The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  I am a passive-aggressive disputant, happy to avoid the direct confrontation and tenderly nurse its grudge instead. Mark is a plain old tenacious arguer. He will grab hold of a disagreement and worry it, shaking it back and forth and back and forth until the crux of it drops out. That’s why I know that those arguments were always about our two different basic fears. I was chiefly afraid of money—of poverty, of debt. It looked like our profit margin would be slim at best, and I thought that paying interest could enslave us. And if this thing failed, I did not want to be left to shovel out from under a pile of old bills. I had some experience with debt, and I had a deep fear of going back there. Mark, by contrast, had a friendly and lighthearted relationship with money, based in part on the fact that he has very little attachment to the having or not having of it. He could be happy living on a park bench, I told him. He did not disagree. But his history with money was actually much healthier than mine. He’d taken out a loan to start his farm in Pennsylvania, and he’d paid it back early. He had even saved enough from his paltry farm salaries to bail me out of the last part of my debt when I left the city for New Paltz. His fear was not of debt but of ruining ourselves with overwork. He’d seen it happen to other people, the farm gaining mass and speed until it ran over the farmer and squashed him. He worried that we would become so overwhelmed by work it would not be any fun anymore, or that his freedom to farm the way he wanted to would be limited. That freedom was worth more to him, he said, than so-called security. He was fond of quoting a farmer under whom he had apprenticed, who said that organic farms most commonly failed not from bankruptcy but from burnout or divorce. I wasn’t sure about the former, but if we kept fighting like this, we were well on our way to the latter, and the wedding hadn’t even happened yet.

  One thing we had to agree on was that it was time to secure some members. We made up a flyer and posted it on the community board, in front of Town Hall. We were offering a full-diet share—including beef, pork, chicken, eggs, milk, vegetables, flours, grains, and dry beans, and our beautiful maple syrup—beginning the first week of August. It would take us until then to put all the pieces of the farm together, and to begin harvesting serious amounts of vegetables. Members who signed up before August could come to the farm each week to get their meat and milk, plus vegetables and other items as they became available. In the breath between the end of sugaring and the beginning of fieldwork, we shifted our focus to marketing.

  We had some forces aligned against us on that front. We were new in this small, conservative town, a town that had watched good farms go under in the preceding decades. We were pitching a radical all-or-nothing, year-round membership model that was untried, even in the most agriculturally progressive pockets of the country. We were asking people to fork over thousands of dollars for the promise of a return that was by no means guaranteed. At the price we were charging, most people in our community couldn’t afford to use our food as a supplement to their usual grocery store haul. They’d have to give up, like I had, that familiar and comforting experience of pushing a cart down an aisle. The central question in the kitchen would have to change from What do I want? to What is available? The time spent in the kitchen—in planning, in preparing, in cooking—would jump exponentially. Moreover, our frost-free growing season is only about a hundred days. To eat perishable food out of season, you have to make the time to can or freeze it while it is fresh and abundant. Those projects are fun and satisfying if you have the time for them, but if you’re working a full-time job while trying to satisfy the needs of your children, they begin to seem sweaty and tedious. Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.

  I knew, from what I was experiencing in our kitchen, that if we could get people to take a taste, some things we were producing would sell themselves. You could not have a pork chop from one of our pastured pigs and ever want to go back to the factory-raised kind. Same with our eggs, with their bright orange yolks standing at attention in the pan. But other things would be a harder sell. Our grass-fed beef was tastier but much tougher than the corn-fattened beef Americans are used to. We experimented with hanging the sides in the cooler for three, four, or even five weeks before butchering. This gave the meat a buttery texture but also a high flavor that I absolutely relished but some people found unpleasant. Also, we were talking about whole animals, and for reasons both ethical and economic, we needed to make use of every part, from tongue to testicles. We’d be asking people to eat things they couldn’t identify and didn’t know how to cook. We found, from giving away samples, that the rich, flavorful Jersey milk I loved so much was just too different from the store-bought kind for some palates to accept, especially if they were used to drinking low-fat or skim. Moreover, we couldn’t offer the kind of consistency that consumers have come to expect from grocery store food. Could we really expect people to change their habits so radically, and pay good money for it?

