Where is your native home?

There is a song that I was introduced to by my cousin a number of years ago called “Boll Weevil,” which is a remix by Greg Hale Jones of an early 20th Century recording of a song about an invasion of boll weevils in a farmer’s field. The song is sung not by the farmer, but by the farmer’s farm hand, who is reporting the infestation to the farmer, who, by the way, paternalistically refers to the farm hand as “my child.” It is a moving and haunting song that I have listened to hundreds of times at this point, and which is quietly playing in a loop the background as I type this.

One of the central lines of the song is a question, posed to the boll weevil by the farmhand, “Where is your native home?” I have often thought about this question, both in relation to myself in terms of being at home in myself and in relation to the farm — to the pigs, to the farm’s form and function. As it turns out, it is a tremendously heady and loaded question.

For example, to ask the question of oneself, “where is my native home,” is to ask, where, in myself, was I born, or, more pressingly and substantially, where, in myself, did I come into being? It is, essentially, to ask a fundamental question about oneself, “who [where] am I, at my roots?” Where, when all of the fluff is blown and brushed away, did I come into being? Is my native home my childhood? Is it the moment of my birth? Is it the moment of my first words, or my first obviously intentional act? Is it the first moment that I consciously reflect on myself and feel at home in myself? Can I have native home”s”? That is, can I come into being, fundamentally, multiple times, in multiple homes, and feel and be native to each?

I would argue, somewhat shallowly, that the answer is different for everyone. Some people do find their native home in their childhood. Some people do find their native home in their birth (people of fundamentalist christian faith, for example). In my own experience, I have been a person of multiple native homes, feeling as if I have come into being, in fundamentally new and different ways, over and over again, and while I might feel settled and quite native in my current home, I am not fool enough to believe I will not come into being in some new native home sometime in the future, perhaps even tomorrow. But for the time being, I find myself here, completely at home in the nativity of myself as a farmer.

My native home is a certain type of labor, it is a certain type of relationship to my body and the uses and functions of my mind, it is a certain type of relationship to my environment, especially the land and space around me and in which I move and work, it is a certain type of relationship to time and the coming and going of the seasons, it is a certain type of relationship to the weather, it is a certain type of relationship to technology and machinery, it is a certain type of relationship to ecological and political questions and problems, it is a certain type of relationship to the product, the produce, of my labor — the pigs — and it is, perhaps most importantly, a certain type of relationship to their deaths. My native home is a home of ebbs and flows, of hardship and triumph, of ease and adversity, and of life and death.

The farm, in both its concrete and abstract forms, is my native home. It is a place, firm and solid, composed of fields and woods, and filled with pigs and the infrastructure to support them, but it is also an idea, composed of cultural, intellectual, and psychological trappings that give it a shape and trajectory; it is an idealistic vehicle in which I travel, experiencing — living — my life as I go. When I wake up and go out each morning to do chores, I encounter the pigs in their real, concrete manifestations, but also in their idealized forms, as bits and pieces, reflections of myself. The choices I make about and for the pigs are choices I make about and for myself. When I take good care of the pigs, I take good care of myself. When I take poor care of the pigs, I take poor care of myself. I find myself in an intricate web of relationships that give shape and form to my native home, to myself.

Never before have I found myself in such a place. There is something about it that, in nearly a decade, I have not been able to quite place my finger on. It is not that it is special, or that I am at home in something praiseworthy, but, rather, something inscrutable about it makes it a home that is radically and fundamentally different than any other home in which I have found myself residing.

I toil, and I oversee the lives and deaths of vivacious, gregarious, highly sentient beings. That I find myself at home in such a place is something of a wonder.

 

Whole and Half Pigs Available

Last year I stopped selling whole and half pigs to individuals and just made wholesale sales, but I have come to realize that I miss the personal interactions involved in selling wholes and halves, so I have decided to get back into it.

The pigs will be ready this summer, sometime between June and August.

The price is $3.00/lb (whole or half) hanging weight,* plus processing fees.** I also require a $200 deposit.

