My Amish Experience

Our church is doing some remodeling and we hired an Amish cabinetmaker to build a new altar, pulpit and baptismal font. Since this Amishman lives near me, I've been the liaison in our dealings with him.

Harley is an agreeable man - 26 years old and married with three young children. I've had the pleasure of getting to know him a little and seeing him interact with his daughter, Susannah, who is about 2 years old and his 3 month-old son, Clarence. Susannah sometimes takes her naps in the afternoon on her father's big workbench. Earlier this week, Clarence sat in his carrier on that same bench while his father and I talked and his mother and sisters milked the cow. Another time, Susannah and I watched Harley milk the cow while he and I talked livestock and barn layout.

Last night, I went over and Harley's father, sister, brother-in-law and nieces and nephew were just leaving. They had just completed the construction of a dining room table for the sister and brother-in-law. When all the leaves are in place, the table is 16 feet 9 inches long (over 5m).

When I first met Harley, we spoke of how hidden costs always crop in construction projects. He told me that when he built his house, he thought he had the price figured to the last dollar. "I was sure it was going to cost me $20,000," he said, "and it ended up costing me almost 30."

Harley's off-grid, simple lifestyle appeals to me. Yes, I'll admit to being a romantic but I'm enough of a realist to know that it's not an easy life. Then again, perhaps we need to define "easy."

Is it "easy" to own a $250,000 McMansion compared to a neat, simple $30,000 home?
Is it "easy" to drive 40 miles a day in a gas-guzzling SUV to participate in a rat race in order to maintain a consumerist lifestyle that is a constant cycle of buying and throwing away compared to a home-based life that strengthens families and small communities?

Since our modern society is geared toward the former choices, they do indeed appear easier. But that ease belies the unsustainability of such a society. We simply cannot continue to pile up debt and burn natural resources at the rate we're going. (I'm speaking of myself here as much as anyone).

The thing that I most envy about Harley's lifestyle is the sense of community. I'd guess there are maybe twenty Amish homes in his immediate vicinity and I'm sure he knows them all. Want some furniture made? Go down the road about a mile and see Roman Yoder - if you pass the apple trees, you've gone too far. Need something turned on a wood lathe? Go about another mile or so and turn left on the road that the county abandoned but is still maintained by the Amish families who live there.

Getting to know Harley has solidified in me the desire to simplify my lifestyle and to get to know my neighbors better. I think that combining the appropriate use of technology with the simplicity of the Amish life would be the best of both worlds.

From The One, Two

Today, I completed one of the weekend projects that I eluded to in an earlier post. Our 24-foot long (7.5 m) hoophouse is now two 12-foot long hoophouses. It was a simple matter of cutting the base and each of the the two purlins. There was a hoop on center so I just cut right beside it and added two new 2x6 end boards and one new hoop.

I decided to do this because the structure was just too long and unwieldy. It was necessary to use a tractor to move it and I was afraid that the base wouldn't last another season without coming apart. We now have a lot more flexibility in that we can pasture our hens in one and raise replacement layers and/or broilers in the other.

The other project that I haven't yet completed is taking samples to send away for a soil test. I figure that I need separate samples for the lower pasture and the hilltop pasture and the vegetable garden. I'm planning to use Ohio Earth Food for the tests. If anyone has experience with this company, I would appreciate hearing about it.

Sheep Love and Thanksgiving Reading

I'm not sure that's a good title for this post. It's hard to tell what kind of pervs will find this blog on Google. Oh, well... Joash and Frost spent yesterday afternoon away from the rest of flock. We're pretty sure that Frost is "with child" today but she has been one of our later lambing ewes in the past so maybe she didn't catch. We'll know in the spring.

This morning over breakfast, I read The Man Who Created Paradise: A Fable by Gene Logsdon with fantastic photographs by Gregory Spaid. The front cover photo, along with several others, was shot in Knox County, Ohio which is our neighboring county to the southeast. Knox County is a mid-Ohio hotbed of sustainable agriculture. The pastured pork, grass-fed beef, 100% grass-fed mozzarella, and organic chicken feed that we buy all comes from there. The story is about Wally Spero, a man who reclaims strip-mined land in southeastern Ohio with his old bulldozer, "Alice," and turns it into a small farm paradise. Thirty years pass and a thriving rural community grows up amid the ruin of the raped land of Appalachia. It was a very good read and especially appropriate for Thanksgiving.

