Category Archives: Farm Life

A Day at the Flea Market

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The two Mexican kids are doing it right, faces buried in big fat ripe peaches with the juice running down their chins, hands, and arms. Yellow jackets be damned, there is only one way to eat some foods, and eating a real sweet peach correctly means ignoring, yes, embracing, the runoff. The two kids trail on down the lane, juices dripping in their wake, past my truck. They follow their parents, who are both eating cotton candy with one hand and dangling a rooster from the other.

It is a Saturday morning at the Crossville flea market an hour away, and I’m here to try and unload old roosters and a small flock of Pilgrim geese. Mr. Kyle, my elderly neighbor, has joined me for the trip. The memory is from twenty years ago, so I’m sure things have changed. I have always meant to go back, but in some ways perhaps it is best to leave that morning as a memory. For all I know, the flea market may even be gone now, like my neighbor.

The roosters sell quickly to the rooster-and-cotton candy couple, who clearly come from a culture that is not afraid to be hands-on, up close and personal, with the next meal. I appreciate that. I also like that they use birds with some heft and age, that they know that age means more flavor in the pot.

For the first half-hour after we arrive, I settle back and try to coax a handful of tire-kickers to buy the Pilgrims. Mr. Kyle meanwhile has wandered off down the tree-lined road that disappears around a curve. He is on a mission to find the sock stall. As a canny farmer, who’ll be worth a bundle when he dies, he does not spend money needlessly. On this day he is wearing his usual tattered shirt and pants stained with the past week’s work on his farm.

Over the years he has always been a generous and helpful friend and neighbor. Oh, and did I mention shrewd? One day he and I were discussing the purchase of some of his cattle for our farm. We’d been talking over the price when he began, “Well, I’m not smart and I don’t have a college education like you, Brian….” I held up my hands. “Mr. Kyle,” I said, “When you start talking like that, I know I’d better grab onto my wallet with both hands, because you are coming for it.” He grinned big—he liked that—because we both knew it was true.

After another half-hour of sitting on the tailgate of my pickup, I watch as a couple comes around the bend in the lane. They had stopped earlier to look at the geese. The Pilgrim is an American heritage breed that can be sexed easily at birth. The ganders are white and the geese gray. I have six for sale, all under a year of age. The man and woman walk over to where I sit. We chat about the cost. I’m asking $20 each (which is a bargain), but I’m getting restless. I want to be done with selling and take in the rest of the market. We settle on a $100 for the six. The woman counts over the cash, and I stick it in my pocket. The three of us each grab a goose and carry it to the couple’s truck, put the three in a pen, then return for the rest. I say goodbye and wander off in search of Mr. Kyle.

The permanent part of the flea market unfolds before me like a medieval fair. The lane twists and curves among oak trees. Each side of the path has wooden shacks open to the lane, each one offering a different line of goods. Tools, logging chains of all sorts, more than a few clothes—something for everyone. There are shops selling candles, candy in old-fashioned bushel baskets, and seasonal fruit (those juicy peaches). The Mennonites from Muddy Pond are doing a brisk business in jars of last year’s sorghum.

And there, finally, on my right, is a stall devoted to just socks. That’s where I find my neighbor negotiating the cost downward on a bundle of white tube socks. Whether they are of legitimate origin or have fallen off a truck does not affect the outcome. The owner of the little store, growing weary, does not stand a chance: Mr. Kyle always get his discount.

Packet of socks in one hand and walking cane in the other, Mr. Kyle accompanies me as I browse the many stalls, but he buys nothing else. We head back to my truck. On the way out of town we stop at Cracker Barrel for a late breakfast. He buys both of our meals, then we head down the plateau toward home.

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Reading this weekend: Last Stands, why men fight when all else is lost (M. Walsh). And County Highway, a new journal that is designed as a newspaper.

The Kitchen Drawer

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Snakes: There is a snake in the garden, and its name is Reggie. It is just over six feet long (with special emphasis on long). It hangs out most days in the hoop-house or sometimes in the potato patch. Last year as I weeded a row of beans, I moved a drip hose out of my way. Only then did I find, much to mine and Reggie’s mutual surprise, that the snake was the drip hose. This is a fine-looking black rat snake who maintains its plump physique no doubt on an endless diet of mice, chipmunks, and rats. Stop by and I’ll introduce you.

