Category Archives: Agrarianism

A Farming Guide to the Political Season (revisited)

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Hard to believe that four years have passed since I wrote this piece. And, as in March 2016, I spent the day oversowing pastures and thinking about the political season. How little has changed. Both parties are chasing growth and both are still ignoring rural America.

Monday night we spent a couple of hours loading yearling wethers. They were destined for the slaughter the following morning. A fairly straightforward operation, Cindy pointed and I grabbed, hoisting the hundred-pound castrated ram lambs off their feet, the two of us then carrying them out of the barn. A better chute system would help, but we work with what we have today.

Wednesday night, in a rain just above freezing and a mud just below boot tops, we loaded a hog also earmarked for slaughter. We slid and stumbled in the muck, cursed and shot accusatory looks, then laughed with relief when she finally walked onto the trailer unassisted.

Thursday night, during a late season arctic blast, our newest sow farrowed 11 healthy piglets. We provided her an ample bedding of hay in an improvised stall in an open shed, adding a sheet of plywood to block the brutal north wind and a heat lamp for warmth, and, beyond providence, we trusted in the maternal instincts of an experienced mother to keep the newborns comfortable and well fed.

By Saturday the late-winter chill had begun to abate, and we were gifted with a rare sunny day and highs around 50 degrees. I spent the day crossing the smaller lamb paddocks on foot, oversowing a mix of oats, rye, and turnip seed that will hopefully provide some fast-growing early-spring forage for the sheep.

Early afternoon I took a break to help Cindy welcome 20 guests from the area Master Gardeners club. They were on hand to conduct a pruning practice in our half-acre orchard, which had been seriously neglected since the last big pruning two years ago — a pruning that is needed annually. In a short couple of hours, armed with pruning knives, loppers, and tree saws, the crew had cut away the deadwood, the water sprouts, and a host of unwanted branches.

Pruning crew gone, we retired to the front porch for a beer with friends, who afterward pitched in and helped with chores, then we all caravanned to another farm and joined in unloading some newly arrived weanling pigs.

I find that as the years go by, the rhetoric of conservatism and liberalism mean less and less to the life we live. Rhetoric aside, no candidate or party speaks for the rural farms or communities. Left or right the language is of the city: eternal growth and happy days (past, present, or future).

As a farmer I know a couple of truths. First, that the manure I sling has real value. Second, that growth is a part of a larger cycle and is never eternally sustained; that the wheel turns and winter always follows spring, summer, and fall.  

So, green grass must be carefully harvested and stored. Orchards must be pruned of deadwood, a diseased peach tree ruthlessly cut down and burned. Lambs serve a purpose and must be sold and eaten when that day comes. Sows will farrow, cute piglets will grow to 300 pounds before being butchered, and gardens will be tilled, planted, harvested, and prepared for the fallow months.

Manure needs to be conserved and used with care. Seed must be sown in order to grow. Resources must be nurtured. Infrastructure must be repaired and improved. And it is partnership and cooperation, not partisanship, that sustain connections in a rural community and on a farm.

And if adequately prepared for, the winter is traversed relatively unscathed into spring.

Angels: The Phone Always Rings Twice

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Turnips in the yard

Reader beware. If you are expecting the seraphim to flap their wings solemnly throughout this piece, search elsewhere. This is not a theological work, no musing on how many of their numbers might fit on a pin head. Today, we simply speak of destiny.

I may wish for a different role in life. But alas, although the home phone seldom rings, when it does, I always answer with some hesitation. Are we marked at birth for the roles we will play in this life? Do the gods gather up a handful of archetypal or character dust and randomly start slinging it about — a little leadership landing there, a bit of maternal instinct here, the jovial, the innocent, the hero cast willy-nilly over the sleeping infants. Is that how it works, what it all comes down to in the end? An Angel of Death for this valley?

It pains me to make this public admission, but when an animal needs to be dispatched, I get the call. It is not a job I sought, yet it comes to me more often than I wish.

