Chicks to Pasture, Field Trips, Environmental Crisis...

The week got off to a rough start with the death of our beloved farm dog Sadie. Amy and I got Sadie as a pup a year or so after we first got married. Amy and I have been through a lot in the past 11 years. Sadie went through it all right there with us. She worked the farm with us. She raised the kids with us. When things seemed to be falling apart, she was there. Steady. Faithfully. Her presence continually reassuring that all would be okay. We’re going to miss her. 

On a more positive note, we’re thankful for the rain showers received throughout the week. Wren and Carter got so excited about the rain, they put on their lifejackets and ran outside to play in the rain shower. 

Most of Monday was spent processing more chickens for a neighboring farm across the mountain. We had a water scare that morning as I went to start cleaning and setting up and had very little water. After riding through the farm, I found a water trough continuously running and overflowing. Having no water is a stressful start to any day, but especially stressful on a processing day. Thankfully I was able to find and fix the problem, restoring our water supply. 

Tuesday we moved over 500 chicks from the brooder out to the field, putting them into 8 chicken shelters that I’ll move to fresh grass everyday. It took a while to put shelters in place, put on the lids, gather feeders, assemble waterers, patch up the wire, stretch out the hoses, catch chicks, and transport them, but it felt good to get it done. Wren was excited to be “big enough to water the chickens this year.” If only we can preserve that excitement for years to come. 

Wednesday I made a pig paddock and put pigs out on pasture. Although we had a training hot wire in the barn for them to get used to the electric fence, about 6-8 pigs darted right through the wire and got out of the paddock. Two of them ended up wondering off over a quarter mile from the paddock. Love those pigs. After the pig chasing ended, we spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for elementary field trips to the farm the next day. 

Most of Thursday was devoted to hosting field trips to the farm with almost 100 students from Rich Valley and Saltville Elementary Schools. Amy showed them the chicks in the brooder and piglets in the barn. Our neighbor, Jennifer, helped guide them through the farm obstacle course made up of old tires, square bales, pallets, step-in posts, rebar, boards, and 5 gallon buckets. I took them on a hay ride through the field to see cows and chickens in the field. My brother John brought a horse up for the students to pet. Hallie was as excited about helping with the horse part of the tour as the kids were about getting to see the horse. I don’t know the best way to explain what we do and why we do it to a kindergartener, but we tried. We had a good day. Hopefully the kids did too. 

On top of that, I kept the cows moving; Amy kept the broth simmering, and we both kept getting the orders filled. 

This week while farming, I’ve been listening to “The World-Ending Fire” which is a collection of nonfiction essays by Wendell Berry. I love his take on pretty much everything he writes about, but I especially appreciated his thoughts on the environmental crisis and his solution to it. The extent of the environmental crisis is widely debated. Some say the climate is not changing. Some say the climate has been warming since the last ice age and that the changes are not tied to human behavior. Though I’m not suggesting that changes in climate are moved solely by human behavior and the extent to which our interaction with nature impacts the environment is certainly up for debate, there is no denying that our decisions can and do impact our environment. 

One simple illustration. Our farm has multiple fresh water springs in the mountain producing streams that flow through our farm. How we steward life in regards to these streams impacts the water that flows downstream, thus impacting, at least in some degree, all life dependent on that water downstream. And on and on it flows. Continually impacting life downstream and continually being impacted by what happens up stream.

Our impact on nature and life as a whole can be detrimental. We have the ability to destroy life and in doing so we destroy ourselves. But it doesn’t have to be. We also have the ability to care for and improve our surroundings. God placed man in the garden, not to destroy life but to make life increase, to make life abundant, to make life more beautiful. Our interaction with nature can be good, not just for us but for all life. 

All life is connected. The environment is bigger than ourselves. No individual can solely solve the climate problems or any environmental crisis. Which leads to a far greater problem than any environmental problem. Man’s solution. Man’s solution is to control what everybody else does. If everyone else is contributing to the problem, we think fixing everyone else as the solution. We think big problems need big solutions, big laws, big changes in policy. Big problems do require big changes, in ourselves. Too many want to change the world but are unwilling to make changes in their own world. Too many want to force others through law to do what they are unwilling to voluntarily do themselves. 

I should continuously try to better care for the water that flows through our farm, understanding the far reaching implications of our stewardship, but not acting like I have the solutions to all the water that flows through the country. And I certainly don’t want politicians in D.C. that have never worn dirty shoes pretending to know what’s best for all the water that flows through the country and enforcing ignorant policies to make people feel like we’re solving it. Government solutions have a history of worsening the problem. Whatever the problem is. The solution lies in the freedom and responsibility of the individuals.

Here’s a quote from Wendell Berry: “Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others. The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the environmental crisis can be merely political, that the problems being large, can be solved by large solutions, generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their values or had a change of heart or experienced a spiritual awakening, and that such a change in passive consumers will necessarily cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies. The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy holders but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a consumptive way of life. The environmental crises in fact, can be solved only if people individually and in their communities recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power, a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the environmental crisis is no such thing. It is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings. It is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an environmental crisis because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves, we are destroying the natural, the God-given world.” 

“Many times after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, ‘What can city people do?’ ‘Eat responsibly,’ I have usually answered.”

Not all are farmers, but everyone eats food. Everyday. We choose what we eat. Not all farming practice are the same. Not all chicken is just chicken. Not all apples are just apples. What we continuously choose to eat not only has direct implications on our health, the way our food is produced has direct implications on the health of our surroundings. The food we choose to eat impacts not just our own lives but all life, life as a whole. I need to eat better. Not just for my own sake, “for heaven’s sake.” 

Have a good week.

Will