The summer after sophomore year, I got a job writing for a student-run travel guide, and after that, I was off on a long string of trips that continued until I met Mark. I had favorite places in Hawaii, Thailand, Indonesia, Rome, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and Burma. Sometimes I traveled alone, working for guides or magazines, and sometimes with my sister, on exploratory trips that we planned and saved for over the course of many months.
As the years on the farm rolled by, I could feel my grip on the details of those places slipping, the maps and names of all the cities I’d visited growing less legible, but my memory held tight to the smells and flavors. Hawaii was ahi poke and rice with kimchi on a picnic table at Ho’okipa while the breakers crashed in salt air. Indonesia, with my sister, was grilled tempeh, gado-gado, fiery sambal, and the smell of clove cigarettes. When I chopped cilantro in my kitchen, I thought of the Mexican highlands where I’d lived for over a year, and the bundles of herbs piled in the market in San Cristobal. The rest of the market was there with me too: the mixed smell of chilis, rosemary, animal blood, woodsmoke, and fresh handmade tortillas with the wool of the indigenous women’s skirts, which were damp with mist.
Farming grounded me. I wouldn’t be traveling very far when tethered to a piece of land and two small children. Under those circumstances, it wasn’t even easy to go to the store. But I was surrounded by the best-quality food, and I could cook and remember. Those years when the girls were very small, the three of us spent a lot of our day together in the kitchen, and went deep into cooking projects. We’d read about them, look at maps and pictures, and then begin. The kids and I harvested and nixtamalized corn, ground it with a molino, and pressed the masa into thin circles to make tortillas; we fermented daikon, cabbage, and garlic into kimchi; we made tempeh and miso from our soybeans. We spent weeks on Persian food, with prodigious amounts of fresh herbs, and on the different cuisines of India, and Jane’s favorite meal became saag paneer made with our milk and yogurt. In order to expand our reach, I bought what we couldn’t grow: fresh ginger, olive oil, wine, rice, and citrus in bulk quantities. I kept my spice cabinet fresh and full, and lined my pantry shelf with cookbooks from all the places I wanted to visit or revisit. That collection was our ticket around the globe and made cooking and eating whole seasonal food interesting and delicious all year.
* * *
Even when a farm is struggling, even when there is no money, there is always plenty of good food. After we kicked the farmers out of the house, I focused more energy on our weekly Team Dinner. This was one of the traditions that we’d started early on, when we had our first employees. Every Friday night, after our members had all come and gone with their cars and trucks loaded with food, everyone who had worked on the farm that week was invited to gather at our house to celebrate. Team Dinner included full-timers, part-timers, and also alumni, significant others, children, visitors, extended family, and any stray wanderers who looked like they could entertain us. Agricultural theories, riotous jokes, lifelong friendships, and romances took root around the Team Dinner table. Once when my sister was visiting, she looked around the table at the strong and nourished people and suddenly felt like she was missing out on something in her city life. She suspected the rest of us were in on a form of delight that she couldn’t quite access, even in a city that could sell any pleasure a person could imagine, at any hour. Most weeks, we thought so too, secure in the bounty around us, and the specific sort of hard-earned joy that farming gave us.
Part of the enjoyment was due to the fact that everyone worked hard and was hungry. Part of it was because all the ingredients came from the good soil around us, often harvested minutes before hitting the pan. And part was the simple beauty of eating the result of all the work that we did together. The people around our table came from different backgrounds, were different ages, and had different beliefs and experiences. At one point, our farm crew would be a combination of evangelicals, Old Order Amish, secular Jewish people, atheists, plus one ex-Amish messianic Jew—a mix Mark called the most diverse set of white people ever assembled—but the table always provided common ground that made us agreeable, sociable, and willing to transcend our differences.
Some nights, Team Dinner was simple—a giant pot of stew and a loaf of homemade bread—but often I aimed for something more festive and, occasionally, a blowout feast with several courses and a unifying theme. Always, it was built around whatever food was perfect at that moment in the season.
* * *
The rest of the farmhouse—the peeling wallpaper, the dim lighting, the fake-wood paneling in our bedrooms—depressed me. I seemed unable to do much about it. There was never extra time or money. Mark disliked anything that distracted us from the farm and its needs. He made it clear that he would not be doing any home improvements. Nor did he want to spend money for someone else to do them. If I attempted to fix something on my own, he pointed out the inadequacy of my skills. When the washing machine broke and I wanted to shop for a new one, we had an extended argument about the efficacy of doing laundry in the bathtub with a pair of plungers.
But the kitchen was an island of perfection in that sea of ugliness. It had evolved, by necessity, into something hard and purely functional, which gave it a utilitarian beauty. There was a nail-studded two-by-four at eye level on the kitchen wall, for hanging our cast-iron pans. The large kitchen table that doubled as a cutting board was set on bricks to bring the surface to waist level for ergonomic chopping. Our sink had been salvaged from a restaurant and had three enormous bays, one for spraying, one for washing, one for rinsing, and took up nearly one entire wall. Over it, two parallel metal pipes were driven into the walls, supporting a twenty-foot-long rack made of chicken wire. This was where we stored the large pots and pans after they came out of the sink. Three people could wash dishes for a table crammed with farmers and have them wiped and put away in ten minutes.
