Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
What makes a farm a Farm? How does it differ from a place where farming once took place? A place whose stone walls and barns remember a former time? Or a place where the iconic stone walls and barns give us a warm feeling when we drive by and maybe even increase our property values? Or is a Farm just any place with a few chickens and a garden? A few years back, I had the pleasure of getting to know Florence Miles, the oldest resident of the town in Vermont where I lived. Florence, nearing a century old, had milked cows for the duration of her working life. So Florence’s stories about the old days weren’t exclusively about farming, but they did all involve farming because that’s what people knew and that’s what people did. They scalded hogs in the fall, salted and smoked bacons and hams, ran the heifers out to pasture each May, mowed the roadside ditches by hand with scythes, and drilled out saplings to pipe water down to the barn from the spring up on the hill. It was actually Bill Little, the third-oldest resident of that town, who told me about the wooden water pipes. Bill lived just across the Valley from Florence. He also told me that there used to be fifteen dairies along the Main Road between his house and the lower village, just four miles down River. At the barn just before the village they used to keep a pair of Goats in the barnyard and, each milking time, they sent the Goats up the hill on the opposite side of the road. The Goats brought the Cowherd down from pasture. When the traffic flow along the Main Road is regularly impeded by crossing livestock—that is surely a time and place where farming is being undertaken. Just a few doors down from Goose Landing my friends at the North Country Creamery scrape fresh manure from the road each day after milking. And this time of year that runny manure stains the pavement a gorgeous shade of dark green. Or at least you might find it gorgeous if you spent a lot of time looking at Cow manure and gleaning from its texture, color and odor troves of information about how the Cows and the pastures are doing.
According to Florence Miles—whose perspective has been finely honed by a specific place and time—a Farm is a place where Cows are milked. It’s that simple. I was milking a single Cow then and asked her if that would qualify. She said with a wink, “Dear, you’ll need more than one milk Cow to call it a Farm.” By “specific place” I am referring to the area we commonly refer to as “New England” or “New York,” where the hayfields, stone walls and barns are more than iconic for many of us. If your people came over from Europe, the warm feeling you get when you drive through such a landscape might be coming from somewhere very deep and old—somewhere ancestral. The people who arrived here worked feverishly to re-create the landscape they knew from the Old Country. Is it possible for those of us alive today to remember something that we ourselves have never seen? The increased property values in neighborhoods with hayfields, stone walls and old barns might be one of the ways we begin to answer yes.
The day before last something miraculous took place here at Goose Landing. We began to fill the old barn with hay again. We loaded the last of the bales into the loft with just enough time to feast on roast Lamb and Squash, Potato salad, Ashlee’s Rhubarb crisp and Marion’s chocolate cake before darkness and the buzz of Mosquitos sent us running for bed. The next morning, as I walk up the hill toward the barn to bring in the cows I am greeted on the path by the heady fragrance of the new hay. No wonder the Cows and Sheep are so crazy for the stuff. By the time I reach the barn the first Rain drops fall with a tap on the metal roof. If you’ve never had the experience of gathering with you neighbors to bring in hay ahead of the coming rain, I dare say you are missing out on something very special—and very, very old. The word barn, like many of the words related to farming—hay, cow, mow, ted, rake, milk—carries the close-to-the-ground quality of the English/German linguistic rootstock. Barn was, in old English, Bereaern, formed from Bere- or Barley, and -aern for house. Barley stands in for the gamut of grasses in this formulation. So a barn is a house for grass. A house that quickly fills us with awe as our gaze follows the soaring timbers skyward. There is one beam in the old hay barn here that must be nearly forty feet long. And there was certainly no crane on site when they raised that massive piece of wood into the Air. So we could imagine a barn as a cathedral, or a temple, to Grass. And Grass grows anywhere the Soils, Sunlight and Rainfall come together in the right combination to make it so. And the Cows and the Sheep are the ones who transform that mysterious alchemy into Humans by way of their milk and their flesh. So calling a barn a temple to grass is shorthand for the sequence of goodwill that has underwritten nearly everything that we commonly refer to as “our lives,” including the chance I have to write this letter to you this morning. With all of this in mind I climb the narrow stairs to the hayloft. The aroma of the hay is almost overwhelming. Summer’s perfume—no less intoxicating than Honeysuckle or Lilac blooms. I want to check the hay for heat—a sign of moisture in the bales—which could cause a fire. No heat. The hay is good and dry, which is no small feat for this early in the season when the plants are still so lush. Winds blew generously on the two days we had to dry the hay—first South Wind brought the heat on Monday and then the low humidity of North Wind ensured the final drying yesterday. The feed quality of this early-cut hay is extremely high, and these precious bales will be saved for Tigger and Topsy once they calve in late January and for the Ewes who will lamb in April. Ask any farmer and they will tell you that May Grass makes milk. The later-cut hay will be fed to the gestating Ewes and the weaned calves, and the stems they refuse will be spread for their bedding. All of it—soiled bedding, manure and urine—will go back onto the fields. The young calves being trained for oxen will haul it out and spread it once they’re large enough to do the work.
