Category Archives: Self-Sufficing

Waiting on the Egg Man

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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. — Mr. Twain

Light on the farm from the setting sun, after a storm.

Our phone has been ringing off the hook, again, and we are glad. But now I have some questions without ready answers.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, small farms did, if not actually thrive, at least fare better than they had for some years before. The population, already primed by Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., deluged us with requests for sides of pork, quarters of beef, whole lamb, chicken, eggs, and produce. We held workshops on foraging mushrooms and raising hogs. We conducted classes on butchering chickens that had real estate agents lined up next to home-school moms, waiting to wield a knife on a live chicken. The job loss, the foreclosures, the crash of the banks — the societal disruption was such that virtually everyone feared being relegated to living a quasi-medieval life before that year or the next was out. For the first time in a long time people thought and acted local. That lasted for a few years.

I have been thinking about that time in this current crisis: What does the future post-COVID-19 hold for small farms? Where will the small farm fit into the economy, or, more to the point, which economy will the small farm fit into? Because, like history, an economy ain’t static.

A recent NYT article mentioned offhandedly that Americans eat 75 percent of their vegetables at restaurants. That stat shows the outsized impact of our consumer economy on what used to be a family or communal experience, that is, whether it be sitting down to shell beans or break bread. We have, in one generation or two, outsourced the love and care of food preparation and delivery to businesses. (Which begs the question of what the heck is in those veggieless home-cooked meals.)

Dan Barber, in his 2014 book The Third Plate, spent several hundred pages eloquently reimagining the dinner plate of the future at his elegant Blue Hill restaurant. One of the questions that still rattles around in my brain is, Does a future knocked from its pedestal by global catastrophe —pandemic, climate change, collapsing resources — really allow for high-end restaurants? Or, indeed, for restaurants at the scale we have today?

A local producer’s economy (or as it is now fashionable to say, the maker’s economy) remains only a twee option in the global consumer economy. I’ve written too many times about the customer seeing “local” as a consumer’s choice: “I bought some lovely pork chops from Winged Elm Farm, honey. Run to Costco and pick up the rest of the meal’s ingredients.” While that “choice” continues, most small farms will be but a rhetorical flourish for the politician, the food writer, and the conversationalist at the restaurant dinner table, a footnote on the farm-to-table menu that proudly announces sourcing local ingredients “when available.”

Small farm culture simply is not relevant in large-scale capitalist or command economies. Indeed, it exists in the margins of most economic models; it endures, in moments of time, as a particular cycle of history expands or contracts. The census used to have a category for the “self-sufficing farm,” an entity that produced the majority of a family’s needs and bartered in a primarily cashless economy for the remainder. That model, while not so sexy to policy planners, politicians, or, frankly, you and me, is closer to how most small farms have existed across the centuries, across the continents. Perhaps the small farm thrives when there is minimal choice?

One day next month or next year, this particular crisis will pass, no doubt. But it has left exposed the limits of global supply chains. It is encouraging that those limits are now being questioned. Yet, I do not hold my breath that good questions or good answers will change our trajectory as a species. Just as likely is that the planet will make the choices for us. Then the question becomes not Where does the small farm fit into the economy? but instead, How does the larger population learn to live a life of reduced choices?

Older farmers in this valley recall that growing up, an egg man used to come around twice a week to collect eggs. He would take them to sell to the family-owned grocery store in the nearest town. He provided some much-needed cash for the farms to buy what they did not themselves produce.

Maybe that is the best outcome we might hope for. When the clearest sign that we have launched ourselves on a new and better course is that one fine spring day, as we are hoeing in our gardens, we hear the sound of the egg man coming up the drive, once again.

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)

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.

Self-sufficiency: repeat

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One from the archives (2012)

 “I am a grandchild of a lost war, and I have blood knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.”
Kathryn Anne Porter from her memoir The Days Before

Our well-house, built with salvaged wood from another outbuilding.

I have written of our efforts at self-sufficiency and made occasional sport of some of our neighbors. But, I have not conveyed much of the wisdom of many our self-sufficient neighbors. As I’ve mentioned previously, self-sufficiency is as much about learning to live in hard times or preparing for the same as it often is a response to a cultural memory. For those of us in the US that memory extends to the Depression and further back to stories of hardship after the American Civil War; with a knowledge that what one currently enjoys may yet be removed from ones ownership.

Here are a few simple examples.

T-posts: A few years ago I helped our neighbor, Lowell rebuild a fence. He and I labored for weeks. He outworked me most days even though he is in his mid-seventies. Besides that fact what Cindy and I often recall was a steadfast determination to build a beautiful and sturdy fence and his use of frugality to achieve it. A t-post, the metal post commonly used in line to attach barbed wire, has become quite expensive. Currently they run about $3.99 a post. Multiply that cost times a hundred and you quickly get fence that is not economically justifiable to build.

