Bustelo coffee can housing connected extension cords. Practical, and festive!
Submitted for consideration for 2011 MacArthur Fellowship.
Still more adventures in clueless farming
On Wednesday I completely lost it with my cattle, then was charged by the bull. And it rained.
My herd–seven cows, four yearlings, seven calves, and a borrowed bull–were grazing near a field leased to a neighbor. As is often the case when they’re next to something they like, in this case fifty acres of corn stubble, a couple of calves sneaked under the electric wire. The wire’s current, supplied by a solar fence charger, had been weakened by three consecutive gray days, so the mamas thought nothing of crashing through the wire after their calves. First one, then three, and then the whole herd was out.
Usually I can lure them back with some feed on the back of the truck and indeed most of them came across the wire, which I had dropped–but then one turned around and the rest followed.
My fuse was short to being with that day, and the high winds and pelting rain didn’t help, so I started running to cut them off and turn them around, all the while shouting like a lunatic. “You fucking stupid cows” in dozens of permutations.
Well. That only succeeded in getting them a little wild. When you can see the whites of their eyes, it’s time to go inside for coffee. Instead, I decided to set out on foot after the bull, who was wandering away from the herd with a couple of cows in tow. In the past, I’d been successful in getting around him and turning him, and he has never shown any hint of aggression, but the combination of howling winds and bellowing farmer brought out the bull in him, and he turned, bucked three or four times, then charged, about five steps’ worth, which still left him fifteen feet or so from me when he skidded to a stop, tearing up deep chunks of soil.
It was a display, and not an attack, but it got my heart pounding and my brain thinking two thoughts: 1. Damn, he can MOVE! and 2. How stupid! One-on-one with a bull in slippery corn stubble, without even a stick, a hundred yards to the nearest tree line. If he had attacked … well, I don’t want to go there.
Actually, make that two thoughts and a question: How long would it take the family to come out looking for me?
Cows: not expecting the Spanish Inquisition
The large animal vet experience is medieval, yet quintessentially modern. Imagine a session with the Grand Inquisitor, all sharp, scary smoking implements of torture … assisted by a fast-talking pharmaceuticals sales rep.
I had to bring my best heifer calf in to the vet not once but twice last week. My neighbor trailered her in for me, and took the opportunity to have some work done on a couple of his cows, including one that he had dehorned. That was a singularly stomach-turning procedure. The cow’s head was tightly secured by squeeze gate and taut contorting ropes; then, without any anesthetic, a high-powered sawz all-type contraption sheers the horn off at the bud. The horn clatters to the concrete as blood spurts in all directions. And then the cauterizing fills the air with a sickening smell of singed hair, bone and blood.
Not long after that cow made it home, she miscarried.
My calf’s procedures were less nauseating. She had been in the first time because she was bloated and frothing. The vet crammed a pipe down her throat and then ran a plumber’s snake through, pushing a large chunk of a hedge apple out of the esophagus into the stomach. We thought that was the end of it, but the next day she was bloated again. The second procedure involved screwing a trochar and cannula into her side, puncturing the rumen, and letting the gas escape. She deflated like a balloon, and seems to be doing well, eating, nursing, pooping. She still has a hole in her side. She seeps and makes funny wheezing noises through it. Eventually, it is supposed to work its way out. Crossing fingers on that.
Cows are not pets, I know, but even so, having seen what I’ve seen, I would have to draw the line at dehorning. Why not just raise polled, i.e. hornless, cattle? I was however impressed by the trochar procedure, and will be even more so if it saves the life of my calf. Not so keen on the numerous medicaments suggested (and sometimes given without being requested) by the vets.
In my two years as a novice cattleman, I have yet to see my fundamental ideas disproven: that keeping cows healthy is a matter of keeping my herd apart from other cattle, moving them often when the grass is growing, feeding them exclusively grass and hay, and letting the mamas do most of the doctoring.
Having said that, I know I have learned only a tiny fraction of what I need to know. I am still a dilettante at this farming business, and will likely remain so until I’m too old to do the work.
“a nation where No lovely thing can last”
For what it’s worth, Wendell Berry gets a good deal of the blame and/or thanks for my move, from New York City to my wife’s family farm in central Kentucky, and for my haphazard Adventures in Farming.
For some time, I wrote a blog inspired in part by a poem of his.
