The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  We crossed another rickety fence and found ourselves standing in an odd forest made up of hundreds of rows of stunted spruce trees growing in plastic pots. There had been a tree nursery on the farm after the dairy closed, and the trees had been growing like that for twenty years. They’d sent taproots through the holes in the bottoms of the pots and survived, but barely. There was a collapsed greenhouse back there, too, with the nursery firs and arborvitae growing up through scraps of pressure-treated wood and rotting plywood. That acreage had an apocalyptic feel to it, the slow force of the trees quietly softening all the square angles of human endeavor.

  The farm’s general flatness was relieved to the west by a steep rise covered in fifty acres of woods. We found a road cut through the trees, and Mark pointed out that the majority of the trees were healthy and sizable sugar maples. He looked along the trunks until he found old scars, where the trees had been tapped, and we realized we were walking through the farm’s sugar bush. On our way back down we passed the sugarhouse, a three-sided barn with sagging walls. Someone had used it for a cow shelter, so it was full of old manure. The roof had leaked down into the evaporator, which had rusted into junk.

  We saw the fields to the south last. These fields ran along the busiest road, and half their acreage was taken up with overgrown nursery trees—fir, pin oak, and linden—that had been planted close and in rows. Mark stepped the shovel into the soil again and pried it up, and reached his hand into the cold cut he’d made. The shovel hadn’t encountered any rocks, and the soil was the color of coffee, and its texture wasn’t anything like the clay we’d uncovered earlier. He squeezed it in his hand, stroked his thumb over it, smelled it, and finally reached out his tongue and tasted it. It was a silty loam, a soil so rich and good it makes a farmer weep, and it ran for a quarter mile along the southern edge of the farm before turning once again to clay.

  I think Mark fell in love with the land at that moment, with the same certainty and speed he had fallen in love with me. From then on, there was no question in his mind that this would be our home. Though it’s hard for me to imagine now, he had to talk me into it. It wasn’t the isolation or the clay that bothered me. “It feels like the farm has no soul,” I said, when we were on the train ride home. “That’s because it’s not being used,” Mark said. “It’s just sleeping. You’ll see.” There was no time for dithering. It was late fall, and if we were going to grow anything the next spring, we’d need winter to plan and prepare. I thought about our other option—another year in New Paltz, looking—and decided to give it a go.

  Part Two

  Winter

  We drove out of New Paltz headed due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren’t nervous then they were the only ones. When we entered the Adirondack Park all traffic fell away, and the mountains rose up around us, covered in pine and already tipped with frost. The light became thin and oblique, the billboards disappeared, the landscape grew wilder, the houses farther and farther apart until they disappeared from view. And then we arrived.

  During the weeks we were away from it, and in the excitement of moving, the farm had gotten better in our imaginations. In theory, it was an adventure. Up close, it was frightening. Mark’s friend Rob helped us move, driving up behind us in his big panel truck. Rob is a vegetable farmer, a hard worker, and an optimist. When he saw the state of the farm, and the size of the fields, he got very quiet.

  The farmhouse was rented out until spring, so we moved our things into a furnished rental in town, a house with good nineteenth-century spirit but pitifully little insulation. Rob, with his farmer’s sense of generosity, had brought us bags of winter squash, potatoes, carrots, leeks, and onions, and we stored them in the basement. That night there was an early snow falling, and Rob and Mark and I sautéed onions with cubed squash and potatoes for the kind of simple, comforting supper that helps make a new place feel like home. After the dishes were cleared, we lingered over a bottle of wine, talking about our plans. We were building a farm from scratch, and the land was big enough, and good enough, to support anything we could dream up. We had eighteen thousand dollars in savings between us, not much, but Lars’s offer of a free year’s lease included land, equipment, and a place to live. Like the size of the farm itself, the sheer breadth of possibility was both exhilarating and terrifying.

  Mark had been musing a long time about the kind of farm he wanted to create. He’d been trained on vegetable farms, and vegetable growing was what he knew best. His farm in Pennsylvania ran on the CSA model, wherein members buy shares in the farm at the beginning of the season and get weekly distributions of the farm’s produce. CSA stands for community supported agriculture, and the concept came from Japan via Europe in the 1980s. There is a lot for a farmer to love about CSA. It can be an effective way to cut out all the middlemen and market directly to your consumer. Moreover, since CSA members pay up front, income is predictable and there is good cash flow when farmers need it most, at the beginning of the growing season. CSA also lined up with Mark’s impatience with the anonymity of the cash economy. He knew the people who were eating his food, they knew him, and they came to know the other members, so that distribution days became more like social events than like grocery shopping. Mark liked the model, but he had begun to feel that it wasn’t enough. CSA farms focused almost entirely on vegetables and left out the foods that actually provide the majority of our calories, the grains and flours, dairy products, eggs, meats. In Pennsylvania, he’d tried to make some of those things available to his members by bringing in products from neighboring farms, but that system was a logistical nightmare, and the constant phone calls and travel time took him away from farming. Since he left Pennsylvania, he’d been wondering what it would be like to tweak the CSA model a bit, so that, instead of providing a set amount of vegetables each week, our farm would produce a whole diet, available to the members on an unlimited basis, just as it was available to us.

