.

He links the fortunes of the two breeds to the influences that shaped modern farming.

You can do your own judging, you people round the ring.

Then the Hereford.

Mike explains how social changes before 1939

led to the cattle being bred smaller.

The cattle got smaller mainly because of the South American market,

South American beef production.

The pampas of South America was very attractive to a lot of British people in the early 19th century.

They went out there, families like the Vesteys and many more, and built up huge meat interests.

They were exporting meat back to this country.

When they started doing that, in the 19th century, the houses in this country that were the big beef-buyers

were large families, they had staff in the house, and the joints of beef were pretty big.

But during that period after the First World War, coming up to the Second World War,

staff went out of houses, families tended to get smaller.

The beef industry had to change. They wanted smaller joints.

We can pick up the story of cattle in 1937, when this cinema short was made.

The son of a beef farmer is getting the chance to visit one of the great pedigree herds in Britain.

He'll see where breeding stock for the southern hemisphere comes from.

He's just received a notice of the next meeting of the Young Farmers' Class,

a sort of club run by the local agricultural organiser.

The members of this class get a chance of learning more

about their job of farming.

What are you going to show them?

Captain Dick de Quincey is regarded as a legend in the pedigree cattle world.

His herd of Herefords was called the Vern.

Young Farmers' Class is just arriving.

-You all ready?

-Yes, I'll get the bulls out for them now.

He was famous for breeding smaller and smaller cattle.

Good afternoon, Mr Evans.

I'm just getting the bulls out into the paddock now.

The Young Farmers then...

and Young Farmers today share the same task -

to judge pedigree Hereford stock.

If the boy in the 1937 film was here today, he'd recognise the cattle's red and white coats.

But their size and their shape would shock him.

Quite a nice head. It's got a bullish face.

They're all quite good bulls.

Lads, you will judge this ring of five Hereford bulls and place them in order of merit.

I place the five bulls in the following order. Two, three, one...

I place this class of four Hereford bulls in the order of B, A, X and Y.

Two, three, five, four, one.

Since '37, pedigree breeders have been at work on de Quincey's legacy.

We're looking at a bunch of yearling bulls, I would think they are.

Captain De Quincey was a very shrewd man.

He looked straight for his market.

He was looking where the money was.

And he cleverly got into the South American market,

which was growing at the time.

It was said that they needed a small carcass in order to be able

to hang them between the decks of the ships as they came over,

because, when you think about it, they were slaughtered

and the carcasses were put straight on the ship.

They were matured for three weeks, coming over the water.

What was happening in Argentina was just as true for Australia.

Australia has nearly 14 million head of cattle on the hoof.

The Aberdeen Angus and the Hereford are bulls

that followed the British colonists round the world,

did remarkably well all round the world.

And so we outsourced beef production.

We sent out the really high quality genetic material and then bought back the beef.

By the 1930s, Britain had become the stockyard of the world.

When the cattle have been drafted, they're taken to the meatworks for killing.

The electric saw, an Australian invention, divides the beef carcass.

Australia pays rigid attention to the quality of the beef necessary to suit the markets of Great Britain,

because England is Australia's best customer and consumes approximately 80% of the world's export meat.

In those pre-war years,

Britain was worryingly dependent on food from the Dominions.

In 1939, the Wright family moved to Warp Farm near the Humber.

That's Grandpa, on his horse.

This is Colin's father.

They call him Grandpa Wright.

He spent three years in Australia.

Then he came back,

married my mother.

And then, in 1939,

they came here.

That's in May, 1939.

I was three years old then.

And I've been here ever since.

He'd ranched out in Australia.

When he got his cows and his horse down there, he just thought he was back in Australia!

It was just a small, potted version.

Me!

Just with the horse Grandpa's just got off.

Ah, there's Grandpa with the cattle on the front.

They're just where they are now, look.

Just there.

He wanted to have a lot more cattle.

Of course, that was in May, 1939.

War broke out in September.

After that, you did what you were told.

The beef industry was paralysed.

The export of breeding bulls was impossible

and food imports were all but stopped.

