Farmer Girl

Weighted Efficiency

2010-12-16T10:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday’s post has me sounding like a lack-a-daisical worker, which is a) not my point and b) patently false. I’m trying to bring to light, Kingsolver style, the challenges that arise when someone trained for intelligentsia tries their hand at manual labor. I’ve found it both humbling and empowering; my employers have seemed bemused but ultimately satisfied.

Similarly, my relationship with the demi-gods of efficiency has been re-visited. Again, cultural mores strengthened by familial outlook hold a strong sway. My whole life, efficiency has been next to godliness, because who doesn’t want to get more done in less time? In college I felt that in tasks assumed, quantity was valued over quality, although the requisite sacrifices of health and sanity were epidemic. Given the costs, the rewards for efficiency long ago lost their shine. Farming offered me a much-needed chance to slow down and search for an alternative.

It was hard to let go: a nagging, judgmental attitude demanding more efficiency followed me from school to farm. Confusingly, my farmers, with their anti-industrial mind-set but also a business to run, needed yet also discouraged it. I did learn to let it rest. I found the value in taking more time: I noticed more, learned more, grew more engaged with the whole farm system. (I also probably worked more slowly than necessary.)

I’ve learned that it’s deeply valuable to commune with nature, and to respect a task by giving it time and full attention. But when I know that hungry people, thirsty animals, or simply a ticking clock await, an attitude of “let ‘em wait” doesn’t sit well with me. Yet I haven’t quite perfected the calculation of when to do something well and when to just get it done. With some things, I’m proud to have learned to do them well and fast. But there are still plenty of times when I have to choose, or just seek a happy (i.e. resigned) medium.

Mind and body!

2010-12-15T23:47:00.003-05:00

I come from a fabulous family. Let’s everybody be clear about this. We’re smart and compassionate and place a high value on good communication. But we’re not perfect, and no family is – one such area being that we (most of us) do a majority of our living in our heads, at the expense of our bodies and sometimes even of our spirits. So while each member of my immediate family intellectually understands the importance of “exercising” and has found some suitable regular activity, we approach it perfunctorily, usually reluctantly, and almost always independently.

Given that, nothing in all my years of book-larnin’ had come close to preparing me for the physical lessons of farming. I don’t just mean learning how to work in the rain, cold, snow, heat, etc – those I accomplished with appropriate clothing and ordinary stubbornness. I’m talking about learning purposeful movement, how to work by drawing on the physical capabilities of my body rather than simply my powers of intellectual concentration. It’s certainly not a lesson I could have learned after a day, week, or month of farming – after two and a half years it’s only finally sinking in.

Old habits die hard – my brain, used to taking the lead, looks at a repetitive task like “weed” or “harvest” and more often than not checks out to daydream, and is very reluctant to be reined back in. So while I have learned to work with my body, distracted musing (I am ashamed to admit) keeps me from working as well as I could. When I can bring my thoughts back to my body I work smarter and more efficiently. Caffeine helps my focus, but I’m hoping that other non-chemical factors can too.

Living in one’s own body is a life-long journey. (Obviously). After many years of not acknowledging it, farming has affirmed the vitality of that journey for me.

Haying Season

2010-12-13T09:06:00.002-05:00

“Hay, now.” I’ve spent two farming seasons on farms that keep livestock – sheep, cattle, and a horse at one, just cattle at the other. Sweethearts, all, but they do get hungry. Both places do the grass-fed thing (and for a lengthy and accessible discussion of raising cattle on grass vs. grain, see Omnivore’s Dilemma). As you may know, this means the rhythm of summer is moving cattle to fresh grass every few days. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of work involved, in maintaining fences and monitoring how much grass there is and where. But summer work also means winter prep – haying - one of the most time-sensitive farm tasks.

The haying sequence, for all you city folk, is: mowing a grassy field, waiting a few days for the cut grass to dry out, driving over it and making bales, loading the bales onto a wagon and then storing them in a big, dry barn. The whole process takes about three days and, depending on the weather and field’s fertility, can be repeated two or three times in one growing season. The most crucial consideration is moisture: while dry grass will store in a mow for ages, wet grass will at best rot and at worst start a fire (rotting gives off heat).

So during haying season, farmers keep a close watch on the weather predictions, and when three days of sun and dry come around haying moves to the top of the to-do list. As with most farming tasks these days, there do exist machines that will do almost every step of the haying process, up to stacking the bales in the barn. But at the farms where I’ve worked, we’ve loaded and stacked bales on the wagon by hand. It’s hot, heavy work that can take out your lower back, but I find the concrete, finite nature of the task rewarding.

Human Ecology - part 4 home stretch!

2010-12-10T21:09:00.002-05:00

So where do humans fit into that forest ecosystem? Well, we know humans were first hunter-gatherers. Compared to today’s norms, hunter-gatherers were few and short-lived, in part because food was scarce and difficult to come by.

Enter agriculture. People literally had more food to eat. Remember - in our “natural” forest ecosystem, the cycles of minerals and loops of life were relatively small. Fast-forward to the new global human ecosystem, dependent on agriculture, which moves biological material (food!) long distances to support billions of humans. The whole situation of 6.8 billion of us grew up so fast that the norms of nutrient cycling (and just about everything else) have dramatically shifted.

Take nitrogen, for a start: it’s essential to building proteins in all living creatures. It enters our Cycle of Life when bacteria that live in nodules on the roots of legumes “fix” it – convert it from its inert atmospheric form to a bio-available form. Before the invention of agriculture, the global nitrogen budget was perhaps at equilibrium. But when people discovered we could benefit by planting more legumes, we planted more and more of them, and the annual global rate of nitrogen getting fixed rose accordingly. Humans shot an even bigger dose of nitrogen into the works when we discovered how to fix nitrogen chemically, in factories. Now, we ship bio-available nitrogen all over the world for people to put on crop fields. We’re so focused on getting more nitrogen to our crops that we overdose, and the excess washes downstream.