Lowell, in typical fashion as we have learned these last 12 years, found a novel way to circumvent that cost. He bought warehouse shelving posts at auction. If you have been in a warehouse you have seen the towering shelving units that go up 20-30 feet where goods are stored. The connecting pieces, a bit like scaffolding, come in 14 foot units. These pieces he bought in bulk and hauled to his farm. Using a cutting torch these were then cut into 7 foot sections. We used these pieces as our posts, pushed into the ground with his front end-loader. They are sturdy and will in all likelihood outlast the un-bought t-posts. Unit costs were perhaps 25 cents.

Home production: A man lives across the road from our farm in a small hand-built house of no particular style, maybe 600 square feet. Additionally he has a few small outbuildings. It all sits on about an acre of land nestled between the road and the creek. The owner works odd jobs as a handyman. His place is beautifully kept, neat and orderly. But, the real pride is the garden. Beginning in late winter a regular and varied succession of crops and veggies make an appearance. Never a sign advertising produce, we are left to assume that is all canned and preserved for his own use. Regardless, his place is a simple reminder of the value of hard work.

Repurposing: Ten years ago Cindy wrecked on Pond Creek while pulling a horse trailer. Shaken but unhurt she secured the horse and made arrangements to have the trailer towed to the wrecker. The top of the trailer was completely smashed like a beer can. To our eyes and the eyes of the insurance company this was a total loss.

A nearby farmer, now deceased, heard the story and asked Cindy to call the wrecker company for him. He bought the smashed trailer for $60. Using a welding torch he cut away the frame of the trailer and was left with a perfectly sound foundation. Using scrap metal from his barn he built a new and sturdy frame. A few weeks later he drove up to our farm and showed us a functional, painted livestock trailer. Still in use the many years later, the trailer reminds us of the need and uses of thrift.

We struggle with the same impulse as the rest… go buy it. We have gradually, though certainly imperfectly, begun to learn to make do or simply “make”. Or, as a friend suggested, based on his farming background, do without.

Treading Water

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Life on the farm has always presented a comforting predictability. A seasonality of changes: winter’s arrival of lambs, marketing of the hogs come spring and fall, the early spring budding of fruits and vines, planting of the first cabbage beginning in late February or early March.

We have built our farming practices around that predictability, erring on the side of caution as suits the natural conservatism of the farmer. We know that September and October are the driest months and that lime can then be spread safely on our hills, and we act accordingly. We have learned to carry over enough hay from the previous year to bed the animals during the cold months. We reserve stores of firewood; we leave pastures fallow. We plan two timetables for the garden starts just in case one planting is lost to weather, disease, or pests. Virtually every decision we make is based on the recurrent rhythms that vary year to year, though always within a framework that is understood.

But now come the unpredictable droughts and deluges. The earth is changing right before our eyes, and we can no longer count on a time to every purpose. The changes cannot be ignored, yet there is only so much adaptability we can accommodate. True, as a small farm we’re able to shift course more easily, even as the smaller boat turns quicker on its keel than the barge. But in times of extreme and erratic turbulence, a different direction does not guarantee entry into a safe harbor. The history of our species teaches us that lesson, and the older geological record hammers the message home with humility.

Friends and family express amazement at our farm’s independence and productivity. Indeed, we do produce all of our meat, most of our vegetables, some of our fruit, and we’ve done so for nearly two decades. Yet this small diverse farm, like everything else on earth, is tied into a vast web of interlocking connections of history, climate, culture, politics, supply chains, and industrial growth. It is impossible to be otherwise. Each external connection impacts our decisions and limits us in ways we only pretend to fathom. Our independence and security are as illusory and elusive as a foothold in the barnyard slurry.

As a farmer, I tend to think in terms of fragility. The newborn lamb, chick, piglet, all need nourishment, water, and warmth to survive and grow. Those are the universal requirements of life. Remove one of the three and fragility is introduced into the equation: death becomes the inevitable outcome. A few days past, I entered the barn only to find a dead lamb, a two-week-old lamb that only half an hour earlier seemed to be flourishing, now unexplainably lifeless, now food for carrion. Fragility.

It is what that word “fragility” represents that most scares me, keeps me awake at night. Its implications ripple out and shake history, culture, and that larger unknown, our sheltering climate (which more and more seems to have been just a window in time). They augur an ocean, churning up waves that threaten to toss us off our little moored raft, into heaving waters, treading until we can tread no more.