Category Archives: Self-Sufficing

This Forgotten Valley

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That in this blighted landscape there are still places of settled beauty is a comfort: a chance to glimpse what went before and could be again. Yet it is also sad—that the occasion of removing oneself from an anywhere to a somewhere should be so jolting as to be noticeable; that the simple absence of suburbs, strip malls, check-cashing joints, derelict commercial ventures, new fast-food emporia serving up empty calories for the lost, the bloated, and the lonely, before those buildings too slough off into the accumulating mire of abandoned infrastructure on the edges is somehow distinctive.

On this morning I am in my truck driving on a remote road in another state on my way to pick up ewe lambs earmarked to become next year’s breeding ewes. The valley, not the vertical, winding, densely wooded path I expected, is everything one would not imagine so close to the heart of empire. Now, I’m not going to name this forgotten valley, because it deserves privacy. Of course it is not inconceivable that some AI algorithm or, more likely, a real estate developer is already mining the coordinates to bring this place into the commercial fold of modern capital, thus ruining it forever.

This forgotten valley is a working valley. It is not the preserve of the newly arrived affluent in gated enclaves, who provide gainful employment to the natives by allowing them to scrub their toilets and polish their antiques. Nope, this is the genuine somewhere, a rare gem just a few inches on the map from D.C., that expanding Borg cluster of the soulless, the clueless, the grifters, and the grafters. So just in case this valley remains off their maps, let us keep it hidden, mum’s the word, ok?

This valley consists of open, gently rolling hills. Up to five miles across, it is protected by steep forested ridges on either side. Every few miles I pass through a compact hamlet, and for the last hour and a half to my destination I do not spot a single fast-food restaurant or—and this is more tragically impressive—a dollar store. There are plenty of family diners, small-time tractor dealers, and a scattering of feedstores. Although primarily a valley of crops and livestock, there are also active signs of small quarrying. I see none of the usual small prefabricated factories that so often dot a rural landscape.

The housing stock is mostly modest older ranchers and the classic T-shaped farmhouse so prevalent in the East, a few mobile homes, but to my relief, no McMansions.  A handful of pre-Civil War homes of stone, set back in groves of oaks, signals an agrarian prosperity both past and present. There are even a few water mills that, although no longer in service, are nicely kept up, perhaps awaiting the day in a future low-tech world when reuse makes sense. This is not an empty valley—homes, both clustered and isolated, are to be seen for the full length of my drive—but no strip mall architecture assaults me as I approach and leave each community. While a few farms advertise places to stay, and many promote eggs, produce, and hay for sale, nothing signals the desperation of the developer to sell both virtue and heritage.

At my destination, a slightly stooped nonagenarian in overalls greets me in a pickup by his mailbox. His son is busy in a field spreading manure with a tractor; his grandson is in Pennsylvania dropping off lambs. I trail the old man in my truck as we bump along to where his son is working. Once the son is collected, I follow behind, down a good mile of a family road with half a dozen homes belonging to the three generations who work the 500-acre farm, before arriving at a barn next to a formerly fine brick two-story, now unoccupied and crumbling. The son tells me it is the family home, built in 1833 after the clan had settled in this valley.

A few more minutes of introduction, and we turn our attention to the ewe lambs for sale. I select four chunky four-month-olds to bring home. We load the lambs, exchange cash, and say our goodbyes. I turn to retrace the hour-and-a-half drive through this lovely, remote somewhere valley and then embark on another five hours of interstate, cheek by jowl with too many others driving to anywhere. Finally, a little after seven in the evening, stiff of neck following a total of twelve hours on the road, I pull onto the gravel driveway of our farm. Cindy is waiting for me in the dark by the mailbox.

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For those of you who listen to podcasts, I have been interviewed on a couple over the past few months (promoting my book). The experience of being asked questions and having to respond on the spot is certainly an interesting and new one for me. It has taught me that I’m better at coming up with an answer after a few days of mulling it over. Alas, that is not the format on offer.

A one-and-a-half-hour interaction with two hosts (Josh and Jason) of the Doomer Optimism podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=MIhsXKq0ZzY

A thirty-minute Q&A with John Murdock of the Brass Spittoon podcast: frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/brian-miller-on-kayaking-with-lambs/ (Link is near the bottom.)

