Category Archives: Agrarianism

224 Feet of Fencing

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On a recent podcast this question was asked of me: What would I suggest to a would-be farmer as a first project? I replied that a good fence, specifically a perimeter fence, would be an ideal first step. Because in the building of a fence much is accomplished, learned, and discovered.

The replaced fence on the left. The sheep are still on the winter paddock.

While it may be somewhat unfashionable—in these days when global elites forswear borders, loyalties, and cultural identities, and even West Point decides that asking cadets to take an oath to duty, honor, and country is potentially divisive and downright antiquated—to discuss and celebrate boundaries, truly, good fencing does make for good neighbors.

One December day back in 1999 we set a corner post three feet in the ground adjacent to our barn. From that original post would evolve the fencing system that spans our entire acreage. That very first line stretched 224 feet westward toward the road, bisecting the upper portion of what would become our lower pastures. From that post and the resulting western terminal post, other lines emerged, merged, and enclosed the boundaries of our irregularly shaped farm. All of that initial fencing took a few years to complete, and factoring in improvements and repairs it is a task that has continued to occupy our attentions each year since.

On that first line we used Red Brand field fence, a thirty-two-inch-tall roll of galvanized wire held together by interwoven four-by-four squares, then topped it with three strands of barbed wire for good measure. While the height was less than adequate, the fence has, even while sagging in places with age, held to its original mission of keeping cattle and sheep in their intended pastures—though, it should be noted, on occasion an errant bull, ram, or even ewe has leapt over for love to showcase the limits on man’s will over nature. (As one farmer cleverly put it, “Where there’s a willy there’s a way.”)

That early fence held, more or less, until last Sunday. That’s when a large yearling ewe who in a bid for greener grass got her head stuck in a stretched-out square. Upon finding herself in such a predicament, she followed the instinct of every prey animal and panicked. Predators though we are, we followed suit. In the ensuing farce—as we hollered at each other, at the ewe, at the gods—we managed in spite of her antics and our collective panic to cut away some of the fencing and release her back into the flock. We closed the gap with stockman’s wire much like a fisherman mends nets. It was only then that we noticed the bottom of the fence. It had with the passing of the years become buried and rusted in the ground and was now broken beyond fixing by the ewe’s efforts to free herself. In other words, it was time to replace this oldest stretch of wire.

Forgive what may sound like an immodest boast, but after twenty-five years of near-constant work, our toolkit of basic competencies is more than adequate for many if not all challenges. Ripping out and replacing fence is old hat. Over the next couple of days, we both, together and individually, working in spare moments during our farm day, removed fence staples and clips and separated the old wire from the fence line. On Tuesday evening while Cindy prepared dinner, I pulled the last of the fence free from the ground.

The following day, a Wednesday, with the help of the Kid (the current one is home-schooled and has a flexible schedule), we rolled up the old wire, unfurled a thirty-nine-inch-tall field fence, stretched it tight with a ratcheted come-along, and attached it to the T-posts and wooden posts (including the two we set twenty-five years ago).

Total time from removal of the old wire and installation of the new wire to cleanup was only four or five hours. Working together gave us a chance to reflect on when we had put in the original fence and other stories centered around the many projects we have tackled. The manual competencies we have gained from working with our hands brings a satisfaction to our lives, a tangible “we did this.” When I get the questions from wannabe farmers, it is these moments I struggle to convey, because the answer is personal. It gets to the character of a man’s internal life and identity, and only that individual can look into himself and answer the question: will the prospect of sweat and physical work bring contentment, even joy, or will it be viewed as menial drudgery best “farmed” out to others?

For both Cindy and myself, it is in the moment of completion that we know ourselves; that we know what we can accomplish with hands to a task, that by embracing our limits and boundaries we are given a sense of who we are. That is the something, that is the everything. That is our analog to the message that place does not matter.

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Reading this week: I knocked out the first three of the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries (L. Block) in as many days. It has been close to thirty years since I read this series with some pleasure. The intervening years have done nothing to dim my appreciation. Think of a funny wisecracking version of Sam Spade, except as a Raffles-like burglar by night and rare book dealer by day, and you will get the flavor of Bernie. I’ve also started The Pursuit of Happiness, how classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America (J. Rosen). I’m only two chapters in to the work but already am mentally placing this volume in my best-of-2024 list.

Books for the Small-Farm Curious

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a view towards our old orchard

It is a known fact, or at least one as reported by my beloved, that I tend to buy books like an average kid buys candy bars. And over the past 30 years, it is true, that I have managed to accumulate a fair library of farming-related books. Even on that fateful day, when we first had the discussion about buying land, my response was to buy a book (or three). And it is because of this truth that I am sometimes asked to provide a list of titles that may be of use to those in pursuing a “productive” life in the country.