The species in the “natural” ecosystems, both land and aquatic, aren’t adapted to the new, higher levels of available nitrogen – see algae blooms and dead zones. Basically, the global nitrogen cycle is in flux – a lot is flowing downstream and very little ever makes it back up. This is typical for much of the nutrients that support human life: in “natural” ecosystems nutrients cycle round and round, while in our human ecosystem their path only goes one way.

Human Ecology: Part 3 (humans coming soon!)

2010-12-09T22:20:00.002-05:00

So let’s go back to our “natural” forest and our Circle of Life and all. Quick chemistry review: carbon is The Building Block of Life, plants absorb it from the air and everything else gets their daily intake from either eating plants or eating things that eat plants. But we’re not pure carbon: among other things, living creatures also need small amounts of various minerals like magnesium, potassium, iron, phosphorous, etc, and these are found in the soil, and enter circulation in the food web via plants.

Before humans came along, the movement of these minerals was neither fast nor dramatic. If a beech tree absorbed a molecule of iron from the soil, that molecule might move, say, thirty feet in its path from soil to leaf and back to soil. The biggest exodus of minerals from the system was through runoff, when rain carried them downstream and away to the oceans. To some extent those minerals would be replaced in the ecosystem before they were sorely missed: at their source, from the slow dissolution of rocks in the soil. But overall, this all happened fairly slowly.

Now consider big animals: salmon, deer, migrating birds. Animals, among other things, are self-propelling packets of nutrition (see: hunting.) While carnivores derive direct benefit from animal flesh (nom nom nom), the greater ecosystem feels effects of their movement, too. Bird and bat droppings create phosphorus rich deposits where they roost; I’m sure North America’s buffalo and passenger pigeons had hefty impacts on the areas where they lived; and salmon bring nutrients from the ocean back upstream when they go to spawn. I don’t know about the other systems, but my understanding is that the salmon runs in particular are a rich source of nutrients that the upstream ecosystems have come to depend on.

My glitter frog lives, but won’t eat anything I give it. Harumph.

Human Ecology - part two of a few

2010-12-08T21:33:00.004-05:00

So at heart I will perhaps always be a ten-year-old boy. I love squatting down and turning over rocks to see what’s living under them; I love going down to streams and peering at the fish and snails and so on. This evening at the grocery store something moved by my foot, which was not too uncommon on the farm during grasshopper season, but in a store in December surprised me. Somehow a tiny frog, smaller than my thumb, was lost on an expanse of white linoleum – and worse, it was covered in pink glitter. I brought him (her?) home with me, figuring that at worst I could give it a quieter, less glittery death than the floor of a grocery store would offer. Poor dear.

Anyway - food chains. Perfect for ten-year-olds who like frogs. Hawk eats snake eats mouse eats seeds. They fancied it up in college with talk of food webs, but it always seemed fairly straight-forward in the classroom. It wasn’t until I was working outside, with plants and animals, day in day out, that the magnitude and universality of this simple concept came home. I watched and managed cattle (grass-fed), and I learned how much land it really takes to grow enough grass to feed an organism as big as a cow (close to an acre per animals on my most recent farm). I tried to grow vegetables on sub-par soil, and I learned how vitally important soil health and quality are to vegetable production. And I found myself hungry and exhausted from growing food for humans, and yet was surrounded only by unappetizing trees and weeds and bugs. I learned, with all the diversity of life that springs up, how miraculous it is that humans have any food to eat at all.

This is all more than a little Pollen-esque. Bear with me. I'm going somewhere with it.

Human Ecology - in a couple parts

2010-12-07T21:35:00.001-05:00

I keep my ecologist hat on most days. I think it’s a cool way to look at the world, perhaps even an invaluable way to look deeper into the nature of things. Like yesterday, I walked by a display case of men’s ties in many bright colors. Let’s pretend they were top-notch and made of silk. That silk came from silk worms; those worms lived and grew and matured and made silk because they were fed mulberry leaves. Those leaves were built from atmospheric carbon dioxide, full sunlight, water, and trace soil minerals, by a mulberry tree growing somewhere on this earth. Soil – leaves – worms – ties - those men’s ties contain the mineral profile and soil signature of some far-off plot of land. Oh, the mystery. And that was just from a moment of window-shopping.

Let’s make an assumption – don’t worry, we’ll question it later. Let’s apply the label “natural” to all non-human creatures. Let’s apply it also to those habitats in which obvious signs of human influence are absent. In other words, let’s call nature “natural” for a little while.

Imagine some natural world – I tend to picture forests, since the places where I live were once thickly forested and perhaps could be so again. I like to picture a healthy diversity of life: trees, bugs, birds, a bunch of small mammals, a few big mammals, herbs, shrubs, soil fungi, soil microorganisms. Rocks. Periodic rain. And then I look deeper – what’s it all made of? The plants are mostly carbon, having built themselves from the air and water and sunshine and some cocktail of soil minerals. All those other living creatures, however, aren’t lucky enough to have DIY bodies – they only grow if they eat.

Which brings me to the question I’m always asking: what is growing here, and what is it eating, and where is that coming from?

More tomorrow.

How do I write?

2010-12-07T20:53:00.001-05:00

Let’s break it down. I write with my computer, which is fashioned from various metals mined from all over the world; and from plastic, which I believe is carbon based but I know no more than that. My words are saved to a server, which effectively runs non-stop, and is powered by electricity produced most likely by the burning of either coal or oil, both irreplaceable. Human systems brought this tool, my laptop, into being: people discovered and developed electrical systems, material science, computer engineering and design, and other people funded their research. Still more people had the work of manufacturing, marketing, and assembling my laptop. I use Microsoft Word on my Apple laptop; both Bill Gates’ and Steve Jobs’ fortunes are built in part from my dollars.

