Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  Though most Americans believe in the separation of city and country, there are pockets of urban farming here—notably in Philadelphia, parts of Brooklyn, Detroit, and East Austin. In San Francisco, I had recently heard about a four-acre urban farm that sprouted up next to the highway. Willow’s urban farms were multiplying as well. Though most of us were small-time operations with less than an acre of land, added together, we made a considerable-sized farm. My role in this scattered-acres concept was, at least temporarily, the pig part of the idealized, rhizomatic farm. And like many urban farmers, I found myself in over my head.

  “How do you kill them in Cuba?” I asked Henry, who has curly black hair and looks a little like Prince.

  “We stab them in the heart,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I nodded, and we went back to the fire to make s’mores.

  Stab them in the heart? I thought, looking at Henry in the firelight. That’s so romantic. But it might be a little too intimate.

  After our guests went home, Bill and I sorted through the rest of the food gifts for the pigs. Some of our friends, in pig ga-ga land, had lost their senses and brought perfectly edible food for humans. A bag of only slightly blemished peaches. Perfectly fine potatoes. We took these upstairs and ate them ourselves.

  While I bit into an incredibly ripe peach, my two pig problems floated to the front of my brain. One was how to kill them. The other was, once that was done, how on earth would I process them? I had a little over five months to figure it out.

  As the hills began to turn gold for the dry season and Bill and I settled into our twice-a-day pig-feeding routine, Willow came over to our house, her dark curly hair in braids and her car packed with chicken cages. It was late May and we were going on a field trip to Vacaville, a rural town an hour’s drive away, to buy some heritage-breed chicks. First, though, Willow had to meet the pigs—she had missed their coming-out party.

  “Oh, they’re so wonderful!” she said. The pigs were snoozing in a pile of lettuce, the chickens politely scratching and eating near them.

  “Yep, they’re the big concept,” I said, poking a stick through the fence to scratch their backs. “Now I’m a real farmer.” At parties lately I sometimes had to defend my urban-farmer identity. The term “urban farm” had become part of the popular vernacular, and many people—especially real, rural farmers—took umbrage at it. They were especially annoyed when the self-proclaimed urban farmers had only a few heads of lettuce and a pair of chickens. My definition of “urban farming” involved selling, trading, or giving the products of the farm to someone else. There couldn’t just be a producer; there had to be a separate consumer. A real farm also had to involve some kind of livestock.

  When strangers at dinner parties questioned the legitimacy of the term “urban farmer,” I only had to show them a photo of me scratching the pigs’ backs with a rake, the auto shop lurking in the background, and the debate was over. My latest livestock acquisition made me feel complete, whole. Every scrap generated in our kitchen went to the pigs. If an egg had a crack, it went into the slop bucket. Stale bread, moldy fruit, rotten milk—all enjoyed deeply by the pigs. Because of our waste stream, raising pigs in the city made a huge amount of sense. And yet this image of me as Ye Olde Swineherder, while affirming that urban farming in America was a reality, also confirmed something else: I was, indeed, a bit nuts.

  Willow and I piled into the car and headed north to the chicken farm. We thought this would be more fun than ordering chicks through the mail. She needed birds for her backyard-garden project.

  Willow had recently gone to Caracas, Venezuela, a hotbed of urban agriculture. In addition to several massive urban farms in downtown Caracas, Willow learned about a government-sponsored food-growing program for los ranchos, the squatter villages in the hills. Along with encouraging some small-animal husbandry, the government provided people with hydroponic grow tables so they could raise their own vegetables and fruit on the decks of their cinderblock houses.

  Willow saw parallels between los ranchos and our ghetto, so she developed and fund-raised to create a backyard-garden program. In West Oakland, where Willow worked, there were no grocery stores within a two-mile radius, and nary a corner market that sold produce. If you wanted to eat an apple in West Oakland, you were looking at an hour’s journey at the least. It was no surprise, then, that residents ate corner-store food—candy bars, chips, and cookies—instead of fresh produce. Instead of taking a bus to the supermarket for veggies and fruit, Willow proposed that low-income people in Oakland grow and harvest their own food in their backyards.