When we hit the Second World War, we came to...as low as about 50%,

55% self-sufficiency for British food in this country, at the beginning of the Second World War.

Suddenly...God, we've got to produce more home-produced food...

The ploughing of land that has never been ploughed up before.

..so you had this call to "dig for victory".

Farms were surveyed by the War Agricultural Committees to ensure every productive acre was used.

You were told what you had to grow on your farm.

If you had too much grass, it had to be ploughed out. We have...

Ministry of Agriculture map.

It tells you what was on Warp Farm in 1941.

The two acres of peas that we had to grow.

If you'd any moles and rabbits, rats and mice...

The priority was to produce milk and wheat for bread.

Beef was well down the list.

Grandpa Wright was ordered to plough up his grassland for crops.

Everything that was here in 1941.

Grandpa wanted it all to be grass.

I mean, there was a lot of rough grazing and things down there.

But it all had to get ploughed out when it was wartime.

The result is that we, in Britain, are growing more food than we did in the last war

and probably more food than ever before in our island's history.

-This, in the middle of the greatest war of all time.

Amongst the many distinguished visitors are Their Majesties the King and Queen.

British farming celebrated the peace at the first post-war Royal Show.

After the war, the beef industry had to rebuild.

Britain was bust. There was no cash for imports from Australia or Argentina.

So the policy was to increase home production.

The 1947 Agricultural Act consolidated the lessons of the war

and offered farmers subsidies to achieve it.

Our two beef breeds, the black Aberdeen Angus from Scotland

and the red and white beasts from Hereford had their own part to play.

Farmers were paid a subsidy to cross them with dairy cows and produce beef calves for fattening.

The government wanted to get more beef into this country.

Home-produced beef.

And the way that they could do that was to ensure that dairy cattle,

apart from producing their own replacements, could also produce, as a by-product, beef cattle.

Therefore, if they put beef bulls on the dairy cows - the Shorthorn, the Friesian, the Ayrshire

and all those, they would improve beef production in this country.

But how did they know that a beef bull was being used?

The pioneer breeders had discovered a genetic gift

and it was seized on by the new team of government bull inspectors.

A Hereford bull always passes on his white face to his calf, no matter what breed he's mated with.

And an Aberdeen Angus bull will invariably sire a calf with no horns and a black face.

One look, and the bull inspectors could check

that a farmer had used a beef bull, rather than just any old bull.

So those two breeds got a very big boost during that period 1945-1955.

In the Welsh hills, on this beef farm, the old film brings back

memories of the time when the little black cattle ruled the farmyards.

-Here is a typical bull. A potent sire...

-God, look at him.

Neville Stacey remembers those days.

He uses a modern Aberdeen Angus bull.

But he's forgotten how small the bulls once were.

Look at this! What have we got here - a basset hound or a bull?

He's a little bit too rotund for the modern market.

'Little daylight below him.'

He's as broad as he is tall, isn't he?

A bull, at the end of the day, is kept to mate, impregnate a female.

I think a lot of the modern cows...

This little chap wouldn't be able to mate with the modern cows...

unless you put a block under his back legs to help him work!

The legs are short and well planted at each corner.

It was 1965 when Neville and Margaret came to their farm in the Welsh hills.

They spent their early farming lives reclaiming the hillsides

and improving the pastures for their cattle.

This is a Curzon Entertainer.

Curzon Entertainer is one of Neville's modern Aberdeen Angus bulls.

Got a pedigree as long as your arm.

Whoa! Stay, Gus.

He's quite interested in one of the females at the moment.

He doesn't want to be messed with me right now.

When Neville started farming, the drive for production was

in full swing, and Britain's uplands were part of it.

To increase our food production, we must use all the land we can.

Every farmer who's willing to reclaim marginal land gets back half the expense as a government grant.

When I first came back here, 40 years ago, where we're standing now,

I would have been standing up to my shoulders in bracken.

All this ground across here was covered in bracken.

Very exciting time to be farming.

As a young man, we were draining these patches, we were ploughing...

