Hardscrabble Farmer – Page 10 – The Burning Platform

THE JOHN STEINBECK OF TBP

As I was reading this comment from Hardscrabble Farmer on the Lazy Teenager thread it struck me. His comments remind me of reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They are so visual and plain spoken and wise. I’m looking forward to meeting our resident John Steinbeck later this week for a beer when he is in Philly on business. I can tell him how exhausted I am from working on that excel spreadsheet all day. 🙂

The past couple of days we have been making hay while the Sun shines, literally. There are several acres of hillsides too steep to mow with the sickle bar cutter, so my 17 year old son and I cut them with scythes and then rake the cut grass into windrows where it dries. These have to be flipped at least three times before we pick them up and make haycocks for the cattle. Scything is about 70% cutting and 30% honing and peening the blade so it involves extreme physicality and focused precision work with hammer, anvil and whetstone. Add to it the delicate rake work of tossing the cut grass into windrows on slopes that pitch like a 7:12 roofline and you start to get the picture.

Of all the things that we do it is the most physically draining, the most demanding in terms of straight through work- from just after the dew dries in the morning until we finally break for supper at 8:30 or so. We talk to one another off and on about books, about history, about family about his future. He is leaving in a week to backpack his way through Europe, from Barcelona to Geneva and we will miss him, but until then he works beside me harder than 90% of most adult males in our culture.

The group he is going with are predominantly the sons and daughters of the well to do. Jokingly I told him that when they sit around the alpine huts in the evening watching the last light fade from the snow covered slopes of Mont Blanc and they are gossiping about their early admission to Yale or Harvard he tell them about how he paid his way on the trip by felling oaks and then splitting them into fence rails, or digging a well by hand, or scything the steep hillsides of his family farm to make hay for his flocks and herds for the Winter ahead.

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“You know they won’t believe it.” he says.

“But you’ll know it’s true.” I reply.

And this is followed by the soft snicking sound of blade against stem, in cadence, for quite some time.

The fact that so many have surrendered their lives to indolence and sloth says a great deal about the culture we inhabit. That their children follow in their footsteps is to be expected because that is the example that they set and it is all that they will likely ever know. It is not an excuse, however for those who understand their responsibility as parents, who believe in a better future for their own children, who plan further ahead than their next EBT transfer from Uncle Sugar.

After we had finished last night we took a walk into the south pasture where the cattle were grazing and studied the grasses, talked about the nitrogen benefits of the various clovers and vetches, and about his plans for building a couple of hobbity cottages along the bouldered hillsides where the stately maples grew in profusion. He sees the farm as a destination for moneyed urban types with an itch to visit the countryside for a long weekend, where they can wake up in the morning to the sound of ewes bleating to their lambs, and eat fresh eggs with yolks the color of tangerines. I listen to him talk about his love for this piece of property, about the light falling in the forest never penetrates deep enough to shake off the blue darkness inside, and even after his day how much he enjoys working beside me.

Next week when he boards his flight, by himself with nothing but his backpack and the clothes he is wearing, I will be watching him go with a small degree of sadness, but with such a deep well of pride in him that it will temper anything else. He is confident well beyond his years, bright and funny and completely fearless of the future unlike so many of his contemporaries, and he has earned his trip from the sweat of his brow, something that means more to him than he understands right now. But one day he will and it will be a foundation upon which he will build his own future.

I feel bad for the teenagers that miss this, but my son is not one of them, and he makes his parents very proud.

YOU DON’T NEED A CREDIT CARD TO BARTER

Another slice of Americana from Hardscrabble Farmer

The day began with a soft rain in the hours before dawn. I usually get up before everyone else, make a pot of coffee and catch up on the world outside through the Internet. I have been using my daughter’s laptop lately because our desktop shit the bed about six weeks ago. Unfortunately I ah a contract/insurance policy through an outside IT company and I tried, unsuccessfully, for the past six weeks to get the thing back up and running. After forty or so phone calls to the good people of India and thirty hours of my time, I still don’t have a functioning computer and I’m out the $400 for the policy. In fact, I was on the phone with them at 10 am when a neighbor drove up in his pickup.

The rain eased up and the two of us took a walk with the animals following at a safe distance, chewing their cud methodically. My neighbor had just finished baling hay on a couple of his fields and having heard from another farmer that we were building our herd he was interested in selling me 600 bales.

We don’t do a lot of paying for things so we got around to talking about what he needed for trade.

