Pig Feed

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Two recent book finds.

The autumn light in the hour before sunset seeps through the thinning branches of the big tulip poplar, landing in bright splotches on the ground by the barn where I stand. The smell of overripe bananas is heady in the air. They are now piled in their bunches in a large tub that once contained a sweet-protein mix for cattle, and already are bubbling slowly, fermenting into a mush. Pigs love bananas, and the riper the better. When I spotted the blackening bunches, my hands were already coated with sticky, gloppy residue from digging through two fifty-gallon barrels of not-yet rotting produce and sorting it into half a dozen buckets.

An hour later, having pulled out the mostly packaged fruits and vegetables from the depths of the barrels and separated the contents into the buckets and tub, I finish this task. The buckets are now filled with berries, mushrooms, lettuce mixes, even cucumbers and tomatoes—all ready to be fed to the hogs in the coming days, along with the mush tub of bananas, courtesy of a local grocery. I bag the plastic wrappings from the haul and put the trash in the back of the pickup. The pile of citrus and onions, neither of which the pigs will eat, I carry to the compost bin and bury under a fresh load of wood chips. Still remaining are the twenty-five gallons of milk, always a bonus with pigs. I trundle them in a wheelbarrow to another building that houses a spare fridge.

Sounds through the wall from the adjacent workshop indicate that Cindy is still working on a drop-leaf tabletop. This is a project she has labored over during the past several months. I stick my head in and say hello before returning the wheelbarrow to the barn, then walk up to the house to wash my hands. As I do, the sun drops behind the ridge and the high scalloped clouds turn gold.

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I spent the past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, at the annual Front Porch Republic conference. Other than being butt-sore from sitting and listening to speakers for a full day, I found it mostly enjoyable. Paul Kingsnorth was the keynote speaker. Being that it was my first FPR conference, I was not certain what to expect. But this summation of the gathering, by Jeff Bilbro, gives you some idea: One of the particular delights of FPR conferences is the wide range of people who gather: farmers and academics, truckers and housewives, tech workers and artists, socialists and anarchists, Anabaptists and Catholics and agnostics. What unites us? Paul suggested that at the heart of his writing and thinking over the years lies two convictions: a suspicion of power and a desire for roots. That’s a pretty good summary of FPR’s center of gravity.

At East Tennessee Feed and Seed

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The smells that surround me as I wait in the breezeway of the family-owned feed store where we do most of our farm business are a heady mixture of sweet feed, rich soil and mulch, and bales of straw and hay, with a bit of not-so-heady chemical fertilizer thrown in for balance. A whiff of propane drifts into the mix and mingles with the others. It comes from somewhere in the back of the storage area where a worker moves pallets with a forklift, wafting by on the cool wave that always seems to flow through the dust-layered building. An auger softly clanks as it screws a load of corn, soybeans, and cotton meal into bins near the grain mill in a distant shed.

The sights and smells of this local institution strike me the same each time I come here for feed, fence staples, field gates, and sundry other farming needs. It’s a physical presence of the past. Now I’m eight years old and standing on the loading dock of Theriot’s feed store just off Ryan Street in Lake Charles, hypnotized by the chicks, ducklings, and turkey poults huddled under the red heat lamps of the brooder, drawn to them once again by some atavistic longing—until my father hunts me down and says it is time to go. The worker at East Tennessee Feed interrupts my reverie when he emerges from the storage area pushing a hand truck loaded with a couple hundred pounds of hogmeal. I drop the tailgate, and he hoists the feed bags into the well-worn bed of the farm truck and I head toward home.

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Reading this weekend: The Need to Be Whole (W. Berry). Seems like a good time to finish this massive book, before the Front Porch Republic conference next weekend—which, if any of you are there, I hope will offer the opportunity to say hello should our paths cross.

October Notes

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After three seasons of rain and damp, I have been gifted exactly what I requested: a drying landscape. With little rain over the past six weeks and little in the forecast, the pastures that were grazed hard and late are already brown; fortunately, though, those grazed earlier in the year are still relatively green. And a trip down our gravel driveway yields a small dust bowl in the truck’s wake.

