Category Archives: Local Economy

Keeping Her Place

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Each ewe marked with a blue crayon streak down her back holds a membership among the select. One day last week we moved the marked group of seven ewes into a separate pen before turning the rest of the flock out onto the summer grass. Later that afternoon we took the chosen seven to a graded sheep auction in Athens, Tennessee. At auction, they might be sold to another sheep farmer or someone looking to start their own flock. Then again, they might be bought as part of a larger lot and head to a processor. You never know who will be buying on any given day.

Ginger

Ewes are culled for practical reasons. Some are at the end of their productive life, others have given birth to lambs that grew out unsatisfactorily, and some have proven to be unthrifty or especially susceptible to parasites. Every ewe culled has been known to us and valued, and the vast majority have been born on this land.

Farming livestock involves a daily exertion of power over life and death. A flock of chickens only needs so many roosters, with the excess going into the pot. The cock that rules the roost remains for a couple of years, at which time he makes way for a younger, more virile replacement and becomes the flavoring for a savory gumbo. A sow that doesn’t produce satisfactorily becomes whole hog sausage. Her weanlings grow and grow and are then loaded in a trailer and sent to the butcher. Extra bull calves are banded and fattened as steers—again, whatever the livestock, one male only is needed for breeding.

Our Red Wattle sow, named Ginger for her coloring, had been chosen for culling. Her date with Morgan’s Meat Processing was booked and noted on the calendar. I bought Ginger in remote Hancock County, a rural county nestled right against the Kentucky border, at a homestead set back in a deep no-light “holler” in the spring of last year. She is a very personable, very docile sow, a lovely specimen of her heritage breed.

Ginger had her first litter in January—a disappointing four piglets, of which only two survived. We would have been content with six but prefer 8-12. We decided to give her another chance and breed her once again to a Berkshire boar. When the farrowing date at the first of August passed with no piglets, it was with real sadness that we scheduled her slaughter. That she would make that final trip with her two market-weight offspring was of no comfort.

On a small farm we have some latitude for keeping animals. Because ours is a modest economic model of a peculiarly non-industrial bent, choices are often made as much for personal reasons as for financial. Still, keeping a two-time loser on the payroll truly doesn’t make sense. We are not that kind of place, neither a petting zoo nor an animal rescue. Ours is a working, producing farm, and here everything is expected to earn its keep.

Yet … last week we were at our friends’ farm picking up three weanling piglets to grow out for ourselves and customers. They were from the same litter that we had helped castrate just a couple of weeks earlier, and we were buying them now because Ginger’s failure to farrow had left us with a gap in our pork production schedule (not to mention that a 500-pound non-producing hog eats the same massive amount of feed that a 500-pound producing hog requires).

While it is still not certain if the failure to farrow was the fault of our sow, when our friend mentioned while loading the barrows that she would be happy to help us artificially inseminate Ginger, I did an uncharacteristic clutch at the offer. I wanted Ginger to work out, did not want to take her to market, at least before she had lived out her productive life.

For those who don’t farm, my attitude towards culling may strike you as callous and unfeeling. Practical decisions often do. Which is why so many tough decisions in life are “farmed out” to others. But, not here on our farm, while livestock is in our care, we treat them well; we give them plenty of room, feed, and attention. Yet there is an end, as indeed there is for each of us.

However, when I fed Ginger last evening—watching her tuck into her trough, then galumph around the pasture—I felt at peace with this very uneconomic decision to give her another chance and allow her to keep her place.

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My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as well as Front Porch Republic Books).

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Reading this past week: both Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi (M. Twain) and select essays from The Burden of Southern History (C.V. Woodward).

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)

The Ants and the Grasshopper

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Our mega farm store Rural King was out of both two-cycle oil and bar chain lubricant for my chainsaws. This is the sort of common outage that no longer really surprises. I did not even bother to ask why. Cindy grows tired of hearing me come home and say, “This week, it’s yogurt! They said the truck was delayed.” Every outing it’s something — milk, butter, or, God forbid, toilet paper — those empty shelves, always rotating, never the same, our new normal.

