by Gene Logsdon
In a few spots where June-blooming wildflowers such as blue-eyed grass, firepink, Jacob's ladder, and Virginia waterleaf occur, we do not mow until July. The rest of the year we dodge around nice specimens of Deptford pink, goldenrod, or even ragwort and heal-all. All this makes mowing a little interesting, and increases eye to hand reaction time, which comes in handy when some young brute hits a million-mile-perhour line drive back at me in the pitcher's mound.
John Fichtner, a farmer and agricultural teacher in Mason County, West Virginia, has been telling me about how he and his wife Carolyn and their children make use of their meadow-land that formerly grew only a weak stand of broom sage. Their farm is a remarkable example of meadow farming and ecological husbandry. The family lives in an earthsheltered home that Carolyn designed. On eighty acres, they graze Suffolk and Perendale sheep, Scottish Highland cattle, donkeys, goats, and turkeys. They also raise a few hogs, chickens, pigeons, ducks, geese, guinea hens, and Border collies, every animal occupying a special economic and ecological niche in the panoply of interconnected life forms. The donkeys, for example, guard against coyotes. The Muscovy ducks control flies by eating fly eggs and larvae in the animal droppings. The hogs root in the winter bedding of the livestock and break it up into compost. The guinea hens with their loud squawking at anything unusual make better watchdogs than dogs. The collies herd the sheep. And because of the variety of grazing animals, each with somewhat different preferences in what they eat, all of the various kinds of pasture plants are utilized.
The Fichtners sometimes rotate the livestock from paddock to paddock daily. Moreover, their animals are selectively bred to grow economically on pasture alone (requiring little or no grain means that the farm does not need to invest in expensive machinery for raising grains), and also bred for parasite resistance. Breeding, pasture rotation, and the use of herbs such as kelp and garlic allow the Fichtners to avoid using harsh chemical wormers.
"Our goal is to produce animal products profitably from grass while maintaining a proper holistic balance between humans, animals, and natural resources," says Fichtner. "We have to pretty much learn from our own experiments because this kind of farming has been mostly ignored by our agricultural universities and agribusiness."
CHAPTER 7
Groves of Trees to Live In
The groves were God's first temples.
William Cullen Bryant
If humans suddenly vanished from this land, in just fifty years the forest would take back its domain. I think of that often as I look out over the countryside of field and village from the edge of my woodlot, my little citadel of native forest in the land of everlasting cornfields. Even after fifty years, the courthouse and grain elevators and St. Peter's church steeple that I can see from my mailbox would surely still stick out above the tree tops. But for the most part, a traveler in 2043, hacking his way through the underbrush, would stumble upon the crumbling, moss-covered houses and stores, and feel no differently than an archeologist discovering a time-lost temple in the green jungles of Equador. When I plant trees, I smile a little, thinking how absurd, in a way, is my work. Nature would gladly plant the whole humid world to trees if we would only get out of the way.
There are enormous risks involved in imposing the psychology of blacktop on a forest ecology. When we separate our soil and climate from their natural role of growing trees, we also separate them from their ultimate source of fertility and ourselves from ultimate sustainability. We do know better, but knowledge is not enough to keep civilization after civilization from disappearing back into its degraded soil to be eventually covered again with trees-or if things have gone too bad, covered with desert or radioactive dust. In "Conquest of the Land through Seven Thousand Years," W.C. Lowdermilk's classic 1938 report on the effects of "civilization" on the earth, there is a photograph that shows one of the four groves of cedars still growing where the biblical "cedars of Lebanon" once flourished. Amidst a few ancient cedars on the grounds of a monastery, the photo reveals cedar seedlings growing in great abundance. Outside the stone wall that protects this green sanctuary from goats and humans, the land is a rocky moonscape of desolation. As Uncle Ade used to say, you couldn't raise an umbrella on land like that if you stood on a sack of fertilizer.
Lowdermilk found the same tragic condition on Chinese mountainsides, where the forest groves of Buddhist monasteries were the only living green in a jumble of rocks and ravines from which the soil had all eroded. An overpopulated society had cut every tree for fuel while its livestock grazed off every blade of grass for food. Below, on the flood plain of the Yellow River-China's Sorrow, as it used to be called-he observed how silt from the mountainsides continually filled the river bed, causing the water to rise and flood the rich farmland. With a stubbornness that defies belief, Chinese farmers built up dikes, century after century, to hold the river at bay, until the water level was higher than the farmlands around it. (The Mississippi River now flows past New Orleans between levees that also lift it higher than much of the city.) Periodically, floods broke through the levees and drowned the farmers. In 1856, 1877, and 1898, for example, the Yellow River flooded and killed millions of people on the densely populated plains on either side. This was, in fact how northern China controlled its population for a while. Let the river do the killing. Let war and famine help. Let us forget the future and the past; on lust let no restraint be cast. Not until the last decades of the twentieth century did China recognize that stabilizing population with birth control just might be a better way. Will the rest of the world realize? Not yet. China farmed for forty centuries with amazing productivity before it admitted that increasing food production merely increases birth rates.
