Category Archives: Climate Change

Notes on The Harvest

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For those of you with your cold Dixie longnecks in hand and ready to ride with me, we will resume our 2006 journey to Louisiana next week. Perhaps.

The onslaught of veggies has been underway since June. The bean field alone is threatening to overwhelm our storage capabilities, and certainly my energies. The tomatoes are weighing down the stalks even with a daily harvest. The okra grows from one inch to four inches and inedibility overnight (though some say the inedibility begins when it’s placed on the plate). But at least the dent corn is harvested and drying, so I can check it off my list.

And then there is this: A few evenings back I found a handful of Granny Smith apples that had fallen to the ground. Thirty minutes later, and a bushel basket was full and inside the house. Which, if my farm journal is any guide, means the Foxwhelp apples are almost ripe and will be ready to harvest any moment. A full morning will be required to gather the heavy crop from those large trees. The old orchard may have been planted with semi-dwarf rootstock 20 years ago, but … My How The Trees Have Thrived. The Yarlington Mills and both the Arkansas and the Kingston Blacks are a few weeks behind the Foxwhelp, meaning they will not be ready until mid-August.

It has taken many years to adjust my expectations of an apple harvest to our East Tennessee weather, and adjust them again to a warming climate. In my mind, perhaps because of nearly a lifetime of reading rural literature from England and other northern climes, my expectation was always that gathering takes place in the fall. Yet year after year the harvest disappointed with wormy, wooden, and rotten apples. I’d walk among the trees in October or November waiting for some transformation, not realizing that the transformation had happened a few months past.

Eventually my expectations for harvest time shifted from blaming the trees to simply resetting the calendar. As a farmer and orchardist, the fault was mine, a failure to observe being a chief liability for anyone who wishes to if not thrive, then at least muddle through with a minimum of waste. But wisdom is a tough mistress to keep if she is ignored.

Harvest tip: When your apple and pear trees bloom in March and April, expect your fruit to arrive in late July through September (unless, of course, your trees or fruit choose an earlier or later date to bloom or ripen).

The majority of trees in the orchard are old English and Southern cider varieties, so the apples will be sweated for a week after harvest. It’s a simple process in which they are piled in the barn on a tarp and allowed to further ripen and soften. After sweating, the cider press will be retrieved from the well house — wasps exterminated from their clever hiding places — and the pressing will begin.

If I were diligent about a thorough harvesting, I could easily expect 20 or more gallons of juice from these first trees. But, knowing that the Foxwhelps are just the start, with the remainder of the apples and the Kelly pears crowding into the calendar in August, I’ll aim to produce more or less 10 gallons of cider from each session with the press, allowing an extra gallon or two for apple jelly. The “cake” from the pressing and the windfalls gathered will be fed to the pigs.

August also brings the muscadine harvest, easily 200 pounds of fruit from our little vineyard that traditionally are turned into even more jelly and then some wine. I’ll distill some of the latter into brandy or gin using my five-gallon copper alembic still.

Harvest tip: Add herbs or spices when making preserves. Rosemary and ginger are perfect flavorings for apple jelly. A bouquet garni of black peppercorns and coriander seeds added to the juice can also give your buttered and jellied toast a nice pop in the morning.

September brings the endless supply of Callaway crabapples, which when fermented with honey make for a delicious mead. Hopefully, sometime between now and then, the figs will be ready — that is, if we ever get more than a trickle of rain. Once they ripen it will be a race between me, the chickens, and the wasps to determine who eats them first.

Harvest tip on figs: Gather early morning before sunup or late in the evening. Otherwise, you risk grabbing a wasp with every other fig. Believe me when I tell you, that grows old rather quickly.

Harvest season in Tennessee is really an almost year-round event. From the greens of winter and spring, the traditional vegetable season of summer, and the small and large fruits from summer to fall, it takes planning, energy, and a willingness to forgive yourself for not saving it all. My friend Tim likes to say, “In East Tennessee we can grow everything, just nothing really well.” True, the weather can be a challenge, the soil is never what you want, and the insects are always ravenous. But overall, I have found that the harvest seasons on this farm are usually generous if the farmer is willing to do the work.

Harvest tip: Take notes in a journal on when vegetables and fruits ripen. Note also how you cooked or preserved their bounty. Your next year’s self will thank you.

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left to right: her son-in-law Lindsey, grandson Joseph, nephew Brian (me). Marjorie Jo Roberts Yeomans.

