Death of a Decade

I woke up early this morning, and went out to search for a doe I shot yesterday evening. I shot the deer in the last of the day's light, and though we found blood, the deer did not fall before disappearing into the laurel thickets. There was a full moon last night, yet despite that the darkness was too thick, and losing the trail, we gave up for the night and left the doe, dead, dying, or merely grazed, out in the woods. I was bitter about giving up; I'd been hunting with a muzzleloader, but the deer had been close. It should have been a clean kill, on one of the last days of a fruitless hunting season. But instead of a body, I was left with a sense of guilt and a poor night's sleep. Today, waking in the pre-storm, slate gray morning to go search for whatever the coyotes may have left of the doe, I wasn't exactly in a pleasant New Year's mood.

It's one of those auspicious New Years that come every ten years; today is the last day of a decade. It's meaningless, really, an artificial designation on an otherwise uninterrupted timeline. But for us humans, place-markers like decades and years and millennia are vital, and keep us sane. And, as far as decades go, it's been a monumental one.

I don't need to go into the details of the past ten years to conjure up a sense of the changes we've seen. The rise of technology and terrorism, the fall of the glaciers and the ice-caps, the vindication of greed and the loss of privacy...I'm sure it's my mindset today that makes the last ten years seem so gloomy.

But, if nothing else, at least this will be one New Years when nostalgia gives way to hope for the future. It isn't easy, of course; the trends of global warming, fundamentalist violence, and environmental catastrophe will only increase in the coming years. Even so, looking back offers no solace. You simply have to hope that things will improve.

For my part, I'm putting my head down and keeping my fingers crossed. I find my joy in the small world around me, and maybe that's enough. The cows are happy, and so are the pigs, and maybe their own small happiness can be enough to sustain my own. Before venturing out to look for that wounded deer, I fed the animals, my morning, depressing as it was, begun in a cacophony of squeals and moos and braying. My day will end the same way. That's something.

We couldn't find the doe. The trail vanished, hoof-prints running together and disappearing in the leaf litter. Maybe even now her bones lay down out on the forest floor. But even then, the coyotes and the crows will have eaten. I feel bad about it, as I should, but there's nothing to be done but learn from my mistakes. Even now, as I write, the sun's come out, gleaming off the snow that fell all morning. It's a bright afternoon, filled with potential.

And tonight, the first decade of the new millennium ends. Good riddance. Let's start thinking about tomorrow.

The Big Chill

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and here in Connecticut things are appropriately miserable.

Most of the eastern seaboard got hammered by a pre-Christmas blizzard this past weekend, and even though our area got off light compared to the shore, Old Man Winter is making up for a lack of snow with screaming winds and frigid temperatures. It's sunny out, but the sunshine is thin and brittle, lacking any real warmth. It'll be gone by four thirty, and once more, we'll wait through the long cold night.

This recent spate of brutally cold days has got me thinking again of the climate. Although, with the recent Copenhagen talks keeping NPR abuzz, warming should be foremost in my mind, I find myself thinking instead about the cold. Why, for instance, is Connecticut this cold this time of year?

The answer isn't as obvious as you might think. Our latitude here is roughly 41 degrees North; Litchfield, CT and Rome, Italy, are equally far north, yet I doubt they're shoveling out the Trevi Piazza right now. Why should we here in North America be subjected to ice and snow while Europe (and for that matter, continents inversely just as far south) are left with much more moderate weather?

The factors are many and complicated, I'm sure, but the one that I think of the most, and which seems to make the most sense, I first read about in a book called The Eternal Frontier, written by a scientist named Tim Flannery. The book is an exhaustive and exhausting history of the entire North American continent (penned by an Aussie, no less), from its Pangaean days to it's colonization by proto-Indians and eventually Europeans. One of the key shaping features of North America has always been its climate, and its climate, as espoused by Flannery, has largely been driven by geography.

In its shape, Flannery likens North America to a big 'climatic trumpet'; can you see it? The continent flares at the top and tapers at the bottom, and on either side run mighty mountain chains in the form of the Rockies and the Appalachians. What this shape does is funnel weather north and south with little to no interruption from east-west mountain obstacles. In the winter, cold air from the arctic is free to come surging down through the trumpet's bell, and in the summer, pressure gradients pull warm air up from the trumpet's Mexican mouthpiece. With this wide open geographic arrangement, vast and dramatic annual temperature swings are not only possible, but common place.

Which is why, in six scant months, the temperature here in Connecticut will be balmy and pleasant. Temperature variations of up to 100 degrees within a single year are entirely possible, even here in New England, which doesn't even have the climatic extremes of, say, Montana. Think about that for a minute: it's in the teens outside right now, yet July will bring days when it reaches the nineties. What's truly amazing to me is that the North American ecosystems have all developed to withstand such egregious swings. The flora and fauna of the continent are all adapted to survive both the cold and the heat and humidity, and to go from one to the other in basically the blink of chronological eye. It's all sort of amazing in its brutality and elegance...that anything, from an oak tree to a deer mouse, can live in such a climate.

But today, most of that amazement is lost on me. It's damn cold out, but even in the worst of the weather, I must bundle up and go out into the teeth of the wind to feed and water the animals. The sun will abandon us too soon, and the night will be clear and freezing. I know, in the back of my mind, that spring will come, and all this wind and snow will make the inevitable summer all that much sweeter. But today, sitting inside now and listening to that wind scour the fields, those summer days can't possibly come soon enough...

Where's the Beef? Right Here...

Yesterday, the cows came home.

Two Black Angus steers, about eight and a half months old and seven hundred pounds each, arrived yesterday at the farm, on one of the first truly bitterly cold days of the year. The steers, numbers twenty and one (henceforth known as Black and Jack), came from a small farm in New Hartford. They are good natured beasts, a little timid at first, but gentle and even tempered. Though the weather has been frigid, they spent their first night in the shelter of a newly opened up barn bay. In a day or two, we'll bring them out into the barn yard to meet the horses.

The plan is that Black and Jack will be the front runners of a small herd of beef cattle. I'm not sold on Black Angus as a breed yet, but the two steers are already growing on me. They don't have the personality of pigs, but are easy going and doe-eyed...it's going to be difficult, as it is will be with all the animals, to transition to thinking of the them as 'meat'.

