After a few lessons from Brick we were trimming hooves, or at least starting to climb the learning curve. Greg flung the sheep and held them while I trimmed the hooves and wormed them. Trimming is no picnic either. Quick a hoof with your razor sharp clippers and you’re likely to get a hoof in the face or your own finger sliced. At day’s end, Greg could barely straighten up, and I had several bandaged fingers.
With that onerous chore done, our girls were ready to receive the ram, appropriately named Romeo. Romeo tentatively entered the paddock, surveying the flock. He put his head in the air and took several big whiffs and, I swear, I saw him smile. I opened the gate to the pasture and the girls all trotted past like teenagers headed to the prom. And so it goes.
The days grew shorter and grayer. Heavy rains fell all night leaving the pastures soggy with standing water. The stream became a raging torrent that swept away the footbridge and cut off access to the far pasture. The rains brought down the leaves, mashing them into the brown mud, leaving only the gray skeleton of the trees jutting into the gray ceiling of a sky that seemed no more than a foot above our head. In this dreary time, nature gives us one of her greatest spectacles.
On a November morning I followed the herd to check on the pasture. Partway there I heard an urgent thrashing in the creek. Chinook salmon were churning their way up the fast waters to their spawning grounds. Our tiny creek, ankle deep in the summer, now challenged these behemoths with water heavy enough to sweep away a horse. Logs the size of Hondas came crashing by, yet the salmon powered upstream. The epic quest of the salmon never fails to inspire. It is one of the greatest testaments to resiliency in nature, and it comes on the threshold of winter, when the message is needed most.
In two weeks, it’s over. Having fulfilled their reproductive mission, the carcasses of salmon wash up on the riverbanks to decay into bug fodder. Those same bugs will feed the salmon fry hatching in about thirty days. Of course, not all dead salmon are consumed by insects. At least two were eaten by our dogs, leading to salmon poisoning. Left untreated, they would have joined the salmon in short order. Once again, Brick came to the rescue, correctly identifying the problem and steering us to the feed store that stocks the Teramyacin needed to treat it. The good news is, once a dog has been poisoned by salmon, it never goes back. Sort of like that bad tequila experience in college.
December began with a hard frost and ended with snow. Our children came back just as the snowflakes began to fall. And with each flake, our farming mistakes were hidden deeper under a soft blanket of temporary denial. We needed that psychological distance to relax and enjoy the season.
One of the benefits of living in a Christmas tree forest is that trees are easy to come by—a short trip out the back door. One of the drawbacks is that trees from the forest are not anything like the pampered and pruned trees from Christmas tree farms. So, when Greg returned from the woods with a scrawny, light-starved sapling, it was greeted with resounding disappointment. For the girls, it symbolized everything they had given up. They had not come back to their home but to a foreign place of someone else’s choosing. And a dark, drafty, isolated choice at that. For me, it was another dashed expectation. This was more Soviet work camp than my ideal of a New England farm accidentally dropped in Oregon. This anemic twig captured all that emotion in one visual metaphor. The opulent array of lights and ornaments from Christmas past would have to be pared down to accommodate its scrawny branches. So much for psychological distance.
But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “you go to Christmas with the tree you have.” The girls and I set about decorating by minimizing. I had always thought of Christmas as a celebration of abundance, but this tree forced a different frame upon us—less is enough.
By the time we finished dressing the tree, our mood was transformed. There was beauty in the simplicity and honesty of this little tree. Perhaps even more befitting the birth we were commemorating.
Of course, just as the eggnog was poured and we all gathered to appreciate the tree, the lights went out. This time I was prepared. Candles and oil lanterns were lit. The wood stove was stoked. We huddled together playing board games, laughing over failed strategies and bad turns of the dice, deep into the winter night. Yes, there was something to be said for simple—and for the bonds of family and for the dark of December that brings it all into high relief.
PART TWO
GO BIG OR GO HOME?
The New Year brings resolutions. Our tradition had been to take stock of the past year and set goals for the new year. So, after Christmas we tallied up our accounts for income and expenses. The numbers were even more grim than we expected. The sale of the lambs covered about 10 percent of our operating expenses. We were running a 90 percent deficit. We reviewed strategies for both reducing expenses and increasing income. Greg had taken work off the farm, but even that was not enough. We could reduce our feed expense by putting one of our pastures into hay production but that would require a tractor—another expense. The classic farm paradox: to get out of debt you have to go deeper into debt and then hope that nature cooperates.
At the end of six months, I had an answer to my question of doing what I can and living with incomplete. It isn’t enough. In particular, I needed a better revenue stream. Was that even possible on our small acreage?
“Go big or go home” was coined by Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture during the Reagan administration. He meant me. Roughly 90 percent of America’s agricultural output is generated by 12 percent of America’s farmers. And soon it will be 10 percent. That’s a testament to the efficiency of America’s industrial-style farming. Never have so few fed so many, creating a base of wealth that spreads throughout our society. Never in history has a group of people paid so little for their food, leaving more funds available for discretionary spending. Farming is economy of scale. The bigger the farm, the more it can support the expensive equipment, which reduces the cost of labor, which in turn reduces the cost of the product. The cheaper the product, the thinner the profit margins, the more competitive the market. Farming is a business, and like all businesses, it responds to the market’s demand for efficiency with competitive pricing.
