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

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!

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...

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!

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?

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!

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.

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.