  In our favor, we had Mark, who, after all, had convinced me to leave everything I knew behind and join him, using only the strength of his own conviction. He believed in the farm we were creating with at least as much force as he believed in our relationship, and when he believes in something, it is contagious, the gift of all good salesmen. At his farm in Pennsylvania, he’d developed what we now call his drug-dealer method of marketing, which meant giving lots of things away, getting people to try a bite of something, anything, knowing that it was so good they’d be hooked and come back. When the growing season began he would stand at the intersection in town with a crate of produce and push heads of lettuce on the passing motorists.

  We had lucky timing. We arrived in Essex just as the wave of localism was gathering and words like foodshed were heard for the first time. Chefs and food writers were drawing attention to the quality of food produced by small-scale farmers. The idea of organics had already penetrated into the mainstream, even in the hinterlands. We fielded a small but steady trickle of inquiries from people who wanted to know where their food was coming from, wanted food free from hormones and antibiotics, food whose origins they could see with their eyes. Another part of our community—truly local folks of a certain age—could care less about buzzwords, but they were already familiar with the taste of farm-raised, local food, because that was the food they’d grown up on, and they missed it.

  What made it work were the people in our little town. They embraced us. I felt they had been watching us, through the fall and winter, to see if we were serious. They had been friendly but had reserved judgment. That spring, they watched us dig in and struggle, and they saw that we weren’t fooling around. They thought of themselves as underdogs, far from the busy and powerful places of the world, so small they were often forgotten. When we became part of them, I think they felt it was their duty to support us, underdog to underdog. Some became members, others helped us in different ways, with tools or advice, by joining us for a few hours at chores. A few became regulars. Liz Wilson began coming over on Fridays to wash the milk jars and make us lunch. Our neighbors John and Katharine came once a week, too, to clean out the barn, or move bales of hay, or whatever heavy work was on the top of our list. Thomas LaFountain helped with butchering when we got behind, even if his own cooler was full of carcasses awaiting his knife and saw. The Owenses came when an animal was sick or hurt. Don Hollingsworth, one of the white-haired people who had made us welcome at the church potluck back in the fall, was a master woodworker, and he would take our broken wooden things to his shop and return them whole, better than new. Shane Sharpe came over, alone or with Luke, to guide us past the problems that stymied us in the machine shop. All he wanted in return, when everything was put back together and running smoothly, was a beer and someone to drink it with.

  Lars bought the first two shares. He lived f
our hours south of us, and we all knew they were pity shares and he would not get his money’s worth. Then Barbara Kunzi knocked on the door. She’d farmed a few miles from our place for sixteen years, until a string of drought years dried up her well and compelled her to sell the farm and move to town. She knew her pitchforks from her plum tomatoes and had every reason to doubt the soundness of our venture, but she sat down at our kitchen table and wrote us a check. By the time the ground was thawed we had seven members, and our bank account did not ring quite as hollow when we made a deposit.

  That little pad of money, small as it was, seemed to soften the tension between Mark and me. With members to provide food for, we had new direction and a clear joint purpose. Every Friday evening from four until seven, our members would come to pick up their shares. No matter what else happened during the week—injuries, stampedes, disasters—we had to pull it together on Friday and get food out to the members.

  The first week, we set up a bare-bones sort of store at the front of the farm, in one of the newer structures, a three-sided pavilion with a good concrete floor. All we had to offer was milk, meat, and eggs, quarts of our first maple syrup, which were very popular, and white jars of lard, which went untouched. Mark decided lard needed rebranding and became a lard evangelist. The next week he talked up its health benefits and its culinary virtues, then he began giving out samples of lard-based pie crusts and vegetables sautéed in lard. Before spring was over, lard was in high demand.