Our little farm could never rise to that level of efficiency. It began as a farm 120 years ago to supply meat and milk to loggers when it was too expensive to haul those supplies over the mountains. Today the loggers get all the meat and milk they want from Walmart. The problems of transporting perishable agricultural goods have now been solved at the global level, making the world flat even—or rather especially—for farmers. These mountain soils could never compete with prime, flat, Iowa bottomland.
So is Mr. Butz right? Is it time for us to go home? Sell our farm into lumber production for pennies on the dollar? The words of my father kept reverberating in my mind, “Educate yourself.” What did the other 88 percent percent of farmers do to make ends meet? I didn’t know but I was going to find out. I may be incomplete, I thought, and yes, certainly naive, but I refuse to stay ignorant. Ignorance is a choice.
Besides insufficient revenue, there was another issue lying in the shadows. Greg had taken a job in town. In doing this, he joined the other 80 percent of American farmers (probably 100 percent percent of small farmers) who work off the farm. He was fortunate that his credentials allowed him to secure a teaching job with a decent wage and work hours that left his summers free to farm. Most farmers take semi-skilled jobs, which pay less and require longer hours, adding to the financial strain on farm families. Greg took the job because there was no other choice if we were to survive financially. It was as simple as that, and I recall it taking less than fifteen minutes of discussion to decide.
And that’s how we fell into the money trap again. Not that money is a bad thing when kept in perspective. The invention of money allows us to apply a metric to issues of time, labor, and materials, which then allows us to add, weigh, and decide a course of action to solve those issues. Unfortunately, money also moves the focus off of relationships and ont
o material transactions. In making this decision, we never once asked ourselves what the cost of working off the farm would be to our relationship. Odd, since our whole reason for moving to the farm was to “get back to the land, get back to each other.” But, that’s what burgeoning debt will do to the human psyche. Without even thinking about it, we had foreclosed on a relationship option and separated a little bit from each other.
There was one more unintended consequence. Since Greg was now working in town, I was no longer the farmer’s wife; I was now the farming wife. Greg was the farmer’s husband. Nothing changed in my work duties, just a subtle shift of weighted responsibility. And that too would send ripples through the relationship. I was making daily decisions that previously would have had shared input. I grew to resent the shouldering of that burden alone, just as Greg grew to resent not being consulted. In other words, we wanted the same thing and were upset the other wasn’t providing it. That little dab of insanity sauce was caused by focusing on the money problem instead of the relationship. When we could have been supports for each other, we were just individuals doing our level best to dig our way out of the money hole.
It all made for some sleepless nights. Maybe the other 88 percent percent of farmers (the non-industrial farmers) were having the same farm anxieties, the same relationship strains, the same sleepless nights. I tried counting sheep.
COUNTING SHEEP TO SLEEP
It doesn’t work for sheep farmers. Picturing fluffy white balls jumping over fences just caused me to try to estimate the weight of each lamb, the amount of forage in the field, and the price at market. And what are they doing jumping over the fence??? That’s a repair. Whose field are they in now? I’ll have to get them rounded up—but they’re not cooperating, they’re running away, scattering. The more I run the more they scatter.
I’m not an insomniac by habit. I actually hate to be awake at night, thinking about things. I prefer to dream my anxieties into other kinds of stories. Sometimes I even dream solutions.
That first year, I sold lambs to a broker as “feeder lambs” for ninety cents per pound. In this system, the broker keeps the lambs, gambling on a better price as the market fluctuates. Of course he’s also fattening the lambs, hence the term “feeder,” so the better price is almost assured. And because the broker has a continuous supply of lambs, the large supermarkets and restaurants prefer to deal with the broker. The benefit to the farmer is that you get one check—one small check.
But this is the age of the Internet, and the small farmer does not have to be at the mercy of the broker. Well, not completely. As a farmer, I don’t sell cuts of meat. I sell whole animals, which is called “hanging weight.” I can advertise on craigslist and sell lambs for three dollars per pound, hanging weight. But between my lamb and your lamb chop there is a butcher. And there is the rub.
Federal law requires that all cuts of meat sold to the public be inspected by the USDA, which means a federal inspector must be on the premises at all times during the processing of the meat. This law stems from the terrible abuses that occurred in meat processing plants in the early twentieth century. (Remember Upton Sinclair?) Since USDA-approved meat-processing plants are expensive to build and operate, there are not many of them, and they cater to the big producers. By contrast, there are lots of small independent butchers who process game for hunters and livestock for the farmer’s own table, but they don’t sell single cuts of meat to the public at large. So, when I sell lambs at hanging weight, in essence I’m selling a customer a whole lamb and giving a referral to my independent butcher who will then cut the meat to the customer’s specifications.
