Tag Archives: Wendell Berry

A Spring Update: Self-Isolating, With Beer

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Ghost flights above the farm

I walk with determination from the house, past the barn and chicken coop and into the hoop-house, with the sole goal of catching a rabbit munching on my tender cole crop transplants. Sunrise is still an hour or more away, and the light is just enough to see that while the rabbits had been having their way (again), none are visible and within blasting distance of my shotgun.

Come high summer I may take a live-and-let-live attitude toward the cute little rodents. At a time when we are deep in the largesse of a bountiful garden, I can afford a bit of noblesse oblige. But in these first days of spring, a sacrificial rabbit is the only deal on offer. There are only so many veggies to go around, and I’m not willing to share, unless the rabbits do the same.

Earlier in the week we spent a couple of hours castrating a dozen ram lambs. We left another two intact, both large singletons, that showed remarkable growth. We will graze them through the summer with Joey, the big boss ram, and see how they shape up for possible use in fall breeding. This morning, through the far open door of the hoop-house, past the nibbled kale, the ewes and their lambs lie at rest, scattered across the corral. Quiet for once, they seem at peace with the morning. I know this will change. For now though, I simply take enjoyment in watching them.

I turn after a few minutes to walk back to the house. Passing the barn, I glance inside to see how our neighbor’s project is coming. He is enclosing for us a 10 x 16 storage room with a low ramp to house equipment and tools. Anyone with experience around barns knows how dusty they quickly become. After 20 years with the need, we are finally moving forward with the construction. The flooring is down and the framed-in walls up. Standing on the floor, I give a jump and find it firm.

Back outside, I approach our three beehives. A steady thrum of activity is audible from a foot away. My recently mandated downtime allowed me the opportunity to act as Cindy’s beekeeping assistant a couple of times this past week. Two days ago she completed a split (a form of swarm intervention), creating a new hive, while I relaxed nearby and drank a beer with drop-in friends. Now, in the predawn, the newly split hive hums contentedly.

Before heading to the house I stop back by the barn and cast a nasty look at the lawnmower. Yesterday I gave it a start for its inaugural cutting. Only after pulling the cord and listening as it idled much too slowly did I realize that I had forgotten to replace the spring on the governor last fall. It was a simple enough fix, which begs the question, why wasn’t it taken care of six months ago? That is one of those eternal questions I ask myself. The answer is that it is all too easy to put aside a repair and move on to another task. The second best response is to fix it on the spot. So, yesterday, that is what I prepared to do. Without thinking, I released the throttle to stop the engine. I then reached down to turn the mower on its side to repair the missing spring. It was at that exact moment that my pain receptors notified my brain that the blade was still spinning.

Thirty minutes later, after bandaging my bruised and bleeding fingers (each mercifully still attached), Cindy went back to her small tractor and continued mowing around the barns and outbuildings — but not before sagely suggesting that I call it quits and instead self-isolate in the backyard with a beer. I did, vowing to maintain proper social distancing from the mower, at least until next week.

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Reading this weekend: A Place on Earth (W. Berry).

Faltering at Birth

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Near winter’s end, your flock
Will bear their lambs, and you
Must be alert, out late
And early at the barn,
To guard against the grief
You cannot help but feel
When any young thing made
For life falters at birth
And dies.
              —The Farm (W. Berry)

Like fat-bellied ships heavily laden with riches, our 19 ewes lie uncomfortably at anchor, waiting to be offloaded. Lambing season began Wednesday morning with a fine set of twins born to one of a small group of related ewes who possess a nervous eye and a high-stepping skittishness. In a herd of cattle, such cows are dangerously overprotective and prone to charging. In a flock of sheep, such ewes, with their stomping and scattering, are merely an annoyance.

Taking turns. One of us around 10 p.m., another after midnight, again at 3, and then between the hours of 5 and 6, we walk softly amidst the flock where they lie. Out in the hay yard, among logs lined up to be cut on the sawmill, we play the light over the tranquil sea. We look for new lambs and for bulging ewes standing separate from the flock. And we watch for the ones in distress and needing a helping hand. Thankfully, we are seldom called upon to assist.

It’s 3 a.m. on Thursday. I step out onto the front porch to find the temperature unseasonably warm, with a near-full moon and clear skies. No light is needed as I enter the barnyard and move gingerly through the mass of bedded ewes. These are the times when I am giddy with the love of farming.

