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It strikes me that many of the problems we run into on a day-to-day basis are caused by people doing a job for which they are not fully qualified. We have all run across the bad restaurant meal: a cook who wasn’t so good; an owner who didn’t get fresh ingredients; a wait person who ruined the meal with bad service.
Or how about the salesperson who knows absolutely nothing about what he or she is selling? Getting parts to repair broken farm machinery is always a challenge; most of the time the parts person has never operated the machine, nor does he have a clue concerning what the broken part in question does. It’s pretty frustrating.
Then there are the people who work for the USDA administering farm programs at a local level. Often very book-smart folks, they are also often not too experienced at farming. If you run a small farm like me, dealing with USDA can be even more frustrating because farms are supposed to be big and what it would call “efficient”. Since small farms, especially organic farms, don’t fit into the USDA ideal, we are generally written off as rather dim-witted, latter day dinosaurs that are doomed and waiting to die.
I have always had lots of respect for mechanical engineers; farm machinery is truly a marvel (most of the time), extremely expensive, but a marvel. It would, however, make much more sense if all those engineers designing marvelous farm machinery had grown up on a farm.
Wouldn’t it be great if those engineers recalled all the expletives uttered by their fathers as they skinned their knuckles, pinched their fingers and smashed their thumbs trying to fix those marvelous yet owner-unfriendly machines? If so, they would design machinery that is easy to fix, easy to grease and always worked as promised!
Now, I am sure there are former farm kids designing machinery, but, apparently, not very many. I would feel much better if engineers had experience trying to fix a hay baler when it’s 100 degrees in the shade and you have a thousand bales of hay to get in and rain is on the way. (As Bill Clinton used to say, “I feel your pain”.) It would also be very comforting to me if the engineer had to lie on his back and try to snake his arm up between belts, chains and layers of itchy dust to get grease to a bearing that only someone with an arm 4 feet long and double-jointed could reach. But that is not the way things work, certainly not in farming, and certainly not in politics.
Politics presents us with a similar situation; we have elected and appointed officials who sometimes are anything but qualified for their jobs. “Heck of a job, Brownie” will forever be the example of government appointee ineptitude.
So how do inept people get elected or appointed? Money seems to help; big campaign contributions generally pay off; Washington must be crawling with Bush’s big contributing “Pioneers.” Appearance counts too, not rich, but certainly not poor. White men are certainly more acceptable than women or minorities, and this year we found out pantsuits are trouble. It seems being a lawyer is a really good qualification, even though most people say they don’t trust lawyers. People who have been around awhile (insiders) have experience, but are attacked for being insiders. Those who exist outside of Washington (outside the Beltway) are not insiders, but they lack experience. So being an insider or an outsider is good or bad, depending on which one you are.
As a farmer I get frustrated with politicians, appointees and government service employees who have no knowledge of farming but still get to run our lives. I suspect teachers, for example, have similar frustrations. People who have not been in a classroom since they left college are setting the curriculum for the education of our children. Welcome to “No Child Left Behind.”
In the big picture, perhaps the heart of the problem is money. Most of the world is poor, yet the people who run it are rich. Most of them have never known poverty, or anything close to being low income. Those who have worked their way up from low or middle income to a place of power either join the club as in Orwell’s Animal Farm or they get marginalized or leave in frustration because they refuse to follow the status quo.
Clearly, as one moves from local, to state, to the federal government, those in power seem to become increasingly more detached from the lives and problems of the people they supposedly work for. World leaders, at times, seem hopelessly out of touch with reality, at least the reality of most people.
Most politicians have no concept of living in the real world, or at least if they ever did have such a concept it has long since been forgotten amidst the memories of travel junkets, golf outings and chauffeured limousines. In this country and I suspect a large part of the world, you get elected if you have money, if you can be “sold” as being blue collar (even if you can’t remember how many houses you own) and if you have a good public relations firm.
And what of the small picture? Government officials who don’t know farming seem insignificant in comparison to a world in crisis, but having some concept of growing food and caring for livestock would, I think, make for better government. Our current president likes to think of himself as a cowboy, but the question I would have for him is one a friend of mine used to ask of those who were obviously phonies: “Have you ever rassel’d a steer down and given it an aspirin with a balling gun?”
Farmers do. As my friend says, “We’re the real cowboys.”
Columnist Jim Goodman is a writer, activist, and organic dairy farmer. He is currently a Food and Society Policy Fellow and lives in Wonewoc, WI. To learn more about Jim, and read more of his published work, you can visit the page devoted to him at the Food and Society Policy Fellows website.
David Walbert’s Backyard: The Life (and Death) Cycle
In June a black swallowtail butterfly laid a single egg in the window box of parsley on our front porch. Several days later an almost microscopic caterpillar emerged and did what caterpillars famously do. When it left its patch of parsley to become a chrysalis, we couldn’t find it in the tangled mess that a seller’s agent would call “shrubbery”, and we hoped for the best. The miracle of a butterfly is a cliché, but it’s a miracle my daughter, who is four, hadn’t yet witnessed, and she gave me daily — if not hourly — updates on the caterpillar’s progress. And, really, it’s a miracle that never grows old. When the aptly named “Parsley” went off into the wide world we were all a little disappointed that we wouldn’t see her emerge as a butterfly.
Then in early August another swallowtail appeared — and laid, this time, nine eggs that we could find. They had barely hatched when the butterfly was back to lay a dozen more. My daughter, of course, insists that the proud mama is Parsley herself, and she might well be, returning to her own safe nursery. Seven of the first — what do you call a bunch of caterpillars? A clutch? A litter? — survived, and this time we found all of their chrysalises attached to forsythia branches, the underside of porch steps, and the vinyl siding. As I write they are still hanging there, waiting.
