The Shape of Things to Come?

Over the past few weeks, every news outlet in the country has been covering the devastation wrought by the recent earthquake in Haiti, and without fail, every piece of coverage I've seen has referred to the events as tragic. I'm not so sure about those semantics. The earthquake was many things: terrible, unfortunate, and disturbingly located in a nation seemingly made for heartbreak. But tragic? I tend to think of tragedy as a distinctly human creation, one equal parts hubris, pain, and irony. Shakespearean tragedy, the gold standard by which all tragic elements in the western mind are measured, is centered around the choices made by mankind and the folly of an imperfect race. An earthquake is a cataclysmic event, surely, but it's also a natural act. As much as that jackass Pat Robertson might like to believe the earthquake was brought about as a result of human wickedness, it reality it was the inexorable grinding of an indifferent earth that caused the havoc. It was awful, yes, but unlike true tragedy, it was also somewhat inevitable. The Haitian earthquake was horrific, but it was not tragic.

But what is going to happen to the county will be tragic.

Im talking about the months and years to come, and what I see happening to the people of Haiti. At the moment, aid workers and supplies are flooding into the small island nation, and, despite massive upheavals, some relief is being distributed. But the real question is for how long this foreign aid will go on? Consider the state of the Haitian situation, even before the quake.

The country was gripped by poverty, wracked by political corruption, and subject, for almost it's entire existence, to the whims of foreign powers. Colonialism is a subject in and of itself, but to shorten the tale, Haiti, in the days leading up to the quake, was in a poor and ultimately doomed position. The country lacked infrastructure, both economically and agriculturally, and already relied heavily on foreign largess. As well as having under-supported agricultural institutions (thanks to subsidies, US farmers could undersell local Haitian producers of basic staples), Haiti also bore the scars of a ravaged ecology. Look at the following photo:

To the right are the still partially forested hills of the Dominican Republic, and to the left are the barren slopes of what once was Haitian forest. Years of unregulated cutting for firewood and charcoal have left the countryside a desolate mess in many if not most places. Add on top of this a people largely illiterate, uneducated, and striated by deep and purposely maintained class divides, and all the spirit and determination in the world can do little in the face of disaster.

The true misfortune of the quake was that it's epicenter fell almost on top of the major metropolitan center of Port-au-Prince. In the wake of the earthquake, refugees have been streaming out of the city, returning to already overburdened country towns. As odd as it may seem, cities are actually the most efficient form of human dwelling, under ideal circumstances; resources are both more readily distributed and more effectively dispersed. Yet now, not only are masses of people fleeing the ruins of the city, but those who stay are not able to get access to locally produced supplies at reasonable prices.

Haiti was a powderkeg, and though it was touched off by a natural event, it was made by man, both the colonial powers that pulled the nation's strings and by the Haitian citizens themselves. And now, the fate of Haiti rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the world's industrialized nations. For the moment, people have rallied to the cause, and millions are being spent to get basic food and water to Haiti. But the cynical realist in me wonders how long this can go on.

No nation has any real vested interest in Haiti, save perhaps a sense of guilt, compassion, or a fear of a destabilized western hemisphere nation. None of these reasons can or will hold up in the long term. Haiti has nothing to offer the outside world, save maybe mangos, and the sad truth is, the UN, the US, and the powers of the world will slowly begin to grow weary of constant aid, and turn away. No one would like to admit it, but it will happen. Because Haiti can't be rebuilt; it would need to be built anew, almost entirely from the ground up. Right now, there are governments that seem committed to the effort, but what about in a year, or two, or ten?

Even in the best of circumstances, Haiti would face a difficult path towards any sort of recovery. But when are circumstances ever the best? In reality, Haiti will continue to be subjected to the cruel vagaries of nature. The first serious rainstorm will find hundreds of thousands of people homeless, without even basic protection from the elements. And the next hurricane will bring chaos on a whole new level. Deforestation caused by the Haitians coupled with climactic disturbances caused by global warming, itself a result of the human industry of the global powers, will lead to hurricanes of unprecedented destructive potential in the coming years, as mudslides and sea swells combine to torment an already tormented people.

Haiti is a recipe for what much of the world may someday look like if we continue on our current route. A lack of potable water, few and overburdened agricultural resources, human augmented natural disasters, civil unrest that may lead to civil war or political dissolution...it would all be just so much dystopian fantasy if it weren't happening right now, just a scant hundred miles south of American waters. These are the things of which tragedies are made, these flaws of human nature and choice, and such a tragedy is being writ large on a scale that even Shakespeare's mind would boggle at.