Tree groves and cultivated fields are both essential to the agricultural survival of human civilization. Trees grow where rainfall is ample, the same places were crops can be grown without irrigation. Trees are big signposts that say: "Farmer, sink your plow here." But trees are also signposts of caution: "But beware. Erase us from this landscape and you too will be erased."
The popular image of a farm is a place of cultivated fields with, perhaps, a meadow in the middle. Various machines plant and harvest the crops, which are stored in various buildings and fed to animals kept in the same or other buildings, all further processed into food in kitchens and stored in cellars. But a farm in a sustainable society is a place of tree groves as well, with an array of tools and other equipment for harvesting, processing, and storing wood crops. (It was still traditional practice, until the piston engine infected farmers with a deadly strain of greed, to leave ten acres in woodland for every hundred acres of cropland-environmental tithing.) Wood crops become tools, fenceposts, gates, furniture, buildings, occasionally food in the form of fruit and nuts, and most of all fuel. A woodworking shop is as integral to the cottage farm as a chicken coop. A woodburning stove is the cottage's symbol of economic and therefore political freedom. If my hero and fellow contrary farmer Harlan Hubbard were alive today, he would say that the governmental regulators have been so strict on woodstove emissions-and even attempted in the 1970s to penalize woodstove users with higher utility rates for having the gall to use less electricity-because they want to discourage self-reliance. Self-reliant people never favor the taxes that allow governments to become totalitarian.
As the price of wood continues to soar, a tree grove may, acre for acre, bring in as much money as field crops on the cottage farm. The wood we heat with saves us about $500 a year in other fuel. Last year I made about $300 worth of gates from our lumber and from saplings thinned to make room for future timber trees. We sawed out about $2000 worth of boards that my son will turn into furniture, and we sold four veneer logs for $1000 each. We framed our woodworking shop with our own wood, and as much as we had available at the time went into our barns.
All this from two groves of about fourteen acres total. The smaller grove of four acres, where our house and barn sit, also provides range for the chickens and an annual two weeks worth of grazin
g for the sheep. In addition, we pick several meals of morel mushrooms from the woods each year, boil down a few pints of maple syrup, and gather all the hickory nuts and black walnuts we can use. The deer save some of the wild apples for us. The birds leave us a few wild black raspberries and all the elderberries and paw-paws we want. As Uncle Pete liked to say: "One paw-paw pie a year is enough."
Unlike steel, plastic, rubber, oil, coal, gas, aluminum, and so on, wood can be cheaply produced on any cottage farm and then shaped, bent, and joined with low-cost tools into a multitude of useful and necessary items. Thousands of amateur and professional woodworkers attest to that.
But above all, wood can stop the silly, disastrous power plays of oil magnates in the Mideast. There is not a house in America that could not save half its heating and electric bills with a combination of wood heat and solar energy. If government would pay farmers to maintain woodlands instead of paying them not to grow corn, wood could replace much (who knows how much?) of the oil used in this country. Wood converts to fuel alcohol more efficiently than corn does. Morton Fry, another magna cum laude contrary farmer in Pennsylvania, rigged his pickup with a gasifier and drove it all over the country on wood to advertise the many uses of the hybrid poplar trees he grows and sells. "Sure it worked," he once told me with a grin. "And I never had to worry about running out of gas. Just picked up a few downed tree branches whenever I passed a woodlot."
If we deny that we are a woodland culture we will fade slowly into oblivion. Those few who understand that fact inevitably become cottage farmers and wood craftspeople, and they plant groves of trees to live in. In effect, they establish little centers for the preservation of civilization during these dark ages of earth-plundering-very much as the monasteries did in those other Dark Ages.
Wood is a most versatile material, not only for those purposes for which it is customarily used today, but for many tools and utensils that we now make with plastic and metal. And this could become even more the case if known technology were utilized. During World War Two, DuPont developed a chemical method (too expensive to compete with plastic at present) that softens wood so that it can be twisted, bent, compressed, and manipulated as if it were a heated metal alloy. The wood retains its new shape and dries harder and stronger than it was naturally. A soft wood becomes as hard as sugar maple and maple as hard as ebony, Wheeler McMillen (another contrary farmer and onetime editor of Farm Journal) once told me. "Light colored pines take on the hues of cherry, the glamour of rosewood, or the depth of mahogany," he wrote in his fascinating 1946 book called New Riches from the Soil.
Even without any such treatment, wood once worked well in light airplane and glider frames, and for car bodies. Plastic toys and bowls are serviceable, but wooden ones could replace them in many homes. The Dutch won't part with their wooden shoes because their wooden shoes are practical and economical. Dogwood still makes arrow shafts as excellent as those that archeologists have found from pre-historic times. Ash makes a good hay fork. Fiberglass handles will never comfort the hands and arms as satisfactorily as ash or hickory. Softball players are convinced that aluminum bats drive the ball farther, but none of them playing today have ever used on a modern ball a bat turned out of the black heartwood of white ash. Osage orange, once promoted as a substitute for wire fencing (with its awful thorns, it will indeed make a cattle-tight fence, though the pruning to keep it that way is very laborious), has tensile strength greater than steel. That is why it was once the choice for bows. It is so hard and strong that it was used for wagon axles, wheel spokes, pulleys, tool handles, insulator pins, police billy clubs, door thresholds, paving blocks, railroad ties, and almost indestructible fenceposts. With its warm yellow-brown color, it could make dazzling parquet floors, though I don't know if it has ever been used that way.
