Faltering at Birth

Near winter’s end, your flock
Will bear their lambs, and you
Must be alert, out late
And early at the barn,
To guard against the grief
You cannot help but feel
When any young thing made
For life falters at birth
And dies.
              —The Farm (W. Berry)

Like fat-bellied ships heavily laden with riches, our 19 ewes lie uncomfortably at anchor, waiting to be offloaded. Lambing season began Wednesday morning with a fine set of twins born to one of a small group of related ewes who possess a nervous eye and a high-stepping skittishness. In a herd of cattle, such cows are dangerously overprotective and prone to charging. In a flock of sheep, such ewes, with their stomping and scattering, are merely an annoyance.

Taking turns. One of us around 10 p.m., another after midnight, again at 3, and then between the hours of 5 and 6, we walk softly amidst the flock where they lie. Out in the hay yard, among logs lined up to be cut on the sawmill, we play the light over the tranquil sea. We look for new lambs and for bulging ewes standing separate from the flock. And we watch for the ones in distress and needing a helping hand. Thankfully, we are seldom called upon to assist.

It’s 3 a.m. on Thursday. I step out onto the front porch to find the temperature unseasonably warm, with a near-full moon and clear skies. No light is needed as I enter the barnyard and move gingerly through the mass of bedded ewes. These are the times when I am giddy with the love of farming.

As I walk, I think of my old neighbor, Mr. Kyle, six years departed now, telling me two decades ago of his love for walking the hilly pastures among his dairy herd on a moonlit night. I have created my own path among the cattle and sheep. The wonderful, earthy smell rising from the resting bodies, the sounds of deep breathing that signify all is well — they strike a soul-satisfying note in the husband.

On this night, too, all is well. I spend 30 minutes with the ewes and feel reluctant to return to the house. Even back inside I toy with staying up, putting on the coffee, sitting quietly and reading. But I return to bed and sleep a couple more hours before getting back up and repeating the trip as the moon sets in the west.

Saturday morning I rise around 5, having slept through my middle-of-the-night check on our charges and not knowing whether Cindy has ventured out into the warm night. Storms are building in the distance, and change will soon be at hand.

I make coffee and dress. In the barnyard I count lambs, playing my light over the ewes. One ewe lies at the edge of the flock. I come near and she stands to allow a pair of snow-white newborns to suckle. They look strong and healthy, so I leave them to do what is natural and walk on. In the shelter of the hay barn’s overhang is another ewe. She is also lying down, and beside her is a singleton. But unlike the twins, this lamb is positioned on its side, at an unusual angle, curled, but with the head stretched out. I touch it and find its coat still warm and damp with afterbirth, its tongue distended, its head already cold in death.

I rub it vigorously, without either joy or hope. My sad expectations met, I leave the lamb on the ground next to its mother. She continues to lick its still body, as if by licking it longer she might will a better outcome. We bury the newborn later in the morning. Even as the day merges into evening, the ewe continues to call for her lost lamb, breaking even the stoniest of hearts.

A newborn’s death surrounded by so much new life is the essence of our work on the farm. We raise these animals for slaughter, for the table; we joke that sheep are born looking for ways to die. Yet there is always real grief at loss, especially that faltering misstep at birth.

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Addendum: This morning (Sunday), another 3 a.m. walk among the sheep. The severe storms of the day and evening before have passed, leaving behind a clear moon and starlit skies to light my steps. All is well. Another visit before sunrise finds two more sets of twins have been born, unfaltering, into this world. Now their real challenges begin.

The Readings Gone By

Like most, I pick up books to suit the mood and moment. Many times, when I just want some entertainment, a Lee Child, John Sandford, or Bernard Cornwell novel fits the bill. But, and this is not an indictment of those authors, the plots and writing soon fade from memory. Their works are the cheese dip and the cheesecake, not the entrée. They are not the books I recall while sitting on the porch before dawn. Nor are they the books I want to press into a nephew’s hand, saying, “Read this, it is important. It will take you places, make you want to upend your life.”

