Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  We would need to buy almost all of our grain that year, because the rain had not allowed us to plant any. Our hay was made late in the season, so it was plentiful but poor in quality. We’d probably need to buy some good hay to get us through the winter. In bed, in the middle of the night, I mentally weighed our income against our expenses.

  We hadn’t expected the farm to give us a middle-class living. After a few years, even I, raw beginner, could see it wouldn’t. Mark and I promised to take each other for richer or poorer. That was a trade we made for farming the way we wanted to, with only a third of our attention to the bottom line, the rest of it focused on the quality and diversity of the food, the health of the soil, the effect on the environment and the community.

  Once, as I was walking down the farm road to bring the cows up for milking, I was arrested by the sound of a violin. Not a beginner’s squawk but a fine full tone, two notes in harmonious conversation. I stopped and looked for the musician. It was the limb of an arborvitae, grown close around the wire of the fence and played by the wind. Farmers like us are always poised between nostalgia for a past that never existed and hope for an idyllic future that never comes. The tension between those two narratives is part of what keeps us in it, vibrating between them like a note pulled from a taut string. In the beginning, when Mark and I started the farm, the past was the image that got me out of bed to do chores every morning. I thought we could create happiness by reinventing the farm of our grandparents’ generation—by working hard together on something that made sense to us and fed us on all levels. After the children came, it was the future that motivated me, the hope that we could make a good and modestly prosperous life for them out of the sun and the dirt. I wanted to build something beautiful and secure enough that they would want to inherit it and continue.

  * * *

  Ben Christian is a generational farmer. His grandfather farmed, his father too, but by the time he and his brother were grown, the land had been sold; the old farmhouse, on a road named for their family, had been sold to out-of-towners. But Ben and his brother, Scott, had spent their childhoods in barns, around cows, with 4-H, or working with extended family. Farming was in them, bone-deep.

  Ben is large, strong, the agrarian equivalent of street-smart—field-smart, maybe—and also an excellent storyteller. When I had a problem with a dairy cow that I couldn’t deal with on my own, like a ripped teat that dripped milk, or a knocked-off dehorning scab spurting arterial blood into the air, Ben was my first panicky call. If he could come, he would, often with Scott and Scott’s son, Jon, along for the ride. Scott and Jon knew a lot about cows too, but Ben had managed a thousand-cow dairy for a while, and that, combined with his lifetime of experience, meant there was not much about dairy cows that he hadn’t seen. He approached any problem in a cow or elsewhere on our farm with the same level of acceptance, no matter its size or complexity. This isn’t to say he didn’t yell or curse. But he had achieved a hard-won detachment, a tacit agreement with himself to take what the world or a cow or the weather or the bank could throw at him, be it beautiful or evil. When it was the latter, he’d quote his mom, a farmer’s daughter herself and later a farm wife, who told him that if farming were easy, everyone would do it. He might groan like the rest of us when something went wrong, but there was no panic in him. Except when it came to snakes. He was afraid of them, and because of that, he liked to tell stories about them.

  Venomous snakes are practically nonexistent in the Northeast, with the exception of the timber rattler, a threatened species that lives in a few very small, localized pockets in our region, where conditions are just right for them. There is a place like that south of us, close to the lake, in a section of wilderness called Split Rock. Timber rattlers are rare in the big sense, but in their little just-right spot, they are quite common. People find them in their garages or yards in the summer; there are signs around Split Rock warning hikers not to stick their hands into any dark crevices.

  Split Rock is surrounded by farmland that has been worked for generations. Ben knew each field and all its details: how much the owners had paid for it, how well or poorly they had managed it, and when it had changed hands. In Ben’s grandfather’s time, the farm next to Split Rock was a dairy. I picture a garden for the family, canning for the pantry in the fall, some chickens, a pig, sufficient good food for everyone.

  Now the timber rattlers are carefully protected, but back then they were considered a public menace, and there was a bounty on them, two dollars per rattle. The state didn’t care how big the rattle was. So when the summer was coming to an end, that old farmer would wait for a cold night, pull on his tall boots, get his shotgun out, and hunt for the rattlesnakes while they were torpid, in their dens. He was looking for nests full of hatchlings. One blast of shot might net him twelve or fifteen tiny rattles and maybe one big one, and he knew where lots of the dens would be. This was the money the family used to buy the children’s shoes for school in the fall.

  What I heard from the story that summer was different from what I would have heard before having kids. It didn’t sound like a nostalgic story of rural resilience to me, of old-fashioned American self-reliance. And my first thought wasn’t outrage on behalf of the poor baby snakes. Instead, I heard the stress and worry the family must have felt at not having enough cash to put shoes on their kids’ feet. The shame at sending your children off to school without the things they need. I heard the absurdity of having to use dead rattlesnakes as your currency when you are employed, full-time and then some, to produce food for your fellow humans. I heard that the cash gain from throwing oneself so hard into difficult work was sometimes not enough to keep the family afloat.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mark was alive with his usual physical ambition, his optimism and focus. He took the dire circumstances and shifted them into action. “If this is community-supported agriculture,” he said, “then let’s reach out for some community support.” He had never been shy about asking for help for the farm. With a long stretch of dry weather at the end of July came an enormous cascade of work. One daunting weekend, we had fall transplanting and weeding that had to be done, plus a thousand bales’ worth of hay that had been cut and would need to be tedded, raked, baled, and stacked in the barn before the next rain.

