Lincolnshire Cattle - Short-horn

Cattle Market in New Road Spalding c. 1890

If you look at pictures of cattle markets in the streets of South Lincolnshire in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century you see the dominance of one breed, the short-horn.

The short-horn was an economic asset to the cottager and smallholder. It provided the household with milk, and surplus milk could be churned into butter to be sold weekly at the local market town. Any calves produced from the household cow also supplemented income. Short-horn cattle could prosper adequately on low grade grazing, low grade hay or even straw eating feed that would see the modern high yielding dairy Holstein die. Short-horn cattle also provided a means of self-improvement and increasing of personal wealth for the enterprising smallholder. As arable farming required ever greater acreage and machinery the arable farming of smaller acreages was only viable using contractors. The smallholder could increase herd size over time enabling more land to be rented or purchased. As the 1880’s recession in agriculture hit hard in Britain the Fens saw increasing amounts of arable land either return to pasture or left derelict. We see reference to this in the 1893 obituary of the farmer Thomas Plummer of Freiston Shore near Boston who had once farmed a great acreage. I have met farmers that have referred to this both in the 1900’s and in the early 1930’s.

Livestock such as short-horn cattle and sheep provided some resilience. It is not an accident that such livestock farming areas as North Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland were hardly affected by the agricultural depressions compared  to Lincolnshire, the Fens and East Anglia.

Some of the earliest references  to short-horn cattle I have found are in Durham and Northumberland in the 1750’s referring to cattle markets and distemper outbreaks (rinderpest). The breed is generally regarded as originating from Durham and North Yorkshire and it became known as the Durham or Teeswater breed. Certainly the improvement of the breed was largely attributed to this region in the 18^th century. It is thought that the breed was certainly present in Durham and North Yorkshire in the 15^th century and was the product of localised breeding. The following gives some indication of how regional fashion usually responding to need affected what was looked for in cattle:

“……..in the early decades of the seventeenth century the Teeswater cattle were most large-framed yellow-ish-red, red and white, and white stock, odd specimens being of a ‘mealy-roan’ hue. Old Northumberland traditions also had it that numbers of the cattle showed dark noses and patches of blue on the skin, such markings being no doubt due to previous crossings with the native black cattle of surrounding districts. Persistence of ‘unfashionable’ noses and a dull blue slatey-roan may thus be accounted for, but to what extent the occasional blue or blackish tips in the horns are due to very old out-crosses it is impossible to say.”[1]

The short-horn is able to cope with varying conditions; outdoors all the time, even with calves in southern England; or housed for six months of the year in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. They were regarded as a good beef animal, but with flatter hind quarters than say a Hereford (or the Lincolnshire Ox!). Milk yields could be good for their time with a typical annual yield of 885 gallons per cow, a modern Holstein can produce three times that yield, but requires more input of quality food.

Short-horns were a good all-rounder, possibly  the ‘ford transit van’ of cattle which made them popular for export. Between 1891 and 1908 16,000 live short-horns were exported from Britain and Ireland with the largest volume being to Argentina.

In Lincolnshire the 19^th century saw the development of a regional breed of short-horn that has become  famous for its shape and colour – the Lincoln Red.

[1] James Cameron quoted in Stephens Book of the Farm 1909