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Reading this weekend: Death Comes for the Archbishop (W. Cather), a slow, evenly paced novel in which nothing much happens but a man’s life. And—I’m just guessing here, having the last third yet to finish—it might just end with his death.

An Offally Good Lamb Pâté

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Friday morning was devoted to slaughtering an eleven-month-old ram lamb. And this morning we butchered it into a myriad of tasty cuts, reserving one leg to cure in the Norwegian fashion of a Fenalår. This will be the second lamb ham cured over the years. The first was left in the salt too long and yielded a rock-hard piece of salt with a somewhat muttony flavor profile. Yet there are high hopes this one yields a more palatable result.

One of the culinary pleasures of the slaughter is fresh offal. On the ten-point scale of adventurous eating I routinely score a 7.5. So, here is my offally good lamb pâté recipe as a challenge. Keep in mind that the amounts, to my way of cooking, are mere guides. You know what to do.

Ingredients

  • Lamb: trim 2 kidneys, 2 testicles, 1 liver, and 1 heart. Add 1 pound of ground pork and a quarter minced onion.
  • Grind twice. The first with a medium grind and the second with a fine grind.
  • Add two eggs, four minced cloves of garlic, a twist or two of nutmeg, a ¼ tsp each of ground ginger, ground clove, and red pepper flakes. Measure out a ¼ cup of bourbon and add to the mix. Feel free, depending on the time of day, to measure out more for yourself.
  • Mix thoroughly and fill up ramekins to a ¼ inch below the top. Place in a roasting pan and fill with water to ½ way up the ramekins. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour and half.
  • Remove from the oven (I then place a pat of butter on top of each) and place the individual containers on a towel to cool. Refrigerate for at least a day. Freeze any that you won’t eat within 5 days.

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Reading this weekend: Watching For The Wind (J. Edinger) and Book of Tripe and gizzards, kidneys, feet, brains and all the rest (S. Reynaud)

Thoughts on Rural Resilience

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Scraping a small hog

(This post was first published in August, 2016. I have been wondering recently what this Covid influx of Californians and Oregonians, among others, will mean for our small valley. Nothing good, I suspect.)

My bookishness, my Louisiana childhood, my habit of looking at a rooster at the end of his procreational contributions and seeing a pot of coq au vin — sometimes I feel the odd duck in this Tennessee valley. But what I and my neighbors do share is a respect for the land, work, and community and the pleasure that comes from doing for yourself.

The homes in this valley are often unattractive, built piecemeal, their landscapes strewn with the debris of a wasteful industrial world. But one man’s junk is indeed another man’s treasure. Tell a neighbor that a weld broke on your bushhog and he immediately rummages around in the weeds before emerging with a stack of metal bars from an old bedframe he salvaged from a scrap heap 10 years earlier. “These should do the trick,” he says, then helps you weld the equipment back together.

This is a poor but resilient rural landscape, a land inhabited by multi-generation hardscrabblers seeking only privacy and independence. Chickens, a pig, maybe a cow are common even on an acre or two, and often a well-tended garden of tomatoes, okra, and pole beans sits alongside the house or barn.

In our valley, neighbors seldom call a specialist to fix the plumbing or dig out a clogged septic line. They repair tractors, mend fences, wire a barn, butcher chickens, cure hams, make wine, deal with an intruder (With wandering dogs, one old neighbor adheres to the three S’s: shoot, shovel, and shut up), or any of the thousands of other skills essential to living a rural life. They do it all themselves or shout over the barbed-wire fence for help.

A neighbor may help you run the sawmill for an afternoon, accepting payment in a few beers, conversation, and the side rounds from the logs for firewood. When you step into their hot summer kitchen, you may find them hovering over the stove canning endless jars of garden produce. Sometimes you’ll come home to find homemade loaves of bread, a jar of jam, a bottle of fruit wine, or a basket of vegetables leaning against the front door.

For better or worse, our neighbors have a yeoman’s obstinacy to rules and regulations and change. Even after a couple of hundred years (or maybe because of it), they still do not take to outside government intervention with enthusiasm. They prefer to be left alone to live in a manner that has been repeated down through the generations.

