Crazy Wife Farm

As you approach the supermarket’s automatic doors you walk onto a conveyer belt where your retina is scanned, your bone structure is measured, and your weight flashes on a flat screen in big red numbers before the glass doors open to let you inside to do your shopping. As you place your hands on the steering bar of your shopping cart a gentle voice speaks softly to you from a speaker embedded in the cart. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Please do not attempt to enter aisles number three, four, and five.”

You meander through the store adding items to your cart: 1% milk, low fat cheese, fake eggs, fake butter, low fat hamburger, chicken wings, a frozen pizza, ice cream, a frozen chocolate cake, frozen french fries, frozen corn dogs, mayonnaise and bread. It’s too far to walk to the produce aisle. You look at it in the distance, all the brightly colored fruits and vegetables. Then you follow the orange glow of Doritos in aisle three.

As you enter the aisle, a laser grid slams down in front of you from ceiling to floor and the wheels on your shopping cart stop turning so fast your chest bashes into the steering bar. From somewhere below the chicken wings and frozen pizza the voice says, “You are 63 pounds overweight. Please do not attempt to enter aisles number three, four, and five.”

It seems unfair. It’s a free country. You ought to be able to buy what you please, eat what you please. You’re frantic for a diet cola and a couple bags of Pepperidge Farm Cookies. You make a run for aisle four, panting, sweating, almost crying. The same thing happens. The laser grid shuts off the aisle, your cart stops suddenly, and you crash into it. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Please do not attempt to enter aisles number three, four, and five.”

Now people are looking at you. Instead of shopping, you cruise the store for a skinny kid. “I’ll give you a buck if you go get me a bag of Doritos, some chocolate cookies, and a diet soda, and bring them here and put them in my cart.”

“Will you buy me a box of Superhero Crunch with the free Gamekid widget inside?”

“Sure. Get me some Cheetos, too.”

Now you’re feeling smug because you think you’ve beat the system. You worked up a sweat shopping for junk food. You’re feeling free and easy. You’re panting, but you pant all the time.

In the checkout line the voice speaks to you with a pleasant mechanical lilt. “Please swipe your shopper’s card to continue.”

You swipe your card and load your groceries onto the cashier’s conveyer as you dream of the chocolate cake, trying to decide if it will taste better frozen or thawed. Thankfully frozen desserts are in the same aisle as frozen vegetables. Ha! They can’t keep you away from everything.

As the bar code scanner reads the package on the frozen cake, the voice returns. “You are 63 pounds overweight. This item may not be purchased.” The cashier takes the cake off the conveyer and puts it on a shelf under the counter. Your eyes fill with tears.

The Doritos pass the scanner. “You are 63 pounds overweight. This item may not be purchased.”

The Cheetos pass the scanner. “You are 63 pounds overweight. This item may not be purchased.”

The cookies. “You are 63 pounds overweight. This item may not be purchased.”

The ice cream. “You are 63 pounds overweight. This item may not be purchased.”

The Superhero Crunch. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Although this item may be purchased, it is not recommended.”

The frozen pizza. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Although this item may be purchased, it is not recommended.”

The frozen french fries. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Although this item may be purchased, it is not recommended.”

Your hands begin to tremble. The cashier presses the panic button and the store manager walks over looking smug. “You know the rules,” she says.

“But I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”

“You know the rules.”

“It’s not fair. It’s not right. This is so wrong. I should be able to eat what I want. It’s a free country.”

“Yeah. Everything but healthcare.”

You look around for the comfort of another fat person. There are a dozen of them, eyes cast to the floor, hunkered over their groceries. No one will make eye contact with you. You are completely alone, publicly humiliated by a pre-recorded voice.

On the way out of the store you walk between two scanners to the automatic doors. A voice speaks from above. “You are 63 pounds overweight. You have purchased approximately 32,000 calories. You have not purchased any fresh vegetables.  You will automatically be charged an additional one tenth of one cent per calorie. $32 will be contributed in your name to your local hospital. Thank you.”

As you lug your grocery bags across the parking lot to your car an electronic billboard lights up and a beautiful woman holds a box of diet food. She smiles at you and says, “You are 63 pounds overweight. Return to the store now for special discounts on Weight Watchers Seven Day Meal Packs, and your $32 calorie penalty will be waived.”