A book update: My book manuscript is finally heading to the publisher to be typeset in a couple of weeks. It will be titled Kayaking With Lambs: Notes From an East Tennessee Farmer, and it should be available to order this fall. Please stay tuned for more shameless self-promotion. Castrating pigs is easier than getting a book to the publisher, I tell you in all candor.

Subdivisions: They come to all neighborhoods eventually. Fortunately the one I speak of is located in our outer corral. Last week we divided the space in half with a handsome fence and an eight-foot gate. We now have two dry lots for the sheep where before we had one. Magic. There is something so pleasing about a well-executed project that is also completed with a minimum of effort.

Gardens in the ‘hood: The pandemic trend of gardening seems not to have abated. If anything, it may be growing…. My best guess from a recent drive is that about 75 percent of the homes in our valley have some sort of vegetable garden. The other 25 will have buckets of over-size zucchini left on their doorstep as the summer progresses’ as a form of punishment.

Landscaping: Being the one who does most of our hand-mowing and weed-eating gives me the credential to tell you in confidence: flowering annuals are a blight on the land. Any plant that can’t survive the occasional whack of high-velocity string doesn’t deserve a place on this farm. (But don’t tell Cindy, lest I be on the receiving end of a high-velocity smack for running over an heirloom plant I mistook for a weed.)

Siesta: After 24 years on the farm, I am impressed how most neighbors, the UPS man, and all of our friends know not to call or visit between 1 and 3 p.m. That’s the sacred time when we take a siesta—our chance for a break with a nap or a little bit of reading and the afternoon cup of coffee to end it. Now if we could only inform the scam callers.

Antibiotics: The FDA ban on farmers’ being able to administer over-the-counter antibiotics to livestock is going into effect at the end of this month. Going forward, farmers will have to get a vet out to make a determination of need and (if the vet deems it appropriate) issue a prescription. I don’t have an issue with that … okay, maybe a small one. Good luck finding a vet who will come out to a farm anymore. Large-animal vets visiting small farms are quickly becoming a thing of the past, unless you have horses, whose vet bill typically carries a pricey tag. The few that remain are overworked and don’t have the time to make a hundred extra stops each day. A prediction: more pain, suffering, and untimely deaths of farm animals.

How long: How long does it take this farm to use a 50-pound box of fence staples and one large roll of No. 14 wire? Twenty-four years.

Chipmunks: Not sure of the reason, but the farm is now home to a growing population of chipmunks. They certainly are cuter than rats. And Reggie loves them—he thinks they are delicious.

Enjoy your week,

Brian

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush

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Note: this is a recent essay of mine that was published in Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic. LC is an old fashioned print journal. Which means it comes in the mail and you can hold it. You can subscribe at www.frontporchrepublic.com

 

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush *

Crossing waters

The hundred-pound carcass is in the truck bed cooling on ice. Before me, stretching out in the morning sunlight in long looping curves, is 49 miles of Highway 15, a narrow two-lane road perched atop the Mississippi River levee in Central Louisiana. The previous Saturday I had butchered the hog with the help of a friend on my East Tennessee farm. We started the frosty morning with a warming shot of home-distilled muscadine brandy, just because. In the woods, the grunting hogs gathered around us, impatient for their breakfast. The one I was to kill was smaller than the others, an abdominal hernia having stunted her growth. Raising my .30-30, I shot her between the eyes from about three feet. She dropped instantly, motionless, onto the forest floor. Killing animals is an integral part of life on a farm. It’s a gruesome task that, especially in the case of those you have raised, is best done without much premeditation or fanfare—it is always good to just get on with the traitorous deed. I set the rifle down and we rolled her onto her back before starting the bloody business of sticking. Meanwhile, the other pigs continued to eat just a few feet away without any real concern. Porcine compassion, like our own, seems in short supply.

The hard part done, we began with the scalding, scraping, and eviscerating. My friend had recently become an American citizen, and we chatted about upcoming projects on both of our farms and discussed the politics of his native Germany and the U.S. Because here is the thing about a slaughter day: even elbow-deep in the still-warm carcass of a dead hog, life goes on. The dogs stayed close, the flock of sheep grazed on the hill, the geese honked and prepared to fight with any and all who came near their domain, and we took time out to eat sandwiches, holding them with our blood-caked fingers, all while a cluster of chickens, having joined the dogs, searched for scraps at our feet.