As I walk, I think of my old neighbor, Mr. Kyle, six years departed now, telling me two decades ago of his love for walking the hilly pastures among his dairy herd on a moonlit night. I have created my own path among the cattle and sheep. The wonderful, earthy smell rising from the resting bodies, the sounds of deep breathing that signify all is well — they strike a soul-satisfying note in the husband.

On this night, too, all is well. I spend 30 minutes with the ewes and feel reluctant to return to the house. Even back inside I toy with staying up, putting on the coffee, sitting quietly and reading. But I return to bed and sleep a couple more hours before getting back up and repeating the trip as the moon sets in the west.

Saturday morning I rise around 5, having slept through my middle-of-the-night check on our charges and not knowing whether Cindy has ventured out into the warm night. Storms are building in the distance, and change will soon be at hand.

I make coffee and dress. In the barnyard I count lambs, playing my light over the ewes. One ewe lies at the edge of the flock. I come near and she stands to allow a pair of snow-white newborns to suckle. They look strong and healthy, so I leave them to do what is natural and walk on. In the shelter of the hay barn’s overhang is another ewe. She is also lying down, and beside her is a singleton. But unlike the twins, this lamb is positioned on its side, at an unusual angle, curled, but with the head stretched out. I touch it and find its coat still warm and damp with afterbirth, its tongue distended, its head already cold in death.

I rub it vigorously, without either joy or hope. My sad expectations met, I leave the lamb on the ground next to its mother. She continues to lick its still body, as if by licking it longer she might will a better outcome. We bury the newborn later in the morning. Even as the day merges into evening, the ewe continues to call for her lost lamb, breaking even the stoniest of hearts.

A newborn’s death surrounded by so much new life is the essence of our work on the farm. We raise these animals for slaughter, for the table; we joke that sheep are born looking for ways to die. Yet there is always real grief at loss, especially that faltering misstep at birth.

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Addendum: This morning (Sunday), another 3 a.m. walk among the sheep. The severe storms of the day and evening before have passed, leaving behind a clear moon and starlit skies to light my steps. All is well. Another visit before sunrise finds two more sets of twins have been born, unfaltering, into this world. Now their real challenges begin.

The Readings Gone By

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Like most, I pick up books to suit the mood and moment. Many times, when I just want some entertainment, a Lee Child, John Sandford, or Bernard Cornwell novel fits the bill. But, and this is not an indictment of those authors, the plots and writing soon fade from memory. Their works are the cheese dip and the cheesecake, not the entrée. They are not the books I recall while sitting on the porch before dawn. Nor are they the books I want to press into a nephew’s hand, saying, “Read this, it is important. It will take you places, make you want to upend your life.”

Here are 10 books from the past year (numbered by chronology, not preference) that meant the most to me. Books that took me out of my small world, connected me to the broader course of humanity, and made me glad to have had the experience. Works that were either artfully written, engrossing, or informative … or, in a few instances, all three at the same time.