He’s a lot younger than I am, early thirties I’d guess, but he was hip to what’s going down with the economy and by the time the walk had come to an end we had made a trade so that he now had a feeder calf and I had some extra hay. He feeds his family, I feed mine. Neither of us lost out, both of us gained something and we both came to an understanding. Turns out this guy was one of the firemen who helped when my barn burned down even though we had never met face to face

As we shook hands at the back of his truck I could tell that I now had one more ally I could depend on and I think he felt the same. Two interactions, one for money on the scale of global economics, across continents and costing me countless hours with no resolution. The other local, with someone who spoke my language for something that benefited both parties, and at no cost out of pocket.

No one has to live this way, the constant consumption, the eating out, the credit cards, the foreign intermediaries and everyone at every level with their hand outstretched, wanting a cut.

Like the old lady in the commercial says, “That’s not how this works. That’s now any of this is supposed to work.”

Right now the kids are out back, the rain falling again as they laugh and scream from the trampoline and after I post this I am going to take the HP 300 Touch Smart desktop down to the sand pit and put a couple of rounds through it for my own entertainment.

A LITTLE SPIRITUAL & PHYSICAL SUSTENANCE

We all need our daily dose of Hardscrabble Farmer wisdom. Don’t be eating Cheetos while reading this.

Providing the sustenance for one’s self and family is fundamental to a successful life and a healthy community/nation/state. We wouldn’t think of hiring a contractor to wipe our hind end after a bowel movement or having someone come in from the outside to have sex with our spouse, or love our children for us, but something as fundamental as providing the very food we eat has been outsourced, gladly.

I happen to believe that the root cause of most of our societal ills can be tied directly to the move away from agrarianism and towards urban cosmopolitanism. Can we survive this way? Sure, in the same way you can keep a body alive on life support. Is that what is best for humanity? The answer should be self evident.

(As I write this my wife is preparing dinner and the children are busy doing chores in the kitchen and the oldest walked in from splitting rails, saying that he was starving. My wife said “hunger builds character”)

I probably sound like a broken record and for that I apologize, but human beings are part of the natural world and are not exempt from the limitations of our nature. The more jammed up we are, the more our anxiety increases, like livestock raised in confinement. The lower the quality of our food, the longer the time between harvest and consumption, the more processes between raw and served, the more malnourished we become and nourishment, like hydration is essential to life.

We’re sick. Personally, culturally, politically, spiritually and intellectually because we aren’t living naturally. The worst part is that most of us don’t even consciously choose to live this way, we simply go along with the existing system because of convenience. It’s easy. Like staying in a bad relationship, like bearing the chains of servitude, like hanging on to a job because of the income.

Making the choice to live like we were meant to requires sacrifice. Toys, leisure time, distractions, excitement. Often times it leaves us out of tune with vast majority of our fellow man and aside from the basic needs of any organism, fitting in with everyone else is crucial to how we perceive ourselves. Being an iconoclast or an outsider is a far worse fate than dying of obesity or cancer.

The other day we were all standing outside after a shower and the largest, most colorful double rainbow I had ever seen created a perfect arc over our farm. The scent of lilacs filled the air and all of us, normally a loquacious bunch, stood there in rapt silence. I wondered how many people in the US were tucked into their climate controlled houses watching whatever passes for entertainment these days, guts plugged with overly processed food, their bloodstreams swimming with pharmaceuticals and felt a sense of profound sorrow that this was being missed, not just this one time, but for entire lives.

Maybe hunger will spark a revolution, but I certainly wish that it winds up being the kind that doesn’t involve conflict with others, but instead a resolution with ourselves.

THE ERA OF CHEAP FOOD

There he goes again. Hardscrabble Farmer works 12 hours in the field and then relaxes by writing another thought provoking, brilliant essay on another important aspect in our long slow decline. Life is full of choices. America and most Americans have made the wrong choices. Hardscrabble Farmer has made the right choices. I love this place. Enjoy.

Simon Farlie has recently published an excellent work entitled Meat: A Benign Extravagance in which he examines, in detail the various arguments both for and against the production and consumption of animal flesh.

Understand this; all life on Earth requires the death of and consumption of another life form. This is an inescapable truth and arguments for the sentience of each particular species aside and its fundamental right to live a life and not become nourishment for other life forms is academic. A steer grazing in my field can either feed my family and my neighbors or it can live its entire life until it dies of some other cause at which point it will be nourishment for worms and bacteria- in the end it feeds something.

Humans have, through the past 10,000 years at least, established a role for themselves as mediators in the process by selectively choosing to husband certain life forms in a way that benefits himself. It is far more reliable to practice agriculture than it is to be a gatherer of wild edibles because of the odds. Weather cannot be controlled-that we know of- but the scale of what can be harvested in its time can be greatly expanded by the use of techniques and methods that maximize the odds in our favor. As observant human beings over the ages began to build their skill sets and methods it was noted that manures, when applied at certain times and in certain states could vastly improve harvests and so farming developed. It has been said that farming is the Mother of the natural sciences- that virtually all we know of the processes of life are a direct result of the practices of agrarians.

