Make Hay When the Sun Shines

One of our first tasks when we arrived here in July of 2005 was to find a local farmer to hay our fields. There were two reasons. Not only are those acres of rolling green hillside absolutely gorgeous to behold, there is money at stake. Taxes. To secure an agricultural discount, worth lots of dollars, we must either rent our fields to someone who does $10K of farming business a year, or do that business ourselves. Renting was our better option.

We soon met Farmer Larry who lived across the way. The stories that tailed him were legendary. He let his dangerous bulls wander onto everyone else’s land. He milked his cows when the cows felt like it—or not. He would give you the shirt off his back. Fact was, Larry told better stories than anyone ever told of him. And he was happy to hay our fields.

To hay a field is the farmer’s equivalent of mowing the lawn. Hay is grass—cut and dried and bound into bales. It can be alfalfa, timothy, orchard, fescue or any mix and match that grows. And though we had yet to discover it in those early years, this basic grass is the foundation of the whole farm economy. The grass feeds the animals who work the land, give meat and milk, and fertilize the soil again. It is a solar-powered cycle interrupted by the use of fossil fuels, as when farmers use tractors to pull their mowers and grains to feed the cows. Still, if you trace that fossil fuel back in time, it all comes down in some time and place, to sun-fed grass.

This year, for the first time, we realized for ourselves how crucial hay is to the farm family. All it took was imagining ourselves in the dead of winter, staring down our four thousand-pound beasts, and trying to explain to them that there was nothing left for them to eat. Our milk production, not to mention our well being was at stake.

As May ripened, so did the stalks of grass. Walking in the fields, I was up to my armpits, swimming through heads budding pink. It was time to hay. The sun was shining high in the sky. Where was Larry?

All the good weather was making me anxious. When the grass is grown, it needs to be cut, else it starts shedding nutrients, preparing to die and be reborn. When the grass is cut, it needs to dry, spread out on the field, else the balls or boxes into which it is baled start to mold. When the cut grass is drying, it needs a good 24 hours of clear sky to do so at least, for any rain that falls washes its nutrients right into the ground. The sun was shining. Where was Larry? I was feeling like a farmer.

Larry, we heard, had stopped worrying about the weather long ago. Where other farmers had internet connections to follow the satellite forecasts, Larry hardly even looked at the sky. You hayed when you could. You took your chances when you did. It would rain or not. And by the time winter came, whatever hay you had to offer your animals, Larry said, would be better than a snowball.

The sun was still shining on the spring day when Larry died in a logging accident. He was out in the woods, doing what he loved, and quickly felled. It was tragic. We missed him and still do. We miss his unfailing smile, his generous ways, and the stories he told at our kitchen table of wild moose and rangy bulls and the pony he used to ride to school. The line of people waiting to enter the funeral home for his calling hours in this rural town topped 800 people. We had thought we were his only friends. He was buried in the most beautiful cemetery I have ever seen, at the foot of a pine tree too big to hug. What would he think, I wondered, looking up at that tree?

Our hay was still standing. The sun was still shining. We talked to Larry’s sons who agreed to hay for him, as they had been doing with him, for years. In their hay days growing up on the farm, they processed over 10,000 bales a year. We would have several hundred.

Then it began to rain. Day after day, one week, two weeks, three weeks. You can’t cut hay in the rain. There was nothing to do but wait. June seeped into July. The grass thinned; its buds darkened red, and we waited some more. Those snowballs were looking pretty good.

Finally the sky cleared. Finally the hay was cut, rained on, turned and combed again, baled, and loaded safely into our barns, still green and crispy good, despite it all. Smells delicious. Our animals love it.

Make hay when the sun shines. In general use, the meaning of the words have softened into something like: take advantage of your opportunities when you can. But we have learned they mean far more than that. To make hay is be the link in the farm economy that enables the life of every member. To do it when the sun shines is to honor your obligation to let others live, by aligning your actions with the productive, creative work of the natural world.

