We found ourselves, my little family and I, in Quincy, Illinois, a city of 50,000 or so on the Mississippi River. I took a job as a counselor at the local counseling center, my fallback position over the first decades of my long career—when there seemed to be no immediate way to make a living farming or gardening, my degree in psychology often opened another avenue.
Exigencies of family life caused us to choose Quincy and we were resigned to apartment living in town without a garden. Very soon, however, we began to realize that we were starving, quite literally. Though we had ample funds to buy mostly organic stuff at the health food store, such as it was in a Midwestern city at that time, it was not locally grown and certainly not Biodynamically grown. We began to appreciate fully that the food we’d been eating for years in the two Camphill Villages had been sustaining in a way far more satisfying than what we were now eating, stuff that lacked that Biodynamic pizzazz. We were feeling undernourished, seriously so.
Less than a year after my dad died so did my mother, as so often happens with couples who spend 50 years and more together. Again my sister called with the news and again I traveled to Kentucky, now as an adult orphan. A couple of months after the funeral came a letter from my sister, who was the executrix, with details about our parents’ estate. They were never wealthy, my folks, and were modest in their lifestyle, so the news from my sister set me back more than a little. Dad had made solid, conservative investments and over the decades they had paid off. My share in the estate was going to be enough to buy and outfit a smallholding of some sort, free and clear.
Having lived in penury in Camphill—though eating very, very well as I have said—we were now situated nicely, with real [that is, paying] jobs and a bank account sufficient to enter the housing market. In a month we contracted to buy a 5-acre place in Fowler within quick commuting distance of Quincy. A habitable home, outbuildings, good well, pasture and garden sites.
The place would be designated a “hobby farm” by realtors in a landscape dominated by farms with many hundreds of acres of, this being Illinois, corn and soybeans, varied by soybeans and corn, intermixed with corn and soybeans. Then the occasional “hog farm,” not a farm at all but, even then, a confinement operation with the animals imprisoned inside buildings with scarcely room to stand and stretch. Sows and young ones never saw the sun, never rooted in the earth, never wallowed. They ate scientifically formulated feed; the brood sows were artificially inseminated, and the piglets had nothing to do but put on weight until reaching the predetermined marketable size when they were butchered. This insane industrialization—cash grain farming, animal confinement and outdoor feedlots for cattle—had become the norm in just a generation here in the Midwest and it was all around us. Our little Biodynamic farm would be both an anachronism and a harbinger of the future.
We moved in at Christmastime, fully decorated tree and all. Looking back 21 years I have trouble wrapping my mind around all the effort we put out [and all the money we spent] those first few months to secure our hold on the land and build a rural and domestic life we could live with.
Some projects we contracted out:
• A new, large garage;
• Kitchen renovation;
• A weaving room off the dining area;
• A screened-in porch;
• Greenhouse foundation.
Others we did ourselves:
• Building a redwood and glass greenhouse, a solarium against the south side of the house;
• Barn renovation to accommodate a cow—box stall and stanchion;
• Interior painting to cover cigar smoke odor;
• Conversion of shed to chicken house;
• Fencing for cow and chickens and pigs.
All of these projects ran over budget, of course.
Then there was the equipment we required to do our work. Very early on I
had spotted an old Ford 8N tractor for sale down the road, complete with disk harrow, plow, small wagon, and another odd implement or two—the whole works for $2,000. These tractors were produced from 1947-52 and are among the most solidly made machines ever conceived. Almost 35 years old at the time I bought it, this little tractor worked perfectly for me until I sold it three years later for the same price. No planned obsolescence here, just great functionality. I’d used one of these at Eden, NY, and the small tractor at Minnesota was of similar vintage and usefulness.
We also purchased a Troy-Bilt rototiller, same as the one at Morningstar garden at Kimberton, a chipper-shredder for mulch and compost material, a half-mile of soaker hose for garden row irrigation, and a riding mower.
By March the gardens were laid out, seedlings were started in the greenhouse and we were well on the way to growing much of our own food and some to sell.
Even before all this equipment buying, Lynda the cow came to us. I’d inquired of several large animal veterinarians for local dairymen who milked Guernseys and Jerseys—few enough, as the usual milking cows in that area, and indeed all over the country, were and are Holsteins, those massively-uddered, 1,500 pound, black and white beasts pictured on milk cartons and in children’s books. But some dairies kept a few Guernseys or Jerseys in their herds to boost the butterfat content of the product in their bulk tanks, the Holsteins being valued more for the quantity of their milk than the quality. I was able to locate one farmer with a Guernsey he was willing to sell, a big cow, already bred and with an udder suitable for hand milking, that is, teats large enough and set forward at a reasonable angle. She was a gentle and responsive animal, I could tell. For $1,000 the farmer was willing to guarantee that she had “settled,” that is, she had a live calf in there, and would deliver her to our place.
