The Learning Curve

So often a farmer tells himself he needs to sit down and write, but nothing comes. Eventually, he starts to wonder why. Where words should be, a dryness lingers.

Our prayer book says that in “returning and rest” we are renewed. Granted, our prayer book is talking about God, but there must be returning and rest on the farm, too.

The farmer’s microcosm shrinks in on him, too, just like a vacuum bag. Pretty soon he finds himself without air, overburdened by the how-am-I-going-to-pay-for-thises and the not-those-damn-worms-agains.

But then Friday comes and chicks arrive in the mail. When their feet hit the brooder floor, they begin racing around and around, in laps, faithful to their training, no doubt, by an Andretti working at the hatchery.

And the farmer smiles

returning

resting

remembering life.

For a long time I have been mulling over labels – Organic, Humanely Raised, etc., etc.

As a Clean Farmer, I have been tempted by these more than once.  I don’t know about all those other farmers out there (who apparently have things figured out much better than me), but I’ve often thought that some label would help me sell product.  BUT then I’m reined in by my ideals.  I don’t buy these labels and I’m never going to.

I don’t mean I don’t buy organic when I’m shopping.

I mean I don’t buy labels as a solution to our need for clean food on every table.

It’s not that I think I’m immune to labels. I am from America, the land where, apparently, somebody is nobody unless they have a largely worthless college degree.

Wait, wait…before you start picking up something to throw – hear me out…

Reason #1:

I was talking to another sustainable farmer this weekend and he explained how his family operation began with conventional, chemical row-cropping, transitioned to organic, and is now back to non-gmo row-cropping, using one herbicide application for weed control.

Why?

After growing organic grains (which they were using to feed their hogs), they discovered that trying to clean all of the weeds out of their corn was such a monumental task negatively affecting both their time and their animals’ nutrient intake, they switched back.

And I didn’t argue with him (and I can’t fault him).

I think I have to credit this to farming and the realities it imposes on our modern, I-want-it-yesterday-and-only-this-way minds.

The important thing in this equation is that he didn’t hide it.

He admitted what he was doing and that it was what he had to do.  He agreed it wasn’t ideal, but he was making his farm work.

Otherwise, his ideals would have stopped his farm from working altogether.

Reason #2

I sometimes think that my parents sadistically sent me to an all-boys, private, Catholic high school.

I know they really did it out of naive love, but sometimes…

Anyway, there were lots and lots of rules there.

Your hair couldn’t touch your eyebrows or ears or collar.

We had to wear dress shirts and ties, then no plaid dress shirts, then no stripes, then all solids.

The rules were literally never-ending.  And it finally hit me why.

The more rules you make, the more ways folks try to find ways around them.  Find ways around them, they will.  Sometimes those end runs rank among mankind’s most clever achievements.  Though ill-used, their is a certain wonderful genius in finding the loophole.  The rulemakers have to keep making new rules to block the end runs.

And that’s my point.  The more rules organic has made or will make (because people are always getting around the current ones), the more ways people figure out how to get around them.

Eventually what you end up with is a 6,000+ page tax code or organic code or whatever.

See, labels can’t fix our food because the rules governing those labels can’t fix us.

I know we’ve all heard the saying, “You can’t legislate morality”.

Organic is the perfect example of why.

If a farmer doesn’t start with doing unto others…then no label will fix the food they produce, making it truly clean.  The law governing the farmer can’t be in a book.  It has to be in, well, a heart – the farmer’s heart, to be precise.

And only by going to a farmer, learning how they farm, asking them questions, even visiting their operation can we truly know our food.

The farmer’s heart will shout to you in his farming.

So, maybe it’s time we stopped settling for mere labels and started talking…

A few years ago I visited a well-known farmer and heard him say, “If you have livestock, you have dead stock, too.” Clever. Harhar, right? Well, sort of.

Such sayings lose their luster and dull in the face of reality. This summer has been particularly tough. It all started with Tammy and Iseesyavontrelle (Pronounced I-sees-ya-Vontrell).

We bought these Tamworths a year and a half ago from a fella in Kentucky and they really took off. They looked fantastic. Then, we put them in the field with other, larger sows. I knew it would be a struggle for them to find their place at the trough, but everyone has to leave the nest sooner or later.

Tammy did alright and I could tell that she was bred by the boar they were now shacked up with, but Iseesyavontrell didn’t. Eventually Tammy farrowed a nice litter of 8 or 9 pigs, and Iseesyavontrell never changed.

