Tag Archives: Work

Would-Be Farmers: A Few Things to Know

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Send me $5 and I’ll mail you plans on how to build a raised bed just like this one!

Throughout 2019, we will be celebrating 20 years of life at Winged Elm Farm. For those who can stomach social media, I have begun by posting a series of weekly photos on Facebook documenting the journey. You can find them on the Winged Elm Farm page. Looking back at my journal and flipping through boxes of photos (thereby avoiding my chores) has put me in a nostalgic mood and gotten me thinking about what I’ve learned these past two decades.

People who want to live the farm life approach me for advice surprisingly often. Being the shy, retiring, completely nonjudgmental sort that I am, I usually refrain from thinking I have anything to offer. But, today I’m feeling generous with my accumulated wisdom. So here it is, a distillation of just a few things you would need to know were you, too, to pursue the joys and challenges of owning a small, diversified farm.

 

  • Gloves: Knitted winter gloves keep your hands nice and toasty if you do no work. The same for insulated gloves. But try and manage fence repairs, stretching barbed wire for hours on end, and you will find your knitted gloves in tatters, bits and pieces stuck along the fenceline. Get yourself some proper leather and canvas work gloves, or put them on your Christmas list. They come in bundles and are dirt cheap.

 

  • Footwear (a favorite topic): It should go without saying that flip-flops, sandals, and fancy-pants boots don’t cut it on an East Tennessee farm. Get yourself some proper rubber boots, specifically Wellingtons. The cost is $28 at Tractor Supply, and they will last you about one and a half years. You will wear them 90 percent of the time. The remaining time, on those rare dry days, a solid pair of work boots will do the job. Think clay, mud, and 1,500-pound animals when making your selection.

 

  • Be a cook: You are raising your own meat, growing your own vegetables, and maintaining a few fruit trees, right? Then stop buying that food from the grocery. Learn how to cook something other than steak and pork chops. Your kids won’t eat yucky eggs that came from a chicken instead of a store? Do as the Spartans did: leave them (the kids) weak and exposed out on a hillside. Then try again.

 

  • Be a neighbor: Build a fence, mend a fence, borrow equipment, lend equipment, and show up with a chainsaw when a tree comes down. Attend a funeral and a wedding, help castrate a calf, drop off some surplus vegetables (especially armfuls of zucchini), and give lots of unsolicited advice. Show up with a shotgun when you see lights on where they shouldn’t be in the middle of the night — just shout a careful you-who first.

 

  • Don’t be a snowflake. Do your chickens really need a retirement plan? The stewing hen is now the thing in fine cooking circles; build a savory pot of chicken and dumplings around her carcass. Likewise old sows and cantankerous rams; there are an endless variety of uses for whole hog or “lamb” sausage. You are on the farm now, not at a petting zoo, and you’re going to need to make some hard choices. Animals will die, one way or the other. Treat them well, feed them well, and when the time is right, eat them well.

 

  • Start young: Even just this past week, I had The Conversation. Someone I know well who is 60 years old is preparing to buy land and start ranching. My advice: Don’t. You no longer have the physical strength. Your muscle memory tells you that you are a teenager. Your back uses a different calendar. Use your remaining years to read entertaining stories of farm life to your still-healthy vertebrae.

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Reading this weekend: Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen) and Boswell’s Journey to the Hebrides. 

Farm Postcard: Summer

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She rises up from the land, pushes down from the sky, and, as you turn to flee, she flings her wet blanket over your shoulders, bringing you to earth. There will be no denying her powers. She rules this land, this season, claimed with heat and humidity. Capricious in her ways, if unhappy with your style of shirt, you will be forced to try on three more before it is noon. You learn your place in her domain, her lordly demands, to submit with grace and a smile… for now. And, for your labor and servitude, she may condescend to favor you with fruits, vegetables, and honey.