Improving, increasing the stock.

Ten years ago, when I started to improve the hill land, most of the slopes were covered with bracken.

The film you saw is exactly what was happening in this mid-Wales area.

Bracken is poisonous to cattle.

But ploughed in and reseeded,

new grass pastures spread across the hillsides.

Yeah. Not only him - I was paid to do it.

I was encouraged to do it financially.

Wasn't so many years after the last war...

when people were really hungry.

As well as grants to improve the uplands,

hill farmers received a subsidy for every breeding animal they kept.

Under the 1947 Agricultural Act, when production was subsidised, there was a headage payment

on the number of sheep kept, or the number of breeding suckler cows kept.

It encouraged people to keep more sheep and cattle.

'In October, the cattle come down from the hills.'

One of the things it did, it enabled farmers to maintain profitability.

Neville's early farming life, 1,000 feet up on the Welsh hills, was shaped by these subsidies.

They ushered in an era of intensive farming across the country.

On the other side of Britain, on the flatland by the Humber,

new machinery and new ideas were coming to Colin Wright's farm.

Colin's cutting the hay.

It was a good little mower.

This home movie was made in 1966, by a friend, to capture scenes of

farming in the year Colin took over from Grandpa Wright.

They're here, father and son, having their bait.

-Drinking, ciggie!

-You see, this is what happened with this filming lark.

They only ever came down to film us when they came down to bring drinkings.

And so every bit of film has a bit of drinkings on it.

Once we got through that period of the Second World War...

That was over, but we were facing a whole Eastern bloc

which was still threatening us.

We knew that our food supplies could always be threatened.

We had to keep up that food production we'd established during the Second World War.

There's Grandpa pulling these two trailers, with old Herbert sat

on top there, because that would be where he finished loading.

The whole way we do things has changed.

That's making hay. We don't make hay now.

We make haylage.

Haylage, a drier type of silage,

was part of the production-driven post-war revolution,

an advance that produced better feed for the increasing numbers of livestock.

'People did begin to understand that if you put heaps of grass

'in a relatively air-free environment, it would preserve itself.

'But silage really began to develop because the technology caught up.

'We suddenly learned that you could harvest grass much more quickly.

'We could grow much heavier crops of grass,

'which indeed were very hard to make into hay.'

We're putting the wrap on to seal it up, keep the air out.

Otherwise it would go rotten.

New machinery, along with chemical fertilisers, was a partnership that drove up production.

We didn't have nitrogen fertilisers until we had a petrochemical industry.

A by-product of the oil industry has been nitrogen fertiliser.

That had a tremendous effect to boost agriculture.

Farming went from being mainly small farms to being something which was

bigger and bigger farmers all the time...

The weight swung from a largely tenanted farming sector to owner-occupiership.

It was a very exciting time.

The Wrights' Yorkshire farm was rented.

But in 1958 Grandpa changed all that.

It was the year we were going to get married

and...

he bought the farm.

And I mean... We'd been tenant.

Bought it for £6,700, was it?

-£27 an acre.

-£27 an acre.

That wasn't buying. It were actually pinching it.

And...even then, he didn't have the money to put down for it.

But they lent him it, did the estate.

They actually lent him £500, was it? Or whatever.

Because he was short on the £6,500, or whatever it was.

And he paid that off over five or six years.

It seemed an awful lot of money.

It won't buy an acre today.

And there's 222 acres.

British agriculture was getting bigger.

Farms were bigger, machinery was bigger, yields were bigger.

Everything was bigger, except the Hereford and the Aberdeen Angus cattle.

After the war, Britain regained her status as the stockyard of the world.

The pedigree breeders re-established their trade, exporting small bulls to the prairies and the pampas.

Prices could reach £20,000.

In 1966, the pedigree world came to Hereford.

Captain Dick de Quincey, the legendary Hereford breeder, had died

and cattlemen assembled for the sale of his famous herd.

Today, the cattle sale of the century will take place when the famous Vern herd...

They're so short!

