Death of a buckling

A few months ago I killed a severely injured adolescent rabbit by striking it with a broad wide shovel. Why, then, can I not make myself to do something similar — end pain — for a dying goat?

I am reminded of the amazing essay “Death of a Pig,” by E. B. White: “I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.”

Just as White’s pig failed to show up at suppertime one day, the littlest goat did not scamper into the yard to see me, and by doing so let me know that his health had changed. By the time I noticed him standing uncertain in the barn doorway, or later, when we saw the signs of anemia, and brown-green excrement stuck thickly to his tail, time may have already run out. I don’t know. “A sick goat is a dead goat” is an adage among those who raise these animals.

He was the runt of four bucklings we bought last spring, the last to wean from bottle-feeding and always lowest in the pecking order. His most memorable trait was poking at people standing in the barn in hopes that milk would appear as it would from his mother. In the last week I have watched the larger two bucklings charge at him so hard near the alfalfa that he has toppled to the side. I imagine that out of my sight, this has been happening for many weeks, increasing the difference in their rapid gain in strength and his weakening.

For his last 48 hours, we isolated the goat in a large pen with fresh straw, alfalfa and water. We turned on a heat lamp and he stood beneath the bulb, shivering. I went to visit several times. Late on Thanksgiving, he spread himself in the straw, back and neck slightly arched. His bleats turned garbled and warbled. I knelt beside him many times, knowing he was uncomfortable. As though he were a friend, I patted his head and willed him to let go and die.

This may seem like much ado over the death of a farm animal, particularly one that was obviously the weakest of the herd. What bothers me — what, as White said, keeps the goat’s death steady “in the bowl of my mind,” is the fact that I could end the suffering of a partially skinned rabbit crying out in the barnyard, but I could not do the same for the goat. I could not shoot the animal, nor slit its throat, as would have been more humane than leaving him lying there in the clean straw, eyes lackluster, for the final 24 hours.

The sun is beginning to come up, and we’ll soon go to the barn to remove the body. I know that death is a part of farming, as it is a part of all living, but it seems to me that I should have done more, or could have, to either prevent it or make death come more quickly.

 

Turkey Day dress rehersal/dressing down

Last week we held a mock Thanksgiving for friends, complete with the traditional Broad-Breasted White Turkey. The 20-lb bird was a re-gifted gift that transferred from industrial farm to wholesaler to employer to employee to us. We wanted to experiment with a trial bird in the new smoker-grill, before the real day and 11 guests arrived.

In the spirit of cooking an industrially produced animal, I recently read Elizabeth Kolbert’s nuanced review of Jonathan Safron Foer’s “Eating Animals” (Little, Brown, and available here). As usual in her writing, she brings a personal context to the review, from the perspective of one who raises chickens herself. She explores the morality of industrialized food.  She focuses on the amount of money and care we lavish upon pets in this country vis a vis our apparent apathy toward the treatment of the livestock that become food on the plate.

“How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious,” she writes. This is the central question to Foer’s book, and one I consider regularly as well.

Kolbert’s review captured my attention more than the book she reviews would, I think. It’s something in the matter-of-fact, near clinical listing of the facts of our  industrialized food system, and how the writing reveals a sense of wonder. She does not judge people for how they eat or their choices, but more focuses on the bewildering ironies that underlie our basic assumptions of how we relate to animals.

Of Foer she is more direct in her judgment, as a review should be. She follows his moral reasoning — that vegetarianism is the only answer — only to watch him undo this perspective by introducing the practices of a heritage breed turkey farmer he has met. He seems to want it both ways – don’t eat meat, but support a heritage farmer. She concludes,  “We are, [Foer] suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.”

Back to the bird: An enormous animal, bred to have the maximum chest size, one so large that the animal at full grown cannot support its own weight. Delicious brined, then smoked on the grill for several hours.

These ironies, in other words, surround me as well. We had our trial bird, enjoyed it, and yet knew (or could guess) the conditions that brought it to our plates.

For the actual holiday, I have purchased a heritage bird from a local farmer. I did so for several reasons, which I’ll get to later – there are morals, curiosity and research involved.

 

Readings on a cold fall morning, first real day of vacation

-the rewards for taking time to develop this system were twofold: we could now afford to grow staple, storage items, such as onions, carrots and potatoes; and we could devote more time during the busiest months in the market garden to high value perishables and specialty items for restaurant sales and the farmers market.

-ground stakes are generally made of the same pipe as the hoops, but with a swedged, or compressed, end so that the hoops fit over them in a female/male arrangement.

-I think it is unfortunate that we have created a chicken that is so far removed from a normal chicken’s ability to forage and fend for itself in the barnyard.

-if the story refuses to end, if the story exhausts the frame called “story,” if the story is about the dissolution of story (what we cannot remember is no longer story, but Sappho), if the story is remnant, ruin, then what holds us to it?

-The more room your chickens have, the healthier and more content they’ll be.

-how to proceed when, after all, they have met only once, a few evenings ago, downstairs, and from her shy vantage point a the windowsill in the conservatory, though she followed him with her gaze, she could hardly lift her eyes from the gleaming buttons in his jacket?

-exercise one:  If you only had $100 left, what would you do with it? how would you spend it? on what? there are no options for family of friends to help you out – it is truly your last $100.

 

A rush to feed the animals before dark

Alfalfa bits stuck in my “good” scarf signal a merge of 9-5 life with farm life.