Early in the summer, while eating dinner outside, we watched a nuthatch bring her several fledglings to the feeder I’d hung from a sweetgum branch near the picnic table. My wife remarked that she had seen a nuthatch at a park and none of the women she was with had ever seen one before. I was baffled; we’ve always had nuthatches. I don’t think of them as rare or extraordinary.
But nuthatches, like woodpeckers, nest in dead wood — in rotting trees, broken limbs, old woodpecker holes, or holes they’ve dug themselves in soft wood. And in the urban parks and suburban yards where most people see birds, there aren’t any dead trees. Once a suburban tree has ceased to be pretty, it’s removed (like a dried-out Christmas tree) before it has a chance to fall on someone’s house. Even dead limbs are quickly pruned, lest they crash through a windshield. Decay isn’t ornamental, and in crowded conditions it’s a liability.
So although nuthatches aren’t threatened with extinction, they need habitat that most people can’t see from their front porches. Which is a shame, because they’re pretty birds, and fun to watch, especially in late spring when they brought their young to our feeders. The juveniles, still fuzzy and awkward, buzzed in close to check us out while their mother fluttered impatiently from another tree: Get a move on! That part of the life cycle, like the butterfly’s emergence, is attractive to us humans. But it depends on another part of another life cycle — the slow death of a tree — that most of us would rather not have around.
Nobody wants a tree to fall on his or her house, but the aversion to dead trees isn’t all practical. The great dead oak just beyond my back fence, which long ago lost its limbs and most of its bark, seems beautiful to me — towering against the sky, a relic of decades past refusing to fall, reverberating with the insistent sounds of woodpeckers — but I expect I’m in a minority. If a kindergartner assigned to draw a tree slashed this single line of brown on the paper, it’s not hard to imagine the teacher’s reaction — a talk with the parents? Therapy? Your daughter draws dead trees. The correct, Platonic tree has spreading branches, flush with leaves — unless it’s winter, but even then we focus on the twigs and buds awaiting warmth. Dead trees aren’t pretty, and they remind us of things we’d rather not think about.
I notice, too, that while there are plenty of photo essays and children’s stories on the Internet about the “life cycle of a butterfly,” they chronicle only the period from egg to winged emergence. We don’t see what happens to the adult butterfly after she leaves the dried-out chrysalis and flies away. Nor do we see what happens to the mother after she lays her eggs. If, indeed, it was “Parsley” come back to our porch, we know what’s going to happen to her. When she laid her last eggs, her wing was torn. Butterflies don’t live long, and she was near the end of her life. Soon enough, she’ll be dead — eaten, perhaps, by one of our juvenile nuthatches, all grown up now at the end of summer.
Before summer ends, though, we’ll enjoy this last burst of new life — the happy, charismatic part of the cycle, a reminder of spring before fall sets in. The butterflies should start to emerge in a few days, and it will be time to plant more parsley.
Columnist David Walbert lives outside Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Kathryn Walbert, and daughter and too many animals. He is the author of Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America. You may find his website at www.newagrarian.com/
Judith Skillman: Five Poems
The Pleiades
You would be the flock of doves
that came close to no man
but hovered forever
near the horizon,
close to red eye of the bull.
It would be you who knew best
how to shun Orion—
warrior with the stunning belt of nebula.
You ushered in the sailing season
while the solstice moon floated
into that corner
of sky still reserved for star-gazing.
The six of you woven tightly
together, caring for one another
even given cancer.
If Sisyphus, a mortal,
could tempt the seventh one of you
into marriage it wouldn’t be
to extinguish that one,
rather to ignite and scatter her.
When my eye rests
on your cluster
I see through my myopia
a face lifted
towards me under crimped blonde curls.
Her blue eyes distort, like water in a glass,
the greatness of our father, who,
when he grew tired of holding up the world,
allowed a kingfisher
to poke holes in the reeds.
*
Another Ice Age
Grasshoppers fly from rocks
to roots to moss
to goats beard.
Queen Anne’s lace
opens its snowy doilies.
Bees make a heavy frieze
of Scotch Broom.
I wander farther
than the master ordered.
I grow sick with thoughts
of the homeland.
I pine for the highest
province—altitude,
the desert country
that never loved me back.
And when I stare down
at fire ants, I see
their segmented bodies—
half black, half red—
teeming millions
who rush from nest
to warfare like Lilliputian
soldiers. They cross twigs
and bent flowers
as though the works
of aggression could stopper
the brutal animal of ice,
that changeling
who lives off the crust
of the earth.
*
Blue Agate
See how it rounds
out the rock
like a jewel,
a sapphire
taken from the mines.
Only a wish,
a sparkle,
the hope of a counterfeit,
gem, a stone
kept in body of the earth
until it could
no longer pretend
that time would allow
it to become
what it would never be…
And yet, the color, that color—
where ice and cornflower
stand and wait
for the meeting
of sky and water.
*
Woods Shock
We pressed on into a clearing hung with ribbons of dusk. The cottonwood familiar—a relative huddled in a torn jacket, unwilling to leave the flowery sofa of comfort. We kept going. Trail-blazed. Alder ranches tore our faces and exposed arms. Crashed into moss of a ravine gone berserk with thirst. Meals bloomed like flowers in our minds and went to seed. The stars went from a pod of sky. Zenith grainy—sepia photo taken with a tripod, the woman in her starched collar, the man telling you nothing and nowhere again with his faraway eyes. Forty-eight hours since the circling began to take hold, thirty-six since the last bottle shook its rancid drip into my mouth. You were still too much the hero to admit we got lost in terrain so benign it could have escorted your ancestors east to west and set them down to grab an Aussie dinner on the barby. With dawn a light will burn, warm the bits of thannatos come down from the trees to visit us in this sleep we have no choice but to re-invent.
