Matthew came to the farm within a day of his first birthday, when his father started work with the pigs. It seems he was destined to become part of farm life from the very beginning.
As a child, Matthew had his own set of farm animals, including a herd of cows. By the age of nine, he had become fascinated by the herd records, keeping a close eye on calving, breeding, milking and births. John Bailey, our Herd Manager at the time, would send him the records even when Matthew was on holiday.
At the time, the herd was moving from the Ayrshires, brought over from Scotland in the 1950s to join my grandfather’s Shorthorns, to Friesians. My sister Annie remembers the ‘grading up’ celebrations with Matthew as animals were declared pedigree Friesians.
Matthew helped around the cows while he was still at school, making sure the milk went into the right churns and that the right calf belonged to the right cow. In 1977, he started working on the farm full time.
He streamlined the identification of animals, looked after the calves and took on responsibility for breeding, carefully observing the animals to identify the right time to serve them.
John Bailey was a very kind, supportive and expert Herd Manager, and encouraged Matthew to bring in semen from bulls from the US and Canada. These bulls had better protein genetics than were available through UK breeding at the time, and increasing the protein concentration of the milk was important because it makes better cheese.
By the mid-1990s, Matthew’s expertise had taken our heifers, our youngest breeding animals, to the top in the UK for their underlying ability to produce milk solids. We were one of the herds leading the charge towards high-yielding cows, which required animals to eat ever more conserved forage. We sold bulls to farmers across the UK and Ireland, and heifers across the country.
Matthew also contributed to the Wilson Committee, which brought together performance and breeding data from across the country and helped establish national standards for dairy cow records.
Even when he moved away from the farm to work in London several times over the years, he continued to choose the right bull for each cow, selecting one that would complement her qualities. In the early days of computers, he would go to Marylebone Library to find the most up-to-date information on bulls. Back at the farm, he would come in during the evening to use the one computer connected to the internet, which sat in its own little cupboard.
Creating the Quicke’s cow
In 1996, we recognised that our high-feeding, high-yielding system had moved us away from grazing, which is at the heart of Devon’s natural advantages. The milk from our cows simply wasn’t making the cheese we wanted.
Cows that thrive on grazing are smaller, hardier, more fertile and lower yielding. They are happy to walk out to pasture and graze for almost the whole year, calving in a tight block to make the most of the grass when it is at its lushest.
This was completely opposite to the large, high-yielding cows we had been aiming for.
Matthew graciously grappled with this whole new focus, launching the change with a sale of our 200 best animals for yield potential. He then set about converting our remaining high-yielding pedigree Holstein herd into a herd of crossbred cows.
He had the wider canvas of bulls from around the world and from different breeds, selecting them not simply for milk production but for their impact on cheesemaking.
And so he created the Quicke’s cow.
As always, his challenge was to work out how to make our animals the very best they could be.
Breeding is a long game, and by 2018 Matthew had achieved what he set out to do: our herd was competitive with the top 25% of New Zealand block-calved herds.
Matthew today
Matthew remains an essential part of the team, managing all things breeding, from serving and calving to making sure cows have properly recovered after giving birth.
He checks calf weights to make sure they are on track to become healthy adult cows that will hopefully live long lives in the herd. He monitors new bulls coming through from Scandinavian Red, Irish and New Zealand bull studs and makes sure all the animals have the right tags.
He is also invaluable when the vet visits, providing the background and history of the individual animals they are examining.
After almost 50 years of working with the herd, there can be few people who know our cows quite as well as Matthew.
Matriarchs of the herd
Some of the oldest cows in our herd can be traced back through Matthew’s breeding work and to cow families that date right back to the foundation of the herd.
Our cows are named after their dams. So, for example, if a cow called Prue has a daughter who is the eldest daughter, she might be called Prue the 2nd.
The Peggette family is the third largest family to come from the 1950s, with 534 animals recorded over the years. It is exceeded by the 620 Ginas and the 821 Ness family.
Today, the Peggette family is the eighth largest family in the herd, with 42 living animals.
These cow families are a living part of our history, carrying generations of breeding decisions, and Matthew has played an enormous part in shaping what our herd is today.
