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.