Multi-purpose

This world of vivid green is our great hope, and our only one. And often it’s a lesson in patience. After another mild winter, you might have expected an early spring – but that’s not really the way it works. This wondrous riot of photosynthesis takes a while to build up. When I called Rusty Bittermann one morning in mid-May, just as he was returning to the house after putting his sheep out to graze, he remarked on the fact that forage growth hadn’t gained momentum yet. “It’s sort of sacrifice pasture, in some cases. I’m going to let them graze sooner than I should, and then reseed,” he said. “The stuff that’s going to stay in permanent grazing rotation for this summer, it isn’t quite ready yet – which is to say, it’s late…. It was below freezing here overnight. The soil keeps getting these low night temperatures.”

Although June frost is not unheard of (remember 2018?), by now Bittermann and his wife Margaret McCallum are likely well into grazing season at Rustaret Farm in Shamrock, P.E.I. – about a quarter-hour’s drive from the Confederation Bridge – where they have 200 acres of pasture and hay land. In addition to their Wiltshire sheep (both Horned and Polled), they raise heritage cattle. They have registered Kerry and Belted Galloway herds, but I was calling to ask about their American Milking Devons (AMD) – a breed that is listed as “critical” by The Livestock Conservancy. “They’re not at extreme risk, but they’re still in trouble, in terms of numbers. They’re not out of the woods,” Bittermann tells me.

AMDs are a triple-purpose breed, intended to be equally suitable for beef, for milking, and as a draft animal. The original stock was brought from Devon, in southwestern England, when the Pilgrims established the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts, in the early 1620s – two centuries before Devons became a recognized breed in Britain. In the New World, these hardy cattle proved invaluable as oxen, in addition to providing food for settlers. They soon spread up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Bittermann, a retired history professor, has spent some time investigating the breed’s introduction to Nova Scotia. “Looking at records from government officials in Halifax from the period after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) – the period when they were bringing the Planters, immigrants from New England, to settle the Annapolis Valley where they’d just ethnically cleansed the Acadians, and they grabbed most of the Acadian stock – the army folks and the speculators – and slaughtered them, so all of a sudden they needed new stock to populate the farms in Nova Scotia, and one of the things you see in the records I’ve been looking at – from the 1760s and early 1770s – are listings of Devon. I think some of the immigrants coming to the Annapolis Valley from Connecticut were bringing their Devons.”

It seems unlikely the breed persisted in Nova Scotia. Though a herd book for the American Devon was published in 1855, the more productive Shorthorn gained prominence over the next few decades. The remaining Devon herds were confined mainly to New England, where farmers valued their superior ability to thrive on rough land. By the middle of the 20th century, the breed was being steered toward beef production, at the expense of its dairy and draft traits – but a few producers maintained the low-maintenance, triple-purpose type, and those bloodlines have been carried forward by members of the American Milking Devon Cattle Association, which was established in 1978. “It’s a terrible name, by the way,” remarks Bittermann. “It would be better named a Heritage Devon or something like that.”

Nonetheless, he admits the name accurately reflects a concentration of herds south of the border, historically and still today. “I think the core of where they exist is Upstate New York down to Connecticut – some into Virginia. That’s sort of the belt where they are significant. And then there’s a breeder in Ontario named John Drummond – he has a herd that’s bigger than ours. The two of us are the main breeders in Canada.”

Rustaret Farm originally got two AMDs about 10 years ago, for household use. “We were so smitten by their behaviour – they’re just a perfect cow – we expanded,” Bittermann says. “We sell them to people who want a family cow that is easy to raise, that gives them good milk, and also – no matter what they cross it with, whether AMD again or any easy cross they can get out of the semen tank like Angus or Hereford – it gives them a good beef animal as an offspring.”

The farm gets more inquiries about Belted Galloways, partly because of their distinctive appearance, but Bittermann says he’s wary of selling them to inexperienced cattle people, because Belties can be pretty high-strung. AMD cows, which average about 1,100 pounds, are relatively docile. “They’re just really easy to fence and to work with – super smart, in a good way. They’re a beginner’s cow…. If you need to see how they’re doing with calving, you just walk up to them on pasture and lift their tail and look – they don’t run from you. With the Belties, forget that!”

Though Bittermann clearly has an interest in agricultural heritage, the guiding principle on this farm is sustainability, not nostalgia. “We’re very focused on being grass oriented, and trying to build soil carbon, soil health, and broader environmental and biodiversity objectives as we go along,” he says. “The three breeds that we have – they like good pasture, and we’re trying to create it for them, but they also make use of the rough pasture. I am rather sure that some of our dairy friends’ animals would die on our farm. We’re looking for low maintenance. We don’t use medicines at all – and we’re looking for that too. We’re grass alone; we don’t use grain. The genetics of the AMDs, as well as the others, have that capability – and not all genetics do.”

The farm is now experimenting with AMD-Beltie hybrids as a beef animal, while also maintaining a line of registered purebred AMDs. Bittermann sees conservation breeding as a practical matter – a precautionary measure for long-term food security. “What will the needs of livestock people be, going forward for the next decades and centuries? To think that we know enough to throw away that genetic inventory from selective breeding over the last few centuries is hubris at its worst, in my opinion,” he says. “Even on the basis of what we know, I can see the merit of the genetics we have here on the farm – and if you add to that some sort of humble recognition that you don’t know it all, and you can’t see into the future, it’s hubris to throw it away. You can’t get it back once you do that.”

This is not a slight against high-performance dairy breeding, which plays a key role in our commercial milk supply. As producers or consumers of plant-based and animal-based food, we should value diversity – in scale, production methods, supply chains, markets, and genetics. DL