Category Archives: Farm Life

A Purchased Life

Posted on by
4

It happens frequently, this informal tour giving. The phone rings and someone new to this locale or new to or considering farming asks to see how we manage our operation. Yes, it takes us away from our work, but we both enjoy helping newcomers and walking visitors around the farm. Sometimes we can be a bit too self-deprecating about our accomplishments, yet the people leave with an understanding of what they too can achieve, with hard work.

This particular day we’ve put our various to-dos on hold to spend a couple of hours escorting a young couple around our small-scale 50-acre farm. Over the years I’ve honed my remarks based on certain assumptions made from our initial phone call and on what I can glean from observing the visitors who have shown up for guidance. Today’s couple have indicated that they are just starting out. They have bought 30 acres in North Carolina (just an hour or so away) that had been misused, and they have moved into the property’s older home. They want to raise poultry for the farmers market and have decided on a goal of growing 100 birds a year for slaughter.

With the information provided — that they want to live a fairly self-sustaining life of raising their own vegetables and small livestock, along with developing a very modest business that will bring in enough to cover expenses, I’ve tailored my conversation to fit their needs.

My recommendations follow a predictable path: “Buy appropriate to your needs. Repair whenever possible. Grow and raise what you wish to eat, and sell the surplus. Be a part of your community.”

All of this goes down well; the two are gracious, easy to talk with, and somewhat knowledgeable about small, diversified farming. At some point I mention that they will need a tractor to accomplish much of the work around their property. And echoing those previous remarks, I say, “Get something older and therefore easier to repair. Look for something that comes with a few implements, like a bush hog.”

At this juncture the young woman mentions that they had just bought a brand new 75 horsepower tractor, complete with front-end loader, grappler, backhoe, bush hog, disc mower, rake, and baler. My jaw drops. I have clearly misread this couple. Instead of struggling newcomers looking to build a life of self-sufficiency, these two are rich or at least willing to go deep into debt.

When they leave, I do a little research. They have just spent $125,000-$150,000 on a tractor that is two to three times the horsepower needed for their land. For comparison, we bought our own first tractor, a 1962 35 horsepower Ford 800, for $1,500 (granted, in 1999). The image that immediately comes to my mind is the 269 horsepower Lamborghini Jeremy Clarkson (British TV’s Clarkson’s Farm) bought that was so big it wouldn’t fit in his barn. As for the worn-out 30 acres the couple purchased? They paid just under $1 million — for an acreage that sold for $100,000 12 years earlier. My brain frankly reels with too many unanswerable questions. The first of which is, how many chickens? As in, how many chickens will they need to raise, at lots of 100 a year, to pay for the tractor and land alone.

Well … if they raise and sell 100 birds a year at $15 each, it will take a whopping 733 years to pay off their core investment. Of course, it might be slightly longer if the chickens cost anything to raise (which they do) or if there is interest on the land or tractor purchase (which there will be unless they paid cash). Then there is the inevitable need to buy tools, diesel, fencing, and a thousand things not yet considered as needed, all of which might affect the timeline of repayment. Plus, let’s throw in those pesky things like taxes, clothes, cars, home repairs, insurance, health needs, and, even in the most self-sustaining household, groceries and beer. I quickly give up posing questions that have no acceptable answers.

It is no surprise that people have the urge to downscale their lives; it happens every day and seemingly with more frequency. What puzzles me is that it appears this young couple wants to purchase a downsized life, like they’re on some extravagant shopping trip, by spending over a million dollars. Why? Just so that they can sport a new co-op feed cap without the earning of it?

This interaction continues to raise more questions than can’t be answered. Stewardship, profitability, self-sustainability — all of these concepts that small farms wrestle with change into something else when they become just another commodity. Land, a house, the means to farm, each costs money. Of that there is no doubt. But if the buy-in to gross $1,500 (or even $50,000) a year is over a million, then something is seriously out of whack. When the value of the land alone has far outstripped what one might be able to earn from its productive use, what then?

