Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  In the 1990s, another blight appeared—a cross between the Mexican and Irish blights that was able to survive our mild winters. In our era of invasive diseases and species, these misfortunes occur more often than in the past. Tomatoes were once a fine Salt Spring crop, but this new blight ruined both tomatoes and potatoes. One of its parents, the infamous Irish potato blight, was responsible for the starvation of a million people in the mid-1800s—because the Irish poor single-cropped one variety of spud too extensively, and the loss of an entire crop in a year meant doom. This blight will flow down the vine and rot potatoes in the ground. When you dig them up, they will be mush. The first year of the blight was disastrous on our island—almost everyone’s tomatoes and potatoes were destroyed. The problem was magnified because casual gardeners let their tomatoes sprawl susceptibly on damp ground rather than staking them.

  We were spared major damage because we grow our staked-and-trimmed tomatoes through holes pierced into black plastic covers. Not only does the plastic afford protection and heat for garter snakes, which are another living insecticide, it provides extra heat in the soil for the tomatoes during our damp springs. We reuse the plastic over the years until it becomes so shredded we finally have to recycle it. With the plastic the blight can’t bounce up from the soil during rains or when we turn on the big farm sprinklers. But I’m still trying to figure out a way of eliminating the plastic ground cover altogether.

  Once a potato vine ripens and withers, it won’t transmit the blight, so if you plant potatoes early the tubers can store nicely underground until the cold, wet weather of late fall. Other islanders cloched their tomatoes and shifted to drip irrigation. Not a grower that I know took up expensive fungicides. Organic gardening is a delight and an adventure. It makes us think in original directions, as ecology itself does—and it’s smarter than the eventually ineffective, toxic chemical weapons that agribusiness puts its faith in.

  In the late afternoon the garden is alive with bumblebees and birds and moths, and the wasps hunting among the colourful nasturtiums. If we are lucky, we will see the majestic sphinx moth in the larkspurs. The big bucket I use to soak my bonsais has mosquito larvae in it, and I’ll have to dump it. Usually I don’t worry about mosquitoes because my ponds contain fish and the larvae provide feed for them, but the West Nile panic is upon us. We work at keeping the local mosquito population down, not just for us but to avoid providing habitat for dangerous public health managers like the one from Victoria who, during the initial West Nile panic, insisted on spraying all the mosquitoes in southwestern British Columbia, because “they’re not good for anything, anyway.”

  Not good for anything? My local bat, dragonfly, nighthawk, trout, and swallow populations would disagree equally with his pronouncement. Mosquitoes feed a myriad of wildlife—entire ecosystems, in fact, are based upon them—but we still have a colonialist, kill-them-all attitude toward pests. While it’s true that extreme health emergencies might need limited and intelligent reactions in special cases, the nature of the chemical approach inevitably leads to excess.

  On Salt Spring we’ve also been battling attempts to aerial-spray for gypsy moths—instead, we use volunteer trap setters and inspectors. Since our island hasn’t been sprayed for decades, we have a vibrant, healthy, diverse moth and butterfly population, including a number of rare and endangered varieties. The government wants to aerial-spray with Bt, which it blithely tells us doesn’t harm humans—only a few “dangerous” moths—neglecting to mention that it will kill rare butterflies and moths on some of the best organic farmland on the island to eradicate a small population that can be better controlled by spot-spraying from the ground, hand collecting, and pheromone traps. When I survey the hosts of caterpillars and the moths fluttering gorgeously around our garden, I consider the damage that ripping them out of the ecosystem would do not only to them but to the entire community of insects that thrive on their carcasses, including the parasitoid wasps. Yet if we don’t extensively and expensively hunt the gypsy moth, this invasive species could undergo a dangerous population explosion—it’s all a question of common sense.