To make hay when the sun shines is to do what you can and what you must to be a life enabling link in the universal rhythms of bodies becoming.

I know that next year, as we are making hay when the sun shines, I'll be thinking of Larry, at the foot of his tree, taking heart that whatever we make will be better than a snowball.

Next week: The cream of the crop

Farm Philosophy

Large fluffed flakes are falling, melting as they touch down on wet grass. A grey sky hangs low. A chill fills the air, smarting against bare skin and sinking deeper too. We have heard rumors that winter will come early and hard, but it is only October! Days ago it was a sunny sixty! We have been working up wood to warm our stove, but will we have enough to last through April?

This weekend, anticipating a hard frost, we pulled up the remaining tomato stalks, plucking off every fruit, hard green to rosing red, and settled them in color coded baskets around the kitchen to ripen as they will. We picked a final crop of the red raspberries, and boiled them into jelly. We picked more apples, making sauces and crisps. In some ways, the end of the harvest was a relief. We will soon be finished with the processing! But the warmth of the thought is tamped by the chill—will there be enough to last?

Of course, there won’t be enough—food or fuel. Even with our Daisy dependence (Oct 15), we produce a mere fraction of what our family of six needs to eat in a year. The wood stove only heats half of the house. To fill the gaps, we will truck to the local supermarket and spend hundreds of dollars a week. We will call the local oil company to fill our tank with fuel. So really, we need not worry at all whether we can last the winter. Right?

So why the chill?

*
Before humans were farmers, we were hunting and gathering, moving from place to place as we followed the herds and the harvest. We observed the cycles of the seasons, of seeds, roots, and fruits, of birth and death. At some point, around 10,000 BCE, the gatherers, supposedly women, began participating in those cycles, planting their own crops in close and clustered areas, trapping and taming small animals for eggs, milk, and meat. Farming as a practice took hold, drawing more of the community into its sphere. Hunting was no longer as necessary. Neither was movement. The hunters started staying home to protect the food stores—and their producers.

Why this shift? It is not obvious. Farming is labor intensive. Plowing, planting, tending, harvesting, and storing take more time and energy to produce the same amount of food as hunting and gathering. Anthropologists estimate that the hunter-gathering clans had a leisurely life relative to the farmers. In three weeks, a gatherer could collect enough grain from a field of wild wheat to last a year.

Even so, farming has its advantages. With a bit more effort, a small piece of land can yield a much larger crop, supporting a crowd of people who can stay where they are and build permanent dwellings. Farming enabled towns and cities to sprout, and with them came the challenges of communal living that spurred humans to develop new strategies for governing, exchanging goods and services, managing resources, instilling values, building relationships, and documenting all of it.

The advent of agriculture enabled the dawning of culture. As a portion of laborers worked full time to fund the food supply, others could begin to begin to think and feel and act as if they existed independent from the forces of nature. Mind over body.

It is an irony of history: farming enabled our distance from nature. It contributed in a significant way to the complicated process through which humans began imagining themselves as individuals, rational agents, whose freedom is a freedom from the body, over the body, to be master of the body—free to consume what the bodies of others provide for them.

Dropped into the wilderness, however, the truth would be revealed. We are forever dependent for our every living moment on the cycles of air, water, earth, and fire, of plants and animals and elements that nourish our flesh. We may be able to imagine we have no bodies, but that imagining does not make it so.

Hence the chill. We are vulnerable amidst our abundance.

So it occurs to me, as a philosopher, here on the farm. If my aim is to offer an alternative to the mind over body ways of being that dominate western culture, then focusing on an individual and her or his desires, as I have done on these pages since January, is only the beginning. I must extend my discussion of What a Body Knows, to revisit and reimagine the relationships to each other and the natural world that our mind over body philosophies and religions express. What better place to do so than on a farm? With my family?

I am learning what our farming practices to date have enabled us to forget: in everything we do, we are always already participating in the earth’s rhythms of bodily becoming. We owe it to ourselves to do so consciously.



