I was on a stock-bull-buying visit to JSR Farms’ Givendale farm near Driffield in Yorkshire recently.
After looking at a number of bulls there, I was being shown around some of the other excellent cattle they have and I noticed a sheaf of wilting vegetation hanging from the roof apex above every batch of cattle.
I asked what these sheaves were and was told it was holly for the control of ringworm, which is what we often called ‘titter’ around here.
I first mentally checked it wasn’t April Fool’s Day then asked for further particulars, but all the while thinking my leg was being pulled.
Ursula Taylor of JSR told me a bunch of holly suspended above a batch of cattle will clear up ringworm in a couple of weeks or so and she assures me that it definitely works.
Richard Fuller, the technical director of the Beef Improvement Group, comes from Wales and says this has become a common practice in parts of that country.
Apparently holly growing wild is now practically an endangered species in some areas of Wales because it is all being cut to control ringworm, and so farmhouse gardens are being planted out with holly for this purpose.
This remedy seems to have spread to the Welsh from their cousins in France.
Ursula told me that the male holly which has no berries and sharper prickles is the best stuff for the job a good armful of this bound up into a sheaf and suspended above the cattle at housing is what is required.
A sheaf seems to last for a whole season.
I am normally pretty sceptical about herbalism, homespun remedies and old wives’ tales but JSR Farms take a very scientific approach to their farming. Everything JSR does is weighed, probed, tested, measured, costed and statistically analysed to within an inch of its life, so I guess they at least must think it works or they wouldn’t do it.
Today we normally associate holly with Christmas, but apparently the Druids thought it symbolised the male god carrying life through the winter and would grow it near their houses to lift the winter melancholy.
They also would wear crowns of holly on their heads in their rituals.
In England in olden times, it was apparently grown around the house to keep away witches.
No doubt that is also why it is very often found near churches and in graveyards.
The Irish made sure that it was grown well away from the house so that the fairies who lived in the house were not disturbed!
Just exactly how holly might control titter is not known.
Holly apparently does contain a number of fungicidal and insecticidal chemicals, including some mildly toxic alkaloids and caffeine, but it is difficult to believe that sufficient chemical is falling out of wilting holly to control titter in cattle.
It is, however, equally difficult to believe that its mode of action is spiritual but, then again, you never know! As the comedian Dave Allen used to say ‘’may your God go with you’’.
We have not seen titter on our farm since we stopped buying in store cattle several years ago, though oddly enough I did catch a patch of it on my forearm some years back and was prescribed ‘Griseofulvin’ by my doctor.
As we have no titter here, I am not able to try out this remedy myself, but those cattlemen who do have titter on their farms should be out with their secateurs pruning that old holly bush in the garden.
It can’t do any harm, and it just might work!