If you are interested in purchasing a whole or half Berkshire or Berkshire-Duroc cross pasture-raised pig, please e-mail me at your convenience at
stonybrookfarm518 at g m ail dot com, or call me at
5 one 8 – two zero 7 – 7 1 six 9.

If you have never done this before, the process is pretty straightforward, you place the order and make the deposit. I then drop the pig off at the butcher on a specified date. At that point, the pig is your responsibility. You need to contact the butcher and let him know how you would like the pig cut up, and then you are responsible for picking it up. Either the butcher or I are available to help you decide how you would like the pig cut up, if you are not sure. I use Marlow’s in Howes Cave, about five miles east of Cobleskill.

*The hanging weight is the weight of the carcass after it has been skinned and the organs, head, and feet removed. The average hanging weight is 200 lbs. (whole), but can range from 175-240 lbs. The typical yield of cuts for your freezer is about 125-170 lbs.

**Processing fees vary dramatically based on how you have the pig butchered. There are fees for making sausage and smoking, so if you have a lot of sausage made and/or a lot of meat smoked, your fees will be higher. Typical processing fees are $175-$225.

 

An Ordinary Life

For most of my life, all of my life, in fact, I have had an intense desire to be extraordinary — not just to stand out from the crowd, but to be the crowd’s meaning and purpose, and the one that gives it direction. Before you convict me of a profound narcissistic arrogance, please let me explain that over the years I have come to understand that this desire is the manifestation of some deep psychological pathology that I suffer from; it is not the expression of a normal desire of a healthy person.

I have worked for years to overcome, to quiet, this desire, and in the recent past — the past two years — I have had a great deal of success, on and off, in doing so. I still hear it, but the voice inside my head screaming at me to claw and scratch my way onto the highest pedestal in sight is mostly muffled, even if only by my conscious will to muffle it. In some ways, I am like the schizophrenic who knows that the voices inside her head are not real and struggles to ignore them.

This success in squelching this desire is part of the reason that this blog has been silent for so long. Even now as I type, I struggle, I question my motives, I wonder why, exactly, I am once again putting myself on display. Is every act of public discourse for me a manifestation of this pathology, or is it possible for me to simply gather a few words together and post them to a blog without hoping that somehow they will shine on me like a halo around my head? I do not want to want to be extraordinary, and so whenever I have a desire to put myself on display, I have to wonder, is this me, untrammeled, or am I being pushed along, blindly in the thrall of pathological desire? It is not easy to know. Seeing through oneself to oneself is like looking through a glass darkly. The murky sight makes clarity impossible.

Given this difficulty, therefore, I have been saying no, I will not write that blog post, I will not give that interview, I will not host that farm tour. I even go so far as to say to myself, no I will not read that book, I will not pursue that thought, that line of thinking. This seems like a decision to treat the symptoms rather than the disease, so let me just say that at the same time, I am working on dismantling the structure of the pathological desire as well, to some effect. It will take time, however, as this is an old, old pattern, perhaps one of my oldest. As I said, it has been with me for all of my (remembered) life.

In the meantime, having come quite a long way, I have developed new desires, the strongest one being the desire to live not an extra-ordinary life, but simply an ordinary life. While swinging so dramatically from one extreme to the other might seem pathological in its own right, this desire for an ordinary life doesn’t seem, subjectively, or objectively, to be a pathological manifestation. It is a response, even though I must admit that on some level it is a contrived response — that cannot be denied — but even in its contrivance it feels to be a genuine response, as oxymoronic as that might seem.

When I began farming, nearly ten years ago now, I was going to be the farmer’s farmer. I was going to change the face of American agriculture singlehandedly with the force and determination of my body and my words. I was going to make it so that people would look at me and my farm as the model of how to farm and how to be a farmer.

