Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  * * *

  Mark and I woke up before dawn and choreographed corn-planting day together, in bed, a particular form of intimacy that we’d had since we met. The farm was so central to our marriage that I sometimes wondered what other married people talked about or did together in the hours they weren’t at work. All farms are busy in late May, but on ours, with its extreme diversity of products, spring can be absurdly complicated. We had six people and eight draft horses to deploy that day. Corn planting was the clear priority. But there were always the regular chores to do, the morning and evening milking, and today, the first cultivation of the transplants, which had taken root after the rain, as had the weeds. If we didn’t hit the weeds now, they’d grow too rank for the horse-drawn cultivator and need to be pulled by hand.

  First, though, we needed breakfast. It was half past five, so we heaved ourselves out of our warm covers, put on our work clothes, collected our pocket tools from the tops of our dressers—a Leatherman each, our notebooks, pens, and earplugs, plus two headlamps—and walked downstairs.

  Blaine was already in our kitchen, boiling water for an enormous pot of coffee. She’d come to work for us the previous summer, her long legs unfurling out of a little red Honda Civic hatchback that was even older and more beat-up than ours. She was twenty-five years old, nearly six feet tall, with perfect olive skin and thick brown hair that fell in waves to her waist. She had tribal tattoos around her forearms. She was strong, stubborn, opinionated, and hot-tempered. I’d never met a woman who cared less about what other people thought of her. She had spent the previous seasons on a farming collective in the Hudson Valley, run by artists and anarchists. I’d heard a rumor that she’d been kicked out of the collective, which, in retrospect, was a pretty big red flag. But as our farm grew, the thought of hiring someone whom anarchists couldn’t live with was less intimidating to us than shouldering the increased weight of the work. Over the winter, I’d become convinced that hiring Blaine had been the right decision. She worked hard, used common sense, knew her way around tools, and was fresh out of welding school. She was most interested, though, in animals and their meat, so she’d become our butcher. I liked her, even the fierce parts. So did Jane, who would spend afternoon hours in front of the butcher shop, watching her at her bloody work. I think Jane liked Blaine because she never spoke in the childish voice that other adults use with kids; she addressed Jane seriously, as a colleague or a peer. Blaine camouflaged her looks in coveralls and thrift-store shirts and never wore makeup. Sometimes she went long stretches without brushing her hair, until it hived up in thick clumps. But still, when new people arrived on the farm, they were almost physically arrested by the sight of her, walking down the road with a rifle over her shoulder, or at the butcher shop, peeling the skin from a gutted hog with her sharp knife.

  When the coffee was rolling, Racey arrived with Tim, and they laid an enormous griddle over two burners of the stove and began frying eggs in a slick of homemade butter, two dozen at once, the shells flying through the air in the general direction of the compost bucket. Tim was all effortless health and cheekbones and beautiful hair. Between college and graduate school, he’d been a cliff diver in Hawaii. He could do a standing back tuck—a skill he deployed once from the back of a hay wagon on the county highway when the horses lurched unexpectedly forward; he landed gracefully on his feet. He was sunny, friendly, thoughtful, and kind. He had just finished a master’s degree in rural anthropology, and he came to work for us because he wanted his own farm one day and thought he wanted to work with horses. Soon after he arrived, he bought himself a young green-broke team of Percheron geldings, dapple gray and not yet filled out but lithe and tall.

  At the table, Chad was slicing a loaf of the sourdough bread I’d baked the day before, and slathering the slices with butter to go under the broiler for toast. He was a few years older than the others, strong and calm, laconic, but funny when he chose to tell a story. He had a quirky accent that was half central New York, half rural Virginia. He’d gone to forestry school nearby but had been working for the last few years as a horse logger in Virginia. Horse logging is a tough business even in good times. Expenses are high, and the work is hard and risky. The market is small and specialized: the small subset of people who will pay extra to log their land more slowly and thoughtfully. When the economy tanked in 2008, the market dried up, and Chad couldn’t make a living with his team in the woods. So he’d come to work with us, bringing a lovely, steady team of chestnut horses named Fern and Arch, whom he’d raised from foals.

