by Brian Brett
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
TRAUMA Farm
“Trauma Farm is a passionate memoir of life on a small farm. Brian Brett brings us his own version of guns and roses with wisdom and wit. A great book that asks the reader to read it and then joyfully read it again.”
PATRICK LANE
author of Red Dog, Red Dog
“If it’s hope you’re looking for, you’ll find it in the fortifying madness of Trauma Farm. You may never want to leave.”
J.B. MACKINNON
author of The 100-Mile Diet and Plenty
“An engaging, quirky narrative of farm life which often reads more like poetry than prose.”
NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN
author of The Righteous Porkchop: Finding
a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms
A REBEL HISTORY
OF RURAL LIFE
BRIAN BRETT
TRAUMA Farm
D&M PUBLISHERS INC.
Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley
Copyright © 2009 by Brian Brett
09 10 11 12 13 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 -893-57 7 7.
Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver bc Canada v5t 4s7
www.greystonebooks.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brett, Brian
Trauma farm : a rebel history of rural life / Brian Brett.
Includes bibliographic references.
ISBN 978-1-55365-474-2
1. Brett, Brian. 2. Brett, Brian—Family. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)— 20th century—Biography. 4. Farm life—British Columbia—Saltspring Island. 5. Natural history--British Columbia—Saltspring Island. i. Title.
s522.c3b74 2009 c818’.5409 c2009-904051-4
Editing by Nancy Flight
Copy editing by Barbara Czarnecki
Jacket and text design by Naomi MacDougall
Jacket illustration by Michael Kelley/Getty Images
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free paper that is forest friendly (100% post-consumer recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free.
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.
The author would like to thank the Canada Council, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Haig-Brown House, and the Writers’ Trust for their support.
This book is dedicated to Sharon and the children . . .
and the children of the children . . .
the eagerness of nineteen-year-olds . . . and Beverly
and Mike Byron—teachers and mentors.
CONTENTS
Overture
1 Grey Hour, the Bird God
2 Morning Is a Community
3 Fowl Play
4 Breakfasts Forever
5 Walking the Land
6 Living inside the Soil
7 Running Dogs and Fellow Travellers
8 Taking Stock
9 More Stock
10 Fruit of the Wood
11 Who’s for Lunch?
12 Seeds of the Day
13 Stop and Look
14 One More for the Birds (and Their Friends)
15 Pest Control Syndrome
16 Grace at Work
17 Fence Builders and Tool Users
18 This Nature of the Absurd
19 Dinner like a Bell
20 A Tour Is Good for the Digestion
21 Regulating a Rebellious Universe
22 Local Living, Local Communities
23 The Last Roundup
24 Creatures of the Night
Selected References
OVERTURE
A FARM IS BOTH theory and worms. Once it was the bridge between wilderness and civilization; now it has become a lonely preserve for living with what remains of the natural landscape—a failing companion to a diminishing number of hunter-gatherer societies, a few parks, and the surviving wilderness. There is a science to farming, but one of its by-products is the terrifying logic of the factory farm. There is also a history of traditional practices, some delicious and others scary. Those traditions, along with the small farms remaining, are being crushed by regulation and globalization.
Yet, if anything, the small, mixed farm is a hymn to the lush achievement of our complex world and to ecological entropy—the natural process that creates diversity. Tradition and science and ecology wrapping around each other like a multidimensional puzzle. It’s nighthawks celebrating the dusk with their booming dives, the fields turning gold in the late afternoon light, laughter in the face of the absurd, a bright Spartan apple peeking from behind a green leaf, and the need to produce good food for the community.
We moved into our four-thousand-square-foot log house on a cold January afternoon, eighteen years ago. The shake roof leaked, skylights were smashed, snow drifted through the laundry room, the plumbing was split from freezing. Two of the outer doors were completely gone. Lost. Who would take someone’s doors? You could see outside through the gaps in the log chinking. The sole heat was provided by a pair of wood stoves, both working inadequately. The woodshed attached to the barn contained a forlorn, punky chunk of alder. The kitchen stove hadn’t been cleaned in a year because the caretakers didn’t realize that ashes needed to be hauled from cookstoves. The chimneys were thick with creosote.
I was still in good health then, and Sharon was, and still is, tireless. We were fools for work. We brought our younger son, Roben, nineteen years old and a silent tiger when it came to labour. He was accompanied by a changing cluster of anarchic nineteen-year-old friends, eager for adventure in our world outside the city—Joaquin, Seb, Paul, Gerda, Lenny, Jason. The farm was a romantic escape for them, as well as a way to keep out of trouble, and they crashed in various spare rooms in the house and barn (which had a guest room). The group changed regularly. A few women drifted into the barn, but it was mostly guys, except for Gerda, who became a master gardener and sculptor. Sebastion, easygoing and affable; Paul, brilliant though he kept his genius hidden; and Joaquin, the vocal rebel who questioned authority. They were the most regular. They still whine about how hard they worked for so little. I tell them that’s farming.