What happened at the close of the Second World War was that two new tools were introduced to the world of agriculture at levels that dwarfed earlier agricultural advances, namely petroleum based fertilizers and petroleum fueled farm equipment. Both of these developments maximized harvests leading to greatly reduced food prices- so much so that within a generation our entire national participation rate for agriculture dropped by more than a 1000%. The processes that fed our families and nourished our bodies were no longer common knowledge of the entire population, but an industrial process as alien as the manufacture of silicon wafers or plastic extrusions. Rather than to rely on the accumulated knowledge of a hundred generations, we passed off our responsibility to feed ourselves to oil men and lab rats. Is it any surprise that in their effort to maximize profits through economies of scale that the inevitable conclusion was to feed their consumers pink slime?

While on the surface this must have seemed like such a great leap forward (where have I heard that phrase before?) by freeing up not only 25-30% of our income that had previously been spent on food, but by eliminating from American life the necessity of laboring in a garden and the risks associated with weather and harvests, not to mention the time in preserving these harvests for the pantry. From here on out it was TV instead of weeding the garden, nodding off in the hammock instead of cleaning out the chicken coop, twitter instead of listening to the tweeting of real birds.

Of course, like physics always shows us, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Those super efficient farm machines that complete in a single day what would take a man months to do also compacted the soils in a way that twenty generations of family members walking on its fields could never accomplish. That the ever expanding requirement for fertilizers would also leave the soils as inert and dead as a lava field, unable to bring forth life without the application of tons of anhydrous ammonias and pulverized lime. That the livestock long required for fertilizing the soil with their wastes would no longer be needed, reducing worldwide herd and flock sizes to numbers last seen in the dark ages. It also placed the flocks, the fields, the herds and the seeds into the hands of less than 1% of the population where previously common ownership had been as ubiquitous as cell phones today. And lest we forget, when we gave up our ability to grow and raise and slaughter and harvest our own food supply, we lost our collective store of generational knowledge. We sacrificed our freedom to feed ourselves and our families for convenience and in exchange we enslaved ourselves to a select minority for the one need we all have daily without regard to age, sex, race or social status- nourishment.

And now we discover that they would feed your precious children “pink slime”, or worse yet, e coli, or camphobactyr or wood chips if it looked good to the bottom line.

Yesterday we worked as a family in the gardens for about 12 hours. The younger children are expected to participate, but aren’t forced to hang in there all day. They plant a bit, go off and play for a while, come back and ask questions, go down to the brook and come back again with a snake. My wife who in a previous life could have been the Princess in Enchanted mixed rotted manure with sifted loam in the wheel barrow and potted red geraniums while I put in 200 feet of red, white and yellow onion sets. We weeded the greens in the raised beds, hilled the rows of beans that were only just starting to germinate on the Sunday before Memorial Day and finished the evening with a steaming plate of freshly harvested asparagus and grilled flank steaks from a particularly sassy Chianina cow that weighed close to a half ton hanging weight.

Whenever I see that stats regarding the number of farmers left in America I assume that I am part of that count, but I am not one of them. There’s no GPS on my tractor, It isn’t air conditioned except by the air itself and I don’t get subsidies for things I don’t grow paid for by taxpayers dollars. I try and make this place a little more productive each year, spread my risk around a bit by adding new crops or improving ones we already produce and make sure that my family never goes hungry. When everything works out right we sell the overabundance to grateful friends and neighbors and put whatever we earn right back into the place so that when our children step up it will be that much more productive, that much healthier and that much more fertile.

The era of cheap food is at the doorstep, America and the new era of expensive garbage in the form of pink slime with all of its concealed and attendant costs to health and nourishment is upon us.

THE NOBELEST TASK OF ALL

Another brilliant, heart warming, wise comment from Hardscrabble Farmer that deserves its own post. This is why we have to keep TBP alive.

I sometimes wonder if, when we look back on this particular time in history, we will realize the sacrifices made in the name of wealth.

My own father is one of the most brilliant men that I know. He was one of the developers of a pivotal computer language in the early 1960′s. He had no degree, simply a desire to provide for his family and a mind that was made for solving problems. His love of music, literature, art and nature provided me with the kind of childhood that most people could only dream of and though he did well financially, we lived simply. About ten years into his career he discovered that the higher he climbed in the corporate world, the more profoundly dissatisfied he became with his life and one day out of the blue he decided to chuck it all and open a small shop in the University town where we lived that sold high quality, locally produced food. Mind you this was in the 1970′s, way before anyone used the term organic. He was known locally as the health food nut.

