Growing a Farmer

by Kurt Timmermeister

  On the fourth day, I trudged back to the pasture, carrying the small syringe, more water and a bit of milk for my young charge. I had fallen into a routine, checking on her every few hours, looking forward to seeing her, confident of success.

  As I unchained the gate of the paddock and walked over to where I had left her the night before, she looked a little different from a distance. A bit more hunched over, but I still had hope. I had kept sheep for years; I could revive a young lamb.

  As I approached the innocent young lamb I knew that things had gone terribly wrong. Yesterday in the late afternoon, as she sat still, unable to get up and move about, waiting for me to return with more water and food, one of the crows that also call this farm home had come down to the sheep field. With his prey too weak to struggle, he had proceeded to peck out her eyes. The still-alive lamb simply lay there, dying a slow death, blood dripping onto her fresh young wool.

  I returned to the house, grabbed the locked rifle and a bullet, and marched back to the paddock with a stride that befitted my anger. A moment later I was back in the paddock, wanting to scream, wanting to cry, but mostly just wanting to end her life as quickly as possible. As the shot went off, the resident crows, perched and watching from high above on the treetops surrounding the pasture, flew off with a racket. I put the gun away and traded it for a shovel from the shed. In a few minutes my young charge was buried. Nature is cruel. Farming has brought me close to the wonders and joys of nature, but also to the dirt and death that make them possible.

  This past summer, the parents of a friend of mine here on the island came to visit me. I had met them briefly and knew a little bit about them, but they had never come to my farm. I agreed to the visit with a great deal of trepidation, despite their innate grace.

  My friend’s father, Marv, was here to celebrate his eightieth birthday. He had spent his entire life on his family’s farm in Lewiston, Idaho. Although I had never seen his farm, I had heard about it many times and was in awe simply of the idea of it. Not just a farm, but also a cattle ranch, it sprawled over thousands of acres. Their family farm grows lentils, wheat and cattle, lots of cattle.

  Marv came out to my humble farm to take a look. He and his wife got out of their car slowly and deliberately, looking around in a polite but confused manner. He walked to the milking parlor, through the barn, up the north road and across the upper pasture, through the orchards and down the lower pasture to the kitchen. Wearing worn cowboy boots, the ubiquitous Wrangler jeans and a large oval belt buckle shiny from years of wear, he slowly plodded across the pastures, commenting on this cow and that, his wife taking pictures, him asking me questions with the respect of a man who sees me as his equal. Marv looked over at me and asked “Do you have the problems with calving on a Jersey cow like that? We do with our cows in the early spring back on the ranch, but not later in the year…” his scratchy voice trailing off. Could he really have wanted my opinion on calving?

  I was shocked and a bit embarrassed as he and his wife asked me how I kept this all going. All this going? I thought. Marv never talked about his “farm,” but rather referred to the “corporation.” He rarely spoke of “acres,” but rather referred to land as “ground”—“This spring we bought more ground for winter wheat.” To have this farmer, a man at the top of his profession, ask me about my cows—my five cows—and about my pastures—my eight acres of pastures—took me off guard. I stammered, trying to find the words, making excuses for not having more cows, more land. “I hope to buy a couple more next year…. Maybe eight cows would be nice.” As we walked back to the house, I muttered sheepishly, “Next month I am going to clear that brush there and plant more grass…really I am….”

  It was during this brief visit on a sunny summer day that I finally got it. This farm has place. It has standing. And a great deal of high-quality food comes from this soil. It is large enough to force me to take it seriously; to recognize that I must be the steward for this land, protect the soil, improve the soil, leave these acres in better condition than when I arrived. And not worry if I have the right boots, the right jeans, the right truck.

  My goal is for all the parts of this farm to work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The classic small family farm of the past worked well because each of the different aspects complemented each other. For example: Growing vegetables requires fertilizer additions to the soil to maintain fertility. Whether it is a natural product such as compost or a chemical-based fertilizer, it still needs to be purchased and brought in if it is not produced on the farm. The best way to produce compost is with animal manure, especially from cows. Without removing the manure from the barns and composting it for the vegetable gardens, the manure will back up and the nitrogen levels will increase to unhealthy levels. In a large industrial dairy, processing manure and getting rid of it is a huge problem. On a small-scaled farm, it is an asset.

  This same logic follows in many aspects of the small enterprise. Pigs fatten by feeding them excess produce from the vegetable gardens, apple pulp from pressing apples for cider, and excess kitchen waste. Chickens eat the grain and fly larvae from the cows’ manure piles, spreading the manure out so that it will decompose faster into the pasture, and then they’ll lay beautiful eggs.

  The ideal farm—and the one that I strive for here—has all the parts in play. A garden for vegetables, an orchard for fruit, pigs for meat and to consume waste food, cows for milk and cheese and to provide manure for the gardens, sheep for meat and to keep the grass low and chickens for eggs and to clean the pastures.