  One of the gorgeous and highly annoying things about Mark’s personality is that, once he bites into an idea, he’ll worry it to death, exploring every possibility, expanding it to the point of absurdity and then shrinking it back down, molding it around different premises, and bending logic, when necessary, to cram it into a given situation. No matter what he is doing or saying or thinking, the idea is perking away in the background of his formidable brain, details accruing. Bits of it will surface, iceberglike, in a burst of chatter, but the bulk of it remains hidden until the whole thing appears at once, fully formed and fiercely defended.

  By the time we’d gotten to Essex, his notion of a whole-diet CSA was complete. He wanted to build a farm that was so diversified it could supplant the supermarket, the kind of farm our great-grandparents’ generation grew up on, but built big enough to feed a community instead of just a family. We would produce everything our members needed, beginning with the edible—a variety of meats, eggs, milk and dairy products, grains and flours, vegetables, fruits, and at least one kind of sweetener—but expanding, eventually, to include all the other things a farm could provide, like firewood and building materials, and exercise and recreation. The farm itself should be a self-sustaining organism, producing, as much as possible, its own energy, fertility, and resources. He wanted to make sure we organized the farm around the types of things we liked to do. For him, that meant as much physical work as possible, choosing hand milking over machine milking, for example, whether it made sense to the rest of the world or not. He still liked the idea of a cash-free economy, but he recognized the need for capital, in the start-up phase at least. Members would pay us one price up front, and there would be a sliding scale for low-income members that would slide all the way down to zero.

  In order to create such a diversified farm by spring, we would need to work quickly, build up our infrastructure, figure out how to raise six d
ifferent types of livestock and integrate them with the vegetable and grain rotations, the pastures and hayfields. We needed to figure out cash flow and labor. We would need to begin, he’d decided, with a milk cow. But first, we’d need to clean up. When Mark stopped talking, Rob just shook his head.

  I didn’t understand enough about farming at that point to grasp how audacious this plan was. And I still harbored a little of the urbanite’s hubris, the feeling that with my education and worldly experience something as simple as farming couldn’t possibly tax me all that much. In the abstract, the idea appealed to me in a way that was almost literary. It sounded romantic, and it resonated with that vision of home that I’d held on to on my way out of the city. It sounded like we’d be building an iconic family farm, only we’d be feeding a rather large extended family.

  In truth, I probably would have agreed to anything, as long as it contained my favorite part of Mark’s plan to make the farm energy-independent: draft horses. He’d never farmed with them before, but he’d gotten to drive teams a few times at other farms. He was no big fan of the tractor. He didn’t like the smell of diesel, or the noise of engines; he didn’t value the time he spent sitting on tractors, and he really didn’t like fixing them. He liked the idea that animals could do everything tractors could do, and they could harvest their own fuel, too. He had seen enough prosperous Amish farms in Pennsylvania to know that draft animal power is far from a kooky idea, that given the right context, and the right scale, horses make good sense.

  Thinking about having horses in my life again was like thinking about a place you’d been when you were young and untroubled, a place so happy that remembering it was almost painful. I was born with an affinity for horses, and all my early memories are suffused with them. I begged my way into riding lessons when I was seven, and when I was fourteen my parents bought me a sturdy little Morgan mare. I kept her at a neighbor’s barn a mile from our house, and she was the counterweight to everything that’s awkward and horrible about adolescence. I’d never driven a team before, never used a horse for any sort of work, but I was confident around horses. I knew what made them tick. I’d left behind everything that was familiar to me—my friends, the city, the rules of urban engagement—for this unknown new life, this compelling man whose sanity I sometimes questioned. The promise of horses, at least, was an anchor to hold on to.

  The outbuildings had filled, over generations, with the kinds of bits and pieces that a line of frugal farmers judged prudent to save: picked-over engines, scabbed chunks of metal, quarter sheets of plywood gone crumbly with rot. In one corner of the machine shop, there was a paint bucket of bent tenpenny nails, waiting for the day when someone would have the time to bang them straight. There were piles of parts from several generations of milking machines—rubber teat claws, buckets, pieces of vacuum systems—and a shed stuffed full of sun-bleached four-gallon plastic pots, too brittle to use, from the farm’s days as a tree nursery. On a nail in the leaning pole barn, there was a horse’s collar, its straw stuffing poking out, a vestige of the last time there’d been animals at work on the farm. Pieces of metal had collected around the buildings like sand on a reef: the tailgate of a pickup, a cartoonlike section of chain with eight-inch links, several road signs, patches cut out of them with a torch. We spent long days sorting through these things, filling the derelict school bus with metal for the scrap man, filling a Dumpster with the trash. We made a stack of useful tools that needed fixing, axes and hoe blades and mattocks and rakes, their broken handles made of hand-shaped ash. I collected some delicious new words: clevis, peen, zerk.

  Two small buildings were beyond repair, their floors rotted through in places. One had been the farm office, and it sat over a basement that had filled with water, visible through a hole in the floor. The other had been used as housing for the hired man, when the farm had been a dairy. We pulled down the buildings and had the foundations filled in with a backhoe.