Lynda, named for the old friend who taught us double digging, proved to be a true gem and within a few weeks of moving onto our little homestead I was back in the swing of morning and evening milking, six AM and six PM, before and after work. Lynda gave a nice two-gallon bucket full of milk every time; the weighty 20-pound tug of it as I walked from the barn to the house balanced by the equal pull of the wash water in my left hand, its bucket kept full just for the sake of balance until I dumped it alongside the driveway. Lots of milk, yogurt, soft cheese and butter for us, and milk to sell to colleagues at work, at $3 a gallon, I recall. I mention the price because here we are as I write, 21 years later, paying $11 in a dubiously legal herd-share arrangement providing raw milk. Now, as then in Illinois and 40 years earlier when I was a child refusing commercially denatured milk, the demand is there for healthful, tasty raw milk—nevermind the dairy lobby, the doctors and the health departments.
That first spring, with Lynda happily grazing in the pasture behind new fencing, we raised 50 baby chicks, began to feed two piglets looking toward fall butchering and added two beehives to our smallholding. Lynda thought all this activity was just fine and seemed content to be with us; she was the whole herd in our one cow dairy.
We cared for Lynda only secondarily as a milk provider, important as that role was for us. Primarily she was a manure donor. We blessed and honored her as the bringer of fertility to our gardens. She came indoors to her stall at the evening milking time and remained in her pen all night, even in the summertime when it would have been perfectly OK for her to be outside, so that I could gather her manure and urine-soaked bedding for the compost pile, 25 pounds of it at least in a day. This I forked onto a wooden sled located conveniently just behind her milking stand and every week or so pulled the sled around behind the barn with the tractor to the compost pile. It took a few months to build up a pile twenty feet long, by eight feet at the base and four or five feet high. This was a nice size for the Biodynamic preparations to be applied and in another few months the compost was ready to apply to the garden and another pile ready to be prepped.
Once in a while we would clear out the chicken house and the pig palace and all this additional manure and bedding we would add to the pile. All of the kitchen waste and garden trimmings went to the pigs.
This process created the living heart of the farm and insured the cycle of fertility and tilth in the soil. Our dear Lynda stood at the center of that cycle—grazing, eating hay, giving milk, shitting, fully connected to the great cow oversoul, to the farm and to us, her family.
Years later I would write about another cow:
I don't consider the labor
expended for Bessie's care as anything but a service. It's a
service to the farm, to Biodynamics, to the planet. As a service
it's my choice to render it and no cost accounting can touch it.
The exercise keeps me healthy; the morning and evening rhythm is
grounding; the attention to detail sharpens my perceptions; the
nurturing character of the work allows me to express my feminine
side. I am a better person for taking care of animals...and who
will account for that? Who will tell me what that is worth?
Leaving aside finances, we come to the intangibles, the interesting stuff. In a way, Bessie represents, calls forth, the spirit of the place, the farm individuality. In her singleminded metabolic nature she is the biosystem around here. Her energy, her presence, her connection to the great cattle oversoul, knits the place together. As she grazes or chews her cud, she's aware of everything going on, seldom reacting with more than a looking up in the direction of the disturbance. But she knows. When the dogs got into the poison a clueless neighbor set out for coyotes, Bessie knew. When the bull was slaughtered, Bessie knew.
Bessie's calm being, her knowing, permeates every corner of the farm, and, through her compost, enlivens especially the seed garden beds. When we contemplate more than the material details of our daily lives, when we take time to consider the layers and webs of existence in which we're enmeshed, when we remember what it's like to be a peasant and to be possessed of the instinctive wisdom Rudolf Steiner spoke of so wistfully--we are grateful to know Bessie and to have our lives enriched by her.
I don't consider the labor expended for Bessie's care as anything but a service. It's a service to the farm, to Biodynamics, to the planet. As a service it's my choice to render it and no cost accounting can touch it. The exercise keeps me healthy; the morning and evening rhythm is grounding; the attention to detail sharpens my perceptions; the nurturing character of the work allows me to express my feminine side. I am a better person for taking care of animals...and who will account for that? Who will tell me what that is worth?
The gardens that first year, growing on rototilled sod, were just
fine. Compost was ready by mid-summer, so fall plantings of quick
growing salad crops and herbs were made in newly enlivened ground, the
ceremony of composting repeated each fall and spring for the whole time
we were there.Leaving aside finances, we come to the intangibles, the interesting stuff. In a way, Bessie represents, calls forth, the spirit of the place, the farm individuality. In her singleminded metabolic nature she is the biosystem around here. Her energy, her presence, her connection to the great cattle oversoul, knits the place together. As she grazes or chews her cud, she's aware of everything going on, seldom reacting with more than a looking up in the direction of the disturbance. But she knows. When the dogs got into the poison a clueless neighbor set out for coyotes, Bessie knew. When the bull was slaughtered, Bessie knew.
Bessie's calm being, her knowing, permeates every corner of the farm, and, through her compost, enlivens especially the seed garden beds. When we contemplate more than the material details of our daily lives, when we take time to consider the layers and webs of existence in which we're enmeshed, when we remember what it's like to be a peasant and to be possessed of the instinctive wisdom Rudolf Steiner spoke of so wistfully--we are grateful to know Bessie and to have our lives enriched by her.