  Racey, Blaine, Tim, and Chad lived together in the Yellow House, a once elegant three-story nineteenth-century home next to the village library, just across the street from the ferry dock. It had been vacant for almost a decade, after the death of its last occupant, and was due for a gut renovation, so the rent was cheap, and nobody minded the muddy boots piled on the porch or the bits of straw that clung to the armchair’s yellowed lace antimacassar. They were first-generation farmers, like we were. Mark and I had some years of experience on them, but without the underpinning of tradition or the certainty of generational knowledge, we often felt like we were making it up together as we went along. We were all entirely committed that year to creating what we had imagined, this system that took in work and cranked out food.

  The toast, eggs, and coffee disappeared as we sorted out the jobs. I could bring the cows in for milking with my dog, Jet, then catch the four horses Mark would need for planting corn. Mark, Racey, and Blaine would start milking. Chad would hitch his team to cultivate the transplants, and Tim would handle the animal chores. I would get Jane some breakfast, then I could start lunch for the whole team. Later, Jane and I could collect the eggs and move the fence to give the beef cattle fresh pasture. The important thing was the corn had to be planted by the end of the day. The forecast called for two inches of rain that night. Our farm’s fatal flaw was poor drainage. The best soil—that beautiful dirt from the glacier’s nose—sat on flat land at the bottom of a hill. Two inches would keep us out of the fields for at least a week, during which the window for corn planting would slam shut. If we were going to plant corn, it would have to be now. At the end of the meeting, we all put our fists together in the middle of the table for the daily cheer—farming is fun!—then broke to jog, like a football team, to our starting positions.

  Jane was still asleep, so as the rest of the team cleaned up breakfast, Jet and I walked outside to bring in the cows. Jet was an English shepherd, a gift from Mark on our first Christmas as married people. He was large and heavy-boned for his breed, black with white details and a thick mane of fur around his neck that made him look regal and masculine. He took the duty of adoring me as seriously as any of his other work. Wherever I went, Jet was in my shadow, his long feathery tail slowly waving over his back. He’d move cows if I needed him to, catch chickens, kill woodchucks, chase off crows, or do his very best at any other job I could make him understand. If there was nothing for him to do, he was happy to lounge in the shade next to the house until something came up. He was a laid-back, intelligent, all-around working dog. In his old age, his talent for love would stop being specific to me and generalize to every person who came to the farm. His retirement job was farm diplomat, an important position to which he was perfectly suited.

  The sun was just coming up, casting a soft, flattering light on the landscape. Everything we had in use that spring was somewhere between well-worn and worn out, mostly functional but held together with tarps, tape, and twine. By then I’d learned to squint to filter out the farm’s flapping and rusty parts and see instead the glorious edible landscape we lived in, the mountains to our east and west, the glimpse of the lake between green leaves, the animals on productive pastures. This squinting, metaphorically speaking, is a skill as important as any other on the farm, to keep the focus on the rewards and blur the hard parts. We’d bought the land the same year Jane was born, but I still couldn’t believe we had a deed that said all this was in some wa
y ours. I felt about the land the same way Jet felt about me. Loyal.

  South of the house, there was an open-sided pavilion—a cracked concrete pad with a roof over it that had been at the farm when we’d arrived, and where we set out each week’s bounty for our members; next to it was our butcher shop, which we had made from an old tractor-trailer box because we didn’t have the money to build something better when we’d needed it. We’d bought the used insulated trailer for fifteen hundred dollars, sold the wheels for five hundred, then added electricity, running water, racks on the wall for butchering knives, and a track on the ceiling to move heavy carcasses along on a hook. The outside walls were beginning to rust, but we’d gained some natural light inside after an especially claustrophobic butcher had cut a crude window to the outside world. Like most of the farm, it was not perfect, but it worked.