It’s a convoluted system in need of reform, but it is legal and safe. For the buyer, it’s cheaper than retail but you must buy in quantity. For the farmer it’s three times the profit compared to selling to the broker but only one lamb at a time. Just like in my dream, one lamb jumping over the fence until the whole flock is sold.
Or I could send my lambs to a USDA-certified processing plant and sell by the cut for an average of twelve dollars per pound. I picture lamb chops jumping over the fence. If I’m selling cuts of meat, what do I do with the rest? In my dream a snow storm blows over the pasture dropping everything into ice. A commercial freezer! Sell over the Internet, use a USDA processor, and buy a freezer to store the pre-packaged lamb.
The next morning I’m placing calls. The nearest USDA processing plant is two hours away, so I would have to transport. My lambs have never left their fields—except to sample from my neighbor’s. The trip would stress them, tainting the meat with stress hormones. I raise happy lambs and I want my customers to taste that quality. I can’t afford to have all my hard work destroyed by a two-hour trip. Worse, the USDA plant is booked six months out. That’s six more months of hay and six months closer to being mutton.
This is where the farmer turns to her most trusted tool—the calculator. After running the numbers, my best option is an amalgam. The USDA butcher is out—too far and too time constrained. I’ll sell as many lambs as I can as hanging weight and the rest will go to the broker again. Not much of a solution, more like half of a solution.
That night I felt my anxiety ramping up again. I woke to the snoring of the dogs and the farmer lying next to me—wheezing metronomes of domestic tranquility. A stark contrast to the winter storm tracking through my mind. There had to be another solution. I pulled the covers up and snuggled in against the farmer. If only I could dream it.
TURKEY DREAMING
The next morning, I was sipping coffee and reading the ag news. Price of natural gas is up. Hmmm, that means the price of nitrogen fertilizer is up, which means the price of corn is up, which means it just got more expensive to feed my chickens. Well, poop!
There was another article about a turkey farmer in remote eastern Oregon. Seems he had just inherited the farm from his father, which was unfortunate for two reasons. The farm was going bust because his father had refused to update to the new breed that tripled weight gain. Seems the weight gain so unbalanced the bird that it was unable to fulfill its procreational obligations. That meant farmers would have to artificially inseminate their flocks. The old farmer judged that to be unnatural and just plain wrong. Sometimes you have to take a stand, also called bankruptcy, in business. So the son inherited not so much a farm as a zoo for a vanishing sub-species of domestic fowl. Worse, and this is the second reason, the son hated turkeys, improved breeds or otherwise.
This might make a good human interest story for the average urban newspaper, but this was an ag paper. Turns out the new breed produced triple the meat at one tenth the flavor. While this trade-off was acceptable to groceries, it wasn’t to restaurants that depended on the quality of the dining experience. And they were willing to pay for the flavor advantage in the heritage breed. The rush to high-production farming left a small but very lucrative niche for that stubborn old farmer—if only he had lived to see it—and a very pointed rebuttal to Earl Butz.
I put down the paper and picked up the calculator. Six months to maturation, eighteen pounds average weight, three dollars per pound—yes, that was a better profit margin than sheep. The farmer’s son was selling the flock. I bought a tom and two hens. Not exactly brave, but I was learning that farming involves managing risk. A tom and two hens could produce sixty turkeys in six months. I didn’t even know yet where I would put them all.
Of course, hens won’t lay until spring, which was three months away. Okay, so sixty turkeys in nine months. I’m still in.
A week after I bought the turkeys, one of the hens fell over dead. Okay, so thirty turkeys in nine months. Many great enterprises started from humble beginnings. Apple started in a garage.
More importantly, at that moment, these two turkeys offered an option, a scintilla of hope. I had found a niche that could enable a small farmer not just to survive but even thrive. I could offer a choice to the American public that the industrial farms, with their emphasis on production, couldn’t. I hadn’t exactly dre
amed this answer, but I had stayed open to its possibility. Like the blind woman catching a butterfly, you have to wait for it to land and then gently, with both hands, encircle what you can’t see.
FINDING LAURA
My father’s words were echoing in my ears when I woke that morning. Educate yourself. I wasn’t yet a sheep farmer and already I was starting a new venture. After feeding chores, I took myself to the library. I was going to be an educated turkey farmer.
I was elbow deep in poultry periodicals when a thin woman with straight hair and large glasses intercepted me. Sarah, the town librarian, had correctly surmised I was the new farmer in town. She had a problem and was seeking assistance. It seems my neighbor, Laura, had a dental appointment in two days. Sarah needed to get word to Laura that the appointment was confirmed. Laura had been waiting weeks for this appointment and needed to know that it was on—she was expected in two days.
I wasn’t sure why this was the librarian’s affair or why she couldn’t just call this Laura, but I was sure it didn’t involve me since I didn’t have any neighbors, unless you count timber conglomerates and the US Forest Service in that category.
Sarah paused, giving me a look, and then in a hushed, confidential tone, noted, “Well, yes, but there’s also Laura and Leonard.”
Country Grit: A Farmoir of Finding Purpose and Love Page 5