So far my actual agrarian experience has not exactly resembled that enjoyed by Berry on his Henry County farm. I am not using draft horses, and, in spite of my best efforts, am surely not making the wisest use of the land and resources at my disposal. Nor am I writing with pencil and 1957 vintage Royal typewriter. My household has not one, but four computers, as well as four vehicles, all with between 140,000 and 210,000 miles on the odometer.
In darker moments, I think my rustic idyll seems more akin to that of the fictional farmer Jean de Florette, an eager, idealistic city-slicker accountant who moves to Provence from Paris, and is driven to madness, to bankruptcy, to death, by unkind weather and scheming provincials. (At this point, I am only partway to madness. Bankruptcy and death still seem to be a good way in the distance.)
Still, Berry’s ideas and attitude loom large over many of my daily actions. Sometimes I feel I should have a wristband engraved with the letters, WWWD (What Would Wendell Do?).
I came face to face with him at a Kentucky Book Fair a few years back. He signed the book I had asked him to sign, and looked up with expectation of conversation of some sort, but all I could conjure was a Ralph Kramden-esque “hummana hummana”.
It has dawned on my in recent months that I am not him, and can never be. There are some, many of his ideas and practices that I strive to adopt, but he has set the bar at a great height. I try as much as I can to be sustainable and conscious in everything I do, but realize that most of the time I fall far short. I realize he might tut-tut the fact that I like to play golf, have 6,000 songs in my ITunes, quaff a 30-pack of Old Style every week, subscribe to women’s fashion magazines. I am pretty sure he would not find much to be amused by in Zoolander or Caddyshack.
Having gotten all that out of the way, I would submit, without fear of overstatement, that he would get my vote for the Greatest Kentuckian Living (well back in the distance: a boxer from Louisville, and a girl singer from Butcher Holler). His poetry can be absolutely transcendent. (start here for a sampling); his fictional world a rival to that of Faulkner for completeness and depth; and his essays are at once uplifting and, as I have hinted here, impossibly challenging.
He will be speaking in several venues in Danville for the entire day, which is pretty thrilling to me. If child care obligations can be rearranged, I am hoping to see him at least once, if not twice.
In preparing for his visit, I have been re-reading some of his essays, and have come across some things I had not seen.
I particularly enjoyed his “Why I am NOT going to buy a computer” from 1987, which comes complete with a series of passionate reactions from readers of Harper‘s magazine, where it was reprinted in the late 80s. Berry’s answers to those reactions, also included, show the man at his most crotchety (to me, a good thing) and most caustic.
Through the genius of hypertext (an innovation Berry finds close to hilarious), that essay links to “The joy of sales resistance”, featuring one of his most contrarian, unpopular (and spot-on) ideas, that education has been turned into just another commodity.
This is another highly acerbic essay, one in which Multiculturalism, the Free Market, and Unlimited Economic Growth come in for a mauling. Though written in the early nineties, it contains what would be a great manifesto for the modern conservative movement, and a large segment of the Democratic Party (although it would surely not be recognized as satire):
Reduce the Government. The government should only be big enough to annihilate any country and (if necessary) every country, to spy on its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money.
Looking for an arbitrary way to wind up this drifting meditation, here, without further comment, a poem from A Timbered Choir—The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997:
The year begins with war.
Our bombs fall day and night,
Hour after hour, by death
Abroad appeasing wrath,
Folly, and greed at home.
Upon our giddy tower
We’d oversway the world.
Our hate comes down to kill
Those whom we do not see,
For we have given up
Our sight to those in power
And to machines, and now
Are blind to all the world.
This is a nation where
No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast;
The people leave the land;
The land flows to the sea.
Fine men and women die,
The fine old houses fall,
The fine old trees come down:
Highway and shopping mall
Still guarantee the right
And liberty to be
A peaceful murderer,
A murderous worshipper,
A slender glutton, Forgiving
No enemy, forgiven
By none, we live the death
Of liberty, become
What we have feared to be.
the redundancy of roosters
Yesterday I came upon two roosters tangled in electric netting. I never turn it on anymore–a good thing–but the situation was grisly even so.
They had been fighting, that leaping and kicking thing. One bird kicked the other into the netting. The attacker got his legs tangled, the attackee somehow got his head through a hole in the grid. There was a good deal of blood around the neck and head of both birds. They kept fighting for some time by the look of it!
By the time I came on the scene they were both spent, panting and bleeding. I tried untangling the wire, but their struggles to free themselves had tightened the tourniquet to an impossible place. I was loathe to cut the fence to free them. It was a hundred dollar fence, and the roosters themselves were worth less than nothing. No value, no function, save entertainment. (And they ARE fun to watch. Our friends Zoe and Mike coined it: “Chicken TV.” Really. You’d be surprised.)