I'm also continuing with Wendell Berry's collection of essays, Another Turn of the Crank. The second essay is "Conserving Communities." In it, Berry chronicles the fate of rural communities as America has replaced agri-"culture" with agri-"business."

The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by "creating jobs." They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in "job creation" only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health - economic or natural or human - any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops."

And:

The governmental and educational institutions from which rural people should by right have received help have not helped. Rather than striving to preserve the rural communities and economies and an adequate rural population, these institutions have consistently aided, abetted and justified the destruction of every part of rural life. They have eagerly served the superstition that all technological innovation is good. They have said repeatedly that the failure of farm families, rural businesses, and rural communities is merely the result of progress and efficiency and is good for everybody.

I could go on and on but for the sake of space (and copyright rules) I'm going to select some individual sentences that give a sense of what the author is communicating:

"...as we now begin to see, you cannot have a postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, postnatural - in other words, it will be posthuman, contrary to the best that we have meant by humanity."

"[Promotors of the so-called global economy] believe that a farm or a forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally necessary in the use of the land; that affection is not necessary at all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human; that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry, that the nature or ecology of any given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in human community or neighborhood; and that technological innovation will produce only benign results."

"American agriculture has demonstrated by its own ruination that you cannot solve economic problems just by increasing scale and, moreover, that increasing scale is almost certain to cause other problems - ecological, social, and cultural."

"Long experience has made it clear - as we might say to the liberals - that to be free we must limit the size of the government and we must have some sort of home rule. But it is just as clear - as we might say to the conservatives - that it is foolish to complain about big government if we do not do everything we can to support strong local communities and strong community economies."

Get the book. Read it.

New Links

I've updated my links here to better reflect what I'm reading these days. Some inactive stuff was removed and some new things were added and recategorized. "Church, Culture & Politics" may seem like a broad category but there's enough overlap to make sense. For example, Father Hollywood and Classical Pelican are both wonderful churchmen of my acquaintance who write excellent cultural and political commentary.

So, if you're reading this with a blog or news reader go ahead and check out the changes.

Farming and the Global Economy

This is a pretty lazy time here on Liberty Farm as the daylength continues to wane toward the solstice and then slowly begins waxing once again as we march toward spring. The ram is busy watching over his harem and checking the ewes for standing heat but the human inhabitants here only have to fill the hayboxes, chicken feeder and water buckets daily and keep an eye on the general health of the flocks. We've got a little work left to finish putting the garden to bed for the winter and the weather forecast for the coming week makes us hopeful that we'll finish that up soon. I've also got a couple small project in the works for this long weekend that I'll write about later.

In general, though, this time of year is one for planning, reading and enjoying long evenings over good meals. Right now I'm reading Another Turn Of The Crank, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry and I’d like to provide some thoughts and quotes from each of the six essays over the next couple of weeks. The first essay is “Farming and the Global Economy.” Berry writes about how American agriculture was still primarily solar powered as late as World War II but nevertheless was “still drawing, without sufficient repayment, against an account of natural fertility accumulated over thousands of years beneath the native forest trees and prairie grasses.” He goes on to write about the path taken after the Second World War:

Instead, the adopted agenda called for a shift from the cheap, clean, and, for all practical purposes, limitless energy of the sun to the expensive, filthy, and limited energy of fossil fuels. It called for the massive use of chemical fertilizers to offset the destruction of topsoil and the depletion of natural fertility. It called also for the displacement of nearly the entire farming population and the replacement of their labor and good farming practices by machines and toxic chemicals. This agenda has succeeded in its aims, but to the benefit of no one and nothing except the corporations that have supplied the necessary machines, fuels, and chemicals - and the corporations that have bought cheap and sold high the products that, as a result of this agenda, have been increasingly expensive for farmers to produce.

Being Wendell Berry, of course, he doesn’t just point out where we’ve went wrong and then leave it at that. Rather, Berry offers us solutions - diversification, on-farm production of fertility and energy, replacing purchased goods with natural health and diversity, and cooperation between farmers and consumers. Here are a couple more quotes:

If farmers do not wish to cooperate any longer in their own destruction, then they will have to reduce their dependence on those global economic forces that intend and approve and profit from the destruction of farmers, and they will have to increase their dependence on local nature and local intelligence.