Here are 10 books from the past year (numbered by chronology, not preference) that meant the most to me. Books that took me out of my small world, connected me to the broader course of humanity, and made me glad to have had the experience. Works that were either artfully written, engrossing, or informative … or, in a few instances, all three at the same time.

  1. Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey, 1968). I was surprised one cold winter day to realize I had not read this oft-mentioned work. So, this time last year, I got myself to the Book Eddy in Knoxville and picked up a copy. This book is a beautiful, haunting, angry, and often funny work on the desert Southwest, a region Abbey feared was changing too fast, one I fear he would now find gone. Every sentence is a Wiki-quote.
  2. Southern Harvest (Clare Leighton, 1942). Based on the English illustrator’s time spent in North Carolina, it contains vignettes of rural Southern life. Most but not all pieces are sensitively written and wonderfully illustrated. I loved her woodcuts so much that Cindy located a numbered print for my Christmas present.
  3. Grey Seas Under (Farley Mowat, 1958). This book sat on my shelf for 20 years before I took it down to read. Sometimes you just know that if given time you will get around to a book, so why rush the experience? This is the story of an Atlantic salvage tug and the men who operated her off the coast of Canada from 1930 to 1948. It’s the absolutely riveting history of a ship masquerading as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. These sailors and their vessel had more of what it takes than any group of men you are ever likely to meet: daredevil rescues amid towering seas in icy waters day after day (and even more often, night after night), year after year — everyday heroics by uncommon people that make you proud to be of the same species.
  4. Cræft (Alexander Langlands, 2017). An antidote to the mass age, Cræft (not to be confused with “craft”) looks at the broad-based skills needed to survive in the old world. Putting up hay in medieval Europe, for example, required not only the knowledge to cut, cure, and store feed, but also to make and maintain a scythe, plant the forage, save the seed…. Today, we tend to learn, if we can be bothered, just a limited part of any craft. This book is a humbling reminder of how we have specialized ourselves into irrelevance yet still claim to be masters.
  5. Localism in the Mass Age (Mark Mitchell and Jason Peters, Eds., 2018). Styled as the Front Porch Republic Manifesto, it is a compendium of some of today’s more interesting writers on localism. This one has introduced me to a whole range of authors who suck away my spare time.
  6. The Last Grain Race (Eric Newby, 1956). Here’s another one picked up at the Book Eddy, a small, expertly curated out-of-print bookstore. I loved this book so much that I sought out a first edition (found cheap in Australia). But, first I read the Penguin orange-cover paperback. The plot: the author chucks advertising career at the tender age of 18 and signs on to sail on one of the last tall-masted ships, leaving out of Belfast for Australia to pick up grain, in 1938. A there-and-back-again tale about his stoic Finnish officers (who spoke little to no English), a polyglot crew, lice, rats, fights, clambers up rotten rigging in pitching seas and howling winds — all played out to the backbeat of approaching WW2, yet written with a touching and self-deprecating humor that makes you wish you had been on board. It now occupies a special place in my library.
  7. Round of a Country Year (David Kline, 2017). Kline is an Amish farmer who puts out a quarterly magazine, Farming (Remind me to resubscribe). This book is a simple diary of the farmer’s year. It’s the kind of work that has me dreaming of being a better steward and neighbor, of getting it right this year, or at least next.
  8. Fruitful Labors (Mike Madison, 2018). Ditto the Kline book. I knew the writing of Madison’s sister, Deborah, a creator of cookbooks, first. But this somewhat practical, often philosophical, work on farming in Northern California reeled me in with the author’s understanding, commitment, and struggle to manage a productive farm. Better written than I expected (and perhaps than I deserved, since the copy was given to me by the publisher), it sat on my to-read shelf for most of the year, the whiff of obligation wafting from its pages. Finally I read it, and for you farmers out there, I’d recommend it. You will be better for it. I know I am.
  9. Payne Hollow (Harlan Hubbard, 1974). I didn’t know much about Harlan Hubbard, other than that Wendell Berry wrote of him and he was mentioned by similar authors. I picked up this reprint at the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky. It is the autobiography of Harlan and his wife, Anna, as they settled down to live a life off the grid on the edge of the Ohio River in the 1950s. Simple, well-written, it kind of makes you regret every tie that binds you to this stinkin’ system.
  10. Conversations With Wendell Berry (Morris Grubbs, Ed., 2007). Goddamnit, Wendell Berry! Even the transcripts of his conversations are good and often great. This one was picked up just to say I owned it, for the bragging rights (Hear me loud and clear, Clem). So, I planned to read just one interview before placing it on the shelf. But then I read another, then another, until 213 pages later I ran out of reading. For Berry fans, pick it up. For those who don’t know Berry, pick it up.

