Second Tuesday on Franklin Hill Farm

Midnight, our newest calf

Food & the farmer

By Bettina Sperry

“The food which was not, he causes to be.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of farmers as patient creators dependent on the sun, weather, and seasons. And so it is.
    I love the work I do on my farm. I love the horses and cows that I produce. It takes many months to achieve the goodness of a single calf or foal. One of the hardships of farming is recognizing the end result of farming livestock is often the production of food. When you love your cows and calves, or sheep and goats and chickens, this isn’t a lighthearted matter.
    In winter, when temperatures are well below freezing, I awake each morning at 4 a.m. to walk the frozen ground with a digging iron, a heavy tool that permits me to pound holes in frozen creeks for the wellbeing of my animals. I’m not walking a few feet, but across a few acres. The animals need water several times a day. Other farmers tell me of their continual daily effort to crack ice in buckets, or of their multiple trips to the barns with buckets of warm water, all of which I have done, too. There are times where I’ve had to move hay manually with a pitch fork time and time again to ensure a cow has adequate storage of hay for consumption while she undertakes the pain and labor of producing and caring for her new calf. Farmers do all of this work out of love and reverence for their livestock. When farming, it is understood that there is little room for selfishness of time, or indolence.

    What happens at the supermarket and within homes can be so very different. It is easy to pick up a steak without seeing the little eyes of a newborn calf, or to pick up a bag of apples or other fruits or vegetables without understanding the painstaking time, care, and human labor – or love – that goes into producing food for human consumption. It may be generally correct to say that most people don’t concern themselves with this at all. If one of my calves makes its way to the beef section of the supermarket, nary a soul will know that I spent many mornings affectionately rubbing the little nose and face of the calf some cut of which they are about to eat.
    Processed food is a still more distant step from what occurs on the farm, separating further man’s closeness from Nature, as Emerson once spoke of it. With the advent of genetically modified organisms, and the addition of herbicides, pesticides, and a host of other chemicals introduced into the food chain, people find themselves increasingly concerned with issues far distant from the barn door.
    While not a vegetarian, I have respect for those who choose this dietary path. Given my life, having been raised by women who were farmers and gardeners, I had my fair share of salads served with meals while growing up. In fact, I recall few meals in which a salad wasn’t served – if there was such a thing. Upon leaving my parents’ home to attend college, I distinctly remember telling my mom that the first thing I’d do was not eat a salad for a year. I get the vegetable thing. In my mother’s and grandmother’s homes, meals were cooked from scratch, and always from the garden when possible. I didn’t know anything different.

There’s a degree of confusion and a lot of discussion as to whether humans are carnivores, omnivores, or herbivores. One can argue the merits of evidence tending toward one view or the other, but regardless, humans have a long history of eating both plants and animals. So, while respecting the diet and life decisions of pescatarians and vegetarians, I know it is hard to fully escape the presence of animals in the food chain – even at the grocery store or your homegrown compost pile.
    I’ve been around gardening and livestock farms too long and have kneaded too much bread to not know that somewhere deep inside the flour I’ve used is the influence of an animal-based product. After all, soil itself is composed of plant and animal organic material, along with other inorganic matter. Right now, in the dead middle of winter and in the coldest of months, I am able to find little mice running around outside under the feed bins of the animals. When they die, in some capacity, they are returned to the soil and fields in which I first found them, along with the other animals and microorganisms with which they reside.
    When you own a large piece of property, there comes a time when you understand, through the observation of skeletal remains, that animals not only live in your pastures, but die there too. This past fall, when walking my farm, I came across a deer carcass. It seems a fox or other animal had dragged the carcass onto my pasture from a nearby area where deer remains are dumped by hunters after being prepped for the freezer. Respecting the fact that the composition of animal tissues and bones are ripe with benefits to plant life, I left the remains of the carcass to decompose so that its nutrients and minerals could be returned to the soil that nature so lovingly provides.

Musketaquid, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And pitying through my solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.

For me in showers, in sweeping showers, the spring
Visits the valley:—break away the clouds,
I bathe in the morn’s soft and silvered air,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and, nearer, yonder bird
Blue-coated, flying before, from tree to tree,
Courageous sing a delicate overture,
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward, and nearer draws the sun of May,
And wide around the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized; then flows amain
The surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hill-side, and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.

Here friendly landlords, men ineloquent,
Inhabit, and subdue the spacious farms.
Traveller! to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or soon forgotten picture,— to these men
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.
They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;
They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,
And, like a chemist ’mid his loaded jars,
Draw from each stratum its adapted use,
To drug their crops, or weapon their arts withal.
They turn the frost upon their chemic heap;
They set the wind to winnow vetch and grain;
They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime;
And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,
Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods,
O’er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,
They fight the elements with elements,
(That one would say, meadow and forest walked
Upright in human shape to rule their like)
And by the order in the field disclose,
The order regnant in the yeoman’s brain.

What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,
I followed in small copy in my acre:
For there’s no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree,
As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole. The gentle Mother of all
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds;
The innumerable tenements of beauty;
The miracle of generative force;
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;
Mainly, the linked purpose of the whole;
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty,
The home of homes plain-dealing Nature gave.

The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain:
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden-spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds, and leave no cicatrice.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear,
Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like nature pass
Into the winter night’s extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent, feel thyself no less?
As when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage, are obscure,
Yet envies none, none are unenviable.

Copyright © 2015 by Bettina Sperry