A few days later I loaded up my truck with the hog on ice and left home to go home. Over the years I’ve given the act of going and coming much thought. I have decided that it is a bit like having dual citizenship. When I return to Louisiana, home of my birth, the act of going does not really begin until I cross water. It’s not when I pull down the long gravel driveway and leave the farm, nor when I traverse Alabama or Mississippi. It’s when I cross The River. The mighty Mississippi, which is just that, a massive current of water, awe-inspiring yet frightening in its single-minded push toward the Gulf of Mexico.

This particular morning, I made the crossing between Natchez, Mississippi, and Vidalia, Louisiana. From the top of the twin cantilevered bridges, the cotton fields of Concordia Parish spread out far to the west. Below, the ghost of Harlan Hubbard navigated the wild currents in his shantyboat, dodging the heavy barge traffic on the broad river. Now I roll down my windows as Jerry Lee belts out the live version of “What I’d Say”over my truck speakers, and I suck in a lungful of thick Delta air. It tastes of home. Pulling off the bridge onto Highway 15, I give a respectful nod to The Killer a few miles north of here, where he takes his final rest in a Ferriday cemetery, before I turn the wheels south toward the heart of Acadiana.

The real Louisiana is a shrouded place. It’s often hard to glimpse if you are blind to seeing. But if your eyes are open, you will discover that the veil is slightly parted on the present culture, revealing instructive (albeit unfashionable) vignettes to older modes of living. While there is plenty of modern commerce and industry, there are also a people and a lifestyle that remain essentially rooted in a rich past. And while there are still agrarian echoes of the authentic South in scattered pockets, it is only when you cross The River that you find them concentrated in an almost undiluted form in this still slow-to-change world. It is of no small importance that Louisianans have the lowest outward migration in any of the 50 states. And even when they do leave, they still remain, as do I.

I often find it hard to convey to non-natives of the Bayou State what a real food culture is like, one where eating amazing food is as natural as a breath or a heartbeat. It has often been said that the native of Louisiana is not focused on the next meal but already planning what to eat the following weekend—where to catch, trap, or shoot it, and most important, whom to share it with. Because the true heart of Louisiana is found at a table of family, friends, or even perfect strangers eating the bounty of the soil and waters from this most generous land as they sit cheek to jowl under an oak tree next to a gas station or convenience store parking lot.

That is where I find myself around lunchtime, at a no-name crossroads convenience store just east of Simmesport. I pull into a parking lot packed with duck and deer hunters, pickup trucks, and boat trailers. The all-male, camouflage-clothed clientele are keeping the friendly ladies behind the counter busy placing orders for plates of jambalaya, bowls of gumbo, and fried chicken platters. I drift almost without thinking into the line. Even though I have only stopped to take a leak and pick up fresh ice to put on the hog, a bowl of jambalaya finds its way into my hands, and I go back out into the warm day. I squeeze onto a long picnic table with the assorted hunters. Each clutches a noonday longneck in one hand and a fork or spoon in the other. I eat my lunch and listen to their stories of the morning. Some are sharing tips on the best ways to prepare a duck gumbo, others about the best processors for smoked venison sausages. In East Tennessee, men shoot deer and gather at Hardee’s to talk. Yet they seldom express much enthusiasm for eating. No wonder, when what they share are only dreary recipes for venison chili or jerky. (This is a truth that is pointless to dispute.) Which is another thing that sets my birthplace apart: its population of working-class men are obsessed with good food, how to get it, and how to best prepare it … so very French in its values, not just in its appreciation of great eating but in all things.

To my knowledge, there is no other state that has guidebooks and websites devoted to the best “real” food to be found at gas stations. Running a successful gas station in rural Louisiana includes providing good food; the man who ignores the mandate doesn’t stay in business. That is Louisiana. Outsiders may describe it as Cancer Alley, a flood zone, a hurricane either on the way or just arrived, or, God forbid, by the reductionist “Oh, New Orleans, I love it!” But if asked what home means, a native Louisianan is most likely to say it’s a table covered in newspapers upon which is dumped a massive pile of boiled crawfish or crabs, to be served alongside potatoes and corn on the cob. Staying up until midnight shucking 500 pounds of oysters. Duck hunting on the marsh at sunrise Thanksgiving Day, making sure you’re back home in time to be clean and ready for the feast at 2 p.m. Being a Louisianan means it’s 7 a.m. and you’re already five miles off the coast fishing for ling, a true roast beef po-boy with 20 napkins still not enough, a truck stop diner serving chicken sausage gumbo, a cochon de lait out on a levee. A Pentecostal church social that serves up jambalaya prepared in a 50-gallon cast iron pot and that all denominations show up to support. A Baptist picnic under 300-year-old live oaks with endless tables of food, including, and always, massive platters of dirty rice. But most important, it is almost never a restaurant dinner. It is, at its most fundamental, about sharing food with family and neighbors.

