Winter on the farm is always difficult. Even in years like this one, when the weather stays mostly mild and the number of livestock to care for is diminished, winter is miserable. The best thing about farming in the winter is that there isn’t much farming to do: the rat race of weekly markets winds down, and the animals are centralized in the home field and easy to care for. The most labor intensive aspects of the farm, the moving of fencing and stock, are eliminated in favor of ease of management. Winter is a time when there are few chores…and more time to bitch about just how bad those chores are.

Having a farm in New England really means having two farms, the farm in the warm months, and the ‘farm’ in the winter. While the two bear superficial similarities, they operate quite differently, and they take different tolls on the farmer’s mood. In winter, the worries and labors of the summer all mostly vanish, to be replaced by a new set of aches and concerns. In some ways, the two farms are mirror mockeries of each other. Water is an concern year round, but in the drought of July it’s an issue of scarcity, while in the icy clutch of January it’s more an issue of physical form. To a thirsty cow, a stock tank frozen solid is as bad as one drained dry. Similarly, the challenges of the warmer months are shifting and unpredictable, while the problems of winter tend to harden up and remain problems till spring. Misplaced fencing is tough to move when the ground is as hard as iron.

In winter, the farm is also reduced in size and scope, and in the intangible pleasures that make the farm worthwhile in the first place. Our farm here encompasses just over one hundred acres, but for a good five months of the year that size is drastically curtailed. The hens and hogs are brought into a barnyard area barely over an acre in size, the cows come down into their five acre home field, and my daily domain is limited to those scant few acres of manageable winter housing. It’s the only practical solution when the blizzards heap snow and the winds howl, but it tends to get horribly claustrophobic. There is little option but to slowly watch the winter accommodations turn to barren brown mud flats – sacrificial fields that won’t green up until I reseed them in spring. Snow, when it comes, is as much relief from that universal mud as it is cause for struggle of its own. And, as the mud and shit slowly accumulate during the months of confinement, I’m reminded by the stream of passing traffic that this, the ugliest part of farming, is on display for all the world: my winter fields sit right beside the busy road, presenting a decidedly unappealing image for anyone passing on Route 109.

This winter has been mercifully mild, yet not without its own discomforts. We’ve seen dramatic swings in temperature, leading to alternating periods of thawing and freezing. A mid-winter warm spell seemed at first like a welcome change, until the tractor started leaving deep ruts and furrows all across the barnyard. When the cold weather returned once more, the ruts froze, and now the barnyard has the tooth-rattling texture of a washboard. Merely feeding hay with the tractor is now a jarring exercise in lower back pain.

Morale tends to be at it’s nadir in winter, as does the farm bank account. Short days, looming darkness, and unavoidable bills all take a hefty toll. Recently, an failure in the frost-free cattle hydrant led to an emergency visit from the plumber and a punishing bill. While not catastrophic, there’s little money coming in this time of year. Any further crisis could be backbreaking. So I bide my time, keep an eye on the long-range weather forecast, and hope for the best.

There’s a malaise in the air this time of year. It’s late February; we’re closer to the end of the season than the beginning. Lately, it seems that March is another bonafide winter month, with blizzards and ice storms occurring with greater frequency, but even so March is the end. But it’s not a question of surviving winter, I always have. It’s a question of making it through with my wits and drive intact. If you’ve ever seen a deep fissure in an otherwise solid stone and wondered how such a crack could form, it doesn’t form by way of sudden disaster or misfortune. No, a large crack forms from a small one, and the repeated thawing and freezing, freezing and thawing of ice, the rock-breaking testament to minute forces at work over time. That’s what winter can be like on the farm. Thaw, freeze. Thaw, freeze. Thaw….freeze.

Crack.

I’m not exactly a ray of sunshine. I aged into the role of curmudgeon early, and have spent the last decade or so refining and perfecting my own brand of homespun cynicism. I find my pleasures in life, to be sure, but in a world that so often seems to be sliding gracelessly into ruin, a healthy dose of misanthropy seems only appropriate.