A recent conversation I had with a county property assessor added another dimension to this upside-down acquisition. The assessor talked about newcomers to our area from California paying similar amounts for property as this young couple paid in North Carolina. The problem that arises with land being purchased at $1 million when it is valued at $100,000? Well, good luck getting insurance or even getting a loan to cover the full amount. (Getting a loan is actually a small stumbling block in these cases, since most of the recent arrivals are cash-flush from selling overpriced homes in their native states, although one might wonder how long that monetary surplus will last. Still, money spent is money earned, by someone.)

As always, I’m more interested in what these outrageous trends mean for local people. What happens to the displaced? Ask that and even more questions begin to surface, such as, what kind of farm policy does our country espouse if the buy-in for living a small-scale life of self-sufficiency is overpriced and unsustainable? Because ultimately this isn’t about a young couple of means. It is about all the other young working-class couples who have been squeezed out of the opportunity to buy and farm their own land. It’s a problem that has only accelerated as a relatively affluent urban class exits the cities in search of the “simple” rural life — not to work or steward the land in any meaningful way but merely to possess it, to buy the style of life for cold cash, play-acting on it, with a substantial cast of the now-dispossessed locals to choose from as background color to that newly purchased life.

…………………………………………………

Reading this weekend: Of Farming and Classics (D. Grene) and A Splendor of Letters (N. Basbanes)

Hire the Farm Girl

Posted on by
8

three of the new ewe lambs in the foreground

“Hi, I’m Anna, Mr. Mark’s daughter. You caught me. I was just unloading the feed before doing chores. We were expecting you at 10 a.m., and I was trying to get this barn mess cleaned up. I’ll call Dad at the house and see if he can come on down now.”

It’s 9 a.m. on a recent cool spring morning. We have just driven from our farm in the Tennessee River valley into Central Time on the Cumberland Plateau, eventually winding down into the tidy agricultural county of Wilson, an area that, like Berry’s Henry County, has the misfortune to neighbor a large city, yet that at least on this eastern edge still seems to be holding its own, displaying no subdivisions or “look-at-me” McMansions to mar our view.

We’ve arrived at an older well-maintained farmhouse. It sits a couple of hundred feet from the rural road, shaded by mature oaks and surrounded by the perfect wrap-around porch from which to gaze at the occasional passerby. The gravel driveway splits midway, the left fork going to the house and the right making a sweep past a long cluster of outbuildings and around the front of the barn. It occurs to me that the art of laying out a farm driveway is a dying craft, and I’m relieved to see that the long loop allows us to back up to the business end of the barn and then pull forward with ease onto the road.

Our trip to Middle Tennessee is a chance to look over and purchase four ewe lambs, all of them Dorset/Hampshire crosses. These new girls are not old enough to be bred until fall of 2024. But like most small and big farms, ours is in a constant state of evaluating and improving its stock selection. In our case we are chasing the ideal meat sheep, one that will grow well on our pastures, with minimal inputs yet the best-muscled carcass at slaughter. It is a horizon that is never reached.

When we pull in, a young woman of 16-18 and attired in T-shirt and shorts is slinging 50-pound bags of feed out of the truck bed and hauling them into the barn. From the evidence of the remaining bags on the pallet, she has already unloaded a dozen with plenty more to grab. I am struck by her greeting: she is poised and comfortable talking with adults in a direct but respectful manner.

Within minutes of being called, her father arrives on foot from the house, and for the next 30 the four of us chat and examine ewe lambs. They both talk knowledgeably about daily weight gains and overall farm goals for its stock. Mr. Mark’s conversational style with his teenage daughter is considerate, and it soon becomes clear that this farm girl is a full partner in the operation. She maintains her own breeding flock, keeps the records, arranges to have her lambs slaughtered and butchered, and sells the meat to an established base of customers and at the local farmer’s market … and has an encyclopedic culinary knowledge of the various lamb cuts. 

When we’ve made the selections, father and daughter hoist the four 75-pound lambs one by one into the pen in the back of our truck. As we drive away, we chat about the experience and Cindy quips, “Hire the farm girl!” And it is true.