*
Five Orders of Vein on a Leaf
At the Stonerose museum and shop, housed in a house, the curator took her time. Her hands wandered over our specimens, numbering them, and she chose from our treasures one piece we brought along as an afterthought. A small chunk, thin as cardboard, on what was once a leaf. There inch-long veins followed right and left to intersect with the half-inch, quarter-inch, eighth-inch road, until, the boundary between sections bearing witness to having been broken into territories so small we understood how the smallest things undo us. Within the delicacy of line and blot, in triangles engraved by eons, lay meat for discussion. The paleontologists would meet downstairs, cool as if time had finally agreed to melt into one place and stay put. In the low tones of academe, their hats tossed off to one side, the experts might find something to put on a stand in a glass case.
*
Judith Skillman’s tenth book, Heat Lightning, New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006, was published by Silverfish Review Press. The Carnival of All or Nothing is forthcoming from Cervéna Barva Press in March, 2009. Skillman is the recipient of WPA’s William Stafford Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from Academy of American Poets, King County Arts Commission Publication Prize and Public Arts grant, and Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. Skillman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She has been a frequent Writer in Residence at Centrum. See www.judithskillman.com for more information.
By Monica Whitaker
The chicken in my bathtub ate instant Quaker oats. She picked at them warily. Perhaps she thought I’d rescued her from the busy intersection after her tumble from the poultry truck only to add her to a pot of carrots and potatoes. Each time I entered, she glanced reproachfully from her porcelain roost, squeezed next to the value-sized shampoo and conditioner bottles.
“I guess oatmeal is okay if you don’t have any mash or cracked corn,” my mother allowed when I phoned her with the details.
But I could tell by her tone that she harbored doubts about my first solo chicken rescue. It wasn’t just the need for cracked corn. Mom knew I’d snatched this hen from danger without a plan. I had the oats, a handful of stale Italian breadcrumbs and some toaster debris. In my 600-square-foot Nashville apartment, I clearly lacked the supplies and infrastructure for urban poultry rescue. And in my mother’s family, poultry preservation is serious business.
As early as the 1940s, my grandmother and her sisters, living in downtown Cleveland, had taken in pastel-dyed chicks, which Sears sold each year for Easter baskets. Long before the concept of animal rights, parents considered the baby poultry disposable, to be tossed out with the chocolate wrappers and dried grass shortly after the holiday. Our family gathered the neighbors’ abandoned birds, raised them in the basement of their tenement housing and shipped them to their mother’s dairy farm in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania when the chicks were old enough to make the trip.
A half century later, my own mother’s chicken rescue mobilized our suburban Cleveland family about the same time each year. It began when Mom, a substitute teacher, collected the live discards from kindergarten classroom egg incubation experiments. It ended every summer with a dozen live chickens transported across state lines in the rear seat of our Oldsmobile Delta 88.
I don’t recall the first time we started keeping chickens in our home. By the time I was a teenager, the practice had taken on a commonplace rhythm. The kindergarten teachers called their “chicken rescue lady”, who made her school rounds with a thick cardboard box. Each clutch came to our house or to my Aunt Tina’s where preparations had already been made.
In their earliest days, the chicks were confined to boxes, which could be moved in and out of the house for them to enjoy good weather (but not direct sunlight) or huddle comfortably in our home’s heat. They needed twice daily feeding, thrice daily watering and a nearly constant poop clearing. A soft white light bulb suspended low in the box offered warmth. As they grew, the chicks dropped their fluff and took on an awkward adolescent look – all mismatched feathers and scruff – while they learned how to scratch and peck for food and for dominance within their pack.
My brother, Stephan, and I helped with the evening round-up of the pre-teen chicks, which could roam in the confines of an outdoor pen but needed to come indoors to sleep. We scoured the neighbors’ curbs on garbage day, always on the lookout for a discarded baby playpen that could be turned upside down to make an outside chick enclosure. Old screens could be placed atop the chick’s boxes at night. After meals at home, we cut table scraps into tiny pieces so the chicks could practice eating real food. Stephan took the brunt of most early morning duties. The chicks generally slept in his bedroom, a converted porch on the main floor. At first light they tittered and scratched in their cardboard bunks, demanding food and freedom.
Ours was, at its core, a farm family in the city. The family dairy farm lasted three generations in Western Pennsylvania, ending its run with my grandmother and great uncle managing the land where they’d been raised. Since the 1930s, relatives in the region had shuttled from city homes to the country helping with milking, planting and harvesting. The farm had survived the Depression, drought and the downturn in the rural economy that reduced the number of American farms from 6.8 million in 1935 to just over 2 million in 1997. My grandmother’s dementia, my great uncle’s frailty and the unwillingness of anyone in my generation to work the land led to the dairy herd’s sale in 2000.
Even after the farm’s demise, our city chicken rescue survived. Without our own family farm to act as a permanent haven, my mother scouted for other, proper placements. Our Cleveland abode became the chicken halfway house for fowl headed to rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, to homes that promised a good life.
A hobby farming couple took a feisty young rooster for their flock. We gave chickens to one young man and to a couple in Pennsylvania who kept animals at their rural addresses. Once, my mother drove an hour to place a hen at a man’s Ohio farm but deemed the place unsuitably dirty and cramped. The chicken drove back home with her and waited weeks longer to be adopted.