A trip to my home state doesn’t need signposts. If you are surrounded by pine forests, you know you are in the northern hill parishes, where my uncle Burl once told my uncle Al, “Nothing grows here but timber and babies.” If the road winds among rivers and endless bayous dotted with small villages, each with a Catholic church at its center, you know you are in Acadiana. Old, ruined plantations tucked among oil refineries that loom next to The River? Then you are between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Midwestern landscape of flatness, impossibly straight roads, and endless rice fields interspersed by sleepy, sluggish bayous? Now you’ve arrived in my home territory of Southwest Louisiana. You are at the place where Jean Lafitte’s men raided my fourth great-grandfather’s home, on September 27, 1819, up on Bayou Queue de Tortue—an event that precipitated a chase by the USS Lynx to recover stolen slaves and resulted in capturing the pirates in Galveston Bay and hanging them in New Orleans before a public audience.

But wherever you find yourself in this state, you are always near good food and a cold frozen daiquiri stand. Because in Louisiana, the laws on and enforcement of alcohol consumption are somewhat befuddled with a Bacchanalian impulse toward legislation. (This is a state where it used to be legal to drive while drinking, just not drunk, which was an odd but somehow important and civilized distinction for the lawmakers, possibly in an act of self-preservation, to insist on codifying.)

My destination on this particular journey south is Chicot State Park, just outside of Ville Platte. I’m heading to the annual gathering of the men in my family. My path takes me past Lecompte, home to Lea’s Lunchroom, a landmark enshrined in my family lore not for its dozens of pies on display but for the visit circa 1930 when my mother’s older sister danced the Charleston as a little girl, to the amusement of family and the other diners. That this aunt later became the most severe tempered of Baptists made the image of her performing even more one to cherish.

Early afternoon I pull into Ville Platte, not far from where my high school father walked out of the woods with a buddy after a week of fishing, flagged down a truck for a ride back to town, and was informed that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. Coming home is like that: the memories are as thick as the fields of sugarcane around me, planted among a landscape of cypress trees along winding bayous, rich rice fields and pecan orchards, all teeming with my ancestors, who walk among and out of mists as densely storied and historied as any in the country.

I load up at Teet’s, a grocery and specialty meat store of long standing (1955), with the essentials for our weekend — mustard greens, boudin, tasso, ponce (stuffed pig stomach), bacon, beer, wine, and coffee. The truck overloaded, I head to a remote cabin sheltered in an old-growth forest alongside Chicot Lake, where I sensibly take a nap to await my kin.

The husband of a niece is the first to arrive. A young ex-marine with a quiet, solemn mien, he helps me get things squared away while we wait on the others. Late afternoon I begin cutting the onions for the big pot before sautéing them in half a stick of butter alongside a quarter pound of smoked bacon. While the onions and bacon cook down, the two of us rinse and chop a grocery bag full of mustard greens, then toss them into the mix. A few chunks of tasso (spicy cured pork), a quart of water, plenty of Tony Chachere’s seasoning, and the lidded pot is left to simmer for the next few hours.

Back when there was still a South, before it began dying a slow and undeserved death with the invention of air conditioning, you could know where a boy was from by the greens he ate. There was a collard belt, a turnip belt, and a mustard greens belt. Louisiana fell mostly in the latter. My father, shortly before he died at 94, was posed the question, “Dad, what are your favorite greens to eat?” ”Mustard greens” was his prompt and correct reply. Some of the newcomers to the region, who in the far-off times of a decade ago would have been called Yankees, propose kale and bok choy as fair greens substitutes. But if a green cannot be improved by long simmering in pork products, then we Southerners don’t want it on our table.