I write in English, the only language in which I am fluent, having built and maintained that fluency from interaction with thousands of native English speakers; from hundreds of thousands of hours of reading English prose; and from no small amount of time watching English language television. While I have studied other languages and alphabets, I have lived primarily in English speaking communities, and this is the language of my thoughts.

I type with all ten fingers, having the bar set by two speed-typing parents and the introductory training provided in my public school third grade class. While the twenty-five monitors in that computer lab showed only green and black, my laptop monitor exhibits full color.

Finally, I write with time, love, and support: I am between jobs, and have no other immediate or pressing responsibilities calling my name exclusively. I have the love of family and community that provide sufficient encouragement and interest in my ideas. I write with time born of economic and social stability.

Back? Back!

2010-12-07T20:43:00.002-05:00

Hey world - long time no writing. Short version: I'm off this, that, and the other farm, between jobs, and have a bunch of thoughts to sort out. What better place than on my blog? Here's my goal, inspired by a dear friend: write 300 words per day, on any topic. Attempt to sort out some of the tangles in my mind. Post depressing things I think about in a non-super-depressing way so that they're a little easier on the eyes. I plan to post a lot of "facts I heard somewhere," most of which I would be happy to find dis-proven or out-of-date. Hopefully I can stick to it until my next thing starts; hopefully the time between jobs won't be too long. So that's the plan - thanks for reading!

Highlights

2009-07-13T22:39:00.003-04:00

It feels like years since I last posted. This post is a brainstorm of topics I ought to/could write about. I do so have a fondness for lists.

milking again
realizing it’s summer – I don't need three blankets and two pairs of long underwear and a sweatshirt to go to sleep
getting obsessed with draft animal power - who needs tractors, anyway?
cooking a lot – making ice cream, making kimchee; we have a joke that the hardest questions to answer at farmers' market are when people say "so, you just boil this up like spinach, right?" to which we would like to reply, why would you boil spinach? Any and all vegetables is to fry them with garlic and a little olive oil.
harvesting – 4xperweek --> routine: walks back and forth between field and wash station; the water isn’t bitter cold like it was in the fall; picking the wilted yellow cotyledons off the radishes, packing vegetables into baskets, summer squash just coming in
tomatoes plants have such a distinctive smell; harvesting kale feels like an old friend since I did it so much in the fall
making tons of cheese from our raw milk; it's sour and has a consistency similar to cottage cheese, and it's really yummy, in part due to all the cream in it
we've had too much rain and too many weeds; it's best to kill the weeds when they're just germinating, because baby plants have a much more tenuous hold on life than more mature ones
a smattering of our crops that we've been able to harvest: radishes; kale; arugula, lettuce, spinach, collards, broccoli, kohlrabi, komatsuna, pac choi, bok choi, napa, shuko, wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress, rainbow chard, dill, cilantro, summer squash, broccoli
smattering of the annual and perennial weeds – jewel weed, Canada thistle, burdock, ragweed, lamb’s quarters, fake arugula, campion, hemp nettle, golden rod, grasses, dock, dandelions, plantain, oxalis, clover, galanzoga, morning glory
in performing some tasks I find my motions echoing those of A&E doing that same task which I've watched them do countless times – like unloading the truck, waiting for the milk to filter, reaching in and grabbing bunches of greens from harvest boxes
The baby is a perfect joy and a good friend. We have many and extensive conversations now. I don't think she'll remember me, though.
Chickens are dusty little feathered velociraptors.
Selling meat at market – new thing! I'm doing markets by myself so I have to know something about the meat I'm selling; I’m learning from which parts of the animal the different cuts come from, and how they functionally differ. Which is: bone, or no bone. Steak or roast.
Strawberries. Omg. People raving about delicious food they've eaten is only interesting for so long, but fresh, good strawberries are tiny ruby bursts of delicate sweet. Too bad the slugs think so too.
Farmers tan like whoa.
Scything – twisting, swinging, satisfying
Being really intrigued by Essex farm – a sliding price scale for their CSA, they offer unlimited supply of vegetables, meat, maple syrup, they're year-round, the wife who had never farmed and is now writing a book rather than working the farm, their isolation from the internet;
I like diversity in a farming operation, and I've been thinking about models that would incorporate diversity and work – perhaps having a couple diff farms that share the sectors
Extroverted farmers? Efficiency?
Wheat. Golden. So little maintenance. None of this weeding or worrying about successions or anything. Now we just have to harvest it.
Peas. Tried to do a living trellis of oats or sunflowers – failed. They didn’t climb the oats and the sunflowers just weren’t there, so they sprawled all over the paths. Sugar snap peas; snow peas; shell peas. I can usually keep them straight, but it's confusing.
Small Farmers’ Journal – periodical dedicated to small-scale farmers, with a strong focus on people who work with horses. I read a really good article about debt, the scale of farming (big w/ debt vs small w/o) and re-thinking standards of living.
Endless cooking. Endless dishes. Particularly the milk pots.
Living a wanderer’s life; wanting to settle down like anything but not really being ready to.
I really like rotational grazing. It's a really cool concept: have a group of animals graze an area down really hard, then move them on to the next and then the next until when they're ready to come back to the first area it's all grown back. Good for the plants, the soil, the animals. Uses grass = free. The fencing and everything else, not so free, but still.
Clover needs light to germinate, so doesn't show up in dense grasses. There are different species of clover. I sort of know the differences between them. It's yummy and fixes nitrogen. And it's pretty.
66 varieties of tomatoes planted omg. Black, yellow, orange, bi-color, cherry, saladette, big ol' slicers. I can't wait.
I’m suddenly really into permaculture, in part because weeding annual plants feels like such a losing battle. I guess our perennials badly need to be weeded too, but everything is more established there and works better.
Getting knocked in the teeth by the Wort (our Brown Swiss steer. He's a jerk.)
Giving skritches to Little Guy (our little motherless red calf) because I love him, but feeling conflicted every time because I know the point is to get him to one day get on a trailer peacefully. Um. Like when that man asked if we’d sell him three lambs, and I was suddenly like – oh! Not our lambs! Don’t kill them!
Getting the sheep skins back from the tanners. They’re beautiful. I salted them when they were still wet and fleshy. Now they’re lovely. Hello, matters of life and death.
Bug bites. I don't wake up in the middle of the night scratching *too* often.
Playing the piano. My soul is woven in music.
Learning my own management style. Very important.
A friendly bull is a dead bull.
A’s attitude towards our animals – our species made an agreement of mutual care and support with their species long ago and we need to uphold our end of it; that livestock are different from pets and wild animals and oughtn't be treated as either
Being really inexperienced at driving the truck. I hate trucks. Except that they carry heavy things for long distances, which is actually pretty sweet.
Understanding why farmers don't like paperwork; I don't even want to answer emails because I'm so tired at the end of the day.

