Spring Begins with a Bang
Spring began here this week with a bang. Literally. Five little piggies (actually huge 300-pound porkers), five sheep and two goats went off to market, as we harvested last year’s babies and made room for those soon-to-be born. The bittersweet event makes the start to the new season both deeply satisfying and awfully sobering. Like farming itself, I suppose.
The adorable piggies when they were a few weeks old. It’s odd how much they already look like sausages.
There’s nothing like spring on an old-fashioned homestead to illustrate that life and death are part of the same story. Not just the meat, but so, too, the vegetables we grow by-and-large die to nourish us. A close friend and shepherd said to me the first year I wrestled with butchering the darling lambs I’d raised: “It’s a wonderful thing – you take care of them and then they take care of you.” She smiled as she said it, but there was an unmistakable touch of sadness in her tone. We both wished the lambs could take care of us with wool alone! But she’s right, it is a wonderful and deep thing to be linked together in a circle of nurture.
The first casualty of this spring was outside of that circle, however, which made it all the more heartbreaking. Nevertheless, it was a death we’ve come to expect this time of year because our outside cats tend to wander when the weather breaks. They are all spayed, which we’re told keeps them from roaming, but a few of ours always strike out for a week or so. Two Marches in a row we’ve found one of our cats dead on the road that passes our house: first Pudding and then Globule. This year, we found Mr. BoJangles dead in our own driveway. At a time when only one of us could have hit him.
The ground was still white with snow the morning we found him, in a horrifically vivid splatter of blood between the horse and sheep pastures. Though we took him away, the blood remained to accuse us every time we walked by to feed animals or drove through into town. But only for two days. Within 48 hours the stain had disappeared – reabsorbed by the soil which put it to good use as nitrogen. The earth certainly has an amazing ability to heal itself and nature makes short work of what’s left behind by death. Rotting matter is evidence of the riot of life that ensues when microbes and larger bugs move in to their place on the food chain. From a certain perspective, it’s a cycle that’s quite elegant. An everyday miracle, really.
Nothing lives, including weeds, where it doesn’t have something dead on which to feed. Though only 5 percent of soil is organic matter – the decaying remains of various living things – it’s the part that really makes things grow. Very few plants will thrive in just the rock particles, water and air that make up the other 95 percent. One of the reasons we raise so many different animals on this farm, applying so many different sorts of useful poops to our soil, is that this land has had its organic matter stolen for years in the form of hay bales. With nobody actively farming the place, neighbors had been invited to cut hay off the pastures, but no one had applied manure back. Wild land does a fabulous job of feeding itself when leaves fall to the ground each year and rot, but when the leaves are systematically removed the roots remaining have nothing to eat. Manure is just what the doctor ordered for this farm – leaves and grains given a kick-start on the rotting process in the bowels of our livestock. Quick dirt. Nature takes 50 to 100 years to make an inch of topsoil, so our animals are pushing that time-table up a little for us, and giving our vegetables something to eat in the meantime.
Of course, we like the animals for lots of other reasons, including their company, and eggs, milk and meat. We’ve reached a peace, if a somewhat uneasy one, with eating our animals – all of whom, except the ubiquitous chickens, are named. And oddly enough, that uneasiness has made our view of the world a bit more measured and tender, both toward the animals and each other. Life is precious, animal and vegetable, and we are daily aware that our health comes at a high price.
At the same time, it does seem that domestication is a mutually beneficial partnership between humans and the dependent species: we harvest individuals and guarantee that the species will be preserved. Slow Food USA, the stateside arm of a global organization dedicated to preserving traditional foodways, has taken just this approach to saving vanishing breeds of American heritage turkeys. By encouraging fine restaurants to feature the smaller, more flavorful alternatives to factory-farmed conventional turkeys, the group hopes to encourage more artisanal farms to raise them, and thus rescue the breeds. (By the way, we are very excited to be one of those farms offering very rare Chocolate heritage turkeys for this Thanksgiving!)
Spring around here also has more auspicious heralds than the sound of the butcher’s gun, thank goodness. Yesterday morning, an odd, but familiar, metallic cry reached me from beyond some close-by blue-misted hills. Though I couldn’t see them, my heart leaped at the sound of the sandhill cranes returning from their vacation homes in Florida. Soon they’ll be arriving en masse, like a parade of rusty-geared jalopies lazily cruising over our heads. Then they’ll be gracefully foraging on gangly legs through the soy field next to us, poking through last year’s rotting pods for tasty morsels. We’ve all got to eat somehow.
