Planning, Obstacles, The Need to be Whole...
Another pretty fall week. We sold about half of our egg laying hens. We still have about 35 that we’ll hang on to through the winter. We moved a herd of cattle off of some leased pasture. Over the next few days those cows will be making their way to some leased pasture on the other side of our farm that we’ve been stockpiling all summer long. We’re still a long ways from needing to feed any hay. We need to be buying some calves to replace and build back our cattle numbers, but goodness gracious they’re high! Cattle prices have gone up probably 50% over the past year or so. Our beef harvest for 2024 is growing and looking good, but it’s time to start getting 2025’s beef harvest on the farm. Long term planning is not my speciality. I have enough trouble planning out my week, much less the next year.
My short term planning is not really my speciality either. One of my favorite song lyrics is from the song “Help Somebody” by Van Zant, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.” This week was filled with obstacles interfering with our plans. For starters, the brakes went out on the truck. When I went to fire up the smoker to put briskets on Monday night, something had chewed through some wiring on the smoker. We got a new vacuum sealer for the on-farm kitchen that we couldn’t get to work. Chances are that operator error is most likely the problem and not the sealer, but Amy and I both tried unsuccessfully for a long time before getting the old one back out. The old sealer presented more familiar problems but still frustrating none the less.
Our biggest obstacle has been our washing machine not working since last weekend. This may not seem like a farm problem, and I guess it isn’t, but its noncooperation has had a very real impact on Amy’s already not-so-flexible week. With four farm kids whose mission in life seems to be finding ways to get as filthy as possible, Amy keeps the washing machine going all the time, which is still not enough to stay caught up on the laundry. Personally, I don’t mind a bit to wear dirty clothes, but I don’t think renters checking into the cabins would be super keen on arriving to dirty linens. Amy runs two loads of sheets and towels through the washing machine every time someone checks out of a cabin. With two cabins staying busy this fall, she usually does 10-12 loads a week just for the two cabins. We were just talking last week about how we needed to get a second set of washer and dryer. Then our one washer stops working. Ha. Shout out to my mom and her washing machine for helping us get through the week.
Other than that, more of the same. Monday I took a load of cows and pigs to the processor. Amy made more broth this week. We filled orders, and Amy delivered to Bristol and Kingsport yesterday. A big delivery day tomorrow to both Marion and Abingdon. Lots of coolers to fill today. Pigs in the woods need moved to a new paddock. Hopefully, I’ll get to it today or tomorrow.
Amy says sometimes I sound too pessimistic. It really has been a good week. The good outweighed the bad as it always does. I guess the bad things just tend to stand out more.
Instead of Wendell Berry’s fictional stories about the Port William community, I started into one of his nonfictional writings “THE NEED TO BE WHOLE: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice.” Not very far into it, there’s a lot of good stuff said so far. This first quote I thought was especially profound, tying the big Ag food industry to the demise of patriotism. As more of society shifts away from knowing and working the land, the less patriotic our society becomes.
“The removal from the land of so many people, removes from the land also those people’s love, care, skill, and work. And it removes the same love, care, skill, and work from those people. This is an enormous and enormously consequential loss to both the land and the people… Mere arithmetic tells us that if so many people who have the most direct and practical reasons to love the country are removed from the country, then the country will be less loved. There will be a great reduction of patriotism in the true sense of that word.”
Here’s a few more quotes from what I’ve listened to so far:
“A society cannot do for its people what it will not do for its land and vice versa. A society willing to abuse its land will abuse its people and vice versa.”
“Some of those reasons are public, governmental, or economic and must be addressed by public and political means… but a lot of the blame for the destruction of our communities, we must accept individually…”
“And so we lose the social and economic benefits of community membership. Like a living functioning household, a living functioning community enables its members to help one another. This ability to help one another if we have it is one of the dearest largest human freedoms, but it cannot be given to us by any of our great public institutions or agencies of the government. If we want living functioning communities, we will have to make them ourselves in our our own neighborhoods, starting with the means at hand and the nearest problems.”
“We no longer speak of health as the natural or normal condition of our bodies in the world. We speak of health as the hoped for result of the use of products produced by the health industry which thrives upon illness.”
“When you have succeeded so far in having a better face, a better body, a better house, a better car, and a better spouse or partner, then what you have is again inferior to what you might have. And so the cycle must begin again. People thus become ideal consumers.”
“Abuse of people is never far separate from abuse of land and the natural world. To poison rivers and winds, as we perfectly know, is to poison people.”
Have a good week.
Will