CHAPTER 8
At first it seemed like the rain would have to stop. And then like it would continue forever. Storm followed storm. Between storms, we had days of heavy drizzle. There was no hint of bright sun or warmth. The fields were saturated. The grass came along, slowly, but the animals stayed confined, in small paddocks or inside the barn, to keep them from churning the pastures into mud. After a huge storm passed, Mark and I loaded the girls into the car to drive around the neighborhood and gawk at water.
We got out at the bend in the Boquet River a mile to the west and walked down the slick bank to the edge. In summer, this was our swimming hole, a calm pool we shared with the resident snapping turtle and a few hungry leeches, always cool at the bottom and warm at the top. Now the pool and its ring of rocks were gone. The river roared by in violent torrents that made me clutch at the back of Jane’s coat. It was carrying whole trees that had been ripped from the flooded banks, and unaccountable tons of topsoil that turned the water the color of coffee, the spray a dirty white. Under the extraordinary static-like noise, we could hear a series of dull heavy thuds, the sound of boulders rolling along the bottom, cracking against one another, reshaping the river for the next thousand years.
We drove to the shore of the lake, a mile to our east, and stood next to it. There was no wind, and the water was a still, ominous swell. It had just broken over the high-water mark and was rising. “Remember this,” Mark told the girls. “You’ll never see anything like it again in your lives.”
* * *
As the days and weeks ticked by, we began to feel like we were under a bad spell. It rained all through April and into May. This was planting season, and in a normal year, we would have been in the fields every moment of the long day and then some. Instead, we busied ourselves with indoor work and listened to the rain on the roof. Lake Champlain continued to rise, surpassing the high-water mark by an astounding seven feet. Our neighbor Old Steve said he had never seen such a bad year for farming in all of his ninety years. “Forget farming,” he growled. “It’s not even a good year for getting your laundry dry.”
Every morning as I made my coffee, I looked for the pair of robins building a nest in the lilac tree just outside the kitchen window. It was such a good nest. The outside was neatly woven from twigs and baling twine. The inside was lined with dog fur. The female laid three sky-blue eggs. After they hatched, I watched the mama bird carry worms and bugs to three open beaks. Would they fledge, or would they get worn down by the constant rain and die? I became inordinately attached to the outcome, as though those hatchlings were sages auguring the outcome of our year. Just as the window for planting corn closed without any corn in the ground, I saw our cat Penelope crouched in the rain with a robin chick in her mouth. The nest was empty. She must have eaten all three, one by one.
* * *
Still it rained. Houses along the lakeshore flooded. When the wind came up, waves crashed into people’s living rooms. The restaurant at the town marina was underwater. Then the lake rose over the ferry dock. The ticket office with its neat lace curtains became an island, half-submerged, the dock itself three feet underwater. Mark went out on his sailboard and cruised over it, through the debris and floating logs. He looked down, saw the parking lot underneath, and enjoyed one brief moment of awe before his mast hit the power lines and he crashed.
On the farm, the rivulets that drained the sugarbush hill had turned to turgid streams. We ran out of hay to feed the animals, who were still confined. One night after the kids were asleep, I walked through the rain to the pasture we called Fallen Oak Field. It was a little higher than the others, and sloped very slightly to the south, so it was always the first one ready to graze in the spring. I was hoping against reason that it would be firm enough for the cows, who were consuming expensive purchased hay. I stepped gingerly into it. The grass was four inches high, but underneath, the soil itself seemed swollen. I felt the top layer of sod tear beneath my foot and slide off.
There’s an ominous saying in our region, “A dry year will scare you, but a wet one will starve you.” We don’t face the same sort of years-long droughts that other regions of the country and the world do. The grass and the vegetables grow slowly in a dry year, and sometimes the vegetables develop intense bitter flavors; the pastures need to be carefully managed, the grazing animals moved off before they eat too low and damage the roots. Sometimes the hayfields don’t regrow fast enough to make a second cut of hay. But the weeds grow slowly in a dry year, and the soil retains its natural structure. Roots grow deep into the still-loose ground, searching for water.