  The ground froze, and all the junk we hadn’t sorted yet froze to it. We lit a fire in the fifty-gallon barrel that served as a woodstove in the machine shop and began organizing the things we’d saved, and the things we’d brought with us. Mark set up his forge in one corner, the tongs, hammers, swages, and punches of various shapes and sizes ranged on a shelf next to his old anvil and a tub full of dusty coal. He began fixing the broken tools there, the sparks and scorched smells flying up from the forge, along with the dull sound of a hammer on soft metal. He taught me the various colors of hot—dark cherry, light straw, peacock—and I learned to hold a glowing piece against the anvil with tongs and strike at it awkwardly, the metal mushing like clay. I liked to watch him work, sweating, hammer falling easily from the hinge of his shoulder, his focus moving between the fire and the anvil.

  As soon as we’d cleared space in the west barn, we bought a milk cow. She came from a dairy just two miles down the road from us, the Shields farm, a father-son operation that had survived the bad decades by staying on the small side. I’d been reading books about cows—my bedside table held The Family Cow and Juliette de Baïracli Levy’s Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable—and was eager to deploy my newfound knowledge in the form of incisive questions. I knew that we weren’t shopping for the black-and-white cows. Those were Holsteins—big, high-volume producers. The hegemony of Holstein genetics is so strong today that, if in an ad or in conversation the breed is not mentioned, it is assumed to be Holstein.

  All other dairy cows are lumped together as “colored breeds.” Among them are the Ayrshires, roan-colored and high-strung; Brown Swiss, large, pretty cows with a reputation for low intelligence; Guernseys, hardy and docile; and Jerseys, small, relatively low-volume producers with milk rich in fat and solids. Most dairies in our area keep a few colored cows in their herd, to raise their milk fat and solids numbers, which brings a premium from the milk plant. The Shieldses milked some Jerseys, and these were the cows we were interested in.

  Billy Shields walked us through the free-stall barn. We saw a wing-shouldered old gal with a long, withered udder, a chocolate heifer with a wary expression, and then there was Delia. She was a small-boned Jersey, sloe-eyed and fawn-colored and pied with big patches of white, like a map of lost continents. Her face was delicately dished, and her ears were soft and ladylike, and she stood a little away from the rest of the herd, her hooves deep in the muck. When Mark touched her udder she bent her head around and regarded him with her tolerant, maternal look. She had given birth to two calves, so she was called a second-calf cow, and she was in the middle of her lactation, pregnant with her third. According to her records she was a good milker, giving forty pounds—a little less than five gallons—of milk per day, which made her a steady, if not spectacular, producer. I checked her parts against what I’d gleaned from my reading. Her udder looked firm and well-connected to her body. Her legs were straight and sound. She was registered and in her prime. The Shieldses would part with her because she was a little too meek for the dairy’s herd. The Holsteins towered over her and outweighed her by several hundred pounds, and she tended to get pushed around at the feed bunker.

  Delia arrived at our farm the next day in a horse trailer, a rope halter around her head. We led her into the barn and released her into the big box stall we’d prepared for her, bedded thickly with mulch hay. She slowly wandered its perimeter, sniffing at the walls, and then lifted her tail and shat. The dark smell of her manure mingled with the green, fermented smell of cow breath and the dry and dusty smell of the hay, and the old barn that had slept so long without a living thing to shelter was awake again, alive with its purpose.

  The first time I milked her, I was almost embarrassed by the intimacy of it. I’d read the instructions in The Family Cow, but was I really supposed to touch those long, leathery teats, tucked privately between Delia’s hind legs? There are hormones involved in the letdown of milk, primarily oxytocin, the same one that gives nursing mothers that glazed, drunk look of love. When I washed her udder with warm water Delia loo
ked at me like that, one calm brown eye pinned on me as her lower jaw moved in a circle, chewing cud.

  I’d found a homemade four-legged milking stool in a dark corner of the barn, its seat worn as smooth as a piece of driftwood. I settled it next to her and rubbed my hands together to warm them, like a gynecologist would. The heat coming from her udder was electric, and the white hairs on the udder reminded me of the soft fuzz on a lady’s cheek. I wrapped my hand around a plump teat, pinning the top of it between my thumb and forefinger, and closed each finger in turn until I had the empty teat in my fist. The milk squirted out in an uneven stream, dribbled down my wrist, and soaked into the sleeve of my jacket, as though magnetically repelled by the bucket between my feet. Delia stood with the patience of a large rock, chewing her cud. By the third day of milking the sleeve of my jacket smelled like something that had curled up and died in a warm hole. By the fifth day, my fingers had learned the dance steps, and the milk was hitting the bottom of the bucket with a rhythmic hiss, but my hands cramped into little, arthritic claws before I’d even finished milking the front teats. Then the effects of Delia’s letdown reflex would wear off, and no matter how much I squeezed at her the milk would come only in little drips and I’d send her back to her stall with her udder still half full, teats chapped from all my yanking. It was a month before I could milk her reasonably well, the milk flowing into the bucket fast enough to form foam on top. By then my engagement ring no longer fit and my forearms had taken on the heavy look of those of a sailor.