“Fuck you.”

In your car you open the diet soda and guzzle it. Then you dip a slice of bread in the mayonnaise jar, hold it up to the billboard, and wag it at the Weight Watchers bitch. The billboard advertisement changes. A handsome man in a white coat seems to look you in the eye. “You are 63 pounds overweight. Did you know candy can be medicine? Return to the store now for special discounts on ChocoLeans appetite suppressing chocolates, and your $32 calorie penalty will be waived.”

You stuff the slice of bread in your mouth, crank up your car, and peel out of the parking lot. Before you hit the first traffic light your cell phone rings. It’s another computer voice.

“This is Fairview Hospital calling to thank you for your recent donation of $32.”

Finally you are home. Home is your refuge. You fondle your food as you take it out of the shopping bags, and with a sigh you stand in front of the open refrigerator door with your eyes closed. Your phone rings again. This time it’s a text message from Archer Daniels Midland.

“You are 63 pounds overweight. Thank you. We appreciate your business.”

I subscribe to a number of food industry newsletters because I edit a monthly digest of farm and food news stories for the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. One of the weekly newsletters I receive is about new equipment and supplies for industrial meat processors. This week’s hot topic is automated smoke stick loading robotics and  a robot called the AST 340 that replaces two humans per shift — that’s as many as six people a day out of a job so we can have cheaper Slim Jims. And we thought all the jobs were going overseas!

According to the newsletter:

Handtmann has introduced the Automatic Smoke stick Transfer unit, model AST 340, that replaces up to two workers per shift.  The high volume, higher reliability AST 340 automatically deposits smoke sticks and loads sausage loops into smoke house trolleys, complementing Handtmann’s integrated smoked sausage solution that begins with the Handtmann VF 600 vacuum filler and Handtmann’s PVLH 241 Automatic Linking line.

Traditional sausage linking/hanging lines require at least three operators to handle the machinery, tie off the casing ends, and load the smoke house trolleys.  According to Handtmann, the new AST 340 robotics automatically load up to six sticks per minute.

Another machine that caught my attention uses “super-sized sausage suspension technology.” I have a keen interest in super-sized sausages.  The SwiStickXXL, pictured here, suspends sausages in neat rows like a cannibal’s collection of shrunken heads. I don’t know whether to park it in the kitchen or the bedroom.

It’s Monday morning, the sky is grey, and it smells like autumn. A patch of leaves here and there are going from green to peach and the tall summer weeds are getting woody.  I have a conference call at 11:30, the washer and dryer are full and waiting, and there are dirty dishes in the sink, but I had a great weekend, and I needed to capture it in photographs. I hung some new pictures on the walls in the house, paintings by my friend Richard Michaels, made a fabulous veal pate on Friday, and then on Saturday I made pickles with cucumbers and garlic from my garden. I grew up making pickles with my mom. But this is my first solo venture into fermenting on a grand scale: 16 jars. Now they disappear into a dark corner of the pantry for a few months. But we’ll have delicious pickles for the winter holidays. I hope.

I followed the directions assiduously with one exception. The directions said never pickle with hard water because the minerals in the water interfere with fermentation. I was supposed to use distilled water, or boil water and carefully separate out the minerals. I didn’t do that. I made pickles with my well water, which tastes fabulous, but has lots of calcium in it. Pickling vegetables has been done for thousands of years. I can’t imagine the ancients used water without the local minerals in it. So maybe we’ll have delicious pickles for the winter holidays, or maybe I spent six hours this weekend learning why it’s important to follow directions.

When we started farming, one of the things Chet and I realized was how repetitious our life had become. We always wrote notes to ourselves. But on the farm, we found ourselves writing the same notes over and over  again. So eventually we wrote permanent notes and kept them handy in the kitchen where they could easily be posted.

Right now I have three notes in the brass clip on the kitchen counter:  ”Goat Hooves,” “Deliver Eggs,” and “Transfer Station.” But in the wooden box on the hutch, where I keep the tissue, there are a dozen other notes pre-written on scrap paper.

“LIVER” means I’m not supposed to forget that liver is thawing somewhere and if I don’t transfer it into the refrigerator when it is soft and mushy, it will become stinky mess. I make Moon’s dog treats out of liver from our cows. I have many pounds of liver in the freezer.