By that time, my cousins, brother and I had all gone to college and gotten out-of-state city jobs. We had each worked on the farm from June to August, every summer, for years. We’d earned blisters, stank like manure, put up hay bales, and carried hundreds of buckets of water to bulls staked out in the fields. We’d risen at 5:00 a.m. to feed bawling calves and milk the herd. We’d stayed out in the fields till 9 p.m. to get a last load of oats in before the rain. And we’d walked away from the cow-and-chicken-caring lifestyle for good.
So even I was surprised at my recent reaction when I watched that chicken cross the road. She’d flapped through rush-hour traffic and was dodging tires just a few feet from the Tigermart gas station. South-bound traffic rolled past toward the I-440 on-ramp. A few disbelieving drivers slowed to gape.
My friend in the passenger’s seat burst out in giggles, pointing wildly.
“Is that a chicken? Oh my God, there’s a chicken!”
I didn’t see her at first but, having dropped my friend at work, I slowed near the intersection and turned into the gas station. By this time, the hen had made her way to the curb and was wandering between the gas pumps and a tire pressure island.
I thought I’d have to corral her, forcing her close to the building. But when I pulled near the tire pressure hose, she moved toward my vehicle. I opened the door slowly. She backed up. I got out. She stopped. We eyed one another a moment. I crossed behind to the other door and opened it as well, stepping away, watching. The chicken looked at me, looked at the car. First silently, then clucking and punching the air with her beak, she walked straight to the passenger’s side and hopped in. I walked to my Honda and shut both doors.
“What do you know about that chicken?” I asked the woman behind the Tigermart counter.
“Guy this morning came through here with a truck full of chickens and she fell out. He stopped and chased her around a while, but he couldn’t catch ‘er. He said he’d be back in a few hours but he ain’t come back. Why you askin’?”
“She’s in my car.”
The woman stared, disbelieving.
“I’m going to take her home. She can’t stay out here with this traffic,” I explained. “Here,” I took a piece of receipt paper off the counter and wrote my phone number on it. “If he comes back, tell him to call me and I’ll get her back to him.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going to eat that chicken, huh?”
The hen sat quietly on the passenger’s seat as I pulled back into traffic. I turned on National Public Radio, looking for soothing classical music, but it was already rush-hour drive-time news and she clucked distressingly at the noise. I switched it off.
At home, I gathered her carefully in a towel with her head poking out like a swaddled babe. We moved through the living room, past my cat and into the cool, quiet bathroom. There she stayed for three days while the cat sniffed and paced nervously outside the door, and I tried to decide what to do next.
“Do you know anybody with a farm? Know anybody who would want to raise a chicken?” I asked co-workers, the secretaries at school and strangers at Starbucks. My queries got laughs and a few offers from people willing to roast her.
“You mean you got that chicken on West End?” one man chuckled. “That chicken was on the news. It caused a traffic jam that morning.”
“KFC would take ‘er,” another man suggested.
By the third day, I was bemoaning my alienation from the rural life, examining the social distance that we city folk had put between ourselves and the farmers. No one here seemed to know anyone who would care for a chicken. I was flouting apartment bylaws and city codes keeping her in the tub. My cat had taken on a nervous twitch, and my bathroom held the acid stench of a coop.
Then, through a Starbucks encounter, I met the owner of a landscaping company who also volunteered with a no-kill animal shelter. The shelter wouldn’t take on a chicken, but the woman promised to ask around.
“There’s a guy I know who does mulch and dirt for us, who has a little farm,” she suggested.
She made the contact, I followed the call and a rendezvous point was arranged.
We met in the McDonald’s parking lot in tiny Ashland City, 20 minutes outside of town. Thankfully, they didn’t have a McNuggets banner up. The chicken, pillowed atop her towel, rested in the footwell of the car’s passenger side.
Her potential keeper was a broad man, 50ish, driving a nice, new pickup. He had dirt on his hand, but he didn’t apologize for it as he shook mine.
“So you got her in a box or a cage or something?” he asked, nodding at my car’s tinted windows.
“No,” I said. “Just a towel. I was wondering if, maybe, I could follow you to your farm to see where she’d be set up.”
The farmer studied me a moment. “You’re welcome to. It’s a far piece. You’ll have to follow me out.”
After a half hour of back road twisting and turning, we pulled up to his drive. The land sat back behind a wooded lot, blocked by a new gate that swung inward automatically. A paved road turned to gravel, wound past a field of well-fed beefers and swung into a cul-de-sac in front of a trim house and new gray barn. Fields rolled gently in each direction. Cattle lowed from their pasture on the left and spring calves sidled shyly next to their mothers.
“We don’t get many visitors up here,” he said.
I stepped out and looked around, stunned at the newness, the picture-perfect quality of it all, and I knew that my rescue mission had brought this chicken to a good place.
The hen house stood behind the barn, two-stories tall with a running-board entrance so the chickens could come and go at their leisure. A high fence surrounded the structure. The farmer said he’d dug a trench and run the mesh two feet into the ground to keep ferrets and foxes from tunneling under and snatching hens at night. The set-up would make Mom proud, I thought.
My chicken made low, throaty gulping sounds when we set her down inside the enclosure. I shook the farmer’s hand and took one last look around.
“Come back any time,” he said.
I nodded enthusiastically at the offer. But I haven’t been back. I’ve lost his phone number. And, though I’ve tried to retrace it several times, I just can’t seem to remember the way.
Monica Whitaker, formerly a reporter for The Tennessean, is now a freelance writer and ESL teacher in Nashville, Tennessee.