Today, that is no longer the case. Today, I just want to farm. Whereas before I took pleasure in the attraction of the spotlight, and in the thrill of doing something new, exciting, and on the cutting edge of a burgeoning movement, today I take pleasure in the rhythmic meter of daily chores, necessary projects, and trips to the slaughterhouse.  I no longer desire to farm in the limelight. I am content to farm in anonymity, seen only by my family, friends, neighbors, and passersby as they drive slowly along the road behind me as I move on the tractor from one part of the farm to another.

Each morning I look forward to the banality of chores, not because they are a means to the end of being recognized as a farmer’s farmer on the cusp of finding and describing an exciting, durable, and generalizable model of farming alternatively, but because they are an end in themselves. Daily chores are the purposive substance of the farm and the sustenance of the spirit of the farmer. It is in the very ordinariness of farming that I have found contentment. This is not to say that I don’t find this ordinariness occasionally boring; I do, but even when I find the ordinary boring, I experience a cool satisfaction in that boredom.

Many years ago, I came across this maxim of Booker T. Washington’s, “there is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple, and useful life.” For years, driven pathologically, I desperately sought to capture this indomitable influence, this seeming superpower, but in the recent past, I came to realize that this maxim, a maxim seeming on its surface to call for steadfast humility, is in fact deeply, and perhaps in some small way, darkly, hubristic in its evaluation of the life that it calls for.  The end of the maxim is not to live a “high, simple, and useful life,” but rather to capture and wield the extraordinary influence garnered by such a life.

While I have abandoned the pursuit of the maxim’s influence, my imagination is still captured by the vision of a “high, simple, and useful life” as an end in itself, for it is the vision of a deeply ordinary life, a life of humility, of hard straightforward work, of honesty, empathy, compassion, and kindness. I find this imaginative vision made manifest in farming, and I find this ordinary life a life worth living for itself, and nothing more.

 

The Grapple of Ethics

When I think about the debate surrounding the ethics of eating meat, I think one thing only, why is it so hard for meat eaters to admit that killing animals (to eat their flesh) is unethical? Truly, there is no sound ethical argument in favor of slaughtering animals for their meat, be they sentient or not; it is as unethical to slaughter a pig as it is a fish.

The simplest way to put it is that slaughter is a socially permissible ethical transgression. Societal permission does not make it ethical, it makes it acceptable, non-punishable. Slavery was for centuries socially permissible, in spite of the fact that there was always a minority standing firmly against it. Did that make it any less unethical? I doubt anyone (today, a time when it is socially unpermissible) would say yes.

As a pig farmer, I live an unethical life, shrouded in the justificatory trappings of social acceptance. There is more, even, than acceptance. There is celebration because of the way I farm the pigs. Because I give the pigs lives that are as close to natural as is possible in an unnatural system, I am honorable, I am just, I am humane. While all the while behind the shroud, I am a slaveholder and a murderer. Looking head on,  you can’t see it. You have to look askance, just like a pig does when it knows you are up to no good.

Out of the corner of your eye, in the blurry periphery of your vision, something dark, and even evil, lurks.  It is the truth: meat is indeed murder. Someday we will know this and accept this as well and as much as we know and accept the evil of slavery, but until that day, I am and will remain a paragon of animal welfare. Pigs on my farm are as piggy as pigness, they are Plato’s pig, the ideal form of the pig. They root, they lounge, they narf, they eat, they forage, they sleep, they wallow, they bask, they run, they play, and they die unconsciously, without pain or suffering. I suffer their death more than they.

The grapple of ethics hooks us and we begin to struggle when we look askance. Do, please, look askance; see through the blurry shroud of the false legitimacy of the bucolic alternative to factory farming, an alternative that is but another obfuscating layer of the justificatory shroud. Look askance and see who and what I am. Look askance and see who and what the animals are. Look askance and see what is on your plate. Look askance and see that society acceptably says yes, Ethics universally, unequivocally, and I believe undeniably says no.

What I do is wrong. I know it in my bones, even if I can’t yet act on it. Someday it must stop. Somehow we need to become the sort of beings who can see what we are doing when we look head on, the sort of beings who don’t weave dark, damning shrouds to sustain, with acceptance and celebration, the grossly unethical, solely for shallow sensual pleasure. Deeper, much deeper, we have an obligation to eat otherwise.