“TRACY” reminds me I am having breakfast with my girlfriend, Tracy, in the morning. Otherwise, guaranteed, she would be on her second cup of coffee at the diner and I would be risking getting a speeding ticket on a country road.

“Wine in the freezer” means I forgot or failed to anticipate the demand for cold white wine in my household, and to expedite the chill I have placed a bottle of white wine in the freezer where it will make an unbelievable mess if I forget to take it out before it freezes… Hmmm… How would you explain this to a child?

“Bea in the Bungalow” means the barn cat has come to the house seeking refuge and discovered the new puppy has first rights to the domicile, so she has made a bed for herself somewhere in the bungalow, and she expects her food to be served there, and door service.

“Vote” means you don’t usually do anything special on Tuesday, so if you didn’t remember to put this sign here, your patriotic duty would pass you by and you would have to lie to your friends about who you voted for.

“COLD FRAME” is intended to have a sense of urgency because we don’t love our cold frame the way we should. My housemate, Catherine, and I would not have remembered to water the cold frame in the dead of winter without this little piece of paper on the kitchen counter.

“CAT FOOD” means go buy your cat some food and don’t be late.

“CHICKEN FEED” means go buy your chickens some food or they will hang out around the house and torment you by pooping on the porch.

“WATER GARDEN” is for the buffoon who can’t remember they planted a vegetable garden this year.

“CLOSE CHICKEN DOOR” usually means we had company for dinner and we were just a little to artificially preserved to remember to go outside and close the chicken door when it got dark, something that needs to be done every night to keep foxes, raccoons, skunks, and opossums out of the chicken coop.

“Turn OFF Water” is the last sign in Chet’s handwriting. I couldn’t hear the sound of the water pump running until he died. I never heard the machines in the house. He would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “There’s water running somewhere.” I would do a mental inventory of possibilities and invariably remember I had left the water running in the garden or at a water trough. In the middle of the night I would trek across the farm to turn the water off so we (he) could sleep. Then he made this sign on the back of an old postcard and put it where I couldn’t miss it.

“Goats Hooves” means it’s time to trim the goats’ hooves. I tend to procrastinate about this and then when I finally do it my hands are sore for days and my clippers need sharpening.

“Deliver Eggs” is supposed to remind me to wash and pack eggs and label egg cartons, then drive them to the store. My favorite part about this is getting paid. This sign could just as easily say “Collect Money.”

“Transfer Station” reminds me to take out the garbage. We don’t have curbside trash removal service here on the farm. We have to take our  pre-sorted trash to a transfer station where we load it into dumpsters and it is hauled away by trucks. Without the sign my trash would be collecting in all the wrong places.

Now that I’ve shared this deeply personal logistical information about my life, I am reminded just how mundane most of life is….

I guess I’ve been depressed for a week or so. Now that it’s been going on for a while, I am starting to recognize it. My grandma died. She was 103. No one from our family was with her when she died because it wasn’t convenient for anyone, including me. It’s funny how life works. We will take time off work to go to a funeral or a wedding. But who takes time off work to sit with someone while they die? Maybe it’s because we don’t die on a schedule that allows for advance planning. Maybe it’s because no on knows exactly when a body will come to a full stop. Maybe it’s because we are afraid to be with someone when they die, or we think it’s icky. My aunt and my brother were with my grandma until a couple hours before she died. She died after they left, and no one in the family witnessed her dead body. Maybe she wanted to die alone. Maybe to her, dying alone preserved her dignity and the wholesomeness of her memory.

I’ve been carrying sadness about my grandmother with me for a week, while I’ve been reading The Grapes of Wrath. Oh, boy, is that depressing — beautifully written and meticulously told — but really, really depressing. It’s bad enough that people are poor and under-privileged and vulnerable to the slick salesmen of debt, but then to lose their land to the banks, watch the banks’ hired tractors knock down their farms and ruin the soil, and then trek a couple thousand miles to the promised land of California only to find out it’s a mirage. So many parallels for the 21st Century malaise — Steinbeck should be required reading for all students of modern agriculture.

For some reason, I find the dog park depressing. Going to the dog park every day with Moon has been great for him. He’s more confident in himself, calmer, and getting plenty of exercise. But I’m giving up a lot. Morning was my time to write and garden. Now I pace the dog park while Moon races around with his friends. This is why I don’t have kids.