As I grew up I noticed that the fathers of my friends were all wealthy, owned big homes with tennis courts and indoor pools, traveled the world on holidays and sent their children to the finest schools, but none of them appeared to be happy. They were grumpy, distracted, miserable pricks whose sons hated them, whose wives cheated on them and whose lives were built on their acquisitions. My father, on the other hand was well respected by a huge number of people who loved to engage him in discussions on virtually any topic- professors, politicians, economists, pot growers, cops, headmasters, pyrotechnic experts, farmers and bankers. If you expressed an interest in any topic and shared it with him in casual conversation, you could count on the fact that at your next encounter my father would dig into his worn out book bag and bring out carefully clipped articles on whatever it was that had been discussed previously and almost without exception the recipient would stand there in awe of the newly discovered tidbit. It was not unusual for me to find guys like Ralph Nader drinking wine out of a juice glass in our study with my father, or to see him laughing it up with John Nash in the storeroom of his shop. He used to trade fruit smoothies to Stanley Jordan in exchange for having him hookup his pig nose amp in the store and play his unique finger tapping guitar licks for the customers long before there was a recording contract. In short, he chose to put all of his energies into living his life rather than to amassing financial instruments.

My father had the kind of intelligence you would expect from someone in the one percent, but the kind of values rarely seen outside of church yard. While other people added to their stock portfolio, he spent his money on season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and on hiking the Appalachian trail with his son.

I understand that in the world we inhabit it is virtually impossible to exist without some means of income. As self sufficient as I have become I still pay property taxes, send my children to the dentist, buy fuel for our vehicles and insurance on our home, but what I don’t have to do is be shackled to the accumulation of financial instruments- not the same thing as wealth. Prior to becoming a farmer I owned a business not far from Admin and was one of the one percent and saddled with all that comes with it- the stress, the employee problems, the taxes, the regulatory compliance, the audits, the infrastructure, the sub-contractors and vendors, and every outstretched and open palm looking for a cut. I quite literally felt like a slave to the wealth I was accumulating at the expense of my health, my sanity and even my own family. Never once did my father express an opinion about what I was doing because he knew that it was my life journey and that only my own discovery of what was important in life would be enough to affect the kind of change I would eventually have to make for the betterment of my family and myself.

Last week was a tough one- building fences, cutting timber, moving livestock onto pasture, planting, tilling, building a barn- and each night I climbed into bed physically exhausted, but comforted and surrounded by a loving family on a well tended patch of earth. On the morning of my birthday I received a card and a book from my father and when my wife called me over to give it to me I sat down in the sunshine and opened the cover and read this inscription.

To My Son on his birthday,

I am so proud that you have taken up the noblest task of all.

All my love,

Dad

I no longer have a gold plated insurance policy, don’t own a 401K, earn less than anyone in the FSA and still I feel like a wealthy man. Intelligence is indeed a predictor of income and accumulated wealth can be passed on to subsequent generations as a kickstart towards a future, but the real measure of a man is in the living of his life, the choices he makes and the consequences he lives with. I have no idea what part of the 1% sleep the sleep of the just, feel confident in the love of their wife or the respect of their children, add something to the world rather than strip something off of it, but to believe in my heart that I had been truly successful in life I would rather have that single book with its inscription than a hundred million dollars.

Imagine the kind of world we would live in if more of us felt that way.

HARDSCRABBLE WISDOM – WELFARE PROGRAMS ARE A HUGE SUCCESS – DOCILITY ACHIEVED

There he goes again. In between working 18 hours a day on his farm, Hardscrabble Farmer takes the time to clarify the true goal of our keepers. Based on this excellent analysis, our owners will likely be looking to cull the TBP livestock due to our unherdlike behavior and bridling at their control.

One of the most important things I learned regarding the handling of livestock is that you can control a hungry animal far easier than you can one with a full belly. A simple shake of a can with a handful of grain in it will give you the power to lead a 2,300 pound bull wherever you want it to go. Animals in confinement are at a disadvantage because you can control their feed and once you’ve learned that, you’ve eliminated every problem associated with free will.

I believe in the humane handling of livestock right up until the moment of slaughter. Until then the livestock should only associate you with positive experiences- leading them to greener pastures, occasional treats, gentle voice and movement around them that put them at ease.

I know that no one wants to think of human beings in terms of livestock or animal behavior, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how intelligent, how spiritual, how ethereal we may think we are, our basest needs and desires are animal in nature. The thing that sets us most apart from all other creatures is that we are the only animal that possesses a duality of nature- both predator and prey. Most humans are herd-like in their behaviors, they care about what all the others think of them and behave in ways that minimize their standing apart from the herd and in that they seek safety. Some use this genetic predisposition towards herd-like behavior in order to manipulate the mass- they are the predatory members of our society and they use the exact same type of handling techniques on humans as a rancher or farmer uses on his livestock in order to get the results he wants- submission, docility, ease of handling, control.