Another unusual example, just to whet your imagination, is mesquite, which ranchers in the southwest have spent a fortune in herbicides vainly trying to kill. As lowly as this wood has appeared to be, applied human ingenuity has turned mesquite into what its aficionados call the "jewel of the Southwest." On ancient houses in Mexico, exposed mesquite lintels remain solid after four hundred years. Jim Lee, one of the contrariest cottagers of my acquaintance, and one of the most successful, makes stunningly beautiful boxes out of mesquite on his isolated homestead in Texas. Besides furniture and flooring, mesquite is being marketed as chips for barbecuing. Mesquite jelly is being produced commercially as a dessert food. In earlier times, mesquite beans were utilized in vast quantities as a cattle feed supplement.
There are many other common and more easily-worked woods for the cottage farmer to utilize (mesquite is twice as hard as oak). Jim and Beverly Lee, and son and daughter Joel and Wendy, who call themselves The Hummers, use dead cedar that lumber companies years ago left behind as slash as the mainstay of their rural woodworking business. They have been known to generate a hundred thousand dollars a year from this "cottage farm crop."
Every northern Ohio farm used to have a grove of catalpa or black locust for fence posts and since cottage farmers today will almost always be husbandmen and in constant need of sturdy fences, such a grove would be practical for them. Of the two, catalpa is better because it is soft, so staples drive into it easily. The softness and yet durability of catalpa make it very desirable to woodcarvers. On the other hand, black locust produces a good honey crop for the bees besides being an enduring wood. Both catalpa and black locust Would be ideal for outdoor furniture since they resist rot for many years. That would avoid the extravagance of depleting the rainforests of teak so that yuppy gardeners can brag about their teak garden benches which no one ever sits on.
A catalpa grove can be harvested indefinitely. When the first trunk is cut for posts, new trunks sprout from the roots and another crop is ready in seven to fifteen years. In England this practice has been called coppicing since ancient times. Ash is another tree that will endure coppicing for many years. The best ash handles for tools come from second or third growth coppiced wood.
Some of my fence posts came from my grandfather's catalpa grove (which was bulldozed away for corn after "farmers went crazy," as my father used to say) more than sixty years ago. Grandpaw Rall used the posts first. My uncle used them in a second fence. And when that fence was torn down, I inherited the posts for a third fence. As these posts get to thirty years of age and older, the bluebirds find hollow places in them that they can enlarge into nests without noticeably hastening the posts' slow decay. If you were to give a money value to a fence post that will last sixty years (no treated wood or metal post on the market will) and maybe make a bluebird apartment for thirty of these years, a catalpa post is surely worth three times the going rate, or $10 each anyway. An acre will hold. about a hundred trees at twenty-by-twenty-foot spacings. To figure the number of trees per acre at different spacings, multiply the spacings, for instance twenty by twenty, and divide that number (400 in this case) into 43,560, the number of square feet in an acre. A hundred catalpa trees at twenty years of age should provide four split posts from each trunk, or four thousand per acre. At $10 each, that's $40,000 every twenty years, or $2000 per acre per year. You would think that someone would get smart and start a fence post and outdoor furniture business with a catalpa farm (selling the scraps to carvers) but by the time those of us so inclined learn about such things, we are "too soon old and too late smart."
Wild cherry and black walnut are much easier woods to work than oak and much more attractive in color and pattern of grain in my estimation. Walnut is very rot resistant and once was used for posts, sheeting, and siding (I know two old houses entirely sided in walnut) but is far too expensive for those purposes now. Walnut's high price-and that of cherry-is an accident (or mistake) of history, brought on by a human-made, very unnecessary scarcity. Both trees will grow and spread like weeds in the midwest if given any chance at all. There are thousands of acres of small creek-bottom fields in northern Ohio that flood so regularly that grain cropping on them is a losing
proposition, but farmers go through the motions of farming these lowlands for the grain subsidy payments that can be drawn. How much better if the government would just pay the farmers to plant these fields to black walnut, for which that land is perfectly suited.
Maple is even more easily propagated than cherry or walnut, because it will grow readily in the shade of older trees. When old hardwood forests of the midwestern and eastern United States are allowed to regrow, after being overgrazed for years, the first new wave of trees in the shade of the remaining old giants is predominantly maple. If these are sugar maples rather than soft maples, that's not at all bad news because no northern tree has as much potential variation in attractive grain for woodworking as sugar maple-from tiger stripe to birdseye-and the wood is suitable for most construction purposes, especially for furniture and such specialties as flooring. Moreover, a grove of sugar maples can be, with the production of maple syrup, the most profitable acreage on the cottage farm. (Read The Maple Sugar Book by Scott and Helen Nearing, the two all-time, venerable gurus of the Contrary Farmer Revolution.)