Addendum: Our Memory Keeper turns 100 today. A century is a long time to be an active witness. Happy Birthday, Aunt Jo!

Waiting on the Egg Man

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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. — Mr. Twain

Light on the farm from the setting sun, after a storm.

Our phone has been ringing off the hook, again, and we are glad. But now I have some questions without ready answers.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, small farms did, if not actually thrive, at least fare better than they had for some years before. The population, already primed by Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., deluged us with requests for sides of pork, quarters of beef, whole lamb, chicken, eggs, and produce. We held workshops on foraging mushrooms and raising hogs. We conducted classes on butchering chickens that had real estate agents lined up next to home-school moms, waiting to wield a knife on a live chicken. The job loss, the foreclosures, the crash of the banks — the societal disruption was such that virtually everyone feared being relegated to living a quasi-medieval life before that year or the next was out. For the first time in a long time people thought and acted local. That lasted for a few years.

I have been thinking about that time in this current crisis: What does the future post-COVID-19 hold for small farms? Where will the small farm fit into the economy, or, more to the point, which economy will the small farm fit into? Because, like history, an economy ain’t static.

A recent NYT article mentioned offhandedly that Americans eat 75 percent of their vegetables at restaurants. That stat shows the outsized impact of our consumer economy on what used to be a family or communal experience, that is, whether it be sitting down to shell beans or break bread. We have, in one generation or two, outsourced the love and care of food preparation and delivery to businesses. (Which begs the question of what the heck is in those veggieless home-cooked meals.)

Dan Barber, in his 2014 book The Third Plate, spent several hundred pages eloquently reimagining the dinner plate of the future at his elegant Blue Hill restaurant. One of the questions that still rattles around in my brain is, Does a future knocked from its pedestal by global catastrophe —pandemic, climate change, collapsing resources — really allow for high-end restaurants? Or, indeed, for restaurants at the scale we have today?

A local producer’s economy (or as it is now fashionable to say, the maker’s economy) remains only a twee option in the global consumer economy. I’ve written too many times about the customer seeing “local” as a consumer’s choice: “I bought some lovely pork chops from Winged Elm Farm, honey. Run to Costco and pick up the rest of the meal’s ingredients.” While that “choice” continues, most small farms will be but a rhetorical flourish for the politician, the food writer, and the conversationalist at the restaurant dinner table, a footnote on the farm-to-table menu that proudly announces sourcing local ingredients “when available.”

Small farm culture simply is not relevant in large-scale capitalist or command economies. Indeed, it exists in the margins of most economic models; it endures, in moments of time, as a particular cycle of history expands or contracts. The census used to have a category for the “self-sufficing farm,” an entity that produced the majority of a family’s needs and bartered in a primarily cashless economy for the remainder. That model, while not so sexy to policy planners, politicians, or, frankly, you and me, is closer to how most small farms have existed across the centuries, across the continents. Perhaps the small farm thrives when there is minimal choice?

One day next month or next year, this particular crisis will pass, no doubt. But it has left exposed the limits of global supply chains. It is encouraging that those limits are now being questioned. Yet, I do not hold my breath that good questions or good answers will change our trajectory as a species. Just as likely is that the planet will make the choices for us. Then the question becomes not Where does the small farm fit into the economy? but instead, How does the larger population learn to live a life of reduced choices?

Older farmers in this valley recall that growing up, an egg man used to come around twice a week to collect eggs. He would take them to sell to the family-owned grocery store in the nearest town. He provided some much-needed cash for the farms to buy what they did not themselves produce.

Maybe that is the best outcome we might hope for. When the clearest sign that we have launched ourselves on a new and better course is that one fine spring day, as we are hoeing in our gardens, we hear the sound of the egg man coming up the drive, once again.

Seeds to Acre

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Moonrise over the hay barn.

Woodsmoke awakens me most winter mornings. It drifts in through a vent in our bedroom window, a sign that the closest neighbor is up and preparing for his day as a jack-of-all-trades around the valley. His house, at the bottom of the gravel driveway, is a quarter-mile away. Still half asleep, I wonder this morning how long it takes once the woodstove is lit for the smoke to reach our window.

Winter is the season in which the senses are sharpened by absence. Stars glitter more, stand out in sharper relief, against a cold, dry sky. Sounds carry farther through the leafless trees. Smells, without the rich competition of high summer, laser into the memory with instant understanding and identity.