 

What it takes to run a farmer’s market, part 2

1  coordinator
2 community board members
5 voting vendor board members
11 sponsors and advertisers
75 dues-paying members
93 stalls, each marked with a tiny identifying number
12 board meetings
1 annual meeting
1 winter meeting
$5,040 in membership and advertising fees
sunlight, water and sweat equity
$21,798.60 provided by members to sell at market
$16,600 in salary expenses
$700 for a new tent, dolly and table
Salsalicious, Eggstravaganza, Cooking Japanese, Tomato Tasting, A Taste of Italy and other events
2 rapid market assessments
About 40 musicians
And most important, thousands of willing customers

 

Anthony's Bee Hive honey on sale at market

 

 

 

What it takes to run a farmers’ market, part 1

This Saturday will mark the last day of the local farmers market. Held Saturdays from mid-April to almost Thanksgiving, it offers fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, cheese, flowers and crafted items to the 2,000-3,000 people who browse through its parking lot stalls. For those who can’t wait all week, there’s a scaled-down version offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

One of the aspects I appreciate about our market is the festive, celebratory air. It’s an event. People bring friends or company from out of town. They use it as a social venue and run into their neighbors. They get to know the farmers, bakers, soap-makers and even the musicians busking on Saturday mornings.

Potatoes grown by Moon on the Meadow, July 2009

For the past year and a half, I’ve been learning what it takes to run a successful market. Or at least, what seems to work here, where the market is comprised of about 100 diverse people whose only uniform commonality is that they sell at market. My education has been in the form of a three-year stint on the market’s board.

As a consumer of the farmers’ market fare, I never would have guessed at the delicate balance the board strikes between business owners and consumers. There are bylaws, applications, rules, consumer advocacy issues, advertising, special events, expenses, income, and even future planning involved. We try to uphold the integrity of the market, which is based on producers growing or creating what they sell, not on re-sale sales. Sometimes that means saying no.

The board is comprised of a salaried market coordinator, five board members who also are vendors at the market, and community members, of which I am one  (the other is the author of this blog).  The vendor members can vote, but the community members and the coordinator cannot. This matters little to a relaxed group that seeks opinions from all.

Going into next year, my perspective will shift again as we expand our farm: we hope to sell at market beginning next April. For the first time, we will be on the other side of the table.

 

fall mashup

October: a collective pat on the back for never missing a CSA vegetable delivery for all 7 months.
Scoop raced across the pasture, the limp and tortured trip to the city long forgotten.
The end of daylight savings illuminated morning chores with 5 rosy sunrises in a row.
I love barters: A massive salad spinner exchanged for a few bags of arugula.
Ordered a heritage turkey for our locavore Thanksgiving.
The four roly-poly kittens are bigger than cereal bowls and learning how to mouse.
Put blogging and farmwork in one post and vowed to do it again.
Barn re-siding came to a standstill when the contractor took a break; hoping it’s finished soon.
Toured hoop houses at area farms and delayed putting ours up till spring.
Anticipating that the mailbox will soon fill with the future plans of chirping chicks and sprouting seeds (catalog season)

Sunrise following end of daylight savings.

 

Toward a distant spot on the horizon

The goal is somewhere on the horizon. It’s past hosting Thanksgiving at the farm, beyond New Year’s resolutions and after the goat kids and the chicks arrive in February. It’s probably at a point somewhere between first plantings of cole crops in the ground and the tomatoes poking up under the grow lights indoors.

The goal is the product of this blog, or what comes out of it. The ever elusive thesis and graduation.

I have been a student in higher ed for 15 of the last 19 years of my life (one BS, one double-major BA and eventually, an MFA). Of all of that, this is the most intimidating project I’ve ever tried to accomplish.

Easily overwhelmed by Big Goals, I tried to ease into thinking of this as a finished product by attending a power point presentation last week. It focused literally on the step-by-step process for submitting a thesis electronically, a necessary procedure in the graduation process. Informative? yes. Inspirational? no. Nothing like watching someone fill in a form click by click on the projection screen to make me want to gouge my eyes out.

I came away from the presentation with one singular understanding. There is no other way to turn in a thesis at this university (or most others, I bet) except as a PDF. This blog will have to be packaged for said PDF, and it changes the way I think about it. Convert individual posts to individual documents? Would I edit them?  How would the links be represented? What will I lose in the conversion from free form association to the linear PDF? What would I do with comments? Much to think about.

 

Cash and his harem

This is Cash, for whom we violated the no name rule. It’s becoming less of a rule all the time. He is so-named for the cash we paid to bring him to the farm, and for the hope that he lays a foundation for a successful business – cash for kids.

He spent his first three days in August in a separate pen adjacent to the one shared by the female goats. The nannies huddled up to the fence in a cluster of tail-fanning enthusiasm to check out the new guy. He somehow jumped the fence on the third night; we discovered him that morning sleeping in the nanny pen.

His presence helps transform the goat pen into an imaginary television nature program — the kind with a British voice-over thrilling at each twist and turn of courtship. There’s a little night music, though it’s more like a soft low car honk. A husky bleat. The cologne is a musky stench (at least, to humans).  Those horns worn by both parties bring an element of danger to all that nuzzling.

Humans. We read romance and television into everything.

 

Three beef thoughts

1) I cooked a CAFO beef roast this week. On sale! the sign entreated. I ignored moral qualms. Three hours later, the roast satisfied comfort food cravings but left a guilty aftertaste.

2) The rejoinder: An unrelated beef recall from the northeast. A reminder that food without moral qualms is more cash expensive but costs less to the soul.

3) Steak the steer leads a good life. Forty acres to roam. Upon sight, he lumbers up to the fence to get a scratch around his ears.

Steak and Scoop equally appreciate a good scratch.