A wet year is a much bigger problem. A wet year brings funguses, blights, and putrefaction. Hay grows rank or is cut to rot on the ground. Tractors get stuck and rut up the field. Underground, there’s no air for the roots to respire, so plants yellow and die. And the windows for tillage are tight, so it’s tempting to work the soil when it’s sodden, which compacts it. Compacted soil takes years to recover, through the patient work of roots, worms, and microbes. A wet year is hard on morale and also on our bodies. Our hands crack and get infected from being constantly wet and soft, and our boots carry an extra ten pounds of mud everywhere we go. It’s hard to like farming in a wet year.
Eventually, we had to plant despite the conditions, or it would be too late. We did it gingerly, into mucky beds that we made behind the horses with the hiller. We couldn’t plant field corn because it was too wet for the planter, but we planted an acre of sweet corn by hand and hoped. We watched the tomato seedlings turn yellow. Mark and I went to the field one evening after the kids were asleep to see how the seed potatoes were faring. They’d been planted on the highest ground we had in production, and I was hopeful. But when we dug into the ground and found one, it had rotted into a mushy, sproutless corpse that smelled like wet death. The whole acre was the same way. The smell of it got into my hands, and I couldn’t seem to wash it off.
* * *
Strange things began to happen. A sow died for no apparent reason. She was eating, nursing well-grown piglets, carrying plenty of weight, looking fine, and then suddenly, she was dead. One of the new dairy cows got horned in her udder by one of our old dairy cows, and her milk turned the sick pink color of strawberry Nesquik. Then a pretty Jersey cow named Carmen, recently bought from a neighbor, gave birth to a little bull calf and immediately came down with diarrhea, stopped making milk, and got shockingly thin, even though she was eating like crazy. Dr. Goldwasser came and tested her for various diseases. The one that came back positive was Johne’s. That was terrible news. Johne’s is a mycobacterium, in the same family as leprosy and tuberculosis. Unlike those diseases, Johne’s has no effective treatment. There’s nothing to do once you know a cow has it except put her down. A cow can carry Johne’s for years, dormant and yet contagious; once it breaks—which usually happens when a cow’s immune system is stressed by a life event like calving or moving to a new farm—it’s fatal. Moreover, Johne’s is extremely hard to get rid of, for a confounding fistful of reasons. Cattle are susceptible to infection only when young, but the disease isn’t expressed, nor can it be detected, until they are at least two years old. At that age, most of them have already had their first calf, along with a good chance of passing the disease on to the calf through her colostrum, not to mention all the young stock through her manure. The best test available is maddeningly inaccurate, detecting the disease in positive cows only about half the time. Some cows become silent carriers, shedding huge amounts of the pathogen in their manure but never developing symptoms. Finally, the pathogen itself is so hard to kill that even lime or bleach won’t manage it reliably. On pasture, it is known to survive through hot summers and cold winters for a year or more.
This isn’t a rare disease. Some farms, once infected, just try to manage it and take the loss of production as a cost of doing business. Seventy percent of dairy herds in New York are thought to have at least some infected cows, but we didn’t want to be one of them. Because of the w
ay we farmed—milking fewer than two dozen cows, without antibiotics, on pasture, making raw milk for our members—we needed a herd that was healthy and strong, not compromised by the pressure of a chronic disease. So we culled Carmen, as well as her bull calf, and dropped them in the compost pile. Then we called the state veterinarian and Dr. Goldwasser. They helped us set up protocols to try to stop the disease from spreading. We began the expensive, heartbreaking process of trying to eradicate it. The next year, we’d have to cull a third of our herd because they tested positive. After that, it began to get easier, but it took us five years of hard work, diligent management, and ruthless culling to get rid of the disease.
Meanwhile, Chad’s mare, Fern, was not well. Could it possibly be worms? Spring is the season when worms break their dormancy, and in a wet year, they can get out of control. As Chad, Racey, and Blaine worked in the butcher shop, I pulled out my microscope, graduated cylinder, and floatation solution. Then I put plastic bags and a Sharpie in my pocket, loaded Jane onto the back of the pony and Miranda into the backpack, and hiked to the field where the horses were pastured, to collect manure samples. These were my new jobs, a step down from the hardest work.
