Circle M Farm Almanac – Late March, 2007
“Poop, Poop, Glorious Poop!”

The weather is fantastic today, warmish with no wind, sunny and fragrant here on the farm. It’s hard to describe the smell, since we’ve got a mix of so many different kinds of animals making their marks on the pastures. When you step out to the south side of the house, you first perceive sheep and horse – sort of a sweaty, earthy note. Walking out into the pastures, it’s the goats you smell, as the friendly, pushy, pungent bucks want to be right next to you. In the little calving barn, it’s the sweet calves’ manure you notice, as they spent the most time in the stalls over the frigid winter. You have to go right into the chicken house to smell them (although that will change as the weather gets warmer). Just now, the overall scent in this valley is nothing short of glorious. Does it sound like I’m crazy? Poop-crazy? I am! Today I’m celebrating Poop Day here at Circle M.

I really do like the smell of my animals. And their poop. The fact is, a few animals in uncrowded paddocks smell good. (Except for pigs, in my opinion. More on that later.) But I’m celebrating more than the smell of manure. I’m celebrating my manure harvest! This morning Shannon scooped up last year’s barn muck from where it had been aging in a hedgerow since last spring. He took the black gold gently up in his tractor bucket and placed it reverently next to this year’s garden where I’ll be spreading and tilling-in this afternoon. Fantastic!

This is one of my favorite parts of mixed-species diversified small farming. In this circle of nurture, manure is a valuable product of the system, rather than an objectionable nuisance or toxic pollutant, as is the case on the large factory farms where most of our nation’s eggs, milk and meat are made. If you’ve read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (and you should, it’s astounding), you’ll remember author Michael Pollan putting it this way: “Raising animals on old fashioned mixed farms … used to make simple biological sense: you can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop – what in retrospect you might call a solution.” But most food animals no longer live on farms, and this is the result: “One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all),” according to Pollan. Since feedlots aren’t a viable living situation for the animals, they are medicated daily with antibiotics in their feed – chickens, beef steers, dairy cows, feeder lambs. And we get it all in our meat, eggs, milk and groundwater.

But on a little farm like ours, healthy animals make food for the soil which will feed the plants which will feed us. The animals feed the pastures all the time as they graze through them, but it’s the winter months they spend lounging in straw-bedded shelters that make us garden soil. After a year rotting, warm and moist out of sun and leaching rain, this pile of barn muck turns to black, fluffy, delicious compost. In fact, after just a few weeks, the pile is full of earthworms and bugs – a living, crawling, sprawling pile of fertility that is constantly turned by eager chickens scratching for insect snacks. As soon as all the ewes and does have safely had their babies next month, we’ll be shoveling out the shelters again, and the compost circle will start anew. Pollan calls this an “elegant solution.” I call it a beautiful miracle. And I have a hard time describing how privileged I feel to be a daily witness.

This land needed a miracle. Not only did we unknowingly buy 20 quaint acres of sand, it was sand that had been harvested for hay for years without having any food returned. It’s basically an anemic sand farm, decades ago a working sand quarry, in desperate need of topsoil and nutrients. And thanks to all our grazing creatures large and small, it’s getting both!

The pigs, well, the pigs own the north pasture and the smell will tell you where they are. Through the winter months, the sow actually smelled good to me – quite sweet, almost like maple syrup. But in the warm weather, I don’t enjoy the scent of the pigs at all – a fermented sharp smell that is clingy. I absolutely adore the pigs, however. They live and till in next year’s garden and are the hardest working farmers on this place. Rotated from garden plot to garden plot, they don’t socialize much with the other animals. But what they miss in diversity of society, they make up in abundance of food choices. As nature’s compost combines, they eat up all of our house and garden scraps, both animal and vegetable, recycle them and promptly root and stomp everything back into the soil. When they are finished with their 7 months in a plot, it’s weed-free, tilled and jam-packed with nutrients. All the work that’s left for us to do is broadcast some cover-crop seed and gleefully anticipate next year’s tomatoes. Oh, and pick up the bacon from the butcher.

That’s in the fall, though. Today, I’ll work along side our pregnant Piggy Lou Harris. I’ll be hoeing compost into this year’s squash patch and she’ll be basking in the sun on a hay pile in the plot next door. In a few weeks, she’ll move to the next plot down and get building a nest for her coming piglets. All the straw she’ll toss with her nose and chew up with her pink snout and poke into the ground with her little stiletto feet will go a long way toward amending the sandy soil and dissolving the compaction of repeated hay-tractor harvests. The rest we’ll have to do ourselves, but it’s little enough that we can accomplish by hand and without petroleum.

The work is quiet, so I can hear Piggy Lou snuffling and even the new lambs in the south pasture bleating to their moms. The sandhill cranes have returned from the winterlands and keep me company with their oddly grinding calls in the cornfield next door. Overhead, the geese come haphazardly clumped, lazily honking their way home. For this pleasant labor, I’ll be additionally rewarded with a bountiful harvest that will begin in just over a month. Happy Poop Day!

You can see Piggy Lou and her borrowed boyfriend “Kong” in a hand-colored mezzotint displayed on artist Susie Medaris’ website. One of Susie’s entries in the Cow Parade was made into the official stuffed animal, so you likely know her work already. To see the pigs, go to http://svmedaris.com/pigs.html and click on “Mulefoot and Friend.” Piggy Lou is the friend. Kong went back to his home farm this week, and Piggy Lou has just me for company now.

Also – we are starting a CSA this June! Well, actually we’re starting it NOW, as today is our first planting day. Peas, carrots, parsnips, kale, chard, lettuce, spinach, radish, beets, onions and turnips are all going in today, ready to receive tomorrow’s rain and next week’s sunshine. We’ll also put in some fun Italian and Asian baby greens, and start a plot of field peas we’ll ship as shoots to eat fresh in salads or lightly sautéed with pasta. Sound good? I’ll send more information soon, but we are planning to make every-other-week deliveries to the NSC starting in June, and we’re only accepting 5 families this year (we’re just learning!). So if you think you’d like to be a founding member of Circle M CSA, contact us right away about purchasing your share