I mention this as preamble to the fact that I found myself this past weekend regaling a crowd of fellow farmers with an uplifting anecdote about slaughtering a runaway steer in the parking lot of an industrial park. It wasn’t the sort of tale I think they’d shown up for, but it was about all I had to offer. To clarify, the gathering where I spoke was an annual meeting of the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance. They call it the ‘Hootenanny’. The NCFA is a swell little organization that I’ve been quasi-involved with for the last six or seven years. It’s the local branch of a national movement designed to connect the upcoming generation of mostly young folks looking to make a life in agriculture. At ten years into the farm, I’m not sure I qualify as a ‘new’ farmer, but I’m happy to have a chance to drink a few free beers, chat with the friends I don’t see often enough, and tell the occasional horrifying and depressing story of agricultural misadventure.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t foist my tale of misery of the crowd uninvited. Every year the get together has a storytelling session that they call Cabbage Moth Radio, after The Moth Radio Hour, an public radio program focusing on amateur raconteurs. Several years back I was asked if maybe I had a good story to present to help get the show rolling. I’m not one to turn down a request, but I was a tad reluctant: when all is well on the farm things tend to move along in a smooth and boring fashion, and so all my engaging experiences come from moments of tragedy and disorder. So that evening I told the crowd-pleasing yarn of how my vet and I had struggled together in the middle of a rainstorm to birth a turned calf, both of us with an arm up to the elbow in the poor laboring cow. The birth ended badly with a dead calf, and ultimately a dead cow, and I left the audience with no clear moral to the story and, instead, a festivity-derailing sense of lingering doom. I wisely took the next few years off from storytelling duties.

But this year I was asked again to offer up an anecdote, and again I had to turn to the wellspring of disaster which seems to engulf the farm on a regular basis. I leavened this years tale of bovine atrocity as best I could, gallows humor being a favorite medium of mine, but even with the laughs it was a sad story. I’ll leave the full telling of it for another day, but suffice it to say that it involved me chasing an escaped steer, with blood streaming from my newly knocked-down face, and then my having to cut the wounded animal’s throat as it stumbled about in the parking lot besides the slaughterhouse. A fun account, and sure to please.

The story was received politely, if not enthusiastically; my wife at the very least told me I’d done a fine job and no one outright shunned me for the remainder of the evening. I offered the story as a cautionary tale, one that might not be fun to hear but is worth hearing. It was a story of how even the best laid plans can unexpectedly go wrong in an instant. That remains all too true in agriculture, a lifestyle dependent on weather, machinery, and the cooperation of large and unruly livestock. I wonder if this isn’t the best use of my natural negativity: to settle into the role of crotchety old doomsayer of my farming community. I could show up from time to time to make dire pronouncements and offer rueful tales of faming gone wrong, and then hobble off to my corner to sip whiskey and mutter. The young farmers would regard me with a shiver and refer to me as ‘Old Man Truelove’, and I’d curse the folly of youth and remind them that winter must always follow summer. That sounds just like the sort of role my bitter little heart has been aching to play all along. Bah humbug.

Spiny, cold, vaguely arachnid in aspect: the lobster was not endearing. He was big though, six pounds or so, and he seemed venerable because of his size, if not lovable. There was a certain air of alien dignity about him, for he must have lived long years in his dark and frigid North Atlantic home. There was a pitiable impotence to him as well, his enormous claws rendered functionless by rubber bands. His was an inscrutable  countenance. His eyes were depthless and his antennae moved barely at all. His mottled shell of blue and rust iron and verdigris was little proof against whatever forces I would turn against him. His legs twitched, but there seemed little fight left, and as we regarded each other the inevitable end was already written.

It was an odd scene for Valentine’s Day. My wife had splurged the evening before and brought us home two Homarus for a special dinner in. One was a bantam weight bug of a pound and quarter, about the usual size I’ve been acquainted with, but the other was the afformentioned bruiser. The role of lobster wrangler, executioner, and chef du cuisine would fall to me. And so it was that as the Valentine’s evening darkened around the house and an orchid, book, and card waited thoughtfully for my wife’s return from work, I contemplated the fathomless thoughts of an overgrown oceanic arthropod.

How much was really going on between those beady black eyes? What conception of existence did those lobsters truly have and what culpability did I have in their approaching demise? I won’t say I didn’t feel some guilt. But was that guilt merely a product of misplaced anthropomorphism, or an all-too human respect for age? Would I feel the same having to kill a spider, or chopping down a tree that had stood for a century? Neither is a thing I’d do without reason or compunction, but nor am I some veil-wearing Jainist, unwilling to inhale a gnat or trod on a worm. I’ve killed plenty of animals I cared about more, and long since made peace with a more cyclical view of life, death, and consumption.