The next meal

That whatever is out of stock typically shows up by the next time I circumambulate the aisles does little to reassure me that nothing has broken. I am not an optimist, though I do play a cheerful pessimist. Which is why I notice with grim fascination and humor the signs that our world of plenty has frayed.

An old friend and I used to debate whether we had too much in this culture. When I mentioned that I aspired to a “genteel poverty” he was dismissive. Well, the reality is that world may just be dawning regardless of one’s aspirations. Certainly, there is plenty that we don’t need. But when the nearby Kroger reduces its bread aisle by half to keep up with ongoing shortages, that is more than noticeable: it is a marker. And as when the global supply of baby formula or cancer drugs is delayed, there are consequences and impacts.

Sometimes it is merely the balance within a particular commodity that is off. That common calibers of ammo for hunting rifles have been hard to find for a few years is not news and concerns only those willing to go out and claim a live animal as the next meal. That the ammo commonly favored by the disaffected for mass shootings is more easily available is a somewhat more problematic concern to the larger society.

Or consider our friends’ elderly mother. Her car was pronounced “totaled” by the insurance company after a modest accident, when a replacement part was not to be found in the supply chain. It would most likely show up, eventually. But it was easier to close out the claim than to wait months or a year for a part to arrive. That there are few cars on any car lot to purchase, and only at a dear price, matters not to anyone but the person in critical need of a vehicle.

Movement of the goods we use to maintain this global lifestyle is principally done via shipping containers. At $1,500 per container, it was a cheap method of transport at the start of 2020. But that cost ballooned to close to $30,000 last year, and it has hovered around $15,000 for the past nine months. All but the most dull-witted can figure out that the cost differential impacts the chain as either a price increase, a delay, or a simple absence of product ordered. Any of the three has a knock-on effect that ripples through the economy, and reaches consumers as shortages and inflation.

Add skyrocketing costs of diesel to the mix, and a profitable store on the West Coast has to close, because the price of sending new books jumped 300 percent, outpacing sales and the cost of goods. Then understand that those everyday profit-and-loss considerations are being factored into every business decision by both mom-and-pop operations and large corporate concerns. The ongoing nuisance shortages like yogurt or two-cycle oil are being amplified exponentially throughout the supply chain, at least in the short term. Factor in timely supply deficits in key parts, fertilizer, and the like, and “nuisance” barely begins to cover our woes. These are only the visible surface cracks of a much deeper structural fracturing of the global economy.

Moving manufacturing back home, then retooling for a national or local consumer economy, seems an unlikely course in these resource- and financially constricted days. And, says my cheerful inner pessimist, there isn’t much we can do to change this trajectory. But there is plenty we can do to provide a little more resilience in our lives, and it’s along the lines of “prepare for changes and expect less.” It is old advice, but growing a garden, developing a basic tool kit of low-tech skills, learning to repair, cultivating friends who share your values and outlook, and stepping outside the 24/7 consumer culture — all can help mitigate.

Time, however, marches on, and it passes the unwary and the unprepared at a more blistering pace than most would have anticipated at the beginning of the journey. Best to be like the ants and start preparing now for our unpredictable future.

“I Know Where I’m Going”

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I’m ending the 2020 year with a repost from December 2015. It touches on several issues dear to my heart. I’ll leave it to you to suss out what those might be. Everyone have a Happy New Year! I do appreciate each of you who stop by with me each week. And a special thanks to those who comment. While a comment is not expected, it does encourage.

Cheers!

Alas, we are down to only turnips in the garden for the next 3 months.

As our betters jet back from Paris, with bellies full of artisanal French food and exciting business contacts that allow them to both profit and “save” the world, our thoughts on the farm have been on Delores. She of the wandering tribe of swine that seldom saw a fence without seeing an opportunity. She who after a gallant effort to artificially inseminate and an arranged marriage of four weeks to a neighbor’s boar is still not pregnant.

We are now faced with a classic small farm dilemma: do we keep her for another try at motherhood or convert her to sausage? Back in August, during her matrimonial date with Old Red, Delores was what is euphemistically described as “pleasingly plump.” She has now been on an owner-imposed diet and slimmed down to what we hope is a good breeding weight. (Yes, hogs, as well as other livestock, can be too fat to conceive.)