September and October are historically our driest months, so I am not unduly worried. Fall also brings cooler temperatures, and I enjoyed the 37 degrees I awoke to at 5 this morning. And I appreciate the opportunity to start my work earlier in the day. Many of my farm tasks can only begin when the dew has dried. During the summer that means work starts when the heat is at its most intense, but the past few weeks have found me out on the tractor bush hogging or even weed-eating as early as 9. This drier weather allows me to be more productive, leaving the farm looking more, well, neatly barbered. I’m happy for the dry now, though if you ask me again in another eight weeks and the rains haven’t come at least a few times, I may be singing a different tune.

Along with the lack of precipitation has come the seasonal arrival of massive combines on our two-lane backroads, slowing traffic throughout the area as they move from field to field. Farms in East Tennessee are not set out in neat Midwest grids. Even the largest fields may be only fifty to a hundred acres, often set in sprawling irregular shapes. A farmer with several fields of such size to harvest, and perhaps scattered across several small valleys, negotiates narrow twisting county highways driving a machine designed to reap, thresh, gather, and winnow grain on the Great Plains. From plot to plot, the farmer and his entourage traverse these blacktops like a Main Street parade on July 4th composed of only combines, dump trucks, and an accompanying fleet of pickups. We don’t farm the big commodity crops of corn, soybeans, and wheat. Nonetheless, I like to see such industrious rural action. And truly, I don’t mind anything that slows me down in this life … much.

During these past weeks that straddled summer and now have crossed over into early fall, the tulip poplar leaves began to flutter off the trees, marking a falling rain of foliage that continues until early November, when the arrival and passing of a single windy cold front leaves the forests naked to the coming winter.

Farming routines are marked by these seasonal and annual changes—much like the recent departure of the Kid, who has been replaced by a new Kid. Our much-appreciated helper of three years, Aiden, eventually matured into a well-rounded older teenager with too many extracurricular hobbies and sport interests (coupled with working on his own parents’ farm) to be here enough to help. So now the thirteen-year-old nephew of our neighbors over the hill has taken up the mantle of following direction and reading the mind of your crusty scribe. The new Kid made me smile when I caught him singing the South Park work song Master’s Got Me Working as he dissembled an electric fence yesterday.

Out on our lower fields the rams have been enjoying a conjugal visit with their respective flocks of ewes. A handsome Tunis boy leased from a neighbor will be returned later today. Both flocks will then be merged, leaving the Texel as the clean-up ram, which means that he will be tasked with breeding any ewes not already bred by the Tunis, in addition to those in his own flock. Lambs to follow in winter and early spring.

And finally, behind the equipment shed in the farrowing yard, Ginger, our Red Wattle sow who was given the butcher’s reprieve, has spent the past fertility cycle with a young inexperienced boar. We hope (though we half expect another failure) that she was bred, never having witnessed the act firsthand. Perhaps the young boar got the job done, but without being too graphic for your Sunday sensibilities, we saw him mount and finish his job from every damned approach but the right one. Poor girl, poor boy. He was leased from another neighbor and returned home earlier this morning. The upshot is that if Ginger comes back in heat a few weeks from now, we will have another difficult decision to make. If not, then look to hear about our new piglets in three months, three weeks, and three days.

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Reading this weekend: Judgment Prey, the latest John Sandford mystery, and Book Madness, A Story of Book Collectors in America (D. Gigante), a dense, well-written glimpse into the early years of collecting in this country.

Threads

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A ham just removed from the salt.

When two or more of my fingers poke through the ends of a glove, or the cloth or leather has torn or frayed so that even duct tape no longer makes it serviceable, the glove is retired, nailed to the joist at the entrance to the barn breezeway in the shade of a large maple.

I recently nailed up another glove, to join its well-used relatives in the ranks. As I climbed the ladder, a cluster of long threads floating in the air brushed across my cheek. Only at eye level with the joist was it apparent where the threads had come from. The nail from which formerly had hung a glove now held only a remnant of fabric. I gazed down the line of gloves and spotted two nails that were missing theirs.

For years birds have put the cloth to good use, unravelling it bit by bit to build their nests. We have seen nests in both trees and bushes, held together by colored canvas threads (and sometimes, unfortunately, bits of plastic string from weed-eaters and synthetic feed bags), but it was only on this day, up on the ladder, that I realized how far the expectant parents’ patient recycling efforts extend.