But the lobster did give me pause. He was far less cognoscente of the world, I’m sure, than a hog or a cow or a turkey, and I’ve made a life on raising those animals for the table. Maybe it was the luxury of it that rankled me. It was one thing to raise and slaughter an animal to sustain myself and sustain the farm, but the thought of pulling a creature from his benthic domain for the sole purpose of treating ourselves to his, admittedly, sweet and buttery flesh was a touch problematic. Had he been treated well in transit? Maybe, but unlikely. Was the lobster fishery sustainable? It’s fairly well managed from what I understand, and some sources say that a decrease in predator populations has lead to a resurgence in lobster numbers. Was I going to let my own doubt and sympathy prevail and drive our erstwhile Valentine’s dinner back to the sea for a clumsy release into the foreign waters of Long Island sound? Of course not.

In the end I did for the lobsters what I try to do for all animals I raise and consume: I killed them as quickly as possible and appreciated their sacrifice as best I could. With a sharp knife I bisected their thoraxes (a live dunking into boiling water is more barbaric and wholly unnecessary). I cooked them simply and well, and my wife and I ate every morsel, and were grateful. Now the shells are boiling away for stock, and the lobsters will give us one more meal as a bisque or paella or risotto. I don’t know if the lives of lobsters are worth more or less than some others that are laid before the culinary altar, but I will say that rarely has a meal been more enjoyed, or so lovingly baptized with butter. Maybe in whatever oceanic burrow he calls home, the cold-eyed, predatory god of crustaceans nibbles on detritus and clicks his claws in approval.

Or maybe he just waits, hungrily, for the next time I go for a swim.

I’m a luddite at heart. I don’t take well to new-fangled technology, more apt to smacking things in anger than to Googling solutions. I have an inherent mistrust of hi-tech machinery in general, and a deep-seated paranoia about what will happen when all the circuitry and bandwidth we’ve come to rely on inevitably craps out on us. When that day comes, and we’re squatting in our dark, unheated homes and plaintively asking our useless smartphones for Alexa to save us, I’d rather count myself among the survivors. I’d rather put my faith in an axe, or a pocketknife, or a cast iron pan, something tangible and solid and comprehendible. But lately my view on hi-tech gadgets has started to soften, just slightly.

It’s food that’s begun to convince me. Even now, pecking away at this keyboard with all the grace and bearing of a stone-browed Neanderthal, I’m putting the latest of kitchen wizardry to good use. One of my Christmas gifts this year was the much talked about Instant Pot, a modernized version of that old and terrifying staple, the pressure cooker. I’ve got a batch of pork shoulder steaming away at this very moment, ready to be shredded into carnitas tacos for tonight’s dinner. I won’t lie, it’s handy as hell. In my heart of hearts, I’d love to have been slow roasting the cuts all day in a low oven, with the aroma of cumin and lard and paprika perfuming the house. But I’m not some retired abuela with nothing to do but cook and watch telenovelas all afternoon; I’ve got a farm to run.

So any bit of kitchen gadgetry that helps put a home cooked meal on the table is ok by me. There’s a fine line: not every juicer of grinder or steamer is worth the shelf space, and I’m all to acutely aware of the cost associated with technological waste. But there are certain bits of culinary wizardry that are valuable enough to stave off  my skepticism. I’ve always championed the humble crockpot, and my electric bur coffee grinder has long kept my French press filled with the best of brews. Most recently, the Instant Pot has been whipping up beans and stocks with startling speed, and another Christmas gift, a compact Sous Vide machine, has turned out amazingly tender beef with minimum set up. Could I churn out quality meals with a hand crank coffee grinder and a dutch oven? Yes, I could, and happily. But the secret ingredient in those meals is the one most lacking in the modern kitchen: time.

I’m not naive, I realize how pressed for time we are as a society. I lament the fact, I decry it, I strive against it, but the truth remains that we are, as a species, more hurried and harried than ever before. And as a purveyor of quality food, anything that helps my customers feel like cooking my product is manageable on a regular basis is more than welcome. Real, everyday cooking is not always an Instagramable frolic through Larousse’s Gastronomic, usually it’s a struggle against the all-too inviting lure of take out menus or a burger at the bar. To make home cooking seem appealing, it must be manageable. And if the latest buzz over the amazing Instant Pot makes cooking seem manageable, even inviting, then who am I to turn up my nose at the technology?

All this is not to say that I’m totally swayed. When time provides, I still like the old familiar methods of the frying pan and the stock pot. I like chopping vegetables and adding them slowly to a long-simmering stew. I like taking my time. My favorite kitchen gadget of all is a simple, well worn paring knife, plain and unadorned, one that fits my hand and skins apples and carrots and turnips with equal ease. But I don’t always have a whole afternoon to lovingly dice and measure ingredients. Sometimes, dinner time is more of a deadline than an invitation. Sometimes King Ludd loses out to the Jetsons, and a hungry stomach rarely can afford to play favorites.

