Anne-Cécile Suzanne is a mixed farming farmer in Orne and a graduate of Sciences Po Paris.
I go up this morning under the tile shed, there, just behind my yard. It's cool and humid, the air stings the nose a bit. I woke up to the sound of a calf crying and a mother calling. I don't know how to help but remain sensitive to the slightest sound emanating from my animals, day and night. I would like to sleep soundly, but it's impossible. The watchful instinct, very maternal, emanates naturally from the life of a breeder. He keeps awake at night and motivated to fight, so that the cows will continue to roam the meadows tomorrow.
Suckler farming is the mother who raises her calf in a pasture in the spring. It's the grass that smells good in the summer. It is also the coming winter, accompanied by its rain and its wind. The suckling herd is then this herd which, when the gate is opened, takes the road to the barn running, towards the straw and the full troughs. These are the cool mornings that wake up to the sound of soft lowing, waiting for the grass to grow again and the sun to shine. Suckler farming is those nights spent watching, helping a calf to be born, a cow to grow. These are the hours spent caring for the animals, watching over their comfort and their health. These are those moments of beauty when, walking through the meadows,we see our herd coming towards us, with, in the middle, a few roe deer frightened by so much docility.
When we raise animals, at all hours of the day and night, without earning a good living, it is generally because we love them.
How can we doubt it?
Anne-Cecile Suzanne
The cages? Cows don't know. They graze in reservoirs of biodiversity known as meadows, take shelter in the shade of hedges at the foot of which partridges nest, maintain the wetlands where they are the last to enter and the mountain pastures, which, gently, without they are dying in the shade of the brambles. The cattle are certainly locked in the barn in winter, but their stalls are large and allow them to continue to live in a herd, as they like to do so much. Antibiotics ? They have become rare since vaccines exist. It must be admitted that microbes rarely develop in the field. Animal abuse? A mistreated animal is a suffering breeder, or a fool walking around, because they are everywhere.But still, when we raise animals, at all hours of the day and night, without earning a good living, it's generally because we love them. How can we doubt it? So yes, farm animals generally end their lives to be eaten. But this is their purpose. Each time in history that a farm animal has lost its purpose, it has simply ceased to exist. Think of draft horses, mules, which are only a few representatives of their once numerous ancestors. And who would be to say that because we are destined to die, we do not have the right to live? Who would be to judge that a life on a farm is not worth living when you are bovid? I don't feel the legitimacy of it,not after seeing them so many times playing, running, jumping, getting angry. My animals are happy and I'm happy to see them like this.
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So going up under my shed this morning, I wondered why so much was blamed on my job. Certainly, many judge without knowing the reality. The first thing would be to know what a suckler cow is, where the meat that we go to get from the butcher comes from, or even to know that a Charolais is not the same thing as a limousine. That an imported rib of beef is not exactly the same quality as the one produced at the breeder next door… We should also, collectively, come to understand that it is not on Youtube, Twitter or on TV that we see reality. Citizens should be asked to make the effort to travel, to visit, instead of spending their time judging by interposed screens. We are todaytoday so easily confronted with images from a hundred places at once that it becomes difficult to have the humility not to understand, not to judge, without seriously observing.
It is our plates that are weakening as French cows disappear, as orchards leave France, as French wheat loses its competitiveness.
Anne-Cecile Suzanne
It is certainly also necessary that the political decision makers finally decide. In this case, each farm today seeks the direction, the vision, for French agriculture. There is an urgent need to designate a collective objective for breeders as well as for cereal growers, winegrowers, arboriculturists... because by dint of paradoxical injunctions, the whole ecosystem is weakening, it is the farms that are closing, the meadows disappearing and with them the diversity of species born there. It is above all our plates that are weakening as French cows disappear, as orchards leave France, as French wheat loses its competitiveness.
So this morning, when I discovered a calf lying alone in the hay because it had gotten lost in the night, I put it back with its mother who was waiting for it.
And I tell myself that definitively, it is by dint of simple gestures that we will succeed in improving the destiny of everyone, including farmers.
These lines are part of it.