While the greens simmer and everyone else arrives, while beer is drunk, a nephew and his son prepare venison backstraps and loins for the grill. They have shot two bucks the previous morning and have brought the best cuts to share.

We gather around the table as the sun sets. A younger brother gives the blessing, I give the toast, and we dig into bowls of greens, links of boudin, and blood-rare slices of seasoned venison, all washed down by cold beer from a local brewery. Once we’re done cleaning up, we retire outside to sit by a fire. A few of us smoke cigars, and bourbon and scotch make the rounds. We catch up on family gossip, share family history, talk sports, regale one another with hunting stories, make fun of those who couldn’t make the get-together.

After a hearty breakfast the following morning, we put the hog in the smoker. Come afternoon, we gather around the TV to watch LSU get destroyed by Georgia, giving us a chance to exchange classic game-day stories. Such as the one about the time our maternal grandparents took three ferries in the 1920s across the Atchafalaya Basin and the Mississippi just to watch LSU beat Alabama. Or the one about the letter we have all read from my 18-year-old father to his mother when he was on a destroyer anchored off Iwo Jima (a few months after the battle), in which he asks two things: first, could she send him his trigonometry book so he could bone up, and second, could she mail him the newspaper articles that covered the LSU vs. Alabama game?

Meanwhile, outside, slumbering under the coals, with skin crackling, the pork roasts on as the heat works its lovely magic. A pig roast, like a crawfish boil, is a communal event. It is a call to gather the extended family, bring the neighbors, help share in the bounty. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We can all eat “high on the hog” with pork, because a pig is easily raised by anyone with the tiniest of rural patches. Flora Thompson writes in Lark Rise to Candleford of small children gathering choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed the family pig. Everyone took part in the yearlong domestic project to fatten the animal so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, and blood puddings. A pig in the paddock says “We can survive, do for ourselves” and “Bring on the worst—you can’t touch us.” Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down, and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn, and stale bread and you shout “Comrade!” even as you plot his betrayal.

Around halftime we take a grateful break from the shellacking to indulge in the pulled-apart roasted hog (soused in a Carolina vinegar sauce), accompanied by corn on the cob, beans, and more links of boudin. With the lot of us sitting before a table full of porky goodness, my elder brother gives the blessing and we drink more beer and eat to gluttony. Mercifully the game finally ends, and we do that most manly of things on a Saturday afternoon: we all take a nap.

The next morning I am on the road by five o’clock, headed for home in East Tennessee, with 10 hours before me. The remains of the hog have been dispersed to the younger nephews. My cooler is again loaded, this time with pounds of boudin, tasso, ponce, and various other essentials that make an expat’s life bearable through the grief of nostalgia and hunger.

Late in the evening I pull onto the drive of the farm I also call home. Having now spent many more years in East Tennessee than in Southwest Louisiana, I have an adaptable notion of what homecoming means. The farm, which I work and enjoy with Cindy, my beloved, is a homeplace in every sense of the word that matters. Yet it is only mine and her life that I see reflected in its landscape. It is a different sort of homecoming than that to be had from revisiting the land my family has nurtured for 250 years, in life and in death.

* Author’s Note: “Hot boudin, cold coush- coush, / Come on Tigers, push, push push!” Is a very old cheer that most Louisiana sports teams use, substituting their own mascot for “Tigers.” Coush-coush is fried leftover cornbread served with cream and syrup. And, dear God, if someone doesn’t know what boudin is, or has never eaten it—well, that person is only be pitied.

A Purchased Life

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It happens frequently, this informal tour giving. The phone rings and someone new to this locale or new to or considering farming asks to see how we manage our operation. Yes, it takes us away from our work, but we both enjoy helping newcomers and walking visitors around the farm. Sometimes we can be a bit too self-deprecating about our accomplishments, yet the people leave with an understanding of what they too can achieve, with hard work.

This particular day we’ve put our various to-dos on hold to spend a couple of hours escorting a young couple around our small-scale 50-acre farm. Over the years I’ve honed my remarks based on certain assumptions made from our initial phone call and on what I can glean from observing the visitors who have shown up for guidance. Today’s couple have indicated that they are just starting out. They have bought 30 acres in North Carolina (just an hour or so away) that had been misused, and they have moved into the property’s older home. They want to raise poultry for the farmers market and have decided on a goal of growing 100 birds a year for slaughter.