 

It’s been raining all day. As I sit here writing I’m serenaded by the slow and steady drip – drip – drip of water falling into a waiting pan: our ceiling is leaking. It’s a new wound in a very old house, caused no doubt by the extremes of weather we’ve seen this week. A few inches of snow Saturday night was followed by freezing rain on Sunday, a drastic plummet into single digit temperatures on Monday, and a slow warming throughout the week till we arrived at the unseasonably warm and wet day today, Thursday. It’s 53° F out, a 50° swing in four short days, and the world is a sodden and confused mess. On Monday I cursed the cold, on Tuesday I cursed the biting wind, yesterday I cursed the snow so crusted with ice I could stand upon it, and today I curse the deluge. The old farmhouse, dumbfounded by meteorological uncertainty, seems to have given up entirely and let the heavens in. I, for my part, am as equally dumbfounded and good deal more dejected. I’m listening to the rhythm of the leaking roof in a gray and malignant weather induced funk.

It’s a funk that’s lingered all year. Farming is a life tied inexorably to the weather. My lot is less dependent on forecasts than a veggie grower, but I’m affected daily none-the-less. A late snow means the expense of extra hay, a wet spring means rutted fields, a dry summer means hauling extra water. While a herd of hogs won’t succumb to blight on the vine like a crop of tomatoes, inclement weather can still rot a farmer’s morale. And this year mine rotted damn near all the way through.

The year began with a winter than seemed to extend all the way through March, something that seems more and more normal lately. Winters seem to have been slower to get going but less willing to give up their icy grip. Some of the worst snowstorms we’ve received in recent years have come mid-March. A lingering winter this year gave way to a wet spring, but rather than dry out come June the wet weather stayed all summer and throughout the fall. I can scarcely recall a whole week that went by without rain, even in the typically dry months of July and August. In years past I had to manually dig trenches to divert our beaver pond in droughty weather; this year I worried more about getting stuck in the mud. And mud abounded. The pigs lived in it, the hens sickened in it, and the water truck bogged down in it. The land here has a high water table and clay rich soil, so drainage has always been slow, but this year the soil, much like the farmhouse roof, seemed to just give up and give in to the constant rain. Farmer’s markets, our main source of weekly income, were canceled with disturbing frequency in the face of threatening thunderstorms. At some point, looking out at the soaked fields criss crossed with tractor tire ruts, my sprit just sort of drowned.

Not that I could escape the weather inside. The humidity was the worst I’ve ever experienced in New England; the walls of the house beaded with condensation, books mildewed, and any surface dampness quickly gave way to mold. A solitary window Air Conditioner offered solace in our bedroom, but otherwise we wilted daily in the fetid air. My wife and I realized with relief and shock that had we waited a year to marry, we wouldn’t have been able to: our October wedding the year prior had taken place in the field, in a spot now inaccessible. While the field was normally dry enough to drive across to deliver the tents and equipment necessary for a wedding, this year you couldn’t walk across it without leaving muddy bootprints in your wake. There was no relief from the precipitation, and the pastures wept groundwater till finally began to freeze.

It’s a hard thing to quantify, exactly, how much the weather affected my year. I know I spent a good deal of time soaked to the bone, caught in another downpour. And I know I spent and inordinate amount of time brooding on it and far too much breath bitching about it. It was, ultimately, one of the defining features of the year. In farming circles not a conversation could be had without acknowledging the rainy season, and in my own personal cosmology I couldn’t help but feel like something important had shifted. I can’t say for certain what role global warming played in our unusual weather, but I sense that predictability will be the first victim of a shifting climate. We’ll have wet months that once were dry, snowless Christmases, freak late March blizzards…I don’t think we’ll have weather we can count on for too much longer. I think there will be more and more weeks like this one, offering up misery in a variety of ways, from freezing to flailing on ice to listening to the roof leak. I’m worried that the weather is not going to be just idle country chit chat for much longer, but something that we’re discussing with real concern. I sit hear listening to the drip – drip – drip of the water in the pan and I’m left wondering if it’s perhaps too late to even fix the leak.

 

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

 

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

– from In Blackwater Woods

 

I don’t know death as well as some, but I certainly know it better than most. I deal with it – and in it – daily; death is the fundamental reality of raising livestock. It’s the lingering shadow always waiting at the edge of the pastoral ideal, like a clever, hungry fox, or a  bitter January storm, or the dark and unstoppable accumulation of cells. Even the clearest path leads to death: the farm is maintained by the bodies of its inhabitants. The freezers filled with frozen meat, the nourishment and profit therein, that may be success, but it’s death none the less. Death is a thing I think a great deal about, not morbidly so, but with a deep curiosity. It’s not a puzzle to be solved, exactly, but I do think it’s knowable. It’s the sort of thing I want to understand as best I can, because its the one commonality I have with everything I will ever encounter.