But I will. The steers will have a good life out on the pasture, and they'll never know the miseries of a feed lot or industrial slaughterhouse. Grass fed and hormone free, their beef will be lean and flavorful, healthier than the heavily marbled conventional meat, and more ethically sound. I feel good about that.

In some ways, two head of cattle is not much to speak of compared to some of the large scale operations out there. But for me, 1400 pounds of cow is a pretty big step, and one I'm quite excited about, and proud of. The two steers are out there now, hunkered down in the cold of the Connecticut night. We're all waiting for greener pastures.

Notes from North Carolina

This past weekend, I drove down to Black Mountain, North Carolina, for the 24th Annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference, hosted by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. I had the dubious pleasure of apparently being the event's only Yankee, a distinction which was repeatedly made apparent to me.

The conference was hosted at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, a hundred year old bible camp compound of a dozen or so buildings nestled in a crook of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Think: the Overlook Hotel, as designed by Flannery O'Connor. Amidst the mountain laurels and streams, the compound was actually quite striking, in that 'haunted by the ghosts of the damned' kind of way. As for the conference...

On friday, I took a tour of three farms in the Asheville area, East Fork Farm, Hickory Nut Gap Farm (man, I love that name), and the farm at Warren Wilson College. East Fork focused primarily on sheep, a flock of around two hundred Dorper-Katahdin cross, along with pastured chickens and rabbits. The farm was small but well run, and made great use of marginal land, on the steep sides of what the locals would call a 'holler'.

Hickory Nut Gap Farm was a slightly larger operation with a slightly more amusing name. They ran grass-fed cattle, pastured hogs, and turkeys and chickens, sort of similar to what I hope to set up. Warren Wilson's farm was the most impressive, 275 acres of bottomland along the Swannanoa River. They have been in operation for over a century, a working farm staffed largely by students and feeding the campus, and they currently run large herds of grass-fed black angus and pastured pigs, as well raising small grains, corn, and chicken. Of course, they have the added benefit of slave labor in the form of college kids; but then, slave labor is a touchy subject in North Carolina. Still, beautiful farm.

Saturday brought a selection of lectures, one on agro-forestry, one on mobil poultry slaughtering units, and one of small farm marketing strategies. All as exciting as it sounds.

On saturday night, the key-note speech was given by Dr. Tim LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute (give it a google). It was a sobering speech, touching on the litany of sins perpetrated by the industrial agriculture system, everything from Roundup killing frogs to lowered sperm counts in men (did you know Danish organic farmers have the most potent sperm in the world? it's a fact that, try as you might, you can never un-learn...). But the good doctor also gave us cause for hope, in the possibility for mass carbon sequestration in soil farmed and managed organically.

It was during LaSalle's speech that I made an obvious but overlooked connection to my own farm. As he spoke about water absorption and its link to soil carbon, I began to think about how the fields here at Hickory Hurst are still saturated from the summer's rains. Those fields have been hayed for the past thirty years, sometimes twice a year, with no return input of manure or minerals into the soil system. If the ground had been managed properly, instead of pillaged, the soil would be able to absorb the vast majority of all that water, soaking it up like a carbonaceous, micro-organism filled sponge. As it is, the soil is weak and thin, deprived of tons of biomass in the form of hay. The water, as a result, stays on the surface, turning whole swaths of the fields into unworkable morasses. Well, if nothing else, I've finally diagnosed the problem. I hope fixing it won't take another thirty years.

I finished the conference on sunday morning with a wonderful session on pastured poultry. Hosted by Andrew Gunther, a Brit, the lecture really helped crystalize my own ideas about how the poultry operations here on the farm should be arranged (plus, everything sounds smarter with a British accent). I left the conference that cold, bright sunday morning with chickens on my mind, and a newfound determination.

So was the 24 hour round trip worth it all? Certainly, though perhaps only at my stage of the game. As someone starting out, it was invaluable to be able to gather information and first hand expertise before delving in with both feet myself. I learned by seeing farms in operation, and from farmers who themselves have learned lessons the hard way. I met people with similar interests and similar outlooks, and was reassured by farms run on smaller and less developed pieces of land than what I have available. I drank sweet tea as sweet as straight honey, and soaked in the molasses-thick souther accents rolling off farmers' tongues. I mingled with rich landowners, hippie kids, and gray-haired, grizzled, old backwoodsmen. Differences aside they were all there together, with a shared vision. And, for that weekend at least, this Yankee was one of them.

A Raw Deal

Once upon a time, my friend Dave and I attended a farmer's market in Middlebury, Vermont. It was a beautiful morning, and as we made the rounds of the purveyor's booths, we stopped and struck up a conversation with an older woman who was selling a modest selection of preserves. I purchased a jar of cherries, and as Dave began asking more and more questions about the woman's farm, the talk became more cordial. Eventually, with a sideways glance and a sly smile, the woman asked if we liked butter.

If someone were to answer no to that question, they'd be no friend of mine.

And so, responding yes, naturally, we followed the woman over to the back of her station wagon, and there she produced from a cooler a dubious looking lump wrapped in white paper. Keeping the lump hidden and lowering her voice to conspiratorial tones, she proudly told us that what lay before us was real, honest-to-goodness raw butter, churned from the cream of her own cows. And for a price, that raw butter could be ours...

The reason that small farmer's market transaction so resembled a back alley drug deal was because in most of modern America raw milk products have the same legal status as controlled substances. Because of our national paranoia about food safety and our governmental commitment to supporting industrial agriculture at the cost of small farmers, raw milk is either illegal or severely regulated by the FDA. Which, to a certain extent, is ok with me; trying to mass market raw milk by industrial methods would certainly lead to illness. But in trying to protect us from the slovenly nature of agri-business, the federal government is also limiting consumer options and the economic viability of small-scale dairying. The butter Dave and I ate was perfectly safe (as well as quite tasty), and we were able to judge whether or not we wanted to take the risk on based on our opinion of the farmer who sold it to us. It was our choice, as it should have been, and the only real danger was in getting caught by the fuzz.