Anyone who thinks that this kind of information hasn’t been studied, understood, and implemented in order to more effectively control the populations of the various nations on earth is either incapable of this level of thought or deliberately lying to themselves. The purpose of providing trillions of dollars in subsidies, housing, food, etc. hasn’t been to help people become independent and self sufficient, it’s been to make the docile and controllable. This isn’t a failed program, it is a deliberately manipulative one with a completely opposite intention of the one stated. The problem is that because of our duality there are some people who remain “unherdlike” in their behavior. They crave independence and bridle at these base manipulations. When we encounter an animal that exhibits these kinds of traits within a herd- a skittish cow or an unpredictable boar- we cull them.

This culling process is taking place in our society today and the reminder are being conscripted via these programs into a life of domestic complicity.

This isn’t a failure of our government to create a nation of independent producers, it a success in creating a nation of docile consumers.

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE vs INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

There he goes again. Hardscrabble Farmer with another comment that deserved its own post:

Virtually everything I have to say is viewed through a lens of who I am and what I do, it can’t be helped. To be honest in this world is to offer the insights you have on the subjects you know. Most people have all kinds of opinions, but they don’t know what they’re talking about or even how they came by their beliefs.

There are two ways of producing food- and by this I mean consumables which is produced via the natural process, not in a laboratory.

Sustainable farming is one means, Industrial agriculture the other. A vegetable produced through sustainable farming produces more calories for consumption than it consumes in production, examples of this are tomatoes grown organically in soil fertilized with rotted compost made from animal or vegetable matter/waste or beef that comes from an open range farm where stocking density never exceeds a carbon neutral fix. Sustainable farming produces more than food as an end product and most of these end products are either invisible to the end consumer- and so unimportant to them if they are unaware of them, or intangible to anyone outside of the process.

Some of these unseen products are carbon locked into the soil, increase in the tilth of soil, decreased erosion, improved water quality, improved pasture, humane welfare of livestock, improved bloodlines and overall health of animals, minimal use of hydrocarbons in production, zero use of chemical inputs to soil, water or foodstuffs produced, development and sustainability of rural economies, increased health and vigor of farm families, decentralized production, fewer food borne illnesses, etc In fact it would take a lot more than an essay to list all of the benefits. The main negative- especially in our current economic position is higher cost for end product.

Industrial agriculture is based on the premise that food is no different than any other profit making good and as long as the dollar value of the end sales exceeds the dollar value of production, any other effect is immaterial. It is less farming and more akin to strip mining calories from an acreage.

It requires an ever increasing amount of chemical inputs, it reduces soil health, erosion, water retention in soil, and fouls watercourse. It usually demands inhumane practices of livestock due to overcrowding, alteration of living animals (docking of tails and ears, teeth/beak clipping, muscle degeneration, unnatural life cycles, pharmaceutical supplementation, increased risk of food borne pathogens and fatalities spread rapidly via centralized distribution, destruction of rural communities, loss of generational knowledge of natural cycles and remedies, etc. The key to this type of agriculture is cheap hydrocarbons which have risen fivefold in price over the past fifteen years and are no longer inexpensive.

Bottom line? By continuing along a path of industrial agriculture as a means of providing cheap food we have lost virtually every supplemental benefit and maximized every possible deficit. The vast majority of lands now under industrial agricultural use would not be fit to farm in the event of a halt in hydrocarbon inputs. The vast majority of people involved in industrial agriculture would no longer know how to “farm”. It would be like taking newly returning combat infantrymen and placing them in a neonatal unit without training.

The fact that virtually anyone in the US can obtain some cheap food at any given moment is not indicative of a healthy or sane system- in fact it is just the opposite. It is evidence of a system so focused on keeping people fat and pacified through the consumption of non-nutritional calories put together through a combination of heavily centralized, soil and water damaging processes controlled by large corporations whose bottom line depends on inhumane treatment of livestock, environmental destruction, erasure of generational skills and knowledge and the malnutrition of its end users.

I understand where food comes from and how to improve the quality of soil, water and environment because my life depends upon it. I was called to farming the way a minister is called to the cloth and view my obligation as sacred having taken a vow of poverty (or near) in order to do it. I speak from limited, but deep experience and I can tell you that while this is not the same discipline as the one Jim has discussed in his piece about our economic situation above, it is tied to it and is an integral part of it.

I am not a predictor of collapses, I have no special knowledge of where our nation is heading, but I am observant and I can tell when something is unhealthy and when something is heading towards death and if our nation were a woodlot, I would anticipate that the next time a dry season came along and an errant spark drifted by that it will burn to the ground. Pretending that everything is right with the world because you happen to have a full belly and a working Internet connection is a shallow means by which to assess the current conditions. I have no idea what the elites know about the future that they are not sharing with us or if they know anything at all and are simply operating like the most ignorant EBT card holder in the hood, getting while the getting is good, but I do know that the path we are on is unsustainable, politically, socially, culturally, economically and naturally.