We could have probably taken the more economical route of hiring farmhands, since the boys ate like horses and had a tendency to break furniture and tools, but we achieved an enormous amount of work and I loved relearning the world of the young. I like to think we gave them some good directions about living in the world. They all spent varying amounts of time on the farm, working for room and board and wine. There was lots of partying, and very little cash. When we look back now at those first six years, none of us can believe how much we accomplished.
As the initial building, fencing, and rebuilding years drew to a close, I recognized I would eventually write about the farm, but some instinct demanded I find a way to tell its story within the natural history of farming itself. The question is, How do you write the natural history of a farm when such histories tend to follow a linear logic? A farm isn’t logical, as anyone who’s had a foot stepped on by a clueless horse or watched the third crop of pea
s fail to sprout will tell you.
I realized the only way I could write this memoir was by association—a walk through a summer’s day—the June day of the solstice. A walk that simultaneously remembers winter snows, sunflowers, the dinnertime song of the sheep, history, and the taste of acid soil—a sublime landscape framed by laughter and absurdity and shock—an eighteen-year-long day that includes both the past and the future of living on the land, tracing the path that led hunter-gatherers to the factory farm and globalization. Just as we have learned to respect the educational and social fountain of Native teaching tales and their great resources, it became obvious to me that the tradition and science of farming could also be told through the magic of story.
Rural living is an eccentric pursuit, in the same way that beauty is an eccentric pursuit—an exercise in nonlinear thinking as much as a series of rational steps. It’s both a logical and an intuitive act, like running an obstacle course; it seems easy until you attempt to make a machine that can do it.
Although our business name is Willowpond Farm, we came to refer to this land as Trauma Farm, because we soon realized beauty also demands a little terror and laughter, and that this story would have to follow the form of the farm and not the romantic or scientific myths we inflict upon it.
Farming doesn’t have a long history by evolutionary standards. The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, whereas Emmer wheat was first utilized around nineteen thousand years ago. Its systematic cultivation began a mere twelve thousand years in the past, closely followed by Einkorn wheat. That’s when the small farm began. These two exquisite grains remain in cultivation, though mainly in small pockets in Ethiopia—and in North America, where seed savers are attempting to protect endangered grains. Rice, although the genus appeared 120 million years in the past, wasn’t cultivated until ten thousand years ago.
The discovery of seed collecting marks a paradigmatic change in human evolution toward what we optimistically call civilization. Cap this with the invention of record keeping, and suddenly, in the five thousand years since writing began, the rest of the planet is in trouble. Estimates of our population in 10,000 bc average around 5 million people. Today, we are 6.5 billion individuals on an endangered planet. The historian Ronald Wright notes our recorded history equals the combined lifespan of only seventy people, counted from slashes in wet clay, around 3000 bc , to the billions of binary codes in the hard drives of today.
Modern economics and simplistic thinking have made farming even more cruel and dangerous than it has been historically—thousands of pigs clamped screaming into sterile environments; fields flooded with contaminated sewage sludge; frog genes crossed with tomatoes; potatoes that are also pesticides in the brave new world of genetic modification.
Fortunately, a new generation is reconsidering the concept of the modern farm, inventing new methodologies and building on traditional knowledge.
as soon as we arrived at the farm, I recognized it was what I’d always dreamed, even as a child—a forlorn kid fantasizing in the back of my father’s truck full of potatoes he’d bought from a farmer, while we drove from the country to the homes of suburban wives, who would sometimes buy our potatoes merely because they had nothing else to do. Being a peddler gave him freedom, and he loved the land, especially in the morning. My earliest memories are of lying on those potato sacks, with a few filthy burlap bags pulled over me for warmth as we drove the ice-puddled frost roads of the Sikh, German, Chinese, or Japanese farms of the Fraser Valley and Steveston in British Columbia—the richest, most temperate farmland in Canada, now covered in apartment blocks, malls, and subdivisions. Father and these elders showed me the real world, and their teachings eventually caused me to lure Sharon to Trauma Farm.
At dawn the canvas flap would snap in the wind while the truck bounced and picked up speed, and through the open window in the back of the driver’s cab Father would yell far-fetched stories. He was excited like a puppy, ready to begin the adventures of the day. We sold bootleg potatoes, unapproved by the government regulators of a byzantine protectionist bureaucracy. Potato-board inspectors would hunt us down and arrest us and seize our potatoes, but my father had a knack for dodging the inspectors and the police, and they seldom caught up with him as he unconsciously encouraged the rebel in me. Both my childhood with my adventurous father and this farm taught me that the world is fluid, and that our compulsive need for regulation could simultaneously be beneficial and dangerous.