The neighbors with a mortally injured lamb who can’t bring themselves, literally, to pull the trigger? They call me. Dying deer on the side of the road, they call me. Pet chickens in the final stages, they call me, Brian the Neck Wringer. It can all get a bit depressing, this being the spine for, shall we call them, the timid. I’d much prefer that they get on with the job themselves. But they can’t, they won’t. They call. Like the day my muscle-bound neighbor followed his hog around a pen for half an hour, pistol in trembling hand, looking for just the right shot to put the pig down, but could never quite pull the trigger. I felt compelled to act. I went to the house, grabbed the 30-30, and, returning to the scene of indecisiveness, pushed past and killed the hog with a single shot.

If you are going to eat meat — hell, if you are going to drive a car — you are going to have blood on your hands. My attitude, perhaps, has more than a strong whiff of the judgmental. But it is justified, certainly. Soon after I first met Cindy, a neighbor’s Doberman got into her barnyard and savaged her sheep. After watching the neighbor hem and haw over killing the bloodied and dying animals, I reached for the 410 in his hands and did the deed myself. I hate to see an animal suffer or a hard decision postponed on account of spinelessness masquerading as compassion.

I hasten to say I’m not insensitive (right?). I chalk up my willingness to kill to a lifetime of gutting catfish caught on trotlines from the family pond, cleaning speckled trout and dolphinfish all night after a day of fishing on the gulf, butchering hundreds of chickens I’ve raised to put meat on the table. One carries out these unpleasantries if one eats. Or did, before the advent of mass man and consumerism distanced us from death. Allowed us to believe that it is better for the immigrant, the lower waged, the lower class to do our dirty work, butcher our meat, butcher our enemies. Washed our hands….

Oddly, and perhaps one reason Cindy and I have been together 35 years, she is called out for the opposite function. If the Angel of Mercy is needed, the phone also rings. When a mother goose got separated from her goslings at work, colleagues called Cindy to solve the problem. When a dog gets injured in the valley — bitten by a snake, shot by a neighbor, hit by a car — the call comes for Cindy. Where my toolbox contains an axe, rifle, and knife, hers includes clear-eyed compassion and skills honed over decades caring for animals in her charge.

Hers is the more rewarding role to play. People come up to her and give her hugs years later for helping nurse a beloved pet or farm animal back to health. I, on the other hand, get the careful nod, averted eyes. Wary, they seem, lest I discern a limp in their step and go for my shotgun.

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Reading this weekend: Sign Posts In A Strange Land (Percy). “the fruit of such mismatch is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry.”

Nothing to Crow About: Speaking of Our Agrarian Roots

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My cousin was in negotiations recently with executives from a Northeastern city, and he stopped them cold when he reminded them, “We may have to lick the calf twice.” It took a bit of explaining to describe what he meant, which is, you may not succeed the first time, but try again. The businessmen took to the expression right away and started weaving it into their written communications with him.

Hearing that got me thinking about all the phrases and words we commonly use that reflect our culture’s deep agrarian roots. Most of us, even if we don’t know a round baler from a square baler, know that when we’re advised to “make hay while the sun shines,” we’re being told to take advantage of ideal conditions for as long as they last.

When our favorite team suffers a no-point game, it’s said to have scored a big fat “goose egg.” Likewise, when our “goose is cooked,” we won’t be of any use to anyone, because we’re in deep trouble. Anyone who has been around geese knows the origin of “you silly goose.” And how could we forget “ugly duckling,” “sitting duck,” “feather one’s nest,” and “lame duck”?

We use these terms so often that our language is enriched without our even knowing the words’ etymology. Yet, a moment’s reflection will make most obvious. There’s “let’s talk turkey” and stop speaking “gobbledygook.” (I’m only hoping this blog post doesn’t turn out to be a turkey.)

Sometimes, when we want to annoy someone, we simply “get their goat.” This is, of course, a favorite pastime of “old goats.” Just as often, we want to be easy on someone, so we treat them with “kid gloves” (a particularly soft leather from young goats).

Sheep have given us a vast language to describe everyday occurrences. Those scam calls in the evening? Get sucked into one and you’re likely to “have the wool pulled over your eyes,” maybe even “get fleeced.” As we move into the election year, we will all be attuned to the “bellwether” states (a reference to the lead wether — a castrated male sheep — which wears a bell that alerts the shepherd to location of the flock). Speaking of flocks, the pastor has one he tends to each Sunday.

