Fall already! October 15th, 2017 to be exact. It’s a rainy foggy morning like many others lately, but the sun often burns through for a glorious few minutes or hours in the afternoon. It’s Monday, so my daughter is back at her job and I’m here on the farm with the Hundred Souls or more. The birches and alders and aspen are holding onto their golden brown leaves, but all it’s going to take is one good blow from the east to send them all flying.
I used to feel uneasy whenever the wind came up. I could never be sure what the damages would be. Nothing like the disasters our friends and neighbours around the world are dealing with, not even close. But still, when the tarp roof is ripped off the little hay shed, tearing all the grommets out, and the rain starts up, or the plastic cover on the greenhouse where we’re sheltering chickens is whipping the wooden frame with a sound like a volley of gunshots, or the rain is pouring through the holes in the metal barn roof – holes that the ravens pick at and enlarge for their own amusement – I would feel nervous, and urgent.
There are times here on the farm when I almost want to give up, when my body is sore and my energy snuffed and my mood dips into the grey zones. At one point this summer, all I could see ahead of me was an endless wall of work, with no guarantees of successful outcomes. When we started out here, we had visions of making the farm pay for itself in, let’s say, a year’s time. We’d be selling excess vegetables, eggs and meat and that money would cover the seed, and chicks and breeding animals and all those building materials. We brought a lot with us, tools inherited from both sides of the family, household stuff, books on every aspect of homesteading, but we really had no idea what it was going to take to get ourselves set up and our systems organized for feeding and sheltering our Souls.
For one thing, the systems need constant monitoring and rethinking as the animals grow and their needs change. Fifty day-old chicks fit in a box the size of your kitchen table, but at two weeks they need running around room. They need different food and increasing amounts of it as they grow. Piglets and goats nurse exclusively, like puppies, until a certain point and suddenly they’re ravenous for solid food, though still nursing as long as their mams will allow. Little babies of any species don’t challenge the boundaries much, but give them a bit of muscle and they’re flying over or wiggling under walls and fences, or in some cases, blundering straight on through them.
The infrastructure here was put in place about fifty years ago, by the lovely couple who first settled here and built the cabin and barns. Mrs. Kennedy still lives nearby and she came to visit me in the summer, bringing a loaf of bread and some stories. The cabin was built with old cedar poles from the original telegraph line that once marched down the valley. The garden is on the site where a sawmill once stood, and the Kennedys, who raised cattle, brought load after load of manure to mitigate soil that couldn’t hold water very well. Before I learned this, I assumed the soil was alluvial, left behind by the river, or maybe dropped there by a glacier. Nope. Just as the forest has been logged, and logged again, and is now mostly deciduous where once it was cedar and fir, the soil has been worked, and altered.
Fifty years is about how long a fencepost lasts, before the part that’s in the ground turns to compost, so that means that it’s time to start replacing miles of fence. We’re doing it in stages, according to which animals have most recently visited one of the neighbours. The various species also have a way of getting into each others pens, especially around feeding time. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced an infestation of goats, but that’s how it feels when you’re trying to take a bale of hay or a bin of apples out to the pigs and you’ve got nine smelly little heads trying to dive into your wagon and eat as much as possible. Six are visitor goats, who will still back off when I clap my hands at them, but my own two know me too well. They’re likely to climb me with their sharp little hoofs, or butt their heads under my arm to get at whatever I’m withholding.
Until my son came to stay for a few weeks this summer, and help me map out a more workable barnyard, the place felt like it was devolving. No sooner did we kick the goats out of the henhouse (where they gobble grain voraciously and then bloat up like puffer fish) then the pigs would appear in the yard, headed up by 600 pounds of grunting, amiable, but unsteerable Mama. Next two of the horses would be missing and found hours later, munching the neighbour’s clover, covered in scratches and insect bites from their foray into the woods. We’d find the place they were getting out, mend it, and then for example the goats discovered that after they’d eaten down enough of the wild rosebushes there was a convenient rock to stand on and hop the fence again. Or Mama would be rooting around for something nice in the mud and create a breech for the piglets to go swarm somebody’s apple tree.