All this leads me to announce with no small amount of happiness that I've been happily drinking raw milk, legally, for several weeks now. Connecticut, in its infinite wisdom, licenses a number of dairy farms in the state to sell raw milk, at the cost of monthly inspections and a lengthy forms process. I get my milk at March Farms, who have no cows themselves, but retail milk from Stone Wall Dairy, in Cornwall Bridge. I need to be on a reservations list to get my weekly gallon, and the milk is at least twice as expensive as pasturized, store bought brands, but for me, it's completely worth it.

The milk is hormone and antibiotic free, and comes from a local source. Not only am I supporting a local merchant, at March Farms, but I'm also giving my business to one of the long suffering Connecticut dairies. Dairies in Connecticut, and in New England in general, are dropping like flies, as wholesale milk prices are set by the federal government at levels too low for small farms to remain financially solvent. Direct marketing of raw milk, a quality product, is one of the few ways for a dairy farm to stay afloat, and I'm happy to pay a premium to support my neighbors. My grandparents' people were dairy farmers once; I think they would have approved.

Of course, I wouldn't buy a product if it was inferior to what was conventionally available, and luckily, I've found raw milk to be superior to pasteurized milk in almost every way. Although raw milk is whole milk by nature, and so skim milk is out of the equation, I've found the milk to be far less heavy than expected. Although creamy and full bodied, the milk is not sweet or cloying. It has a nice piquant and a pleasant bouquet, perfect for that late night bowl of Cheerios...

The milk is pale yellow, and must be shaken up before drinking, as the cream separates out to the top. It's late fall now, and the cows are no doubt already on hay and winter fodder, but I'm curious what the milk will taste like when spring rolls around and the pastures turn lush. It'll be nice to taste the seasons in my food.

Yesterday, I took my lactose-love to a new level. I had an extra gallon of raw milk, this one a gift, from Rich Farms over on the Southbury-Oxford line (great ice-cream there too, by the way), and using a simple recipe from last Sunday's paper, I attempted home-made cheese for the first time. I heated the milk, and used half a cup of lemon juice as my curdling agent. Although I was dismayed by how much whey is left over, I yielded a not inconsiderable little ball of farmer's cheese, about the density of thick mozzarella. The lemon juice gives the cheese a distinct lemony flavor, which I quite like, especially with tomato and basil, which was my breakfast (and the whey was breakfast for my pigs). Next time I'll use half lemon juice, half cider vinegar, and add peppercorns to the milk while it simmers. For anyone interested, I'll give you the recipe I used:

1 gallon whole milk, 1/2 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice, cheesecloth, colander.

In a heavy-bottomed pot, heat milk over medium-low until heated through. Bump up the heat to med-high, and stir constantly to avoid scalding. When the milk starts to bubble around the edges, turn off heat and stir in lemon juice. The milk with start to separate into curds and whey. Avoid spiders and tuffets. Let sit five minutes. Line a colander with a double layer of cheesecloth, and pour milk in. When the curds are cool, fold the cheesecloth over and lift the cheese out. I tied my cheese to a wooden spoon which I suspended across the mouth of a deeper pot, but you can also tie it to your sink faucet. Give the cheese a few squeezes to make it firm, but keep it PG. Refrigerate, and consume greedily.

The Chow Down

When one owns pigs, the world looks like a buffet.

As agents of consumption, my pigs have proven to be second to none, and it has become one of the chief quests of my waking days to supply them with new sources of wholesome, and ideally free, feed. Emphasis on the free.

I wouldn't say I've been trying to cheap out on my little porcine charges, but with a little creativity and a little frugality, I've been able to give them more nosh than they know what to do with. The first buffet-bonanza was the pair of pear trees that have long been sitting in the corner of the farm yard, quietly dropping bushels of fruit year after year, largely unnoticed. I froze a freezer-chest worth of the fruit, and stored several wheelbarrow's worth more down in the cool of the old milking parlor, buried in straw and sawdust. Mid-winter, I'm counting on a few defrosted pears to enliven the pigs' meals and give them some much needed vitamins.

Pumpkins have also been a huge boon this fall. The pigs love to eviscerate a good pumpkin, diving into the orange guts head first (it's all the more twisted when you have to look the disemboweled jack-o-lanterns in the face as they are devoured, like a Halloween themed re-enactment of a scene from Hannibal). And, at a pumpkin a day, I've got enough set away in the barn for a few more weeks of nutritious hog food.

Acorns are another source of a free meal; in about an hour this afternoon, I raked up enough acorns to fill ten five gallon pails. The oak trees that loom over my mother's house leave the ground littered with the nuts, and a bit more work later this week should see another truck full of acorns stored away for colder weather. Besides being a favorite of the pigs, the acorns should give the pork great flavor: world famous Serrano hams come from pigs fattened on acorns in the oak groves of Spain.

All this is just the tip of the foraging iceberg. A good friend (shout out to Carrie Flickinger!!) visited with a trunk load of day old bread from her award winning Clear Flour Bakery in Boston, and the pigs go wild for whole wheat loaves. With luck, I can strike up a more regular deal with the local Bantam Bread Company for a steady supply. I've already made arrangements with some other local businesses for scraps and throw-aways: pizza crusts from Giovanni's Restaurant, vegetables from Sunny Ridge Supermarket, and gone-by fruit from March Farms Orchards. All this free food is available with just a smiling request and a little bit of leg work. In almost three weeks, I've used only about half a bag of official pig feed, and the pigs are happy, healthy, and growing in leaps and bounds.

Finding creative ways to feed them is more than just a money saving venture, however. I hope, by relying on local businesses, to be making connections in my area, creating a sense, however slight, of community. In the spring, I'll repay buckets of cast off produce with farm fresh eggs, as a way of showing my appreciation and building area ties.

I also get an oddly profound sense of accomplishment from using the pigs as perfect little organic recyclers. Food destined to go into the garbage or decay in the field sustains the pigs, and like some alchemy, they transform unwanted scraps into delicious pork. It's a system beautiful in its simplicity, and satisfying in its implications. Pumpkins, apples, acorns, pears, bread, corn...the world, as I said, is a veritable buffet.

Pigging Out

So, I have pigs...