But before we delve into learning by reading … it should be noted that the best education comes from those who have the experience. So, try and find someone who already farms, then volunteer to help. Learn by putting your hands in the dirt, stretching barbed wire, raising animals, and most importantly, paying attention to what you are learning.

That last is particularly important. Over the years we have both benefited from a habit of critical assessment. After, say, a difficult session castrating young steers, we will sit down, usually over an afternoon coffee, and discuss what went well and what could be improved. It may be a simple modification to the infrastructure or a reminder to make sure we have everything on hand before we begin. But that active reflection on what we did is as important as the preparation for what we do.

Each wave of books on farming or homesteading has its own new jargon to describe similar methods. While the blame may lie partly with the publishers, who are tasked with putting new titles before the public each year, it can also be placed with the consumer, who is always in search of the latest and greatest, the magic bullet. For instance, the au courant buzzword is “regenerative.” A couple of years ago, the more or less same practice was called “restorative.” Four years before that it was “resilient.” “Permaculture”, “sustainable”, “self-sufficient” — each held sway for its allotted years. “Organic” is said to have been coined in 1940. Go back even further, to the 1930s, and the word du jour was “self-sufficing” (at a time when farming was simply called “farming”). Take my word for it; I have books with all those terms. Each new designation frames the question of how to farm in a slightly different way, but they all fundamentally describe a style of agriculture that is non-industrial, at least in mindset. The point here is, don’t get hung up on a term. (If you really want to go old school, Lucius Columella, AD 4-70, has something worthwhile to say on most topics … that is, if you exclude the bits on when to sacrifice a puppy before plowing.)

On to the book advice:

If you want to read only one author, then Joel Salatin is always a great choice. But you may need to grab just one title of his to get the gist of what the others preach: practice multispecies pasture rotation. Then again, he is always entertaining in how he says what he says. And I should know; I have seven of his books.

Next, two publishers to consider. A publisher is like an artist, in that each has a style even as his or her work evolves. These two, Storey Books (Garden Way) and Chelsea Green, are the best “artists” in the small-ag field. A solid, instructional farm library can easily be built on their selections alone.

www.storey.com or www.chelseagreen.com

General guides

  • Grow It! The Beginner’s Complete In-Harmony-With-Nature Small Farm Guide (Richard Langer, Noonday Press). It came out in 1972 and remains an easy-to-use reference when you get stumped.
  • Small-Scale Livestock Farming: A Grass-Based Approach for Health, Sustainability, and Profit (Carol Ekarius, Storey).
  • Successful Small-Scale Farming, An Organic Approach, a companion to the one above (Karl Schwenke, Storey).
  • The Winter Harvest Handbook, Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses (Eliot Coleman, Chelsea Green). Coleman is the godfather of year-round gardening. That he pioneered his techniques in Maine makes his approach even more amazing and indispensable.
  • Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening (Will Bonsall, Chelsea Green). I reread this one every two years. Bonsall is an old hippie and a vegetarian who grows everything, with no animal inputs, very little fuel. This is a man who walks the walk and shows you how you can produce more with very little. It is a powerful book, with humor.

Specific guides

Focus on Storey Books publishing. They have dozens of titles like these:

  • Small-Scale Pig Raising (Dirk van Loon)
  • Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats (Jerry Belanger)

Every volume is an essential reference for raising a type of livestock. The range covers the basics of geese, beef cattle, milk cows, turkeys, ducks, and on and on. My suggestion is, pick four to buy based on your interests. You can’t go wrong. Most can be found used.

I’d also suggest one title on butchering if you plan on raising livestock:

  • Butchering: Poultry, Rabbit, Lamb, Goat, Pork — The Comprehensive Photographic Guide to Humane Slaughtering and Butchering (Adam Danforth, Chelsea Green). I attended one of his butchering workshops a few years back, and he knows his stuff. I use this book as a refresher guide multiple times a year.

And there you have it, an instant farm library … though, if these are the essential ones, then why does my library contain a few hundred other agricultural titles? Because books themselves are necessary. Sure, the internet and all those videos on YouTube can be helpful. But since farming is ultimately an analog life, books are a perfect companion on that journey. So perfect, in fact, that they can be read by solar power and never, ever require recharging. Genius!

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Reading this weekend:  A Rich Spot of Earth, Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary garden at Monticello (J. Hatch). Feeds and Feeding (F. Morrison).

An Agrarian Life (revisited)

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“He lives the song he sings just as many of us sing the songs we don’t live.”

–Richard Taylor

It is a subject as old as the Roman poets: trying to live the song we sing. No doubt, as long as members of our race have felt consoled by the comforting embrace of empire, they have felt the snare grip their ankle as they tried to reclaim whatever was felt to them as an authentic life.

