Woodlot Management in the Anthropocene: Part Three

“A constructive and careful handling of the resources of the earth is impossible except on the basis of large co-operation and of association for mutual welfare.”

— Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

 

Winged Elm Farm has approximately 40 acres of hardwoods, and last year I posted a couple of pieces on our woodlot management plan, here and here. In them and here, I use the term “Anthropocene,” the period in Earth’s history when the impact of human existence shapes the natural world and climate. I chose that term to distinguish the plan we’ve embarked upon as being a more old-fashioned management approach.

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A large “wolf” tulip poplar in a new growth woods on our farm.

As we began the process of managing our woodlots, our biggest hurdles were knowledge and the preconceptions of being moderns. Our mindset was geared toward extraction, the basis of our current economy. Our innate resistance to extractive processes like clearcutting was primarily why we had avoided managing the woods at all.

But a Wendell Berry piece three years ago spurred our interest in sustainable management, and a casual review of the 19th century literature based on the knowledge of small farms past showed us a clear path for applying the same model. How markedly different was the approach of those manuals and handbooks — managing woodlands for the benefit of farm and watersheds for future generations — from the “modern” practices of that century and the 20th of the extractive industries.

Last week, as we prepared to take hogs to market and dreamed of the variety of dishes and cuts we were to enjoy, the phrase “nose to tail eating” came to mind. The term is used to describe the process that takes advantage of every bit of the animal. It’s a way to honor the animal’s life and sacrifice.

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One of our Haflinger drafts hauling a small log out of the woods.

The slightly modified term “nose to tail logging” aptly describes a good woodlot management program, the constructive use of every bit of the harvested tree: for our benefit, for the soil’s benefit, for the watershed, for the wildlife, and, most important, for the woodlands’ benefit.

There are innumerable old texts on managing a woodlot, books that describe how to select harvest, reseed, preserve soil, amend and improve the soil. So far, the approach as applied to our farm seems to be working — from selection to lumber, chipping to removal, sowing mushrooms and providing firewood, leaving wildlife habitat to conservation. Future generations will need to be the final judge.

A couple of newish books, too, have helped us flesh out the specific and the larger challenges to sustainable woodlot management.

Paul Stamets’ work, especially his book Mycelium Running, helped reshape the way I viewed the soil and its structure in the forests, a soil as in need of care and replenishment as that in our pastures. And, of course, it opened my eyes to the use of fungi to facilitate those ends.

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Poplar lumber newly cut on our Norwood mill.

But the mindset of extraction lingers as the world’s dominant invasive species. Azby Brown’s recent book, Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan, helped me correct some of that dominant outlook. A study of the Edo period (early 1600s to mid-1800s), his chapters on farming, and particularly the one titled “Guardians of the forest,” were revelatory. The care and thorough use of all woodland products, the steps to endlessly recycle natural products through multiple generations of use, the care of water sources, waterways, and riparian buffers — all were woven in that period into an overall societal commitment to what we would now call planetary care.

The practices of the traditional Japanese and of our own small-farm woodlot ultimately rely on a larger cultural awareness of the need for such intensive conservation of both the woodland and the products derived from it. The evidence of stress on our Eastern hardwoods from escalating climate change is before us. To be successful in both harvest and preservation will require some old-fashioned individual commitment and a multi-generational commitment by our culture.

Our farm can commit to the first. It remains to be seen if there is the will for the second. And that is the real challenge.

Meaningful Work

Bush-hogging the hill pasture in preparation for winter, I came across a large buck with an impressive antler spread. He leapt in front of the tractor, then bounded over a fence into a neighbor’s field, which, unbeknownst to him, was a no-kill farm, a safe zone where he could, if he only stayed put, live out his entire life without danger. I then watched him run across the field and jump another fence, and he was gone. Another circuit around the hill and I saw a couple of trucks pull up at the farm. I headed down and greeted the men arriving to cut down four massive trees alongside our drive.

The trees, one white and three red oaks, needed to be felled expertly to avoid nearby power lines and a neighbor’s house. The men had to climb 60 feet and, from an eagle’s perch, drop the limbs. Once the upper limbs were cut, they laid the trunks across the drive and cut them into 10-foot-long sawlogs. Ultimately, the largest logs will be milled into lumber, the crowns mulched, the limbs cut into firewood, the stumps drilled and plugged with oyster mushroom spawn. Logging 007

Dancing high above the ground with running chainsaws is dangerous work, but it was done with real purpose, joy, and competence, something that seems at odds with the lethargy of many young men I encounter. It’s a lethargy that seems endemic: man-boys extending their adolescence well into adulthood, living at home, gliding into their thirties without experiencing responsibility.

Not so long ago 80 percent of American high schools offered vocational training. But in just a 20-year span those totals were reversed, including at our own rural school. Now boys (and girls, too) enter biological adulthood without getting any practical schooling in crafts that formerly allowed them to earn a living and, more importantly, self-respect. The fallout from this lack of preparation for honorable and satisfying work: Young men like my neighbor who drive 40 miles to Knoxville to work in a call center, selling jewelry to elderly women.

For reasons not fully understood, we continue to entertain the idea that all youth are destined for college. Without any statistical evidence, I’d still hazard a guess that the average electrician, plumber, or surveyor out-earns a significant portion of college grads.