Born with a rare genetic malfunction that made me middle-sexed, Kallmann’s syndrome, I was a troubled and difficult left-handed child, regularly thrashed by my teachers who wanted to make me right-handed, though there was a lot more help I could have used. So I learned to be ambidextrous and would switch back and forth just to drive them crazy. One teacher used to give me the strap because I’d look out the window and weep at the beauty of the world—bad form for a twelve-year-old “boy,” and he tried to beat the beauty and the weeping out of me. “Be a man!” he said, as the leather strap hit my girlie-boy’s outstretched hand. It was a popular phrase in that era, and I began to understand its real ramifications only when I started receiving treatment in my twenties for this disorder that disables the pituitary gland and causes numerous side effects, including the inability to produce male hormones. The doctor who diagnosed the condition shortly after my twentieth birthday predicted I wouldn’t make it to forty. That was thirty-eight years ago. It took a long time to accept he was wrong—and his comment merely another incident in the absurd circus of life. As luck would have it, he died, and I lived beyond his prediction. Though I will never awake to another day without pain in my body.
These experiences taught me to always look over the wall, to enjoy traditional knowledge, yet never trust authority. And that’s why I am writing these stories in this non-Euclidean form—stories within and alongside other stories—as elastic as the world around us, a web in every direction. It is the way we actually live, despite our attempts to regulate the world—a stroll told backwards and forwards, all the way from Babylon to the exotic archipelago where my island farm exists today.
Milan Kundera long ago discussed how we see the history of a life. Each of us spends our existence walking through a fog, but when others look back on our stories, they see only the missteps, the great leaps, the retracings— they don’t see the fog. History, real history, needs to run with all of it—numbers, dreams, and the fog.
Not only have Sharon and I lost money every year since we began farming, like all small farmers we are also in conflict with the mighty tentacles of agribusiness. Given a bad year or two we could even be forced to sell. It took us only a few years to realize we couldn’t make it financially. Every one of our naturally grown free-range sheep cost us $25 when we sold them last year. We paid our customers for the privilege of spending a year growing their lambs. Now that’s farming.
Yet we’re unwilling to sell the farm. Debt used to terrify me. Farming today is learning how to accept debt—a spiritual exercise in humility. Like the seasons, you live with it. The small farm hasn’t got an ice cube’s chance in hell. But we’ve made our rebel decision. That’s what makes the fight so beautiful. Farming is a profession of hope. You will not meet a farmer without hope even when you encounter a flock of them drinking coffee at the local café, lamenting their lot, bankers, pests, fuel prices, seed costs, weather— hoping they can harvest the low field before it turns to mud, or the rain won’t split the cherries, or they can get the livestock to market before the prices crash again.
I like to tell the story of the government inspector who showed up at a farmer’s door claiming he’d heard there was a man cheating his hired help, and was it him? And would it be possible to talk to the workers? The farmer doubted the culprit was himself. “I’ve got a hand here who I pay good wages, and I cover all his benefits. You can talk to him until the cows come home, but it won’t do you any good.”
“Anybody else?” asked the inspector.
“Nope.�
�� Then he thought for a moment. “Maybe you mean the local idiot who I pay fifty cents an hour and feed a bottle of whisky every payday.”
“That’s the one I want to talk to—the idiot.”
“You’re talking to him.”
It’s a comic occupation.
The numbers vary depending on who they come from, as it’s complex trying to calculate what is rural, suburban, or urban, but it’s generally accepted that in 1790 almost 90 percent of Americans lived rural lifestyles. By 1900 the number had fallen to 60 percent. Yet rural skills remained strong. During the Second World War, according to Michael Pollan in a New York Times article, 40 percent of American produce came out of Victory Gardens. When the recent century expired, around 2 to 4 percent of North Americans lived on working farms. The farmland has been accumulated by multinational agribusinesses, and the leftovers, the land that once circled the cities, have been swallowed by subdivisions named after the landscapes they destroyed. Hazelnut Grove, Meadowlands, and Orchard Valley have become tacky comments on our vanished landscapes.
But you must recognize that as soon as you start talking numbers you have already made a judgment. The issue of local farming versus factory farming has been a victim of the same dissemination of false statistics as the cigarette wars and the climate change debate—too many of the numbers depend on the point of view of the number cruncher. Lewis Carroll knew what he was talking about when he said, “If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics— it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them.”
Both sides of the debate are guilty of twisting statistics, but this story is not about statistics, it’s about the glory and joy and terror of living on the land. That’s why I’ve decided to treat all statistics as stories. I’ve sought the best numbers I could find, but the reader, like me, should regard them as what they are—stories. This is a story of stories, not of statistical leveraging. Distrust all authority. Suspect all statistics. Although I have abandoned the practice of footnotes, I have included a small collection of my best sources, with some comments on the more interesting books cited.