A week and a half ago, I drove up into the eastern hills of the Green Mountains, to the little town of Chelsea, Vermont, and came back with four wee piglets, Tamworth piglets to be precise. They had just been weened, and were perhaps six or seven weeks old at the time; still small enough to comfortably fit two to the dog crate. The little buggers squealed bloody murder for the first hour of travel, but as we drove south, homeward, they quieted, and all five of us settled into the warm funky stink of barnyard animal.

The first home for the four piggies was the fenced in garden plot at the farm, a small square overgrown with the withering remnants of this past summer's growth. After a little timidity, the pigs loved it. There are two males, one castrated, and two females, including the runt, who was simply too cute for me to leave lingering alone back in Vermont. After five days or so, the garden began to seem a tad small and well rooted-up, and so we fenced in a segment of pasture out behind the barn with wire and electric tape. Few things in this world are as sadistically comical as seeing a pig hit the electric fence...

But they learned. Now a week later, they've made the new paddock their own. The pile of horse manure we fenced them in with has been torn up, turned over, and lounged in thoroughly (happy as a pig in shit has taken on an all-new veracity). The little porkers, who are growing with nearly alarming speed, love to root up the grass, digging with their spade-like snouts for who-knows-what in the rich brown earth. They scratch themselves upon a log we provided, bury themselves in the hay of their shelter, and they come running when I ring their dinner bell. All in all, they seem like happy little piggies.

Which is the point of this whole enterprise. Anyone can go to the supermarket and buy a nice pork roast for a fraction of the cost and effort that I'm devoting to my pigs. But that's bad meat. Not bad for you, per se (though salmonella is rife in factory farmed meat), but bad in a way that I almost want to call spiritually. Pigs are smart animals, emotionally complete and social, and though the manner of industrial pig farming is a topic for another day this week, just know now that it's shameful and heartrending. There is nothing joyful about a Stop 'n Shop pork-chop.

But pork is delicious, and I honestly believe that eating meat can be reconcilabe with a firm set of ethics. I want my pigs to have a happy life. They are bound one day for the butcher's block, but in a manner of speaking so aren't we all; every beast's time comes due at some point, you and me included. But how much joy can be wrung from what life there is?

Watching my four new pigs gorge on pumpkin, nap in the warmth of the manure pile, and run around their grassy pen, I'd like to think quite a bit.

Pig Earth by John Berger

I found this little gem of a book, Pig Earth by John Berger, in the used book store in Kent, and, in anticipation of my forthcoming hog ownership, I thought it was worth a mention. In some ways, Pig Earth defies description; part essay, part poetry, part fiction, the work floats in the odd space between all three. The truth is, I had never heard of the book, and had I not stumbled upon in on the 'farming' shelf of the store (how sweet is it that there was even a 'farming' shelf?), I doubt I'd have ever come across it. But who can deny the magnetic appeal of a dust jacket featuring a bloody butcher draped in a cow's earthly remains? Not I.

Pig Earth is apparently the first of a rustic trilogy, Into Their Labors, a trilogy I will soon be searching out. Set in Berger's adopted home of rural, trans-alpine France, the book seeks to sketch the life, and death, of peasant culture. Such an attempt, by a foreign author (Berger is English) could and perhaps should come across as an attempt at romanticism or anthropological study. But there is fairly little of the life Berger portrays that is romanticized, and though he seems to mourn the passing of peasant existence, he understands the causes. He addresses his role as outsider and erstwhile chronicler bluntly and succinctly in a well-woven introduction, and because we buy Berger's earnestness, we follow him willingly into the lives of the men and women he writes of.

So what does he actually write about? Issues and events at once both banal and vital. An old woman leads a doe goat to be mated on a winter night, an orchard keeper runs up against the injustice of law, a pig is killed, a calf is born, generations pass...every event, isolated and magnified, becomes important for its own sake. The poetry, while not the strongest ever written, in interspersed between the prose pieces, and has an erie way of making the stories float in a seemingly surreal medium, un-grounding tales which are individually dense and earthy.

As a whole, the book is delightfully unsettling, a taste of a by-gone time and place, where the tractor was an invader and the daily ritual of labor was everything. It's a taste of something completely alien, a life both simple and hard. The writing is passionate, and deft, and makes the agrarian rhythms of work and season take on a spirit that one finds lacking in modernity.

Of course, my own pigs come thursday. Those rhythms may be all too familiar come friday night.

Of Asses and Axes

The farm now has its first official denizens! Over the weekend one buckskin horse, named Jack, and one jackass, named Jake, came home to Hickory Hurst. Aside from slightly boring and juxtaposed names (shouldn't the ass be named jack?) both animals seem to be doing well. The good news is that Jake is a guard donkey: he's been trained to watch and protect sheep and other sundry livestock. Perfect as a non-lethal defense against the coyotes who roam the property. Unless they shop at Acme.

Also, wood cutting carries on apace. I'm in the process of clearing a stretch of overgrown stone wall, a remnant of the farm's original boundary markers. It's just my luck, however, that CT has an ideal climate for the proliferation of both briar bushes AND poison ivy. Sweet. Yet after getting suited up in my spiffy and fashionable new Carhartt overalls, I feel nigh-on invulnerable. And my first rash of poison ivy has gone down wonderfully. Now, if I manage to avoid taking my leg off with the chainsaw, I'll be golden...

Farm Fresh

So, I'm starting a farm...

Hickory Hurst is a retired dairy farm in Morris CT, last in operation sometime in the late sixties. Somewhere around 90 acres of mixed wood-lot and pasture, for the last thirty years the land has been owned by our family friends the Hachems, and, apart from the house and barns, maintained only as hay fields. Now, thanks to the family's generosity, the land will be put back into full-time production as an integrated, sustainable, organic farm.

Following a model perfected, if not pioneered, by farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm (most notably described in The Omnivore's Dilemma), the goal at Hickory Hurst is to focus on grass-based, low-impact farming techniques, including utilizing animals and crops in complementary roles. The health and ethical treatment of livestock is as much a priority as high quality meat and eggs, and both well-being and product are tied directly with the health of the land itself.

