Tag Archives: Work

A Valentine’s Day Musing

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Over the years I’ve frequently been asked for advice on this farming life. I’ve been pondering my thoughts since Chris Smaje wrote to his younger farming self on his blog, Small Farm Future, and an acquaintance asked me to be on his radio show to discuss my experiences.

As I sift through my farm memories — the tragedies and successes, the wasted resources and the careful stewardship — one constant stands out: a partner who shares in the work and joy of running a small farm.

Without her buy-in, none of this would be possible. I don’t say this as a romantic nod to Valentine’s Day. In my modest way, I hope that I also give good value. I say it because, to my mind, too many relationships have no element of true partnership.

Farm life, with its intense need for coordination, either enhances the cooperation essential to any successful relationship or brings stresses that will tear that relationship apart when the goals and the vision are not shared. Much of modern life involves “farming” out the labor to others. Life lived on a small farm is quite the reverse: we build the fences, we tend to the veterinary needs of the livestock, we preserve the food, we work the long hours for little monetary compensation.

Over time, I have had a few farming acquaintances in which only one shared the desire for a farming life, and it can be done. But for one person to take on all the work, the load becomes a drudgery instead of a shared pleasure in accomplishment. Without a partner, the family and the larger community never coalesce.

And what of the rewards — beef raised in the nearby pasture, produce from the gardens, fruit from the orchard? True and complete satisfaction is only achieved when the bounty is shared with someone who participated fully in the production.

When embarking on a life on the farm, by all means dream of an idyllic world of fresh veggies and just-laid eggs. We certainly did, and to a large part still do. But I also suggest a test to determine the compatibility of your partner for the farming life. In a race against the clock to provide shelter for a very pregnant sow, stand outside in a blowing snow for several long hours building a farrowing hut. You will quickly learn a few things about the work ethic and temperament of your beloved.

Here is my best farming advice to you: Share this life with someone who can handle with equanimity the occasional heartbreak at the inexplicable death of a newborn lamb, the endless abundance of your gardens, and the true joy of being a good steward to the land and your charges.

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Reading this weekend: Old Southern Apples by Creighton Lee Calhoun, Jr.

Farm Mornings: The tasks before the tasks

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January, in theory, should be a slower month on the farm. So forgive my pique this Saturday morning when the rooster — who should be sleeping in on these post-solstice, light-deprived days —begins crowing before dawn. Opening my eyes for a squint, I read the red glow of the clock at 5:58. I close my eyes and try to drift back off to sleep. After what seems many more minutes, I chance another glance: 6:02.

Resigned, I drag myself from under the covers, gather up my overalls, and feel my way downstairs in the darkness to start the morning coffee. The 6 o’clock hour is my natural wakeup time without an alarm clock, regardless, so nothing lost.

Over coffee I contemplate the to-do list of the day, then dress and head out into the cold. Of late, our morning chores seem to have expanded. Currently we have pigs in three different paddocks. Water needs to be checked, feed delivered, bedding inspected, back scratches administered. Caesar, the draft horse, needs hay, his fresh manure shoveled and added to a growing compost pile, and the gate opened to his pasture, which in mid-January has little grass, yet still manages to absorb him all day in the search.

The hens take the least time in the morning: simply open the gate of the chicken run to the outside world, scatter a bit of grain, and let them do what they do best — chase cold-hardy bugs and get chased in return by the amorous rooster. We collect eggs in the evening, what little there are in these short winter days, saving that extra step in the morning.

In the sequence of chores, I usually check on the sheep, but this morning I decide to first feed the cattle, who get fed every other day. That requires fueling, then warming up the tractor, scooping out a bucket of grain, and putting hay spears on the front and back of the tractor. The bucket of grain is just an enticement, a path to the bovine heart, as it is for all God’s creatures.

The cattle are in the back forty, a half-mile’s journey through the woods. They meet me at the gate leading to the upper pastures. After a bit of jockeying so the tractor can get through (a nod of thanks to Becky, our English shepherd), I continue up the hill to the feed trough. I toss the grain in, count heads, and drive to another field, where I roll back a tarp to uncover a stack of round bales, then pick up a bale with the front spear, turn the tractor around, and lance another on the back hay spear.