It might take incalculable generations of being hooked by and grappling with the ethics of slaughter to get there, but we really do need to get there, because again, what I am doing, what we are doing, is wrong.

 

The Last Seven Months

For the last seven months, this blog has been wordless. I thought it would remain permanently wordless, believing that I had divorced myself from social media. But, here, today, I find myself tapping at the keys again.

The last seven months have been a great time of change, on the farm, and in my mind. I have shed bits and pieces of the farm and have been disillusioned and enlightened countless times.

I have cried. I have chuckled. I have struck out in anger and frustration. I have nursed and cared with empathy and compassion. I have felt adrift. I have felt more firmly moored. I have felt trapped. I have felt set free. I have lost. I have gained. The farm has been my savior. The farm has been my executioner. The pigs my joy. The pigs my fury.

I have been Sisyphus. I have been Prometheus. I have been Hercules. I have been Achilles. But, most of all, I have been myself, and in being myself, I have struggled to be — to be a farmer, a husband, a brother, a son, a friend…

I have lost hope more times than I can count. I have regained it just as many.

Pigs. I love them. I hate them just as much. I am invigorated by them. I am tortured by them. They  are my totem and my curse.

After five years, the honeymoon is over. I am living real life now, free from lies, free from myth, free from hyperbolically romantic notions about farm life.

Free, finally free. But, it is an enmeshed freedom. I am enmeshed in mundanity, the banality and utter boredom of rote chores.

The thrill of being part of something grand is gone. I know now there is nothing grand about farming; it deserves no cachet. It is a job, like any other. I hate the fresh air, the rumble and bounce of the tractor, the mirthful narfs and antics of the pigs just as much as I hate the cubicle, the water cooler, and PowerPoint.

But…

But in spite of the end of the honeymoon, in spite of the loss of illusion, in spite of the loss of the myth of the grand, I continue farming, on the brink, spurred on, vocationally enlivened.

 

 

The Farmer and the Fawn

About four years ago and just about this time of year, I was mowing a very tall pasture when I suddenly heard a loud squealing sound coming from the bush hog (mower). The high pitched squeal sounded like a mechanical problem, so I quickly raised the mower, shut down the PTO, and idled the tractor while looking over my shoulder. What I saw, much to my dismay, was a tiny little fawn come tumbling out from underneath the mower as the tractor rolled forward before stopping. “Oh, fuck,” I thought, “fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

My relationship with death, now well established and occasionally banal, had barely begun. I didn’t want to get off the tractor. I didn’t want to see what I knew could only be gruesome. But, I had no choice, so I stepped down off the tractor and walked back to where the fawn was laying in the grass. Again much to my dismay, I saw a battered and bloody speckled fawn that couldn’t have been more than a week old (I could not have made that estimate then). My dismay, however, was less about the battered and bloody and more about the fact that the fawn was still alive. I repeated my f*bomb mantra, this time out loud, as if it would make some sort of difference.

What to do? I won’t go into the horrible details of what I saw, but it was obvious even to me that the fawn was totally ruined. It had to be put out of its misery, but how? I had no gun. I had no knife. I had nothing. I stood there paralyzed, welling up with empathetic emotion. Finally, I decided to go get my neighbor, who I knew had a .22 that we could use to put the fawn down. Then, just as I was about to walk away, I noticed that the fawn had stopped breathing. I waited a moment. No more breaths. I bent down and leaned closer. Nothing. I looked at its eyes. They were fixed and glassy. I waited again. Nothing. I was certain. The fawn was dead.

So now what? What does one do with a dead fawn? I decided that I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of burying it. I was down near the edge of the woods, so I picked it up and walked over to the woods, which is at the very edge of a steep hill, and unceremoniously tossed the fawn into the woods. I heard it tumble down the hill a bit and then stop. The thing I remember the most about carrying the fawn is how soft its fur was. It might have been the softest thing I have ever touched.

Leap forward four years to me, mowing tall pastures, again in the height of fawn season.