Some of you readers may have had the good fortune to grow up on a farm or perhaps work in a family business. You will be nodding your head in agreement. But yours is an opportunity missed by most. It is difficult to convey the maturity that came naturally, and bolstered by 4-H and FFA, to this farm girl. For a farmer to succeed, it requires a complex range of attributes, among them physical strength, intellectual reasoning, and sophisticated social skills. A friend of mine, a well-respected, highly successful lawyer in a small town, was gifted with being raised on a dairy farm. From my observations it shaped him in profound and positive ways: it gave him a leg up in the world that the average coddled youth does not experience, and it rooted him in his community and instilled in him a compassionate heart.

So let us also throw emotional wisdom into this discussion. Lest one of you is thinking that this young woman has been hardened of heart and spirit by her work, that she has been raised to be no more than a merciless money changer, think again. To raise animals from birth and choose which ones will die in order for the farm business to carry on does not produce a callous soul. On the contrary, it cultivates love developed with a clear-eyed view of the means, ways, and limits of compassion, stripped of sentiment and confronted daily by hard choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

Indeed, we might wish that our leadership class today was pulled from the well-maintained small farms in the agricultural counties of this land. We all might sleep better at night. Maybe it is not just an admonition to “hire the farm girl” — maybe we should elect her, if given the choice.

…………………………………………………………………

Reading this past week: True Grit (C. Portis), a well known book that has been poorly served by two movies. Greenmantle (J. Buchan), a Richard Hannay novel.

Lessons From Will and Ariel Durant

Posted on by
5

I rise from my reading chair and prepare to walk out of the house to go feed the pigs. It’s 6:30 a.m. and there is just enough light outside and just enough coffee inside me to warrant the start of the day. Earlier I spent a little time rereading the Durants’ The Lessons of History, a Cliff Notes version to their 10-volume history. (If there is any relevance of that volume to this missive, it is that our days and actions are bound, or so says Twain, to repeat or rhyme with the past. And chore time on the farm mirrors that arc: some progress, some backsliding, some things different, and some the same.)

My first stop in preparing is the refrigerator, where I make a quick assessment of what has passed the “best consumed by humans date” but is still in the edible range for the hogs. What I discover are a large container of salad and two small containers of sprouts.

Dodging the three dogs fighting over a footlong stick on the porch, I pull on my muck boots and head to the barn. The heavy rain yesterday has left as a reminder a low-hanging fog, giving the morning a closed-in feel in which the world seems small and personal. I trudge across the 200 feet of sloppy and very sticky red clay that marks our newly refurbished septic field — not the most exciting or glamorous way to spend $4,800 — and make a mental note to spread grass seed and straw later today.

In the barn breezeway where the feed barrels are stored, I add the fridge contents to three five-gallon buckets, then mix in some locally milled hog meal, followed by a gallon of whole milk into two of the buckets. The dairy addition is courtesy of a mutually beneficial arrangement with a local grocery: the store management gives me expiring milk, as well as produce, and I deliver the occasional fresh eggs and pound of sausage as a token of thanks.

The bucket without milk goes to our sow, Ginger. At 400 pounds plus, she needs to be kept in fighting trim to deal with the arrival of Jack, the boar, next week. The largest bucket goes to three feeder pigs living next to the garden. A fence made of hog panels holds the peace between them and the fast-growing greens in the hoop-house. Mostly.

Two mornings ago the pigs managed to breach the battleline. It was not a happy farmer who discovered three sated swine waiting to greet him at the garden gate … inside the garden. Moving them from their breakfasting on my collards back to their paddock was the work of a few minutes. Another few were occupied in resecuring the fence to the wooden post. I then spent most of the morning replanting my potato patch, which they had rooted up, as well as tidying up other damage from their nighttime escapades. Overall, I remind myself, it could have been worse: the flock of 40 sheep could have broken into the garden.