Bales fore and aft, I head back across the fields to the cattle. While they are busy licking the trough, I roll out a hay bale across 50 yards of pasture. This allows them to eat as if grazing, and fertilizes along the path in the process.

Cattle counted, fed, and content, I climb back on the tractor and head back through the woods to the lower portion of the farm.  I arrive to find our weekend helper, armed with a to-do list from Cindy, busy loading hay in the barn to carry to the pigs in the woods. An arctic blast is coming, and we need to make sure they have plenty of hay in which to burrow down.

lambs 007

Two ewe-lambs born the next morning.

Our helper greets me by asking if I have seen the new twin lambs. I had not. Two beautiful ram lambs, the first of, we hope, 20 or more, are busy nursing their mom — a wondrous sight, no matter how often witnessed.

Although it is now just 9 a.m. and we have plenty to do the rest of the morning, I feel as if the day is done on our small farm. I turn back from the barn and walk up to the house to catch up with Cindy. She had been busy separating and attending to the new mom and lambs, but I find her inside, just hanging up the phone. She is off to another farm to collect a gilt (a young female pig) who’s been with a neighbor’s boar the past few days. I grab another cup of coffee and go back outside, to begin anew a slow January farm day.

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Reading this weekend: rereading selections from In Your Stride by A.B. Austin, a guide to walking England written in 1931

Your Basic Essentials

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“Dish-washing is my balm and poultice.”—Robert Mifflin in The Haunted Bookshop

The wind is up outside the windows of my cozy study this morning. I hear tin tumbling across the ground near the wood yard. Something has come loose during the night, hopefully not a roof.Hauling Firewood with Ginger 019

A well-attached roof is an essential for living comfortably. But other than competent shelter, what else is really essential to a good life? The New York Times recently ran a lengthy article on a young couple’s travails in finding an apartment within their budget ($3000 a month) that had a dishwasher. The unchallenged assumption was that a dishwasher in an apartment was one of those essentials. Anything less, the writer implied, and the couple might as well return to medieval times.

One landlord told the couple that they didn’t need a dishwasher because New Yorkers liked to eat out. That a couple would choose to eat at home and hand-wash their dishes was a non-starter, perhaps even inconceivable, for this spoiled and entitled young couple.

More than a hundred years of consumer capitalism and the free labor of fossil fuels have left most of us ill-equipped to contemplate the essentials of life and the value of work. We as a society have used the largesse of cheap fuel to devalue community and extol the individual, warping in the process our relationship to the daily rhythms of work, to the degree that simple hygiene gets farmed out to an appliance.

Is the struggle to wash dishes really such an onerous chore? In the days when we owned a dishwasher, we put almost the same amount of energy into loading and unloading the machine as into hand-washing the dirty dishes ourselves. Doing dishes together, we have found 15 years into living sans dishwasher, is a great way to catch up on the day, to reconnect over a shared task.

As moderns, our definition of what is truly essential includes computers and smartphones and dishwashers. What is truly essential is now defined as anything that helps us avoid what we perceive as work. And adhering to that definition clouds our understanding of what we need, unsettles fundamentally our ability to truly know what we can do ourselves, promotes our abdication of control and authentic participation in exchange for accessories to purchase, whether labor or goods.

Our journey, living on a small farm, is not unusual; it is one on a well-worn path of reasserting some measure of control over production and community. During these past 16 years, we have learned to do more for ourselves and to more fully embrace the life that as a friend who grew up on a farm described as “Do it yourself or do without.”

This life on the farm has taught us to be more thoughtful on what is essential, to value more dearly the help of a neighbor and recognize the need to cultivate those relationships. We’ve discovered that physically building fences enhances the metaphorical sense of the same: it indeed makes good neighbors.

I dare say that the generations to come, in dealing with the decline of fossil fuels and the ravages of climate change, will not find the struggle to wash dishes nightly a mighty inconvenience. Indeed, they may find that the essentials of a satisfying life come from shared toil, the fulfillment of building something with their hands, or the freedom of doing without.