And this valley is certainly not unique. Across the continent rural values of community, cooperation, and resilience, while battered, still have life. Perhaps we are fortunate that while the urban centers still glow pink-cheeked with wealth, these rustics have more or less been abandoned to muddle along and do for themselves. It’s that abandonment that has preserved and nurtured self-reliance and partnership.

Definitely not an Eden, theirs is a resourcefulness often born of poverty. But it is one model, of sorts, that offers an emergency escape plan for the hard times to come: a poor people without the necessary capital resources to stripmine the future for their benefit — a gift that this planet might appreciate at this particular juncture in its 4.5 billion years.

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Reading this weekend: I Drink Therefore I Am: a philosopher’s guide to wine (R. Scruton) and Death On the Barrens (G. Grinnell). The latter is a grim and beautiful account of six somewhat foolish young men taking a canoe trip through a landscape they didn’t understand.

Lambing Season on a Small Farm (with a recipe)

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I could see her in the darkness at the far end of the outer corral, 50 yards from the barn. She was vigorously licking a small white something wriggling at her feet. It was 22 degrees that morning as I approached to inspect the newly born lamb, which even as I covered the distance stood up. The mother nudged her baby back to the business end, and it immediately began to nurse. The ewe clearly still had more lambs to come (and hopefully just one more) before I could coax her to the barn and into a lambing pen. I flashed my light across the other ewes in the heavily pregnant flock. None showed any signs of labor, so I headed back to the house for a first cup of coffee.

An hour later, around 6 a.m., I found the ewe still at the far edge of the outer corral, with two healthy ram lambs on their feet and nursing. I picked them both up and began the backward-crouch-and-walk familiar to all who have raised sheep. Both were covered in ice crystals in the cold predawn. I continued to hold the lambs in view of their mother, and she followed ever so slowly, chuckling to her babies softly, afraid she was leaving one or both behind. Eventually I made it to the barn door, managed to get it open with one hand while holding the two 8-pounders in the other, and ushered all three inside.

Already in the barn were 10 ewes and their 21 lambs. (All ewes so far this year have twinned, except one mother who had triplets.) The last few steps to the lambing pen were especially chaotic. If a ewe has trouble out in the open keeping track of her newborns, then a barn full of lambs running about, each calling loudly for its mom, is nothing if not sheer cacophonous confusion. With a little wrangling, though, the four of us managed the short trek and I closed the gate to the 24-hour maternity ward. A bucket of water, a block of fresh hay, and a small scoop of feed left with her, I returned to the house for my second coffee and the start of the day.

In the afternoon, Cindy headed the hour-plus to the processor’s to pick up packages of lamb. The previous week I had delivered 13 yearlings to be butchered. Four customers were coming to the farm for their meat, and one lamb was earmarked for our own freezer.

When she returned, I pulled a small shoulder roast from our packages and set it in the fridge to thaw for dinner the next night. I then checked on the sheep once again — a multiple-times-per-day activity in lambing season — making sure they had water and feed and that the lambs were doing well, before moving onto other tasks.

Late in the day, Cindy and I sat on a windy hill, enjoying the last of the sunshine and our newborn charges cavorting on the grass.

Those of you who farm or are longtime readers of this journal will see no contradiction in the joy we experience in raising lambs and the meals we create from the harvest. There is a beginning and there is an end to everything. What always matters, what only matters, is how we treat those in our care while they live … and after.

Braised Lamb Shoulder in Citrus

In a Dutch oven (ceramic-coated or stainless steel pot), sweat 3-4 carrots and celery and an onion in a bit of butter or olive oil until soft.

Braised lamb in citrus (first steps).

Add a cup of canned tomatoes, minus most of the juice, the zest and juice from a lemon, 4-5 cloves of minced garlic, some dried oregano, a cup of stock (I use beef), and half a bottle of white wine or dry mead. Bring to a boil, and reduce to simmer.

Meanwhile, salt and pepper the lamb shoulder. Then, in a cast iron skillet, brown both sides in a little oil on medium high heat. Nestle the lamb in the broth mixture and cover.

Place the pot in the oven for 2.5 hours at 250°. Salt and pepper to taste along the way. Shred the tender meat in a separate dish. Ladle the juice and veggies over mashed potatoes, rice, or couscous, and top with the shredded lamb.

Enjoy.

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Reading this weekend: The Holy Earth (Liberty Hyde Bailey). This is a reread of the short classic.

“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).