Rodger Moody: Three Poems
Two Cents
I was fifteen and loitering at the swimming pool
when she drove up, middle-aged and frumpy,
asking all the boys if they’d like to make a little
pocket money. It was summer and hay bales
were resting in the fields, heavy enough.
I couldn’t see the end of the week
or work gloves and scratched forearms.
I couldn’t have known her husband
would work his own boys, the ten year old
driving the flatbed in the hayfield,
the dark father yelling directions as he walked off the dry field.
Everyone is paid 2 cents a bale. Haymows
are a dusty and a close space, air hot in your lungs.
Sometimes the farmer’s wife would feed you.
One job a farmer’s son sat with us at a picnic table beneath a tree,
his left forearm flat on the table above his plate,
he leaned over the food as if it were gold,
shoving spoonfuls into his mouth with his other,
free hand. Another had chickens
and ate eggs every meal, every other word
out of his mouth a curse. Two cents a bale.
You could work sunup to sundown,
make twenty bucks. I remember
reaching for baling wire as I drifted in my bed — a hay bale
all I could see when I closed my eyes.
*
Williamsport, Indiana, 1965
The streets are numbered
or named for presidents
The entire town is skirted by farms
with rolling fields
The water tower looms green
The fairgrounds steam crowded every fourth of July
Girls kiss boys
behind the cattle barns or in the pavilion
beyond the swimming pool
And after hours when the park lights flicker out
the presidents pick a number — all of it
fades into the black dirt under a farmer’s thumbnail
*
Bridge
Something was pushing me out of father’s slow moving car.
I could see whirlpools below and imagined
being pulled under by the current,
arms flailing like a man falling from a tall building,
Pig lots, cows in the distance
announced themselves with the wind.
Too scared to dive for mussels
with the other boys
I thought of forgotten canal mules walking purposefully
along the levee as they tugged barges down or up river.
I wanted to fit in, or to go unnoticed.
A river tunneling through the days.
Rodger Moody is the founding editor of Silverfish Review Press. His poems and prose poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Caliban, upstreet, and Small Farmer’s Journal. New work is forthcoming in Eclipse and Dislocate Literary Journal. A chapbook, Unbending Intent, was published by 26 Books (Portland, Oregon, 1997). He has made his living as a warehouse worker for the last twenty-three years.
The backyard for which this column is named — the literal backyard, at least, the one directly behind my house — has never been in danger of winning any awards from glossy design magazines. Plantain rules a few patches where I let the ducks graze too freely. The old garden bed the dogs use for naps is grown up in weeds that are fascinating in their diversity and virulence but neither productive nor conventionally attractive. And one corner is littered with the detritus of a series of projects and incidents, planned and unplanned, that beset us last year. To wit:
• The wooden structure that used to shelter our ducks, an open frame of two-by-fours with a roof of plywood and tin. For several years after we moved the ducks to better quarters it stood under our second-story deck and kept bales of straw dry, but when we had the deck rebuilt last summer I took it apart and moved it, figuring I’d reassemble it as soon as the new deck was finished. I didn’t. A tarp keeps the straw dry, and the structure lies in pieces in a shady and unused corner of the yard.
• Three foot-diameter logs from a tree blown down across the fence; I sawed it up but the logs were too heavy to move any farther.
• A metal pole that used to hold up one end of a clothesline, still attached to the block of cement that held it in the ground before it was dug up to make room for a new septic tank.
• A stack of white plastic chairs, beneath which the grass has grown unmowed since early spring. (I don’t remember my excuse for leaving the chairs there.)
All of this would appear to the casual observer to be junk, but it’s hidden from the street by a post-and-rail fence and, at the moment, a half-dozen tomato plants, and the casual observer has no business standing in my backyard for a closer look. I have a vague, gnawing Calvinist guilt about it, and one day I’ll clean it all up.
In the meantime, my excuse for leaving the mess is that the dogs love it. They snuffle under the chairs at whatever is hiding in the tall grass. They walk across the tin roof several times a day for no reason I can discern — that corner of the yard is far more easily accessible — except to hear the metallic rattle. They use the logs as balance beams. They seem happier, in short, to have all this mess to explore.
If you go to zoos — modern, progressive zoos with open habitats instead of cages — you’ll see that a lot of energy and expense goes into keeping the animals mentally stimulated. They have flowing water, rocks to climb, multiple perches, ropes to swing from, indestructible balls — whatever will keep them amused. Animals are happiest in varied environments. So, logically enough, are my dogs.
Somehow we rarely think to apply these lessons to ourselves, but something similar seems to be true of humans as well. I’ve noticed that among our neighbors there is an inverse relationship between the amount of perfect grass in their yards and the amount of time they spend actually using it. The manicured lawns sit vacant like princesses while the half-tended, half-wooded lots teem with children and conversations. Not that working in the yard precludes enjoying it; some spend time and money on flowers and shrubs and then sit or walk among them, but the yards where the shrubs are most vigorously pruned and brought to order are sadly silent. The family in the Scott’s commercials — the kids running wide circles on the fairway-clipped grass, the parents cheerfully sipping lemonade in expensive wrought-iron chairs from which they survey their scientifically guaranteed domain — doesn’t exist. At least not around here.
I’ve read a number of articles and books lately about why the traditional big American lawn is bad: It provides no habitat for native insects and wildlife; it requires chemicals and gas-powered equipment for maintenance; it uses too much water. All true, but maybe there’s a psychological reason we should scrap the “perfect” lawn– perfection is inhuman. It’s something to be worshiped from afar; up close, it’s off-putting and probably boring. The great suburban lawn is your grandmother’s white sofa on which no one was allowed to sit, the cake so beautifully decorated that no one will take the first slice, the leggy blonde no boy dares ask to dance. It’s no wonder we spend all our time inside: If we went out, we might mess up the lawn. And what is there to do on it, anyway?