It’s been a week when death has come into particularly sharp focus. On Wednesday I put down one of our boars, a Berkshire named Winston, who had ceased siring litters and whose rear hips had started to give out. Then, yesterday, the poet Mary Oliver died. She’d long been a favorite of mine, and yet the sorrow of the moment was leavened with a sense of certainty and acceptance. If any person could be said to have come to terms with mortality, at least publicly,  perhaps it was her. Both deaths, falling in quick succession, seem to be parables in their own right about the nature of loss. Even if that’s only the facade of meaning I tack on to otherwise meaningless events, well that’s just what the living are always left to do.

Killing Winston was something I’d put off for too long. I’d had the boar for about three years, though he was nearly two when I bought him. He was gentle and friendly enough, important traits for a 700 pound animal with three inch tusks. For a long time he produced fine litters at a regular rate. But his last offspring were born almost a year ago. For a long time I wasn’t sure why he’d become sterile, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt when most breeders would have culled him. But eventually his rear legs began to show sign of some degenerative weakness, and that seemed to be the source of the infertility. Treatment wasn’t ever a consideration, since the reality is that a new boar is far more affordable than a vet’s visit. Still, I had more pigs than I needed for market, and letting one old boar live out one last year seemed kind enough. As fall progressed and turned to winter, however, I found myself putting off the killing day after day. I was busy first with winter fencing, then turkeys, then any number of activities that otherwise diverted my attention. And all the while, though he ate well and enjoyed the company of his sows, Winston’s legs became worse and his mobility faltered. At some point what I’d considered mercy soured into negligence, and real mercy lay in the gun. When I finally couldn’t avoid my duty any longer, I killed him quickly and cleanly with a shotgun slug to the head. He was content and unaware in his final moments.

The lesson of Winston’s death is that of joy and utility. He lived a wonderful life for a pig, better than the overwhelming majority of his kind. His days were filled with as much sun and rain and majesty as the world could offer, his stomach was full, and he was never wanting for the company of sows. Dead, his body will sustain the farm by feeding the dogs. In life he had little by way of need, and in death he gave himself up so that our lives here on this patch of dirt may carry on that much longer. The fulcrum of change, from life into death, was the point I was responsible for and therefore the one that seems most meaningful. And to me it was: it was an act of mercy but also of the same selfishness that always comes with taking a life to sustain one’s own. But the meaning there is simply what I imbue in the moment. Nature is far less concerned with meaning, and death is not always so ordered or understood.

It seems unfair to say that Mary Oliver was a poet concerned with death when so much or her writing dealt with the unquenchable desire to drink in and be a part of the living world, but in truth the reason her words about life were so full to bursting was because of their duality. Death was ever on the tip of her proverbial tongue because it is always hovering on life’s periphery. There is no one without the other. It was that contrast and interplay that she always seemed to return to with shamanistic acuity in poem after poem: the owl with it’s beak red with blood, the graceful heron feasting on the silvered jewels of living fish, the skunk cabbages rising from the loam of their dead forebears. There was no life without death, but nor could there be death without life. The hunger for that life, for the beauty and wonder in it, was a hunger ever at odds with inevitability. Hunger itself was death, the bear’s hunger, the owl’s hunger, the fisherman’s hunger, but death was a satiation too, the final fulfillment of all that long hunger for life. If you’d eaten enough, if you’d drunk deeply of the majesty hiding in plain sight all around, then death when it came was nothing to fear. At least that was always how it seemed from the poetry; I hope that in her passing she was able to reach some sort of similar, peaceable accord.

I don’t know what the moral of the story is. I don’t know how to quench fear or live fully or die well, but I know I can’t live a good life by ignoring death. I try to accrue bits of meaning piece by piece: sadness, and gratitude, and terror, and relief. I want come to the final shore having studied the river itself, even if the far bank remains perpetually out of sight.  I may not ever want to wade down into those dark waters, but one day I know I must. On that day, if nothing else, I’d like to know how to swim.