Julian Gallimore was at the sale of the captain's pedigree Herefords.

They're so small when you look back on them,

in comparison to what we have now.

The sale has become a turning point in the story of the modern Herefords.

Julian was once the auctioneer.

He's retired now, just a ringside observer.

There is my bid. At 2,200.

But the art of spotting bids was honed back in the '60s.

AUCTIONEER CONTINUES

The Vern herd was the creation of one of the greatest cattle-breeders the world has ever known.

Captain de Quincey, who died last year.

Mrs Gordon, the stockman's wife, leading the first bull round.

Brilliant.

To look at this vast congregation - my father there,

selling - many of them just to look, but many of them to try and buy.

There is a photograph of me wearing glasses.

Altogether, the buyers have paid about 700,000 for the various animals.

The highest price of all, over 47,000 - a world auction record - was paid for Vern's Scorpio.

To average just about £1,500

for everything - calves, cows - it proved to us,

proved to me as a relative youngster, that Herefords were supreme.

But the triumph masked a threat.

Britain's native breeds were about to fall foul of a new drive - a fight against fat.

In the 1950s, we began to really

study and get an understanding

of the impact of diet on health.

Before then, food was something that kept you alive.

We were beginning to see the problems.

One of the biggest problems was saturated fats.

Now saturated fats mostly come from grazing animals, like beef and sheep.

The traditional British breeds, the Hereford and Angus,

were easier-fattening and, therefore, did carry a lot of fat.

The bulls the post-war government had seen as a solution to increasing

home-produced beef had now become the problem.

The challenge for government was to produce beef with less fat.

The question was,

what are we going to do about it?

It was decided to do it genetically - we would have to -

but we could speed up the genetics

by actually doing it using imported cattle.

Cattle like the Charolais, coming past me now, were a breed that hadn't been bred for fat.

They'd been bred for size, for pulling and pushing things.

They developed much more lean and much less fat than our breeds...

In 1961, a group of Charolais bulls arrived on trial.

A decade later, Mike was on the committee that reviewed the experiment.

It was chaired by Professor Ian Holmes.

The Holmes Committee, which I was the new kid on the block on,

I was the youngster, they came to the conclusion

we should import more Continental breeds.

Hence, the next importation in 1971 was Limousin, Blonde d'Aquitaine and Simmental cattle.

Being overtaken now, given a lead.

It had a remarkable effect because the imported breeds

added that size and growth rate to our beef production system.

And they bred cattle to produce that extreme beef-ness - that huge loin and that huge back end.

Well, you won't see a finer line-up

anywhere in the country than the one you've got in front of you now.

By the late 1970s, Continental invaders were replacing

the Hereford and Aberdeen Angus bulls.

Today, a Belgian Blue presides at Warp Farm.

He'll father calves that will produce

the less fatty meat customers have been taught to choose.

Colin and his son Neil are selecting cattle ready to go to market.

She'll not grow any more cos she's how much Holstein in her.

'Neil would never be anything else but the farmer.'

He's a nice shape, he is.

I reckon he'll do right well at market.

He's got a hell of a back end on him.

He never wanted to do anything else.

That's Neil on his bicycle.

He's throwing stones and things.

He's acting for the camera.

That's what he's doing.

He's going for ice cream now.

This ice-cream van started calling on us

when we first got married 50 years ago.

It has just been retired, last year, has that van.

The Wrights bought their farm in East Yorkshire in 1958.

Since then they've followed the trend and expanded production.

They changed the cattle, they improved the land

and they started to grow cereals for their cattle.

This is feed barley.

It's grown for feeding the bullocks.

This is the same field where Grandpa Wright once kept his cattle.

In those days, it could take up to four years before they'd be fit for the butcher.

The beasts this barley is for will be ready in about 15 months.

It's not too bad a crop, considering this field

was nowt but marshland before we drained it.

Them days, on that film, it was the old tractor-drawn class.

Colin's just lifting up a sack of stuff there. He just looks up.

-He's in heaven.

-SHE LAUGHS

It's lovely.

-Lift my cap.