My plan right now is to spend the fall cutting back sections of wood, and performing up-keep and cleaning on the barns and pastures. If all goes well, in the spring I'll begin fencing and acquiring stock. I'll be starting out small, and hopefully expanding in coming years to a level sustainable with the size of the farm. Here's my initial target for spring purchase:

*about ten head of beef cattle, possibly a heritage breed, maybe Herefords from a local breeder. Fed only grass and hay, the cattle will grow slower that their feed-lot counterparts, but produce a leaner and more flavorful beef.

*10-20 hogs, ideally Tamworths, a heritage breed know for their foraging ability. 'Pastured' in wooded enclosures, finished on pears, acorns, and hickory nuts in the fall, the pigs should be a perfect fit. Mmmm, bacon...

*200-300 broiler chickens; pastured, used as insect control, given room to move and lots of sunlight, there is nothing better that a fresh, well roasted chicken.

*150 laying hens; I'm already trying to design mobile coops to follow the cattle in the fields.

*25 sheep and a few goats, money permitting.

In the second year, I intend to convert a six acre front field into vegetable rows focusing on heirloom species and New England specific crops, as well as personal favorites. A second three acre back lot, currently consisting of rocky, poor soil, is destined for reclamation, and I'm going to experiment there with a 'milpa' system, a free form Mexican diverse crop mix. Corn, beans, squash, and melons are sown together and allowed to proliferate, providing ground cover, water retention, nutrient fixing, and, if nothing else, feed for the stock.

I plan to sell at local farmers markets, most notably in Litchfield, but also need to support of friends, family, and the community. I'm looking to develop a meat CSA, and if you're in the Northeast and think you might be interested, give me a shout; chickens and eggs should be ready in the early summer, pork in the fall.

A Fair is a Veritable Smorgasbord...

Oh, the county fair, epitome of taste, pinnacle of social graces, standard by which to judge the continuing devolution of the human form...ahhh, how I've missed you.

This afternoon I went with my family to revisit the bosom of my youth, the Bethlehem Fair. It was a gray afternoon, redolent with the scent of sizzling grease and sugar. The ground was slick, spongy with mud in places, and strewn with hay already soaking through. But despite the drizzle and the mud we plowed on resolutely into the heart of the beast.

And what an odd beast it was. The fair is a spectacle almost beyond description, an event and a cataclysm existing on many different planes simultaneously. Heritage and tradition, bundt cakes and oxen pulls, stand along side hot-tub vendors and faux-Tibetan trinket stands. In the span of ten feet, I could watch draft horses haul stone blocks and find a decorative southwestern poncho that matched my eyes. I could eat kettle corn popped before my eyes or have the Harley Davidson logo put on my shoulder in henna tattoo. Homemade pickles, knock-off t-shirts, warm apple cider, ice cold Vitamin Water. It fairly boggles the mind.

And nothing is quite so engrossing as watching the crowds themselves. Even here, in Connecticut - Connecticut, for crissakes - there is nothing so tawdry, nothing so skin-crawlingly delightful as the average fair goer. Neck tattoos of Chinese characters (people still get those?), tweens in halter-tops, the morbidly obese...you can't help but gawk at the gawkers. I wandered the crowd, part of it but feeling utterly apart, dazzled by the raw stink and shine of it all.

So what did I do at the fair? Well, I ate. Perhaps wanting to blend into that seething mass of humanity with morbid obesity of my very own, I seemed to work methodically through the fair's various food sellers. Fried dough, onion rings, a roast pork sandwich, very good blueberry shortcake, birch beer, apple fritters...not my personal best, but not bad either. We wandered the barns, looking at photographs, macramé, and preserves, and dodged the splatter of beef cow effluvia. We 'ooohhh'ed and 'awwww'ed at lop-eared rabbits and three horned goats, and watched the vague indignity of a mechanical milking machine being attached to a Jersey's udder. We visited the hand sanitizer dispenser, more as proof against the germs borne by slack jawed yokels than by the hogs or horses.

And then, satiated by crudeness and cholesterol, we left for home, past the sad cries of the carneys and the games barkers, past the art barn, past the screaming metal of the ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl. The last sight was the hulking form of the portable funhouse. On its sides freakish clowns were painted, and obscene pig-nosed caricatures leered down at us. A bit too on the nose perhaps, but what can you do. We went home, full, sleepy, and secure, for the moment at least, in our own comparative normalcy. But even now, I'm thinking about that shortcake, about that once-a-year pork sandwich. I might have to go back again tomorrow...

Fear of a Bee Planet

It turns out that it might not be Africanized honeybees we need to be afraid of; maybe we should be worried about the Americanized kind.

I read an article yesterday in the latest issue of Discover that discussed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, the mysterious die-off and disappearance of honeybees sweeping North America for the past decade or so. For years the causes of CCD were unknown; everything from mites to air pollution to global warming was blamed, but nothing seemed conclusive. The issue came to the national fore when, in true capitalist fashion, a monetary value was ascribed to the dying bees: worldwide honeybees are responsible for pollinating a vast amount of agricultural crops. In fact, pollination is of such importance to American farms and orchards that an entire industry of honeybee pollination has grown from niche service to big business. And apparently, that's the root of the problem.

It seems that what's causing CCD and killing honeybees is basically what's killing Americans too, a lifestyle built around profit, monoculture, monotony, and slavish devotion to industry. Consider an average industrial bee-keeping outfit. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of hives are shipped around together on flatbed trucks, moved from orchard to orchard as the season progresses, used as an agricultural tool more than a living agent. The bees, which have been genetically selected and managed by their keepers, are fed through the winter months on corn syrup, pumped into their hives via gasoline nozzles. And we wonder just what could possibly go wrong...

What CCD seems to be, at least among commercial honeybees, is simply this industrialized lifestyle finally catching up with the little buzzers. The stress placed on these utility bees is immense; trucked around on a whim, left to find their home amongst hundreds of identical hives, the bees natural homing instincts are pushed to the limit. How can you perform a waggle dance when the last blossom you visited was two hundred miles away, the day before? Another problem with this lifestyle is nutritional. Under ordinary circumstances, bees visit a myriad of flowers, each of which has pollen with its own trace minerals and proteins. But when a hive is brought in to specifically pollinate a cherry or apple orchard, the bees feed on that type of pollen and that type of pollen alone, often for months at a time. And in the winter months, corn syrup alone sustains the bees, giving them the energy needed to survive perhaps, but offering little else. It'd sort of be like a person trying to live exclusively off Big Macs and Coke. Sound familiar?