 

 

This morning, after chores – feeding the dogs, watering the pigs, checking on the new calves – I decided to take a walk. It was cold but calm, fine winter weather, and since the sun was particularly bright I decided to take a lap on the boardwalk at a local preserve. The world was still and frigid, the ice covered marsh below the wooden planks brittle and beautiful. It was a good hour for a walk, and I tried to be content, I tried to focus on the frozen cracks and patterns and the way the sun splintered off the ice, but it all seemed small. Whatever little moments of peace or poignance I find lately seem inconsequential in a world going steadily to hell.

It’s hard to carry on normally in a world where Donald Trump is President. It feels a bit like what I imagine living with cancer feels like: at the best of times its a barely remembered specter, hovering over an otherwise fulfilling life, while at its worst it’s a source of daily nausea and anger. Most often its the latter, and life carries on. But at other times the whole grand tragedy of the moment seems all too immediate, and you can’t shake the feeling that you’re not just witness to the bullshit, but that you’re drowning in it too.

Today felt a little like drowning. Forgetting for a moment the tightening noose of the Russia investigation, and the general upside-down nature of living in a world of nonsense, lies, and misrule, today cut deeply because in quick succession I saw the issues that most interest me, food and agriculture, cast into the garish presidential limelight.

The first was an image I woke up to, that of Trump grinning proudly behind a table stacked high with fast-food garbage as he welcomed the Clemson National Football Champions. Maybe no other image so perfectly captures this moment: fake food, a fake man, and a fake photo op, all reeking of cheap, greasy trash. Michelle Obama had a garden behind the White House; this slimy fuck can’t even spell hamburger. I work hard to try to provide well-raised, ethical meat, while Trump glories in the sort of corporate, industrial junk that represents everything I’m laboring against.

Alone, the take-out buffet would just be one more asinine moment amidst many, but yesterday Trump also happened to address the national Farm Bureau convention. Farmers are not a monolithic group, and broadly speaking, the camp that I fall into has little to nothing in common with the large-scale crop and livestock agriculture prevalent today. A midwestern confinement hog grower is less my compatriot than my mortal enemy, not least of all for the reason that industrial farmers were a solid voting bloc for Trump. It delights me to no end that his tariff plans are causing them fiscal troubles; if only every Trump voter had as tangible a sign of his two-faced nature. So while I’m happy to see Trump voting farmers’ ignorance repaid with ruin, I was amazed if not surprised to hear Trump alter one long running talking point and suggest that maybe he’d make it easier for certain immigrants to come across the border to fill ag-sector jobs…just not ‘the bad’ kind of immigrant, whatever that means. It would have been a jaw dropping moment from any other person, but for a man so steeped in duplicity and double speak it was just head-shakingly par the course. After all, without immigrants who would operate the slaughterhouses to supply Trump with those 300 (or was it 1000) all-beef patties?

The third food related tidbit fit to make me lose my lunch was an article in the NY Times briefly relating the struggles of the FDA and USDA to maintain inspections during the current, and longest running ever, government shutdown. I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with the USDA in particular, as I imagine many farmers do, but I’d never say their job was unimportant. While I work diligently to produce a safe and quality product, I realize not all do. I’ve read The Jungle, and I’ve no interest in returning to an era without regulation.

So while the petty shutdown drags on, government inspectors are returning to their posts…unpaid. The cogs of the American food system are massive and unceasing, and they grind on whether watched or unwatched. Seeing as tainted lettuce has killed more people this year than illegal immigrants, perhaps it’s more important that the men and women tasked with safeguarding our unwieldy food supply get compensated than a useless desert wall get green-lit.

All these annoyances, all this nit picking, it only scratches the surface of deep and nuanced problems. But the problems aren’t going away, and they are amplified and brought center stage by the spotlight hogging orange asshole in the Oval Office. I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about Trump, I wanted to momentarily get lost in the cold beauty of a mid-January morning. I have the luxury of trying to tune him out, my life isn’t directly affected by the shutdown or endangered by his administration. But ignorance isn’t always bliss. The world was still out there beyond the marsh and the boardwalk and the ice and the sunlight. It’s a world filled with fast-food hamburgers and hypocrites, of people profiting off the very system they vilify and disparaging the agencies that keep us safe. It’s a funhouse mirror version of reality, and today in particular, it all just left me queasy.

We generally don’t like to go too long between disasters here on Truelove Farms. When things go smoothly for too long you tend to start to get a sense of impending doom, a creeping dread  that keeps you awake in the hollow hours of the night. The waiting is what gets you. When the catastrophes come at regular intervals, at least you know what you’re in for, and even if it seems as if things have gone to shit, well, thats where things where headed anyways. Here on the farm, we prefer disasters you can set your watch to.