  I had the chance to watch the building of one of the backyard gardens. Willow and crew arrived with supplies—wood, soil, and plants. After some concentrated weeding, the crew placed a wooden raised bed (similar to the ones in our garden), filled it with soil donated from the garden center, and then planted all manner of seedlings (collards, tomatoes, celery) that had been grown in the City Slicker greenhouse. Volunteers would return to show the backyard gardeners how to harvest their bounty and plant new seedlings.

  Now Willow wanted to add chickens and eggs to the mix. It would be the same model: the crew would bring in a premade coop and the chickens, and drop off the chicken feed for their clients.

  The late-May heat of Vacaville blasted through Willow’s windows. I was just glad to get out of town and not think about the pigs for a few hours. They had quickly taken over most of my mental bandwidth.

  “Have you heard of the urban farming system they had in Paris?” Willow asked. I had been telling her about my latest foray into the hills for horse manure. The whole squat lot was filled with raised beds—we had reached full capacity. Bill, always curious, brought the pigs some of the manure, and they gleefully chomped it down. Was there anything they wouldn’t eat?

  “No, what is it?” I said.

  “In the middle of Paris in the nineteenth century—right in the middle of the city—huge tracts of public land were devoted to market gardens,” Willow said. “They would scoop up the manure from the horse-drawn carriages and use it in these massive urban gardens. They also used cloches to grow stuff during the winter. It provided a huge amount of produce.”

  This is why I loved hanging out with Willow. Where did she get this stuff? In this case, she had read about the Parisian gardens in her favorite magazine, Small Farmer’s Journal. I later looked it up—the urban farms were mostly two-acre plots, many in an area of the city known as the Marais. At their height, 1,800 of these little plots grew an annual total of 100,000 tons of vegetables. So much produce, they actually exported the excess vegetables to England, Spain, and Portugal.

  “This is it!” Willow said as we pulled into an acorn-strewn driveway.

  The chicken lady, a mousy woman with a perm, gave us a tour. Hers wasn’t a “real farm,” more of a suburban place that had once been rural. The whole house and yard had been turned into a chicken-breeding operation. The chickens were kept in fairly small runs, sequestered, I guessed, to prevent unwanted breed crossing.

  A Jersey cow lingered in the backyard, which you could see had once been rolling countryside but now was being covered with town homes. Next to the woman’s house was one for turkeys, made out of an old shipping container, and five apricot trees. The turkeys—like the chickens, also heritage breeds, a few Royal Palms, some Bourbon Reds—pecked at the fallen fruit.

  “How much do you sell those for?” I said, thinking of Harold and my latest batch of turkeys, which I had ordered through Murray McMurray again.

  “Fifty dollars,” she said.

  “Plucked and cleaned?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  What a bargain. I knew how much work that was. She should charge twice that.

  The chicken lady explained that she was feeding the chickens and turkeys no commercial feed whatsoever. The turkeys had the run of the farm; the chickens were fed with whole wheat soaked and sprouted in water. Willow and I got very excited—we were always looking for new tricks.r />
  “I won’t feed them any of that soy feed, so it’s the best, healthiest meat and eggs,” she said. “I can’t advertise on Craigslist, though. Animal liberationists,” she whispered. “At first I was worried about you two.”

  I laughed, but I knew what she was talking about. I had started blogging about my farm, and my sister had warned me about animal liberationists, too. So far, I had gotten only a few angry comments from a woman from the House Rabbit Society who kept rabbits as pets.

  A guy, a vegan, had posted to ask, “Why have you chosen to raise and kill animals on your farm rather than perhaps raise animals as a part of a community petting zoo for children or a home for rescued and abused animals? In both the latter cases you could derive the benefits of domesticated animals for your plants without killing them.” Who, I had responded, would pay for this elaborate petting zoo? I did like the idea of having people meet their meat, though.