If communities of farmers and consumers wish to promote a sustainable, safe, and reasonably inexpensive supply of good food, then they must see that the best, the safest, and most dependable source of food for a city is not the global economy with its extreme vulnerabilities and extravagant transportation costs, but its own surrounding countryside. It is, in every way, in the best interest of urban consumers to be surrounded by productive land, well farmed and well maintained by thriving farm families in thriving farm communities.

Since this essay was published in 1995, I think we've come a long way with things like the Eat Local Challenge and the 100-Mile Diet and related 100-Mile Thanksgiving. Certainly only a small minority of farmers and consumers alike are even aware of such ideas but I still think the tide is turning. The absurdity of our global food economy becomes apparent whenever an outbreak of food-borne illness such as the recent E. Coli infection of bagged spinach and the ground beef recalls comes to light. Berry points out that this shift to a local food economy is best done gradually and the signs are there that it's happening. This little 3-4 county area in north central Ohio where I live has a thriving little food economy of grass-based farms working toward sustainability.

The Sheep Calendar

We have two barns on our farm which we have creatively named the white barn and the red barn. The rams live in the red barn and the ewes live in the white barn. Today we shook things up and moved the maiden ewe lambs to the red barn and moved one of the rams to the white barn for breeding with the adult ewes.

The ewe lambs are in one stall and the remaining ram is in another stall with a vacant stall in between them. The ram who was left by himself went a little nuts and climbed over the partition into the vacant stall. I had to add a cattle panel and another 2x4 to raise the height by about 18 inches. I went out later in the evening to get a tool out of the barn and all was quiet back there. He either calmed down or went into a hormone-induced coma (hypotestemia?)

The other ram went a little nuts, too. It makes it a little tough on the ewes when there are only five of them with one ram. They would get a little more peace if the ram had about 30 or 40 ewes to keep track of. He constantly checks to see if they've come into heat by smelling their urine stream and laying his head on their rump to see if they'll stand still for him. Things will calm down a little bit after everyone settles into a pattern. The ram will leave the ewe flock around the last day of the year, which brings us to the title of this post.

Most reference books written about raising sheep include some sort of the calendar which describes a year in the life of a shepherd. Oftentimes, it seems that these calendars begin a new year at this time when breeding begins. Some might think it appropriate for the new year to begin when the lambs are born. Neither of these seem right to me. On our farm the shepherd's year follows the western calendar perfectly. Right now feels like the beginning of the end of the year to me. The last major task of the lifecycle on our farm has been put into motion and will be complete when the rams are back together in their bachelor pen and the ewes are reunited. Then we will quietly slip into the new year and all will be right with the world.

Jack Of All Trades...

...and, unfortunately, master of none.Today, I put my mostly nonexistent carpentry and plumbing skills to work. My first project was this new haybox pictured above. The bottom is plywood with treated "feet" underneath and a hodge-podge of 1-bys and 2-bys for the side pieces. It was made completely out of wood that I already had here on the farm. Fortunately, the sheep don't care if the corners are square or the uprights plumb, which is a very good thing for me.

Then I moved into the cellar, aka "the dungeon" according to my 10 year-old son. First, I had to route a new discharge line for the sump pump. When I installed the pump, I ran the line out the door but this wasn't going to continue to work through the winter. It was a simple matter of going up to the ceiling and across and outside. No problems.

The second plumbing project was installing a check valve in the downstairs bathtub drain to prevent water from the washing machine from backing up into the tub. The check valve worked great but since the water couldn't flow up the bathtub drain it just backed up and overflowed the drain pipe behind the washer. Hmmmm... Apparently I've got a restriction in the line due to clogging or mineral buildup. When we moved here last year, the washing machine drain was plumbed into the floor drain in the cellar which I think runs into the stream. That was unacceptable so I plumbed it into the line for the dowstairs tub and opened up this new can of worms.

One of the problems I've discovered with old plumbing in old houses is that when you work on one section of pipe you often cause a leak somewhere else just by jiggling the pipe and putting tension on it. So now I've got a leak around the tub drain to deal with as well. Oh well, back to the hardware store tomorrow.

I also closed the sheep in the barns today in anticipation of separating the ewe lambs from their mothers and putting the ram in with the adult ewes for breeding. The hay box I made is going into the bachelorette quarters which is bedded and ready to go. We didn't make the move today, though, because there was a bitter cold rain blowing in from the northwest. If not tomorrow, then early next week. Sheep hormones are running wild here. The rams have worn the ground down to dirt pacing the fence line while watching the ewes.