The crisis of the hour is out of season calving. It’s been my goal over the last few years to downsize my beef herd and perhaps faze out cattle entirely. If I could go back in time and take my younger self by the shoulders, after I was done cursing his general damn-fool ignorance the first specific thing I’d caution him against was buying cows. Beef has generally been a source of ire and misfortune here on the farm. Almost as soon as I had cattle they began breaking out, lacking the capital as I did for proper permanent fencing. Plastic step-in poles and polywire do ok when the herd is content on fresh pasture, but do little when a young steer is hungry and obstinate.

Nor is the land here really sufficient for proper grazing. There isn’t enough pasture to keep a decent sized herd, for one thing, and the quality in most places is sparse at best. Producing proper grass-fed beef on any real scale was never a real option. Without the economy of scale to make operations worthwhile, raising cattle has always been more of quixotic endeavor, too demanding of labor for too little return. Without proper fencing or chutes, moving and loading animals has always been arduous. Without proper genetics or forage the quality of beef has always been variable and underwhelming. Without close or reliable slaughterhouses, at least until recently, merely getting an animal processed was a challenging task in and of itself.

And a those are just the basic problems. The particular disasters have been nearly too numerous to count: difficult births, dead calves, fights between bulls, midnight break-outs, one slaughterhouse’s e-coli recall (no fault of our own, mind you), and one steer who knocked me down, escaped the loading pen, and, after a long pursuit, had to be killed in the parking lot next to the abattoir.

Raising chickens has never proven so dangerous or so dramatic.

The disaster of the moment, as I said, is winter calving. I sold off my main Hereford bull nearly two years ago precisely to get out of cattle breeding, but in typical half-assed (or in this case one-testicled) fashion, I failed to properly castrate a young bull calf, and that bull calf grew up. Though I thought I had separated him from the breeding stock in a timely manner, apparently he sowed a few wild oats before heading off to slaughter. The first bovine accident was born about three months ago. Another hit the ground last week, and a third arrived today. I see at least one more heifer who looks to be in the family way, and there may be others not yet showing.

It’s January now. It hasn’t been a bad winter so far, but it’s early yet, and things will change. I had planned on an easy, recuperative winter: I downsized the number of pigs I have to feed and house, and processed the laying hens for soup chickens. The hay is stocked up, the farm store stays mostly closed, and the daily chores are light. The plan for a quiet season off seemed on track.  I should have known to be on guard.

So now it’s time for worry and guilt, for kicking myself for poor husbandry and for scrambling to figure out last-minute solutions. I got today’s calf suited up in a cold weather jacket, and unsuccessfully chased his rather spry compatriot for a good while, attempting to dress him the same. At least for the moment, I reasoned that if he’s fit enough to outpace me, he’s strong enough for another night outside. Tomorrow, a day that should have been about as close to a day off as I get this time of year, I’ll instead need to fence off a more sheltered part of the barnyard as a maternity ward, and see about shifting the cows and calves up into better winter housing. With every bitter night or blowing snowstorm that arrives this winter, I’ll have added concern and anxiety on my mind. Whatever plan I may have had has given over to this new, calf-filled reality.

And now the clock starts ticking on the next disaster.

 

Just the other day, I was rooting through the papers and notebooks that clutter my desk when I happened upon a journal I’d been keeping as I started farming. It wasn’t from too long ago, a mere seven years, but it felt ancient, and it made me feel ancient. Near the front, neatly itemized, was a list of my first farm purchases. Bar and chain oil, a timber-jack, a pair of Carhartt overalls: even before I had any livestock I jumped into cutting brush and felling trees. There were books too, how-to’s by Joel Salatin, and each entry was dated and given a dollar amount in a neat and orderly script. In the following pages I’d penned paragraphs and treatises about the sort of farm I’d like to have. I wrote zealously about rotational grazing, and nutrient cycles, and honeybees and heritage breeds and goat cheese, and all the grand plans past-Tom had for the farming life. Was there a market for rabbit? Where could I look to finance my needed infrastructure? How could I contribute to my local food community? Those were the pressing questions for the bright-eyed, naive Tom of seven years ago. A pressing question for the Tom of today is more like ‘how badly do I stink like cow shit, and do I think the lunch-crowd at the bar will notice’?

It’s not that I look back on past-Tom with pity or regret: he was a swell kid, and he meant well. But a lot can happen in seven years. As the farm grew, bit by bit, I learned not just about farming, but about myself. In fact, a deep and painfully keen sense of my own strengths and failings might be the single greatest take away from this whole endeavor.