Speaking of which. Good night world.

Gardens gardens everywhere!

2009-03-19T22:00:00.002-04:00

The Obamas are planting a vegetable garden at the White House! Way to be!

Also, I just adopted a lamb that will need to be bottle fed six times a day for the next two months. I'm going to have to love it knowing that I can't keep it and the farm probably won't either. Isn't that what life is, though, loving even though you know it's going to hurt later?

Firsts: Part 2

2009-03-09T23:07:00.005-04:00

Sunday morning I was, once again, determined to take my day off - I needed to cook a dish for a potluck with my choir before our small concert in the evening. That coupled with the time change meant I was feeling pressed for time. But when E came in from morning chores, he commented that the sheep Josie looked like she was going into labor. Soon after, Laura started going into labor. I got a running commentary from A & E as I worked in the kitchen trying to throw something together for the potluck - Laura had first one lamb, then another, and finally A came in and said point-blank "If you want to see a lamb born, come out now because it looks like Laura's got a third coming."

I'd been not-so-secretly hoping I'd get to be there for the birth of at least one of the lambs, but with our growing herd of darlings it was looking less and less likely. So I left a pot to simmer and went outside into the warm, teasingly spring-like day. I joined A & E in the sheep house, where we quietly watched Laura in her pen, licking her two big lambs and turning in circles. Under her wide, woolly tail two water balloons were dangling - one amniotic sack for her second lamb, and the other meant a third was coming. A & E whispered this information to me; we leaned against the mangers and waited and watched.

Laura's second ewe lamb was damp and just-born; we watched her struggle to her feet, skinny legs quivering at this brand-new job. She nosed around her mother's belly the best she could, and finally found the udder. Laura nuzzled her butt and then started licking the air, mother instincts clearly kicked in but still in some distress. Finally, after about a half hour of waiting, she sat her back legs down, and E pointed out the tiny black nose and feet coming out. Then, with no fuss at all, she pushed out a third lamb, born inside a sack of its own. I had never seen anything be born before, and this small, new life was miraculous. Just as soon as I realized I had actually witnessed my first birth, E climbed into the jug and pulled the birth sack off the lamb. It was neither breathing nor moving. He cleaned out its mouth and nose, tried giving it mouth-to-mouth. The jug was cramped with ewe and lambs; E lifted it out where he could have more space.

This lamb's body was permanently prepared for birth: wet, stream-lined, boneless, front legs together and still pointed for its dive into the world. Soon after birth, a lamb ought to breath, open its eyes, struggle to its feet, and morph from a limp, wet rag into a tiny sheep, with the muscles and bones of knees and ankles and neck all working to hold their bodies in sheep shape. But not this one. It was perfectly formed, but it never breathed and never woke up. Laura never looked at it.

I did. I don't know why it died, although we had another still-born lamb later that day, again from a set of triplets. Three lambs is a lot for sheep. But after Laura and Josie carried these lambs for five months, nourishing them in their bellies and then bringing them into the world, to then lose them was such a waste.

A & E have been through this before, and E took the utilitarian outlook - at least we wouldn't have the chore of feeding a bottle lamb, because a ewe often can't feed a third lamb; we'd take them down to the woods and leave them for the coyotes because the ground is still too frozen to dig. And keeping genetics in the flock that predispose ewes to have a third still-born lamb isn't ultimately good for the flock. But A&E know the stakes. We've talked about how farming is fundamentally stewardship of plant and animal life, and part of that is having an understanding that death is a part of life and so being able and willing to grant a clean and quick death when appropriate. More on this later.

So that lamb's was the first birth I'd ever witnessed, and also the first death. This may be connected to the fact that I then got my first speeding ticket later that day. Ca c'est la vie.

Firsts: Part 1 of 2

2009-03-08T22:26:00.003-04:00

Part 1: Lambs! A backstory

About a month ago, our ewes started giving birth to their lambs. I had been prepping for this by reading books on sheep care and watching the sheep to learn both to tell them apart and to get a sense for what Normal sheep behavior is. Finally, after weeks and weeks of waiting, one Sunday morning I was in my room, determined to take my day off and waste my time as I chose, when the murmur of "lambs!" floated up from downstairs. E had gone outside for chores and discovered two new faces in the flock. I threw on some clothes and ran outside and, sure enough, Tiffany had given birth to a little fawn ram and a little white ewe - tiny, white wool still yellow and damp with amniotic fluid, incredible. I was in awe. E carefully lifted up the lambs and led their mama into a jug (small pen). All ewes and new lambs hang out in a jug for a few days to bond, nurse, avoid getting trampled, and generally stay where we can keep an eye on them to make sure everyone is healthy.