Twenty years of observations on the farm finds me chiding myself over how little I know or have accomplished. My life will soon enter late afternoon; in another couple of decades it will see the sun setting. Thomas Jefferson said, “I am an old man but a young gardener.” As an old man, will I have the same patience to endure and nurture my own ignorance, to engage with what I don’t know?

This past week, off the farm for work, I chanced into a conversation with a computer scientist experienced in modeling disease outbreaks. For a couple of hours, we parsed the data of the coronavirus, looked at his modeling of the numbers, discussed the true fragility of a global economy. He had, with the exception of his current trip, canceled all work-related travel for the next eight weeks. The system will be overloaded during that period, he predicted.

I found myself wondering if it was wrong to find a kernel of hope in the prospect of a global slowdown built on the bones of a possible pandemic. Ten years after the great recession brought housing expansion in our valley to a halt, the maw of our species is being stuffed once again as wooded lots are bulldozed and foundations laid. This frenzy too may end only with the close of the day. The sun sets on everything, eventually.

Jefferson, in his farm notebooks, gives tried and tested information on the ratio of turnip seed per acre as a winter forage for sheep. It is his thoughtful exercise in self-providing that I’m struggling — in a world of impeachments, elections, health concerns, aging family, needs of the farm, care of the land and animals, global ties, and limits of all sorts — to understand and to implement. What is the properly scaled relationship, the seeds to acre, for this life?

Amid the overload, how do I provide those in my charge enough forage for the season, yet leave enough that the same may be repeated in countless seasons to come? These thoughts come to me while I stand on the porch in the dark morning, glittering stars above and smoke in the air from below. I indulge in the questions, exercises without answers, sharpened by absence.

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Reading this weekend: A Place on Earth (W. Berry). The Social History of Bourbon (G. Carson)

The Vanishing

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There is mist lying low on the hill above the farm. It flows before sunrise in rivers among the tall grass. In the rose-colored light it presents a glistening dew and touches with grace each spiderweb, highlighting the countless numbers.

Turning my gaze away for only minutes, I look back to find that it is already gone. It has receded now into the lower reaches of the valley, vanishing, as mysterious in its departing as its arriving, revealing in its ebbing, in the high hay of the hill pasture, a doe and her spring fawn. Surprised as I am, naked to the growing light, she is not: she bounds gracefully out of sight, followed by her offspring. Now left alone, except for my dogs, who root through the scuppernong vines for opossums who left their own leaving until too late, I sit.

Gradually, to my ears, comes the faint thrum of traffic, ten miles distant, winding its way through the various valleys and over the slanting ridges. Motor life returns to a workday rhythm after the holiday, pulsing through the outlying blood vessels into the city, draining the countryside of purpose other than that of a traveler’s inn, of sorts, for greed and accumulation.

Is this our fate, I wonder? A mere warehouse of life purposed toward temporary gain. To drive past lost meanings in the lay of the land, unable even to parse the text of an old dying fencerow, eddying like mist around an old barn in the hollow before retreating to some dank cubicle to cross off our days remaining.

In this aging epoch of ours, is it too late to envision a return to something different? Is there a rite, an investiture in the holy office of simple labor, a smoking censer swinging high and low that would cleanse our mess with a restorative blessing, allowing us to stay, to work on and with the earth? Would any supplication now offered find a listening and sympathetic ear?

Does our lover even love us anymore? Spurned for so long, paved over and ignored, gouged and robbed, would she still have us? Even want us? Always we acted as the domestic abuser, so will our promises of changed behavior now be believed?

We should have known, could have read the marriage register held deep in the vaults, that she had dallied with five other lovers and outlived each. That record telling of a vast patience, taught over four and half billion years.

Taught, that even now she has already conspired with her next consort to bury us deep in the rock.

We are mists, vanishing.

Small Town Resilience (a repeat)

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We have spent a busy weekend making mead, bottling some older mead, butchering chickens, harvesting produce, and preparing to harvest apples and pears. So, I’ll leave you with this older piece on a different kind of resilience.

The aftermath of butchering chickens.

Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

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Reading this weekend (2019): Underland (Macfarlane) and iGen (Twenge). The former is another terrific read by the author of The Old Ways (among others). And, the latter is a data driven survey of the generation that has grown up with the i-phone (be afraid, be very afraid).