-That's right.

Right, we'll go on.

-And were you in heaven?

-No.

He's just laughing. It's just lovely. A lovely piece.

This was the way the beef industry was moving.

More barley was being fed to cattle.

Barley speeds up growth and puts a layer of fat on the beef.

That's where the taste comes from.

We imported the Continental breeds

because we wanted animals

that didn't get too fat.

We almost immediately found that they didn't get fat enough,

because these big breeds like the Charolais

were never bred to produce the roast beef of Old England.

Most of them were actually draught animals, bred to pull ploughs and the like.

You can't finish them in the traditional ways at pasture.

So we went for an animal that didn't produce enough fat,

and we found it didn't produce any at all, so we had to feed it barley.

AUCTIONEER COUNTS, CHATTERING

Hey up. Hey up, get rid on it.

The Wrights' barley-fed, Continental cattle are on their way to the butcher.

They've grown quickly.

They are over 500 kilos.

AUCTIONEER TAKES BIDS

65, 65.

One beast will cut up into about 600 meals.

The buyers are judging the price they bid on the shape of the beasts.

Is it carrying lean meat in the right places?

Will there be a lot of fat to cut off?

53, 54, 55, 56.

They'll pay about £900 per animal.

59, 60.

As these Continental invaders moved into Britain in the '70s,

so did a standardised way of assessing the carcasses.

This is a way of describing the shape of the cattle.

It starts with E,

which is the best, and then goes down to E, U, R, O, P.

A EUROP grid with E for the biggest and leanest

and P for the skinnier carcasses.

On the E side, we'd be looking at the Continentals. Belgian Blue.

Down into the Rs, where we come into

the better end of the Angus and some of the Hereford.

And lower down still, once O,

once again still some of the Angus and Hereford.

Below that, we are getting into dairy/dairy crosses.

The EUROP grid brought Britain into line with the Continent

just at the time we joined the Common Market.

And just as the bull subsidy scheme of the post-War years

had given the Aberdeen-Angus and Hereford bulls a boost,

so in the '70s the EUROP grid turned the tables on these native breeds

in favour of the big European cattle.

It's twenty past one,

and Margaret's joint of beef is ready for the table.

That's what you call an oven buster.

My favourite piece.

-It's one of the joint that comes out bigger than it goes in.

-Yes.

The EUROP grid helped turn beef farmers

against the smaller, fattier native breeds.

We have mostly Belgian Blues. They are a lot leaner.

Butchers like 'em because that's what they can sell.

They have to have what they can sell. That's what we have to produce.

These breeds produce meat in bulk and with less fat.

If you look at them, they've that big back end.

That's where all the topside is.

All the dry meat.

By the 1980s, the big beasts from Europe had become dominant.

Is Colin getting a bit?

It's summertime in Scotland

and Robert Parker's new-born calf has grown.

She's nearly three months old.

Robert is moving his herd to new pastures.

We're going to a fresh bit of grass.

We try and move them round every two or three weeks, just to give them a fresh bite.

Until recently he farmed in the same fashion as the Wrights at Warp Farm.

He crossed a Charolais bull with cows from the dairy herd

and finished the calves on barley.

Then he spotted something in the data.

I got the figures back onto the computer here.

He'd bought a few cows that were Aberdeen Angus cross Hereford.

Then I noticed something to do with the breed of the mother, which is also on the spreadsheet.

He compared when their calves were ready for the butcher

with those from his dairy cows, and there was a big difference.

The ones with the Hereford Angus mothers fattened 40 days quicker.

40 days at 10-12 kilos a day is nearly half a ton of barley,

so that's roughly about £60 or £70,

just because you had a different mother.

His data showed that calves from Aberdeen Angus cross Hereford mothers

were quicker at converting food into beef.

It's something the ranchers back in the '30s would have known.

Robert won a scholarship to travel to the southern hemisphere

and discovered that the sons of the cattlemen

who had imported the bulls back in the '30s

were crossing the two breeds to produce what's called black baldies.