The Good Tenant

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I look on as the last of our Red Poll herd clambers aboard the trailer, bound for a farm in Southern Illinois. One lone steer remains behind, with nothing but ewes and lambs for company. Around the corner, the Barred Rocks and Brown Leghorns scratch for bugs, totally indifferent to the leaving. The pigs in their paddocks, still sleeping off their dinner repast, are oblivious to all but dreams of breakfast.

To run a small diversified farm is to live within the wheel. It turns for the seasons, for the markets, for the climate. We have spent these many years planning, building, and repairing the infrastructure to support multiple endeavors, to make the farm resilient, to create and sustain a place where the absence of one species simply indicates another cycle, unremarked in the larger scheme.

Livestock live their lives out here, with their offspring raised, fattened, and slaughtered. Crops are planted, watered, and harvested. Dinners are planned, cooked, and enjoyed. The refuse is gathered, emptied, and composted. Wheels within wheels, seasons within seasons, years within years. Everything is done within a scale that is appropriate to our abilities, our infrastructure, our needs.

Some wondered, with the sale of the cattle, if we were scaling back, down, in retreat. They deconstructed the act, examined the entrails, to discover more than was presented. But if they had taken a closer look and a broader view, they would have seen a panorama painted over seventeen years, and one that continues to unfurl.

In that big picture, the beautiful snow in winter becomes a distant dream come the dry, hot summer and chicks in the spring lead to a convivial table in the fall. A herd of cattle is followed by a flock of sheep; a harvest of potatoes is replaced by manure and then a crop of beans. The one true constant in all is the turning wheel that brings the careful observer into active participation.

The small farm is itself a participant workshop of opportunities and dreams. It’s a place that, if we will read the cycles, does not scale up or down, but in a circle. A place where the new becomes the old becomes the new again, all within a framework of what is reusable, possible, and desirable.

Yet, as well as we live within the wheel, we are but fleeting stewards. The farm belongs not to us but to a much more demanding landlady, one who insists on her share of the successes and who is unforgiving of our failures. The panorama she paints is of billions of years, not a mere seventeen. And while capricious in her communications — railing one minute and calm the next — she is nonetheless predictable to a degree. Our challenge is to watch out for her moods and scale appropriate to what she will allow, knowing that when we are done the tenancy of our land reverts back to her.

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Reading this weekend: The Running Hare: the secret life of farmland, by John Lewis-Stempel.

 

A Fever In The Night

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There’s no measurable rain in the forecast through the end of the year, and a pall of smoke hangs over the valley from wildfires. Firefighters have been flying in from all over the country to help overloaded volunteer fire departments cope with the size and number of blazes flaring up.

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Round bales of hay stored on our farm

I spent much of yesterday hauling and stacking square bales of hay purchased from a farmer two valleys over. With each bend in the road coming and going,­ another dry pond, dead pasture, or dying hardwood came into view. There is a bit of the post-apocalyptic look to this land. The verdant Southeast has been laid low by two years of below normal rainfall. Wells are beginning to run dry; farmers are selling off livestock. The pasture rootstock is at or beyond any quick recovery.

The tried-and-true strategies of rotation, permaculture, and old-fashioned conservation help mitigate the worst effects. Or perhaps “mitigate” isn’t the right word. Defer? Yes, the tried-and-true strategies help defer the worst effects. Mid-south agriculture is based on, depends on, plentiful rainfall, not irrigation — the result of a cornucopia of happy geographic coordinates.

Is this drought a direct result of climate change? It’s impossible to know for sure. Grazing and growing practices are based on the faith that things will continue long term much as they always have. But will our happy coordinates no longer contribute to our abundance? With exceptional droughts and 1,000-year deluges occurring with the regularity of the rising sun, I’m inclined to sound the ram’s horn. I’ve discussed with other area farmers how to prepare for a warmer climate. But what has only become clear in the past few years is that we have to prepare for an unstable climate.

For those who live in the city and buy their meat and veggies at the grocery store or at The Olive Garden, drought and heavy rain are an inconvenience. For those who produce a measure of food for the public, climate instability can be ruinous. For the average rural household of South Roane County, which earns a paltry third of the income of East and West coast city dwellers (low-$20,000s vs. $60,000s), the ability to grow at least some of their own food can mean the difference in surviving and not.