So ultimately, what's responsible for colony collapse disorder? Well, we are. In turning honeybees into cogs in the industrialized agriculture system, in trying to get them to live like we do, overworked and unhealthily, we push them to ruin. There's no great mystery, so 'smoking mite' to ascribe blame to. The bees are disappearing because nothing in the natural world can survive the American way. Maybe we should all pay attention.

Meet The New Breed

This past weekend, I visited friends who happened to be dog-sitting for a few days. They were watching two dogs, Cody, a yellow lab, and Hugo, an English bulldog. Seeing as how the three of us, the two dogs and I, equally shared rights to the couch, I got to know the canines somewhat intimately. Cody was a sweetheart, though she shed something terrible, and Hugo...well, Hugo got me thinking.

I won't deny there was something fascinating about the bulldog, something endearing. You might say he was lovable, though, if pressed for specifics, you'd have trouble explaining why. The fact was, Hugo was a bit of a lump. An ugly lump at that.

Now I don't mean to pick on poor Hugo here, and as I said, there was something undeniably likable about him. But I couldn't tell you just what that was. He was entertaining, but mostly in the way a freak-show is entertaining. For freakish he was: he had a pronounced underbite, and his jowls hung down about his chops in flaps and folds. Slobber would occasionally fleck his jaws, and when he drank, water and drool would drip from his mouth and trail across the carpet. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, leaking gunk from the corners. His hindquarters seemed to be some impediment to his locomotion; he stumbled about and dragged himself onto and across the couch. He panted like an overweight asthmatic. When he slept, he snored, and when he wasn't sleeping, he might as well have been, so lethargic was he. He futilely humped the grill cover (well, that was amusing). And though he had little trouble finding his food dish, poor Hugo just didn't seem too bright.

Hugo was not an exceptional bulldog nor was he below average; if anything, he was fairly indicative of his whole race. For centuries the bulldog has been bred into the sideshow attraction it now is. The jawline has been contorted into the underslung scowl we now see. The head has been enlarged compared to body size, to the point that most bulldog litters must now be delivered by caesarean section, the puppies too malformed to be born naturally. The hindquarters are bowlegged, and the stubby tail and facial folds must be cleaned often to avoid bacterial infection. And that dull look in the bulldog's eyes may be because its cranial capacity has been curtailed in pursuit of a short muzzle and archetypal profile. The bulldog has been twisted into this form for one reason and one reason only: to suit the whim of man.

The bulldog should not exist. As a creature, is is the antithesis of evolutionary fitness, surviving only because people delight in the bulldog's a-typical appearance. People love a freak, and so they breed bulldogs (and many other breeds) to maximize that freakishness. Now, what we have is a type of dog that can't reproduce on its own, has a short expected lifespan, and is prone to an inordinate amount of ailments during that life. The bulldog, for his part, hasn't asked for this lot. As an animal, he is a victim of human hubris.

It's difficult to remember when looking into the sad, baleful eyes of a bulldog that once those eyes belonged to the wolf. Once, millennia ago, the bulldog's distant ancestors stalked the forests with a grim nobility. They were hunters, intelligent social creatures, honed by Darwinian forces into some of the most successful survivors ever. Domestication was in many ways just another form of that survival: wolves are around us still, in the guise of Canis familiaris. But what a disguise it is. Who could mistake the bumbling ugliness of the bulldog for the sleek and predatory grace of the wolf?

Don't get me wrong; I liked Hugo, sort of. I was vaguely disgusted by his drooling, by his slobbishness, but more than anything I felt sorry for him. We laughed at him when he tried to climb onto the couch, we laughed when he snored in the corner, we laughed when his bowlegged haunches humped wistfully on the grill cover. He just looked at us, with those mournful eyes of his. He was bred to be the butt of our jokes. Poor little guy.

Canis lupus

Canis lupus familiaris (English bulldog)

A Tale of Two Corns

Today, I saw something that made my blood run a little cold: coming down Rt 6 from Watertown towards Bethlehem, passing a farm I pass almost every day, I noticed a field of corn bordered by a row of white and red signs. I recognized the signs from a distance, and my jaw clenched a bit. I'd seen plenty of the signs, or those like them, before, during the brief time I lived in Iowa. Out there, in the green desert, many fields sprout such warning signs, as unsettling as those demarcating a land-mine zone. As I drove closer, the signs revealed themselves, plastic placards on stakes, red and white, simple. Each one bore the name ConAgra. Hybrid, GMO, copyrighted corn had come to my little corner of Connecticut.

ConAgra, like its bigger brother Monsanto, is one of the chief faces of evil in the realm of industrial agriculture. As well as dabbling in confinement livestock factory farming, ConAgra makes its name building frankenfoods. Now, for what it's worth, I'm not as opposed to genetically modified crops as you might think (I'll devote time soon as to just why), and unsettling as the whole idea may be, what truly upsets me is the industry's tendency to treat their corn as intellectual property.

Farmers planting ConAgra hybrids must register with the corporation, risking legal action if they should try to plant a second year's crop with their own seed corn instead of re-upping from the parent company itself. Worse, should TM corn be found growing in a neighboring farmer's field, even if it hybridizes accidentally or is spread by mistake, that farmer can be sued for illegally possessing the equivalent of stolen corn. In return for high yields and straight rows, farmers forsake their freedom, and the industry reaps the profits.

I always considered Iowa a lost cause; the farmers there seemed just too far indebted to the system, and too weak-willed, to ever get out from under the corporate thumb. But to see the mark of ConAgra greed and a grower's ignorance so close to home was unsettling. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

There was, however, a nice counterpoint to that ConAgra corn field, just a little further down the road. Another sign, though this one a little more welcoming: a giant plywood ear of corn, green and yellow, advertising native sweet corn at Logue's Farm (credit where credit's due, Logue's has the best butter and sugar corn this season, beating Towne's farm hands down). Sweet corn season is one of the most pleasant in northwest CT, late summer when the weather swelters and then cools, and the green of the landscape seems to deepen in its final moments. And the sweet corn itself embodies what's best in local, seasonal eating. As delicious as it is, it comes and goes in a matter of months; you eat all you can and then hope the taste lingers till the following year.