At the same time all this mess was accumulating in our backyard last fall, on the other side of the yard I had to plant grass. I had never in my life planted grass — I’m happy with weeds and moss if it’s free and low-maintenance — but the installation of a new septic tank reduced a third of the yard to bare clay, and I had no choice. I bought pickup-loads of topsoil, bags of fertilizer, and grass seed; fenced off the new lawn, bedded it down with straw, and waited for spring.
Fungus on Fallen Pine by Kathryn Walbert
Now it’s a broad, soft, even expanse of lush green in which any self-respecting suburbanite would rejoice. It’s also the least-used part of our entire property. My daughter plays soccer and croquet in the tiny front yard, blows bubbles in a half-cleared bit of woods, or runs down the nature trail building fairy houses from bark and pine cones. My wife and I sit in the clearings or walk the trail. This week we spent the better part of an afternoon in the woods looking for interesting fungi that have emerged in the recent wet spell. (And let me tell you: our part of North Carolina has a lot of fungi.) The dogs get the backyard, and they, as I’ve said, thoroughly lack appreciation for the achievements of modern lawn science. We go out there to play with them, and that’s about all. The lawn looks nice from the new deck, but honestly, I’d rather see the fireflies whose grubs were destroyed when the old wiregrass was dug up. We have a few this year, but not as many as before. They don’t seem to think much of the new lawn, either.
Columnist David Walbert lives outside Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Kathryn Walbert, and daughter and too many animals. He is the author of Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America. You may find his website at http://www.newagrarian.com/
We often think that farmers markets are a product of our times as they spring up in cities and small towns across the country. Truth is, farmers markets are the traditional way of selling agricultural produce around the world.
The really nice aspect of this transaction is that the farmer receives just compensation for his product and the eater can be assured the product is fresh, local and grown in a manner that is acceptable to all. If these criteria are not met, the consumer can look for another farmer whose products better suit his or her needs.
After the industrialization of agriculture, farmers still sold at farmers markets, but it was just a matter of time before supermarkets were developed and farmers started selling to large companies that moved food all over the world; many Americans stopped planting gardens because it was so much easier to get “everything” at the store.
We certainly have gained something through the globalized food system: more variety, foods we cannot grow in cold climates and, of course, cheap food that is mass-produced by underpaid farmers and farm workers. Some good news, some bad. I certainly like coffee and chocolate, but I want to know the growers and workers were paid a fair wage and that it was grown in an environmentally- responsible manner. I would like to be sure all the food I need to buy meets those same standards, whether imported or locally grown.
So, we come back to farmers markets– local, fair, green and affordable. I am, as you can tell, a big fan of farmers markets and it’s not just because we are vendors at the farmers market in Madison, Wisconsin. I, too, can get vegetables that don’t grow well in our garden, as well as pork, eggs, fruit, chicken and lamb. I know all the growers personally, where they live, their children, and we get to enjoy each others’ company every Saturday morning. True, getting up at 3:30am to get to the market isn’t always so much fun, nor are those occasional cold or rainy Saturdays when few customers show up.
Understandably, not everyone is all about farmers markets. One of our customers, who we see very infrequently, showed up with his wife the other day and said going to the market involved three of his least favorite things: getting up early, shopping and crowds. Well, to each his own.
While the supermarket may eliminate getting up early, it still involves shopping and crowds and has little to offer in the way of fresh, local or fair food. Affordable, yes, but we know the affordability of mainstream food relies on low-wage farmers, and industrial farming practices that in turn rely on heavy use of chemicals, large-scale animal production and hidden costs to the environment.
We also know that the nutritional content of that supermarket food has been in steady decline for decades. We know most of our winter vegetables are imported and possibly grown in a manner that is not healthy, fair or green. Even the USDA, which touts our food as the safest in the world, (despite dramatically increasing numbers of food poisoning incidents) is critical of the declining nutritional content.
According to the USDA, Americans are increasingly deficient in calcium, potassium, magnesium and vitamins A, C, D and E. This lack of vitamins and minerals in our diet is indicative of depleted soils world wide, caused by industrial farming practices. A comparison of today’s soil mineral content across the world with that of 100 years ago shows an average decline of mineral levels of roughly 80%. No wonder supermarket food is lacking in nutrition!
Another statistic from the USDA’s Economic Research Service indicates that if all Americans were to eat in accordance with the dietary guidelines establish by USDA, we would need an additional 14.1 million acres for fruit and vegetable production and would be short 111 billion pounds of milk per year. Granted, Americans will never eat according to the USDA guidelines, which are probably too heavy on milk and meat and way too short on vegetable consumption. Still, even the USDA concedes we are a food deficit nation; globalization is apparently not working, for we depend on the rest of the world to feed us while many of them are starving.
While the practices of the industrial “Green Revolution” did increase food production, it appears it did little for food quality. Industrial production of the cheap food that fills our supermarkets is slowly starving us. It all sort of adds up: food safety scares, declining food quality, the world food crisis, all these abysmal failures of food production and marketing will eventually bring food production back to the local level. Local producers quickly learn that caring for the soil and making it healthy again produces healthy, nutrient dense food for both people and animals.
Could we be entering a renaissance in food production and eating? Many think we are, for many small reasons that together add up to the overwhelming conclusion that we can no longer ship our food 1,500 miles or more from farm to table; industrial farming has crested the hill and is on the downhill slide.