Finally, yesterday, I rescued my blueberry bushes. A month of crab grass had swallowed them up and they were lost under a layer of flowering weeds. The soil was so dry I had to water before I could get the weeds out of the ground. But all nine bushes are saved. I got soaked and muddy kneeling in the wet garden, but it refreshed my spirit to focus on a simple task with a tangible reward. I gardened for six hours, and then I took a hot bubble bath. The gloom lifted, and the next day at the dog park I may have actually laughed.

Gardening is the time of some of my best thinking. I realized I had been brought low by editing a monthly digest of agriculture stories for a regional non-profit. One of the stories I read was traumatizing for me on a subconscious level. It seems that in Delaware recent analysis of the Potomac Aquifer (which supplies New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware with water) has shown chemical pollution from the region’s factories to be at 500 to 8,000 times the acceptable level established by the EPA. But the information was not made public until a newspaper discovered it via a Freedom of Information Act filing. To date it still isn’t a big news story, and yet to me it is a story as big as the BP oil spill.

In the post 9/11 world, and especially since the passing of the Patriot Act, Americans have been conditioned to believe the biggest threat to our future is terrorism, and our best recourse is to find terrorists where they hide and wipe them out before they try to wipe us out. The best defense is a good offense.

I think we are the biggest threat to our future: we are threatened by our lifestyle, our values, our poor decision-making. I’m sure there are hundreds of stories like the one about Delaware, situations where outrageous pollution is accepted as the cost of doing business, and the public will be the last to know when it’s life threatening, but the first to pay the price. Corporations live forever. Pollution kills people, not corporations.

But there I go again, leaping onto a soap box when I should be kneeling in the soil. As a friend of mine says, “Balance or be balanced.” Excavating my blueberries balanced me. The world is fucked up and all is not going according to plan. But if I can put my hands into damp, fluffy soil, I’m ok.

Trim the goat’s hooves, brush-hog the pastures, take out the compost, clean the barn, muck the holding pen, clean the nesting boxes, muck the chicken coop, get the broken hay ring out of the pasture, put the new hay ring together in the pasture, fix the fence in the south pasture, weed the vegetable garden, sell the raw wool in the closet, set up the root cellar, organize the canning supplies, split firewood, clean out the ice house, move the cured firewood to the ice house, stack the firewood in the ice house, move the birch logs out of the poison ivy, set-up firewood stacks on the back porch, mulch the blueberry bushes, prune the suckers off the new trees, move the leftover cedar fence posts from the pasture to the garden, plant winter greens, build cold frames and plant them, kill the Jersey Giant cockerels and get them in the freezer, buy chicken feed, sell beef shares, kill the cow and get the carcass to the meat locker, pay for hay and can tomatoes.

Moon is eleven months old and I am struggling to train him to come when I call him. If I have a pocket full of treats, he is very attentive. But if I don’t have a pocket full of treats, or if he is too far away from me to see that I do, he may or may not come when I call. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter, but if he is on a jaunt up the road toward the highway, I am panic-stricken to get him to turn around and come home. Part of his drive to run toward the highway is the horse farm with four dogs just across the two lanes with a 50 mph speed limit, and cars and trucks that often go by at 70 mph.

The anxiety I feel when I think about Moon being killed on the highway keeps me awake at night. So I resolve to give him more playtime, pay closer attention to him, and be a better trainer. We had our first therapy session with a dog trainer last week. She admonished me for being imprecise and verbose. My homework assignment is to not use the word “No!” for two weeks. I am supposed to recognize good behavior while he is doing it, say the act’s name/command, and reward him immediately so he associates the act, the command, and the reward.

Sometimes I feel like I am on a game show. Puppy survivor. I am definitely the weakest link. I can’t remember to carry dog treats with me everywhere I go (maybe it’s because I don’t smoke them). I am inconsistent with my training vocabulary. My tone of voice is usually gruff, when apparently it’s supposed to be more like baby talk. And instead of saying “No!”, I find myself making the buzzer sound that goes off when you give a wrong answer on Jeopardy.