Within half a mile, I saw two very different ends of the agricultural spectrum. One corn crop was good for nothing but high-fructose syrup or cattle feed, an industrial engineered shackle around a farmer's leg. The other, sweet, crisp, fleeting, stood in my mind for a lot of what is right with the local food movement. I know which end of the spectrum I prefer. I drove home, with the giant wooden ear receding in my rear-view mirror. It looked good enough to eat.

A Poem for a New September...

The Only Love That Counts

Is the hawks’ love, the fierce

and taloned love that finds itself

in the open above us,

the love that meets foot to foot

and falling,

with only the sharpest,

killing parts

kissing.

They drop as if dead,

together,

towards the wing-

breaking ground that waits

like a promise,

and, amid the rush

of their blood’s hot pull,

they part,

and rise, again, to fall, again,

together.

And in our simple,

timid-with-the-lights-on hearts

everything is done by halves

and, bitterly, we know

we have nothing

half so raw

as the hawks’ truth,

love’s bold,

all-giving

tumble.

In Defense of Fear

In Defense of Fear:

Finding a Place for Large Carnivores in the American Psyche

It has become dreadfully cliché among writers to exclaim how once having met the grizzly on its home turf, one never again looks at the country in the same way. But there are only so many ways to dress up the same naked truth of that statement, and no honest way to omit it, so I’ll simply repeat the mantra.

- William Stolzenburg

I was doing everything wrong. To begin with, I was breaking the first tenant of wilderness safety, hiking alone, and, amplifying my error, I was hiking alone in bear country. There are precious few places in the lower forty-eight that can still be classed ‘bear country’, but I was surely in one of them: Glacier National Park, in northwestern Montana. I was on the east side of the park, hiking along Lake Josephine. There are certain suggestions, if not rules, about hiking in bear country. The first is to travel in groups. I was obviously not doing so. The next is to make ample noise, alerting any nearby grizzlies to the presence of a human, and many hikers employ bear bells for this purpose, small jingle bells worn on the body to herald the approach of a homo sapien. I found the bells noisome and intrusive; I wore none. I sang, occasionally, and shouted out half-heartedly from time to time “hey bear, Hey Bear!”, but the sound of my own single voice in all that wild expanse seemed somehow discourteous. More often than not, I walked in silence, trusting my all too human ears. I carried bear spray, a noxious and potent version of pepper spray, holstered like a pistol on my hip, but my faith in the lone, small canister was tenuous at best. There’s a Montana aphorism that goes something like this: ‘how can you identify grizzly shit? It smells like pepper and has bells in it’.

Like most gallows humor, the joke has dark truth at its heart. It bespeaks a sort of fatalism that one must eventually adopt in the face of something as powerful as a grizzly bear. Against seven hundred pounds of instinct, hunger, and muscle, the best of human cunning and artifice often amounts to little. Tiny brass bells and weaponized hot sauce can only ever offer so much security. To be out amongst grizzlies is to be, ultimately, in danger.

It was a conscious choice on my part to put myself in that danger. I was not hiking out of recklessness or with a thrill-seeker’s half-hidden death wish, but out of a measured need to be, for perhaps the first time, a second tier player in the food chain. I wanted, in some inexpressible part of my mind, to surrender myself up to a newly felt, deeply rooted fear. I wanted to feel, for a moment, what it was to be prey. I would get my wish.

The fear I sought was a fear familiar to our ancestors, a fear deeply ingrained within us still. Even after lowering themselves from the trees, the first early human forbearers had to contend themselves with the large carnivores of the African savannah. The lions, leopards, and hyenas that shared the grasslands with the new walking apes found little distinction between them and any other living meal; the infancy of our species was spent as prey. An australopithecine skull recovered from a bone-strewn cave on the edge of the Kalahari bears the all too evident marks of a violent death. The skull, that of a child, is pierced almost methodically at the braincase and cracked along the base of the cranium, just as modern-day baboon skulls are often found to be damaged. The holes match up almost perfectly to the talons of the protohuman’s killer. The murderer was an African crowned eagle. Our ancestor’s flesh was the eagle’s feast.

Yet all too quickly, early man began to push back against his predatory antagonists. Armed with stone, brain, and fire, man first defended himself, and then drove away killers from their own kills. Man became a scavenger, then a hunter in his own right, spreading out across the globe. The fear of the predator, which still lay in the primate mind of humanity, became twisted into hatred and contempt. With spear, bow, musket, and deadfall, man began to take a prey’s revenge on his tormentor, almost methodically. The slaughter reached its bloody pinnacle on the continent of North America.

In the Americas, European colonists found a host of carnivores, both those familiar, and novel. While wolves had long been hated and hunted in the Old World, Europe had nothing to match the stealthy prowling of the mountain lion or the sheer brute force of the grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. Presented with these predatory affronts to their God-given right of dominion, Europeans began exterminating large carnivores with a gusto unmatched in human history. With rifles, steel leg traps, and strychnine-laced, airplane-dropped tallow balls, humans butchered everything from foxes to wolverines to eagles. The death toll was, and continues to be, staggering. Nearly 100,000 coyotes alone are still killed annually in the contiguous United States, ostensibly in the name of livestock protection. From its historic range, which stretched from Mexico to Alaska and from the Pacific to the Mississippi, the grizzly bear was driven North, retreating into the Canadian Rockies, holding on by razor thin margins in isolated pockets such as Yellowstone National Park. Although featured prominently on the flag of California, the grizzly was wiped out of the state. In the lower forty-eight, the species retained barely one or two percent of its former range. For some humans, even that was too much.

And yet, slowly, almost glacially, some Americans’ attitudes began to change. In the absence of large predators, their necessity became apparent. Predators were examined for the first time from a scientific perspective, and throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, more and more evidence began to mount up in defense of the role carnivores played in maintaining ecosystem health. One of the earliest and most vocal champions of the predator was Aldo Leopold, a wildlife manager and a convert, who, in his early days, had been a leading proponent of predator removal. In his seminal essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, Leopold describes, perhaps with poetic license, his own shooting of a she-wolf in the American southwest. As he watched “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes”, Leopold came to realize the wolves’ importance in the landscape. Years earlier, he had seen with his own eyes the effects of removing predators from the land.