Their black coats from the Aberdeen Angus, their white, so-called bald face,

that trait always passed on by the Hereford bull.

This is not a new system.

This is basically what the rest of the world does.

I mean, I've travelled and I have seen it working,

and it certainly works really well.

The new bull is making his majestic arrival.

But Robert couldn't have changed his cattle unless the pedigree breeders

had improved the bulls since the days when the old films were made.

He certainly wouldn't be using a black Aberdeen-Angus bull

if the size of the breed hadn't been restored since that low point

in the 1960s by breeders like Willie McLaren.

That was me when I was a 16-year-old.

That's what I mean when I talk about belt-buckle cattle.

I was just a 16-year-old boy

at the time really.

On his farm in Perthshire, Willie McLaren has played

a leading role in increasing the size of the black cattle.

In those days we were talking about belt-buckle cattle.

You see where he's coming up to me now?

They talked about belt-buckle cattle, and that was down here.

For a comparison of size, there's a picture of me holding my hand up

with a bull that was double the age of this one,

and my hand's away up here.

And you can see how small he is because that's my hand up there.

He was probably the shortest legged bull that I actually ever produced.

And then this is the most extreme one of the lot.

He was actually almost three year old when this was taken.

So, '64 was really

when we hit the bottom of the trough.

A 40-year task lay ahead.

This film was taken in the '70s.

It shows Willie with the small cattle.

This is back in 1977, and it shows me and another breeder

assessing the bulls at the bull test centre in Aberdeen.

It was when everyone was leaving the breed that Willie took the biggest gamble of his working life.

I decided, instead of going into another breed, in the 1980s,

that I would buy the best cattle I possibly could.

I saw this bull in Canada.

By the time I'd shipped him in, it cost me £30,000,

which was a tremendous gamble.

It's just the same in the stock market at the present time.

Those that are brave enough will take a gamble and buy the shares that are at rock bottom.

They're the ones that are going to have the best rewards.

Willie had made his high-risk investment.

He'd have to wait for his return.

The beef industry was changing.

No longer were animals slaughtered behind the shop.

The way meat was sold changed.

High-street butchers gave way to supermarkets,

and customers were removed one more step

from the process of putting food on our plates.

The butcher's van was parked up for the last time,

and meat began to come in pre-wrapped packets.

The product had to have eye appeal.

It had to have the right pink colour

and be lean to catch the customer's eye.

Beef, out of all of the red meats,

is probably the one that raises the most emotion in customers' minds.

It's what they used to have when they went to their grandmother's,

or it's the way their mother used to cook Sunday lunch.

It's the emotion around that,

and it comes out in beef more than any other red meat.

And the family joint is ready too.

But that sentiment and the industry

were about to suffer a kick in the teeth.

After the debate about fat in the '70s,

and the early '80s worries about red meat, a time bomb exploded.

About 1984, 1985, BSE hit us in a big, big way.

The pictures on television

of cows falling over.

It was clearly a horrible, horrible disease of cattle.

BSE was a problem of the dairy industry.

It was a problem of feeding

bits of cattle back both to dairy cows and their young calves

taken from them at birth.

And in the public's mind, it was unnatural.

Cows are supposed to eat grass,

they're not supposed to eat bits of other cow.

The government at first tried to reassure us that this was only

a disease of cattle, it could not be transmitted to humans.

And then of course we found that it could.

My wife is very worried about this mad cow disease,

and I think that, for the time being,

we won't buy beef for the time being.

It completely blocked all exports of British beef.

It could have completely crippled the beef industry.

In fact, it didn't.

There was a drop, which was about 20 per cent which was

sustained probably until about 1995, which is quite a significant drop.

But for a disease which has an incubation period of many years,

the real blip only lasted about six to eight months,

which just shows how irrational people are.

For the Aberdeen Angus breed,

this disaster proved to be an unexpected opportunity.

That one, wasn't it? 108, wasn't it?

In the 1990s, David Gunner, a supermarket supplier, was part

of a partnership that took up the cause of the little black cattle.