The Kispiox is one of the last areas where free ranging is allowed by law, which means your neighbours have to fence your animals out of their property rather than vice-versa – but come on! A few stray chickens maybe, but nobody wants horses in their petunias or goats in their vegetable garden. But here within the perimeter fence we do need to push the animals outward. I need to be able to go into the barnyard without being crowded by four horses, or nine goats, or seven pigs. I need to be able to step out of my bedroom without four puppies scratching my legs raw. My son drew a diagram with concentric circles labelled “mind”, “body”, “house with family and invited guests”, “yard with dogs”, “barnyard”, “horse fields”, and “the wild”. Or something close to that. He explained that the reason I felt like I was going crazy was because I was. Every single boundary was being breached. Brrrrr!
So after work and on weekends, no matter what the weather, while my son was here, he would stride out the back (not the way back, maybe the mid-back) and amid distant cries of “Hodor!” I would see Very Large Objects being slowly dragged here and there and stacked in various piles. Pounding and scraping sounds followed, and the ringing of metal on rock and there! He’d cleared out a bay of the barn and converted it to a sturdy pigpen. My job was to load the garbage (anything we couldn’t find a use for) and hostile liquids (anything without a label) into my pick-up and drive to the dump, bringing back screws and hardware and loads of fresh-cut lumber from the mill. We contracted a Bobcat operator who showed up with a bundle of fenceposts, which the men distributed along the grid we’d marked out. My son would raise each pointed post above his head and thrust it, javelin style, a few inches into the ground. I would follow and eyeball the line, signalling to the operator to adjust the angles. It took mere seconds for the machine to pound each post a couple of feet into the ground.
All this new fence made the old part, which happened to be the approach from the road, look pretty shabby. It’s like buying new jeans, you really need a shirt and some boots to go along with them. So we weren’t all that upset a couple of weeks later when the bottom gate just plumb fell over one day, taking a whole section of fence with it. I had to come down to the city, so my daughter hired a couple of local guys and together they knocked over what was left, augered new posts and nailed up fence boards, specially cut and delivered by our neighbour at the millyard, and rehung the gate. Do you know what a hammer drill is? I still haven’t seen one but you need it if you want to drill a two inch hole through a cedar post a foot and a half in diameter. Which you do want if you’re going to rehang a gate.
Some people have been saying (quietly) that they thought maybe we bit off more than we could chew, acquiring the Hundred Souls (106 at the moment, no 105 since Something got the guinea hen the other day) in the first year, but we had plans. Good plans. The baby chicks would become laying hens and their gentlemen friends, plus meat for the freezer. The piglets would grow up to be hogs and feed a few families through the winter. The goats really are the best lawnmowers of tall grass and noxious weeds, and goat meat is much like lamb, so if you can put up with the burnt-rubber stench of the billy you could end up with a dozen kids from six fertile does, and then there’d be six does in milk if you wanted to learn that skill and make some cheese. The extra produce from the large garden could be sold at the farmer’s market, or fed to the Souls.
So when things started getting out of hand this summer, what with fences failing right and left, and having to outrun the pigs and fend off the goats twice a day in order to barricade myself long enough to dole out their feed, and getting everything ready for market on Sundays only to serve two or three customers because everyone else had their own favourite vendors, or their own gardens, and not being able to prevent the horses from beating up on Mrs. Pig and the pigs from wrecking the hen house and the goats from eating whatever they damn pleased, and all I could see for the rest of my (vastly shortened) life was WORK and chaos, it took a good sit down with both my grown kids to make me see that laying out money now for fencing was not optional. Neither was a new freezer, a new washer, a log splitter and repairs to the cook stove. We needed a cistern, to catch enough rainwater to service the new pigpen and the horse trough, out of bounds now behind a sturdy new fence. And we needed a winter coop for all the chickens, situated in the barn so all the animals can be segregated and fed safely and efficiently from one room. But most of all, they pointed out, there was soon going to be a natural attrition of the many many Souls, called butcher time. And the two year experiment with the six visitor goats would end now, because their owner had no time to come help us build them a warm shelter, and we didn’t need the stress of trying to design and throw something up in time for the deep freeze that’s coming. Four pigs, forty-one chickens and six goats gone reduces our numbers by quite a bit.