I don't consider the labor expended for Bessie's care as anything but a service. It's a service to the farm, to Biodynamics, to the planet. As a service it's my choice to render it and no cost accounting can touch it. The exercise keeps me healthy; the morning and evening rhythm is grounding; the attention to detail sharpens my perceptions; the nurturing character of the work allows me to express my feminine side. I am a better person for taking care of animals...and who will account for that? Who will tell me what that is worth?
We did not name our smallholding, too diminutive perhaps to name, but for the sake of a credible presence at the farmer’s market on the square in Quincy on Saturday mornings we had painted on the old van we purchased, “Homegrown Naturally,” which I thought had a nice ring to it. A blue van with that yellow legend painted on each side with a stylized image of a sunflower. The first year and the second on the land we tested the possibilities at the farmer’s market. These are the impressions I took away from that experiment, the first and last time I attempted to market that way. Understand that all this was happening in the mid-1980s when “organic” was still a miniscule sector in the food marketplace, not the $20 billion commerce it is today as I write. 1) Buyers at farmer’s markets habitually return week after week to the vendors they are accustomed to trade with and are very likely to pass by unfamiliar ones, regardless of presentation or quality; our lettuce and broccoli might be just as good and equal in price to that featured in the stall next door, but habit wins out and why shouldn’t it? Loyalty, after all, is a virtue. 2) The agony of watching stuff wilt in the intense summer heat, no matter what you do to try to prevent that. 3) The hidden costs of going to the farmer’s market with your stuff: the per-mile cost of getting there and back, the impedimenta [tables, signage, canopy] to deal with, the payments to the market organizers, the sheer amount of time involved—nevermind getting up at 4:00 AM to harvest—all this puts whatever profit is gained into a realistic perspective. The conclusion was, it ain’t worth it. This, remember, from a grower who had been spoiled by a captive market; the Camphill households were happy with what the gardeners produced. End of story.
Another cautionary tale about the exigencies of growing for a farmer’s market is the following. At one point early in the season the second year I planned to grow some 300 broccoli plants to take to the Saturday market. In early March, then, I sowed the seeds in flats and carefully grew the plants to be sturdy transplant-sized broccolis in mid-April, by which time the soil was warm, and well composted and beautifully tilled in the chosen spot between the barn and the shed. I put the irrigation hose in place, weeded those broccolis, fussed over them, grew them up to size by late June. Now in those days I wasn’t committed to open pollinated varieties and these were a hybrid, Premium Crop, a broccoli I’d had wonderful success with at Kimberton. Now one of the features of this hybrid is that all the broccoli heads mature at the same time. I had planned for 300 perfect, beautifully sized heads to sell, maybe $750 worth, but I hadn’t planned for them to mature on a Tuesday, which is exactly what happened. By Thursday they had to be picked, all of them, or they’d have become over mature, tough and bitter. This I did and put them on ice in the basement, hoping they would hold until Saturday, market day, but they did not. The crop was a total loss and came to nothing financially speaking, though we did freeze some of it.
This was another reality check for me about farmer’s market sales, and it also spelled the end to my dependence on hybrid varieties. An open-pollinated broccoli type would have been a better choice, as the heads would have come to maturity over a period of many days. If I’d been paying attention here I might have noticed a pattern, going like this: whenever I focus on the numbers at the end of a project before I consider the gist of the project—the living beings involved: plants, animals, people, the life and energy flow of the thing, I’m headed for trouble. It would happen again with the meat chickens, and yet again with bees, before this chapter is finished.
I was on the lookout for different marketing method, but that didn’t come to me for another little while. I had no way of knowing that in that 1986 season growers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire had independently come up with an alternative that would change the face of the farmer/eater relationship.
In late summer Lynda presented us with a calf. We had ceased milking her, as is customary, two months before her due date, to allow all her internal energies to go toward growing the calf in her belly. We watched her closely and she got bigger and bigger and bigger that summer. As the due date approached I let my boss know that I might have to leave work suddenly to attend to the birthing. She was slightly bemused by that, but when the call came during a Wednesday afternoon staff meeting, and I told people I had to leave, and why, I got a jolly sendoff.
I found Lynda in her stall, in labor but no particular distress and stayed with her through the delivery a few hours later of a huge calf, a bull calf of such size I named him Jupiter.
The big guy stayed with his mom for a day, then I shifted him into the small stall I’d built adjacent to hers. As I rested from that—no trivial thing to “shift” a 100-pound gawky long-legged calf out of sight of his mother--I watched open-mouthed as this day-old critter half jumped, half climbed over the side of his stall, which was common with his mom’s stall [not smart of me, eh?]. That top board was a 2”x12” armpit high on me and that baby bull scrambled over the top of it in a flash, and was right back at mom’s side. There he stayed until I lag-bolted yet another 2”x12” up there at head height. And another, on the other side; and another over top of his stall gate. Once again, later that day, I manhandled Jupiter into his own stall and there he stayed to be bottle fed until he was weaned. He did go out on pasture during the day in a grassy pen out of sight of his mother.