My concerns for the future lie in the intersection of community and self-sufficiency. Thinking of all the rural communities devastated this year by floods in places like the Carolinas and Louisiana, I wonder if those communities will ever come back: the foundations of neighborliness foundering on economic dissolution and post-growth politics. My gut tells me that no one left or right in the political elites really gives a shit. Which in the past has been okay because the rural folks traditionally have made do.

That is, they were able to make do based on the old model. It is this new climate model about which I’m not so sanguine. Sure, we can stockpile our hay, pull our livestock off sensitive hill pastures, nurse our orchards, vines, and gardens with a careful tonic of water (provided it is not stolen by cities at war with us and each other over water stocks). We can make these changes for the short term. But those are actions based on a hope that this is just an aberration, that things won’t get really bad, that the worst imaginings of our mind are like a fever in the night that passes before waking.

My worst imaginings are for uncertainties for which you can’t model an outcome.

Basic Farm Lessons: Part 4

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Short Lessons

  • Magic Wild Turkey Tricks: I have a magic flock of wild turkeys on the farm. Each evening, between the hours of 4 and 6, they reliably cross the lane and graze on our hill pasture. Yet if I stand quiet in the shadows with my shotgun at the appointed time, they magically never appear. How do they do that?
  • Learning to Panic: Living on a farm provides plenty of opportunities in learning to panic. Owning Grainger, a 70-pound adolescent Carolina Dog who still considers chickens chew toys, gives me multiple moments of anxiety each day. Yesterday, I walked around a corner of the barn to find the door to the brooder left open and all 25 4-week-old Barred Rocks scattering to the wind.
  • Water Conservation, Part 1: (A timely lesson as our county slips into extreme drought.) Question: If I turn on the water for the hogs in the woods at 8 a.m., at what time will Cindy come in the house to inquire after the length of time the water has been filling the hog trough? Answer: 5 p.m.
  • Water Conservation, Part 2: In an effort to redeem myself, I hustle outside and fill up the sheep’s water trough. When it is full, I leave the hose in the trough and carefully disconnect the hose from its source. Doing so allows the hose to act as a siphon … slowly pulling all of the water back out of the trough and onto the parched ground. Later, over dinner, Cindy asks, “I thought you were going to fill up the sheep’s watering trough?” I feign deafness.

The Longer Lesson

Timing Is Everything: One of our nearer neighbors owns six or so dogs, an unruly mix of mutts big and small. The largest are kept penned, bored and alone, and bark morning and evening. Although a good third of a mile from our house, they can still be heard clearly through the windows and walls of my study. Not quite loud enough to disrupt my slumber, they nevertheless disturb my early morning reading and correspondence.

I’d been looking for a way to gently approach the neighbors with the question, “How in the hell can you live with such racket?!” Since their son works on our farm on Saturdays, I decided that would give me a perfect opportunity for a conversation. And, more important, a demonstration of how we manage to be good, quiet neighbors by keeping our animals firmly in check.

Yesterday, after he’d arrived and we’d exchanged a few minutes of pleasantries, the time had come to diplomatically broach the barking dogs.

Having first made a point of disciplining Grainger as he repeatedly lunged at a chicken on the other side of a fence, I began, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask …”

Alas, it was at that very moment that the sheep chose to begin their morning cacophony, drowning out my words, “… about your barking dogs.” Their bleating was immediately overwhelmed by the cattle in the lower pasture as they began bawling lustily for fresh hay. The sounds echoed off the ridges and continued for the next 15 minutes, disturbing the peace of everyone within a mile.

Half an hour later, our farm helper reminded me politely that I had wanted to ask him something. “Never mind,” I said. “We can talk about it another time.”

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Reading this weekend: The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman. A re-reading of this modern classic to prepare us to use our new hoop house.