If you have ever seen a territorial ram in action, then the term “battering ram” needs no explanation. When we’ve done something exceptionally foolish, well, we are feeling a might bit “sheepish.” And at a dinner party, when someone espouses some daft idea, we accuse them of “woolly thinking.”

Pigs, too, provide an arsenal of colorful expressions: We “pigged out,” you are so “pigheaded,” and “this room is a pigsty.” I “bought a pig in a poke,” but I’m “happy as a pig in clover.” “Sweating like a pig” (which doesn’t really make sense, since pigs don’t sweat), “squealing like a stuck pig,” and “bleeding like a stuck pig.” And, oh, yeah, “when pigs fly.”

So do cattle. “Bullshit,” “bullheaded,” “bull market,” “bull in a china shop.” “Take the bull by the horns,” and “crack the bullwhip.” “Don’t have a cow!” Let’s “beef you up,” maybe even turn you into a “beefcake.” Take care of your “cash cow” and “sacred cows.” Wait “till the cows come home.” He’s a “milksop.”

And horses. You may be “backing the wrong horse” or “betting on a dark horse,” unless, of course, you have the “inside track.” Waking up in the morning feeling “as hungry as a horse” is much better than being “off your feed.” “Stop that horseplay!” “Get off your high horse!” Ever feel like you’re “beating a dead horse”? “Putting the cart before the horse,” “riding for a fall” or “riding roughshod,” “putting them through their paces.” “Straight from the horse’s mouth,” a real “workhorse.” “Taking the bit between the teeth.”

I’m “mad as a wet hen.” I mean, we’ve got a “pecking order” here and I “rule the roost”! I’m “hardboiled” and must sometimes “scratch for a living,” but I’m “saving a nest egg.” On occasion, I’m “henpecked” and feel like I’m “walking on eggshells.” But I’ve learned to “never count my chickens before they are hatched.”

I’ll leave you to “brood over” that. Because if I go on much longer, none of us will exactly be “spring chickens.”

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Many of these words were conveniently listed for me in the thoroughly comprehensive work The Encyclopedia of Historic and Endangered Livestock and Poultry Breeds (Dohner).

Reading this weekend: Virgil’s The Georgics, a poem of the land. “All life’s best days speed earliest away to mortal rue; in slink diseases, bleak dotage and distress, and cruel death ravages unmerciful.” Yep, it is all that, plus guidance on raising cattle, planting vines, and caring for bees. Written just a short 2,000 years ago.

Fall: A Season of Salvage

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I spent Saturday off the farm attending to personal business. So I leave you with this seasonal post from 2015. Enjoy!

There is a day each year. A day when you find yourself in the kitchen slicing the last of the season’s ripe tomatoes, a moment you have lived before, knew was in the cards. A day when the vines are still heavy with green tomatoes. A shortened day in which those green tomatoes will never fully ripen, destined instead for frying or making chowchow. How did that unstoppable summer deluge become a trickle and then a drought?

So begins fall, a chance to cherish what is passing before the weather turns to ice and snow — both too soon to dream of the fallow winter, when the cold months spoon next to the season of rebirth, that bare season, stark in its absence of greenery, when our native imagination colors in the palette of the riches to come, and too late to partake of the fresh bounty of the summer season just passed. The in-between season.

Fall is the season of salvage, of scouring the fields and paddocks for useful leftovers. In modern parlance, it is the sustainable season. A rush to harvest the last of the fruit to preserve in jams, jellies, chutneys, and wines. A time to take stock with some soul searching of Aesop’s Fables significance: Do we have enough firewood? Did we use our time well last winter, spring, summer in preparation for the next year? It is a time of movement, cattle to new pastures and forage to shelter. A time to glean the excess hens and roosters, butchering for hours to stock the larder for the gumbo and chicken and dumplings that will get us through the cold months to come.

Fall is a time of hog fattening. The cruel reward for an ability to gain 300 pounds in nine months comes with a knife wielded the week after Halloween. The bounty is delivered to us in sides of bacon, salted hams, corned shoulders, butcher’s wife pork chops, hand-seasoned breakfast sausages, headcheese, pates, and bowls of beans with ham hocks.