On the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, all the native wolves, cougars, and coyotes had been extirpated, leaving only an unchecked population of mule deer. In the absence of natural predation, the deer population exploded, first denuding the earth of all edible plants, and then crashing in short order. Thousands of deer died slow and awful deaths of starvation and disease. Leopold carried with him the unpleasant sight of skeletal mule deer too weak to stand. He came to realize how crucial a role predators actually played in keeping both their prey and habitat healthy. To think like a mountain was to appreciate the importance of every piece in the complex ecosystem, even those pieces with the most fearsome of teeth and claws.

Leopold’s theory was born out again and again by evidence gathered under scientific conditions. On predator-free islands in a man-made lake in Venezuela, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants ate their jungle to ruins. In the eastern United States, without wolves or mountain lions, whitetail deer numbers bloomed to unheard of levels, munching away the diverse plant life of the hardwood forests and leaving only ferns and feces. Most notably, the reintroduction in the mid-1990s of the gray wolf to Yellowstone, after nearly sixty years of absence, was followed by a remarkable transformation. Elk and moose, long allowed to linger and over-browse aspen groves, were re-acquainted with their former fear, forced to move from food source to food source instead of grazing patches of brush down to stubs. As the aspen regenerated, streamside erosion lessened. Beavers returned. Wildflowers sprang up anew, unmolested by the constant cropping of ungulate teeth. Ravens, golden eagles, even bears proliferated, fed on newly available wolf-killed carrion. Even songbirds, nesting in the re-grown aspen thickets, began to appear in greater and greater numbers. All this took place in the span of a mere five or so years. In Yellowstone, the return of the wolves was trumpeted with birdsong, and garlanded with wildflower blossoms.

Yet science will only take us so far. Although the need for large carnivores in ecosystems is now a scientifically provable fact, the survival of predators, particularly the man-eating kind, will never be merely a scientific matter. Rather, their survival hinges on the all too ethereal nature of the human spirit. To speak of Americans specifically for a moment, we, as a people, need to see if we have the capacity in ourselves to live with large predators, to allow them to live. Certainly many among us do not; hatred of wolves, bears, cougars, even coyotes, is as virulent today in some places as it ever was. In Alaska, rifle-armed sharpshooters in bush-planes continue to kill wolves in a misguided attempt to keep game species such as caribou safe. Our tax dollars fund the effort.

Yet it’s fairly easy for most compassionate Americans to decry such a situation. It is, after all, distant, almost theoretical. It’s much more difficult to embrace carnivores when they begin to return to your own back yard. In some parts of the country, southern California, the Northeast, this issue is coming to the fore, as mountain lions stalk joggers and black bears re-colonize suburban New Jersey. People who never expected to are having to face the prospect, infinitely slight though it may be, that they will encounter in their daily lives something that could kill them, and perhaps wants to. Such a concern should not be taken lightly. Fear of the carnivore is one of the most deeply ingrained in the human psyche; it’s why we jump when we see something move suddenly in our peripheral vision. And though the chances of once more becoming prey in the modern world are almost negligible, the actual horror of a predator attack shouldn’t be glossed over either. Consider the following account of a grizzly mauling, almost salacious in its details, yet all too real:

The bear quickly dropped onto four legs and ran after and attacked Cohoe, who was still running. Within seconds the huge bear clasped its powerful jaws around Cohoe’s face and bit. Cohoe screamed and within a minute or two the bear attacked twice more. Late the next morning the investigative team at the mauling site found fishing gear and the upper part of Cohoe’s jaw and mouth with nine teeth, his nose, and a large piece of his cheek. About a week later Cohoe died from his injuries.

Our fears are there for a reason. But perhaps it’s time to embrace them. We live daily in a world unfathomably more dangerous that the lion-thick Serengeti or the grizzly haunted McKinley Range. A lone tractor-trailer on the highway can with a single motion kill more people that have been killed by cougars and bears combined in the past fifty years. Our fear of the beast is not misplaced, simply out of proportion.

It’s time to accept fear, to be washed in it, to remember what it was to be less than godly in our dealings with the natural world. Now more than ever, we need a touch of that humbleness which fear brings. We need to see ourselves, at last, as part of the natural order rather than usurpers of it. If placing ourselves willingly, daringly, back in the food chain is the way to change our perceptions, then so be it. The world needs our perceptions changed. The large predators of this planet are important, crucial in ways that we are only now beginning to understand, now that we have done so much to expunge them from the face of the earth. It’s time to allow the carnivore back into our lives, to live alongside them, to accept the danger of it. To accept that beauty, order, birdsong and wildflower all must in some way come with risk. To walk carefully, with the hairs on the napes of our necks standing, and our hearts beating wildly in our chests.

In Glacier, I hiked alone, and almost died for it. Rounding a bend in the trail, along the shore of Lake Josephine, I came upon two feeding grizzlies. I had been too quiet, and the bears, who should normally avoid humans if forewarned, had not heard my approach until too late. As I rounded the bend, I heard them first, grunts so low as to be felt, tectonically, in my gut. Brown masses rising in the brush, twenty or thirty yards off the trail to my right. Everything clenchable in me clenched, everything paused — and after but a second or two the bears fell back to browsing on the hillside. I could hear their long, finger-sized claws raking through the rocky soil, a hollow, scraping sound. I was that close. My breath whistled in and out of my nostrils, my jaw ached, set as tightly as it was. I was terrified.

But I waited there. I began to talk to the bears, little nothings said only to let them know I was a human, and still down there behind them. They kept clawing up the earth, grubbing for Glacier lily bulbs in the spring morning sunlight. I sweated, and my knees, honestly, were weak. But I was enthralled too. I was held entranced by the rippling of heavy muscles beneath their brown coats, by the size, by the very presence of the bears. The hillside, the trail, the land, the day itself were all the grizzlies’; I was at their mercy. Yellow balsamroot bloomed beside me. A Swainson’s thrush cried from a nearby juniper. I quaked with fear, true and honestly afraid for perhaps the first time. Gloriously so.