Sometimes I wonder if the fruitfulness of that period of our farm—the way it spawned couples, other farms, and babies—was related to the elaborateness of those Team Dinners. I watched the evolution of romances that summer, all around the table. Racey was in love with Nathan. Tobias was in love with Blaine. Chad had just met a newcomer, Gwen, the woman he’d eventually marry and build a farm with.
Sometimes I planned Team Dinner well in advance and started cooking days ahead. Other times, the meal came together all at once, through inspiration, when I caught sight of creamy white cauliflower coming ripe in the field during a morning walk, or an unusual cut of meat hanging fresh in the butcher shop. Jane spent some mornings that summer in front of the butcher shop, sitting on top of an overturned bucket, watching Blaine eviscerate pigs and steers. Jane’s fascination with this process was due in part to her attachment to Blaine, who could be acerbic with adults but was invariably attentive and kind to Jane. Blaine had given Jane some of her favorite books from when she was a child: Harold and the Purple Crayon and Happy Birthday, Moon. Those books became Jane’s favorites because they’d come from Blaine.
As Blaine butchered, she chatted with Jane and narrated the work she was doing. She showed Jane how she slit the animal’s belly skin, the knife held at its hilt with the sharp edge pointing out, being careful not to puncture the intestines. She demonstrated how to saw through the breastbone, tie the bung, and enjoy the suspenseful moment of repose just before the innards fell out in a heap. She pointed out the vast white bag of the rumen, which held so much fermenting green grass, and the heavy, limp bloodred liver, which she rinsed and impaled on a rack of spikes in the cooler to chill, and which we might have later for dinner. Jane watched it all like television, entirely absorbed, for long stretches of time. By the time Miranda was old enough to venture away from me, Blaine was gone from our butcher shop and on to her own farm, but Miranda and Jane would still dash outside when they saw the tractor roll by our house with a carcass swinging from the raised bucket, to see the action.
One morning I went out to find Jane talking with Blaine over a pair of
pigs that she was butchering. Blaine was laying open the body cavity of the second one as Jane peered inside. The arrangement of the organs is a divine packing job, no space wasted and nothing extra. It’s finished with a drape of strong membrane that is so thin it’s translucent, a flexible windowpane run through with lacy veins of white fat. This is the caul. Jane was poking at it, curious. I took it from the steaming cavity, along with a kidney, a hunk of liver, and the heart, and trotted back to the house, suddenly sure what we would have for Team Dinner: crépinettes in French, fegatelli in Italian, and genius in any language, which I’d read about but never tried to make.
I pulled my grandmother’s meat grinder out of the drawer, a pocked old thing that made me happy to use, like her scissors from the shirt factory, because I could feel the ghost of her slim strong hand on the handle. I’d carved a notch out of the bottom of our kitchen table to attach it, because the wood was too thick. I chunked the organs into pieces and mixed in hunks of stew beef and pieces of pork shoulder. All organ would be too intense. All pork, too fatty. All beef, too lean and boring. A third each? Perfection. I ran to the garden, knife drawn, and hacked off handfuls of sage leaves. Back to the kitchen to put it all through the grinder. Then Jane cracked half a dozen eggs for me, and I mixed them with the ground meats, sage, fresh cream, some bread crumbs for binding, plus salt and ground black pepper. When it was all mixed, I fried a sample for us to taste, adjusted the salt and pepper. Then the fun part. We cut the caul into squares and wrapped balls of the mixture in it, like little meat presents, and tucked them into a hotel pan and popped them in the oven. The heat shrank the caul and melted the fat around the meat into something so juicy and delicious-looking they came out at Team Dinner to actual applause.
* * *
Despite the difficulties, our membership was growing quickly, by 10 percent per year. Employees were necessary, but they brought a different kind of work, less sweaty but more stressful sometimes than plowing or weeding. The accounting became more complicated. Mark had always done the books old-school-style, by hand, in a ledger, with a pencil. Now we needed more efficient systems and different tools. We switched, laboriously, to using a computer. The same thing was happening all over the farm. One piece of infrastructure would get too small to work efficiently—the grain mill, the walk-in refrigerator, the root-washing system—and need replacing, and then another and another in a constant stream of expensive improvements. Mark could manage it most of the time. He’s comfortable in a near-crisis, putting all his substantial energy into an immediate and urgent problem. But for those of us not built like he is, the plotline could be exhausting, as if watching a movie made up entirely of climaxes. In one argument, he said to me, “I can’t live with you if you can’t bounce back from the chaos I create.” It took years, after I heard that, for me to realize he was telling the truth.
