The Balance

Tomorrow, my theoretical wish to be a farmer finally runs up against the hard edges of reality. After seven months, I'm taking two of my first pigs to slaughter, and it will test my commitment in a way that nothing has before. I'm not broken up about the prospect, exactly, but I am filled with an odd mix of emotion: unease, guilt, worry, and even anticipation. I'm torn, trying to both put things out of my head and hold onto every nuanced feeling. Part of me wants to be a vegetarian, part of me is curious about the bacon; maybe, just maybe, that's the right balance.

I know the pigs have had a good life, better than most pigs certainly. I know I've eaten pork in the last week that came from hogs whose lives weren't a shade as long or comfortable. I know the pigs are out in the trailer tonight largely oblivious to what tomorrow holds. I know that if I cared too much about them I couldn't be farming, and if I didn't care at all, I shouldn't be.

After we loaded the pigs this evening, I went out and sat by the trailer and had a beer. The sun was just starting to set over across the brook, behind the trees. I'd look in at the two hogs from time to time, and they'd look back at me, their eyes at once clever and uncomprehending. They're big now, almost ten times the size they were when they first came to the farm. They've rooted and wallowed and slept in the sun and have never stood on concrete once in seven months. As far as I'm concerned , that's the trade. It's no the best trade in the world, but it's the fairest I can offer. On the balance, it just about equals out.

Learning Curve

Nine PM, saturday night, I received a call from the Waterbury Post Office: there was a box of chicks there with my name on it. The birds weren't supposed to arrive until tuesday morning, but that point was moot. They were here, whether I was ready or not. I was not.

That first night, with the heat lamps and pen in the barn yet unassembled, the chicks came into the house with me. I settled on two plastic clothes hampers for temporary quarters, under a reading lamp appropriated for what heat it could give. I cranked the thermometer up to around 75, unbearable for me, but not even warm enough for the infant birds. It was past ten by the time I was ready to open the chirping box and see the fluffy cargo.

Inside, crowded together, were 101 day old chicks of various colors, representing perhaps half a dozen brown-egg laying breeds. There were Rhode Island Reds, Black Australorps, and breeds I won't be able to identify till they're older. All were equally cute.

It's almost impossible to avoid hyperbole when describing the cuteness of a baby chick. They are built as if with the specific intent to tug on the heart strings, so small, so innocent, so...cute. Few other words fit so perfectly. They trundle around, peeping, taking tentative steps, preening their downy fuzz. As I gently transfered the chicks from the cardboard box to the hampers, it was as if I was dipping my hands into huddled life itself, coming up with soft handfuls of sweetness and light. It was tough to not melt right away.

I'll interject to say the birds, despite being shipped across country from Iowa in a cardboard box, in late February, arrived in good health. I'll give due credit to the McMurray Hatchery for fine chicks (though I'd no basis for comparison) and an expertise that brought the birds swiftly and safely to me. I'll use them again.

After a night of constant chirping that no doubt drove Blitz crazy, I woke early to set up a more permenant home for the chicks in a barn stall that I'd begun to turn into a brooder room. I'd read extensively about just how to keep the newborns, about the temperature needed, about food, water, space, and about just how fragile the little chickens were, vulnerable to drafts and dampness of any sort. I'd read that keeping them close was fine for the first few days, better than having them spread out over a larger area, and so I hung the heat lamps over a large rubber trough, which I'd bottomed with layers of hay and pine shavings. I filled a tray with feed, and placed the waterer in the center, and after a few hours of leaving the heat lamps on, I used a thermometer to make sure the temperature was right for the birds. I moved the birds first back into their traveling box, then down into the barn, and slowly placed them into their new home, taking time to dip their beaks into the food and water, so they knew where it was. They were a little crowded when they all were unloaded, but they seemed warm, and were finding their food fine. They seemed perfectly ok, and I checked in on them constantly through the day and into the evening.

This should be a fluff piece about getting chicks for the farm, about how cute they are, about how having birds is great. But this post isn't about that. It's about how the next morning, I came out to the barn and found 18 of the chicks dead, crowded into their waterer, and once wet, unable to make it through the night. 18 was a lot, and as I slowly gathered them from out of the water trough, one by one, the count seemed to never end. Wet, limp, they seemed even more frail, even more slight than they did when they were fluffy and alive. Two other chicks seemed destined to die, weak, damp, listless. I left them in with their sisters, and hoped for the best.

The chicks died because I didn't know what I was doing. The space I'd provided the chicks was not enough for them, and now, in hindsight, that's very clear. In the grand scheme of things, 18 dead chicks out of 101 might not be so uncommon, and in comparison to the thousands of chicks and chickens that die or are killed every day, my tragedy was trivial. But it stung. I had been entrusted with this chirping mass of innocence and naivete, and within 48 hours I'd let the birds down. It was a taste of something that I'll have to get used to as a farmer. It's a feeling I'll no doubt have when I kill a pig or send a steer to slaughter. But this was different; this was a mistake.

When you're dealing with living things, when you take that resposibility upon yourself to raise them, when you only have secondhand experience at best, the learning curve can be very sharp. Those 18 dead chicks are a taste of failure, a taste of what I'll have to face up to again, if I really expect to do what I'm doing. It hurt, more than you'd think given the tiny stature of the victims, but there was little to do. I tried to focus on fixing things, pushing forward.