Oil will never be cheap again and climate change has made world food production very uncertain. Developing countries can produce more food that is more appropriate to their cultures if they are allowed to use traditional production practices as opposed to industrial farming practices. Local producers world-wide know that hands on farming affords a better way to care for the soil and produce healthy food.
Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper speculated on what the future and the future of food might look like, from giant chickens to hose-fed, genetically engineered bananas the size of a cruise missile. I know, it’s just a movie, but Monsanto may be working on it. Forget the movies. The future of food is local.
When one farms locally, or supports local agriculture, he or she may, at first, miss the convenience of the old cheap, globalized food system. Change for the better is seldom easy, but always worth it. There will still be getting up early, shopping and crowds, but in the end, I think, local farmers and eaters have more fun and live better for it.
Columnist Jim Goodman is a writer, activist, and organic dairy farmer. He is currently a Food and Society Policy Fellow and lives in Wonewoc, WI. To learn more about Jim, and read more of his published work, you can visit the page devoted to him at the Food and Society Policy Fellows website.
The Hard Way
We are, for better or worse, part of the land we live on. We can choose to extract as much as possible from the earth around us, the “Manifest Destiny” (or nature’s in my way) line of thinking. Or we can take as little as necessary and leave as small a trace as possible, the “Seventh Generation” concept of the Native American peoples. If farming well were easy and profitable, everyone would be doing it. Farming is never easy, no matter how you go about it, but at least when we farm with nature it’s not a 24/7 battle.
Responsible farmers, organic advocates, environmentalists, etc. see nature’s way as our attempt to fit into the environment in the least invasive way possible. We realize that, no matter what we do, nature is in control; we cannot dominate for long. Eventually our best laid plans will fail, our monuments will fall, our cities will vanish and nature will go on in spite of us.
Since we are not fatalistic at heart, we try to find our place within nature. Farming depends on nature; it succeeds on our knowledge and a certain amount of luck. Farming fails when we are ignorant of nature or when we ignore its cycles and diversity.
Farmers, for example, learned that they couldn’t plow up and down the hills and that they needed to leave some sod strips to slow the water down as it followed the pull of gravity. They had to add nutrients and organic matter back to the soil with manure or plant matter if they wanted any kind of crop. Planting the same crop year after year depleted the soil and allowed weeds and insects to establish themselves as the natural diversity and competition were lost. Nature abhors a vacuum; weeds and grass want to fill the void when a field is plowed.
So from the beginning farmers struggled, trying to grow the crops they wanted in an environment that wasn’t always receptive to their efforts. Droughts, floods, hail, frost, insects and weeds; farmers always struggled with them, and it was never easy. They farmed in deserts and irrigated; they farmed in the north and developed crops that could grow in the short seasons; they raised animals, grains, fruits and vegetables. Some years they were lucky and had good crops, some years not. They cursed too much rain and prayed when they needed more, hoping in time things would balance out.
This has been a hard year in my part of Wisconsin, and we hope things will start balancing out soon.
The weather turned against us in May of last year. We had a nice rain on Mother’s Day, then for nearly three months we watched the pastures dry up, the corn shrivel and the dust blow. Some said be careful what you wish for; when the rains start it might not turn out as well as we had hoped. And, of course, they were right. In early August the rains returned to Southwestern Wisconsin, in some places nearly twenty inches in a week’s time.
The meteorologists said it was a “hundred year rain”, thus the hundred year floods. Farmers saw not only their crops washed away, but their soil as well. Fences, roads and bridges, all were swept away by the water that only days before we had been praying for.
Our farm is on a ridge, so other than some ditches, minor soil erosion and a crop of oats we couldn’t harvest, things didn’t look too bad. While the cows slogged through the mud, we felt lucky we were spared, yet we were sad for those who had lost so much. As things greened up after the rain, we felt fortunate that our heavy soils had held enough moisture, even through the drought, to keep things alive. Nature did balance things out and although the crops were late, they yielded well.
The cows were on good pasture until early December when the snows started and never seemed to let up. Over a hundred inches of snow fell from December through April and we worked and fed cattle in what became a series of white trenches connecting the farm buildings.
The snow melted slowly and with the hundred year rain and the hundred inches of snow behind us, we waited for the warm winds of spring. And we waited. It was an abnormally cool spring and a wet one. Some of the early planted corn didn’t come up or came up yellow and stunted. We plant our corn late, intentionally, the end of May or early June, to miss getting pollinated by the neighbors’ early planted GM corn. I guess that’s the official excuse, but sometimes we are just late.
Then on June 7-8 we got another hundred year rain: ten inches in thirty-six hours. Flooding was worse than last August. Many small towns were cut off as roads were flooded, bridges were washed out and power lines knocked down. Again, farmers had their crops submerged and they watched as their soil washed down the Kickapoo, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi rivers. Even on our high ridge the heavy downpour was enough to collapse the concrete walls of our manure storage pit. It was empty and thankfully there is no threat of a manure spill, but now we face building a new structure, costing at least $ 100,000.
As I write, it is raining again. We have measured another two inches and east of us over four inches has fallen. Several towns are evacuating and there is no travel permitted in our county. WWII amphibious “ducks” from the Wisconsin Dells are moving people to emergency shelters. Many highways are closed in spots, including Interstate 94 and 39. Tornadoes and straight line winds have destroyed homes, farms and other infrastructure. About half of our farm lies in Vernon County where the initial damage estimate was $60 million. Since that estimate, close to six more inches of rain have fallen, and the worst of the damage may still be under water.