  The other goal is to make the farm a closed system. I want to bring as few things into the farm as possible. The inputs, such as hay, grain, baby animals and seed, are often from other parts of the country. They are not necessarily appropriate for this climate and region. We want plants and animals to thrive, to be ideally suited to this locale. Also money must be spent to purchase the inputs. Any cash outlay brings down the bottom line of the farm at the end of the year. If feed for the animals can be grown on the farm and not trucked in with transportation costs and taxes assessed, then it is a better deal for the farm as a whole. The farm will be more profitable and the animals will eat food that is better for them. My disdain for packaging contributes to my goal of not buying feed or supplies.

  I started my cheese-making business with a cheese named Dinah’s Cheese in honor of the first cow that I bought. Although she was stubborn and difficult to milk, she still has a place in my heart. Dinah’s Cheese is a fresh cow’s milk, bloomy rind cheese, usually known as a Camembert-style cheese. I choose not to call it Camembert, however, as this isn’t Normandy, and I am in no way French. My small round wheels of Dinah’s Cheese, covered in a snowy white mold, came from this island, even if they are inspired by the French originals.

  Every other day I make a batch of half-pound cheeses, forty-eight at a time, in the creamery. Throughout the day the milk is heated, cooled, stirred, cultured, coagulated and cut. By the early afternoon the curds are ready to be ladled into the awaiting molds. On a large stainless steel draining table the whey will drain away. Later that evening I will flip the molds once, twice, three times before I eventually go to bed, leaving the cheeses to firm up by morning. The next day I will unmold them, salt them and begin their aging process. After a total of twenty-five days they are ready to be sent to the small cheese stores, the large grocery stores and the chef-run restaurants in the city that appreciate this local cheese.

  A second cheese is also in the works, a hard, aged cows’-milk cheese that will be prepared in eight-pound wheels. I have tentatively named it Francesca’s Cheese, after the second cow to call this farm home. This Italian-style hard, grating cheese will age for at least ten months or, with a bit of luck and patience on my part, a full year.

  Taking fresh raw cows’ milk and transforming it into a new product is both exhilarating and, so far, profitable. I have found that people are far more willing to pay a premium for an exceptionally made local p
roduct such as cheese than a really good local carrot. I can price my cheeses to compensate for the price of the land, the buildings, the upkeep of the cows and also for my own time. I did not have the ability to price my vegetables or fruit or even raw milk high enough to pay for my expenses. These goods have a perceived value based on supermarket prices. Artisan cheeses do not. In cheese making I have found a balance, something that I love doing that also has the potential to support my farm.

  Whether or not this farm is profitable in an economic sense is difficult to calculate. My goal, and I would assume the goal of many other such small farmers around the country, is to sell enough food to pay the bills so that a job in the city is no longer necessary. I have pursued this objective for years and spent much too much time thinking about it, puzzling over a way to make this goal possible. I have come to a few conclusions.

  Growing a commodity crop is a bad idea. Commodity crops are products that are the basis of much of the food we eat: corn, soy beans, wheat, etc. On the scale of a farm such as this, the possibility of growing wheat is pretty unlikely, but I would include items such as carrots, beets and lettuce in the same grouping. Whether it is corn or carrots, there will always be a large industrial farm somewhere in the country that grows the item on a huge scale, both cheaper and more efficiently. There is little chance of competing with these producers in a financial sense. Even though the carrot grown on my few acres is better, fresher and tastier than those produced by commodity farmers, it is unlikely that the consumer will pay three times as much for it. When I realized this I quickly got out of the vegetable-growing business. Primarily because I was not particularly good at it, but also because the numbers just never added up. I could see no possible way to pay my bills selling tomatoes, cabbages and garlic.

  I tried moving up the food chain, raising more expensive food items: raw milk, meat and eggs. Although these foods brought in more money than vegetables, they are all regulated by the county, the state, the federal government or all three, and therefore require greater investment in infrastructure, permits and insurance premiums to sell them. The result is little profitability from the selling of these high-ticket but highly regulated products.

  And so I have found creating value-added food products to be the best model for financial self-sufficiency here on the farm. Making cheese feels right to me. I ran a small business for nearly two decades in the city and I always had a sense of when something was working and when it wasn’t from an accounting perspective. I must confess, however, that since the day I left my job in the city, I have always felt that the golden ring of profitability was just a few months, a bit more volume, the next season, one new product away. It keeps me motivated, keeps me striving to make it to the next step toward a goal of financial stability from growing food.

  Right now this farm couldn’t operate without the weekly cash infusion from the farm dinners. The money a dinner takes in as compared to a weekend night at my old restaurant is minuscule, but because I don’t have to pay rent on the space, purchase the food or pay a staff, almost all of the proceeds contribute directly to the farm’s operating budget. I would like to believe that in five years cheese making alone will be able to support the whole farm, but the last twenty years have taught me not to make grand proclamations extending five years into the future.

  There is an extenuating circumstance that makes my challenge realistic, makes my goals of stability conquerable. It has allowed me to become a cheese maker on the eve of my fifth decade. I bought this land when I was still in my twenties, when the price of real estate was lower, and spent the years since then both paying off the debt and transforming this land from the low-value acreage that I had purchased, to the highly productive farmland that it is today. If I, or any beginning farmer, were to purchase a farm identical to this one today, the sales price, and therefore the debt associated with it, would be dramatically higher than the price I paid all those years ago. A new farmer would have to sell ten times the cheese I do today and throw dinners every night to pay his mortgage.