The best thing I’ve done is to take Moon to the dog park every morning at 8:00 am for an hour-long romp with ten to twenty other dogs. In the two weeks we have been doing this, Moon’s personality has evolved by leaps and bounds.  He is more confident in himself, he is more relaxed at home, he has a routine he looks forward to, and he knows how to handle himself around other dogs. It has been a fascinating experiment in socialization. You might think that living on a thirty-two acre farm would be plenty of room to play for a dog. But now I see there is no substitute for letting a dog play in a pack of dogs, and experience the true nature of the species.

The trade-off for an hour at the dog park every morning is I’m not spending that hour in my vegetable garden. After two weeks without weeding the garden has gone wild. Last night I went looking for thyme to add to dinner and all I could come up with was a few straggly stems because the crab grass had all but killed my herbs with shade. But that’s the choice I’ve made — trading a well-behaved dog for an out-of-control vegetable garden.

In the morning after chores I feed Moon, and while he is digesting his food, I meditate for twenty minutes.  This morning as my brain was twinkling, the chickens screamed in panic, Moon barked and ran to the door, and I very reflexively jumped out of my meditation and ran to open the door for Moon. We bounded across the barnyard in the direction the chickens were running away from, and there on the ground was a mass of red and white feathers. A few feet further there were red tail feathers everywhere.  Moon was far ahead of me on the trail, up the road and into the woods, with me ouching my way behind him in stocking feet.  As a Ford pick-up truck approached, I realized I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

Earlier in the morning I had been harvesting garlic and got my shirt sleeves all wet and muddy. So before I sat down to meditate I took my shirt off. Now I ran to the barn, ducked in until the truck passed, then ran to the house to put my shirt on. All the while freaking out that Moon was on the loose without me at the heavy traffic hour on our road.

Properly dressed, I ran back to where I left Moon and heard him running through the underbrush of the forest making wide circles around the scent of the fox. Then up the road in the sun a battered chicken walked out of the trees, looked both ways, and crossed the stretch of gravel into an open field, in the direction of home. She looked dazed. Most of her tail feathers were missing, and she had broken feathers on her wings where the fox must have had her in his mouth.

Moon leapt into the clearing to find me, on fire with excitement. He was the hero of the day — maybe the week. I felt pretty smug myself, training this ten-month-old puppy to hear chicken distress, rush to the rescue, trail the scent of the fox, and do it fast enough to save a chicken already in the jaws of death. We herded the damaged hen home and Moon had osso bucco for breakfast.

Memorial Day weekend I had a gathering of friends from the city who had all heard about Violet’s demise and wanted to visit her, so we went for a walk in the woods.

I am still reflecting on the amazing power of salt having recently finished the book, Salt by Mark Kurlansky, and having recently cured sheepskins with salt, and having recently eaten a fellow gourmand’s homemade prosciutto (ham dry aged and cured with salt). FYI — one of the things it says in the book is that cheese is just a way of storing milk using salt.

When I killed and skinned my sheep, the blood, viscera, and carcasses drew flies immediately, but as soon as the gooey skins were covered with an inch of salt they didn’t smell, they didn’t draw flies, and the cat and the dog had no interest in them. The salt was killing bacteria, cleansing as it was drying the skins. That is the power of salt: it enables us to clean, dry, and cure animal skins for shelter, and meat, fish, and dairy for food, which may then be stored for future meals.

Going back thousands of years, the ability to store food safely for long periods of time (using salt) lead to the development of the first export markets for trade of both salt and items cured with salt. The growth of markets lead to some of the first major government tax programs, and ultimately government monopolies of commodities and trade. Money from salt grew governments and built empires. Along the way the environment surrounding saltworks was almost always ravaged, and in many places, the salt workers became slaves to the system without even enough salt for themselves. If you live and work in agriculture, you should be seeing a pattern here.

That brings me to The Cow Industrial Complex, a piece I wrote in 2006 advocating idealistically for the separation of business and state. At the time, I was very focused on ending corporate personhood and did not know the five-thousand-year history of government and business getting in bed together to enrich themselves at the expense of society and the planet. Corporate personhood (the idea that corporations have the rights of people) is just the ultimate destination of a road human civilization has been on for a very long time. Today we are at the end of the road — government, business, and the economy have become inseparable.

I haven’t changed my mind about separation of business and state.  I believe it is as essential to democracy as separation of church and state. But now I understand what a fundamental and historic shift in values it will be the day our government sees its mission as balancing society, the environment,  and the economy, versus fueling one by sacrificing the other two.