Are we better off because we farm organically, with much of the land in pasture and hay? I think so. It really is not a question of “organic” vs. “conventional”; it is a question of being a part of the world around us, rather than trying to conquer the world. We need to fit in, just as farmers have fit in for thousands of years. They made mistakes and took their knocks like we did last week. We lost some soil in a few fields, but no more than the “no-till” farmers that rely on chemicals rather than cultivation to control their weeds. I know that none of the toxic chemicals headed for the Gulf of Mexico in the flood waters washed out of our fields, and there is some comfort in that.
What will come up when the floodwaters recede across the Midwest? It won’t be corn and beans. Look for grass and weeds.
Columnist Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer in Wonewoc, WI. He has published essays in the Madison Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is a fellow of the Food and Society Fellows Program.
David Walbert’s Backyard: A Small Patch of Dirt
When I write about gardening I sometimes, without meaning to, give the impression that I wake every morning to survey a vast domain of neatly tilled beds and a refrigerator bursting with home-grown produce. In fact we have very little space. We own an acre and a quarter, but nearly all of it is wooded; very little gets enough sun to support a garden — and most of that is in the backyard, which has the twin disadvantage of being underlaid by a septic field and being overrun by basset hounds. The former means we can’t dig, while the later means that anything we do plant will be dug up.
When we first bought the house we built raised beds and gardened in the sunny backyard. Our dogs then didn’t dig; their only interest in the garden was the occasional low-hanging cherry tomato or a baby watermelon too easily mistaken for a tennis ball. But they’ve passed on, and our new dogs think a raised bed is a sandbox. Any fence that doesn’t prevent easy weeding is no match for their barrel chests and stubborn wills. The backyard once produced great quantities of cucumbers, peppers, beans, and sugar snap peas, but seedlings no longer stand a chance. Last winter I dug up and sheet-composted some new ground at the bottom of the driveway, about eight feet by twenty, enough for greens and potatoes. But I hated to waste all those carefully constructed raised beds.
Potatoes were the only crop I could think of that might be basset proof. Before our daughter Ivy was born we used to grow them in bins: three short metal fenceposts supporting a ring of chickenwire, lined with newspaper and burlap. As the plants grew we piled more dirt into the bins, and when they died back we took down the wire and combed through to find the potatoes. Simple enough, and a good use of a small space.
So in early March I built four bins, two in each of a pair of four-by-eight raised beds, and Ivy helped me plant some Pontiacs and Kennebecs from the garden store down the highway. Sure enough, after I built the bins this spring and planted the potatoes, our dog Sadie found her way into one of them — and couldn’t find her way back out. An hour or two in chickenwire prison was enough, and after that she left them alone. Last week we harvested the first two of four bins, and Ivy declared them the best potatoes she ever ate in her whole life.
Few gardeners grow potatoes, perhaps thinking they’re too mundane to be interesting. But although my wife has experimented with raspberries and (quite successfully) with shiitake mushrooms, it’s the potatoes that are the real vanity crop. There is an obvious benefit to growing your own tomatoes – even at a farmer’s market you don’t get the real pick of the crop; if you want fruit at its absolute peak of ripeness, you must grow it yourself. Snap beans, too, are best if you pick them in small batches as they’re ready and you want them, instead of once a week on Friday for market. Ditto cucumbers and zucchini. And it’s relatively easy to grow all you can eat of those crops for a few months in a fairly small patch of dirt.
Potatoes are harder to justify. In a small space we can grow only a fraction of what we’d eat over the course of a season. From our first two bins we harvested eight pounds of red-skinned potatoes; we could have had more, but the plants wilted young — a disadvantage of buying garden-store variety potatoes not certified against disease, but mail-order seed potatoes are just too expensive in small quantities. Eight pounds wasn’t too bad for a 4-by-8-foot bed and a half-serious attempt, but it won’t last more than a couple of weeks, especially the way Ivy has begun eating potatoes.
The difference in flavor is subtle, but interesting if you pay close attention. Potatoes freshly dug — and I mean freshly dug, eaten within a few hours or few days after they left the ground — have a richness and complexity of flavor that they seem to lose after even a few weeks in a bag or a barrel. They become a vegetable, a meaningful food, even the centerpiece of a meal instead of just the starch you toss on the plate next to an oversized hunk of meat. And you could experiment with varieties beyond the standard red, white, and yellow — cranberry, blue, carola, all the rainbow varieties my farmer friends grow for direct sale — although we didn’t; we grew whatever the garden center happened to have in stock.
Potatoes are educational for kids, of course, and fun even for grownups. They defy the standard plant-a-seed-and-watch-it-grow procedure everyone learned in elementary school, and that the food is hidden under mounds of earth is nearly magical to a kid.
But the real reason I enjoy growing potatoes is precisely that they are so mundane. They’re basic food, carbs, the staff of life for a billion people. If I combine fresh-dug potatoes with eggs from my ducks, a tomato or summer squash and some herbs, I’ve got a full meal. Potatoes may not impress the way a fresh Cherokee Purple tomato impresses, but if I can learn to grow them in my backyard, then feeding myself is only a matter of scale.
—Or so I like to think. As I said, it’s a vanity. I have a lot to learn about growing potatoes. But backyard gardening is as much about the inspiration as the yield, after all. Even if I’m only playing at self-sufficiency, play can teach us a lot about who we are or would like to be.
And that one entirely home-grown meal a year tastes mighty good. Maybe even the best I ever ate in my whole life.
Columnist David Walbert lives outside Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and daughter and too many animals. He is the author of Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America. You may find his website at The New Agrarian: http://www.newagrarian.com/