So what about our ideals? I wanted to grow “heritage” animals, keep them and butcher them humanely, and fill our larder as well as earn some money to help with all these expenses. But what do you do when only 2 of 10 piglets survive, and when the beautiful heritage chicks you raise are still not laying eggs at 7 months and the beautiful heritage meat birds are going to take twice as long to get to butcher size than their popular but alarming white broiler cousins? What happens when it rains most of the summer and the garden produces well, but only half as well as projected? And what about the emotional toll of knowing you’re going to kill off all these Souls before the snow flies? What about the business of eating meat that was recently an animal you could pick out of the flock, or the herd? And the resolve it takes to stay calm as you catch an animal and hold it steady for the knife, or wield the knife yourself? You also need a knife to castrate piglets so the meat won’t have “boar taint”. You might find yourself kneeling on the neck of your favourite little horse while he’s gelded so he doesn’t plow through the new fence to get at the neighbour’s mares.
“How could you?” say some. How could I make friends with an animal and then betray that friendship by hurting it, or killing and eating it? You’ve heard this many times, I’m sure, but how is the responsibility for an animal’s suffering different when you buy meat on a styrofoam tray or produce it in your own back yard? There are only two ways of ensuring that your meat and eggs and milk are healthy and the animals they came from have been treated as humanely as possible. One is to do what we’re doing, and the other is to get closer to the source of your dinner and find out how the animals are treated while alive, and how carefully they are killed when the time comes. Spend your food money at markets and farms that can prove their food is humanely produced, that the vegetables are grown in soil that is building and being nourished, that the animals have happy comfortable lives until that one bad moment, and that the humans who help do the work are being treated well and paid a living wage. And while you’re at it QUIT bitching about the price of that food. Most producers are struggling financially and if they’re not, they’re cutting corners somewhere in the care and feeding of the animals and the quality of the vegetables.
This is not to say it’s noble to work for pennies. I hope that eventually, even soon, small scale food producers can earn enough so they can be fairly sure they’ll be in business next year and can plan accordingly. Cheap food is a myth. It’s costing a great deal, in the health of the land and water, in the relationships between land owners and farm workers and between humans and food animals, in order to produce cheap food. Where did we start getting the idea that food should cost so little? I’m going to say it was when convenience began to matter more to us than having intimate knowledge of the source of our food. When we started assigning the labour of growing and tending, and the responsibility for harvesting and killing to others. When we started turning a blind eye to factory farming and the suffering that goes on when farmers start to cut corners to save money. When the “bottom line” began ignoring the suffering of animals and degradation of the soil and water and and became solely financial. Anything goes if you save a buck, have you noticed that?
A lot of people I know and you know have at least flirted with vegetarianism or veganism as a way to sidestep their complicity in these issues. It’s getting late and I’m going to temporarily jam out of that discussion, but I’ll be back. Let me just say that it’s not as simple as refusing to eat meat or to use animal products. Expecting food to be cheap is a systemic issue and it extends to vegetables and grains, sweet things and alcohol and the fake foods that crowd every supermarket shelf in the first world, and increasingly, everywhere you go. And I can’t rightly say how I got off on this tangent, except I’m always thinking about these issues. I want to help regenerate this land we are so fortunate to live on, and I want to contribute to food security in this area, but first I have to learn how to raise happy animals and beautiful food without going broke.