  He put out a call for volunteers of any kind. I listened to him working the phone, going through his whole list of contacts, looking for experienced tractor drivers, able-bodied hay movers, auxiliary kitchen support, and child care for Jane and Miranda. When he didn’t hear back from enough people, he sent word out again, louder and farther, until we had gathered a dozen neighbors, friends, and relatives, along with our own crew. Everyone set to it in the July heat, and by the end of the weekend, the hay was in the barn, the transplants were set in the field, and the weeds had taken a serious hit.

  * * *

  I had Miranda in my arms and Jane trotting along at my heels that summer, and what I wanted—what I needed, I implored Mark—was a reasonable sense of security, some sort of guarantee that we’d never see a season as difficult as that spring had been, ever again. I couldn’t shake the memory of watching the rain pound against the window and fill the puddles in the driveway as we sat helplessly inside. And if we were being totally honest, it wasn’t just that spring. The rains had been extreme beyond anyone’s living memory, but it was only a more intense version of the problem that had plagued us from the beginning. It had been the third spring in which too much rain had made our planting late or difficult. Of the eight springs we’d seen on the farm, our biggest problem for seven of them had been flooding. In part, that was because ours was a low-lying farm. But I wondered if it also had to do with changing weather patterns, which would mean we could expect more of the same, a long series of years that started with hope and faded into disappointment. That fear gnawed at me. I knew enough by then to see that farming was a game of betting for or against natural forces that were much bigger than we were. To nudge the odds in our favor, we need
ed to hedge against the things we couldn’t control. The only surefire way to hedge against too much rain would be to move to the bone-dry Central Valley of California and get our rain on demand from irrigation canals. Otherwise, we could drain our fields.

  Mark and I talked about drainage endlessly. We knew that our farm had been drained in the past because we had unearthed busted-up lengths of pipe-shaped ceramic tile, which farmers had used for drainage before the advent of plastic. Since the 1970s, farmers in our region had been using four-inch plastic tubing perforated with tiny slits. The excess water could seep into the slits and run through the tubes, which were buried four feet deep throughout a field, in regular lines that joined together into a main line that drew the water out. Any farmer whose economy was big enough to afford to drain the fields, did so. Drainage could increase production tenfold in fields where the soil was good but wet. It allowed farmers to plant earlier in the spring and get crops out in the fall. It took away those dreaded wet feet and helped plants thrive. Whenever I saw puddles in our fields or watched the leaves of plants turn yellow from flooding, I argued that we needed it.

  Mark argued the other side. There were tillage techniques we could use and improvements we could make to mitigate flooding without the huge expense of adding drainage. Moreover, he had a visceral hatred of plastic and the diesel required to install it. But really, the reason we hadn’t drained our fields was that we simply couldn’t afford it. The cost of draining an acre of ground topped what it cost to buy an acre in our area, and we were already at our financial edge, paying the mortgage on what we owned, paying ordinary bills, meeting a growing payroll every two weeks. Sales were up, but at this rate, drainage was probably ten years away, and that was without setbacks. After a year like this, if bad luck continued, we wouldn’t make it that long without going bankrupt.

  Then one hot, muggy day in late summer, Mark walked into the ice cream shop in town. Everyone in the village ends up there on summer evenings, locals and tourists alike, spilling out onto the curb or walking along Main Street with a dripping sugar cone, past the library, down to the ferry dock or the rocky shore of the lake.

  A woman approached Mark as he ordered. She said, “I’d like to talk with you alone sometime.” Mark felt himself tense up. This sort of request made him nervous. Most people in town had been so supportive of us and our farm, but there had been some friction too. Our first year, in the same ice cream store, the man at the counter had scooped our ice cream with melodramatic contempt. We had no idea why. It took inquiries to find out he was angry because we had special permits to shoot deer in our fields out of season. He was an avid hunter, and our permits might lower his chances for a buck. Another year, a neighboring farmer, who was formerly friendly, became blisteringly angry with us because we’d taken over his grazing lease on some land adjacent to our farm. Other people disliked the sight of our run-down buildings, which cluttered the view so close to our quaint little village. So when the woman made this vague request, Mark demurred. He wondered if she wanted to complain about the crummy office trailer we’d plunked down near the road, or the rusty horse equipment parked in a line next to the driveway.

  The next week, he was walking alone down the farm driveway, a damp notebook in his hand, running through the list of things he needed to do before sleep. The day’s heat was radiating up from the ground in thick waves, and he was sweating through a dirty shirt. The woman from the ice cream shop pulled up next to him in her car, leaned over, opened the passenger door. “Get in,” she said. She had the air-conditioning on full blast, and he sank warily into the cool seat. She handed him a cold Coke. “You probably don’t drink things like this,” she said, grinning. And normally, he didn’t, but he took it and drank it gratefully, the sweat from the cold can dripping mud onto his lap from his soil-covered hands. “I want to get right to it,” she said. “I want to pay you to drain your fields. Twenty-five acres.”