  1. Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey, 1968). I was surprised one cold winter day to realize I had not read this oft-mentioned work. So, this time last year, I got myself to the Book Eddy in Knoxville and picked up a copy. This book is a beautiful, haunting, angry, and often funny work on the desert Southwest, a region Abbey feared was changing too fast, one I fear he would now find gone. Every sentence is a Wiki-quote.
  2. Southern Harvest (Clare Leighton, 1942). Based on the English illustrator’s time spent in North Carolina, it contains vignettes of rural Southern life. Most but not all pieces are sensitively written and wonderfully illustrated. I loved her woodcuts so much that Cindy located a numbered print for my Christmas present.
  3. Grey Seas Under (Farley Mowat, 1958). This book sat on my shelf for 20 years before I took it down to read. Sometimes you just know that if given time you will get around to a book, so why rush the experience? This is the story of an Atlantic salvage tug and the men who operated her off the coast of Canada from 1930 to 1948. It’s the absolutely riveting history of a ship masquerading as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. These sailors and their vessel had more of what it takes than any group of men you are ever likely to meet: daredevil rescues amid towering seas in icy waters day after day (and even more often, night after night), year after year — everyday heroics by uncommon people that make you proud to be of the same species.
  4. Cræft (Alexander Langlands, 2017). An antidote to the mass age, Cræft (not to be confused with “craft”) looks at the broad-based skills needed to survive in the old world. Putting up hay in medieval Europe, for example, required not only the knowledge to cut, cure, and store feed, but also to make and maintain a scythe, plant the forage, save the seed…. Today, we tend to learn, if we can be bothered, just a limited part of any craft. This book is a humbling reminder of how we have specialized ourselves into irrelevance yet still claim to be masters.
  5. Localism in the Mass Age (Mark Mitchell and Jason Peters, Eds., 2018). Styled as the Front Porch Republic Manifesto, it is a compendium of some of today’s more interesting writers on localism. This one has introduced me to a whole range of authors who suck away my spare time.
  6. The Last Grain Race (Eric Newby, 1956). Here’s another one picked up at the Book Eddy, a small, expertly curated out-of-print bookstore. I loved this book so much that I sought out a first edition (found cheap in Australia). But, first I read the Penguin orange-cover paperback. The plot: the author chucks advertising career at the tender age of 18 and signs on to sail on one of the last tall-masted ships, leaving out of Belfast for Australia to pick up grain, in 1938. A there-and-back-again tale about his stoic Finnish officers (who spoke little to no English), a polyglot crew, lice, rats, fights, clambers up rotten rigging in pitching seas and howling winds — all played out to the backbeat of approaching WW2, yet written with a touching and self-deprecating humor that makes you wish you had been on board. It now occupies a special place in my library.
  7. Round of a Country Year (David Kline, 2017). Kline is an Amish farmer who puts out a quarterly magazine, Farming (Remind me to resubscribe). This book is a simple diary of the farmer’s year. It’s the kind of work that has me dreaming of being a better steward and neighbor, of getting it right this year, or at least next.
  8. Fruitful Labors (Mike Madison, 2018). Ditto the Kline book. I knew the writing of Madison’s sister, Deborah, a creator of cookbooks, first. But this somewhat practical, often philosophical, work on farming in Northern California reeled me in with the author’s understanding, commitment, and struggle to manage a productive farm. Better written than I expected (and perhaps than I deserved, since the copy was given to me by the publisher), it sat on my to-read shelf for most of the year, the whiff of obligation wafting from its pages. Finally I read it, and for you farmers out there, I’d recommend it. You will be better for it. I know I am.
  9. Payne Hollow (Harlan Hubbard, 1974). I didn’t know much about Harlan Hubbard, other than that Wendell Berry wrote of him and he was mentioned by similar authors. I picked up this reprint at the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky. It is the autobiography of Harlan and his wife, Anna, as they settled down to live a life off the grid on the edge of the Ohio River in the 1950s. Simple, well-written, it kind of makes you regret every tie that binds you to this stinkin’ system.
  10. Conversations With Wendell Berry (Morris Grubbs, Ed., 2007). Goddamnit, Wendell Berry! Even the transcripts of his conversations are good and often great. This one was picked up just to say I owned it, for the bragging rights (Hear me loud and clear, Clem). So, I planned to read just one interview before placing it on the shelf. But then I read another, then another, until 213 pages later I ran out of reading. For Berry fans, pick it up. For those who don’t know Berry, pick it up.

I dream this January of a book yet to be found, at random, in a stack, discarded by a library for a sale. A forgotten and never-checked-out castoff that will make me fall in love with reading again and again, that will change me in ways I haven’t considered. A book that causes me, the next time I see you, to say, “Have you read…?”

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Reading this weekend: The Last Cowboys, a pioneer family in the new west (Branch). 

Small-Farm Economics

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Apologies to my most sensitive readers, but this is another piece that deals frankly with the life cycle on a farm. You have been warned.

With 625 pounds of freshly butchered pork cut into quarters, beer in the fridge and pizza ready for the oven, sharp knives and meat saws on the tables, we went to work.

It can surely be said that the small farmer is more intimately involved with life’s cycles than the average citizen. The observations of birth, life, death, all harvested into good meals from countless livestock, leaves the practitioner with no illusion of his permanence on this green land.

We bought a sow back in February of this year. She arrived in the usual manner, from another farmer who had gotten in over her head with pigs. The owner couldn’t sell what the breeding stock produced, and she couldn’t afford to keep and feed their offspring. For the small farmer, raising out hogs is a chancy business. Unlike for cattle, there is no real market at the stockyard, so if the animals are sent that route, they bring a pittance for the substantial investment of time, money, and effort. Pork, on the small farm, is all about the direct marketing of the meat to a customer.