Make of that prognostication what you will.

Tapped Out

Submitted By Hardscrabble Farmer

Every year, near the end of Winter, when most people are still shut up tight in their homes waiting for the snows to melt and for some color to emerge from the landscape, we spend our days deep in the sugarbush tapping maples. The job itself is tiresome; snowshoeing through the accumulated drifts that rarely see the light of the sun and drilling holes into the bark of thousands of rock maple trees on the southern flank of the mountain, carrying your tools and supplies with you as you go. We use tubing rather than the old style bucket and spile familiar to most people, not because it is archaic, but because it is next to impossible to manage three thousand buckets over seventy acres with only the labor of our family. Each run of tubing follows the contours of the land, the mainlines running in the draws where Spring thaws create runoffs between massive erratics- boulders the size of small houses. Between these ravines the majority of the maples grow, climbing the mountainside in profusion, their roots wrapped around glacial moraine like fists. Smaller lines, laterals that carry the sap from each tap run taut towards secondary 1/2″ tubing that eventually joins the mainlines, each drop adding to another until it reaches the collection points.

At first, in early February, when you drill the hole nothing comes out but shavings. Later, as the weather warms and the sun touches the bark, as soon as the bit emerges from the cambium clear drops of sweet sap begin to pour from the hole. You place the tap into the hole, attached to a “drop”, or length of tubing fastened to the tree like a collar six to eight feet above the forest floor depending on the snow that year. When it come time to remove the taps when Spring is in full bloom we carry a piece of ladder with us so we can reach the taps, now out of reach of human hands. The entire tapping process is carried out over a period of two or three weeks depending on how much help you get, but it is, for the most part, a very solitary process. You can hear the sound of another drill out of sight and the soft tap-tap-tap of a hammer driving a spile into place somewhere out of sight and know that you are not alone, but until the light starts to dim in the western sky and you head back in to the house, you are on your own.

During these times you begin to notice the subtle changes between Winter and Spring. The snow is covered with tracks; bobcat, mink, snowshoe hare, moose and coyote. Occasionally as has happened to me, you will find evidence of bear coming out of hibernation, sections of sap lines ripped from the trees, fang holes through the plastic where it has discovered a sweet snack early in the season. There are the sounds of birds, owls and hawks mostly calling back and forth to each other, but migrating birds too, warblers, flycatchers and the occasional thrush. It’s hard not to pause between runs and simply stand there in awe. The incipient buds developing on the birch, the pale pink at the tips of the black maples, the wide brush of deep green where the hemlocks stand. It is this part of the year that virtually no one gets to experience, this glimpse of the rebirth of everything that makes tapping out so rewarding.

Last week a couple of young men- successful thirty-somethings who wanted to experience sugaring first hand- came up to the farm to volunteer for the day. One was an orthopedic specialist, the other a project manager for an industrial contracting firm, both longtime friends who lived in a large urban area in the Northeast. I gave them a half hour of instruction and a set of tools and supplies and after sharing some warm maple syrup and tea, we headed out to the orchard. For a while I worked with them, close enough to QC their efforts. Both men were proficient with tools and physically fit for the task. They had been to our farm in the past, to buy grass fed beef for their paleo diets and once to shoot targets on our range. As an open farm we get lots of visitors, many whom we never see again, but even more who over time become friends to our family and who take pride in working with us on whatever we happen to be doing at any given time during the year whether slaughtering chickens in June or sugaring in March.

After a while they moved out on separate traces, up the mountainside one tree at a time, repairing lines and tapping trees. We worked that way for six or seven hours, stopping on occasion to straighten out a confusing section where branches had taken down lines or to eat our sandwiches, but working slow and steady until dusk. As we made our way back out of the sugarbush they talked about how much they wished they had the same kind of office to work in as I did and I tried to let them know that as beautiful as it was there were days when they probably would be grateful for the climate controlled digs they called home. I held up my broken arm still in a splint to drive the point home. before they left I packed them each a box of steaks and bacon and a bottle of last years grade A dark amber syrup. We shook hands and said our goodbyes and I told them to stop by again when we would be boiling the sap in the sugarhouse and they said they’d try and get up.

This year isn’t looking to be very good for production. Here we are almost at the end of March and the temperatures are still in the 20’s during the day and below zero at night. The last time tapping out was this late in the year was 1953 according to the penciled notes on the sugarhouse wall and as of this morning we haven’t got more than 500 gallons of sap. By the time it goes through the reverse osmosis filter we’ll only have 300 gallons of concentrated sap on hand, 700 gallons short of what we need to fire up the evaporator. Next week looks like it might be good with temperatures in the 40s during the day, enough to let the sap really flow, and freezing at night, a requirement for the flow to continue.