  I also kept my well-paid job in the city for many years, paying down the mortgage, paying for the barn, land-clearing, fencing and pasture work. Without that income, the present-day viability of this farm never could have been achieved. As a result, do I turn a profit today? I wouldn’t know exactly what to include in the expenses and earnings, but I make enough to keep the operation afloat and support myself, so in that sense I believe I do turn a profit. My bank account is not getting fat, but I never expected it would.

  When I have read books on farming or attended lectures, the most important lesson I have gleaned is that not creating debt is imperative in building a sustainable small farm. Saving money beforehand to buy a small piece of undeveloped land or keeping a city job while paying down a mortgage and then farming seems to be the best, if not the only, strategy for making a small farm possible economically. A heavily mortgaged farm is always a bad idea, no matter the scale. A case could also be made for keeping a side job throughout the life of the farm. Gene Logsdon, a farmer who writes on the joys and perils of running a small farm, makes the argument that throughout American history the farmer or his wife, or both, worked off the farm to bring in needed cash. Even if this is the case, I want to believe that growing food can be profitable, inspires me to work harder, producing more and better cheese, improving the herd and raising the productivity of the pastures.

  Fifteen

  The Table

  Daily life on my farm starts at a very civilized hour: in winter, when the sun is just about to come up; in summer, when the sun has already risen. Each of my days is bracketed by two bookends: morning chores and evening chores. In the middle lie tasks that vary from day to day and from season to season. The bookends are the same year-round.

  The morning and evening chores are the same every day. The animals are fed and watered. The cows are milked, the milk is processed and the dairy is cleaned. No bookend task is negotiable. Animals always need to be fed and watered. Cows always need to be milked. I can be sloppy and rushed about additional tasks during the middle part of the day, but I have a responsibility to the health of the beasts that inhabit this farm. They are fenced in pens for the nourishment of my friends and family, so the very least I must do is to ensure their good feeding and health. When there is a party that evening that I would really like to get to, the evening chores can be very rushed and hurried, but they are never skipped.

  Farms operate around the clock. Farming is not a nine-to-five occupation, but rather a full-time job in the most literal sense of the term. There isn’t necessarily something to be done during the odd hours of night, but there could be. I share this property with some four dozen other beasts and if it happens that one of them needs some assistance in the middle of the night, I must be available. Cows calve at strange hours, lambs can be born in the wee hours, dogs have been known to get onto the property and wreak havoc with the sheep, raccoons make it into the chicken coop. All this chaos happens after normal business hours.

  Although I expect to live for forty more years, I am a stubborn man and will most likely live out my years here. When I bought this house nearly twenty years ago, I thought, as many do, I bought this house; now I own this house and I own this land. You can own a house, a building, a structure, but I feel differently about the land. As I began to work on the land, clearing scrubby trees, improving the soil, I started to feel a responsibility toward it. I am protective of this parcel, possessive of it, but I am aware that I do not own it. No one can own land. We are all mere stewards of the land. You may own your condo, but land is different. I have an obligation to pass this farm on to someone in better condition than when I first set foot on it. I want to leave it cleaner, less polluted and more productive when it’s my time to go.

  I like the project of creating a farm and being a steward of the land; I am attracted to the enormity of that task. Years ago when I attended Henning’s lecture and heard him speak about the history of his land, he talked o
f a fifty-year plan. He felt it would take that long to accomplish the goals he had set out for his farm. At the time I thought he was crazy, that I would be “done” quickly. I have now come to realize that fifty years is a good time frame. Raising the quality of the soil, bringing trees to their maturity, learning the way the land reacts to time and weather—it all takes many years.

  Over ten years ago I started planting the orchard, mostly nut and fruit trees. Many have done well, some have suffered the plague of deer chewing on their leaves and some are long since dead and replaced. I cannot say, a decade later, that the orchards are mature and at their full capacity. If at the half-century mark they are still not mature I will be a bit discouraged, but at this point I am still quite hopeful, optimistic for the day when the walnut trees tower over me and in the fall I struggle to harvest all the nuts that fall to the ground.

  To the north of the log house is the kitchen, guarded by two sentries of towering bay laurel: the cookhouse. A low, long building, it contains the energy of the farm. In a very literal sense, all the utilities run through this building. The range is heated by natural gas, the main boiler heats the water that runs through underground pipes heating the log house and the kitchen. The kitchen is filled with coolers and freezers humming around the clock, those coolers and freezers filled with meat and produce. On the long stainless steel counters are mixers, meat saws and meat slicers, all run on the electrical current that comes into the building from underground wires. In this building, nothing is quiet or calm. The log house is peaceful, the grandmother of the land. The kitchen is full of youth and life. At night the long rows of multipaned windows shine with the bright lights reflecting off of the worktables and eating tables. Only late at night after the day’s work is finished are the lights in the kitchen shut off.