Fast forward a few weeks, to last Monday. Our lamb count had slowly climbed to eight, and the youngsters had grown big enough to run back and forth as a group in the sheep pen, playing tag, jumping onto their mothers. They've lost that gangly, newborn look and have started to grow up and out; they're big enough that they have to go down on their front knees to be low enough to reach their mama's udder, and they're strong enough that the upward head jabs they make when nursing have got to hurt. But the mamas still dominated the flock, though, and each lamb was unique enough that telling them apart was a straightforward no-brainer. But since last Sunday, a ewe has been popping out lambs about every twelve hours, and we've been busy.

Our sheep generally don't need help with birth - we may notice that one looks uncomfortable, and when we come back half an hour later we find that ewe licking off her newborn lamb. The trouble came last week when five ewes all decided to lamb at once during an extra cold snap. One of the really dim ewes actually had a lamb in the snow, but three or four other lambs were in serious danger of freezing to death simply by being born wet into a world below 32 F. So for three days in a row A & E (and later me!) picked up the slimy lambs and hugged them in our coats to warm them up and melt the amniotic ice. We dried them off as best we could, made sure they were nursing properly, and after a few hours they were all fine and dandy.

Aside from a few problems encouraging two of the ewes to stand still for nursing, the lambs have been healthy, and they've all left the jugs to rejoin the flock. This means that watching the sheep now involves not only the mental gymnastics of remembering which sheep is which but also whose lamb is whose. And the flock is almost half lambs now - fawn, white, brown-black, black-black, black with white star on forehead, grey-fawn-white, red. They're beautiful. And that's where we were this morning.

To be continued...

Day in the life of...

2009-03-07T06:43:00.002-05:00

I haven't kept track of how many people have asked me "So, what do you do on a farm during the winter?" There's not a whole lot to do, but it's beginning to pick up now that March is here. Chores, however, have been the daily constant, as follows:

Wake up at dawn. Lie in bed and admire the sunshine coming in through my east-facing window, if it's not cloudy or snowing. Think about how lucky I am to a) have an east facing window b) not have to wake up to an alarm c) have such a sweet job. C occurs to me more often when I've got legit sunshine. My morning ritual commences: this, then the elaborate chore of getting dressed in layers - I average probably about five shirts n' sweaters every day.

My commute is the best ever - I either tiptoe or amble downstairs, depending on whether I've heard the baby's voice yet. I scarf leftovers - crusty bread, last night's dinner, apples - and then lead the charge to go out. (Proper breakfast usually comes after chores.)

The trick with livestock, you see, is that they're dependent on humans for survival, and need basic tending every day. This means carrying hay bales (25-40 lb range - I only rarely try to take two at a time); filling water buckets; and Poop Management.

The trick with freezing weather is that everything's frozen. I don't think I'd understood what writers meant when characters walked over the "barren, frozen ground," but the quality of the earth changes when all its moisture freezes solid. It really feels frozen under your feet. I think all its happy inhabitants burrow down below the freeze line, have some vital channel for air flow, and hibernate. Frost heaves, too - we didn't have them growing up, but here they push all the fence posts over and bring more rocks up from the subsoil to lie in wait for spring plowing.

So for water, the stock tank has a crust of ice on it every morning, up to 3" thick, so we whack at it with a chunk of wood and scoop the ice out - mostly with a kitchen strainer, but with bare fingers too for big & awkward chunks. Once that's filling, it's time for Poop Management. When the cattle are all distracted with breakfast, we scoop out the fresh manure from the shed where they sleep. When it's really cold, it's all frozen to the ground, and we pry up the dozen or so poopsicles and cart them off to the manure pile. When it's just above freezing, everything's wet and mucky and the smells are much stronger. I just hope I don't lose a boot in it one day. I periodically sugar-coat the task in my head: call it Farm Nutrient Management and remember that it's all going on to the fields later to make the soil fertile, the fruits and vegetables big and healthy.

That all happens twice a day, and soon hand milking will get added to the list. Our first calf is due today, and we'll have fresh milk again soon. I'm off to see if it's been born yet. More on births later.

if only the crossword writers knew...

2009-01-27T07:30:00.002-05:00

Learning the craft knowledge of farming involves learning its vocabulary - it's got jargon just like any other field. Some highlights -
Fairly obvious:
apple drops - apples that fell off the tree
side dress - add fertilizer to the side of a row of crops (I learned this one on a farm where they did use chemical fertilizer)
dry off a cow - not with towels! to stop milking her/milk her less and less frequently so that she stops producing milk

Less obvious:
thresh - to get grain out of its inedible packaging (removing husk & awns)
tillering - suckers on grass plants (like wheat!)
sucker - lateral shoots
haw & gee - left and right (or right and left?) when directing draft animals
stanchion - a restraining device for cows or sheep that lets them eat but doesn't let them move around; we use them for milking
maddock - like a hoe, but for moving mud around rather than skimming the top couple inches of loose soil
Shetland, Hereford, Aricana - breeds of sheep, cow, and chicken, respectively
peen - delicately hammering to put an edge on a soft metal tool
snath - the handle of a scythe
scorzonera, skirret - root vegetables that we will be growing next year
cardoons - related to artichokes; bred for their stems rather than flower buds; I didn't manage to get them on the seed order...yet
mawl - the heavy, relatively blunt tool used to split wood
creosote - n. burnt; the crusty black carbonaceous charred stuff that collects in a chimney when a fire isn't burning hot enough
polled - cattle without horns

Yay new words! Go forth and win at Scrabble!

2009-01-16T07:28:00.006-05:00

So I think Agroecosystems Management is about the coolest thing ever. Note that I'm living pretty far removed from family and friends (both old and potential new), doing hard work in the cold for little pay, setting out to follow a career path that could leave me both poor and physically beaten, all in the name of Agroecosystems Management. Which ought to tell you something. Maybe it's that I'm crazy.

But how could you not love Agroecosystems Management? Let me be more clear: Sustainable Agroecosystems Management. Irresistable.

