Cows in culture and soil
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From Cuyp's paintings, to Wordsworth's wanderings to modern dairy management and soil fertility via Victorian Industrial farming and talking Swiss satirical cows - Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks joins Matthew Sweet in a programme marking the anniversary of the poet Wordsworth, who helped shape attitudes to landscape. Other guests include New Generation Thinker Seán Williams from the University of Sheffield and Professor Karen Sayer from Leeds Trinity University who is writing Farm Animals in Britain, 1850-2001 and is part of a team of academics working on the project https://field-wt.co.uk/
James Rebanks is the author of English Pastoral: An Inheritance; The Shepherd's Life and The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd. An exhibition of paintings by Cuyp (1620–1691) at the Dordrechts Museum in Holland will now run from 3 October 2021– 6 March 2022
Sean read his own translation from the 1850 Novel "The Cheese Dairy in Cattlejoy" by Jeremias Gotthelf.
The contemporary cow-art Karen mentions is in an online exhibition at Reading's Museum of English Rural Life https://merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/online-exhibitions/sire/
Producer: Alex Mansfield
You might also be interested in the Free Thinking Collection of episodes Green Thinking which includes discussions about soil, Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring, a Free Thinking festival discussion with James Rebanks and anthropologist Veronica Strang, Peter Wohlleben on trees, George Monbiot on the Green Man myth, Chris Packham on music https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 Our Woolly episode looks at sheep from medieval wool merchants and images of the lamb of God to Sean the Sheep on screen https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009bw4
You can find a discussion about Wordsworth with the directors of Lancaster University's Wordsworth Centre for the Study of Poetry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p087kr4n
Radio 3 is broadcasting new writing from the 2020 Contains Strong Language Festival in Cumbria on The Verb and as the Radio 3 Drama.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | My name's Matthew Sweet and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast, and it's so beefy. |
| 0:41.5 | This episode is all about cows, so mind where you're putting your feet. |
| 0:45.7 | Milking time begins after this message. |
| 0:48.8 | Before your chosen podcast, my name's Ian McMillan, keeper of the box of delights that is the verb. |
| 0:55.4 | If you like poetry and stories and spoken word and performance |
| 0:59.3 | and language that falls between the cracks, then the verb is for you. |
| 1:04.5 | Download us wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:07.6 | Let us consider the cow, the baroque cow, sunlit in a Dutch painting of the 17th century, |
| 1:14.7 | the naive cow, the star of another genre of art, a kind of 19th century agricultural pawn |
| 1:22.3 | that gave Betty Page curves to the British bovine body, and the beast itself, the great four-legged, four-stombered |
| 1:31.7 | behemoth with those swaying paps that have made so much possible. Mr. Whippy, Wensleydale, |
| 1:38.9 | the ordeal of Miss Muffet, certain kinds of 1930s plastic. There she stands steaming on a hillside, |
| 1:47.2 | loosing a cascade of excrement onto the grass. Do we feel sorry for her? Poor cow manipulated |
| 1:54.3 | over centuries into becoming an organic machine that does lactation and steak. Do we celebrate her, a marker in the landscape, |
| 2:03.4 | showing us that the countryside is still the countryside? Or is she really the villainess of this |
| 2:10.0 | story, producing gigatons of world-warming methane that may lead us to ask, Daisy, is this planet |
| 2:17.2 | big enough for the both of us? |
| 2:19.0 | Well, I can't answer these questions, but I've corraled some people who can. |
... |
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