  Jet and I turned north, past the machine shop and the pole barn, along the pitted driveway, toward the two main barns. The East Barn was the newer of the two, with low ceilings on the first story and a large loft above. Its red paint was coming off in moth-size flakes that fluttered around the perimeter. The West Barn, next door, was its older and more elegant sister. It had been built of heavy hand-hewn timbers in 1890, as a stable for the farm’s draft and buggy horses. Back then our land had been owned by the son of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, a gentleman who aspired to be a farmer. He had built himself a stone mansion on the lake, made a demonstration farm of the thousand acres that stretched behind it, and stocked the pastures with pretty Guernsey cows. He’d spared no expense, even building a round barn with a slate roof to house his cows and their hay. Nobody builds a round barn because it’s practical; a square angle is cheaper than a curve. But the round barn had been beautiful: I have a postcard of it in its glory days. Though it burned down in the 1940s, some of the older people in the village remembered it. And we could still see its circular ghost, stretched between the two stone ramps that were its foundation, on either side of our cluttered barnyard.

  The quality and beauty of the round barn lived in the beams and sound walls and good light of the West Barn. Mark and I got married in its cathedral-like loft. Every year since then, it had held hay. As the summer ticked by, we would fill it with fragrant bales, and as the winter progressed, we would empty it again.

  The dairy cows were lying down in Long Pasture, northeast of the barns, chewing their cud. They raised their heads as Jet approached, then stood and stretched, and began to plod along the path to the barn. They knew the routine. Jet was merely an incentive, weaving slowly behind them, calm as a monk.

  We were milking seven Jersey cows that year, and most of them were three months bred, compliments of a beady-eyed bull named Brian who appeared regularly in my nightmares. Jersey cows are known for their soft, sweet natures, but Jersey bulls are notoriously dangerous, especially as they mature. There’s a short window between when they are useful and when they are dangerous. They aren’t tall or mature enough to breed cows until they’re about a year old, but by eighteen months, they’ve become increasingly unpredictable. Brian was usually calm and compliant, but one dark and sleety evening the previous winter, I had been bringing in the cows with Jet. One of the cows was in heat, and Brian decided he didn’t want me to take his girlfriend to the barn. He dropped his head, pawed the dirty snow, turned broadside to me, and bellowed. It was no empty threat; dairy bulls kill people regularly. When Brian shook his head and feinted at me, I realized I’d forgotten the stout stick I usually carried in the pasture with the bull, and I started to calculate how long it would take me to reach the fence at a dead run. Then Jet appeared out of the dark, a black-and-white streak. I’d never seen him move that fast. The easygoing dude was gone, replaced by this ferocious bruiser. He launched himself at the bull’s face and bit him on the nose. Brian shook him off, turned, and trotted to the end of the field with Jet snapping at his heels. Then Jet reversed direction, came back to me, and brought the cows in quietly, as though nothing at all had happened.

  * * *

  We walked the cows into the West Barn through an awkward cinder-block addition from the 1980s. The roof leaked at the junction, and the windows were too small, so that section was always close and dimly lit. We’d patched the leaks on the ceiling with old vinyl billboard tarps that had proved surprisingly durable. Inside, we used more billboard tarps as giant curtains that we could raise and lower to section off the barn—milking stanchions in the south end, draft-horse stalls in the middle, farrowing pens in the north.

