Nearly every corner of this farm, in Webb family lore, has a name attached to it, or a story, or both. There is Pear Orchard Hill, Dewberry Hill, the Milk Gap, where the cows used to cross the road coming home to the barn. We still call it the Milk Gap, though no cows use it now. A farm has its practical geography; when you tell someone to go close the gate, she needs to know whether you mean the Milk Gap gate or the barn lot gate. We have the Garden Road, the Woods Road, the Paw-Paw Cemetery, and the New Orchard. And once a year, for a few days, we have a spot that rises from obscurity to prominence: Old Charley's Lot.
Old Charley was a billy goat that belonged to the Webbs some seventy years ago. In the customary manner of billy goats, he stank. For that reason they kept him penned on a hillside nearly half a mile up the hollow from the house: that was Old Charley's lot, figuratively and literally. Most of the time now it's just a steep, unvisited place on the back side of our farm, but for one week of the year (for reasons unrelated to the goat, as far as we know), it's the pot of gold at the end of our rainbow. What grows there sells for upward of twenty dollars a pound in city markets: the most prized delicacy that ever comes to our table.
The mountainsides of our farm stand thickly wooded with poplar, beech, and oak. Two generations ago they were clear pastures, grazed by livestock or plowed for crops. This used to be a tobacco farm. It astonishes us when our neighbors look at our tall woods and say: "That's where we grew our corn. Our tobacco patch was on top, for the better sun." Such steep hillsides were worked with mules and a lot of hand labor (a tractor would roll like a boulder), which is exactly why so much of the farmland around here has now grown up into medium-sized stands of trees. The deciduous eastern woodlands of North America can bear human alteration with a surprising grace. Barring the devastations of mining or the soil disaster of clear-cut logging, this terrain can often recover its wildness within the span of a human lifetime.
Farming a hillside with mules had its own kind of grace, I am sure, but it's mostly a bygone option. The scope of farming in southern Appalachia has now retreated to those parts of the terrain that are tractor-friendly, which is to say, the small pieces of relatively flat bottomland that lie between the steep slopes. Given that restriction, only one crop fit the bill here for the past half-century, and that was tobacco; virtually no other legal commodity commands such a high price per acre that farmers could stay in business with such small arable fields. That, plus the right climate, made Kentucky and southwestern Virginia the world's supplier of burley tobacco.
That plant works well here for cultural reasons also: it's the most labor-intensive commodity crop still grown in the United States, traditionally cultivated by an extended family or cooperative communities. Delicate tobacco seedlings have to be started in sheltered beds, then set by hand into the field and kept weed-free. Once mature, the whole plant is cut, speared with a sharp stick, and the entire crop painstakingly hung to dry in voluminous, high-roofed, well-ventilated barns. Once the fragile leaves are air-cured to dark brown, they must be stripped by hand from the stalk, baled, and taken to the auction house.
On the flat, wide farms of Iowa one person with a tractor can grow enough corn to feed more than a hundred people. But in the tucked-away valleys of Appalachia it takes many hands to make just one living, and only if they work at growing a high-priced product. The same small acreage planted in corn would hardly bring in enough income to pay the property tax. For this reason, while the small family farm has transformed elsewhere, it has survived as a way of life in the burley belt. Tobacco's economy makes an indelible imprint on the look of a place--the capacious architecture of its barns, the small size of its farms--and on how a county behaves, inducing people to know and depend on one another. It makes for the kind of place where, when you walk across the stage at high school graduation, every person in the audience knows your name and how much work you've been known to do in a day. Tobacco even sets the date of graduation, since the end and beginning of the school year must accommodate spring setting time and fall cutting.
This was the context of my childhood: I grew up in a tobacco county. Nobody in my family smoked except for my grandmother, who had one cigarette per afternoon, whether she needed it or not, until the day in her ninth decade when she undertook to quit. But we knew what tobacco meant to our lives. It paid our schoolteachers and blacktopped our roads. It was the sweet scent of the barn loft where I hid out and read books on summer afternoons; it was the brown powder that clung to our jeans after an afternoon of playing in old outbuildings. It was the reason my first date had to end early on a Friday night: he had to get up early on Saturday to work the tobacco. For my classmates who went to college, it was tobacco that sent them. Me too, since my family could not have stayed solvent without other family economies that relied on tobacco.
From that society I sallied out into a world where, to my surprise, farmer was widely presumed synonymous with hee-haw, and tobacco was the new smallpox. I remember standing in someone's kitchen once at a college party--one of those intensely conversational gatherings of the utterly enlightened--listening while everyone present agreed on the obvious truth about tobacco: it should be eliminated from this planet and all others. I blurted out, foolishly, "But what about the tobacco farmers?"
You'd have thought I'd spoken up for child porn. Somebody asked, "Why should I care about tobacco farmers?"
