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.