After five days of that the weather looks to get much warmer and judging by the bud development on the trees that will be all it will take to slam the lid on another season. For a family that depends on maple syrup for enough income to pay property taxes and a little left over for expenses, a short season is a let down. But as my daughter is fond of saying, ‘you get what you get and you don’t get upset’ and I agree with her. Some years are good years, some not so much, but on average doing this is worth the effort. Doing anything else would be a let down.

So now we wait; for the run to start, for the sap to flow into the sugarhouse and for the syrup to come off the pan in a room filled with sweet, warm steam, redolent of the scent of sugar and wood smoke. We’ll wait for the bottling of the varied colored grades, from pale yellow fancy of the first run to the blood red grade B dark amber at the end of the season, for the clean-up that follows and for the Spring that will turn this mountainside blue green with life once again. I hope that fifty years from now that our sugarbush is twice as productive as we have made it so far, so that my grandchildren will be able to snowshoe across the same ravines under soaring columns of rock maple and white ash, carrying their tools and supplies in the same bag I use now, hoping for a sweet harvest long before any crop has been planted anywhere else.

WE’RE NOTHING BUT A BRIDGE BETWEEN PAST & FUTURE GENERATIONS – A HARDSCRABBLE FARMER’S STORY

Hardscrabble Farmer did it again. He made such a great comment on another thread that it deserved its own post.

Over the course of the last week or so, my two youngest children have been pouring over my collection of Indian artifacts. I have thousands of them each one picked up out of the soil, dropped between 300 and 12,000 years ago on the same land we have all inhabited. Occasionally I will find a relic of our own time- last year I found a silver tablespoon with a monogram of the guy who owned the land back at the turn of the century and I returned it to his great granddaughter, my current neighbor and she was thrilled to put it back with the rest of her family silverware. She shares with me photos of the farm the way it looked 110 years ago. The guy who owned it in between used to come up to the farm to visit. He had Alzheimer’s pretty bad, but the woman who brought him said that the moment they drove up the driveway he would light up and start talking about the farm, and when we walked around and talked I never noticed anything in him but love for this place and a trove of memories.

His last visit before he passed away we sat on the edge of the hill overlooking the pond and ate egg salad sandwiches from the chickens we raise and just talked about the land. Both of us have hunted it and fished it. We’ve logged and hayed and planted and disced, burned brush fire, tapped maples, raised chickens and geese and ducks and pigs and sheep and cattle and goats on it. Our children have grown up in it’s fields and pastures, woodlots and streams. We’ve taken dips in the ponds, slept out under the spray of stars above it, endured the losses through fire and predator, disease and drought. We had good years and great years, hard years and brutal Winters. Down in the basement of the milk house on an old post there is a record of every deer that my old friend ever took written in dark pencil with a steady hand.

Every day of my life I do something that improves the quality of the life on this farm; yesterday we delivered the last calf of the 2014 season and tomorrow we start tapping the maple orchard, some three thousand taps over seventy five acres and by Town Meeting Day we will probably start boiling our first syrup which we will do every single day, 10-12 hours a day until the leaves bud out and we start to get the fields gardens ready for Summer. My wife and children work with me every day, but only as much as they care to because I want them to love work, not dread it. When we have had enough of fences or weeding we go fish for brookies in the stream, or harvest fiddlehead ferns in Spring and gather mushrooms in the Fall.

We make plans often and revise them constantly to fit the land rather than our own desires. Pretty much every day someone comes up to buy some hamburger or eggs or to hunt the back part of the property in season, or snowmobile the wide open meadows on the southern flank of the mountain. At th end of every visit the people always linger by their cars looking out at the fields and forests and trying to get their kids to hop in with them- always hard to do when there are piglets chasing the chickens or we’re pressing apples and the juice is free to whoever wants a taste- and they tell me how lucky we are to live like this. Most times when people pay me for whatever it is they buy and I reach into my pocket for change they stop me and tell me no, no change, please keep it and I know it isn’t because they like me, but because of what we are doing for this property.

A few years ago when I was rebuilding a loading dock on the front of the sugarhouse to the same scale and style as one that was there back in the 1890′s (I’ve seen the photographs of the old men standing on it, wearing worn out suit coats and floppy hats, standing stock still for the camera and grinning like little boys). I would work on it in the evenings when the Sun had gone behind the mountain and cut and nail the boards by myself in the cooler air and I had during that entire time the oddest feeling that I was being watched, intently, by someone I could never quite catch a glimpse of standing in the open door of the sugarhouse. It got to the point where I would make sure to open the door before I commenced my work just in case there really was someone there watching and after I had completed that job, I never got that feeling again.