The breed was largely grass fed and so less associated in the public's mind with BSE.

And as this 1959 film, made by butcher Peter Colebrook, argues,

it had an advantage over leaner meat.

The flesh is fine-grained with an abundance of marbling.

Those flecks of fat he was pointing out held the taste.

The task of the industry was to rebuild confidence, and to rebuild

confidence in the industry through things like traceability, provenance.

But also, a bunch of people, some people perhaps more forward-thinking

than others, had been realising that some of the things

that Peter Colebrook was talking about

were actually things that we'd lost and ought to try and get back to.

David's father was a butcher.

He knew Peter Colebrook in the years when the small native breeds

were still feeding the nation.

I knew him.

He was a lot younger in this film than when I knew him,

but he was a friend of my father's.

They worked together on carcass competitions.

'..ready for transport to the retail shop.'

David Gunner reassessed the values Peter Colebrook stood for - taste and texture.

In 1991, a partnership with a big supermarket was the start

of sourcing beef from native breeds.

In terms of how that compares

with what customers were buying in the '50s and '60s...

Heather Jenkins was instrumental in putting Aberdeen Angus

and Hereford beef on the shelves and behind the supermarket counter.

-What can I get for you, madam?

-Can I have two of the rib-eye steaks?

The industry had to find a way of doing

what the traditional butchers had once provided.

A direct link back to the source of their beef.

To do that, we had to ensure traceability of the bulls,

of the cows that the calves were coming from,

and the whole traceability right through the system.

And we've done that since 1991.

Superb. Thank you very much indeed, madam.

-Lovely, thank you.

-Thank you.

The supermarket is our link with the production chain.

We don't go on the farms, we don't see the farms any more.

But we do go into the supermarket.

So, if we're going to trust the provenance of our food

and the quality of our food,

the people we really have to trust are the supermarkets.

In the livestock country of mid Wales,

Neville Stacey was one of the first to join Heather Jenkins' scheme.

He bought a black Aberdeen Angus bull in 1990.

He's had an eye on the quality market since.

This bullock here is only young, but you can see his back is broad.

There'll be a tremendous amount of meat along that top line.

And when he's finished, he'll cut out some very nice sirloins,

which are the high-value cuts.

BSE was a classic and very dramatic...

..demonstration of how, in the public mind,

how unnatural intensive farming had become.

And so there was a great yearning for more natural schemes,

of which, of course, suckler beef out on range

or on the mountains is the quintessence.

Neville is getting the grass in for winter feed.

He's seen big changes since he moved into the hills.

The old films told a story of how farmers were paid to reclaim

the uplands and turn them into pastures.

It was part of the post-war drive to increase farm output.

BSE changed the pubic debate.

Over 20 years, subsidies moved

from supporting production to backing environmental schemes.

..traditional hay meadow.

Now Neville Stacey, a man who spent a lifetime

increasing the number of animals on his hill,

gets grants for growing flowers.

After years of increasing production, what does it

feel like to turn his grassland back into traditional meadows?

That's a rather emotive question.

From a farming point of view,

who's always been seeking production,

it seems wrong.

But, from a business point of view, at in the present times, when we are

being encouraged now to go down this line, yes, it's all right.

We'll take a useful crop of fodder here, which will keep cows.

And this is where the native breed cow is coming in.

She's able to convert this type of forage into production

and to grow her calf through the winter.

So, when I look at it from that point of view, yes, it's all right.

It's been an exciting farming time,

but I suspect a lot of what we've been doing, as time goes on,

will not be sustainable, because of the oil.

Now Neville has gone organic.

The crops we are harvesting here today,

compared to what we would have been doing ten years ago,

we're probably harvesting a third of what we would have been then.

The old ways are being re-learned.

There's probably where the future of British agriculture lies. Clover.

There's one that's in flower.

I suppose they're a chemistry factory in themselves...

..in as much as that will fix nitrogen through photosynthesis from the sun.

Neville is responding to history

and reinterpreting the knowledge of yesterday.

And we've seen the same with the cattle,

the red and white Hereford

and the black Aberdeen Angus.