I dream this January of a book yet to be found, at random, in a stack, discarded by a library for a sale. A forgotten and never-checked-out castoff that will make me fall in love with reading again and again, that will change me in ways I haven’t considered. A book that causes me, the next time I see you, to say, “Have you read…?”

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Reading this weekend: The Last Cowboys, a pioneer family in the new west (Branch). 

Small-Farm Economics

Apologies to my most sensitive readers, but this is another piece that deals frankly with the life cycle on a farm. You have been warned.

With 625 pounds of freshly butchered pork cut into quarters, beer in the fridge and pizza ready for the oven, sharp knives and meat saws on the tables, we went to work.

It can surely be said that the small farmer is more intimately involved with life’s cycles than the average citizen. The observations of birth, life, death, all harvested into good meals from countless livestock, leaves the practitioner with no illusion of his permanence on this green land.

We bought a sow back in February of this year. She arrived in the usual manner, from another farmer who had gotten in over her head with pigs. The owner couldn’t sell what the breeding stock produced, and she couldn’t afford to keep and feed their offspring. For the small farmer, raising out hogs is a chancy business. Unlike for cattle, there is no real market at the stockyard, so if the animals are sent that route, they bring a pittance for the substantial investment of time, money, and effort. Pork, on the small farm, is all about the direct marketing of the meat to a customer.

This particular sow arrived pregnant, due within the month. The seller had become desperate at the prospect of 6-12 new piglets arriving even before the last litter had been sold. This is often where we find the margin to make a small profit on our farm; it’s the classic adage of buy low and sell high. We paid $100 for this sow and picked her up from a small acreage on the Cumberland Plateau.

Mere weeks after her arrival, she gave birth to six piglets. Eight weeks later, we sold three of the weanlings to two customers to raise out for their own freezers. Those three brought in $120, which covered our initial expense. Between the sow’s temperament and her conformation, we chose not to keep her. Instead, we took her to the abattoir and had her ground into sausage, much of which we then sold — one of the many clear-eyed decisions a farmer has to make daily.

The first of November, nine months after their birth, our three hogs were sold as pork to customers. The average hanging weight of each hog was 275 pounds. We trailered them to the packinghouse on a Tuesday and picked up the packaged meat on Friday. The customers drove to the farm, then paid for and left with their pork by late afternoon.

Last week the friends/customers who had bought two weanlings from us in the spring had them slaughtered. Those few extra weeks of feeding boosted the hanging weights to a 312.5-pound average, which, circle back around to the reason newcomers get into trouble with pigs: they just keep growing and eating until they go in the freezer.

Our friends elected to save money and do the final processing of the carcasses into cuts. Now, that is a lot of meat to process! They asked for assistance and we were happy to oblige. Mind you, none of us is a skilled butcher, but we do have a working knowledge of the parts and various cuts of the carcass, and within four hours we had a tidy pile of loins, tenderloins, ribs, assorted roasts, and ham steaks; two hams and four sides for curing; lots of trimmings for grinding into sausage; and vast quantities of bones, fatback, and leaf lard. We paused only once, for the pizza and beer, before finishing up and heading home.

The small-farm return on investment is simple, in this instance: One sow produced enough meat for approximately 12 families to eat well for one year. And there, my friends, is a crash course in small-farm economics — food produced at scale for a knowable audience.

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Reading this weekend: Irish Journals (W. Berry)

Moving Hogs

It’s what we do, darlin’.