I imagine a real farmer would have taken a tin snips to the birds, not the fence. But I am soft.
This is not one of those stories about how the worst things happen to me. Rather I think the motto should be, when it comes to farming, at least the halfassed way I do it, is “Dang, I didn’t see that coming.”
My agrarian woes have been bothersome, but in the scheme of things not catastrophic. No rain for 10 weeks? Just part of the deal. Plan for it. Beehives decimated by small hive beetles, until this year a bit player in the cast of pest players? It happens. Farming is hard.
Today the weather is changing. The wind’s howling would have meant a serious storm on its way just a few weeks ago. Now it’s just a typical autumn breeze. The washing is flapping hard on the clothesline. The sun is still warm, but as of today no longer quite balances the cool of the wind. I think of the twins, who are having a pumpkin patch excursion at school today. Did I dress them warmly enough?
Just took a walk among the cows, checking udders, hooves, and reproductive equipment. They are mostly all big and healthy, and I think I am more prepared than I have been for winter. But that is not saying much.
Today my New York friends will arrive for their annual Kentucky golf outing.
For seven years now, I have picked up my guests at the Lexington airport, usually on the late Friday flight. Dennis, Dave, and Richard appearing feet first at the top of the arrivals stairs. Always grinning and laughing about something, usually some crazy Campbell riff. This year, of course, will be different, as Campbell will not be there. I really can’t imagine what that will be like.
Baby steps in the right direction
This week, the FDA issued a “draft guidance” that in effect asks industrial meat producers to pretty please, at least think about limiting the practice of pumping massive quantities of antibiotics into factory animals meat machines.
The big lobbying groups, predictably, were outraged by this intrusion of mere science into their god-given right to make a bundle at the expense of the world’s health (both animal and human).
Tom Scocca at Slate sums up just how late this is in coming:
Forty-one years after the United Kingdom concluded that feeding antibiotics to healthy animals to make them gain weight could promote drug resistance in bacteria, 12 years after the European Union banned the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock for weight gain, nine years after researchers found widespread antibiotic-resistant salmonella in American ground beef, and four years after the EU banned all feeding of antibiotics to healthy animals, the Food and Drug Administration today issued a “draft guidance” urging “judicious use of medically important antimicrobial drugs” in the American livestock industry.
At Grist Tom Laskawy some excellent background on the issue as well as a slightly more optimistic view. “While this may sound like so much bureaucratese, it represents a strong statement by the FDA and suggests further action is forthcoming.”
This draft, though clearly preliminary and subject to industry feedback, also gives Congress a reason to move forward on legal restrictions knowing that a scientific consensus is forming — though in reality it’s unlikely a law could be passed much before November, if at all.
The question remains just how hard Big Meat will fight this guidance. The FDA wants to bend over backwards to limit problems for livestock producers by phasing in restrictions and taking their concerns into account. But will groups like the Pork Board — which denied the very existence of the problem to CBS News anchor Katie Couric in her blockbuster report on the subject — take the hand the FDA has offered? Or will they bite it?
Or will CAFO operators simply seek to bypass any regulation altogether, by claiming that routine doses of antibiotics are medically necessary to prevent disease in close quarters? I’m contacting an expert on this topic to find out if the FDA’s draft guidance indicates such loopholes will exist, and whether industry will head for them.
We know that subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock is unnecessary. The Danes have, somewhat famously, proved it by banning the practice and significantly reduced the threat of antibiotic resistance with no long-term effects on livestock health or productivity. The American Society of Microbiologists knows it. The FDA does, too. Even over a hundred House members and 17 senators (that being the number of cosponsors attached to the pending legislation) know it. With any luck, the industry will finally get the message.
Futureless farming?
I imagine there must be a proverb or several somewhere about the farmer who travels in springtime, when a huge chunk of the year’s work has to get done.
This year, I had to travel not once but three times in the crucial spring months, and since returning have been scrambling to rescue my little farmstead from total chaos. Calves still coming in, new chickens to tend to, the beehives thriving but needing a lot of attention, weeds galore in the garden. Weeds. Weeds. Weeds. WEEDS! (Did I mention weeds?)
But I think I’m getting there.
Which raises the question of “where is there”?