Yesterday after reaching the bottom of the pasture, I made a turn and started back up the other side. I noticed a shape in the next pasture out of the corner of my eye, so I looked over. “Oh no!” I thought. It was a lone doe deer, grazing. A lone doe means only one thing. Somewhere, very near, there was a fawn lying silent and still, nestled deep in the tall grass.

These days I am a reluctant, uncertain partner with death. Nevertheless, the gruesome, violent, painful death of a tiny baby deer is not something I want to be a part of ever again, so when I saw that doe all sorts of alarms started going off in my head.

As I continued forward, I did two things, I started scanning as deeply into the grass that would in moments be rolling under the mower as best I could and I started thinking: “The doe is over there. You are over here. The fawn is probably over there. But, what if it isn’t? What if it is over here? You’ll never see it through the grass. That’s what the spots are for! You’re gonna run it over. But, it’s probably over there with the doe.” On and on I went as I very nervously drove up the pasture past the doe.

I came back down the other side and made the turn again. “Dammit!” I thought. The doe was standing at the pasture fence looking very intently into my pasture. She was nervous too. Her ears and tail were twitching. The fawn was definitely in my pasture.

I had probably two acres left to mow. That’s a lot of tall grass. I couldn’t walk it all — well, of course I could, but I wasn’t going to. I would just stay vigilantly scanning the grass and take my chances.

Just as I was coming up parallel with the doe, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye because I was staring through the grass ahead of me as if I had x-ray vision, a line of trampled grass coming up just ahead and to the right of the tractor. “Yes!” That’s got to be the doe’s path away from last night’s bed! I looked further up the pasture, and about ten feet up, at the start of the path, there was a depression in the grass.

I immediately stopped the tractor and shut down the mower. I climbed off the tractor and walked over towards the bed. The doe, probably only twenty feet away from me was starting to stamp her front feet. Her head was high. Her eyes were wide open. He ears pricked forward. Just as I reached the bed, the fawn leaped to its feet and darted out of the tall grass into the open mowed section. It ran in the mowed area for about ten feet, but feeling vulnerable, hopped back into the tall grass and laid down.

I had to get it far away from where I was mowing, so I sped up and moved into the tall grass and approached the fawn. The doe at this point was frantic. She ran away from the fence. She ran back toward the fence. She stamped. She stared. I could see the fawn. Just as I was about to reach down and snag it by a hind leg, it hopped up again and started bounding through the tall grass, but the fawn was too young and the grass too tall. It kept getting hung up, which let me keep up with it, but I still hadn’t had a chance to catch it. Then it just gave up and stopped bounding. Mid-bound, it just quit, either out of energy or out of hope. It fell face first into the grass. Its hind end sticking up. It cried out once, very loudly and then was still.

Curious, I looked up to see how the doe responded to the cry because it was the first sound that the fawn had made. Quite frankly, she flipped out. In a single bound, from a standing position, she exploded over the five foot fence and then started tearing around my pasture. First running towards us and then running away.

Not wanting to miss my opportunity, I quickly reached down and grabbed the fawn around the belly. It screamed. The doe flipped out even more. I picked the fawn up and tucked it under my arm just as I would carry one of my lambs. Just like that dead one from four years ago, it might have been the softest thing I had ever carried. As I walked I looked at it delicately featured face — so cute.

I was walking towards the mother away from where I was mowing, over to another pasture. The doe ran away, but then, irresistibly controlled by her maternal instinct, stopped and ran back towards us. Then she would freak out and run away. As we approached the other fence line, she again effortlessly leaped over the five foot fence. As I walked the fawn would scream ever now and then.

When I got to the fence, I placed the fawn on the other side of it, in the tall grass, about fifteen feet from where the doe was. I backed away, watching. I didn’t hear the doe make any sound, but after about two seconds, the fawn hopped up and quickly snaked its way through the tall grass over to the doe was standing.

The doe put her nose down and then looked up at me.