It had rained yet again the night before, and the fields were still too wet for the horses to work. The whole herd was grazing along a stretch of brushy pasture to the north of Pine Field. We knew we were sacrificing a few years of production in that section, as their hooves would churn the topsoil to mud and compact the whole area, but there wasn’t a better option. At least the horses looked happy, tearing at the tender shoots. We turned the delighted pony loose to graze with them, and I sat with Miranda on my lap, chatting with Jane, while we waited for fresh dung. The three of us lay in the grass, faceup, watching the muted light play in the leaves of the ash trees above us.
The ash trees were not doing well, infested by a blight that had left the lower branches bare, riddled with rot. Worse was coming for them. An invasive insect called the emerald ash borer—which sounds innocuous, magical, even, like something from the Land of Oz—was beginning to devastate forests and the hedgerows of farms all through the Northeast. As climate change allowed the insect to survive farther north, the ash trees were dying. A downy woodpecker beat a joyful tattoo in the tree above us, needling his beak through the soft wood to reach the insect life inside. The tree’s loss was his great gain.
Ash was the dominant species in our hedgerow. Ash trees grow tall and straight, good wood for tongues of horse tools, as well as decent stovewood that could be cut in the spring and seasoned, ready to burn after one summer, or even burned green in a pinch. We had warmed our house with freshly cut ash more than once, when we were caught short of wood at the end of winter. All these trees would be gone, the biologists predicted, in a decade. Such little things, these insects, would transform the landscape more radically than we could, with all of our iron and diesel. It messes with our illusion of control, the fundamental human belief that we must be masters of all we survey. Don’t underestimate the power of the small.
Once I found a live worm in the toilet after one of the children had used it. At first, staring down at it, I tried to make myself believe it was something else, anything else. Or that it had arrived there somehow under its own wriggling power and not through my small child’s digestive system. Despite my own highly developed powers of denial, it was a worm, a long one, unmistakable. And there was no other possible explanation for its presence. I was filled with horror and shame. This is what happens when you’re not like other Americans, I thought. This is what you get for raising children on a farm. It wasn’t the first time that sort of thought had occurred to me. So many of the choices we made—the very choices that added beauty and value and satisfaction to my life—seemed to go against what the prevailing culture told us was right. Who said you can leave the food system, grow it instead of buying it the way it’s meant to be bought, in neat plastic packages? Who gave you permission to give this child raw milk that you coaxed, yourself, from a beast’s hairy udder? A part of me—the rule-bound, middle-class good citizen—was always awaiting punishment.
Through my mind flashed all the times I’d let the kids kiss a newly hatched chick or walk barefoot in the pasture or failed to make them scrub their hands well enough before dinner. I thought of them as babies, sitting between the rows of strawberries in June, pushing handfuls of soil into their mouths along with all the berries within their reach, so that their faces were streaked in red juice and mud, and how, because they were so determined and I was so busy, I’d let them do it.
I ran to the barn for a pair of shoulder-length gloves, then fished out the worm and put it in a jar. All my anxieties about values and normalcy and parenthood were contained for a few hours in that cylinder.
Mark never felt these things. His own upbringing had been, in most ways, outside the lines of normalcy. His parents were back-to-the-landers who had left city careers for a piece of shaley land in the Catskills before Mark and his sister were born. They raised much of their own food and lived, for the first part of Mark’s childhood, in a converted barn without indoor plumbing. Also, Mark’s nature was to question all the rules, all the time. He was naturally distrustful not of the hairy udder but of the neat plastic packaging.
I dialed our pediatrician, Dr. Beguin, feeling relief in the idea that he knew us. That seemed important, in case this was the sort of thing that had to be reported to the authorities, the ones who can take your kids away. When his nurse, Carolyn, answered the phone, I explained what I had found. “Hm, impressive, aren’t they?” she said casually. “Why don’t you bring her in this afternoon?”