I got into farming for a whole host of reasons. I wanted to set roots, I wanted to be my own boss, I wanted to work out-doors, I wanted a deeper connection to the food I ate, I wanted to help the planet, I wanted to strengthen my community…the list was long and tangled, and if you asked me when I began, I probably couldn’t have unraveled one rational from any other. But undergirding the whole plan was this heavily romanticized need for identity. I wanted an identity that encompassed all those ideals and passions, an identity that was equal parts ditch-digger, poet, and martyr. I viewed farming as kind of a salvation, an experience that would teach me patience and responsibility and the value of a hard-earned dollar. And that was all true, at least a little bit. But not nearly as true as the one overarching and overwhelming fact I came to discover: farming is really, really, really fucking hard.

And hard not just in the ways I had expected and braced for, but hard in all the ways. The labor and poverty I was sort of ready for. I don’t think I’ve ever read a single piece of writing on farming that candy-coated those points, and with good reason. Running a quasi-successful small farm, be it crop or stock based, is a back-breaking challenge. But everything about farming turned out to be hard. The record keeping, the planning, the budgeting. Coordinating with the butcher-shop, and the slaughterhouse, and the smoke-house, and farmer’s market masters, and the USDA inspectors, and the health departments. Answering endless emails, and phone calls, and Facebook messages, and questions from customers who all seem to be wondering ‘what’s jowl bacon’? Freezing in a walk-in on a sweltering August day, and rooting around in a cooler full of frozen meat during a drizzly November market. Hauling halves of hogs over my shoulder from the meat hook to the van, chasing runaway cattle in snow storms, waking in the morning to find the field littered with dead hens in the aftermath of a fox attack. Telling the tenth unhappy shopper in a row that you’re out of eggs cause this is the middle of January, but hopefully in a way that will magically stop them from just going to the supermarket from now on. Tossing and turning through sleepless winter nights, overcome by general worry and a vague sense of dread. Having to euthanize day old piglets that’ve been half-crushed by a careless sow, and knowing it’s time to put down the old boar who’s shooting blanks, even though you’ve got a soft spot for the gnarled sonofabitch cause you’ve had him since you damn near started. Not a single goddamned thing about farming turned out to be easy.

And in most ways, unfortunately, I found myself unsuited for success. Those neatly tabulated ledgers gradually gave way to pocketfuls of crumpled receipts. Bookkeeping drifted into theoretical territory, with fistfuls of fives and tens often going straight from the self-serve egg box to my wallet. The smiling, chipper facade I was once able to put on for several farmer’s markets a week became harder and harder to summon. My attitude, once optimistic  for the future of local agriculture, became more cynical and rueful as ideology gave way to experience. The fortunes of the farm have risen and fallen much along the same lines, becoming a hive of activity that was fruitful, but exhausting and unsustainable. This past year has seen the beginning of a lull; my course as a farmer was like a helium ballon, rising quickly to bounce gently off of the ceiling, then gradually deflating and sinking back to the far more comfortable ground.

And I’m ok with that. Trying to hammer the square peg of my personality through the round hole of successful farming just resulted in splinters and tears. I don’t have it in me to be a great farmer. I’m never going to promptly answer customers’ emails, cause I hate email. I’m never going to host a farmer-day-camp-agritourist-petting-zoo, cause kids are the worst. I’m never going to be able to breezily sell tenderloin to soccer moms, because I despise people who only eat tenderloin. I’m never going to have fancy accounting software, or well planned farrowings, or product inventories, cause I’m too old to get good at those things now. And I’m never going to be the next Joel Salatin, and I’m fine with that too. I don’t want to be a teetoteling, libertarian workaholic with an intern pyramid-scheme empire. I want be out alone in the far field. I want to chop up pumpkins for my pigs with an old machete. I want to putter along on my tractor, brush-hogging briars with a six pack in my lap. I want to go to my one Saturday morning farmer’s market where I know everyone and everyone already knows what jowl bacon is.

Amidst all the romanticism of those early days, there were images of farmers that continue to resonate with me. They weren’t the stalwart young back-to-the-landers, bright eyed and eager. And they weren’t the successful cattlemen who mapped out stock density and forage quality on spreadsheets. Instead I relate to the gruff hill farmers from James Herriot’s Yorkshires, who cared about their land and their pints and perhaps not too much more. Or the French farmers from Berger’s Pig Earth, riding to town on old tractors to take their noon-day glasses of red. I don’t want to be good farmer, who tallies his life away with figures and glad-hands his way to sales success. I want to be who I really am: a half-pissed misanthrope with an affinity for pigs and cow-shit on his boots. I want to be a bad farmer.