  “They’re like terrorists,” the chicken lady said. Willow and I looked at each other. Now, that was going a little too far.

  “I’ve got two pigs,” I said. I wanted to reassure the lady, but at the same time, I had a sneaking suspicion that she had a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker lurking on one of her cars. She was not my people.

  “Potbellies?” She smiled, assuming I must be raising pet pigs.

  “Durocs.”

  She nodded her head vaguely. “OK,” she said. Even she—a woman with a cow in her backyard and several egg incubators in her carport—thought I was a nutball.

  “She feeds them from the Dumpsters in the city!” Willow, my biggest fan, said.

  “Uh-huh,” the woman said. I could tell she was ready for us to leave. So were we.

  Willow and I picked out some of the rare-breed chicks: some Chanteclers (big golden chickens), Langshans (mixed colors with feathered legs), and a handful of Araucanas (the kind who lay pretty Easter-egg-colored eggs). They were older than the ones Murray McMurray usually sent and looked quite healthy.

  I snuck a peek into the woman’s house while Willow wrote her check. Yep, it was as disorganized as mine. Egg cartons piled up on her counters; feathers wafted to the floor. Now that I was part of the farming club, I had come to the conclusion that farming isn’t without its downsides. Like my filthy house, for instance. Between my various real jobs and animal husbandry, there was just no time for cleaning. The floor was dirty from all my tracking in of animal droppings and wood shavings. Hay was strewn all over the front stairs. Sticky beekeeping equipment was piled up around the house. For some reason I thought of Lana when I considered my messy house: it was a sign of a busy, full life.

  I had volunteered to house Willow’s chicks until they were ready to be adopted by her low-income backyard farmers. When we returned from Vacaville, we set the new chicks loose in the chicken tractor that Willow had built. A chicken tractor is not a poultry-driven farm vehicle, as the name suggests; it’s a predator-proof chicken-wire pen that has wheels and can be moved to different parts of the farm. Usually it is used postharvest: You wheel the tractor to a recently harvested area, so the chickens will scratch at the leftover crop, stir up the dirt, and drop their nutrient-rich poop everywhere. I set up the tractor under the plum tree, where the chicks could peck at leaf litter and grass.

  Figuring that it was warm enough outside, I put my latest batch of Murray McMurray turkey poults, which I had been keeping in a warm brooder, in the tractor with the new Vacaville chicks. There were four poults—one white, three brownish-red—and they had been in the brooder for several weeks. Suddenly released into the world of sunshine and fresh air, the chicks and turkey poults set to work scratching and eating bugs and grass. I smiled. Soon Willow’s chicks would be parsed out all over West Oakland. I felt a little like an animal liberationist.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The pigs were attracting a fan base. Besides my friends, the kids from the neighborhood had taken to visiting them. I don’t know how the kids heard about the piggies, but word must have spread.

  “Can we see the pigs?” a group of five ten-year-olds asked me one morning at the gate.

  “Sure,” I said, and led them back to the sty. I had just fed them their breakfast, and the boy pig, whom I had started called Big Guy, was bogarting the trough, eating plums as quickly as he could. His neck, I noticed, was starting to get a ripple of fat underneath. The girl pig, whom I had “named” Little Girl, quietly gnawed on a cantaloupe that had rolled into a corner. She stepped on the melon with a dainty hoof to hold it in place while she sucked up cantaloupe juices.

  “Wow!!!” The kids cheered, pressing their faces against the gate.

  “I never seen a pig before,” the oldest kid, named Dante, said. He had light brown skin and braided hair.

  “Stinks!” one of them stated.

  Dante waved his hand in front of Big Guy. Thinking the kid’s arm might be toothsome, the pig sniffed at his fingers, gave a little nibble.