Being a good farmer means, in part, keeping track of the soil, water, and "biology" on the farm. It's the complexity of interactions between these that I find so seductive. Soil needs to have healthy levels of various nutrients so crops can grow; it needs a healthy soil ecosystem - a common rule of thumb holds that a billion organisms will live in a teaspoon of soil if it's managed properly; and good structure - those bacteria and fungi need oxygen and water, so the soil needs to have enough tiny spaces for those to be exchanged and absorbed. Then there's water - crops need not too much and not too little; mismanaged water can both leach valuable nutrients or just erode away the soil itself; and driving to plow or plant on wet soil squishes the structure I mentioned earlier.

Then there's the "biology" - all the different living and dead organisms and how they interact. Obviously the crops need to be healthy - they need to be planted at the right time and temperature so that they don't freeze or fail to thrive; they need to be weeded so that they get first choice of the available nutrients, water, and sunlight. They need pollinators, and those bees and flies need habitat themselves, best found at field edges or uncultivated areas.

Maintaining these healthy ecosystems means that a few crop pests - fungal, bacterial - will live in the soil. The trouble with spraying chemical fungicides and insecticides is that they often kill off more than the desired species, and removing species from an ecosystem, even a soil ecosystem, shifts and weakens it. There are several ways of dealing with crop pests while avoiding chemical sprays. You can rotate where you plant your crops so that they're not in the same place year after year. You can study how the pest affects the plant, and avoid the pest - if they only attack older plants, keep planting young ones and ignore or pull out the ones that have succumbed. If it only attacks in late summer, plant earlier in the summer and then stop harvesting. If the damage isn't too severe, you can decide to live with it. But above all: diversify - plant lots of different crops, so that you won't lose the year's work to that one pesky fungus.

So that's the boiled down and simplified version of agroecosystems management. What I love about all of this is that each piece interacts with every other piece, and if you can understand how it all fits together and be smart about management, you can build a glorious whole of a farm that produces amazing food and nurtures life. That's the theory, and the dream. I'll keep you posted on how the reality turns out.

Why friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is

2009-01-16T07:22:00.002-05:00

I am well aware that the local-sustainable food movement is still somewhat of a fringe endeavor, with ties to the hippie culture of the 60’s but with its own character and values. It’s not about free love or gourmet food or violent demonstrations or (at least as far as I’m concerned) smoking a lot of pot, although each of those are close cousins. It grows more from the desire to strengthen both natural and human communities, and comes with a strong bias against the parts of the current establishment that have undermined these.

You can tell the food-hippies first by their diets (the number of approaches is actually a little ridiculous) – raw, fermented, local, seasonal, vegetarian, vegan, grass-fed only, grown or baked or even caught and killed yourself, total avoidance of processed food, food rescued from a dumpster or even trash can. You can also tell them by their steel water bottles or Ball jars (plastic leaches into food and water and it doesn’t biodegrade); by their satchels that they knitted themselves or made from recycled trash or that a peasant in the third world got a fair wage to make. Everybody owns at least one of those brightly colored handkerchiefs with the black or white paisley design, and they’re tied around a thick mop of dreadlocks or stuffed into pockets and substitute for disposable tissues. A crowd of food hippies will have a higher density of small tattoos and face piercings than most, although not usually to the extremes of bikers or punks. Dyed hair is pretty rare – styled haircuts scarce from their expense, their stylishness, and impracticality – you try to weed with bangs in your eyes. Somebody is always willing to pull out a guitar, and bangos, fiddles, and pennywhistles are not far behind – although it seems that men are usually the instrumentalists, while women only sing. We wear quilted vests and chunky knitted hats somebody – us or our friends – knitted for us; second-hand clothing, scarves woven in the third world, Carhartt’s. We all know about Micheal Pollen, Alice Waters, Barbara Kingsolver, as well as Joel Salatin, Wendell Berry, and Eliot Coleman – dig further and people will know Rudolf Steiner, Wes Jackson, David Schumacher. We are predominantly Caucasian, with a small but healthy rainbow of other descents.

We are earnest. Trusting. We try to be friendly as a rule, if not outgoing. It doesn’t take much probing for someone to admit to finding beauty in leaves, seeds, trees, animals, landscapes, rich soil, handcrafted anything. We’re trying to live by our ideals and have decided that certain sacrifices of personal comfort, convenience, and familiarity are worth it (deciding to Consume Less Stuff makes shopping a completely different activity, let me tell you).

I’ve also found that this ethos often comes off as holier-than-thou, which drives everyone else around crazy – when this is on purpose, it’s frustrating, but when it’s not, it’s troublesome. Yes, I think that humans need to change their consumption habits – not just with food, but also with buildings, transportation, Stuff Accumulation – but I struggle a lot with how to bring that about. Yelling at whoever is around is a tried and true method of Not Helping, but I’m still looking for a productive alternative that works for me. I recognize the parallels with religious conversion – the True Believer wants to bring everybody into The Faith, a whole new way of living and being – and we’ve seen how alienating that can be as well.

Links! Links!

2008-12-06T06:51:00.002-05:00

Just got back from the Young Farmers Conference - I had a great time, met a lot of really cool people, and came away with a lot of really positive energy and a bajillion ideas of things to think about.

Another links post!
Read through the Food Declaration and consider signing it. No matter what you think about foodies or sustainable agriculture, farmers markets, what have you, its basic principles ought to be something everybody can get behind. They're aiming for 300,000 signatures, and are only at 9051 right now.

My techie roommate was rhapsodizing a few years ago about how there is a wiki for everything - she had just found a very helpful physics wiki. I wasn't able to find a soil or plant wiki. But! There is a young farmers wiki. It looks pretty cool.

More links! Check out San Francicso's plans for a new food policy. The Moth had a fun podcast recently about quitting everything and buying a farm. The New Yorker recently looked at beer (I heart fermentation); the Greenhorn Project has a great blog and is making a film about young farmers.