By the middle of my second summer the gardens were flourishing but my frustrations with marketing remained. Then came the Summer, 1987 issue of Biodynamics, the journal of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, with an article by Jan VanderTuin about a concept, new to the U.S., called “Community Supported Agriculture.”
VanderTuin told briefly about the relationship between the growers at Indian Line Farm in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts and their customers who, in essence, paid up front for twice-weekly boxes of produce during the season. In this system the farmers are paid early in the season when they most need the money for seeds, equipment, etc. and the eaters have a stake in the farm, sharing the risks of unfavorable weather, a poor harvest and so on. They also share in larger-than-anticipated harvests. Instead of buying one head of lettuce or a couple of tomatoes at a time at the farmer’s market or the grocery store, they “subscribe” to their share of the entire season’s bounty.
I was to discover only later that another initiative, the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire, independently started the same sort of scheme in the same year, 1986.
But it’s more than a marketing innovation. There is for the eaters the sense of belonging to an economic initiative that makes sense for all concerned, of being stakeholders in a farm that’s doing things right.
The light strobed in my mind, dazzling me: here was a melding of Steiner’s agricultural insights and his Threefold Social Order, a cooperative venture between growers and their customers that resulted in a sacred compact—“support my efforts and I will feed you to the best of my ability.” It removes from the equation the deadening competition between growers for the buyers’ dollars, the dreadful uncertainties of marketing, and opens the possibilities for the families who eat the food to see how it is grown, to help a little if they wish, to have a more comprehensive relationship with it. Go to the farm, kick the soil, taste it, inspect the chickens, sniff the compost pile; bring the children and pet the pig, sample the green beans—this is the reality folks, it’s got dirt on it, bugs over there, but it’s all of a piece, food without the packaging, the hype, the coupons and the adverts.
I was inspired and enheartened but wasn’t able to wrap my mind about how to proceed with starting a CSA project here in the benighted Midwest where “farming” meant cash grain crops from here to the horizon.
Not until New Year’s Eve.
The eve of the new year, 1988, we were invited to a party like no other I had experienced: eats aplenty and camaraderie, music and good talk—but no alcohol. That’s what the invitation specified. By 10:00 PM or so, at the hosts’ behest, we arranged the seating in a circle and sat looking at each other, wondering…
Then the hosts made their intention clear: we were all going to speak in turn around the circle telling the others what our dream for the new year is, how, with all obstacles removed, we would conduct our lives that year. The others in the circle—there were about 20 of us there, mostly couples—were to treat each speaker’s dream as worthy and achievable and in response tell how they could help, if they could.
What a contrast to the drunken, content-free commotion at most New Year’s Eve parties! Here was an opportunity to share our heart’s desire with friends, no matter how outlandish, and accept pledges of support. And, turnabout fashion, cheer one another on and, to the extent we could, offer assistance.
I, of course, outlined the CSA concept, told of my difficulties and dreams regarding marketing the produce of our smallholding, wondered if such a cooperative plan would fly in conservative Quincy, told of my willingness to put my efforts and assets on the line. In fact, if I got a go-ahead from this group I would quit my job by February to work full time to make this thing happen.
The response was far more than I could have hoped. Alise and her husband Todd offered to head up the effort to recruit members; Otto, who had done much of the renovation of our farm house, was willing to help with special projects; Al, an accountant, would keep the project honest in that realm. These folks would lend credibility to the venture, for they were long-time Quincy residents, and I was a comparative newcomer.
At the party a meeting was scheduled for the coming week with those who had pledged to help and by the time that meeting was over we had decided to name the enterprise Quincy Community Supported Agriculture Project; further, I would write a press release announcing a public meeting in late January, to explain the concept and recruit shareholders; I committed my time, land and equipment. In addition, Alise and friends would work up plans for festival events to draw the shareholder families into full participation.
Here was my core group. It was clear that such a group was necessary for the ancillary tasks associated with running a CSA, while the farmer concentrated on growing and harvesting the crops.
The local newspaper ran a nice interview, with photos of the greenhouse work just getting underway. We found that our nascent project was truly newsworthy, a radical innovation in the relationship between growers and eaters and before the season was done there were several news articles and TV reports featuring Quincy Community Supported Agriculture Project.
That first news story drew more people to our home for the public meeting than I expected, 20-some, including three or four core group members. I presented the ideas underlying CSA, gave a foretaste of the season’s harvest—vegetables in quantity from early June until October—told a bit about Biodynamics, outlined the financial arrangements necessary to get the CSA underway. I enumerated the steps I’d taken over the past two years to make it possible—the cow, the greenhouse, the fencing and gardens about to begin a third year, composted and tilled. I also introduced Dennis Hurley, my garden partner for the year.
Dennis had called out of the blue a couple of weeks earlier. He was financially independent, intensely interested in Biodynamics and willing to sign on as apprentice. He lived in northern Illinois and came to visit us at the time of the meeting. His willingness to offer full-time help to the project and the articulate endorsement he gave to our plans may well have swayed some of the undecided folks to join up.