My gut feeling that self-worth comes from tangible outcomes, whether raising livestock, felling trees, or wiring a barn, is backed up by personal experience — my own father’s landscape, for example, where a lifetime as a construction engineer allows him daily to see the evidence of an industrious life.

Matthew Crawford echoes the same sentiment in his insightful book Shop Class as Soulcraft:  “The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect on the world.”

Should the young men fed into our current system, one that devalues particular competence and focused physical activity, descend into a lifetime of malaise and meaningless boasting, it will not come as a surprise. Nor will there be any surprise should those rural young men who find employment in crafts, trades, or farming have a stronger sense of purpose and self-worth.

As the day ended, the cutting crew got in their pickups. They grinned, waved, and drove away. Another job well done but without ceremony.

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Reading this weekend: Marcus Terentius Varro’s, On Agriculture.

 

Where does the time go

The lambs can see the light on in my study. One does wonder what goes on in their not-too bright brains. But clearly the connection is made that the master or possibly their slave is up and should be attending to their needs. Those bleats in turn raise the hopes of the sheep in the barn. Which signal to the hens to clamber off perches and wait for the door to open. There are bugs to catch, my good man, get to it!

After tending to their endless needs we spent some time helping a neighbor dig twelve post-holes. They are in the process of installing a new solar array for their farm. Working the auger always takes a few practice holes to get in the swing. But we were in fine form after four were dug. It was on the fifth hole that our luck changed as we buried the auger in the ground. After squandering an hour trying to get it out of the ground we regrouped. Our neighbor hit upon an easy solution. We removed one of two bolts holding the auger onto the head assembly, ran a piece of rebar through the hole and spun it counter-clockwise. A miracle!

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Green tomatoes ready to be pickled

Returning back home for a well-earned nap I awoke to find the season of salvage continuing with a session of making dilled green tomatoes. After harvesting about ten pounds of small green tomatoes, Cindy cleaned, halved and quartered them in preparation for canning. Adding a bit of garlic, dill, coriander seeds to the mix we quickly knocked out six pints and two quarts. I salted down the rest into a crock and put them in a corner of the study with a half-dozen demijohns of wine and perry. All were bubbling away merrily by morning.

We finished up our weekend with a two hour excursion up to Hancock County. A wild, beautiful and very isolated county of only 7000 souls. Cindy wanted to view and possibly purchase a new draft pony as companion to Caesar. After crossing the Clinch Mountain, with innumerable switchbacks up and down, we finally arrived at our destination. But only after a long drive down a one lane road, where an oncoming car backed a quarter mile to allow us to pass.

Cindy viewed and she purchased and we returned home. The whole of the weekend passing quickly. Leaving me with that feeling that somehow I haven’t measured up, was not productive. And to cap it off where I started, the lambs are now bleating for dinner.

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Reading this weekend: Marcus Cato’s “On Agriculture”.

A Season of Salvage

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Muscadine and scuppernong grapes

There is a day each year. A day when you find yourself in the kitchen slicing the last of the season’s ripe tomatoes, a moment you have lived before, knew was in the cards. A day when the vines are still heavy with green tomatoes. A shortened day in which those green tomatoes will never fully ripen, destined instead for frying or making chowchow. How did that unstoppable summer deluge become a trickle and then a drought?

So begins fall, a chance to cherish what is passing before the weather turns to ice and snow — both too soon to dream of the fallow winter, when the cold months spoon next to the season of rebirth, that bare season, stark in its absence of greenery, when our native imagination colors in the palette of the riches to come, and too late to partake of the fresh bounty of the summer season just passed. The in-between season.

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A killing cone for chickens.

Fall is the season of salvage, of scouring the fields and paddocks for useful leftovers. In modern parlance, it is the sustainable season. A rush to harvest the last of the fruit to preserve in jams, jellies, chutneys, and wines. A time to take stock with some soul searching of Aesop’s Fables significance: Do we have enough firewood? Did we use our time well last winter, spring, summer in preparation for the next year? It is a time of movement, cattle to new pastures and forage to shelter. A time to glean the excess hens and roosters, butchering for hours to stock the larder for the gumbo and chicken and dumplings that will get us through the cold months to come.

Fall is a time of hog fattening. The cruel reward for an ability to gain 300 pounds in nine months comes with a knife wielded the week after Halloween. The bounty is delivered to us in sides of bacon, salted hams, corned shoulders, butcher’s wife pork chops, hand-seasoned breakfast sausages, headcheese, pates, and bowls of beans with ham hocks.

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Assorted lambs for winter customers.

Fall is also sheep-breeding time. As the days and nights cool, the ram has his pleasurable work cut out for him, making sure all ewes are bred. We, servant-like, make sure the ewes are conditioned for lambing, in good health, hooves trimmed, attending to their every need. Meanwhile, last winter’s lambs are grazing in their own pasture, fattening before they fall under the butcher’s sword in the remaining months of the year.

Fall is the season of coming face to face with imminent and unavoidable death. It is the fever of the dying year, the mumbled words from the patient in the bed trying to get his affairs in order, to make amends. So much to do and so little time.

It is a season of contrasts, when we eat a ripe tomato while composting the vine it grew on, feed a pregnant ewe while fattening for slaughter her year-old offspring, crush grapes and pears while sipping the wine made last year. Past, present, and future are jumbled in this most hopeful season, when we weigh the year to come to see what is left in the balance.

Like a culture that prepares for a future generation, this work is undertaken for a year not yet born.