Tammy started losing body condition and hair. She looked like she had mange and worms. So, we did our all-natural doctoring, but it had little effect. As soon as she’d weaned her piglets, we put her in the field, the cleanest place on the farm. And she slowly, very slowly, improved. After about a month, her hair was growing back and she’d definitely put on weight.

Iseesyavontrell was still with a large group of pigs that needed to move to a new area, so we took them over to a new, wooded paddock. Tammy followed two days later. The next morning, they were both dead as a doornail. No warning, just dead.

It was so hot at 8 am when we found them that our vet said an autopsy was already impossible. In less than 15 hours, decomposition was already roaring along. I have a handful of suspicions about their demise, but nothing concrete.

Then there was a black sow, in the same multi-acre, wooded paddock as Tammy and Iseesyavontrell. We were walking the woods one morning, two weeks later, looking for a missing pig (not her) and there she was – dead as a doornail. She had given us no signs of illness. She didn’t appear wormy. She’d been born on our farm, had been dead less than 12 hours, but was in a spot impossible to get to with any implement large enough to lift her. So, the vet was out and we had to inspect her. We think maybe this was a problem with a pregnancy.

Finally, early last week, I saw buzzards circling near the barn. We have some boars and large barrows (castrated boars) in a field adjacent to the barn and I hadn’t seen a young boar in that group come up that morning. I sent Wright to look for him, and he found him. The buzzards were gone that afternoon, so I thought nothing else about it. But there was this horrid smell. It kept wafting over from the very field I’ve already mentioned. Since we had processed chickens Monday and dumped the offal (guts, etc) in the field for said boars, we thought they just hadn’t eaten it all and it was rotting, slowly.

But we had forgotten about Reggie. He was an Old Spot boar we’d bought from a neighbor and castrated. We had planned to make him into barbecue. Sadly, we discovered that he was the smell. We found him in the pond on Friday morning. I don’t know what happened. Just like the other pigs, the frustration of the mystery remains. And I have to ask myself what I’m doing wrong to be mysteriously losing so many pigs. At this point, I’ve become my own vet and swine mortician.

I was really down, standing there on the edge of the pond, trying to figure out how to handle the mess of Reggie when a duck walked by, with a duckling I’d never seen before. And it hit me – Life is not gone. There is a delicate balance here, on this farm, that I will never understand. I live in the middle of it. I think, often, but wrongly, that I control it, but I only play a part. I am just a creature, too, but not without hope. Here is death, in all of its horror staring me in the face and life is still marching, still bravely waddling along, multiplying beauty, and quacking loudly.

Well, she’s finally joined our ranks.
You can call us white trash, or the more politically-correct – rednecks. Whatever, she’s now a card-carrying member of our little clan. It’s only taken 12 years, but I want y’all to know, my wife is in.
There was always some wonder about if she’d ever make it. When we first moved out here, to “the country”, she would walk through the yard, in the summer, wearing knee-high mud boots. She said she didn’t like bugs. And, truly, I don’t like chiggers, either, but her disassociation with all things outside was almost obsessive.
From time to time I would take great pleasure in teasing her about it. Sometimes I would point to the large, red building across the road and tell her to repeat B-A-R-N after me. She was not amused, and after she made me sleep there a time or two, I began to see the light.
But that’s neither here nor there.
The point is that she simply limited her time outside to the walk from the car to the house, or vice versa.
This isn’t to say that she hasn’t warmed up to the outdoors and life on a farm, over the years. In the last couple of years, she started mowing the lawn with the riding mower. Granted, she never touched the grass, but she was out there. She was trying to embrace it all in her own sweet way.
But then, after 12 years in the same little house, we moved. We built our own house (in a mere 16 months of aaaagggghhh) and all the sudden, Ellen is the outdoorsy type.

We hired some friends to work out a landscaping blueprint and, to her never-ending credit, she got the plants and has single-handedly planted all of them. She didn’t just stick a few things in the ground. This week alone she has planted 30 shrubs and one suspicious looking ‘crepe myrtle’.
All of this leads up to how we (really I) knew she had taken the plunge to our side.
Last week I was helping Ellen move some dirt around the house, using our little Kubota tractor. I had finished and mistakenly parked it in the way of her setup for an outdoor birthday party (full of skeet shooting, no less!). Instead of just moving it, I thought here was a good opportunity to show her how to drive the tractor. Afterall, she turned over a new leaf, and maybe she’d like the power of it all.
It was, of course, a cinch for her, and she even graciously endured the guffaws of the fellas working on our porch.
Then we had to take our car in for new tires. The same night, I had to go to town, carrying children to baseball games. Ellen stayed home to rest and mentioned she might visit my brother and sister-in-law, who now live on the other side of the farm.
Later in the evening, I was leaving to come back home and texted to tell Ellen. She wrote back, “At Christian and Erica’s. Pick me up. I drove the tractor.”
I drove the tractor?
Immediately the picture of Ellen driving that bright orange tractor down our dirt road, in the dark, with a bottle of Pacual Tosso Malbec between her legs and a wine glass in the cupholder flashed across my mind. And that’s when I knew.
If driving a tractor to a family member’s house, at night, while drinking a glass of over-priced wine doesn’t get her in, nothing will. So I say welcome, dearest. You are now a queen among us – white trash royalty.