This particular sow arrived pregnant, due within the month. The seller had become desperate at the prospect of 6-12 new piglets arriving even before the last litter had been sold. This is often where we find the margin to make a small profit on our farm; it’s the classic adage of buy low and sell high. We paid $100 for this sow and picked her up from a small acreage on the Cumberland Plateau.

Mere weeks after her arrival, she gave birth to six piglets. Eight weeks later, we sold three of the weanlings to two customers to raise out for their own freezers. Those three brought in $120, which covered our initial expense. Between the sow’s temperament and her conformation, we chose not to keep her. Instead, we took her to the abattoir and had her ground into sausage, much of which we then sold — one of the many clear-eyed decisions a farmer has to make daily.

The first of November, nine months after their birth, our three hogs were sold as pork to customers. The average hanging weight of each hog was 275 pounds. We trailered them to the packinghouse on a Tuesday and picked up the packaged meat on Friday. The customers drove to the farm, then paid for and left with their pork by late afternoon.

Last week the friends/customers who had bought two weanlings from us in the spring had them slaughtered. Those few extra weeks of feeding boosted the hanging weights to a 312.5-pound average, which, circle back around to the reason newcomers get into trouble with pigs: they just keep growing and eating until they go in the freezer.

Our friends elected to save money and do the final processing of the carcasses into cuts. Now, that is a lot of meat to process! They asked for assistance and we were happy to oblige. Mind you, none of us is a skilled butcher, but we do have a working knowledge of the parts and various cuts of the carcass, and within four hours we had a tidy pile of loins, tenderloins, ribs, assorted roasts, and ham steaks; two hams and four sides for curing; lots of trimmings for grinding into sausage; and vast quantities of bones, fatback, and leaf lard. We paused only once, for the pizza and beer, before finishing up and heading home.

The small-farm return on investment is simple, in this instance: One sow produced enough meat for approximately 12 families to eat well for one year. And there, my friends, is a crash course in small-farm economics — food produced at scale for a knowable audience.

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Reading this weekend: Irish Journals (W. Berry)

Moving Hogs

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It’s what we do, darlin’.

The sounds of fiddle and banjo picking went late into last night, following a dinner with friends of homegrown salad, chicken and sausage gumbo, and an amazing dessert of strawberry and mint cream soup. We were gathered out back around the table, a bottle of elderberry mead making the rounds, as some of us listened and others serenaded. Somewhere between “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Wagon Wheel,” I threw in my own entertainment by sharing the story of how I accidentally moved our 250-pound hogs.

On the farm we currently have two groups of pigs. One group of three is closing in on market weight and has six weeks to complete a life of indolence. At 100 pounds each, the other three will not be slaughtered until late in the fall. Through a combination of chance and timing, the two groups ended up together in the same paddock and pasture. The larger hogs are food bullies, and consequently, the younger ones have not grown out as fast as we would like.

Separating out hogs was long overdue and had, alas, been at the top of our to-do list for the past few weeks. Which brings us to Friday, when I stepped out onto the porch and found all six pigs in the first throes of liberty, cavorting in the side yard.

Hogs are by nature curious and cautious. They test limits, yet they are fearful of consequences. On Friday, the unlatched gate was discovered early, but, clustered and nosing around the magic line, they still took hours before gathering the courage to step across to freedom.

In the early years on the farm, I would have responded in dignified panic, running amongst them screaming and pleading and flailing my arms. Yesterday, as a seasoned warden of many such feeble escapes, I responded with calm. For pigs, like teenage boys, are both perennially rebellious and hungry. They can easily be controlled, if only just, with a full bucket of feed.

I waded through the scrum to the barn and grabbed the bucket. “Piggeee,” I called, and they came running back through the gate. All except one. The outlier barked loudly and ran the opposite direction. The rest stopped in mid-run to the food, turned, and followed suit. I tried again.

The next go ‘round I managed to get the smaller pigs through the gate, but the larger ones gamboled about among the muscadines. Figuring three pigs in a paddock beat six in the vines, I slammed the gate shut and, having doublechecked that it was indeed latched, headed off to deal with the others.

Now snuffling around the pawpaw trees, they came docilely to my calls and trotted into the large wooded paddock … their new home, where we had intended to move them all along and where they spent the remainder of the day celebrating their victory by eating last year’s acorns among the oaks.

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Reading this weekend: just received in the mail, the new American Library edition of Wendell Berry’s collected Port Williams stories and novels.