The sounds of fiddle and banjo picking went late into last night, following a dinner with friends of homegrown salad, chicken and sausage gumbo, and an amazing dessert of strawberry and mint cream soup. We were gathered out back around the table, a bottle of elderberry mead making the rounds, as some of us listened and others serenaded. Somewhere between “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Wagon Wheel,” I threw in my own entertainment by sharing the story of how I accidentally moved our 250-pound hogs.

On the farm we currently have two groups of pigs. One group of three is closing in on market weight and has six weeks to complete a life of indolence. At 100 pounds each, the other three will not be slaughtered until late in the fall. Through a combination of chance and timing, the two groups ended up together in the same paddock and pasture. The larger hogs are food bullies, and consequently, the younger ones have not grown out as fast as we would like.

Separating out hogs was long overdue and had, alas, been at the top of our to-do list for the past few weeks. Which brings us to Friday, when I stepped out onto the porch and found all six pigs in the first throes of liberty, cavorting in the side yard.

Hogs are by nature curious and cautious. They test limits, yet they are fearful of consequences. On Friday, the unlatched gate was discovered early, but, clustered and nosing around the magic line, they still took hours before gathering the courage to step across to freedom.

In the early years on the farm, I would have responded in dignified panic, running amongst them screaming and pleading and flailing my arms. Yesterday, as a seasoned warden of many such feeble escapes, I responded with calm. For pigs, like teenage boys, are both perennially rebellious and hungry. They can easily be controlled, if only just, with a full bucket of feed.

I waded through the scrum to the barn and grabbed the bucket. “Piggeee,” I called, and they came running back through the gate. All except one. The outlier barked loudly and ran the opposite direction. The rest stopped in mid-run to the food, turned, and followed suit. I tried again.

The next go ‘round I managed to get the smaller pigs through the gate, but the larger ones gamboled about among the muscadines. Figuring three pigs in a paddock beat six in the vines, I slammed the gate shut and, having doublechecked that it was indeed latched, headed off to deal with the others.

Now snuffling around the pawpaw trees, they came docilely to my calls and trotted into the large wooded paddock … their new home, where we had intended to move them all along and where they spent the remainder of the day celebrating their victory by eating last year’s acorns among the oaks.

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Reading this weekend: just received in the mail, the new American Library edition of Wendell Berry’s collected Port Williams stories and novels.

A Lamb’s Life

Winter: It was 24 degrees the morning No. 28 was born. Sleet pellets bounced off my old Carhartt jacket and the sky was slate gray when I headed out on my early morning rounds. The two cups of hot coffee helped little in warding off the chill wind as I rushed through my outdoor chores before reaching the relative warmth of the barn.

Entering a barn during lambing season involves careful observation: Who is soon to lamb, and is anyone showing signs of a distressed labor? Who has lambed already, and are all lambs up and nursing? The experienced mother will keep close track of her offspring, protecting them from the scrum of other sheep, but a first-time mother is easily unnerved and will often rush outside without her newborns, trailing the afterbirth, oblivious to what is expected of her in this new role in life.

On this particular morning, January 6th, a handful of fresh faces greeted me — the most exciting, twins born to our favorite ewe, No. 1333. No. 1333 is a large, handsome ewe who is uncommonly friendly, always standing still to receive a good scratching. As in the previous lambing season, she had just given birth to a male and a female. Much to our disappointment, she had lost the last year’s ewe lamb in a freak accident. We were anxious that nothing go wrong this time.

Later in the day, we eartagged No. 28 and her twin, 29. Eventually, we’d finish the season with 44 lambs, but in this first week of the year, lambing was just getting started. Other than the identifying numbers, the twins were soon indistinguishable from the mass of other lambs, running in and out of the larger flock, occasionally pummeling the udders of their moms.