  “Hey!! He bit me!” All the kids screamed and ran. But they were laughing. It was summertime, and this is what kids in our neighborhood did all day: wander around looking for something—anything—to do.

  “Bill told me you got rabbits,” Dante said when I walked back out front.

  “That’s right,” I said. Bill worked at home, so he knew everyone.

  “Can we see ’em!! Can we?! Can we?” they all yelled.

  “OK, OK,” I said, and I took them upstairs to the deck. I felt a little nervous, because I didn’t want to get sued or accused of anything, but again, these kids were used to just wandering the streets—their parents couldn’t be that worried about them.

  Did we have rabbits? We had hella baby rabbits. All three of Nico’s bunnies had given birth, so it was a full house indeed. Nico was back from Ireland, but she was working on making a documentary, so she hadn’t claimed the rabbits yet.

  I handed each kid a baby rabbit. The rabbit kits looked like kittens or puppies. They were tiny, with fur as soft as pussy willows, some spotted, others solid brown. The kids did just what I would have done: They held the soft little things up to their checks, snuggled them, and kissed them. A gang of small, scrappy kids from the inner city cuddling with baby rabbits might have been the cutest thing I had ever seen.

  “I want one,” said Dante.

  “Me too, me too!” the others yelled.

  “Well, they are a lot of work,” I said. “You have to feed them and make sure they have water—”

  “OK,” Dante said, ready to sign up.

  “And you have to ask your mother,” I said. I put the kits back with their mama rabbit, who made grunting noises and started licking the babies. Groans went all around.

  Their ten-year-old’s attention spans maxed out, I sent them off to play. I looked outside a bit later and saw that they were sword-fighting in the garden with some bamboo stakes. My friend Max came over and saw them. “If I were a little kid growing up here,” he said, “I’d be over here every day, too.”

  In a way, I did have a little petting zoo, just as my vegan blogger had suggested.

  That night, Bill and I went to Chinatown to get the next day’s pig food.

  “Do they like bitter melon?” Bill asked.

  We were going through the green bins like the professionals we had become. “No. Let’s just get the bakery stuff and peaches and greens.” I had become the expert, because I tipped the buckets every day and observed what the pigs left to sink into an ever-growing pile of rotting muck in their yard. I expected that this bounty would cause a rat infestation. Oddly, I hadn’t seen a rat since the day we brought the pigs home.

  I had read that pigs are the best converters of food into meat over time. While rabbits efficiently turn grass into meat, they can grow only so large. A whopping 35 percent of what pigs eat becomes stored fat and meat. They just keep growing. Compare that to 11 percent from sheep or cattle. And, I had read, pigs will eat almost anything, with gusto. This I witnessed on a daily basis.

  The next morning, I upend
ed two containers of veggies and fish guts, wontons and fruit, into their trough. After a few weeks of fish guts, the pigs didn’t seem quite as excited about the protein slop. Within moments, though, they licked up the last bit and gazed up at me, wanting more.

  “Bouf, bouf,” Big Guy called out. He stood his ground, his red shoulders curving into a perfect half-circle, his floppy ears almost shrouding his eyes. The pigs were growing at a monstrously fast rate. Little Girl, always more polite, nuzzled the chain-link dog gate that kept them contained in our backyard. I touched her nose; it was slimy but somehow muscular. She gave me a little love nibble.

  Not only did they want more food; they wanted better food. And I noticed that they preferred cooked food over raw. Lately, if they didn’t like something, they would leave it in the trough to rot in the sun. We were going to have to upgrade.

  Driven by the pigs’ desires, that evening Bill and I decided to journey with our station wagon, aka the Slop Bucket, into a new frontier: the tony part of Oakland, where high-end restaurants were springing up like mushrooms. We cruised past the nouveau-Mexi place, the wood-fired-pizza joint. The sidewalks were lit up at night, so different from the dim streets of MLK. The fine diners were, true to Oakland, a melting pot of ethnicities and ages. But it was clear, these folks had money.