So cold...so very cold...

2008-11-28T07:58:00.002-05:00

This looks to be the coldest winter of my life, at least since I can remember. Not because climate change isn't real, but because I'm living farther north and because I'm outside every day.

But it's really not that bad. Yes, I did go and buy all the 100% wool sweaters at Salvo (there were three, plus a sweater dress with shoulder pads that I left on the rack; I am a fiber snob, but I need warmth); yes, I'm wearing two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, three shirts and two sweaters every day; yes, I finally finished knitting a hat that actually fits me (woot!) - but now all of this is routine and I'm usually warm! Good times.

The trouble is keeping my hands warm. They lose heat pretty fast because they're extremeties and I'm outside handling cold/freezing things. Insulated work gloves are awesome, but for harvesting we have wet-suit-type gloves. Hosing them off reliably cleans them - important when handling food - but if they get water in them, it stays until you can leave them out to dry properly.

We also have a wood stove that we use for some of our cooking and heat (the gas stove has more fine-tuned temperature control for baking and frying, but propane is more expensive than wood at this point.) E said to me that firewood warms you four times - when you cut it, when you split it, when you carry and stack it, and when you burn it. I proposed that we could just stay warm all winter by carrying the firewood around and not bothering to burn it, but we'd probably freeze at night.

Farmer botany! Farming around ice!

2008-11-25T08:02:00.006-05:00

Did you know? Carrots and Queen Anne's Lace are the same species, Daucus carota. Beets and chard are the same species, Beta vulgaris. And why do farmers talk about brassicas? Well, check it out: cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards, and brussel sprouts are all the same species, Brassica oleracea. Not to mention Brassica rapa, which is both Chinese cabbage and turnips, and Brassica napus, with canola and rutabega.

People keep asking me what happens on a farm in the winter, and one of the things I've learned is that harvest goes quite late in the year, thanks to the frost hardy crops like brassicas - we've still got brussels sprouts! Starting in October, the temperature began to dip below freezing - at first, just for a few minutes before the dawn sun came to haul the temperature back up. But the frosts got longer and colder. Naturally, these low temperatures freeze plant juices, and some plants can't handle it - tomatoes and eggplant are long gone - but others, like the brassicas, have ways of surviving this freezing.

Although brassicas can survive freezing, harvesting them in between regular frosts is tricky. Frozen solid kale leaves can't just be hacked off the plant as per usual. The water inside the plant expands as it freezes, pushing the plant cells to their breaking point - the stress of touching them can push them over the edge and seriously bruise the plant tissues. So after there's been a frost, we have to wait for the plants to thaw out and wake up before they can be harvested. The brassicas will ultimately die from freezing, reducing to a mass of translucent, wilted leaves - but it takes a while.

And another thing - brussels sprouts are so wack! First, take cabbage, where the leaves form a head that we harvest - I get that. Then you have kale - the leaves grow out from an upright stalk and they're chopped off, I get that too. But brussels sprouts! Their leaf buds are tiny cabbages! We harvest the leaf buds! All the tissues of Brassica oleracea, you'll note, are edible (such as broccoli leaves and stems as well as the flower buds; the roots, I hear, are edible but woody). Anyway, the sizeable leaf scars of brussels sprouts after harvest remind me of palm trees. If my camera battery doesn't freeze when I take it outside, I may be able to provide better pictures.

How are chickens like small children?

2008-11-24T21:53:00.003-05:00

Give a cow a pile of hay for the day, and it is content to sit and munch in the sun and let the time ebb away. However, give a chicken it's daily ration of grain or other feed in a single pile, and it gets distressed. Chickens are descended from jungle fowl, and they're going to scratch and peck at the dirt whether they're looking for food or not. Chickens need not only food, but also entertainment. Like small children.

I am a Sheep God!

2008-11-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

I give them food, I bring them water. I pour out yummy, salty kelp powder for them. If I’m feeling especially benevolent, I bring them apples or cut up squash. And I even do the same for cows.

Farmers ideally want livestock to be a little wary and afraid of humans – a cow that respects humans doesn’t try to jump on them or butt them in play. But livestock do need to be handled periodically and if they’re too shy, catching and handling them becomes much more difficult. Sheep that were bottle fed as lambs, for example, are more comfortable with humans and more likely to follow them around* – but they also won’t lie still when they’ve been caught for shearing or hoof-trimming. So in building a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle, livestock personality is an important factor.**

As the apprentice, I’m really more like a sheep and cattle demi-god. I’m still new at doing all of these things (and I don't have a great deal of responsibility yet) and I’m not involved, as proper gods are, in the life and death decisions of the livestock. My host-farmer-teacher-bosses (hereafter A and E) are the real sheep and cattle gods.

We recently drove half the flock of sheep to the slaughterhouse – mostly this year’s lambs, but a couple ewes and at least one ram. The genetics in a flock are a big deal, and the decision of who will go cannot be undone. So, the trip was preceded by a week of listening to A and E’s (interminable and impenetrable) conversations about the relative merits of every single sheep (sample quote: "What do you think about F's lamb? I think 14 has a better coat. But 15 weighed more. And R had bad feet this year; but don’t forget that 29 spooks easily. So should we keep F's lamb?"). We finally sorted them into two groups: stay and go.

For the life bit of the big decisions, A & E also have some say in how many animals get born – for sheep, they decide when to let the rams into the pasture, and for cattle – well, let’s just say for now that bulls aren’t used very much and more, and AI in farming circles does not stand for Artificial Intelligence.

*One of the friendly sheep is named Elsie, and so every time I visit the sheep the song Cabaret inevitably starts rolling in my head...inappropriate to the situation on several levels.

**And, for future reference, if a cow is getting too close and trying to get all up in your space, you can smack its ear (not box - firmly bat). Since cattle-speak doesn’t include ear contact, this reinforces the notion that humans are special – we speak a secret, unfathomable language, if you will.