I'm still struggling to answer that. Yes, I do know people who've died wishing they'd never seen a cigarette. Yes, it's a plant that causes cancer after a long line of people (postfarmer) have specifically altered and abused it. And yes, it takes chemicals to keep the blue mold off the crop. And it sends people to college. It makes house payments, buys shoes, and pays doctor bills. It allows people to live with their families and shake hands with their neighbors in one of the greenest, kindest places in all this world. Tobacco is slowly going extinct as a U.S. crop, and that is probably a sign of good civic sense, but it's also a cultural death when all those who grew it must pack up, go find an apartment somewhere, and work in a factory. What is family farming worth?
Most tobacco farmers wish they could grow something else. As of now, most will have to. Federal price supports, which have safeguarded the tobacco livelihood since the Depression, officially ended in 2005. Extension services and agriculture schools throughout the region have anticipated that deadline for more than twenty years, hoping to come up with a high-value crop to replace tobacco. No clear winner has yet emerged. When I was in high school, the family of one of my best friends tried growing bell peppers, the latest big idea of the era. They lost the entire year's income when the promised markets failed to materialize. I still get a knot in my stomach remembering the day their field of beautiful peppers, representing months of the family's labor and their year's livelihood, had to be plowed back into the dirt, in the end worth more as compost than as anything else. If people out in the world were irate about the human damage of tobacco, why wouldn't they care enough--and pay enough--to cover the costs of growing vegetables? I can date from that moment my awareness of how badly our food production system is deranged, and how direly it is stacked against the farmer.
The search for a good substitute crop is still on, but now that the modest price supports have ended, farmers in tobacco country have only a year or two more to figure out how to stay on their land. Vegetables are a high-value crop, especially if they're organic, but only in areas that have decent markets for them and a good infrastructure for delivering perishable goods to these markets. The world's most beautiful tomato, if it can't get into a shopper's basket in less than five days, is worth exactly nothing. Markets and infrastructure depend on consumers who will at least occasionally choose locally grown foods, and pay more than rock-bottom prices.
In my county, two of the best tobacco-transition experiments to date are organic vegetables and sustainable lumber. A program in our area offers farmers expert advice on creating management plans for the wooded hillsides that typically occupy so m
uch of the acreage of local farms. Mature trees can be harvested carefully from these woodlots in a way that leaves the forests healthy and sustainably productive. The logs are milled into lumber, kiln-dried, and sold to regional buyers seeking alternatives to rain-forest teak or clear-cut redwood. When we needed new oak flooring in our farmhouse, we were able to purchase it from a friend's woodlot nearby. No farmer earns a whole livelihood from this, but the family farm has a tradition of cobbling together solvency from many crops.
Experimental programs like these, though new and small, are notable for the way they turn a certain economic paradigm on its head. U.S. political debate insistently poses economic success and environmental health as enemies, permanently at odds. Loggers or owls? People or green spaces? The presumed antagonism between "Man" and "Nature" is deeply rooted in our politics, culture, bedtime stories (Red Riding Hood's grandma, or the wolf?), and maybe even our genes. But farming at its best optimizes both economic and environmental health at the same time. A strategy that maximizes either one at the cost of the other is a fair working definition of bad farming. The recent popularity of agriculture that damages soil fertility still does not change the truth: what every farmer's family needs is sustainability, the capacity to coax productiveness out of the same plot of ground year after year. Successful partnerships between people and their habitats were once the hallmark of a healthy culture. After a profoundly land-altering hiatus, the idea may be regaining its former shine.
Is Bigger Really Better?
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Which are more economically productive, small family farms or big industrial farms? Most people assume they know the answer, and make a corollary assumption: that small farmers are basically asking to go bankrupt, they're inefficient even though their operations are probably more environmentally responsible, sustainable, diverse, and better connected to their communities than the big farms are. But isn't it really just about the profits?
If so, small farms win on that score too, hands down. According to USDA records from the 1990s, farms less than four acres in size had an average net income of $1,400 per acre. The per-acre profit declines steadily as farm size grows, to less than $40 an acre for farms above a thousand acres. Smaller farms maximize productivity in three ways: by using each square foot of land more intensively, by growing a more diverse selection of products suitable to local food preferences, and by selling more directly to consumers, reaping more of the net earnings. Small-farm profits are more likely to be sustained over time, too, since these farmers tend to be better stewards of the land, using fewer chemical inputs, causing less soil erosion, maintaining more wildlife habitat.
If smaller is economically better, why are the little guys going out of business? Aside from their being more labor-intensive, marketing is the main problem. Supermarkets prefer not to bother with boxes of vegetables if they can buy truckloads. Small operators have to be both grower and marketer, selling their products one bushel at a time. They're doing everything right, they just need customers.
Food preference surveys show that a majority of food shoppers are willing to pay more for food grown locally on small family farms. The next step, following up that preference with real buying habits, could make or break the American tradition of farming. For more information, visit www.nffc.net.
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The people of southern Appalachia have a long folk tradition of using our woodlands creatively and knowing them intimately. The most caricatured livelihood, of course, is the moonshine still hidden deep in the hollow, but that is not so much about the woodlands as the farms; whiskey was once the most practical way to store, transport, and add value to the small corn crops that were grown here.
