Tag Archives: Patrick Leigh Fermor

Hollering for Home

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No matter what kind of trouble a teenage boy might get into on a Friday night, he will be home in time to raid the fridge for a midnight snack. It is a plain and simple fact of nature. Home is where the stomach gets filled, as the adage goes (or should).

Apparently one of our guests gifted us this “farm helper” last night.

Of all the skills we have learned on the farm (and we have learned plenty in 22 years), among the first and most critical lessons in Husbandry 101 is the importance of hollering for dinner. Teach your livestock to come to feed and your life has been made much easier. Call them even when they’re confined to a barn. Let them associate your bellow with getting fed. They will love you for it.

Yes, stepping out into a field for the first time and hollering for cattle with neighbors in earshot makes you feel like a right idiot. Get over it. I have been with friends who struggled with controlling their livestock. The reason was clear. As the herd ran rampant over distant fields, they would stand in the barn doorway with a bucket and say “Here cattle, come here cattle” and shake the bucket like it was filled with feathers that were about to float away.

You can’t pussyfoot around — you have to call your livestock like you mean it. Start by getting them used to a little feed every day. When we first get a load of weanling pigs, we keep them confined for 24 hours. Each time they get fed, even though they are five feet away, we holler, “Here piggee, piggee, piggeeee!” (The classic “Sooey!” used to call pigs is said to derive from the Latin Suidae, the family that includes domestic hogs.)

Walking out to the barn at sunset and giving a holler, “Here chick, chick, chick!” then watching the chickens, heads down at a fast waddle, stream from all points of the compass. When you’re under the gun and required to treat a lamb for scours right now, shaking a bucket and blasting out a booming “Come on, girls, come on!” then having 50 ewes and lambs stampede toward you from 400 yards away. Those immediate responses to your call are more than just satisfying; they’re critical.

Pigs, though, are somewhat different. They will come running if still confined to their paddock. But if they have escaped, slightly different rules apply. They may, if hungry (and pigs, like boys, are almost always hungry), follow your cries and a bucket of feed back to home and hearth. Or they may ignore you. (In which case they will typically return overnight, homed in on the trough of feed … unless, of course, they don’t. See Big Sandy Callin’.) Regardless, recapture is more easily done when any stock have been handled and when they associate the sound of your distinctive call with safety and feed.

Last night several couples joined us for a St. Paddy’s dinner celebration. Shortly after arriving, one of the couples told us of a flock of sheep out on the road a couple of miles away. Cindy and the couple went to assist. Turns out, the farmer was out of state and unable to help. Twenty-odd lambs had already scattered every which direction, and only a flock of 8-10 greeted the three and one other neighbor. It was apparent those lambs had never been “called to dinner,” or even left their barnyard. How much more smoothly things would have gone if with a simple holler of “Come on, girls” and the rattle of a bucket they had turned toward home. As it were, after 40 minutes of coaxing lambs toward their barn half a mile away and vehicles stacking up on the country road, Cindy and guests turned and headed home for their own dinner, leaving the job in the hands of the newly gathered reinforcements to finish.

Was it a coincidence that we who had stayed at the farm had just stepped out on the porch and yelled, “Come on, Cindy, come on”?

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Reading this weekend: Drink time! in the company of Patrick Leigh Fermor (D. Payas). A short memoir of time spent with PLF by his Spanish translator.

2021: The Farming Year

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Farming is a wheel that rolls through the hours and days, grinding down the seasons and the years, only to bring you back to where you started. The sowing of crops, raising of livestock, harvesting of hay, maintenance of infrastructure — each are acts of renewal, and faith in rebirth. Even the variabilities of the weather, markets, and customers, or simply the challenges and distractions of life, constantly reframe our work on this land.

Here is a short summary of the farm in 2021:

Livestock

  • Poultry: Chickens first arrived here the same week we took possession of our property, September of 1999. Since the beginning, we have always kept a flock, along with the occasional geese, ducks, and turkeys. But aside from one lone elderly goose living out her life on a pension, 2021 was a year of chickens only. A small flock of 8-15 hens provided us a steady supply of eggs for home use, with any surplus going to feed the pigs. We also raised out two batches of Cornish-cross meat birds (30 in all) for our table, slaughtering them at nine weeks. And we fattened, dispatched, and froze three batches of roosters (8-10 at a time) for future dinners of gumbo, coq au vin, chicken and dumplings, to feed ourselves and share with guests.
  • Sheep: We began and ended the year with a flock of 20 Katahdin ewes. The flock had a 200 percent lambing rate (all twins except two singletons and two sets of triplets), so we gained 40 lambs in 2021. We retained only five ram lambs for our customers; those market lambs head to the processor next week. We also held back four ewe lambs for evaluation as replacement breeding stock. Last January, 15 of the 2020 crop were sent to the processor for customers. But, to be frank, we found that handling that many customers at one time was just too much to juggle. So we put a new strategy in place for 2021: to actively sell lambs and ewes as breeding stock and ram lambs for weekend barbecues (and, in one case, as a 4-H show lamb) throughout the year. The new approach helped reduce pressure on the pastures and generate extra cash flow, and it allowed us to focus on continuing toward our goal of improving the flock’s genetics.
  • Hogs: As we have the past four years, we purchased weanlings instead of keeping sows in 2021. If the price for replacement pigs remains between $50-$60, maintaining breeding stock for our small operation does not make economic sense. And while we have the infrastructure to raise more, we have settled into a routine that works for us. We raise the weanlings to slaughter weight (at nine months) in groups of three, adding a new group every 3-4 months, for a total of 12-15 hogs a year for our customers. That gives us flexibility and pork in our own freezer (we hope!), and protects us somewhat from increased feed prices. Our hogs continue to be raised in rotating paddocks of 1-3 acres.