This blog is about farming, about the life of working the farm and the subtle ways that that life changes the participant. My farm life is a journey. A journey, if you will, about living those songs I sing. A journey that has taught me to live songs, often heard as if at a great distance, with muted lyrics, songs that once learned help loosen the grip of the snare.

Looking back over these 16 years of posts, certain themes regularly emerge: changes by a birth or death, the cycles of seasons, mistakes learned over and over again, the value of a willing partner, the companionship of friends and family, the rediscovery of the art of observing, the liberating value of work performed.

So too revelations of being more profoundly conservative and liberal than previously imagined. Not the conservative mindset of our chattering classes, with their mania of global commerce, their cavalier resource depletion, and their religious litmus tests. But instead, the timeless conservativism of careful consideration to structure, change, technology, land, and relationships. A growing awareness that progress and change, as needed on a farm, best proceed from thoughtful slowness.

And not the liberalism of our contemporary world, a cultural leveling to the lowest common denominator or the mire of identity politics–an effort to redress ills with broad strokes and imperial power–but a liberalism derived out of observation, of slowness, community, and responsibility, that by those acts, the world observed is seen with very different eyes. A narrowing of one’s focus, a localizing of compassion, can flower to encompass a wider realm.

Odd how this life has given this participant an active tolerance and intolerance concurrently: the former for the beauty and diversity of the natural world of which I am a part, the latter for the bad and boorish behavior of our own acts and the larger self-absorbed modernity.

How any of us loosens the snares that bind us is our own journey, our own song. It is, for me, the agrarian life, or at least my own approximation of how it should be lived, that continues to exercise a power to change. I still don’t know if I am living the song. But those lyrics, once muted, are now heard with greater clarity.

This was a post from the archives that is as true to me today as when written, perhaps more so.

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The Unbroken Thread: discovering the wisdom of tradition in an age of chaos (S. Ahmari)

“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).

 

A Spring Update: Self-Isolating, With Beer

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Ghost flights above the farm

I walk with determination from the house, past the barn and chicken coop and into the hoop-house, with the sole goal of catching a rabbit munching on my tender cole crop transplants. Sunrise is still an hour or more away, and the light is just enough to see that while the rabbits had been having their way (again), none are visible and within blasting distance of my shotgun.

Come high summer I may take a live-and-let-live attitude toward the cute little rodents. At a time when we are deep in the largesse of a bountiful garden, I can afford a bit of noblesse oblige. But in these first days of spring, a sacrificial rabbit is the only deal on offer. There are only so many veggies to go around, and I’m not willing to share, unless the rabbits do the same.

Earlier in the week we spent a couple of hours castrating a dozen ram lambs. We left another two intact, both large singletons, that showed remarkable growth. We will graze them through the summer with Joey, the big boss ram, and see how they shape up for possible use in fall breeding. This morning, through the far open door of the hoop-house, past the nibbled kale, the ewes and their lambs lie at rest, scattered across the corral. Quiet for once, they seem at peace with the morning. I know this will change. For now though, I simply take enjoyment in watching them.

I turn after a few minutes to walk back to the house. Passing the barn, I glance inside to see how our neighbor’s project is coming. He is enclosing for us a 10 x 16 storage room with a low ramp to house equipment and tools. Anyone with experience around barns knows how dusty they quickly become. After 20 years with the need, we are finally moving forward with the construction. The flooring is down and the framed-in walls up. Standing on the floor, I give a jump and find it firm.

Back outside, I approach our three beehives. A steady thrum of activity is audible from a foot away. My recently mandated downtime allowed me the opportunity to act as Cindy’s beekeeping assistant a couple of times this past week. Two days ago she completed a split (a form of swarm intervention), creating a new hive, while I relaxed nearby and drank a beer with drop-in friends. Now, in the predawn, the newly split hive hums contentedly.

Before heading to the house I stop back by the barn and cast a nasty look at the lawnmower. Yesterday I gave it a start for its inaugural cutting. Only after pulling the cord and listening as it idled much too slowly did I realize that I had forgotten to replace the spring on the governor last fall. It was a simple enough fix, which begs the question, why wasn’t it taken care of six months ago? That is one of those eternal questions I ask myself. The answer is that it is all too easy to put aside a repair and move on to another task. The second best response is to fix it on the spot. So, yesterday, that is what I prepared to do. Without thinking, I released the throttle to stop the engine. I then reached down to turn the mower on its side to repair the missing spring. It was at that exact moment that my pain receptors notified my brain that the blade was still spinning.

Thirty minutes later, after bandaging my bruised and bleeding fingers (each mercifully still attached), Cindy went back to her small tractor and continued mowing around the barns and outbuildings — but not before sagely suggesting that I call it quits and instead self-isolate in the backyard with a beer. I did, vowing to maintain proper social distancing from the mower, at least until next week.

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Reading this weekend: A Place on Earth (W. Berry).