These hills have other secrets. One of them is a small, feisty cousin of garlic known as the ramp. Appalachian mothers used to regard these little bulbs as a precious spring tonic--one that schoolboys took willingly because it rendered them so odoriferous, they'd likely get barred from the schoolhouse for several days. For reasons not entirely clear to the outsider, ramps are still prized by those who know where to find them in the earliest days of spring. The emergence of ramps elicits joyous, stinky ramp festivals throughout the region.
Ginseng, another Appalachian botanical curiosity, is hunted and dug up for its roots, which sell for enormous prices to consumers on the other side of the world. "Sang" hunters know where to look, and tend to keep their secrets. So do Molly Mooch hunters, and if you think you've never heard of such, you just don't know the code. A Molly Mooch is a morel.
The mushroom genus Morchella contains some of the most highly prized of all edible wild fungi. Morels fruit in the spring, and just to keep you on your toes regarding the wild mushroom situation, they contain toxic hemolysins that destroy red blood cells--chemicals that are rendered harmless during cooking. (Just don't eat them raw.) Their close relatives, the Gyromitra, are pure poison, but the edible morels look different enough from anything else that they're safe to collect, even for novice mushroomers like me. Their distinctive tall caps are cupped and wrinkled in a giraffish pattern unique to their kind. Here in the eastern woodlands we have the black, common, tulip, and white morels, and one unfortunate little cousin called (I am so sorry) the Dog Pecker. All are edible except for the last one. They're similar enough in ecology and fruiting time that we've sometimes gathered many types on the same day, from the same wooded areas. I've heard them called Molly Mooch, sponge mushrooms, haystacks, dryland fish, and snakeheads. What everyone agrees on is that they're delicious.
Wild mushrooms are among the few foods North Americans still eat that must be hunted and gathered. Some fungi are farmed, but exotics like the morel defy all attempts at domestication. Maybe that's part of what we love about them. "With their woodsy, earthy, complex flavors and aromas, and their rich, primeval colors and forms," writes Alice Waters, wild mushrooms bring to our kitchens "a reminder that all the places we inhabit were once wildernesses." They are also incredibly hard to find, very good at looking exactly like a little pile of curled, dead brown leaves on the forest floor. In my early days of Molly Mooching, I could stand with my boots touching one without spotting it until it was pointed out to me. They're both particular and mysterious about where they grow: in old apple orchards, some people vow, while others insist it's only around the roots of tulip poplars or dying elms. Whatever the secret, the Molly Mooches do know it, because they tend to show up in the same spot year after year.
On our farm we could have walked the woods for the rest of our lives without finding one, because they don't grow near our roads or trails, they've never shown up in our old apple orchard, and they're shy of all other places we normally frequent. Where they do grow is in Old Charley's Lot. We know that only because our friends who grew up on this farm showed us where to look. This is the kind of knowledge that gets lost if people have to leave their land. Farmers aren't just picturesque technicians. They are memory banks, human symbionts with their ground.
My family is now charged with keeping the secret history of a goat, a place, and a mushroom. Just as our local-food pledge had pushed us toward the farmers' market on the previous Saturday, it pushed us out the back door on the following cold, rainy Monday. Morels emerge here on the first warm day after a good, soaking mid-April rain. It's easy to get preoccupied with life and miss that window, or to coast past it on the lazy comfort of a full larder. This April our larder was notably empty, partly I suppose for just this reason--to force us to pay attention to things like the morels. Steven came home from his teaching duties, donned jeans and boots, and headed up toward Old Charley's Lot with a mesh bag in hand. Mushroom ethics mandate the mesh collecting bag, so the spores can scatter as you carry home your loot.
No loot was carried that day. We really knew it was still too cold. We'd had snow the previous day. But we were more than usually motivated, so on Tuesday in only slightly nicer weather, Steven headed out again. I was mending a broken leg that spring and could not yet navigate the steep, slick mountainside, so I
was consigned to the wifely role of waiting for Man the Hunter to return. After the first hour I moved on to the wifely custom of worrying he'd fallen into a sinkhole. But no, he eventually returned from the woods, empty-handed but intact. He was just being thorough.
On Wednesday he went out again, and came back through the kitchen door with a conspicuous air of conquest. Triumphantly he held up his mesh bag: a few dozen fawn-colored, earthy, perfect morels. It wasn't a huge catch, but it was big enough. By the weekend there would be more, enough to share with our neighbors. I grinned, and went to the refrigerator. A little while earlier I'd gone up to the garden and returned with my own prize lying across my forearm like two dozen long-stemmed roses: our most spectacular asparagus harvest ever.
We put our Mollies in a bowl of salt water to soak briefly prior to cooking. I'm not sure why, but our mushroom-hunting friends say to do this with morels, and I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim the distinction of being still alive. I sat down at the kitchen table with Deborah Madison's gorgeous cookbook Local Flavors, which works from the premise that any week of the year can render up, from very near your home, the best meal of your life. Deborah's word is good. We cooked up her "Bread pudding with asparagus and wild mushrooms" for a fantastic Wednesday supper, seduced by the fragrance even before we took it out of the oven. Had I been worried that cutting the industrial umbilicus would leave us to starve? Give me this deprivation, any old day of the week.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Page 9