Next week: Making hay when the sun shines

Forward to the Farm

The rooster is crowing, cracking through thick layers of sleep. The kids call him “Brooster.” Guests at the farm call him “Dinner.” He seems to think that everyone needs waking up all the time. At this moment, at least, he is right.

The next sound I hear are steps going down the stairs, plodding into the kitchen. The milk bucket clangs. It is Jordan. He will be pleased to be down there first, gathering his supplies, and out to milk his cow, Daisy. He loves to milk—by hand, twice a day, ever since Daisy gave birth to Dandelion in March. Who knew that was in my genes? I roll out of bed to be downstairs when he returns. There will be milk to process.

I open the refrigerator and pull out the stainless steel pot where last night’s milk is separating. With a large spoon, I skim the skin that has formed on top. Golden folds of thick cream slide into a waiting quart jar. We will use the cream for cream, ice cream, butter; and the remaining milk for drinking, and making yogurt and cheese. This is step one.

I muse. Jordan is two-handedly securing our Dairy Independence, or rather, he is cementing our Daisy Dependence. For nothing now tastes as good as the sweet substance she provides. Her milk is living, luminous. It practically glows, like the liquid sunshine it is: sun-fed grass-made nutrients transformed into a sweet protein rich elixir. Talk about miracles.

I pour the remaining milk into waiting bottles and wash my first pot of the day. Jordan enters with the usual gallon and a half. Milk anyone?

Being here is different than I imagined. When we decided to move over three years ago, we wanted land. It was incidental to us that this place had been a farm. We are artists, not farmers—makers of culture, not agriculture. We wanted to do our work in closer relationship with the natural world; we wanted to generate art and ideas that remain faithful to the earth in us and around us. But farming? Thanks anyway. A vegetable garden perhaps, but that would be it.

Think again. A first “aha” moment came several months into our experiment. By then we had learned more about the history of our farm, and the three generations of one family who had produced potatoes then milk then beef. We had begun to appreciate how much of the beauty of this area—its wide green vistas and tree covered hills—was due to a light agricultural touch.

The realization dawned: Farming is not just about producing food. It is about participating in the endless, ongoing pro/creativity of the earth—soil, air, fire, water becoming plant, animal, human and back again. Farming is a relationship to the natural world. Perhaps even the relationship to the natural world that Geoff and I were yearning for to fund our arts and ideas. We realized that we want more than simply to bear witness to the cycles of the natural world, we want to be those cycles, to move with them, to co-create with them, making this world what it is and can be. The fact is we humans are part and parcel of what is. Farming is a way of knowing concretely that this is true.

The animal count started to rise. First chickens, ducks, and then a cow. A second revelation soon followed. Farming is not just about our relationship to the land. It is about our relationships with each other too.

In our culture and many others, farming has traditionally been a family affair. Before the shift from sun-based to fossil-fuel based farming (a shift whose implications Michael Pollan documents brilliantly in his must-read Sunday Times article, “Farmer in Chief”), farming was what a family did to ensure its survival. A farm wasn’t (just) a unit of agricultural production, it was a community of people in which the well being of every member depended on and enabled the well being of every other member. It was a community in which work and play, art and life, career and kids entwined in mutually-enabling synergies. The farm made the family who made the farm.

Insight flashed: We are a farm family. That is who we have always been and who we want to be.

It all began to make sense. Sure, we moved here with plans for the farm, but the farm had plans for us too. The farm is working through us to create us into the network of persons and relationships it needs to thrive. We are learning about love.

Ever since, we have been open to learning, and learn we have. We are learning what we need to know to take care of plants, animals, and acres of land, but we are also learning about the perspectives that doing so provides on the values, trends, and ideals that dominate contemporary western culture. Nothing more or less than a radical new philosophy of living is emerging here—one inspired by a duck, a rooster, two cats, three cows, four hens, four children, and a horse named Marvin.

Next Week: Farm philosophy