This blew my mind:

The Youngs have been organic since 1974, and farm free-roaming beef cattle. The animals stay in family groups – or sometimes not, for she reveals some mothers fall out with grandmothers over how to raise a calf. Their pastures are full of “weeds” because they have realised that cows seek out different plants for a balanced diet. If injured, a cow will often eat willow.

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In reality, she has no truck with cheap tricks. “Some farmers will always scratch the top of a cow’s tail and the cow goes into ecstasies. I don’t like doing that. It’s using your power to make them like you. If a cow doesn’t like me, that’s fine.” Mostly, she communicates non-verbally, placing a hand on them. “You don’t need to talk. It’s the presence, or feeling calm.” And cows talk back to her: they may push, moo or simply seek her out, standing outside her kitchen window if they have a problem.

When Young was 13, she brought some young cows back to their main herd after a summer in a distant grazing field and remembers noticing how one stood intently “talking” to her mother. “I thought, crikey, they’ve missed each other,” she says. “We didn’t know they even knew each other because that calf had been taken from its mother at birth. In those days we were not as sensitive to their needs. Gradually it dawned on me. That was what farming life was, you just farmed and noticed things.”