  Each cow had her own stanchion, with her name hung on a card above it, and knew exactly where to go. Delia had the place of honor by the door, and I paused to scratch the root of her tail. She had been our first cow, back when one cow was enough, and I had learned to milk on her. She was ten years old now, officially old for a milk cow, and her daughters and granddaughters now graced the lineup. Her fawn-and-white-spotted coat was sun-bleached to a vague tan, and her udder swung loose and droopy when empty, the teats hanging well below her hocks. She looked warily at Jet. Delia’s dislike of dogs, even gentle ones, was justified. She had been attacked by three dogs after arriving at our farm. The dogs had belonged to the tenants then in the farmhouse, and they had nearly killed her. She still carried the scars—the most obvious being her lack of ears. The dogs had ripped them to shreds that our veterinarian, Dr. Goldwasser, had trimmed cleanly away, so that she was left with a set of small waxy nubs on the sides of her head. My affection for Delia was due in part to what she’d been through, in part to the good milk she had given us, and in part to the fact that she was the only creature on the farm who had lived with us through all the changes of the past seven years. However, my affection would not be enough to extend her life another season. I’d learned by then that on a farm, it was not only possible but necessary to love an animal and also kill it. When Dr. Goldwasser had come to check the dairy herd for pregnancy, the rest of the cows were bred, but Delia was open. Who knew why she hadn’t conceived—age, a difficult calving, some minor nutritional stress, hard weather? Whatever the cause, she would not have a calf that year, and without a calf, there would be no more milk. Moreover, that udder: it hung so low, it was hard to keep the teat ends clean. She’d had a bout with mastitis over the winter, and it was only a matter of time before another. When her milk production slowed, toward the natural end of this lactation, she’d be culled. Cull, from the Latin colligere, to collect. Her final gift to us would be her muscles, organs, and bones. The decision to cull a cow is a choice against the individual and for the whole. It gives me a cold, sick feeling to make it, and after it’s made, there’s relief.

  I checked the cows condition as they filed into their places. Three weeks ago, they’d all seemed winter-weary, with grass-longing in their eyes and their bags less than full at milking time. Now their coats had made the transition between the thick fullness of winter and the sleek shine of summer, and they came into the barn with tight udders. Still, they could use some weight on them. Early spring grass is full of protein but not a lot of carbohydrates. The protein boosted their milk production, but the calories required were more than this grass provided, so they pulled what they needed from their own body fat. Their hips had begun to look sharp. Some sweet, succulent roots would do them good.

  I could hear Mark in the milk house, gathering the pails and cans. Our first year, when we had cows to milk and members to feed but no infrastructure, we’d milked into buckets, filtered the milk into ten-gallon cans, and chilled them in ice water. There was something very satisfying about that short straight line between cow and consumer, which required only about two hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and provided dairy every week for thirty people. We washed the pails and the ten-gallon cans in the sink in our house. One day the milk inspector paid us a surprise visit and pointed out the ways in which this was illegal. It was fine to milk by hand if we could do so cleanly, and as long as the milk got cold enough fast enough, the ice-water chilling was okay too. But we were suppo
sed to have monthly inspections and analysis of the milk’s bacteria count, screenings for pathogens, plus a license to supply raw milk. A license required a proper milk house adjacent to the barn. We didn’t have nearly enough money to build something new, so we called the same man who had sold us the tractor trailer that became the butcher shop, and he brought us another one, drove it up to the wall of the West Barn and dropped it there. We sold the wheels from that one too, cut a hole in the back gate for a door, plumbed and wired the box for hot water and electricity, and filled it with sinks and racks and the stainless-steel pails, and boom, we had a milk house and were back in business within a week.

  That morning Mark had shouldered fifty-pound bags of carrots, beets, and turnips to the root grinder. The root harvest had been excellent the previous fall, and we were feeding the cows what our members could not eat. This was part of the beauty of producing a full diet year-round. Waste from one part of the system became fuel for another. The grinder was an antique thing we’d found at the back of the barn when we’d moved in, a relic from a time when this kind of synergy was normal. It was in surprisingly good shape, its bright red paint mostly intact. It had a stout handle attached to an axle that spun a cylinder inside, which was notched all over with sharp moon-shaped blades that bit into the roots, cut them to chips, and spat out a giant’s chopped salad. We had dug the roots in late fall and stored them deep in the buried stone foundation of the old round barn. The bags at the outside edge had frozen on the coldest nights and stayed that way all winter, so in the spring, the orange chips of carrot were slightly mushed on the edges and crystal inside. Mark could make cutting through those hard roots look easy, his long strong arms whipping the cylinder around at high speed, but I knew the weight of the handle. In the winter, no matter how cold it was outside, the work of turning it against its heavy gear would heat me from the inside. If I lost control of the handle, it could knock me across the aisle of the barn.