In last week’s Letter I recounted a story about a vegetable farmer who responded to my longing to make hay by hand by sharing that his farm requires seven calories of inputs to produce one calorie of food. At some point during that conversation he said, “We have to figure out how to bring animals back to the farms—for fertility and for power.” I understood him to mean Cows, Sheep, and Horses that are fueled by the Soil/Sun/Rainfall/Grass sequence described earlier. But he could have been just as accurate if he meant the animals who walk on two legs. I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks travelling by foot through remote villages in the German-speaking Alps on the border of Austria and Italy, where I came across old women and men from the village mowing Grass from the steep roadside edges by hand, collecting the cut Grass into pack baskets with leather shoulder straps, and then walking their harvest back to the hayloft of the barn where they spread it out to dry for a few days before stacking it in one of the barn’s bays. The strength of the local dialect made it difficult for me to speak with them, but as I watched these older folks work I remembered my conversations back home with Florence Miles and longed for access to the treasure trove of memory and knowledge that these elders surely carried. I didn’t need a research study to discern that their farming practices operated on a different accounting scheme than seven-calories-to-one. We have to figure out how to bring the animals—the two-legged and the four-legged—back to the farms.
To make small square bales these days is to step back in time, as most farms have switched over to the convenience of moving round bales around with a tractor. Square bales require a lot more human handling. So on Sunday after we finished mowing, I put out the call for helpers for Tuesday evening, rubbed a large leg of Lamb with salt and spices, and scrubbed some of the last of the stored Winter Squash.
The weather, the tractor and the baler have all cooperated, and so by the time the crew gathers at the farm Tuesday around six pm, all of the hay is baled and most of the bales are already stacked on the wagons. Ashlee carefully drives the first wagon down the hill to the barn, where the rest of us prepare to lower the hay elevator down from the open hayloft door. Three work on the wagon loading bales on the elevator while a crew of five works in the hayloft stacking the bales as they drop, building a pile to well over head high. The work goes quickly with this many hands and backs, and so once the final wagon is pulled up to the barn Marion and I break away to collect the dinner foods. She’s brought homemade lemonade with Maple syrup, and the crew couldn’t be more grateful for that fine treat. A round of spoken gratitude marks our transition from haying to feasting. The leg of Lamb and the full glasses of fresh milk help us to remember what will become of this hay and of our labors in the season to come with some good fortune. And there’s nothing resembling drudgery to be found anywhere at the Farm this evening. A lot of smiles, yes, along with the sound of fellowship between new and old friends, and the lilt of laughter rising and falling on the cooling breeze. So what makes a farm a Farm? On this day I can answer the question in this way: A Farm is a place where labor—the labor of drawing human life again each season from the land—becomes an occasion for conviviality. And by that more-than-human conviviality we are re-membered.
Many blessings to you and yours. Thanks to you for reading.
With great care,
Adam
Lovely! On my dad’s farm where I grew up there was a rusted carcass of an old square hay baler.