  Mark looked at her, uncomprehending. He told me later he felt like the woman in the driveway, with her air-conditioning and soda, was playing the part of a genie, or some other plot device in the drama of our farm and our family, too perfect to be believable, a deus ex machina dropped from the hot sky into our sad field. “Why?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said simply, “I’ve been watching this place for the last eight years. Your fields are wet, and you need drainage.” Mark kept his mouth shut for once, numbers clicking through his head. She exhaled and continued. “I’ve lived in this town for twenty years,” she said. “I love this town. And your farm has made a lot of positive changes here. I want to see that continue. But you need to drain it.”

  I knew the changes she meant. They had something to do with Mark’s incessancy. He was so determined to make this farm succeed. Rural America, family farms in America, had been struggling against a sense of defeat for so long. Our corner of New York was no exception. When the first wave of dairies went out of business in the 1980s, the feeling took root that there was no way to win. The hard-won skills that rural people possessed had lost their value. Then the rest of the world got high-speed Internet and a booming economy, and we were left behind. Alienation led to hopelessness led to torpor, and the young moved away or gave up. The older people saw that and lost hope themselves.

  Mark might be irritating sometimes, he might even be delusional, but he was rich in hope. And hope has its own energy. His hope, and the clear vision of the farm that he projected, brought young people from far away who wanted to live here and work with us. Our farm was close to the village, and the best fields were right by the road. These strong and beautiful people were visible every day, working hard, impossible to miss. They rented houses in the village, fell in love with each other, got coffee in the café, went swimming at the town park. They brought young life to town. Soon they were starting their own farms, and there was talk about a food renaissance, the possibilities it held to draw new families to us, to better everything for everyone.

  It doesn’t take much, in a tiny town, to shift things. Our payroll that year was only $150,000, but a good part of it was spent in the village, which was enough to make a difference. But mostly, it was the visibility of the work. It heartened people to see. “How is it you have seven beautiful women working in your field?” one of our neighbors asked Mark. “Are they beautiful?” Mark asked, genuinely surprised. He’s like that. For all our other conflicts, he has eyes only for the dirt and for me. He hadn’t noticed, but everyone else had.

  In the car, with the woman, Mark chose his next words carefully. “What do you need in exchange for your generosity?” Mark isn’t like most people, like I am. He has no manners, really, no compulsion to refuse an extravagant gift. I probably would have tried to thank her for the thought and escaped the car as fast as possible. It never would have occurred to Mark to refuse, if the life of the farm was at stake. But he did see money as energy that needed to be balanced. He wanted to understand what would need to flow back from us to her.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t want anything for this. It’s not a loan, it’s a gift. I don’t want to be thanked. I don’t even want to be invited to dinner. I’d prefer anonymity. You have a wet farm, and you need drainage. Drainage will help you grow. I’ll send you a check next week.” And she did.

  Mark is less interested in money for money’s sake than anyone I’ve ever met. He would rather drive an old car, if he must drive a car at all—owning a car, as he often reminded me, was a concession to the life of semi-normalcy that he’d agreed to as part of the bargain of marrying me. Before we met, he biked when he needed to get somewhere, or hitchhiked. He’d rather get his clothes secondhand and wear them until they literally fall off of him. If the woman had handed him a diamond, or any priceless beautiful impractical thing, he would have stared at it and handed it back to her. But what she handed him was a renewed ability to pull things out of the earth. And the energy of her generosity cleared away any remaining doubt that our farm would grow.

  There is n
othing that animates Mark more than taking an idea out of the air and making it reality. If he has the resources to do it, it happens like lightning. An hour later, he was on the phone, calling around to fellow farmers, to the extension office, to excavators, getting leads on who lays the best tile drainage. Within the week, he had zeroed in on a company, had a date to begin. The same day the promised check arrived, the Barnes family unloaded the drainage plow at our farm. Mark and I had decided to use the gift on the fields we called Small Joy and Large Joy, two low-lying fields east of the farmhouse that had beautiful sandy-loam soil but a problem with flooding.

  I took Jane to watch the last few lines of tile go into the ground. She had just turned four. I held her hand and explained that this was a momentous occasion that she should try to remember. We met Milton Barnes, the family patriarch, eighty-five years old, who had been laying tile back when it was actually made of ceramic tiles. He was at the bottom of a six-foot ditch, wielding a shovel, while his sons drove the backhoe and the drainage plow. It was good to know we were in such experienced hands. The drainage plow itself looked like an ancient monolith attached to the bulldozer’s insectlike tail. It dug a narrow trench five feet deep and fed the plastic tube to the bottom, where it would drain excess water to the edge of the field. The plow was blunt, colossal, and we walked behind it, watching the brute force of diesel at work, the plow running through all that earth as though it were made of warm butter. We stopped, dangled our legs in the cut, and held handfuls of the dark, loamy topsoil and the light, sandy subsoil. There were no rocks to be seen. The two fields were one now, and needed a new name. When the surface had been plowed and harrowed smooth, we seeded it to rye, as a cover crop, and rechristened it Superjoy.