We lost a cow to lightning!
Three weeks ago, amid the myriad of storms this April, Bella was thoroughly fried. She had been on a ridge top, in a bad storm. Maybe, among the cows, she had drawn the short straw of lightning bait that night.
Maybe not.
Regardless, it was heartbreaking. Bella was a first-calf cow out of our very best, now-gone, jersey of all time, Molly. On top of this, Bella was our only A2/A2 cow. I had such high hopes for her.
But my mother always said, “God never takes something away from you, but to give you something better.”
And did He ever!
At this point, I realise I have now become a farmer. Real farmers are interested in bloodlines, right? They want to know who that boar’s daddy was or where that ferrett’s grandmama came from.
That’s my understanding, anyway.
So I have been after this certain Jersey bloodline for several years. Really. I actually have semen stored, cryogenically (sp?). I have waited for the right cow to use it on.
And, suddenly, there she was. Just the right price. Just over in North Carolina. But, somebody else had first dibs. They were going to look at her on Saturday, so I had to wait.
And I did – on pins and needles, trying to temper my anticipation with the thought that if she was meant for me, this would work out. Then I got the call. The folks coming to look at her had backed out and if I wanted her, she was mine.
And now, after a staying-up-til-2:30am-night to receive her, she is here, in all of her Glory(a).
God is certainly good.

As she surveys her domain...

I keep asking myself why my infrequent posts are about pigs and I guess the answer I must admit is that I truly love them. Here’s why…
A couple of weeks ago we went to pick up a sow over at my brother’s. She was in a large wooded area and we knew she’d farrowed (given birth) just a day or two earlier. We wanted to catch her and her babies and bring them back to the main farm where we could keep a closer eye on them.
After about ten minutes, we found her, hovering over little black babies who were still quite wobbly on their feet. Four of us surrounded her and her piglets and a couple of us, one by one, picked up the piglets by their tails (they don’t squeal if you pick them up this way) and placed them in a cage we’d brought along. All the while, mama nervously circled. She didn’t chomp, which is a very aggressive move. She didn’t even grunt much. She just hovered, circled, and watched.
No sooner did we put the last piglet in the cage, did mama take off. She wasn’t running, but we were concerned because we still needed to herd her into the feeding area and load her onto the trailer. Her path, though, took us straight there. Not only did she walk right into the feeding pen, but she headed straight to the first full feeder and began slurping water as fast as she could. She was obviously dehydrated. I was stunned.
Here was this first time mama so faithful, so diligent, so loving that she wouldn’t dare leave her piglets to even drink until she knew they were alright. Here was selflessness shown to me by a pig!
And then it hit me. I had just sunk one station in life. No longer am I a pig farmer. I have been demoted to piglet babysitter.
Still, things aren’t that bad. At least I’m not a banker.

Toyota pickups are illegal on our farm – actually it’s just blue Toyota pickups.
Here’s why…

The first was Wright’s. It was an early 1980’s model with those awesome tie-down things they had on truck beds back when people actually used them. And, it was blue.

There was nothing fancy about the truck, but it served Wright well for a number of years – I think Jena might have married him for it, but that’s really just speculation.
Anyway, some days we had to use it on the farm to haul pig food down to Pig Holler. Driving down to Pig Holler, you had to cross Pork Chop Hill (I think there’s a repeating theme here), which has a gate at its entrance.

Wright has always had a strange bias against parking brakes and this little truck was no exception. So, it was natural to chock a wheel if you ever parked Wright’s truck. To the uninitiated, a chock is anything solid – a rock, a block of wood – that you stick behind a wheel to keep a vehicle from rolling.

When Christian (a younger brother) was going down to feed the pigs one day, it was natural, therefore, that he should chock the wheel when he hopped out to open and shut the gate. He got over-confident, though. He jumped out and opened the gate without chocking the wheel and, once he drove through, thought he could do the same while he shut the gate. Alas, it was not to be.