Fall is also sheep-breeding time. As the days and nights cool, the ram has his pleasurable work cut out for him, making sure all ewes are bred. We, servant-like, make sure the ewes are conditioned for lambing, in good health, hooves trimmed, attending to their every need. Meanwhile, last winter’s lambs are grazing in their own pasture, fattening before they fall under the butcher’s sword in the remaining months of the year.

Fall is the season of coming face to face with imminent and unavoidable death. It is the fever of the dying year, the mumbled words from the patient in the bed trying to get his affairs in order, to make amends. So much to do and so little time.

It is a season of contrasts, when we eat a ripe tomato while composting the vine it grew on, feed a pregnant ewe while fattening for slaughter her year-old offspring, crush grapes and pears while sipping the wine made last year. Past, present, and future are jumbled in this most hopeful season, when we weigh the year to come to see what is left in the balance.

Like a culture that prepares for a future generation, this work is undertaken for a year not yet born.

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Reading this weekend: On Homesickness: A Plea (Donaldson), an odd little beautiful book.

Labor Day: The Bold and The Feckless

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Work: Pile work upon work upon work.

Some 2,800 hundred years ago, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote his didactic poem Works and Days. It is equal parts sibling admonition, theogony (old-school genealogy of the gods), and farming calendar (On the eighth day of the month castrate the boar and roaring bull). But it is the injunction to work that is the crux of the 800-line poem. The message is one that underlies many of the classic texts, not surprisingly, for without work, shame (if not starvation) would haunt our steps.

Even today, in our valley, people are often introduced in conversation as “a hard worker.” And those who don’t work, while not allowed to starve, are held in low esteem — indeed, disclaimed — by their neighbors, pronounced to be “as useless as teats on a boar.” Farming can be a brutally conservative enterprise, one in which animals are dispatched for failing to measure up; it is an occupation in which it is hard to conceal one’s inadequacies.

The nature of work and why we do it has been much on my mind this year. For reasons we won’t explore here, I am all too often witness to the refusal of work and a willingness by adults, mainly men, to reject advancement. As one of like gender, I find those instances in which a healthy man prefers to be idle and stay at home deeply offensive. To be offered work of worth and to instead choose the path of just getting by or, worse, relying wholly on the largess of others is frankly beyond my ken.

Misfortune can be caught in swarms, and easy. The road to it is smooth, and it lives so near.

This is not meant to be some sort of grim Puritan sermon I write, of suppression of desire, harnessed to a yoke until dropping in the traces. For I (as you will surely know by now) put a premium on conviviality with friends, family, and neighbors, on good conversation and laughter, on wine and food.

Then, O then let there be some rock-shadowed cool, some Bilbine wine, a milk-soaked cake and the goats’ last thick milk, the meat of a forest-graised heifer…. O drink the bright wine and relax in the shade with a heart’s fill of food, face tilted into the freshening westerlies.

All of these enjoyments go hand in hand with the work we do. Without the work, each gift (whether necessity or indulgence) would be gained only by throwing oneself at the mercy of community. To be clear, I am a firm believer in the need for a communal safety net; we all at times need a helping hand, for life does indeed break us down. Yet only our hard work allows us to take full satisfaction in the fruits of our labors. It is a pleasure deepened in the owning of the process, embracing it and asking for more, that allows us to claim community among our kith and kin. To expect reward without work is to break with the covenant.

For the granary won’t fill for the feckless.

I understand the tenuous relationship of modern employment to the employed, and I speak today not of that but of our older relationship to each other and our responsibilities to the same. Not all work is based on remuneration; often it is done simply for love, and that is when it is most satisfying.

I am at sea on a raft of frustration with the covenant breakers, whether they be the person who embraces the trappings of his position but spurns the intellectual rigor required to do the job well or the one who refuses an opportunity because “it sounds like too much work.” It is not seemly to enjoy the glass of wine without the earning, to expect honors without the requisite work of ambition.

And if you haven’t broken the bond, then May another year take good root beneath the soil.

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Reading this weekend: Hesiod’s Works and Days: A New Translation by Kimberly Johnson (2017).