The core group and I had decided that we had to have at least 20 signups in order to go forward. Our recruitment efforts in the spring ultimately yielded 27 member-families and the CSA season was a go from then on.
By the time Dennis arrived to spend the summer, though we didn’t realize it, the drought was already underway. This was the year Yellowstone burned.
From the NOAA website:
The three-year drought of the late 1980s (1987-1989) covered 36% of the United States at its peak. Compared to the Dust Bowl drought, which covered 70% during its worst year, this does not seem significant. However, the 1980s drought was not only the costliest in U.S. history, but also the most expensive natural disaster of any kind to affect the U.S. Combining the losses in energy, water, ecosystems and agriculture, the total cost of the three-year drought was estimated at $39 billion. Drought-related losses in western Canada exceeded $1.8 billion dollars in 1988 alone.
By 1988, the drought intensified over the northern Great Plains and spread across much of the eastern half of the United States. This drought affected much of the nation's primary corn and soybean growing areas, where total precipitation for April through June of 1988 was even lower than during the Dust Bowl.. The summer of 1988 is well known for the extensive forest fires that burned across western North America, including the catastrophic Yellowstone fire.
In addition to dry conditions, heat waves during the summer of 1988 broke long-standing temperature records in many midwestern and northeastern metropolitan areas
The three-year drought of the late 1980s (1987-1989) covered 36% of the United States at its peak. Compared to the Dust Bowl drought, which covered 70% during its worst year, this does not seem significant. However, the 1980s drought was not only the costliest in U.S. history, but also the most expensive natural disaster of any kind to affect the U.S. Combining the losses in energy, water, ecosystems and agriculture, the total cost of the three-year drought was estimated at $39 billion. Drought-related losses in western Canada exceeded $1.8 billion dollars in 1988 alone.
By 1988, the drought intensified over the northern Great Plains and spread across much of the eastern half of the United States. This drought affected much of the nation's primary corn and soybean growing areas, where total precipitation for April through June of 1988 was even lower than during the Dust Bowl.. The summer of 1988 is well known for the extensive forest fires that burned across western North America, including the catastrophic Yellowstone fire.
In addition to dry conditions, heat waves during the summer of 1988 broke long-standing temperature records in many midwestern and northeastern metropolitan areas
This was the year I chose to risk starting a CSA, taking people’s money and committing to grow food for them! Yes, June was hot and dry, but nothing too much out of the ordinary. We spent a lot of time moving hoses and sprinklers, burned a lot electricity drawing water from the well, and prayed for the well to hold out. I went to bed every night grateful for that well.
About this time, out of the blue, a gentleman arrived from out of town—his name was Andrew, but I don’t remember where exactly in Illinois he came from—and told us he had heard what we were doing, supported the idea, and wanted to help us the best way he could, which was to teach us to dowse. He spent an afternoon with us showing us how, making it clear that there was nothing magical about the tools [we used L-rods, pendulums, and Y-shaped willow sticks]. We dowsed for the water lines running to the barn and to the pasture from there and reliably found them. We dowsed for produce quality, asking the pendulum how a particular specimen rated on a scale from one to nine, and the results confirmed our [admittedly subjective] judgment. We thanked him profusely and off he went, leaving me scratching my head, wondering what that was all about. We’d been taught that dowsing is a dependable adjunct to intuition and since I’ve used the technique literally thousands of times to good effect, even in the grocery produce department to evaluate the quality difference, say, between bagged spinach from one source and loose spinach from another.
Jupiter grew apace. An adolescent calf, well fed on grass and hay, can put on three or four pounds a day, 100 pounds a month, growing from gangly, long-legged gawkiness to sturdy young bull-hood from spring to fall. Two things needed doing while he was still young, then he cold be left alone to grow. First, halter breaking. Within a few days of his birth Jupiter, thriving on his mother’s milk, outweighed me and was stubborn as could be. I purchased a small halter [and would buy three more in ever larger sizes over the next several months] and after only a brief tussle got it on him, then snubbed the halter rope, thick and soft and easy on the hands, to a post in the barn, talking to the little guy all the while. He had to get the idea that he wasn’t going to get loose on his own, but only by cooperating, that is, calming down. When he was ready—the first time he nearly exhausted himself fighting the restraint—I loosened the rope from the post and walked him in a tight circle and quickly snubbed the rope again to the post. He mustn’t get any notion of freedom as long as the rope was latched onto that halter ring. Nor could he ever get the idea that he was stronger than I and could pull me right off my feet, thus the tight circle, which kept him a little off balance. Soon he was walking out the barn door to the pasture where a handful of grain waited for him, happily walking at my side on his rope; any rambunctious behavior and it was the tight circle again. We practiced daily for quite a while until I was satisfied he was controllable, even when he got to be seven or eight hundred pounds, a formidable nine-month old animal. Second, he needed to be castrated. I bought an “Elastrator,” a device that stretches a small elastic band to fit over the neck of the scrotum; the band then compresses the blood vessels and a while later the tissue just sloughs off. It was only a 10-minute job and caused the little guy only a little discomfort until the parts went numb. [Notice how offhandedly I assure the reader that my surmise of “only little discomfort” is factual; if someone were coming at my privates with an Elastrator I reckon I would rethink that surmise a bit.]