  I don’t like to think of how many laws were broken at those early distributions. We did not yet have a milk house, or a dairy license, or even a dedicated refrigerator. We did not yet have a butcher shop. Mark hacked up sides of beef or pork to order, out in the open, glancing quickly at the illustrations in our worn paperback copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game. Even then, though, our members brought a happy, jovial atmosphere with them, arriving with baskets and boxes and bags empty, leaving with them full. Most of them were already friends with one another, and those who weren’t quickly became so, bonding over stories of the meals they’d made that week, over recipes and storage tips. It was fun, like hosting a weekly cocktail party at a third-world market.

  The early improvements came through our nearest neighbors, John and Dot Everhart, who were retired farmers, married sixty years. They’d managed a dairy south of us for decades, until the place—a beautiful spread on the lake—was sold as a second home. The story we’d heard in town was that the new owners offered to let the Everharts stay on at the farm out of deference to the number of years they’d been there. The only catch was that John would have to give up his guns. The Everharts quietly picked up and moved, to a neat new modular home across the street from us.

  John checked in on us every few days, coming up the driveway in his truck or across the fields on his ATV, Dot on the back. He was a wealth of the kind of granular knowledge you can get only from a lifetime of farming in one place. Mark peppered him with questions about the timing of planting and plowing, weather patterns, soil and forage types, our local predators. Like Shep Shields, John had farmed with horses as a young man, but unlike Shep he was no fan of them, and it made him nervous to see a woman driving them. He worried I’d get hurt. “Hot team you got there,” he said disapprovingly. He disliked our Sam in particular. “You know, best thing to do with that high-headed horse is shoot him.”

  John worked at the dump just up the street from us. Almost everyone in town visits the dump once a week, and it is the closest thing we have to a social center. John kept his eyes open for us and put aside things that he thought we could use. He brought us a large upright freezer and a good-size refrigerator, both slightly dinged but not too old and perfectly usable. He brought us tables and shelving until Mark and I decided our pavilion no longer looked like a third-world market. It looked like a second-world market at least.

  By the end of April our first seeds were well up, in rows of soil-filled flats on the farmhouse’s sunny, glassed-in porch. We’d planted the onions between sap runs in March, and now we had ten thousand small, green, bladelike sprouts striving to grow. Leeks came next, and then herbs, broccoli, pepper, tomato, flowers, lettuce—five types—cabbage, and kale. I’d begun to understand what farm scale meant. Seeding was like running a small, muddy factory. The potting soil we used came in a one-ton sack (“If it weighs a ton,” my friend Alexis said when she heard this, “can you still call it a sack?”). We stirred water into batches of the potting soil until a handful of it would drip once or twice when you squeezed it in your hand. We borrowed a soil blocker, a nifty metal mold on a stick, from some neighbor farmers and used it to form the moist soil into cubes. Into the center of each cube we dropped seeds, some so small you had to squint to see them. Then we dusted the tops of the flats with more potting soil and watered them. I loved that miniature work in the pale spring light. I liked imagining what the seeds would become, and I liked the contrast with the usual farm jobs, which always seemed to involve heavy lifting.

  The nights were still dangerously cold for tender young seedlings. When the weather radio warned of freezing temperatures, we opened the windows between the house and the porch and stoked up the woodstove. We bought box fans to push the warmer air around. The porch got so crowded with flats, maneuvering among them for watering was like playing a game of Twister. Then we ran out of room entirely. The tomatoes placed in the porch’s corners were not getting enough light, and they were growing too tall and thin. We stacked hay bales into rectangles on the farmhouse lawn and topped them with windows John found for us at the dump: poor-man’s cold frames. We moved our leggy tomatoes outside and crossed our fingers.