  In 1958, when Mao initiated China’s Great Leap Forward, part of it was the Four Pests Campaign—the elimination of mosquitoes, flies, rats, sparrows. He decided to include house sparrows because he’d learned a sparrow can eat ten pounds of grain a year. Six hundred million Chinese citizens were ordered to kill sparrows on a single day, tearing out their nests and running around banging pots and making noises, keeping the birds in the air until they fell from the sky with exhaustion—causing a catastrophic destruction of the sparrow population. What Mao wasn’t told was that sparrows eat more insects than grain and feed locusts to their young. Within two years the crops were overwhelmed by noxious insects, especially locusts. This was one of several ignorant “scientific” decisions about farming that led to the famine in which 20 to 40 million people died.

  If I see dragonflies haunting the water above the ponds, I know that they, along with the swallows, are feasting on any mosquitoes whose larvae survived the goldfish. Dragonflies aren’t called mosquito hawks without reason. They can eat their own weight in half an hour. They also are captured and eaten by the swallows even as they are eating a mosquito in the air. A lucky dragonfly can survive as long as a summer. I love it when the great spring and autumn flights of carpenter ants and termites erupt into the sky, because then the dragonflies will hunt in packs, and it’s an amazing sight. There are eighty-five varieties in my province, of which twenty-four are listed as endangered. Their young nymphs eat underwater, devouring mosquito larvae, other water bugs, and tadpoles until they emerge and moult, leaving their clear nymph shells attached to our iris leaves. I’ve made arrangements out of the leaves, which can give a thrill to visitors who suddenly notice the clear casing with its legs, abdomen, and head on a leaf among the blossoms on the table.

  The more I live on the farm, the less damage I want to inflict, except maybe on the nasty imported European slugs—not the giant Pacific slugs, those slow, liquid sages of the forest floor, harmless and beautiful. I love using nature to help us garden. When I rototill I’m usually followed by peafowl and robins snapping up the fat, pasty-fleshed cutworms as they’re exposed. For the birds I am the gifting god of their summer garden, revealing the feast of pests.

  THE EAGLE IS MERELY one of many predators and pests that haunt small farms, and with the peafowl on sentry duty, I don’t worry about their attacks much, though they might snatch the occasional chicken. The inability to accept loss is the greatest weakness of farms both great and small. That said, an eagle will kill and pluck a full-grown chicken in front of the cowering flock and then fly away with the corpse, leaving only the gizzard behind on a pile of feathers. Roosters sometimes attempt to defend their hens, but they’re puny and useless against an eagle—unless they raise enough of a ruckus to alert the peafowl. Then the feathers hit the fan, and the advantage shifts.

  Our eagles are not sport killers, and they don’t slaughter indiscriminately like cougars, mink, raccoons, or a rogue raven. This might not be so true in other regions. Also, they can be startlingly brutal. Several years ago the vultures circled a thicket in the lower field. Trouble. I found the ewe huddled in the trees. Her lamb had stuck while being born. The ewe was still alive, but there was an eagle eating the head of her lamb even as it was being born. I chased the eagle away and got hold of the leg of the lamb and dragged the poor headless body out of the distraught mother.

  Hawks will infrequently take a shot at a young chick. Hens might be small, but they can be valiant defending their young. At night the barred owl is a master killer of chickens roosting in trees. It will land on their branch and sidle up next to the chicken, tuck right against it, then lean over and—chomp! Their depredations are balanced out by the saw-whet owls, which specialize in mice and voles and are impressively brave as well as nosy little birds. More than once I’ve been startled while standing on someone’s deck suddenly noticing this tiny owl sit
ting on a branch a few feet from my face, gazing curiously at me.

  Our greatest aerial danger on these islands can be the ravens—intelligent and friendly birds, with a sense of humour, they are also territorial. I have a gentleman’s agreement with our pair. They are large, well fed, and getting on in years. I ignore the occasional theft of a goose or chicken egg, and I always “accidentally” spill a little grain at the sheep trough. I’ve seen a raven soar right into the coop and fly back out with an egg in its beak. Luckily, my ravens don’t make this a habit, so I assume they do it only when they’re desperate. They will also feast on the corpse of any animal.

