Category Archives: Community

Farming in the Fog

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Trying to be a good farmer? Let’s start with the old chestnut, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Sound enough advice on the surface, particularly for a small farm like ours with a focus on self-sufficiency. Freezers full of pork, we have been busy curing hams and bacon, making sausage, and rendering lard. All enjoyable efforts, they provide added value, of sorts, to the routine of farm life. Yet, we are part of the larger economy, where income is still essential. We’d prefer that our customers engage in the same preservation activities, reap the same rewards at the groaning table, but we’d also prefer our own freezers to be closer to empty and our farm account closer to full.

Which brings me to this thought: Just when does the man drown? When his lungs fill with water as he sinks to the bottom? Or is the die cast further back in time — as he first stepped into the boat, bought a boat, played with a plastic boat in the bathtub as a child? One might as well ask when a Republic fails. Is it when the caesar takes over, when the wealthy first use their clout to block access to office, to markets, to land? These are rat holes into which one could pound sand all day and still have room.

In two decades on the farm, I’ve learned that it is of benefit to accept the gray over the black and the white. The latter is certainly more comforting — simply point to one aspect of life, society, or politics and say, “That was the turning point: I became middle-aged; that was the golden age; if that bastard hadn’t gained office, then….” But the realities are infinitely more bewildering and messy.

I like to think that we are symbolically engaged in either a communal effort to, as the old left described it, build a new society in the shell of an old, or playing an important role in pruning an old orchard to keep it in production. But those may just be more platitudes I hum under my breath to stay awake.

To be clear, we are not drowning, because we never swam. Our farm has always generated just enough to pay our way, cover our bills. But it has never been an economic success story. We are waders in the shallows.

The small farm that grows and provides quality products needs more than simply market access. It also needs a base of buyers who truly value its existence. Who see the small farmer as more than just a commodity choice or an archetype (Let’s buy from the hip chick, support the old man in overalls, go multicultural this week). Who instead see the small farmer as an essential part of the community. But that is wacky-talk. It presupposes that any of us are rooted in a community at this stage. In our modern world (even if we can possess the truth as we imagine it), when we shout from the rooftop, our message becomes just so much noise among the other shouts, irrelevant and unheard in the cacophony. Ignored in a price-is-right babble.

So, here is my final question: What is good agriculture? It surely isn’t just the farmer or the farm; it isn’t just access to markets. It most certainly is not providing for a society that binges on empty calories, is not driving an hour and half to sit at a farmer’s market for six hours and sell $25 of peppers to the bourgeoisie. You don’t get there from here by placing a pin on a starting place or on an ending, by pitting urban against rural, community against individual, or by offering access to the digital universe while ignoring the true majesty that surrounds us.

It is not just land use or a freezer full of pork. It isn’t a one-word answer in black or white. If I climb up on the barn roof in the gray fog on a cool fall morning and shout the question, all I get are echoes off the nearby ridge in reply. In this fog it is hard to hear, but I think it’s saying, “It is not three hams curing under the stairs when you only need one.”

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Reading this weekend: One for the Books (Queenan)

Small Town Resilience (a repeat)

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We have spent a busy weekend making mead, bottling some older mead, butchering chickens, harvesting produce, and preparing to harvest apples and pears. So, I’ll leave you with this older piece on a different kind of resilience.

The aftermath of butchering chickens.

Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

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Reading this weekend (2019): Underland (Macfarlane) and iGen (Twenge). The former is another terrific read by the author of The Old Ways (among others). And, the latter is a data driven survey of the generation that has grown up with the i-phone (be afraid, be very afraid).

Saying Grace

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The man was the last one on board the plane. With everyone else seated, he walked almost to the rear to stow his bag before taking his seat back at the front. Once the plane landed, the man fought the current of impatient passengers like a salmon swimming upstream to retrieve his bag. For whatever reason, it popped into my head as I watched him that pausing before a meal, whether to say thanks or wait for all to be seated, has become an act that goes against the course of our culture.

Like many, I grew up saying grace before the meal. In my house, we sat down together for dinner or supper, then paused. A prayer was offered by a member of the family before all began to eat, the words always including a thanks for the food that was before us. No one ate before everyone was served and the blessing was said. Of course, a nibble from the plate was fine. But it was not only a household offense but also a violation of cultural mores to grab a fork and dig in before each member was ready and grace had been said.

Blessing the food, saying a few words, is a ritual as old as our race. It crosses all religions and backgrounds; it is one of the most elemental of our sacraments. Acknowledgment to whatever creator or force one believes in seems one of our more beautiful and beneficial rites. An exercise of thanks for what is before us, of gratefulness for the bounty; patience in waiting until all have been served; humility in recognition that others may be doing without; and pleasure that there are guests, a community, with whom to share the food — all are rolled up in those few words said at the start of a meal.