Spring: Unlike the long and devastating drought of the previous year, this winter and spring’s rains had created a lush growth by April. It became a daily occurrence for us to remark on the change in landscape, as the unnatural browns gave way to the deepest greens. The lambs and ewes were turned out on new grass and thrived. For hours on end we’d watch the youngsters, tumbling about in soft grass at play, interrupted only by a mother’s bleat or a long, sun-warmed nap. Throughout the season, the inevitable deaths occurred: the lamb born at night that managed to roll outside the barn and die from the elements; the one I had to dispatch mercifully after it was stepped on by the flock and broke its back.

Summer: Mild temperatures and steady rain, a record hay crop, and modest garden success provided the backdrop as our little No. 28 transformed into a hardy, large-framed weanling. In June we separated the babies from their mothers. For the next few days, the moms would crowd one gate, the lambs another, fifty yards between them, and bleat. Loudly. Day and night. Another couple of days and the moms turned their attention back to the grass; a couple more and the lambs finally followed suit. Weaning accomplished, quiet restored.

Fall: It was an October evening during the late Indian summer, as we headed out to a dinner with friends, that we spotted a lamb lying down in the tall grass of the bottom pasture, noticeable by its isolation from the flock. We stopped the car and walked out to the field. There she was, No. 28, head up, alert, but unmoving.

Sheep are prey animals. They don’t lie down and stay down until they’re physically unable to go anymore. A quick check of the lamb’s gums revealed an unhealthy lack of color. Seemingly overnight, she had lost all of her body fat. We grabbed a wheelbarrow, put her in for the ride, and I pushed her up the long hill to the barn. We secured her in a stall and went on to dinner.

Over the next several days, we treated her with two different types of wormers. For us, worming is an infrequent occurrence. All sheep have some internal parasites, but we select and cull based on an individual sheep’s ability to carry a small enough “worm load” that she thrives without repeated use of parasiticides.

Each morning, we’d bring a bucket of warm water and mild soap to the barn and sponge off the accumulated scouring (diarrhea) from No. 28’s rear legs. After the second wormer was administered, the feces became solid, well formed — not what you’d expect from a lamb with a heavy parasite load. At that point we began to suspect something else was at work, since No. 28 remained alert, yet still unable to stand.

The day before we found her lying in the lower field, our 200-pound ram had managed to breach a fence and spend the night with our ewe lambs. Our new working hypothesis was that the ram had attempted to breed the developing young ewe and caused some nerve damage.

Having ascertained that her back was not broken, we rigged up a makeshift sling of saddle girths in hopes of retraining No. 28 to stand. For the next three days, we placed her in the sling three times a day with her feet just touching the ground. We would exercise each leg, moving it forward and backward, side to side. Through all of this, the ewe lamb continued to have a healthy appetite. We were committed to nursing her as long as the possibility of recovery still existed. But recovery was not to be.

On the morning of the fourth day, when I entered the barn, No. 28 was lying upright, but her head was extended forward onto the hay. This is never a good sign, but we were both loathe to give up on her too soon. We were anxious to preserve both her genetics and her life. She remained a calm, affectionate lamb, seemingly glad to have you stroke her head even in her distress.

Leaving the barn, I headed out to finish bush-hogging an upper pasture. We had a cold front coming in around midday and were expecting rain. It was a few hours before I made my noonday hospital visit to the patient. This time, when I approached, her neck was stretched out in the hay, her body limp, like a balloon with a slow leak. Her eyes still followed me, but without the usual spark. This was an act in a play that we had seen too many times. She was going to die — it was now just a matter of when.

I walked slowly back to the house. I picked up my 30-30 and returned to the barn. The lamb’s labored breathing was audible when I opened the stall gate. I raised the rifle and shot her between and just above both watching eyes. She died instantly.

Outside, the cold rain began to fall on the valley. I went back to the house, gun in my hand, breathing in the smell of the rain, of this season, aware of this rhythm, this awful beauty in the dying of the year. But I continued to look ahead, on another cold day in early January, to when the next lambing season begins on our farm, always in hope and sometimes in death.

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Reading this weekend: The Art of Loading Brush: new agrarian writings, by Wendell Berry. And, The Lean Farm: how to minimize waste, increase efficiency, and maximize value and profits with less work, by Ben Hartman. Both, seemingly at odds with each other upon first glance.