  These ravens, fortunately, keep our territory tightly controlled, except for the occasional sneak attack by an outsider. Our birds seem exceptionally smart and mischievous, and I enjoy watching them torment the dogs at dinner. Once they hear the goose honk, signifying feeding time, they fly up and park on the trough. As soon as I open the pasture gate the dogs give chase to these “enemy birds” at full speed. The ravens fly three feet above the ground, gliding just slowly enough to keep ahead, as they take an extended tour of the fields, until the dogs’ tongues are hanging down to the ground at the end of the far pasture. Then the ravens return and perch in the birches near the trough while the dogs, exhausted, lurch back to the house, their duty done. When I lock the pasture gate on the way out, the ravens fly down and scurry amid the sheep, picking up grains of barley. Afterwards, in the summer months, they fly up and have a little dessert of cherries. I’ve tried netting. I’ve tried paper owls and spangled streamers. Nothing scares off the ravens for long. To add insult to injury, they start on the pears after they finish off the cherries. I’m forced to count my blessings. So far they aren’t eating the plums and the apples.

  Then there’s the obnoxious and brilliant jays, who nest in the spring, disappear to torment other farmers and their crops in high summer, and return the week before our hazelnuts ripen. Their first chatter is like an alarm bell at the farm, and within days we are fighting them, branch by branch, for the hazelnuts.

  Sometimes a farm can’t win, and it’s our stubborn spirit that makes us want to change nature, which seems easier than changing ourselves. Planting dwarf grafted cherry trees or hazelnuts in netted enclosures would be the most efficient method of discouraging bird robberies. Otherwise, you end up with the American fruit farms and those traps exterminating tens of thousands of ravens, crows, starlings, jays, and migrating songbirds. Crop growers, especially vineyard owners unwilling to net their vines, will employ radar systems to detect bird flocks and then send out shooters, disguising their gunfire with the propane bird-scare cannons that go off from dawn until dark and drive neighbours nuts. Scare-eye balloons, distress calls, biosonic devices, flares and other pyrotechnics, fake owls, hawks (with handler), shotguns that shoot firecrackers and streamers, and hilariously wonky inflatable clowns operated by motion detectors or radar—all work to a degree, but the birds eventually seize their share of the prizes if the fruit isn’t netted.

  Beyond insect and bird pests, North American farms are locked in a permanent duel with several mammal pests and predators. Trauma Farm’s most consistent pests are mink and raccoons, which can wipe out a chicken coop in fifteen minutes. Afterwards the raccoons will wander off to one of those green-concrete hobby farms and be fed because they’re so cute, though the owners don’t recognize that the exploding raccoon population is destroying the low-nesting wild bird population of the island as well as our chickens. Brown eyes always beat harsh reality when it comes to our species, and that issue brings us face to face with the deer epidemic.

  Our island’s nature conservancy recently brought in a particularly impressive government biologist for a lecture on the exploding deer populations, which are extirpating the majority of our native flowers and shrubs, including the island’s endangered orchids and the fabulous ecology of the wild Garry Oak orchards. When we first arrived the meadows were alive with flowers. The only fawn lilies and orchids that I see today are on cliffs where the deer can’t reach them, including a spectacular fawn lily wall across from a lumberyard. Without cougars or coyotes, and with the rapid decrease in hunters, the deer infestation is spiralling out of control. In our early years two varieties of orchid flowered profusely along the forested margins of our pasture. Sharon and I would take enchanted afternoon walks among them. I haven’t seen one in ten years.

  Encouraging deer where there’s a shortage of predators is the equivalent of feeding Norway rats, another beautiful creature that, once its ecology collapses, will spread disease and illness and reproduce in fantastic numbers. If you feed deer, it’s illegal; but worse, it is as ecologically dangerous as pouring oil in a local creek. Fed by sentimentality and “brown-eyed environmentalism,” the deer are not only remaking the ecosystems of the continent, they’re being trained to regard farms and gardens across the continents as food banks. My neighbour is a deer feeder, and I have counted twenty-nine in her abandoned hayfield. According to the biologist not only are the deer altering the deciduous forests of eastern America, they will eventually make extinct the great cedar forests of Haida Gwaii as they prevent any seedlings from growing.