The economics of using draft horses were becoming harder to manage as the farm grew. As more of the work was done by employees, on payroll, the cost of using horses began to feel untenable. Time was money. It cost money to harness the horses, to care for them, to feed them. It cost money and other opportunities to work at their slow pace. And it cost money to train people to use them. We could spend a year teaching a new person to drive horses, slowly increasing the complexity of the jobs he could do, the number and type of horses he could handle. Then he might stay another six months or a year and move on, to another farm or his own place, and we would have to start all over. Yet Mark had a vision of thirty teams in the field, fifteen teamsters, everyone parading out of the barn at dawn for a day of beautiful sun-powered work. Buying diesel for the tractors pained him, not because of the expense but because he could see firsthand what climate change was doing to the planet, and he knew we were part of the problem. He stubbornly wanted a better way.
As much as I loved the horses and agreed with his environmental concerns, I couldn’t see how it could work, as we grew, to keep them as our main source of power. We’d do no good to anyone if the farm was insolvent. “You’re delusional,” I said to him one night. Our arguments almost always happened at night, when we were exhausted. In the old days, we could work those tensions out in bed, but these days, with one child in my arms and another nursing, the last thing I wanted at night was to be touched. I’d spent all day being touched, mouthed, and made unpleasantly sticky. I wanted my body to myself. Which didn’t help the mood between us.
“I’m not delusional,” he answered, looking squarely at me.
“Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would say that you are,” I said.
“Just give me five hundred years,” he said, “and they’ll all say I was right.”
“You’ll be dead! We can’t do what’s impossible here and now. We have to choose. We can be small and weird,” I said, “or big and normal, but we can’t be big and weird.”
“But I am big and weird,” he answered. And I couldn’t argue with that.
* * *
Scale is just scale, but it’s everything in farming. Scale dictates the equipment you use, the infrastructure you need, the labor you employ. When the size of the farm pushes up against the limits of your current scale, things go awry. The well, for example. The final crushing irony of that wet, wet year was that our well went dry. It was an artesian well, and the farm had grown to the point where the natural flow it provided was not enough to reliably keep the stock watered, the dairy equipment washed, and the chicken carcasses chilled on slaughter day. For a while, it was a problem only when we had a leak in one of the miles of hose that we fed out along the pasture. The leak would drain the cistern, and when I woke up to make my coffee, I’d find the kitchen faucet dry. There would be a panic to find the leak, to get water to the thirsty stock. After we found the leak, fixed it, and let the cistern refill, the water would be full of fine sand and silt, which would wear down valves all over the farm, leave grit in the bottom of the teakettle, and break the insides of my hard-won household appliances.
When the weather turned hot and dry, we started running out of water even without leaks. I knew that we needed to do something about the well, but couldn’t see where the money was going to come from. It was an inflection point, another chance to disagree about finances, about our identity and what we were supposed to be.
There was a limit to how big and homogenous a farm could be and still be a place where I wanted to live. Large-scale monoculture is very efficient economically, but even within organics, it tends toward systems that work against, instead of with, the rules of nature. And farms like that do not feed people directly, not even the farmers who work them. The product has to be expensively manipulated and packaged into something else before returning to the table. I had no interest in growing five hundred acres of carrots, or milking fifteen hundred cows, then buying my vegetables or milk at the store. Mark and I both knew that a farm like that might solve our financial woes, but it wouldn’t make us happy. We could also see there was an opposite limit to how small and diversified a farm could be and still provide a living for a family, at least in a world that requires property taxes, a mortgage, health insurance, and shoes.
Some farms find their sweet spot by getting very small and specialized. We gave a talk at one farmer conference with a couple who made a very respectable living on a single acre of high-end vegetables, sold mostly to chefs and at farmers’ markets. They grew fancy produce in greenhouses, under plastic, where they could control the weather with heaters, fans, and sprinklers. They had no children, no employees, no farmhouse, no mortgage, no land of their own, just two miniature dachshunds. They had barely, it seemed, any dirt. They showed crisp graphs and spreadsheets during their talk, which supported the intelligence of their decisions. It sounded perfect for them and perfectly awful to me. Even though it made me crazy, what I loved about our farm was its wild diversity, its mix of plants and animals. I loved the enormous compost pile that took in all forms of life and cooked it into live food for the soil. I loved the soil itself, and the richness of
its biology, which was the sum of all our input and decisions. I believed that was the origin of our magic. And I knew that I loved the food. Baby vegetables were beautiful, and apparently quite profitable, but they weren’t what filled people’s bellies every day. That job was for fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, which came from elsewhere.
There must have been a significant part of me that was drawn to the gamble too, and to our long narrative full of climax. I didn’t want to live and work under plastic, even if it kept the rain off my plants. The risk and the unknown were part of what made it attractive. I had, after all, sidled up as close as I dared to Mark’s incandescent chaos. I’d married it.
* * *
Mark and I weren’t disagreeing, exactly. We were trying to sort out what we were, and Mark’s way of knowing what he thinks is by arguing it. He’d ask what seemed like an open question, then pounce on my answer and worry it to the ground. That made me want to defend my original position with my life. Our evenings together, which used to be steeped in sex and food, were now full of loud debate. What we were talking about was our identity. I was feeling the precariousness of holding on to what we had made, which I loved as much as I loved him. It was dizzying. In the big stack of bills and the new line of credit, I saw a hard truth: the farm that had been so hard to build would be so easy to lose.
Good Husbandry Page 18
