An Economy of Satisfaction

Our language is shot through with sayings that originated in our agrarian past. “Don’t bet the farm” and “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” are two. Both have resonance for a small diversified farm such as ours.

 

Hogs in the woods

Hogs in the woods

This past week we have been working on our 12-month farm plan. No surprise to anyone, fencing does make its perennial appearance. But the biggest change, a turning of the wheel, brings us back to the first years of our farm: the presence of breeding stock. In those early years, we had Milking Devons, Berkshire hogs and a flock of Border Leicester sheep. But as the years progressed and our needs and the economy changed, we sold our breeding stock and focused instead on feeding out weanlings.

Over these past 16 years, we have bought virtually no meat from the grocery. In that time our farm has supplied all the beef, pork, lamb, chicken and duck for our table and for dozens of other families’ tables as well. Sales of the first three helped us pay off the farm and house in 10 years. Making this small-farm market economy modestly successful has taken work and sacrifice.

That work produces a household economy of vegetables and fruits for the table. In spring, summer, and fall the gardens feed us, friends, and the pigs. Fruits from the orchards and honey from our bees are used to make various country wines and meads, jams and jellies, and … to feed our pigs. A household economy measured in quality and satisfaction: Only a fool would wonder about financial inputs and gains when enjoying fresh crowder peas or a ripe tomato plucked from the vine.

Alongside hard work a degree of luck factors in. We were lucky that both of us escaped the Great Recession relatively unscathed. We know from the experiences of most of our neighbors that our farm life could have gone completely off the rails. Lucky as well that Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and that the documentary “Food Inc.” were released when they were. Both helped create a larger audience and culture that valued the work we did in producing food.

But the market wheel continues to turn and we adapt. Maintaining breeding stock, for many years, paid off. Then one day it didn’t. That’s when it became more cost effective to buy feeder pigs, weanling steers, and lambs from local farmers. Then the wheel turned again. The cost for buying lambs doubled, then tripled. Our response was to buy a few ewes and a ram and ease back into the breeding business. That small investment had quick returns both financially and in flock numbers: what started out as a flock of five or six now consists of 20 ewes, a ram, and 26 lambs.

Red Poll Cattle

Red Poll Cattle

Our return to breeding stock in pigs proceeded from the same reasons. Replacement prices have risen in recent times, if feeder pigs are available at all. Hence, the purchase of our sow, Delores. Likewise, cattle prices have exploded, while the prices paid by consumers have increased more modestly. Years ago we could get 400-pound replacement steers for about $300 a head. Last fall the price was $1300. The wheel turned with a vengeance. So this week we took receipt of two bred Red Poll cows and two heifers. We plan to phase out our existing stock of steers in the coming two years and, hopefully, replace them with steers from our new Red Poll herd.

“Don’t bet the farm” and “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”—there is a reason those two adages are still in use. Flexibility, foresight, diversity, and a bit of luck are all important in the success of a small-farm economy and of the larger culture.

But without factoring in an economy of satisfaction, the investment would all be for naught.

It’s Rodeo Time: the dearth of farm vets

No sooner had the young vet climbed out of the cattle chute than our two farm dogs, Becky and Teddy, darted from the barn, each with a bull testicle dangling from its mouth. It’s a macabre sight, but one all too familiar to anyone spending time on a farm.

Home Vet Supplies

Home Vet Supplies

As I wrote out a check, Doc Beason stretched his shoulder to work out a kink where a 700-pound bull calf had kicked him. All in a day’s work, I thought. The rain was pouring down on the last day of winter, the barnyard was ankle deep in muck, yet the farm vet emerged with a grin on his face. No doubt he had chosen the right profession. I thought back to last year, when on a snowy January day he cheerfully came out one Sunday morning and put a prolapsed uterus back in a favored ewe.

Beason’s predecessor, Doc McCampbell, sported the same demeanor: cheerful, whether working in rain or sun. A similar day had the elder vet castrating a long line of weanling bull calves. He jumped into the chute, exclaiming, “Let the rodeo begin!” and was promptly stomped and kicked for his enthusiasm.

These are unusual days in the large-animal vet field. Nationally, 80% of all graduates from vet school are women. Now, women can certainly do large-animal work, but most choose not to. The few who do, choose the more lucrative equine field. Being a farm vet isn’t as well paid as small-animal or equine. As poet-vet Baxter Black points out, “there is no anthropomorphological attachment as exists in the pet world.” In other words, why spend $100 on a ewe that may only bring $110 at the stockyard?

Traditionally, most large-animal vets were men who came from a farming background. As the number of family farms and farm families plummeted, so too did the number of young men who valued that life. Valuing the farm life seems an essential to anyone, man or woman, who contemplates such a robust career as a large-animal vet. And combining a love for the physical demands of the farm vet with the educational drive to get through vet school reduces the number of prospective farm vets even further.

The dearth of farm vets, coupled with economics, means that those of us who farm livestock learn to do much of the doctoring ourselves. And Cindy and I do most of the castrating, worming, vaccinating, assisting with births, and other nonsurgical doctoring. Still, not having trained professionals available for that prolapsed uterus, cow that eats a nail, or any of the other seemingly endless ways in which an animal’s health can be imperiled is worrisome.

Watching our youthful vet jump back in his truck, wave, and drive off to his next round, I’m relieved that in spite of the shortage of farm vets across rural America, our needs appear to be met for some time to come.