Meanwhile Hubert and Helen, the piglets, grew even faster on garden wastes, kitchen wastes, excess skim milk. Whatever we brought them, they ate.
Hubert and Helen came to us in springtime and by late fall they were about the right size for butchering, which was their destiny all along of course. There was a dilapidated chute attached to the pigpen which I renovated the last week before the pigs’ appointment with the butcher and on the day I put the sides on the pickup truck and backed it up to the chute. With the truck tailgate lowered it was a straight shot from pen, up the cleated wooden ramp and into the truck. The trick was getting the pigs to see that. The oddly-angled unfamiliar surface under their trotters baffled the pigs and made them uncooperative; tempt them as we would with luscious garbage and other goodies, they were immovable. Finally I recalled a trick I’d read in an old farming book. A pig who cannot be pushed or pulled, compelled or coerced, to move forward will move backwards on his or her own, away from a basket placed over the head. I got the first pig, it was Helen, situated with her butt at the bottom of the ramp and slipped a peach basket over her foreparts. In utter confusion at this insult to her dignity, she rapidly backed up the incline and found herself in the truck bed; Hubert, who loved his sibling dearly, joined her with no need for persuasion at all and the loading was done.
I had participated in butchering pigs at Claymont and knew the routine, but chose to take these guys to a professional because we did not possess the requisite band saw, sausage grinder or work tables that could be properly sanitized and we were selling half a pig, cut and wrapped, to pay the costs, so the meat needed to look professionally done.
At the butcher’s in town we reversed the process and the pigs happily entered the place. They weighed out fairly close to the 225 pounds I’d hoped for.
The year of the CSA we discerned a ready market for fryers among our shareholders and raised two batches of 100 meat birds each, three weeks apart. These chickens, unlike the pigs, we butchered ourselves and after the fact I said, “Never again,” and meant it. Meat birds, Cornish cross hybrids, are amazingly quick to grow to full size, six weeks or so. As it was summer and the cow was dry, we left her and her calf out in the pasture while we turned the central part of the barn over to the chicks. Chickenwire barricades kept them out of the odd corners of the barn and from exiting through the big barn doors, which we left open for ventilation and sunlight. With plenty of feed and water and fresh air, they grew…and grew some more. With a wide stance to support a husky body and especially the over-developed chests, a result of decades of cross-breeding, these birds were a marvel, and by the time six weeks had passed they weighed, on average, six to seven pounds, which translated to four or five pounds dressed weight—a large fryer or small roaster.
Meanwhile I recruited folks who would pluck and dress the chickens in exchange for taking a few home for free. I was the designated beheader. Years ago, from studying farm supply catalogs I copied the idea of a killing cone from the commercially produced ones on sale there. My cone was a sheet metal affair, ten inches across the top and tapering to a three-inch opening at the bottom, maybe 30 inches high, fastened to a fence post. In use, the chicken is slid inside and thus immobilized with the head emerging at the bottom, to be cut off with a sharp pruning shears. No hatchet, no chopping block; no flapping wings and headless running around with blood spurting everywhere. It’s as humane a killing method as can be, quick, and no fuss. After giving each bird a couple of minutes to bleed out into a bucket, I dipped each into a washtub of scalding water with a small fire underneath to keep the water up to temperature, to loosen the feathers, and delivered them in small batches to the people on the plucking and gutting assembly line in the garage. I had the easier job, out in the sun and moving back and forth from the barn to catch the birds, to killing cone, to garage. The folks at the tables were stuck inside with gut and feather stinks and heaps of offal. But as each cleaned bird was slipped into a plastic bag and put on ice we were closer to the goal, fifty of them one day, fifty the next, and three weeks later, the same deal all over again.
The meat sold readily at a dollar a pound and certainly improved the cash flow of the farm that month, but, as I said, “Never again…” This was too much like industrialized agriculture. We had no real relationship with birds who were genetically destined for death at an early age, who were never really part of the farm organism, rather, just a blip on the balance sheet representing a hell of a lot of work, blood, feathers and death. Here’s that pattern again. The profit is foremost and then all the “how to” details—nevermind that we’re dealing with living creatures and depriving them of perhaps 95 per cent of their lives—for financial gain—[well, yes, but for food too, and that takes come of the curse off of it, or does it?]
Jupiter, however, was a different story. We’d lived with this guy for a year or so and he was a gentle, sweet bullock. We’d met a couple, Ted and Marcie, down the road who raised a few beeves every year and had all the equipment for butchering. They agreed that in exchange for meat I would bring Jupiter to their place for slaughtering and cutting up the meat, the latter being an all-day job after the halves had hung in the barn for a few days.