Book Recommendation

Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception is publishing a new book. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods will be availabe in January 2007.

According to Sheep! magazine:

[Smith] looks into potent health risks of genetically modified foods and shows how current safety assesments aren't competent to protect consumers from the dangers.

For example, Dr. Kirk Azevedo, a former Monsanto employee thinks prion diseases like "mad cow" could be linked to genetically engineered cotton.

Some GM cotton contans not just the "Roundup Ready" gene, but also extra proteins created during the gene insertion process. Scientists have found that DNA damage during genetic modification is far more extensive than previously thought. GM crops commonly create unintended proteins, alter existing protein levels, and even change the components and shape the proteins created by the inserted gene.

Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. Know where your food comes from and how it is produced.

Trotters

We've had a little bit of everything here lately. I've got another food post to make, then, I promise, we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming. There's going to be some farming goin' on here this weekend.

Anyway, Jennifer made braised "trotters" (aka lamb shanks) for dinner on Monday. In my opinion, lamb shanks are an unsung delicacy. Here's how she made them.

Coat shanks with seasoned flour and brown in olive oil along with some chopped onion.
Pour some lamb stock and some chunky tomato juice in the bottom of a roasting pan and add the shanks - use a rack or not. Cover and cook at 325-350 for about 2 hours.
About 1/2 hour before the meat is done, add veggies to the pan. We had Brussels sprouts, Yukon Gold potatoes and mushrooms.

On the Eve of Election Day

I mentioned back at the time of the primary election here in Ohio that I identify with "crunchy" conservatism. So, on the eve of election day with the paperback edition of the book just now hitting shelves, I thought I would print here the Crunchy Con Manifesto for your edification:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship - especially of the natural world - is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family."
   

Now, how does this manifesto actually work itself out at the voting booth? If you figure that out, please let me know.

The Fall Clip

Here is a photo of one of our ram fleeces. It was a nice, tight fleece that really held together well. It's been pretty heavily skirted.

We ended up with 25 pounds (11kg) of heavily skirted fleece and are planning to have it scoured and carded into rovings at Morning Star Fiber in Holmes County, Ohio. I've been gradually teaching myself to shear for the last three years and finally got some instruction from a neighbor last summer with another neighbor's flock and again this fall with my sheep. This is the first time we've ended up with usable fleeces.

The second photo shows the bags of wool with our other ram's fleece on top - plus a good shot of my shadow.

I've Been Tagged

Damn. I've managed to write this blog for almost 10 months without getting tagged for one of these memes. Oh well, it was a good run. Thanks, a lot Alison. (Just kidding.) Alison is an old friend from our high school days. So here goes:

1. One book that changed your life.
One book that I've never read (not yet at least) which changed my life is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. My lifestyle today as an "organic" (in the best sense of the word, I hope) farmer has developed over the last 10 years and this classic book, written 10 years before I was born, helped to steer modern environmentalist farmers in the direction we're going. We need a Rachel Carson for the 21st century.

2. One book that you've read more than once.
I guess I'm a non-conformist because I'm going to cheat on this one, too. I haven't read this one a second time yet but it's in my "queue" for reading again soon. The book is Father Elijah by Michael O'Brien. It is an apocalyptic novel and O'Brien is a Roman Catholic. Spare me the Left Behind series and all that other Evangelical, Dispensationalist crap.

3. One book you'd want on a deserted island.
This is a cop-out, I suppose, but I'd have to have a Bible - AV or NKJV with Apocrypha, if that's possible in today's protestant Bible publishing climate.

4. One book that made you laugh.
For a good, light-hearted laugh, I like the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. Better yet, get the audiobooks and let Lorelei King read them to you while traveling.

5. One book that made you cry
Hmmm...I can't remember one. Does that mean I'm an insensitive bastard or that I avoid books that are emotionally involving? A little bit of both, I suspect.

6. One book you wish you'd written.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. The best science fiction I've ever read. I wish I had the imagination to write Sci-Fi.

7. One book you wish had never been written.
See the last sentence of number 2 above.

8. One book you're currently reading.
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. This book will change the way you think about food and how it arrives on your plate. Highly recommended for anyone who eats.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
Landscape with Dragons also by Michael O'Brien (of #2 above). This book was recommended to me by my friend, Father Hollywood. It's about imagery and symbolism used in children's literature and how it has changed in postmodern times.