I take a few minutes to observe the trio once I’ve emptied the feed into their trough. The slaughter date for this group is set for June, but I’m now thinking that may be pushing it. Although the pigs are packing on the pounds, they look a little too light at this juncture to make 300 pounds by that date. I make a mental note to chat with Cindy later about rescheduling to July.

A chainsaw starts up a few hundred yards away and down the hill from the pig paddock. The neighbors are back at work on their grand fencing plan. What could be an annoying noise to some in the still of the morning is pleasing to me because it also sounds productive. I smile at the pigs and the morning in general and head back to the barn. Pausing in the breezeway, I pick up the last bucket of hog feed. This one I have to carry back across the farm and out into the woods, a distance of a few hundred yards, to the final group. These are Ginger’s piglets from her litter back in January. They are Berkshire (Jack) and Red Wattle (Ginger) crosses and are looking fat and stout at around 75 pounds. They should be right on schedule for their date with the processor in September.

As I enter the woods in the growing light, I note that the ground is mostly covered in a four-inch stand of hairy green rye and fescue interspersed with red and white clover. This area had been much abused by our practice of raising multiple groups of pigs for multiple periods that lasted longer than they should have, with no rest in between. This year I have been diligently sowing grass seed and moving brush to mend the erosion, and I am relieved to see that my efforts are now paying off. We will leave this area fallow for another 12 months and revisit with another batch of pigs. Will and Ariel Durant would understand this cycle, I think, as I pick my bucket up and head to the house for breakfast.

Gardens and Pastures (and a nod to Marxist cigars and bourbon)

Posted on by
8

Our new herd sire, a Texel ram

As my friend Russ likes to say, “Everything grows in Tennessee. Just nothing grows particularly well.” For me, that’s one of those statements like, “If you don’t like the weather around here, just wait five minutes”: I have heard it voiced from Maine (where it is true) to Arizona (where it most certainly is not). Utterances of universality are meant to convey a winking nod to some truth, and if there is any to be found in that assessment of gardening in this area, it boils down to the simple fact that ours is a mild climate, interspersed with extremes, with long growing seasons. Our climate allows the cultivation of both cool- and warm-weather plants, all of which in our equal opportunity environment are plagued by heat and humidity and cold and ice, accompanied at strategic times by voracious assaults by insects and pestilential diseases.

The real bottom line is this: Producing a vegetable garden in our valley, one that even the curmudgeon William Cobbett would admire, is not terribly difficult, provided you can overlook the occasional pigweed and its ilk. The main limitations are those sudden swings in the mood of Mother Nature, such as the 4-5 days of single digits in December that blasted the cole crops into withered submission, wherein what should have been a hoop house full of greens to bless our table until this spring became instead a flash-freezing method that Clarence Birdseye would have approved … except that what remained was no longer edible.

All of this and more has been on my mind these past weeks, as February unfolded, soaked to the bone but much warmer than normal. Just in time for March’s mid-week entrance, the hoop house is now replanted, mainly with greens. The seed potatoes are spread out in the barn and starting to sprout. With just a few days of dry weather, the spuds should be ready to plant in the south garden. The garlic shoots are six inches high — planted last fall, the cloves stand at attention in three neat 40-foot rows — and I’ve taken to spending my evenings at the kitchen table with my garden journal and seed bin, sketching out improbable planting timetables.

Beyond the gardens, the pastures are greening up at least two months earlier than last year. Yet, once again, we missed this past fall’s liming schedule. One of our area farmers co-ops is backed up on deliveries until next year. The fault is, of course, laid at the well-heeled feet of all those ex-pat Californians and New Yorkers demanding even more from our limited services (here I am kidding, yet, sadly I am not). So this spring we try and balance whether to oversow expensive grass seed onto pastures whose nutrients may be locked up by a pH imbalance with whether the temps will remain moderately warm for germination and growth.