I happen to believe, it's rather perverse, this,

but I happen to believe that the Continental invasion

actually was the saviour of many breeds, but in particular the Angus and the Hereford.

In the '70s, Willie McLaren bet the farm on a hunch, that the little black cattle could make a comeback.

This is a six-month-old heifer calf,

which weighs 340 kilos,

which is pretty close

to what the yearling weight was for a bull back in the '40s and '50s.

He gambled that he could get

the cattle from the size of this calf held by his granddaughter

to the stature of the bull being led by his son.

Now here we are bringing up a yearling bull,

and it just shows you how much the breed has progressed.

This is what we call the belt-buckle cattle at this age.

Whereas now we're up to what, probably shoulder-high.

You can see the difference in it, even though only just

40 years of breeding, the difference.

We have changed this Aberdeen Angus breed.

Three generations of McLarens,

and 40 years of breeding have effected a revolution.

And it's been done by measuring.

First recording heights and weights,

and now they even look under the skin.

This is the big one.

This is measuring the eye muscle area.

So he's looking at the muscle between these two ribs,

and looking for this movement up and down.

-That's his rib-eye steak.

-SHE CHUCKLES

This is the data that's changed the breed

since the low point in the '60s.

My thinking at that time was if I stuck with Angus, I could get size

to compete with the Continentals and also with the quality in the meat.

That's what I set out to achieve,

and I was kind of out on a limb for a number of years, but I can now say

that I have no regrets in sticking to them.

Another important part of the breed plan

is we measure the scrotal circumference

of the bull's testicles because it relates to their fertility

when they're working later in life.

And he is...at the widest point...

..42.

42's a good measurement for an Aberdeen Angus, which was that size.

"I'm a bigger boy then you," he's saying to these other fellows.

Robert Parker is looking for a new bull.

Nice straight bull. He'll do the job fine.

He's probably too expensive for me, though.

He's seeing what the McLarens have to offer.

We can always do a deal.

The bulls are here for sale, and that's always what we do, so...

On his farm he crosses Aberdeen-Angus and the red and white Herefords.

But can he afford this bull?

So is he just...about the 3,000, then?

About, but a bit more. THEY CHUCKLE

No, he would be 4,000.

Aye, I thought that.

Robert is using the new, bigger bulls to meet the demands

of today's beef industry.

From the '70s, the Continental cattle delivered meat in bulk.

That's a good taste.

It was bred lean and taste suffered.

-Tender or tough?

-Slightly tough.

I would say fair with that one.

Now a group of farmers are doing consumer research.

Robert is part of the group.

Mm-hm.

They've got a machine that bites meat to gauge its tenderness, and they can measure taste as well.

They want to adapt the 1970s EUROP grading grid,

that system which favoured the bulky carcasses of the Continentals,

to include a taste and tenderness measurement.

EUROP, when it came in, I think it was needed. It really was needed.

At that time, native breeds

were quite poor on the meat yield,

and the EUROP grid has done exactly what it was designed to do.

The problem is that it's gone so far that the producers are actually

focusing so much on producing this fancy carcass

that they've forgotten that it is about eating quality.

It's a consumer that's going to eat that eventually.

The new grading system, if we manage to get something in, would take this into account

and hopefully reward farmers for eating quality and not just yield.

It's the end of the year in Scotland.

Robert's brought his spring calves in.

These are this year's calves.

These were all born April, May, so they're about eight months old now.

They'll spend the winter indoors eating grass silage.

But first Robert clips them to stop them overheating.

This stops them sweating too much in the shed.

The calves will grow on in the shed.

The cows will winter outside.

This has been an 80-year story of the cattle

that have shaped farmers' lives...

..and stockmen who have shaped the cattle's fortunes.

In it, there have been quiet revolutions,

and a rediscovery of old values.

I think the future is quite rosy,

with beef of known provenance from the hills

seen as this luxury product you eat when you go out into restaurants,

and also as a part of an overall

stewardship of some of the loveliest country in the United Kingdom.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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