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Reading this weekend: Resilient Agriculture: cultivating food systems for a changing climate by Laura Lengnick

Slow Farming and Climate Change Talks

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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: Animate Earth by Stephan Harding

The ‘self-sufficing’ farm

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It was late afternoon when I stopped at a friend’s farm. An invitation to sample three new homebrews and some freshly sliced prosciutto from a 2-year-old ham had been issued. The short drive found me passing dozens of small homes and farms. None of them could be called financially “going concerns.” Most had vegetable gardens and chickens; some had fighting cocks staked to huts; many had a steer or two in a small pasture and a few pigs in sties near the barn; one had a gutted buck draped from a pickup truck. These are features of our landscape. It’s a traditional landscape of those getting by, doing for themselves. Not quite the “self-sufficing” farms of old, but closer than most in this modern world.

Lounging by the coop.

Tools of the trade

In the 1930 census, one-third of “self-sufficing” farms were located in Appalachia, accounting for the majority of farms in the region. These farms generated less than $100 a year, produced more than 50 percent of their needs on the land, and bartered and traded for the rest in an essentially cashless network. In a system hallowed by custom, kinship, shared work, and shared deprivation, these hill people still led a life rich in music, folkways, food, and craft.

Cashless networks create challenges within a capitalist economy. Communities operating outside the prevailing system must always be brought inside, to the sheltering embrace of improvement, progress, and markets. A people not in search of “the civilizing influence of a cash economy” will be given it anyway. And once it’s presented, they’ll often surrender to it, for after all, the sirens’ call of cheaper, plentiful goods is hard to ignore when there is money to spend.

The 1930s were really the midpoint in a long, complicated pursuit of bringing “progress” and wages to the mountain people. That pursuit ultimately resulted in the destruction of those self-sufficing farms, the cashless society and culture, and what remained was a shell, a dependent people, and the faintest ghostly echo of that world today.

Perhaps it is a romantic streak, but I see ghosts. Ghosts of what we have lost in our drive for progress and shiny baubles. One North Carolina woman, at the brink of the Civil War, anticipated the loss to come in that conflict: “How quietly we drift out into such an awful night, into the darkness, the lowering clouds, the howling winds, and the ghostly light of our former glory going with us to make the gloom visible with its pale glare.”

A friend of mine works with non-profits and universities establishing links between the peoples of Appalachia and the Maramures region of Romania. ‘Twas a link I thought a stretch until he sent me William Blacker’s chronicle Along the Enchanted Way. It is a haunting work, beautifully written, of a land isolated and untouched yet by the capitalist economy and unaffected by the communist government just fallen—a land like ours once was, of custom, barter, and kinship, of self-sufficing farms.

During the years Blacker lived among the Romanians, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, he witnessed the impact of cash and commercial goods on that society. How quickly a rural, traditional society unravels, one outside paycheck or charity at a time, leaving a pale glare to light the path behind.

We find it hard to step outside our immediate desires and see the long-term consequences. We bemoan the loss of kith and kin, praise the handmade, the local, yet undermine all by our gluttonous drive for new markets and consumption. Left behind is the debris of formerly stable societies, slathered now with the cheap, sugary pink frosting of hope and mountains of discarded plastic toys.

On our farm, we don’t lead a self-sufficing life. We try. But even with our table loaded each night with food sourced from just outside our door, with a pantry full of jars of preserves, pickles, and canned produce from the garden, with bacon, jowls, and hams under the stairs, we conjure only a pale outline of what was or could be. We try to barter and repair the literal and figurative fences in our community. But, we fail. Those links to a self-sufficing life are now severed. We are too plugged into this economy, too enamored to envision a way out.

The problem is not just our fossil-fueled lifestyle, our globally connected train of goods and services, or our commodification of all physical aspects of our modern existence. It is our mindset. We discard with ignorance and shortsightedness and embrace the new without question.

Perhaps we mistake the lowering clouds as security and the howling winds as the sound of contented voices. Yet … if the pale light guiding my path leads me to three homebrewed beers and some home-cured prosciutto, then I’ll gladly trudge on.

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Reading this weekend: Book of Tripe: and gizzards, kidneys, feet, brains and all the rest. By Stephane Reynaud.