With the information provided — that they want to live a fairly self-sustaining life of raising their own vegetables and small livestock, along with developing a very modest business that will bring in enough to cover expenses, I’ve tailored my conversation to fit their needs.

My recommendations follow a predictable path: “Buy appropriate to your needs. Repair whenever possible. Grow and raise what you wish to eat, and sell the surplus. Be a part of your community.”

All of this goes down well; the two are gracious, easy to talk with, and somewhat knowledgeable about small, diversified farming. At some point I mention that they will need a tractor to accomplish much of the work around their property. And echoing those previous remarks, I say, “Get something older and therefore easier to repair. Look for something that comes with a few implements, like a bush hog.”

At this juncture the young woman mentions that they had just bought a brand new 75 horsepower tractor, complete with front-end loader, grappler, backhoe, bush hog, disc mower, rake, and baler. My jaw drops. I have clearly misread this couple. Instead of struggling newcomers looking to build a life of self-sufficiency, these two are rich or at least willing to go deep into debt.

When they leave, I do a little research. They have just spent $125,000-$150,000 on a tractor that is two to three times the horsepower needed for their land. For comparison, we bought our own first tractor, a 1962 35 horsepower Ford 800, for $1,500 (granted, in 1999). The image that immediately comes to my mind is the 269 horsepower Lamborghini Jeremy Clarkson (British TV’s Clarkson’s Farm) bought that was so big it wouldn’t fit in his barn. As for the worn-out 30 acres the couple purchased? They paid just under $1 million — for an acreage that sold for $100,000 12 years earlier. My brain frankly reels with too many unanswerable questions. The first of which is, how many chickens? As in, how many chickens will they need to raise, at lots of 100 a year, to pay for the tractor and land alone.

Well … if they raise and sell 100 birds a year at $15 each, it will take a whopping 733 years to pay off their core investment. Of course, it might be slightly longer if the chickens cost anything to raise (which they do) or if there is interest on the land or tractor purchase (which there will be unless they paid cash). Then there is the inevitable need to buy tools, diesel, fencing, and a thousand things not yet considered as needed, all of which might affect the timeline of repayment. Plus, let’s throw in those pesky things like taxes, clothes, cars, home repairs, insurance, health needs, and, even in the most self-sustaining household, groceries and beer. I quickly give up posing questions that have no acceptable answers.

It is no surprise that people have the urge to downscale their lives; it happens every day and seemingly with more frequency. What puzzles me is that it appears this young couple wants to purchase a downsized life, like they’re on some extravagant shopping trip, by spending over a million dollars. Why? Just so that they can sport a new co-op feed cap without the earning of it?

This interaction continues to raise more questions than can’t be answered. Stewardship, profitability, self-sustainability — all of these concepts that small farms wrestle with change into something else when they become just another commodity. Land, a house, the means to farm, each costs money. Of that there is no doubt. But if the buy-in to gross $1,500 (or even $50,000) a year is over a million, then something is seriously out of whack. When the value of the land alone has far outstripped what one might be able to earn from its productive use, what then?

A recent conversation I had with a county property assessor added another dimension to this upside-down acquisition. The assessor talked about newcomers to our area from California paying similar amounts for property as this young couple paid in North Carolina. The problem that arises with land being purchased at $1 million when it is valued at $100,000? Well, good luck getting insurance or even getting a loan to cover the full amount. (Getting a loan is actually a small stumbling block in these cases, since most of the recent arrivals are cash-flush from selling overpriced homes in their native states, although one might wonder how long that monetary surplus will last. Still, money spent is money earned, by someone.)

As always, I’m more interested in what these outrageous trends mean for local people. What happens to the displaced? Ask that and even more questions begin to surface, such as, what kind of farm policy does our country espouse if the buy-in for living a small-scale life of self-sufficiency is overpriced and unsustainable? Because ultimately this isn’t about a young couple of means. It is about all the other young working-class couples who have been squeezed out of the opportunity to buy and farm their own land. It’s a problem that has only accelerated as a relatively affluent urban class exits the cities in search of the “simple” rural life — not to work or steward the land in any meaningful way but merely to possess it, to buy the style of life for cold cash, play-acting on it, with a substantial cast of the now-dispossessed locals to choose from as background color to that newly purchased life.