Dr. Beguin, in his gentle monotone, talked me through it, all the facts I knew when dealing with animals but, in my panic and anxiety about parenting, had failed to apply to my own child. Parasites aren’t entirely evil. We have evolved together, we and our parasites, and as long as we stay in balance, there is no cause for concern. In fact, there is evidence that exposure to parasites can be good for us, because they help train our immune system to focus on the real pathogens and ignore the rest, which reduces the overreaction that causes allergies and autoimmune disease. Maybe that was why the children had been so instinctively compelled to push soil into their mouths in the first place. In any case, these things were unrelated. The worm I had found was a roundworm. It was far more likely that she had picked it up from the sandbox at the playground than on the farm. It did not make me a bad mother. I could be grateful to the worm for doing its job and move on.
* * *
The horses grazed around us, making greedy ripping sounds with their teeth. They were eating young fescue, mixed with reed canary. It was plentiful, and in the sweet stage of growth that drove the horses crazy with pleasure. They would turn their noses up at the reed canary in a few weeks, when it became tall and coarse, but for now it was a delicacy. Jake lifted his tail and contributed a manure sample, and then Belle, the pony, and finally, near lunchtime, Fern, my target. I gathered balls of dung the size of shooter marbles from each pile, labeled them with the horse’s name, stuck them all in the back of Jane’s backpack, caught the pony, and headed back to the house.
There is a small scientist inside of me, a scrap of a younger self who could have chosen that path at the fork in adolescence and been quite happy. I like the equipment, the methods, the rules, the moments of quiet concentration that lead to the discovery of useful information. I like questions that have sure answers. After lunch, with both children napping, I spread out my supplies. I wasn’t looking for worms but for their eggs. A few worms produce a few eggs; a lot of worms produce a lot of eggs. A heavy worm burden can make an animal look worn down, but you can’t tell for sure how infested an individual is without looking and counting.
I weighed out a gram of manure on a digital scale. Parasites are a nuanced subject. Every grazing animal has some parasites. The goal is not to eliminate them but to manage them so that the worms are not a drag on the animal’s overall health. There
are enormous variations in an individual’s ability to resist parasites and maintain good health. Youth is a dangerous time, as are pregnancy and parturition, when the immune system lowers its defenses to allow that greatest of all parasites, the fetus, to thrive. Malnourished animals are vulnerable too, because parasites tax the blood supply, syphoning protein. If protein is already in short supply, you have a situation on your hands. Young animals will not grow. Older animals will lag, look poor, sometimes die. Vulnerability to parasites varies from species to species. Cattle are hardy and rarely need treatment. Sheep are another story. Worms are the bane of the shepherd in our climate, where sheep are grazed in small lush fields instead of over expanses of arid rangeland. And horses, even giants like ours, can be brought low by worms. Sometimes it is sudden, dramatic, and fatal. The collective power of the botfly larvae can block digestion; a knot of strongyles can explode the aorta. Do not underestimate the power of the small.
I used a dropper to put some of my manure slurry on a slide and waited for a few minutes for the eggs to float to the top, then placed the slide under my microscope. The slide holds one milliliter of solution and has a grid printed on the top, which makes the job of counting eggs easier.
Before modern worming medications, farmers used all sorts of mixtures to kill worms. Tobacco was the old standby—plug tobacco was readily available, cheap, and effective. The problem was that there was a fine line between a purgative and a poison. Now there are anthelmintics, with a wide range of safety and a high rate of efficacy, but we have a different problem on our hands: resistance. If we dose every animal in the herd whether they need it or not, we selectively breed worms that are resistant to wormers. In many places around the world, whole classes of modern anthelmintics are now entirely useless. But if you dose only the few animals whose parasite burden is too high for good health, the rest of the herd will still harbor naive worms, so the evolution toward resistance slows down. It’s not as easy as dosing the whole herd—it requires judgment, and close observation, and looking at the big picture over short-term gain—but it takes into account that the genius of nature is its mutability.
Good Husbandry Page 13