  Mark was not used to working with ad hoc systems like this. On his farm in Pennsylvania, the start-up phase had been funded by a twenty-thousand-dollar loan, which had allowed him to buy all the equipment he needed and also build a greenhouse. Because of my fear of debt, and because this whole-diet farm venture was new and untested, we’d agreed to get through our first trial year on nothing but our savings. Since those were already spent by planting time, we were bootstrapping, and sometimes we went too far. We didn’t buy a $250 garden cart—a tool so basic and essential to the everyday work of hauling heavy things on a farm, I now can’t imagine how we did without it—until the middle of our second season. We did not have enough hoses, which meant spending scarce time unhooking and dragging them from one place to another, or else hauling loaded buckets. And with the thrown-together cold frames, we made a bad miscalculation. When the plants were good-size seedlings, the temperature dipped unexpectedly low one night, and in the morning we found all them drooping, tender leaves and stems turned the darker green of frost-nipped death. It was too late, by then, to start again, and buying started plants did not fit into our budget.

  We were saved by a fellow farmer, Beth Spaugh. She had left her job as county extension agent several years earlier because, she said, God told her to farm. She’d turned the small acreage around her house into a market garden and chicken coop, and, through faith, hard work, and sheer stubbornness, carved out a niche for herself selling vegetables and eggs at the local farmers’ markets. When she heard about our frozen tomatoes, she drove over to our place with her truck bed full of stocky, vibrant tomato plants. She’d planted extra, she said, and these were her leftovers. She knew we had no money, so she gave them to us for free.

  We found that kind of generosity over and over again our first year. Without it, I don’t think the farm could have survived. Gifts were made quietly, so as not to embarrass us. When Billy Shields came over to artificially inseminate our cow Raye, he refused to take a check for it. When we pressed him, he looked away. “I like to help a young farmer just starting out,” he said, and that was the end of the discussion. I knew that Thomas LaFountain stored our meat in his cooler at a cut rate, and I suspected that our vet, Dr. Goldwasser, was undercharging us for farm calls. The next spring, when we still did not have a greenhouse, our neighbors to the north, Mike and Laurie Davis,
let us use theirs, even though they started their own CSA that year, which made us their direct competitors.

  Beth Spaugh’s tomato plants thrived in our cold frames, and by the time the threat of frost was over, they were covered in little yellow blossoms. In the trip between her farm and ours, the plants had lost their identification tags, so when we planted them in the field, the many varieties were all mixed together—slicing tomatoes intermingled with cherry tomatoes, and hollow tomatoes meant for stuffing growing next to a bright yellow variety that looks cheekily similar to a peach. We’d never again have such a wildly beautiful tomato patch, and it produced extraordinarily well, as though even the plants themselves were inclined to help us when they could.

  * * *

  Don’t let anyone tell you that growing vegetables is not a violent act. The muted sound of a plow tearing through roots is almost obscene, like the sound of a fist meeting flesh. Before planting, we had to raze the ground.

  Plowing is primary tillage, the first and crudest step in making ground ready for seed. It takes tremendous power. Imagine digging a ditch nine inches wide, six inches deep, and eleven miles long. That’s what it takes to plow a single acre. The job of the plow is to rip through the earth and then to flip it over, so that the surface is buried. There are plows for breaking new ground and plows for stubble, for hills, for clay, muck, and sand. The simplest horse-drawn kind is the one-bottom walking plow, a heavy pointed hunk of steel with handles on the back end, a clevis to hitch to the horses on the front. When a walking plow is well-made and properly adjusted, and the horses are fit and well-trained, plowing is pure pleasure. The plow floats through the soil, and the furrow opens up behind you in a long dark wave. Our first plow was an ancient relic that Shep Shields had loaned us, found in the back of his barn. It was a rusty thing with cracked handles, and its share, the curved metal piece that turns the ground, was badly worn. It was missing its coulter, the sharp knife that is supposed to slice through the sod in front of the share. Our first attempt to use that monster was an abject failure.