I built a new space for the chicks, a frame made of tall plywood, with ample room for movement. I bought a third heat lamp, paranoid about keeping the chicks warm in what's turning out to be a bitter early March. By early afternoon Monday, the chicks were in yet another new home, and this one finally seemed a proper fit. One night passed, with no deaths, and the two chicks who seemed on death's door began to perk up, though even now one seems to be less fit than its fellows. Relief began to fill me, and I began to feel good. The next morning, though, one chick was dead. One chick, I told myself was not bad, comparatively. It really wasn't. I don't know why that chick died, it could have been anything, since the body was dry, and the crop was full of feed. Though I was responsible in the bigger picture, it wasn't my fault. In the days since, I haven't lost a bird, but I know I could at any moment. It's something I'll need to get used to, this occasional loss, this sense of having let down something blameless.

There's a learning curve there, a sharp one, and one I'm just now skidding into. I keep my hands on the wheel, and my fingers crossed.

The Gospel of the Lunatic Farmer

This past saturday, I drove up to Worcester for the Massachusetts chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association annual conference, and a day long seminar with Joel Salatin. Salatin is something of a guru to many small farmers, aspiring farmers, and foodies alike; he owns and operates Polyface Farm, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It was Salatin and Polyface that were featured as an alternative model of success in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and since that book's publication, Salatin has slowly moved from cult figure to national hero. He made an appearance in the recent Inconvenient Truth-esque Food, Inc., and chances are, if you've read an article about the local food movement lately, Salatin's name was in it somewhere.

As a fan and student of Salatin, via his several how-to and autobiographical books, I jumped at the chance to actually meet the man, and hopefully learn first hand some of his accumulated wisdom. Because if anyone is getting it right, it's him. He's parlayed what began as a modest and eroded family farm into a small multi-million dollar miracle, all on less land than your average Iowan corn farm. Polyface is no dog and pony show, however, and between the roughly five hundred acre home farm and several leased farms adjacent or nearby, Polyface is dealing with thousands of acres of arable land. Yet unlike that afformentioned Iowan corn farm, Polyface is doing things right.

Salatin focuses on health: the health of the consumer, the health of the animals he raises, and above all the health of the land. Although Polyface raises cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits, Salatin styles himself a grass farmer. His job, as he sees it, is to insure the continued fertility of the soil, trusting that a grass and soil based form of agriculture is the most sound. And certainly, for the animal, it is. Pasturing animals most closely resembles (if anything can) their natural state, and makes for more contented, healthier livestock. This translates into healthier food for the consumer; leaner, grass-fed beef, salmonella free eggs, and meat free of antibiotics and growth hormones.

But perhaps Salatin's greatest claim to fame is his role as preacher, prophet, and proselytizer of the sustainable food movement. It's fitting to use the religious terminology, because in his zeal Salatin most closely resembles a religious figure. Salatin calls himself a lunatic farmer, in reference not only to his non-traditional farming techniques but also to the half crazed intensity he brings to his work, in both its practice and discussion. He's notoriously outspoken, and his charisma goes a long ways to making his arguments ring true. This charisma was on full display saturday, not only in the seminar, but also in the keynote speech Salatin delivered to the 800 some-odd attendees of the conference. He had a friendly, positive air about him, and his grin and southern twang made his words deceptively jocular, even when railing against the ills of the industrial food system.

But, if Salatin preaches his trade with a religious ferocity, then he too should be examined with the critical eye due all religion. For all the positive aspects of the Polyface model, it is not a perfect system, nor is Salatin an unflawed figure. Some of his scientific and ecological ideas are slightly off the mark, as when discussing the role of the bison in the North American environment. His politics are further to the right than I'd expect, and his belief in laissez-fare capitalism as a positive force seems to ignore the unregulated might of the Monsantos and Cargills of the world. He also seems to have little regard for what is ultimately America's greatest blessing, its tracts of still relatively untouched wilderness. If Salatin is to be believed, these wild forested areas are 'unhealthy' in their own right. He'd see such forests managed and logged, and wilderness lands turned into farmland. I'm all for the balance of environment and sustainable farming, but that was going too far for my taste. The issue of animal welfare also seems to be somewhat secondary at Polyface, although I would still say it's leaps and bounds beyond you average industrial farm. But seventy five broiler hens squashed in a cage on grass is still seventy five broiler hens squashed in a cage. They're much better off than if they were raised industrially, but is 'better' 'best'? It's a sticky question, but one that begs asking, even of someone as seemingly un-besmirch-able as Salatin.

Yet, I will say in Salatin's defense that he's the first person to own up to his own limitation, at least those he acknowledges. While relentlessly espousing the benefits of a grass based beef system, he also freely admitted the limits of sustainability when it came to pork and chicken production. The need to source grain for those aspects of the farm where a limitation and a compromise, but a compromise that the customer demanded. That's the beauty, and potentially the flaw, of Polyface: Salatin at once operates outside the bounds of convention, and yet simultaneously firmly within them.

If all this sounds suspiciously like a negative response, well then I should rephrase myself somewhat. I point out the lapses in logic and imperfections of the Polyface system mainly because I get very wary of anyone given messianic status, even by such a benign movement as the organic food culture. Salatin isn't perfect, of course, but he's the best we've got, by a long shot. He's the man fighting on the front lines against the agro-industrial complex. He has Tyson lobbying to get his free range poultry classified as a bio-terrorist threat, and still he stands up for his methods. He's the man winning over the hearts and minds of consumers, and in our society a dollar's vote is the only vote that counts. Having heard the man, even at an even he was aid to speak at, sound off with such passion and self assured clarity, it was easy to overlook my quibbling complaints and be impressed. Salatin had me sold, not just in a new model of agriculture in general, but that I could be a part of it, that it was a worthwhile cause that I wouldn't have to fight alone.

I'm sure all of us felt that way, listening to him as he gave the keynote speech. I thought to myself how great it would be if he could make the same speech, not to a room of organic devotees, but to the uninitiated, those yet to understand the perils of how we currently eat and live as a society. Then, perhaps, the lunatic farmer would be king, and we'd all be a little better off.

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.

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.