Fruit. Last year brought us a very mild late winter and an early spring followed by two hard freezes. Which left our apple, pear, and fig crops the weakest in a decade. Even the always-prolific crabapple tree failed to produce. There was also an increase in rusts and cankers in the orchards that has me worried about the long-term health of the trees. However, the plantings of the small fruits did well. They, like the orchard trees, are all for home use. We harvested plenty of blackberries, muscadines, blueberries, and raspberries for jams, jellies, wines, and when we finally ran out of steam, frozen bags of fruit.

Gardens. After producing a beautiful and highly productive Covid garden in 2020, I had to be content in 2021 with a somewhat productive and unattractive one. Each year in the garden holds its surprises, and last year had winners and losers. Winners: peppers, greens, eggplant, cole crops, field peas, green beans, onions, garlic. Losers: tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, butter beans. The determining factors are to be found in the muddy area between weather and energy exerted.

Infrastructure. Two-plus decades on, farm infrastructure is bound to need a bit of TLC. Last year we replaced one wall of the chicken coop. We still need to replace the corral fencing and a section of the potting shed floor that has water damage. And, of course, there’s the occasional tree that will inevitably drop on the fencerows. We did have a new 16×60-foot barn addition completed that covers the chute system we bought in 2020. Late in the year, we also hung LED shoplights both in the barn and in the addition. The results were as dramatic as, well, night and day.

Farming life. New Year’s Day 2022 we sat on the front porch waiting on another round of severe weather to hit, when something from earlier in the afternoon got us tickled. It ended with a bent over, tears streaming, unable to catch our breath, bout of snorting and guffawing. Fortunately, I live with someone to whom laughter comes easy and often. Which, while not essential to a farming life, sure makes mine more enjoyable.

That laughter, along with the companionship, were needed this past year as I faced the loss of the older generation of my family (my aunt, father, and stepmother). That my 22 years of farming also provided a framework for understanding those changes should not surprise. For both death and rebirth have been manifested daily and throughout the years in our life on this land.

Indeed it would be easy to say that loss and renewal are simply different signposts to two roads in this existence, my life and farming, and not to confuse the two. But increasingly I know that they are one and the same.

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Reading this week: The Solace of Open Places (G. Ehrlich) and continuing the journey with Patrick Leigh Fermor.

The Matters of Location

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My farm notes often seem to start with the wind, writing as I frequently do just before sunrise. In the dark it is what I hear that informs. Last Saturday morning, the sun would not appear above the eastern ridge for another hour and a half, and out by the barn the gates creaked with each gust. The wind caught the oaks, shaking their dry brown leaves before releasing them to hit the house, then it curled under my drafty windowsill, cooling my hands and coffee.

When I let the dogs out at sunrise, the temperature was an unseasonably mild 69. In an East Tennessee mid-December that can only mean one thing: change. By the time I poured my first cup of coffee and Buster the rat terrier had nailed his first small varmint out in the muscadines, the change had started whipping full force through the valley. I didn’t need the weather service to tell me strong storms would hit us, possibly as soon as late morning, before piling up and spilling over the mountains to our east. Sure enough, an early morning peek at the news confirmed devastation far to our west and northwest, with a death toll predicted and only expected to rise.

As the morning progressed, concerned text messages began rolling in to check on our welfare. We did the same with friends who had family in the hardest-hit area of western Kentucky. A friend just 35 minutes to our southeast lost a portion of her barn roof in the path of the storms, but when the first and most intense line had passed, our immediate area emerged unscathed.

Now, not that damage couldn’t and hasn’t occurred before from severe weather in this broad valley. We have had our share of violent storms, floods, occasional heavy snows, even tornadoes (though not in our smaller valley), and, most damaging to our farm, the long-running extreme drought of 2016. But this area of the upper Tennessee river valley, extending from Knoxville down to around Athens, is not noted for extreme weather. This land — an area of 30 to 50 miles across that is tucked between the Cumberland escarpment to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east — typically escapes the worst of the weather inflicted on the plateau and Middle Tennessee, as well as the tornado alley that starts near Chattanooga and cuts southeast across Alabama.

Location, for us, matters, at least for now. While the impacts of severe weather are here to see, those of climate change are really a matter of percentages. A 10 percent increase in the number of microbursts, and the town of Waverly is removed from the map. A 5 percent increase in the frequency of F-4 tornadoes, and a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, is blown out. A catastrophic drought lasts 13 months instead of seven.

We could build in more resiliency to our infrastructure. But increasingly too often, we are spending our spare energies and resources just rebuilding. With a 5 percent more here and a 12 percent more there, a budget is soon depleted. The scope of preparing for every wall of water rushing down every narrow valley, the bulldozing of towns by 250 mph tornadic winds, the leveling of cities by a Cat 5 hurricane, the occasional loss of crops on a continental scale — all is too daunting for a civilization that already appears exhausted fighting useless culture wars.

And as we are now learning, while the impacts of severe weather are great, the changing percentages of its frequency are what really tell the tale. That’s a particularly alarming thought when you’ve always taken comfort in thinking your location keeps you safe.

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Reading this weekend: A Time of Gifts (P. L. Fermor). About a young man’s walk across Europe in the early 1930’s.