In general I’ve downplayed my farmerly ambitions by claiming only that I’m trying to feed my family better, and perhaps create a better sense of self-reliance. I do hold out a hope, not often expressed, that someday this farm will be our livelihood. Slowed food revolution, in this month’s American Prospect, makes me wonder how realistic that dream is.
The author, Heather Rogers, offers a thorough look at the state of the American organic or alternative or sustainable farmer, seen from a policy perspective as well as through the eyes of Morse Pitts, who farms in the Hudson Valley and can charge what for me is a jaw-dropping price of $14 for a dozen eggs at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. In spite of this, and the fact that he is hard-working and resourceful, he still has had enough with a life that promises (and delivers) so many rewards, save one—the ability to earn a steady and decent living.
… despite having no mortgage debt (he inherited the place), a ready market, and loyal customers, Pitts wants to leave his farm. His town recently rezoned the area as industrial, and if he wants to cultivate soil that’s not surrounded by industry and its attendant potential for water and air pollution, he has to move. The problem is, he can’t afford to.
Aside from the standard instability farmers must endure — bad weather, pests, disease, and the vagaries of the market — holistic and organic growers face great but often overlooked economic hardship. They must shoulder far higher production costs than their conventional counterparts when it comes to everything from laborers to land. Without meaningful support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, their longevity hangs in the balance. In the meantime, the USDA showers billions on industrial agriculture. Growers who’ve gone the chemical, mechanized route have ready access to reasonable loans, direct subsidy payments to get through tough years, and crop insurance, plus robust research, marketing, and distribution resources. Whether organic and holistic growers raise crops, like Pitts does, or grass-fed, free-range livestock, they must contend with circumstances made harder by a USDA rigged to favor industrial agriculture and factory food.
As he has done in so many other areas, the president raised hopes for progressive farmers to the sky, and then sent them crashing. An organic garden at the White House! Beehives! But not a heck of a lot of tangible things have been delivered to folks like us. And even modest things like the Know Your Farmer campaign have met with angry resistance. “In an April letter to the new agriculture secretary, agribusiness-friendly senators Saxby Chambliss, John McCain, and Pat Roberts opposed even the meager support the USDA is giving small unconventional growers. ‘American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs.'” Which of course is a hugely disingenuous piece of cow dung. And then there’s the “urban locavore” dig—a “trendy food choice” by well-to-do foodie snobs doing their evil mischief again. You know, if it weren’t for Alice Waters, America could be made whole again.
It’s a really good article, if not particularly encouraging for me, or for any of the other kooks out there who want to eat real food that isn’t farmed in ways that are killing the earth. I recommend you read the whole thing….
Lions and tigers and superweeds … oh, my!
Who could have seen THIS coming?
A recent New York Times article on the rapid growth of “superweeds” notices that some species have done exactly what Darwin noticed living things do: under herbicidal assault, they adapted.
Now Roundup, Monsanto’s crack for farmers, is having trouble killing pigweed, and the expensive herbicide/seed program isn’t looking like such a good deal anymore. But the large-scale farmers have a lot invested in industrial farming, so many are just layering new poisons onto the Roundup, and are even encouraged to do so by Monsanto, which, the Times reports, “is it is taking the extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing herbicides to supplement Roundup.”
Michael Pollan, one of the Room for Debate voices in a Times discussion on the subject, points out that this should come as a surprise to exactly no one. “A product like Roundup Ready soy is not, as Monsanto likes to claim, ‘sustainable.’ Like any such industrial approach to an agronomic problem — like any pesticide or herbicide — this one is only temporary, and destroys the conditions on which it depends. Lucky for Monsanto, the effectiveness of Roundup lasted almost exactly as long as its patent protection.”
The Times parrots without comment the claim that no-till agriculture with “Roundup Ready” seeds is “environmentally friendly.” True, it reduces erosion and lessens runoff, but I don’t think everyone really understands what really goes on in this kind of agriculture. (Interested in the details of how glyphosate works? Check out this fact sheet from beyondpesticides.org (pdf). “Environmentally friendly”? I’m not so sure.)
And here is where I would like to make a rather bold suggestion: Why not just call the superweed callaloo and eat it?
Pigweed is amaranth, after all, and amaranth is edible and nutritious, both as leaves and seeds. When we first moved to Kentucky, Florence, our friend and one-time babysitter (from a past life when we were both had jobs and 401ks and benefits in New York), came to visit us. She looked into a field of what we called pigweed, and saw callaloo, a delicious green from her youth near Ocho Rios, Jamaica. She waded in, harvested a few large bags, trimmed it and cooked it up with lots of garlic and hot peppers and it was delicious.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone to eat the pigweed laced through with Roundup of course. And I’m not sure the resistant palmer amaranth is the same variety of amaranth that we enjoyed. But if there are varieties of a “superweed” that are edible and nutritious, a smart farmer might take the hint from mother nature and grow the native plant that doesn’t need massive doses of chemicals to thrive.