We’ve decided to split the difference. First, we will redo our out-of-date soil testing. Then we will get back on the schedule for liming in the fall with the Loudon Co-op, at which point a driver will (unless we’re bumped to 2028) show up with a massive dump truck and drive over our most butt-clenching terrain spreading ag lime. This is done in our area in the fall simply because it’s the season of the driest months. It also takes about six months for the lime to break down and moderate the pH in the soil. If all goes as planned, spring 2024 we will reseed the limed pastures, a critical task that has been on our to-do list since well before the pandemic. Meanwhile, in the spirit of throwing good money after bad, I will go ahead now and oversow the smaller sheep paddocks with a mix of clovers, annual rye, and turnip seeds (yes, sheep love turnip greens) in hopes of adding at least some additional spring forage and nutritional benefits to the soil.

And there I have it distilled, after all these years, that the most essential elements in this farming life are an ample store of hope for the future and the luck of good timing.

………………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: Captain Blood (R. Sabatini), suggested by a nephew (good one, Andy). Holy Smoke (G. Infante), a Marxist  — Groucho, not Karl — interpretation of the pleasures of cigars. Why? Well I made a New Year’s resolution to smoke more cigars, and reading this fun house mirror of a work helps remind me to keep that resolution. Also, The Social History of Bourbon (G. Carson), the classic and so-fun-to-reread history of our most essential contribution to world civilization.

Waiting on the Rain

Posted on by
Reply

Off and on over the course of the day, occasional drops of rain would fall from overcast skies onto the parched fields. It had been close to five weeks without any rain on our farm. Plumes of dust followed our truck every time we went up or down the gravel drive. Rich green pastures had turned brown prematurely in these months of September and October. Yet the drops falling never accumulated enough to mature into even a short drizzle, much less a shower. Then the skies cleared.

That evening, at sunset, I sat on the porch, watching as the faultless blue day shifted gradually into a clear night. The first stars in the western sky popped out … just above a dark band of clouds on the horizon. I observed an approaching cold front. Its line of attack seemed almost unmovable, frozen in the distant west. Using the hornbeam in the front yard as my sextant, I placed the upper edge of the storm bank just four inches below the topmost twigs.

With the emerging starlit night came pink flashes of lightning in the black band. The storm, although seemingly immobile in its travel from west to east, was actually streaming northwards at great speed. It reminded me of those wonderful N.C. Wyeth paintings of the vast cloud giants rolling across the distance. Where were they going? Would they come visit? Did we want them to?

Against that dark outline, bats swooped about one of the orchards looking for prey. The dogs lay about the porch, exhausted after a busy day of harassing each other, oblivious to my observations. The sheep and poultry were already secured for the night in their paddocks and coops, while the pigs in the woods still snarled at each other over scraps from the dinner table. The winds in the woods and among the trees along the driveway sounded like traffic rushing down a busy street: in a hurry, needing to be somewhere else.

And always, as I sat, those flashes in the distance promised a nurturing rain overnight — I hoped. Because, with the millennia-old optimism of a farmer, I had spent the afternoon oversowing ryegrass seed on my test plots in the one-acre paddocks. A few weeks after tilling and planting, and still no rain had left the emerging plants withered and weak. If the storms delivered, then the new seed would help bulk up the winter’s forage. I sat on the porch and waited, watched, listened.

Before leaving my post, I chanced another glance at the hornbeam. The approaching storm was now measured against the horizon at a couple of inches above the utmost branch. Taking that glacial progress as a sign, I came inside and joined Cindy upstairs. An hour later, just before sleep, we lay awake listening to the rain begin to fall on the tin roof.

………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: The Narrative of the Narvaez Expedition (C. de Vaca), a fascinating eyewitness account of a Spanish expedition to Florida that traversed the Gulf Coast to Texas, where the survivors then continued westward to the Pacific … walking, in the 1500s.

Also, The Need to Be Whole, Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (W. Berry). It’s a work I’ll be reading and chewing on for some time to come (at 486 pages); a work that, if I can state after reading a couple of chapters and the introduction, has a thesis, of sorts: “Our problems do not relate to one another in linear sequence, but rather in something like a network, in which correcting one requires correcting several.” I like that a book on such a topic has been written by an elder.