To lead Jupiter on his halter rope down the two lane blacktop for two miles I chose to take the tractor and fasten the rope behind the seat. The animal did not know about cars and I knew that if we were walking and he heard one coming behind and bolted I could not hold him. As it was, we had no problem, putt-putting along at a slow walk speed on the country road and Jupiter followed along happily, taking in all the houses and fields and vehicles he’d never seen before. Shortly, we arrived at Ted’s place and I drove the tractor around the barn to the corral and Ted closed the gate behind us. It was chilly midday in a chilly October.
Jupiter nuzzled happily at a flake of hay Ted had brought for him. Ted had his rifle at his side. I was admiring Jupiter, thanking him for his being and letting him know he was appreciated as Ted edged to one side a bit to get a square shot at the bullock’s forehead. Quicker than I expected he fired and the animal went down, kicking once, then again. Ted handed the gun to me and climbed the steel fence panel in front of us, whipping his sticking knife out of its sheath as he hit the ground. I was a little slow on the uptake here—we hadn’t rehearsed this after all—but I found a safe place for the rifle, leaning it against the building, and I was on the ground inside the corral shortly after Ted to lift a foreleg while he plunged the knife in alongside the breastbone and worked it back and forth until there was a gush of blood from the incision. He’d cut the main chest arteries. I pumped the leg a few times and we waited while Jupiter bled out.
It took another two or three hours to hang, behead and gut the animal, skin him, and cut the carcass in two. During that time, in my mind, he went from being “Jupiter,” the character, the stall jumper, the image of bovine contentment out there in the pasture…to two sides of beef hanging from a rafter in the barn, 450 pounds, more or less, of fine meat. Thank you, Jupiter.
Meanwhile, Tuesdays and Saturdays were CSA distribution days. Half of our group of 27 families came on each of those days to pick up the produce Dennis and I harvested for them in the morning—salad crops in spring and early summer, then the summer stuff: tomatoes, peppers, okra, summer squash, green beans and the crop that saved us that droughty year, sweet potatoes. I had ordered 500 sweet potato slips from a grower in Georgia, knowing that many people like them and that they can grow well in dicey conditions such as poor, dry soil. We put them in three feet apart in the row and the rows three feet apart, each slip with a shovel full of compost to give it encouragement; this was on a dry slope in the pasture, a north-facing eighth of an acre that I’d not used for gardening. Each slip got a good gulp of water and we strung a temporary electric fence around the plot and left it alone. Either they would grow or they wouldn’t. In the event, they did very well indeed and by late summer we had more than 700 pounds of sweet potatoes to distribute to shareholders, despite the lack of rain.
In late summer, digging sweet potatoes in drought-hardened ground, Dennis blew out his knee, the right knee he’d injured as a high school quarterback, and that was pretty much it for the season for Dennis. He returned home and not long afterwards had that knee operated on once again. I missed his help and his cheerful good nature for weeks.
Often enough for our customers during the season the visit to the farm to pick up their share was just another chore on the list of things to do and they were in and out again with their vegetables pretty quickly. Some moms with little ones were able to take time to go visit the chickens or greet the cow and we were happy to spend time with them. For real getting-to-know-you socialization we invited families to the farm for festivals at the spring equinox, summer solstice, and Michaelmas, the autumnal equinox. Our wonderful core group folks organized these events—kite flying, balloons, pot luck meals, farm tours and all the rest. Honey tasting at Michaelmas.
* * * *
This same season I had the opportunity to move a hive from nearby Quincy to our place, add it to my little bee yard, and enjoy what promised to be a fine crop of honey, for I’d seen the hive—two brood chambers and three honey supers—and knew that it was very heavy. In my greed to possess this treasure and my recklessness, I failed to take several things into consideration:
• It was August and very hot;
• The hive had been neglected for at least two years;
• As I said, it was very heavy;
• And, very much to the point, I’d never done this before, never tried to move a colony this populous, one that did not know me as the beemeister, nor one that hadn’t been frequently inspected.
Nevertheless, in the early evening I set off in my pickup with all the tools and contrivances I figured I’d need. I knew this was a risky adventure I was on but I’d failed to hive a swarm the month before—someone had called me about this beautifully accessible swarm hanging from a tree limb in a public park in Quincy and somehow I’d blown the job. I was therefore anxious to prove myself as an intrepid beekeeper. I parked some distance away from the hive, which was in the backyard of a rambling old house, inhabited until now by friends from the CSA, who were moving away. I suited up, already a little uneasy, because I could see from 100 feet away that masses of bees were hanging off the landing board of the hive, a sure sign of overcrowding inside. These guys clustering outside were making room for cooling air movement between the frames. If they didn’t do this, bringing into play their fine discernment of heat and humidity in there, the beeswax, with precious honey, pollen and baby bees would begin to melt, a huge, disastrous mess. Overheated bees are not happy bees, and here I was, about to disturb their peace. Discretion would have been in order here…never my strong point.
I fired up the smoker, put on my hat and veil and gloves and immediately got overheated myself. By the time I’d approached within arm’s reach of the hive I was sweating profusely…not an auspicious sign. Already the fabric of the arms and shoulders of my bee suit was sodden and plastered to my body. Already as I began to smoke the outside clusters angry workers were emerging from the entrance and zeroing in on me; I began to collect a few stings.