Or not. Even if that farmer is dead-set on continuing with the commodity crop (and of course that’s where the (subsidy) money is), The redoubtable Rodale Institute has been doing some great work with organic no-till methods.
Broody
Nature is weird and wonderful, and to my city-boy eyes nothing is quite as weird/wonderful as a broody hen.
Two years ago, I took advantage of two broody hens and stuck a bunch of eggs under each of them, and we got about 10 new chicks that year.
Last year, I tried the same with one hen, but she turned out to be stark raving mad. From my limited observation, broodiness has an at least tangential relationship to full-on insanity. The hen kept pecking her eggs, for reasons still unclear to me, and at the same time insisted on staying on the nest, which in short order became a sticky rotting mess. Only one baby chick survived, and that one was blind in one eye. I think because of that messy nest situation.
This subject of this year’s experiment seems tidy and calm, though frighteningly and obsessively focused, as are all broody hens. She seems capable of starving herself in her dedication to her compulsion. I have to remind myself to yank her off the nest once a day.
I hope in three weeks time we get a bunch of baby chicks out of her.
Now, really I am no expert on broody hens, having only had a few years to observe what is an ever rarer phenomenon in nature, as it has been deemed wise to breed broodiness out of nearly every variety of chicken you’ll see, because a broody hen is not a laying hen. That strikes me as a little shortsighted, and it also strikes Harvey Ussery the same way. Mr. Ussery, a contrary farmer in the best sense of the term, , has written an interesting article on the benefits of using, not fighting, broodiness.
Crusade for better foods … and get stomped
That episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution where he showed kids all the nastiness that goes into chicken nuggets—and they wanted to eat them anyway? As upsetting as it was, it did save me the bother of showing it to my nugget-inhaling son, as it will probably achieve the same (opposite of intended) result.
I don’t for a moment doubt Jamie Oliver’s good intentions in this food crusade of his. But he is a wealthy celebrity chef, and he will get over it. He is probably already home in Britain, regaling his like-minded friends with tales of the benighted colonials over some delightful meal he’s just whipped up, along with a number of impeccably complementary bottles of tasty plonk.
Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that speaking out about the garbage served to kids in schools can have career-threatening consequences. From La Vida Locavore, here is an excerpt from the woeful saga of what happened to a school teacher who became concerned about what her students were eating. (Writing in haste today, so apologies for the extensive cut-and-pastiness).
Mendy Heaps, a stellar English teacher for years, had never given much thought to the food her seventh-graders were eating. Then her husband, after years of eating junk food, was diagnosed with cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure and suddenly the french fries, pizza and ice cream being served in the cafeteria at rural Elizabeth Middle School outside Denver, Col., took on a whole new meaning.
Heaps was roused to action. She started teaching nutrition in her language arts classes. She bombarded colleagues, administrators and the local school board with e-mails and news clippings urging them to overhaul the school menu. She even took up selling fresh fruits and healthy snacks to the students on her own, wheeling alternative foods from classroom to classroom on a makeshift “fruit cart,” doling out apples for a quarter.
Finally, the school’s principal, Robert McMullen, could abide Heaps’ food crusade no longer. Under threat of being fired, Heaps says she was forced to sign a personnel memorandum agreeing to cease and desist. She was ordered to undergo a kind of cafeteria re-education program, wherein she was told to meet with the school’s food services director, spend part of each day on lunch duty recording what foods the students ate, and compile data showing the potential economic impact of removing from the menu the “grab and go” foods Heaps found so objectionable. … The case of Mendy Heaps is a stark reminder that at least one voice is largely missing from the debate over school food that’s getting so much attention lately: the voice of teachers. Teachers see what kids eat every day. They have opinions about the the food and how it impacts children’s health and school performance. Yet they are almost universally silent.
… “When I got the memo, everyone became afraid,” said Heaps. “If I tried to talk about the memo, no one wanted to listen. I got a little support from a couple of teachers, but not very much. Everyone wanted to forget about it and they wanted me to forget about it too…The only thing I still do is write letters and try to get someone interested! I’m working on one for Michelle Obama right now.”