There are so many small farm models to follow in this world. And we do not offer ours up to any but ourselves: a three-way contest between profits, sufficiency, and fulfillment. Last week’s post on taking time out from the first two to sit in the woods and do nothing but meditate and smoke a cigar spurred one online reader to call me a slacker.

The conclusion I drew was that, in his mind, the monetary profits of the farm stood superior to sufficiency and fulfillment. An imbalance, if applied mindlessly, that has contributed greatly to this world of rapidly diminishing resources and a climate rollercoaster. Which reminded me of a another recent commenter who seemed to take issue with the notion that achieving sufficiency was anything other than a weigh-station toward profitability or a path down the road to abject poverty.

So, as we watched the old classic set in the Scottish Hebrides, “I Know Where I’m Going,” last night, I chuckled when one of the characters took umbrage at being told that the villagers were poor because they had no money. What poverty of imagination, she said, that would imagine us as poor because we lack money.

Hers was an outlook actively at odds with the modern mindset, the one that devalues the wealth derived from family, community, and being a part of the earth, the one that feeds on the acquisitive and that can, if not moderated, create a life out of balance.

It is this mindset, I think, that led to conditions that energized our betters — a convening of corporations, governments, and nonprofit agencies — to spend a week dining in Paris. Now, with their bellies bloated and their backs sore from congratulatory pats, I have the sneaking suspicion that all of their grubbing around for money will result in a climate plan for more of the same.

We, meanwhile, spent our weekend on the farm. We dined on produce from our gardens and meat we raised. We worked hard, relaxed, and gave a favored sow another chance.

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Reading this weekend: Endurance: Shackleton’s incredible voyage (A. Lansing).

 

Highway 36 (revisited)

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Has anything changed? One might wonder if a trip down highway 36 this spring, in the midst of a pandemic, would yield a garden or two? Inquiring minds…. This piece was written in May of 2014.

storms building in the north

I spent a couple of days in the heartland this week. I flew into the Indianapolis airport and took the two lane highway 36, from Indiana into the heart of Illinois. A drive, straight as an arrow, that takes you though some of the richest agricultural land in this country. Small towns were planted every five to ten miles, even an oddly placed suburb in what seemed the middle of nowhere, and vast oceans of farmland.

Having nothing better to do with my time, I counted vegetable gardens. I counted as I drove through towns on the highway. I counted as I passed subdivisions. I counted as I passed farms by the dozens. Finishing the trip two and half hours later with a grand total of zero vegetable plots spotted. My recent digs at neighbors for not planting gardens now seem misplaced, because well over half of the homes in our valley have some sort of vegetable garden. But zero? 

Now we can assume I missed plenty. But I was diligent in looking and even a casual survey should have turned up the odd patch of tilled ground behind a house or two. But I also didn’t see any small orchards or vines. Most homes in our valley sport at least a pear tree or two in the front yard. 

What could account for a food desert in this landscape? Was this the curse of rich land and commodity prices? Or was it that I was simply looking at 200 miles of an industrial park disguised as an agrarian landscape. A bit like those fake Hollywood towns of yore, looks the look at first glance but nothing supporting it. 

It was odd to see old farmhouses with the corn and soybeans tilled and planted up to the driveways. The houses bobbing on the landscape like lost boats at sea. Gone were the outbuildings and barns of the past, now replaced with corrugated buildings housing supplies and gargantuan equipment. No room in this landscape for the personal or something as humble as a vegetable patch or fruit tree. No need for the homestead pig or grapevine, the message is clear, this is valuable land. 

Yet what explained the absence in towns of vegetable gardens? As is my wont, I’m no doubt guilty of reading too much into this simple lack of observable gardens. But vegetable gardens, a few chickens and a fruit tree or two make a statement. And their absence in our rich heartland is a statement, something darker, a yielding of ones will or culture. 

Perhaps it is better to farm or garden on land that requires a bit more struggle?

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Reading this weekend: Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler). The just published update to his 2005 bestseller. A concise overview of “where we are”. Although, since the work was written just before the pandemic, one imagines the author wishes to have been able to add an addendum.