While shutting the gate, Christian turned around to see the truck begin to roll. He immediately shot for the truck not 15 feet away, but it was picking up speed. That cruel trickster, fate, left a branch in his path and as he tripped, his hand reached in desperation just behind the door. But fate laughed and the door slammed, carrying it’s invisible new driver ever more quickly downhill.

Christian said that in the next few, desperate seconds he actually wished the truck would simply blow up on impact. Maybe, that way, no one would notice it was missing. And, it kind of actually did, just without fire, because when ten buckets, traveling 15 miles an hour, each full of 15 pounds of corn and an equal amount of water, suddenly stop, there is an explosion of sorts.

Christian later described a pig food tidal wave that rose 10 or 15 feet above the invisible truck immediately after he heard the awful sound of truck meeting tree. The funny thing? The truck actually still ran. Christian ran downhill and turned it off, but knew there was no hope. Several pig buckets had torpedoed through the rear window and emptied their contents into every air vent, lighter receptacle, and cd holder in the vehicle. Wright, he knew, would not be pleased.

And he was right. Well, actually, he is Wright, but that’s another story.
It doesn’t really matter, because Wright didn’t learn. In very short order, he found another, slightly newer, blue Toyota pickup, but that’s another story…

From these postings, you’d think we only have pigs, but no. Pigs may be short on manners, but they’re long on personality. Maybe they’re just an easy target.

I bought Turnip Green from a friend about a year ago. He’s a very rare Mulefoot boar. Always a docile pig, Turnip Green wouldn’t hurt a fly. Rambo knew that, too. Rambo was a terror of a pig. If you could bottle a tornado then reform it into a pigs body, you’d have Rambo. But his is another story.

When they were both about six months old, we put them together. Rambo immediately began what we later found out was a life-long pursuit – Turnip Green torture. Within the first week of their cohabitation, we came in one morning to find Turnip Green limping around a well-beaten track in their stall. Apparently Rambo had run him around the stall all night and Turnip Green had pulled something. There were a couple of gilts (females never bred) in the stall with them and we thought they might be the source of friction, so we removed them. And that seemed to work.

Turnip Green and Rambo proceeded to grow up together. It was very obvious that Rambo had a crazy, aggressive side, and Turnip Green just hung back, but within a few months the two were moved into a larger group of juvenile pigs and everyone was happy. We never realized what simmered just under the surface.

These little boars eventually reached sexual maturity and I wanted to try out Turnip Greens genes first. We put him into a partitioned area in a field with about six young sows and removed Rambo to a sturdy stall in the barn.

Within two days, Rambo had broken out of his stall and was running around the field adjacent Turnip Green and his newly-acquired harem. With great difficulty, we corralled Rambo and re-penned him. In less than twenty four hours, Rambo was out again and had broken through not one but two stout fences. We found him in the field with Turnip Green and his women. Well, not really. They were no longer his.
Turnip Green was as far away from Rambo as he could get, cowering in a corner of the field, while Rambo was up at the highest point of their paddock, with all his women. And Rambo was in the mood for love.

We repeatedly tried to remove Rambo to no avail. Finally he started snapping at folks when they tried to feed them, so we de-manned him and made him sausage.

Turnip Green’s saga continued, however. Even after we removed Rambo, he wouldn’t go near the other pigs. From all appearances he was so beaten, so psychologically traumatized that he would never even be able to function in porcine society again, much less entertain ladies. But we left him in with them anyway.

Finally the time came for us to move all the young sows to another location for the winter. Determined to make sure all 15+ of them got bred, we put in Turnip Green, plus two other boars – Elvis and Hinkle. The enormous size of their wooded lot, plus the docile nature of the other boars assured us that Turnip Green would not be harassed and maybe, just maybe would date again someday.

Shortly, however, our hopes were dashed. Turnip Green was obviously the low pig on the totem pole in the herd, just barely above the eunuchs. He ate last and skulked around, always timid. So, when sows began to farrow a few weeks ago, we were sure that they would come out looking just like Elvis (the largest of the three boars in the herd).

It took a lot of patience and finagling to catch all 28 piglets born in the woods, plus their four mothers. But when we did, it was well worth the work. Here we had beautiful, watermelon-striped grayish silver and black piglets. To top it off – not a one of them had cloven hooves! To our shock, they each bore the unmistakable single-toed hoof of a Mulefoot. It turns out Turnip Green worked like a thief in the night. Turnip Green, you might say, is a true back door pig.