And, I fear, the curtain is only now rising on the first act...

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.

Song Dogs

I woke up last night to a choir of yips and crying, somewhere out in the fields. I was startled at first, unsure where I was, in the sleep addled way of the newly roused. Then, laying there in the darkness, I listened closer. It was coyotes, talking to each other in the night. I couldn't tell how many there were, two at least, and out in the cold moonlight they mewled and whined and sang. It was...unpleasant. I've heard wild wolves howl, and heard coyotes before on numerous occasions, but being pulled out of sleep as I was by the eerie singing was unnerving. It was a cold January night, moonlit, and as I lay there trying to figure out where the coyotes called from, my heart raced. I was thinking about the animals out in the barn, concerned in a vague, unsettling way.

By the time I had fully woken up, I wasn't really worried for the safety of anything; the cows and horses and donkey were all safe, and even the pigs should be big enough to defend themselves, and certainly wouldn't be menaced huddled up together in their shed. But having something out there, even something as relatively harmless as a coyote, made me feel a surge of protective husbandry.

I have been seeing a coyote out in the back field fairly often recently, as it hunts for mice or voles beneath the snow. I've watched it pause and listen the leap, coming up with a small dark bundle that is quickly bolted down. Watching the coyote, I've been filled with conflicted emotions. I'm intrigued by the animal, like I am with most animals, and could just stand there with the binoculars for what seems like hours. But another part of me, a part that I sort of hate to admit, wants to go get the rifle.

I don't have a bloodlust, or an urge to wantonly kill anything, not like I may of had as a single-minded child, but when I see the coyote I feel a need to, I guess the best word would be 'defend' things from the predator. There may not be any danger from the coyote now, but in the spring there will be chickens here, and perhaps someday sheep. And, with the coyotes still here, I will lose some of those animals, to them.

But I haven't gone for the rifle yet, and even when I lose a chicken, I don't intend to. I'm committed to living and letting live. I'll be troubled as much by foxes and by the resident red tails, and I wouldn't dream of killing them. My thoughts on the coyotes shouldn't be any different. I can't decry the treatment of wolves by ranchers out west and simultaneously murder coyotes here; I don't want to be a hypocrite in that way.

But I understand now where the blind hatred that drives 'predator control' comes from. It's not a rational thing, it's primal. I have no reason to despise the coyote, when all it is doing is living as best it can. And logically, I know that, and try to appreciate the coyote for what it is, a cunning, often striking beast. But hatred, fear, aren't logical feelings. Sometimes they're just howls in the night, shivering, lonesome, and hungry.

Cow Pies, Horse Apples, and Other Swine Dining

Here on the farm, I've found myself spending the greater balance of my time wrapped up in the same activities as a new mother: cleaning up poop and preparing food. Far be it from me to disparage the importance of a mother's work, but I have to say that perpetually being knee deep in excrement has swiftly lost its sheen. Particularly in midwinter. Still, I never did expect the life of a farmer to be all beer and skittles...one has to do what one has to do.

And one thing I've ended up doing, unexpected though it might be, is cooking. A lot of the food I've been able to grub of for the pigs has been less than appetizing in its normal form. Raw pumpkin, for instance. Now, when I threw a pumpkin into the pig pen (before they all froze, at least), the pigs would wolf down the innards, but leave the vast majority of the rind gnawed perhaps but uneaten. Cut that self-same gourd up and stew it for half an hour and suddenly the swine go wild, and a snack becomes a meal.

Cooking for more than four little piggies would probably be unfeasible, but for the time being a little more culinary attention has its benefits. Cooked food, more easily digestible, has big caloric payoffs. Bad for you and me, good for fattening up a hog. Plus, I think the pigs just enjoy roasted veggies more than pig pellets. They like squash, and potatoes; asparagus not so much. Which is fine, since their pee smells enough already.

Yet even though I slave away over a hot stove for those porkers, the little ingrates love nothing more than to drop everything and go rooting through fresh horse crap. They hear the sound of the quad driving to the manure pile and they come racing along the fence-line, hell-bent on digging around in the droppings. It's gross, of course, but who am I to judge. I appreciate the help composting.

And so it goes, poop and food, poop and food...a mother's work is never done.

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.