My discovery was one more small insight into our natural world, an act of resilience and adaptation that I applaud. Yet it is also just one example of my endless and ultimately futile fight to hold back the forces of nature that would reclaim the progress I’ve made in harnessing this land to suit my own purposes: a recognition that the infrastructure—the result of years of sweat labor—is so frail and fragile when measured against the forces of time and nature and all of her creatures seemingly marching in legions against this farm; that the loss of whimsies like my glove museum are minor when compared to sagging fence posts or depredations in the gardens. This endless course of work is all done merely to maintain my place on the treadmill, and when I am gone, unless someone shares my vision, the fruits of my labor will also disappear one thread at a time.

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Reading this weekend: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way (L. Mytting). The Farmer’s Wife, My Life in Days (H. Rebanks).

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A personal favor to my readers: My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is set to be released next weekend. If you have ordered it (and thank you if you have) please take the time after reading to leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. For all books—but more than ever for books from small presses like Front Porch Republic—a comment from the reader means the world to any effort by the author to bring the book to a wider audience. Thanks!

Keeping Her Place

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Each ewe marked with a blue crayon streak down her back holds a membership among the select. One day last week we moved the marked group of seven ewes into a separate pen before turning the rest of the flock out onto the summer grass. Later that afternoon we took the chosen seven to a graded sheep auction in Athens, Tennessee. At auction, they might be sold to another sheep farmer or someone looking to start their own flock. Then again, they might be bought as part of a larger lot and head to a processor. You never know who will be buying on any given day.

Ginger

Ewes are culled for practical reasons. Some are at the end of their productive life, others have given birth to lambs that grew out unsatisfactorily, and some have proven to be unthrifty or especially susceptible to parasites. Every ewe culled has been known to us and valued, and the vast majority have been born on this land.

Farming livestock involves a daily exertion of power over life and death. A flock of chickens only needs so many roosters, with the excess going into the pot. The cock that rules the roost remains for a couple of years, at which time he makes way for a younger, more virile replacement and becomes the flavoring for a savory gumbo. A sow that doesn’t produce satisfactorily becomes whole hog sausage. Her weanlings grow and grow and are then loaded in a trailer and sent to the butcher. Extra bull calves are banded and fattened as steers—again, whatever the livestock, one male only is needed for breeding.

Our Red Wattle sow, named Ginger for her coloring, had been chosen for culling. Her date with Morgan’s Meat Processing was booked and noted on the calendar. I bought Ginger in remote Hancock County, a rural county nestled right against the Kentucky border, at a homestead set back in a deep no-light “holler” in the spring of last year. She is a very personable, very docile sow, a lovely specimen of her heritage breed.

Ginger had her first litter in January—a disappointing four piglets, of which only two survived. We would have been content with six but prefer 8-12. We decided to give her another chance and breed her once again to a Berkshire boar. When the farrowing date at the first of August passed with no piglets, it was with real sadness that we scheduled her slaughter. That she would make that final trip with her two market-weight offspring was of no comfort.

On a small farm we have some latitude for keeping animals. Because ours is a modest economic model of a peculiarly non-industrial bent, choices are often made as much for personal reasons as for financial. Still, keeping a two-time loser on the payroll truly doesn’t make sense. We are not that kind of place, neither a petting zoo nor an animal rescue. Ours is a working, producing farm, and here everything is expected to earn its keep.

Yet … last week we were at our friends’ farm picking up three weanling piglets to grow out for ourselves and customers. They were from the same litter that we had helped castrate just a couple of weeks earlier, and we were buying them now because Ginger’s failure to farrow had left us with a gap in our pork production schedule (not to mention that a 500-pound non-producing hog eats the same massive amount of feed that a 500-pound producing hog requires).

While it is still not certain if the failure to farrow was the fault of our sow, when our friend mentioned while loading the barrows that she would be happy to help us artificially inseminate Ginger, I did an uncharacteristic clutch at the offer. I wanted Ginger to work out, did not want to take her to market, at least before she had lived out her productive life.

For those who don’t farm, my attitude towards culling may strike you as callous and unfeeling. Practical decisions often do. Which is why so many tough decisions in life are “farmed out” to others. But, not here on our farm, while livestock is in our care, we treat them well; we give them plenty of room, feed, and attention. Yet there is an end, as indeed there is for each of us.

However, when I fed Ginger last evening—watching her tuck into her trough, then galumph around the pasture—I felt at peace with this very uneconomic decision to give her another chance and allow her to keep her place.

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My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as well as Front Porch Republic Books).

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Reading this past week: both Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi (M. Twain) and select essays from The Burden of Southern History (C.V. Woodward).