Um. Awesome.

2008-11-02T07:47:00.001-05:00

I promise my next post will be more substantial and not another link. But. Weddings on farms. I (predictably) think it's a great idea, but in the event that I have my own farm one day I'm not sure I would want to host weddings as part of my business plan. Hm.

Pollan explains it all

2008-10-30T07:39:00.000-04:00

Michael Pollan is the author of several best-selling books generally about Food and Agriculture in America, such as the Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. He's also a big name in sustainable agriculture circles because he puts the important issues in an intelligent and interesting way.

He wrote a rockin' article for the New York Times recently, an open letter to the President elect.

Shortly thereafter Terry Gross interviewed him on Fresh Air, during which he proceeded to liberally quote himself in the article, so if that link expires or you don't have a NYT account, check him out there.

My thoughts: the part about how we need more young, smart farmers made me feel all warm and fuzzy, as well as justified in my life choice.

What is raw milk and why does it matter?; I try my hand at science writing

2008-10-29T07:48:00.000-04:00

Milking by hand is at once strenuous, kind of gross, and great fun (I admit I often find the last two to be synonymous). Cow teats: wrinkled, squishy, and limp. There’s a trick to squeezing them downward to get the milk out, and then aiming into the milk bucket rather than your boots. I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it - I did Sunday night’s milking solo!

We usually get about a gallon of milk with each milking, which happens twice a day. It goes in the milk fridge, which is *always* full of milk. So much milk! They make kefir (essentially a yogurt equivalent) and skim the cream to make sour cream (the skimmed milk goes to the chickens); I made butter once, and I kind of want to try my hand at cheese.

What this means, though, is that we’re drinking raw milk – a contentious substance and topic in the world of food. Depending on who’s doing the talking, raw milk is either a healthful panacea or a deadly poison. It’s been a little difficult for me to sort out the facts from the two polarized viewpoints, but I think I’ve finally got the gist.

The main trouble is that cows everywhere don’t care if they get a little brown and crusty with stuff that’s only partly mud. No matter how careful people are, milk is still going to be a bit contaminated – this holds for milking done by both hand and machine. If raw milk is allowed to stay warm for too long it can start growing populations of bacteria that can cause food poisoning. When you’re only milking one or two cows, it’s easy to take the milk straight to the kitchen, filter it, and put it in the fridge to prevent that. But when you’re milking a hundred cows with a milking machine, it’s much harder to prevent bacterial growth: the milk cools more slowly when it’s collected in a big tank where fresh, warm milk constantly coming in, and the more equipment involved in the process the harder it is to make sure that everything is clean for every milking. Add the equipment and time for shipping and processing at a central plant, and the risk of dangerous contamination increases. That’s why mass-produced milk is pasteurized – by heating the milk, all the bacteria are killed and the milk can sit safely on the grocery store shelf for longer.

The raw milk enthusiasts point out that pasteurization denatures the enzyme lactase, which helps to break down the sugar in milk (lactose) and make it more digestible and bio-available; they also hold that the low level of microbes in fresh and safely stored raw milk is good for one’s immune system. I can attest that the raw milk we’re drinking is safe and delicious, and we can enjoy it because we’re being safe and careful with it. For anyone who’s dead-set on drinking raw milk but can’t keep a cow, the most trustworthy and safest raw milk will be the same stuff the farmer and her or his family are drinking.

Markets!

2008-10-19T22:09:00.000-04:00

Right now, at the end of October, my/the farm schedule is still dominated by markets. Twice a week, T and I harvest, pack the truck, and drive off to market. Working at farmers' market was one of the things I was most excited about before coming here, and after three weeks and six markets under my belt, I'm still enjoying it.

I'm kind of a farmers’ market junkie, and neither of our markets disappoints. I love markets generally for their array of colorful and healthful food, the opportunity to support local producers, the profusion of re-usable canvas bags. But it's really the people who make the market, and some wonderful characters have turned up at market. Both markets we go to have a great community of vendors, trading goods and catching up during the quiet moments between sales. There's one baker who gave us two bushels of bread that he couldn't sell one day; and there are two lovely ladies at one market who sell crepes and give them free to vendors in exchange for herbs or fruit. And I love all the friendly and wacky people who turn up as customers. They ask all kinds of questions - my favorite customer this week had a greyhound wearing a blue-flame patterned sweater, and she was absolutely delighted that we were selling golden raspberries.

I haven’t even mentioned the rush that comes from doing basic arithmetic on the fly in front of strangers (6.30 for tomatoes plus 3.50 for eggs and 2.50 for a bunch of kale leaves how much change out of a 20.00? Don't try this while sleepy.)

I worry a lot about the world’s problems. Farmers markets offer a concrete way to feel like I'm making a difference - in selling fresh, organic produce, people get the opportunity to buy and eat food that's good for both them and the environment and the farm gets to stay solvent. And I love that it provides a gathering space for the community - it's often been the place where I go to catch up with my friends.

Our markets are over at the end of October, and even though our truck brings less and less as fall frost kills the remaining crops, and even though they're time consuming, I will be sad for them to end.

Thoughts on blogging

2008-10-18T22:10:00.000-04:00

So, my posts on this blog have been sorely delayed by the conundrum of how much of this blog to make public and how much I want to keep private. I want to share how I'm doing with all the wonderful people in my life, but I want to respect the privacy of the farm where I'm working and not put all the details of its workings on the internet for anybody to read. I also want to have a place to post my musings without filling everybody's inboxes with weekly updates of "guess how many names of different varieties of hot peppers I learned *this* week!"

More detail than you needed: I thought about doing this on LiveJournal where posts can be private or public, but I didn't think my mom would want to create an LJ just so she could read the stuff I want locked for people I know. So, I'll try this for a while.