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Reading this weekend: Ancient Herbs by Jeanne D’Andrea

Basic Farm Lessons

The Lessons:

  1. Hogs: After you have been face down in the muck with pigs thundering over your body, check for broken bones first, launch temper tantrum second.
  2. To-do lists: Whatever I did with my time in the city, my farm to-do list makes that former “active” life seem downright sedentary.
  3. Phone calls: “Are you missing any cattle?” This question usually translates into, “You are missing cattle. And they are on the highway (or in my front yard or garden).”
  4. Fencing: First, it is never done. Second, even a secure fence means nothing to a hungry steer or a horny bull. I’ve watched steers clear a five-foot-high fence flat-footed and bulls uproot a 10-foot-wide gate from its hinges to enjoy the company of a cow in heat.
  5. Deer hunters: They routinely cut fencing, nail slats up trees for steps, leave behind deer stands, screw peanut butter jars onto trees, disturb the quiet and take a one-time permission to hunt as license to spend the winter in your woods. That said, if the sheer number of deer in the landscape is any indication … they are mostly lousy shots.
  6. Closing gates: The injunction to close the gate behind you means it should also be latched. Just pulling it closed doesn’t count. Trust me.
  7. Number of muscles: Most folks have no idea how many muscles are contained in the body. But I know, because over the past 16 years each has hurt at one time or another.
  8. Bad weather: When the temperature is in the 20s and the wind is blowing with gale force and you’re facing the elements as snow and sleet slants sideways, you tuck your head and keep working. Because the sow that needs shelter for farrowing can’t build it herself.
  9. Life and death: Wendell Berry’s “The Mad Farmer” says: “Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs to come.” The cycles of life, just barely understood when I lived in the city, are an intimate presence of each day on the farm.
  10. Watch the skies: A circle of vultures over the back pasture is the signal that there is a newborn calf or a dead yearling steer.
  11. Farm life: No one ever reminisces about summers spent with Grandma in her suburban rancher. Our race memories are of the land, and the land is where we return.

Mercy and Democracy: a mid-week musing

An interaction and an incident yesterday, one that I will not elaborate on in these pages, had me thinking about both mercy and democracy. Mercy is certainly not the sole providence of small farms. But Victor Hanson, in his excellent history, The Other Greeks, makes a persuasive case that Greek democracy developed out of the small farm culture of ancient Greece. That the nature of agrarian interactions, of modest finances and the need to accomplish the work with few hands led to an independence of culture and the martial willingness to defend it. Which led me back to wondering if mercy has some roots in an agrarian past? Whether mercy, in the end, is the ability to act decisively and also with compassion, all informed by the daily practice of intimate familiarity? And whether democracy without an informed exercise of mercy can thrive?

From my Winged Elm Farm Alphabet:

M is for Mercy

Mr. Blake says that “mercy has a human heart.” As a quality based on compassion for those in one’s care, mercy on a farm gets a lot of experience. It is frequently exercised in dispatching an animal when butchering, mercifully killing an injured duck whose leg has been pulled off by a turtle or any of the other seemingly endless ways of dying or being injured on a farm. Farming expands with a clear-eyed view the means and ways of compassion, strips the sentiment and leaves you with choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

Making Headcheese

No Cheese Needed: I spent a pleasant warm day yesterday making headcheese. Here is a post from the archives about the same.

Fromage de tete, coppa di testa, brawn, presskopf or souse, we are speaking here, of course, of headcheese, a frighteningly disgusting term for what turns out to be a delicious dish. The old saying that with a pig you eat everything but the “squeal” is true.

All porky goodness.

All porky goodness.

“If we are going to live on other inhabitants of this world we must not bind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savor to the fullest the beasts we have killed. Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib?” M.F. K. Fisher

Our new processor asked last year when I delivered four hogs if I wanted the heads. Immediately I knew that headcheese was in my future. But, time and energy interfered. The heads lay bundled up at the bottom of the freezer, forgotten, and eventually pitched at the dump. A year later, last week, another hog delivered and the same question. And, yes, was my answer.

So Saturday morning I hauled out the head, ears and trotters and placed them in the sink. Using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe for headcheese from the River Cottage Cookbook I gathered up onions from our garden, and clove, coriander, nutmeg, peppercorns, 1/2 cup of red pepper flakes from the larder. Added a big bundle of thyme, rosemary and parsley from the herb garden and got to work. Using my butcher saw I quartered the heads (I no longer do this step) so that it would fit into the pot easily. Adding the head, ears, trotters, onions, seasoning and herbs to a biggish pot of water and brought that to a boil. Once at a boil it smelled a bit like a crab boil.

Next step is to skim of the scum that floats to the top for about 30 minutes then reduce to a simmer for four hours. After four hours the meat and bones are removed. The liquid is reduced by 2/3 to a gelatinous soup. Next I pulled the meat from the head and jaw and finally chopped into a hash, peeled the skin of the tongue and did the same. Then mixed in a good sized clump of fresh parsley (chopped) and juice of a lemon (many use apple vinegar) and put the mixture in the fridge.

When the liquid was reduced it was strained into another pot. The onions and bundle of herbs were tossed. The meat mixture was then pressed into a terrine and the liquid was ladled over the top. Placed back into the fridge until the jelly set.

What a nice way to create a delicious dish from some very inelegant ingredients. I do recommend using the head next time for those of you who raise or buy a side of pork from time to time. Talk about nose to tail eating!

I’d close by recommending three other books, a holy trinity of sorts, dedicated to the concept that nothing gets wasted. They are all by Jennifer McLagan. Bones, Fat, and Odd Bits. Each is beautifully produced and full of wonderful recipes: Ex.  a hearty dish of ravioli made of brains and morels.

Now, where did I put my brains?

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Reading this weekend: Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: essays from a farmer philosopher by Frederick L. Kirschenman