I couldn’t see because of the grass, but if fawn’s are anything like lambs, that fawn darted between its mother’s legs and went straight for the udder. For lambs, and I imagine for fawns, there is nothing like a warm drink of milk to soothe rattled nerves.

I watched for a minute to make sure they weren’t going to come back into my pasture. Then, confident that they weren’t, I walked back to the tractor, started it up and got the mower going again.

There had been no blood, no gore, and I had gotten to carry the cutest, softest little baby deer you can imagine.

 

The Birth of Living to Death

I am typing at the moment because I was inspired by the sound of the birth of life outside the living room window, coming from the nearby lambing pasture.

A ewe is murmuring to her newborn lambs. Ordinarily on hearing the gentle cooing, I would go outside to make sure that everything was  okay because a ewe will murmur to a weak or dead lamb just as actively as she will a vigorous and live one, but this morning I can actually see the ewe and her two new lambs right through the window. The two lambs are about fifteen minutes old and have been stumbling around the ewe looking for her teats as the ewe instinctively licks first one and then the next for the last five or ten minutes. Any moment now they will find the teats and start sucking. The ewe’s warm colostrum, the antibody and nutrient-rich first milk, will flow into the lambs’ bellies, warming and fortifying them, giving them both the energy and warmth needed for life, and, literally, a natural antibiotic force field that will shield the lambs from disease.

I just glanced up from the screen and looked out the window and saw too many lambs surrounding the ewe. I grabbed my binoculars to get a closer look, and sure enough, two colostrum thiefs, opportunistic older lambs from other ewes, were pestering the ewe, darting in between her legs as she attended to her lambs. Overwhelmed by hormones that trigger the ewe’s instincts to care for and nurture her lambs, ewes are often momentarily tricked by colostrum thieves. The sucking sensation is exactly one of the things the ewe is “waiting” for, so instinctively, she cocks her hips, which tips her udder and teats into a better position for access, and lets the thieves suck. But, just as instinctively, the ewe turns her head and sniffs and licks the back ends of the lambs that are sucking, and suddenly, she bucks her hind legs off the ground and spins around, facing the thieves as olfactory alarms ring in her head “Not your lamb! Not your lamb!” The thieves make a move to dive back between her legs. The ewe sidesteps, drops her head, and butts one of the offending lambs, sending it flying. Remembering her own lambs, she spins back around to make sure they are alright. The thieves return. The ewe throws her head at them, hitting one, missing the other. The thieves persist, the ewe hops and spins, keeping her udder away from them. She swings her head at them and nails one of the thieves hard, pressing it against the ground with her forehead, which is as hard and solid as an anvil. And then, just as suddenly as they appeared, the thieves disappear, having decided, perhaps, that the little colostrum they get for their trouble isn’t worth it.

Unmolested, the ewe returns to attending to her own lambs, who have continued to stumble around her while she fought off the thieves. As I type now, they are close. Both have figured out that the hind end of the ewe is where they should concentrate their attention. It will be only a matter of minutes, or even seconds, before they find the teats and latch on, securing their lives, for me as much as for them.

You see, these lambs are living to death for me on the farm. Their survival to death is essential to the farm economy. The instinctive theater being played outside my window is merely the first, and most important, act in the drama of the lives of not only these two newborn lambs, but all of the lambs and all of the ewes living on the farm. I make use and take advantage of, perhaps nefariously, all of the sheeps’ instincts, to eat copious amounts of grass, to drink water, to lick salt and minerals, to flock together, to breed, to give birth to and attend to newborn lambs, to fight off thieves, to stumble around relentlessly to satisfy an irresistible first thirst.

Through various manipulative interventions, I hold captive and encourage these instincts so that “I” can “produce” meat on the farm for people to eat. I encourage and urge the ewes to give birth to lambs, and I encourage and urge the lambs to live.

And the lambs? They are happily suckling, wagging their tails madly as the ewe sniffs and licks them, her nose and tongue saying to her head, “Mine, my lambs. Drink. Live,” while I say the same. “Live. Live to death for me on the farm so that I might prosper.”