“This is the real thing,” Aaron said, “This is farming, for real.”
“It’s pretty hard-core,” I chuckled, as I widened my incision with the scalpel.
Stuart was silent. I heard him gulp and then wimper, just a little.
We were stuck – castrating pigs. I freely admit I am a procrastinator and, in this case, for good reason. It’s not the most pleasant job.

We first started performing surgery nearly ten years ago. Our first two pigs produced an abundance of little boars that had to be, for lack of a better word, tamed. With pigs, stools and bullwhips won’t make a dent. You have to use a scalpel, and sometimes even that doesn’t work.

There was Peripatetic, for instance – the half-crazed pig who we had cut (read: castrated) when young. I truly believe he was mentally damaged. He escaped one day, took a wrong turn, and ended up in the horse pasture.
The horses quickly made him the ball in a pickup game of soccer. The second goal was ugly and I know he was hooved in the head pretty hard.
After that, Peripatetic didn’t come around very often. He actually disappeared somewhere in the woods. He would reappear every few weeks, strangely hairier, and keep his distance. If he even saw a horsefly, he would vanish. When we’d see him the next time, he’d be hairier still. When we finally managed to trap him, I promise, he had the most beautiful, blonde, lustrous hair growing at least three inches off the tips of his ears.
Castration did wonders for his hair, but it did not tame him.

But back to the actual work at hand. Castration is truly traumatic. Without going into the painful details, it is enough to say that when we began castrating little pigs of about 20 lb., none of the men on the farm could bear it. The scene was something like this:
We would line up at the barn, face the cage of caught piggies, set up a piece of plywood on a couple of rickety sawhorses, and don gloves and aprons. We would then, very solemnly, pray and stand aside. No male was brave enough to operate – my sister and eight month-pregnant wife were the first bold surgeons.
The men would valiantly pull the pigs out of their cage and hold them. This was somewhat difficult since we had to do this while simultaneously trying not cry, gag, or look at what was happening. Truly. During castration, my brother-in-law gagged almost continuously. When he didn’t gag, he moaned. This was bad because I’m a sucker for gagging. As long as I’m not hugging a toilet, if I hear gagging, I laugh. I don’t have to even hear the gagging. I can hear a story about someone hearing gagging and laugh. Some might call this keeping alive the child in me; others might term it nourishing the sadist.
Regardless, the women were castration whizzes. They studiously ignored our empathetic whining and worked with precision. Eventually, however, they wanted us to grow up. So we had to learn. And learn we have.
We actually had a boar named Nelson (Rockefeller). He was a bad dude – mean. When he got too big to handle and had sired too many piglets with genetic defects, we decided it was time to cut him. We were all too ready to leave our first full-size, totally grown boar castration to the professionals, so we carried him to the vet. I myself was absent, but through repeated re-tellings in hushed alleyways of the farm, I have heard that the vet gave the boar a shot of anesthetic. This made him mad. The next shot made him mean. The final shot made him irate enough to run the vet, his helper and one brother over the gate and out the back of the trailer. Another brother, Wright, was the only human left in the trailer. Nelson saw him just after Wright activated the suction cups on his back and played Spiderman on the trailer ceiling while the boar made leaping bites at the air just below him.
Eventually, Nelson slowed down enough for surgery, but our vet has declined cutting any more of our pigs.

Today was much quieter, however. The pigs did squeal. Our stomachs did turn, but we never saw Spiderman and nobody got bit. This is not to say, however, that I’m not still searching our genetic pool for self-castrating pigs.

Where do you begin with your story when you’ve been gone a long time? How far should you go back? Is the cow that lost her calf too sad to write about? Can you tell people from the city that you had to spend two hours pulling it out, knowing it was dead, but desperate to save its mother’s life? Will they understand your wonder that you were able to hold that cow by her horns – in the dark, in an open pasture all that time? Will they fathom your relief when she recovered?
Can they feel the cold? Had it ever been that cold? Did they worry about their piglets at night and stand in awe, in the 15 degree dark, staring at the day-old piglets not even trembling? Will they laugh when you tell them you later found those piglets hiding in their hay bedding – undectectable – except when the hay pile moved? Can they grasp your relief when sows finally start to farrow seven piglets and not four, ten and not two? Would they walk around the barn with you and not mind the smell?
Would they feel your shakes when the trailer spun on the ice, smashed into the side of the truck and shoved it into the ditch? Can you explain, really, how cold it was driving that same truck to the shop when it was 20 degrees and there were no windows? They probably would understand the embarrassment.
Would they have gotten mad at those pigs that had to break out on Sunday morning – the muddy Sunday morning? Would they know how happy and awestruck you can be when escaped pigs make a sick mule stand for the first time in days? Would they like getting their boots muddy, too?