  While there’s an increasing number of ecologically sensitive small farms, farming history is uneven. Farmers, despite their pretensions to a romantic, bucolic lifestyle (as with my foolish deer-feeding neighbour), can also be a bloodthirsty lot. Wolves moving into a territory will hunt down competition if they can, as will farmers. This doesn’t mean small farmers are responsible for the world’s extinctions. Population growth is the real enemy of the planet. Hunter-gatherer cultures have been no less ruthless than farmers, and the great mammalian extinctions of the Pleistocene era in North America were likely caused by a fatal combination of hunting and climate change, just as globalization and escalating populations and climate change are increasing the pace of today’s extinctions in the ever-shrinking wilderness. Once farmers have reduced predators, they’ve historically tended to eliminate grazing animals that compete with their livestock for forage, as well as to supplement their own diet. Finally, the farmers are forced to confront the explosions of small-pest populations created by their meddling with the food chain. And then, if faced with plagues, wars, famines, and overpopulation, people in search of food will hunt the small and the strange and the sad, which is why you find food enthusiasts for stag beetles in Thailand, grub eaters in Africa, and sparrows on sticks in China.

  If you’re a poor peasant scrabbling out a hopeless living on the land, the need to protect it from predators is overwhelming, even when this leads to further environmental damage that will return to haunt you. Consider the livestock farmers of the prairies. Wolves will sometimes take cattle or sheep. Packs that become habituated to dining on livestock have to be dealt with, but they generally stay away. The difficulty with exterminating wolves is that they are a check on the coyote population. They also stabilize moose populations. Once wolves were brought back to Yosemite, they immediately started hunting the coyotes. Within a few years the coyote population began shrinking and the moose left the sandy riverbeds because they no longer felt comfortable in the open. As a result, willows returned to those riverbeds and the ecosystem renewed its traditional balanced habitat.

  Trapping and poisoning the wolves and coyotes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to gopher population explosions. So rancher-farmers have turned gopher slaughter into a Sunday sport with Rodenators and other explosive devices, filming themselves laughing as burning gophers whiz past and then uploading these cruel videos onto YouTube. Yet the gophers still proliferate, injuring livestock with their dangerous holes and degrading the grazing land of the once-lush prairies.

  THE REAL NIGHTMARE OF any farm is rats—not so much the local, native rats but the ubiquitous Norway rat. A pair can produce fifteen thousand descendants in a year. Rats are attracted to farms because there’s so much feed and shelter. They love grain and compost and fallen fruit and almost everything else.
Our island can be particularly rat infested at times, but you won’t find that in the tourist brochures. We have an equally noxious feral cat population caused by eco-urbanites who consider it “natural” to release a house cat into the wild when they grow bored with it or move away. The feral cats are hell on the songbird population but oddly, not on the mice or rats.

  I often eliminate our rats for several months. Then suddenly there’s one, and then there’s dozens, and the war begins again. Outside of Antarctica, a few uninfected islands, and Alberta, which insists rats don’t exist (I’m deeply suspicious) within its boundaries, Norway rats are everywhere. No doubt they and their sometime companions, the cockroaches, will outlast the human race. While we rapidly push the planet toward mass extinctions, they’re waiting for the leftovers.

  TRAUMA FARM HAS THE standard assortment of dogs and barn cats assigned to patrol for rats and field mice (another professional pest). We use metal containers for feed and follow the best procedures, but still they burrow up through the ground or chew holes in the walls. The rats and mice worked us over pretty good during our early years here—a few even got into the attic above our bedroom. I resorted to poison pellets. Once! Little blue pellets. I put them in the sealed attic where our cats couldn’t enter. Despite my precautions, I soon found poison pellets stashed at the back of our medication drawer in the bathroom. Rodents are smart! Not only that, but they obviously weren’t just in the attic. We got more cats and set up more traps and finally drove them out of the house.