Today, unless I am sitting down with people who share a common cultural or religious background, I find that offering thanks has become an awkward rite in both its recognition and its execution. To sit still and refrain from eating till all are served — it is a custom increasingly ignored. Witness adult men and women, greedily shoveling food in their faces, plates already half empty, who then look up at a waiting table and say defensively, “Well, I’m not waiting!” It’s a statement that neatly sums up the narcissistic spirit of our times.

Among a certain group of moderns, the actual offering of a blessing or thanks now seems artificial, like passing around an artifact of carefully chipped flint, a relic of another age. Yet the sentiment lingers, even if manifested in a simple raising of glasses.

My religious friends and family can still roll out a beautiful and meaningful prayer at the drop of a hat, one that includes each of the four points of the ritual: thanks, patience, humility, and community. The words offered are still unencumbered by loss of faith or tradition. My own utterances, meanwhile, seem stilted, unpoetic, and rusted from ill use and the lack of expectation from listening ears. Those spoken words of mine float about, against the crosscurrent, searching for a cadence and rhythm, searching for a home, trying to express humble gratitude for our rich existence on this planet.

I Scream, You Scream

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Surely, among all the major accomplishments of our species, there, residing in companionable honor among the top 10, those giants that we can point to with pride when all else has crumbled into dust, will be ice cream.

While some men turned their talents to the dark side — inventing dynamite, improving the crossbow, or mixing gunpowder — another kindly and heroic soul determined to ameliorate the human summer condition. Oh, bore me not with your Persian ices, your frozen Indian rose waters; keep your gelatos and frozen yogurts to yourself, thank you. We are Americans, goddamnit, and Southerners to boot. Give us a full-fat frozen scoop of precious deliciousness, and be quick about it, man!

Locked in the scrapbook of my mind is the recollection of laboring with my brother Keith over the old manual ice cream maker in our garage on Sale Street. I would have been 4 years old. My father, insisting that we learn the manly arts, even at a tender age, had each of us take turns cranking the grinder as he added ice to the wooden tub. And then to partake in the reward: After the watermelon was eaten in the back yard, we indulged in a huge bowl of his uniquely vanilla ice cream. It’s a taste I can still conjure this half-century later.

My dad used to bring a tub of his magic concoction to the men’s ice cream socials at church. While others experimented with chocolate, peach, strawberry, and the many other flavor fads of the day, Dad stayed true to his simple, heavenly specialty. Those were glorious evenings, often staged in a large grove of live oaks, where displayed on long tables would be as many as 50 different ice creams to sample. For us kids (and I’m betting the same was true for the adults), the sermon by the pastor was ignored. Eventually, he would be drowned out by the rumble of a few hundred stomachs and would be forced to cut short his Godly remarks. Finally, after the last prayer, we would stampede to the tables to sample the wares. What seemed to be an acre of ice cream is a pretty impressive sight, certainly to a boy.

So it really isn’t odd that ice cream is still associated with those memories of church. As kids, we used to leave our vacation bible school at Trinity Baptist and walk down Ryan Street to the Borden’s ice cream parlor and plant, each getting a fresh scoop before our return trip. Late in adolescence, we would skip the services completely and go straight for the reward. After all, a scoop of ice cream on a hot and muggy afternoon or evening is a pretty spiritual indulgence in itself.

Years later, until its ultimate demise, Cindy and I would seek out the old-fashioned Kay’s Ice Cream. There was the one up on Broadway in Knoxville, another down Chapman Highway, and one way out in the badlands of Maryville. With its 30-foot multicolored ice cream cone out front, it was easy to spot. Particularly when coming back from the mountains after a hike, our sugar and potassium levels dangerously depleted, a banana-chocolate malt was just the restorative required. (And yes, please, always use vanilla ice cream when constructing a chocolate malt.)

After we bought the farm and Kay’s had closed most of its locations, I toyed with buying one of those giant ice cream cone signs to mount on the barn roof. I still regret my failure to do so as some sort of moral weakness that will mark me in ways yet unknown.

Even now, on hot summer evenings we seek out the good stuff. Last night, after a day’s work filling the barn with freshly baled hay, weeding the garden, and completing the dozens of other chores that mark what we call “busy,” I got in my truck with Cindy and we drove the 15 miles to Loudon. It was 8 o’clock when we drove down the quiet main street, passed the still-packed community pool, and pulled up to the Tic Toc Ice Cream Parlor. There was a line to the door. A crowd filled the small park across the street by the fountain — men, women, and children, all eating their ice cream in view of the tall oaks and Confederate and other war memorials at the courthouse.

Cindy went inside and returned 20 minutes later with single scoops of homemade ice cream in cake cones. (For we are not heathens to be eating our ice cream in waffle cones like foreigners from Michigan or Florida.) Then we headed out with the truck windows down, licking off the drips as the sun set, and followed the country roads back to the farm.

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Reading this weekend: The Hills is Lonely (Beckwith) and Old Herbaceous (Arkell)