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Reading this weekend: Of Farming and Classics (D. Grene) and A Splendor of Letters (N. Basbanes)

Hire the Farm Girl

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three of the new ewe lambs in the foreground

“Hi, I’m Anna, Mr. Mark’s daughter. You caught me. I was just unloading the feed before doing chores. We were expecting you at 10 a.m., and I was trying to get this barn mess cleaned up. I’ll call Dad at the house and see if he can come on down now.”

It’s 9 a.m. on a recent cool spring morning. We have just driven from our farm in the Tennessee River valley into Central Time on the Cumberland Plateau, eventually winding down into the tidy agricultural county of Wilson, an area that, like Berry’s Henry County, has the misfortune to neighbor a large city, yet that at least on this eastern edge still seems to be holding its own, displaying no subdivisions or “look-at-me” McMansions to mar our view.

We’ve arrived at an older well-maintained farmhouse. It sits a couple of hundred feet from the rural road, shaded by mature oaks and surrounded by the perfect wrap-around porch from which to gaze at the occasional passerby. The gravel driveway splits midway, the left fork going to the house and the right making a sweep past a long cluster of outbuildings and around the front of the barn. It occurs to me that the art of laying out a farm driveway is a dying craft, and I’m relieved to see that the long loop allows us to back up to the business end of the barn and then pull forward with ease onto the road.

Our trip to Middle Tennessee is a chance to look over and purchase four ewe lambs, all of them Dorset/Hampshire crosses. These new girls are not old enough to be bred until fall of 2024. But like most small and big farms, ours is in a constant state of evaluating and improving its stock selection. In our case we are chasing the ideal meat sheep, one that will grow well on our pastures, with minimal inputs yet the best-muscled carcass at slaughter. It is a horizon that is never reached.

When we pull in, a young woman of 16-18 and attired in T-shirt and shorts is slinging 50-pound bags of feed out of the truck bed and hauling them into the barn. From the evidence of the remaining bags on the pallet, she has already unloaded a dozen with plenty more to grab. I am struck by her greeting: she is poised and comfortable talking with adults in a direct but respectful manner.

Within minutes of being called, her father arrives on foot from the house, and for the next 30 the four of us chat and examine ewe lambs. They both talk knowledgeably about daily weight gains and overall farm goals for its stock. Mr. Mark’s conversational style with his teenage daughter is considerate, and it soon becomes clear that this farm girl is a full partner in the operation. She maintains her own breeding flock, keeps the records, arranges to have her lambs slaughtered and butchered, and sells the meat to an established base of customers and at the local farmer’s market … and has an encyclopedic culinary knowledge of the various lamb cuts. 

When we’ve made the selections, father and daughter hoist the four 75-pound lambs one by one into the pen in the back of our truck. As we drive away, we chat about the experience and Cindy quips, “Hire the farm girl!” And it is true.

Some of you readers may have had the good fortune to grow up on a farm or perhaps work in a family business. You will be nodding your head in agreement. But yours is an opportunity missed by most. It is difficult to convey the maturity that came naturally, and bolstered by 4-H and FFA, to this farm girl. For a farmer to succeed, it requires a complex range of attributes, among them physical strength, intellectual reasoning, and sophisticated social skills. A friend of mine, a well-respected, highly successful lawyer in a small town, was gifted with being raised on a dairy farm. From my observations it shaped him in profound and positive ways: it gave him a leg up in the world that the average coddled youth does not experience, and it rooted him in his community and instilled in him a compassionate heart.

So let us also throw emotional wisdom into this discussion. Lest one of you is thinking that this young woman has been hardened of heart and spirit by her work, that she has been raised to be no more than a merciless money changer, think again. To raise animals from birth and choose which ones will die in order for the farm business to carry on does not produce a callous soul. On the contrary, it cultivates love developed with a clear-eyed view of the means, ways, and limits of compassion, stripped of sentiment and confronted daily by hard choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

Indeed, we might wish that our leadership class today was pulled from the well-maintained small farms in the agricultural counties of this land. We all might sleep better at night. Maybe it is not just an admonition to “hire the farm girl” — maybe we should elect her, if given the choice.

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Reading this past week: True Grit (C. Portis), a well known book that has been poorly served by two movies. Greenmantle (J. Buchan), a Richard Hannay novel.