I should have backed off and reconsidered the situation but instead I endured the stings and pried the lid off. The mess I found in the top super should have deterred me as well: the frames there were welded tightly together with propolis and burr comb. I knew there was plenty of honey in there because of the weight, 80 pounds or so, about as much as I could pick up and carry. I pried the top box from the next lower one; again, the solid adhesion of one box to the other.
And the bees are getting very pissed off. And me stinking with the sweat of exertion, 100°F temperature, and, yes, fear. You see, the bee suit is not entirely impervious to the thrust of a stinger, especially where the fabric is tightly stretched and wet across the shoulders and the back. I was getting stung at a rate I’d never before experienced.
I began to work hurriedly and none too gently to separate the five boxes, knowing I could carry just one at a time to the truck, and then restack them and try to plug the gaps for the journey home. There I would have to reverse the process and set the colony in place next to the other hives.
It took half an hour to restack the colony in the truck bed, to tape the gaps [the boxes set none too squarely, each on the other], to screen the entrance, and to tie the whole works down securely. Thousands of bees were in the air, searching for the hive and their sisters. They were left behind as I drove a few blocks, with my helmet and veil in place since I’d brought plenty of bees into the truck cab with me. I stopped and opened the doors, got out and took off the headnet and helmet—Sweet Relief!—and surveyed the situation. I was running on adrenalin and had blocked the pain, but I knew I’d taken several dozen stings. In back, things were about as secure as they could be.
Back home, exhausted and staggering, I installed the new hive in its place as best I could and went to the house. When I stripped off the bee suit I found dozens of stingers embedded in the fabric and the smell of venom was even stronger than my own. I needed a bath, a cold bath to lower my core temperature and to help with the itching hives I was beginning to experience.
The next few hours are blurry to me now, for I was either delirious or unconscious most of the time. I was floating in a cold tub with a scum of puke, trying to explain to my partner what had happened. I was in a bathrobe, lying on the back seat of our mini-van going somewhere. I was hearing my partner and the doctor in the hospital ER, her explaining, him harrumphing and examining and injecting.
Then I was back home, somehow in bed and beginning to realize I’d narrowly skirted death from anaphylactic shock.
Beginning to realize how stupid I’d been:
• Not to have realized early on that I had bitten off more than I could chew;
• Not to have stopped what I was doing;
• Not to have asked for help;
• To have let greed override common sense.
* * * *
My 27 CSA customers were very kind and uncomplaining about the smallamount of produce they were getting, which was less than they might have liked. It was certainly less than I would have liked. The drought concentrated the life force in the vegetables, however, and the flavor was superb even if the quantities were not there. We could not water all the beds as much as we wanted to, out of concerns for the well. Day after day, week after week of brutal heat assailed us and some crops just burned up. But three years of Biodynamic composting and the Biodynamic spray preparations hadimparted a certain resilience to the garden and things were not as bad as they might have been. One of the features of Biodynamically-grown stuff is its wonderful aroma and flavor. For the most part my customers were down-to-earth folks, many with rural roots, and they knew what good garden truck tasted like; they also understood what drought was and gave me credit for doing all I could to assure abundance. Each week I published a newsletter that people picked up with their share, outlining developments in the garden, prospects for the next week’s distribution, news and commentary. I strove to keep things light and place disappointment regarding individual harvests in perspective, but the fact remains that some people must have been disenchanted with the CSA concept and felt they were paying a fairly high price for involvement with a new social initiative. Probably most would not have signed up for a second year.
This realization led me to understand that I was not going to sign up again either. The first year of the Quincy project would also be the last. I reconciled myself to that and was able to come up with a self-absolving case to prove that the shareholders had gotten their money’s worth: #1 – they’d been introduced to associative economics and the experience should have opened them to other possibilities than the producer/consumer duality; between the grower and the eater the commerce is in a life-affirming exchange of energies, not just money and goods. #2 – They had the chance to experience Biodynamic produce, and some of them to experience the making and using of the preparations; I heard week in and week out phrases like, “I don’t even like [spinach, green beans, whatever] but yours tastes like candy to me!” or “The kids won’t eat any vegetables but yours…” #3 – They got the chance to belong to something new, just starting out, and I’ll bet even now 19 years later, they remember Quincy CSA as having beensomething worthwhile; some may even belong to this year’s iteration of the same kind of thing.
We would not have been so eager to leave after the demise of the CSA had we not had occasion to sell out and move to southern New Hampshire, to associate with the Pine Hill Waldorf School and the Temple-Wilton Community Farm. That initiative, by Trauger Groh, Anthony Graham of Lukas Foundation, and Lincoln Geiger began in 1986, the same year as the Indian Line Farm CSA in western Massachusetts.
I would not be gardening for the Temple-Wilton farm, however, and the next short chapter will cover my impression of having been a member of Temple-Wilton Community Farm. Otherwise, 1989-94 is a five-year hiatus in my hands-on gardening career.