I think, but maybe with a different perspective than the woman in the video, that we never really do “own the land”. In truth, we don’t, the local government does because even though I have no mortgage, should I fail to pay my taxes on time, as much as we are respected and thought of in this community, they would begin the process of taking this land away from us, prefering to let it sit abandoned and to fall into disrepair than to allow us to continue our stewardship of it. That’s just how govrnments roll, nothing personal, but someone has to run the rackets and keep the flow of money going.

I have given up on the belief that I really own anything. Everything we have, starting with our families, are nothing more than a temporary arrangement. When my old friend died last Winter I went to his funeral and spent a lot of time talking with his children- he had 10- and to a one they have all made a point to stop by to visit. I show them all the pencilled record of their father’s deer hunts and to the oldest son I even returned his old Daisy BB gun that I found under a boulder not far from the sugarhouse where his littel brother, a jealous six year old in 1949, had concealed it.

We all leave relics of our time here and in some distant future someone inevitably picks them up and wonders, if only briefly, what relics they will leave behind to be found by others.

So no, we never really own the land, but if we are careful stewards and treat it well, we can know that for a brief moment, the land has owned us. And owns us still.

WISDOM OF A HARDSCRABBLE FARMER

BELOW IS A COMMENT MADE BY HARDSCRABBLE FARMER ON ANOTHER THREAD. IT IS SO GOOD, IT DESERVES ITS OWN POST

I think a lot of people-even here- use the word job as if it were something to aspire to. Working for others in exchange for wages is definitely better than being in the FSA, but not by much. When money had value and companies had loyalty to employees and benefits were a given it was the kind of thing some men were willing to do in order to support a family because they didn’t have the confidence/aspiration/drive/capital required to create something of their own, but these days a job is no more a guarantee of economic security than a college degree is.

Maybe its time people start reexamining the purpose of life and what you do with the limited amount of time you get.

I started out in one of the hardest working, lowest paying positions on earth- as an infantry private. Those four years were an economic black hole, but it gave me the discipline and the confidence to go out in the world and make my own way. I started my own business with my own two hands and a few tools and by the time I was 45 I had amassed enough capital (not to mention a wife and children) so that I could drop out of this rat race. No debt, no worries, no keeping up with the Joneses, just a profound satisfaction with all the choices that I made over the course of my life that led me here.

Today I do what I want to do. I spend every day with the people I love and care for the most. I work with my whole being- mind, body and soul in the outdoors where men should be. I eat better than Gordon Ramsey, sleep the sleep of the just, eshew materialism and there is a line of people who beat a path to my door to buy our surplus production for top dollar and praise me for it. In short, there isn’t a thing in my life that leaves me unsatisfied or with regret.

We have a little cottage on the property that we have tricked out with a chef’s kitchen perched on the edge of a hilltop with a view of the pastures and ponds, where our renters- skiers from the city in Winter, writers on retreat, entrpeneurs who want to get away from it all, pre-retirees searching for their next step- and every last one of them falls in love with this place, how we live and what we do. It is a palpable envy- though not in a bad way- for something most Americans have forgotten completely in their quest for a job, or a career, or their fortune and that’s a life. A real life, where you provide your own sustenance from your own land using your own wits and hands, surrounded by a loving family.

Somehow we got off course. We lost the thread and forgot what the meaning of life is and this substitute- this pale world of I-gadgets and McMansions, insurance policies and anti-depressants, 401K’s and SUV’s has left an entire generation or more in a state of abject defeat. I look out on the rest of the country and see people who have bloated themselves into Macy’s Day sized bodies on poisonous snacks, who scribble allover their bodies with nonsensical tats, who dress like whores or aquire mountains of debt just so someone will notice them for a moment in a sea of dissatisfied malcontents. Most people couldn’t tell you where their food comes from, how their newest electronic toy works or why they continue with this empty charade day after day, but their behavior screams for meaning.

People have stopped living their own lives. They perform for the public like trained bears, posting every last act on Facebook as if that were proof of their existence, jabbering away with their thumbs like deranged mental patients rather than swinging a hammer or holding the hand of the person next to them.

Our whole society, top to bottom is sick, deeply, seriously ill. We went down a path that led to anger and alienation, depression and dissatisfaction, greed and ennui- every act, top to bottom, from TARP to Knockout King is a manifestation of our poor choices and there is no fix for it short of abandoning everything we’ve done for the past half century.

People talk about the collapse as if it hasn’t happened yet when all you see when you look around is rubble. From a distance, at the right angle and in a good light the Colliseum looks brand new, but we all know that it’s just a shell- and a stark reminder- of what was.