The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  Sam and Silver arrived at the farm two weeks later. Mark and I had spent the week banging together a pair of straight stalls for them in the west barn, the bitter cold sending shock waves to the elbow with every whack of the hammer. We spread a thick layer of straw in the stalls and filled the new mangers with hay, and we were ready. They stepped off the trailer like kings. That such creatures exist moves me. That they labor for us, willingly and with heart, is miraculous.

  They were Belgian geldings, sorrel-colored, with flaxen manes and tails. Their histories were murky, but they were supposed to be fourteen years old, used for farm work, parades, and pulling, bought separately at auction and paired up by Jim Cooper. Silver was the looker of the two. The vast majority of male horses are castrated when they’re young, to prevent unintended breedings and make them more tractable. Gary told us Silver had been a breeding stallion until he was past ten years old. He still had a typical stallion’s neck, thick, arched, and heavily muscled. He looked custom-built for pulling heavy things, with a wide chest, well-sprung ribs, and a short back. His expression was powerful and confident if not stunningly intelligent. Sam was his opposite, angular, stringy, and wise. His action was snappier, and he carried himself like an enlisted soldier, upright and a little tense. Sam’s ear flicked back when you spoke to him, and he conveyed the sense, like some horses do, that he would do his best to take care of you, even if you did something stupid. They both topped eighteen hands, so tall I had to stand on a bucket to brush their backs.

  The next morning after milking, I backed Silver out of his stall and put his bridle on, climbed a stack of hay bales, and leapt onto his bare back. It was like riding a warm sofa. When he moved, it was an oceanic roll. He seemed a little bewildered at the strange, small weight on his back, the unfamiliar feeling of legs wrapped around him, and it occurred to me that he’d probably never been ridden before. I put him back and bridled Sam, whose sharp withers were not nearly as comfortable as Silver’s broad back. But Sam was eager to go. We rode out through snowdrifts to the big rise at the eastern edge of the farm. From the rise, there is a good view of the lake, and the wind had blown the frozen ground free from snow. I gave Sam a little kick, and he set off at a canter, stretching his long legs, his huge stride eating ground. I felt a familiar joy pulse through me, the feeling horses have given me since childhood. Sam seemed willing to run for miles, but I was a little worried, at that speed, that I might lose my seat on his bare back and crash. I pulled him back down to a walk, smiling. He might be a plow horse, I thought, but he’s got a Thoroughbred soul.

  Mark came home late one frozen Sunday carrying a bag of small, silver fish. They were smelts, locally known as icefish. He’d bought them at the store in the next town south, across from which a little village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of shacks with holes drilled in and around them. I’d seen the men going from the shore to the shacks on snowmobiles, six-packs of beer strapped on behind them like a half-dozen miniature passengers. “Sit and rest,” Mark said. “I’m cooking.” He sautéed minced onion in our homemade butter, added a little handful of crushed, dried sage, and when the onion was translucent, he sprinkled in flour to make a roux, which he loosened with beer, in honor of the fishermen. He added cubed carrot, celery root, potato, and some stock, and then the fish, cut into pieces, and when they were all cooked through he poured in a whole morning milking’s worth of Delia’s yellow cream. Icefish chowder, rich and warm, eaten while sitting in Mark’s lap, my feet so close to the woodstove that steam came off my damp socks.

  As we were scraping the bottoms of our bowls, Mark pulled out a piece of paper covered in hieroglyphics, words and arrows and cryptic symbols. At first I thought it was his latest plan for the farm, but then I picked out familiar names. It was a guest list. For our wedding. “Oh,” I said and slipped off his lap. “We are engaged, you know,” he said, not quite looking at me. “Yep,” I said. “I’m aware.” I was dug in by then, more and more each day, but a nervous little animal inside of me had begun squirreling around, looking for an exit. The deeper my commitment, the more desperate that animal became. In love, and in most other parts of my life, my pattern had always been to be a tourist, not a citizen. I would dive in deep but soon get out of the pool. I was not insincere. I always truly believed. It’s just that, on personality tests, I score dizzyingly high on novelty-seeking behavior. The word forever just plain scares me. I was completely enthralled with the farm. I was passionately in love with Mark. But knowing myself, I really, really didn’t know if either love could last.

  We had tentatively agreed that the wedding should take place in the fall, after harvest, at the farm. In early October the food would be plentiful but the weather still fine. It had seemed so far off, but now it was less than a year away, almost close enough to see. “Hey, maybe we should wait until next fall,” I said, trying to make it sound light, as though it had just occurred to me. “What with everything we have to do and all.” We’d been engaged for a year already, and he’d wanted to get married right away. He stood up, bowl in hand, and headed for the sink. “I’m not waiting another year,” he said from the kitchen. “If you don’t want to get married this fall, I don’t want to get married at all.”

  There is no better lesson in commitment than the cow. Her udder knows no exceptions or excuses. She must be milked, or she’ll suffer from her own fullness, and then she’ll get sick or dry up. Morning and evening, on holidays, in good weather and in bad, from the day she gives birth to her calf until the day ten months later when you dry her off, your cow is the frame in which you must fit your days, the twelve-hour tether beyond which you may no longer travel. What she gives you in exchange for your commitment is impressive. She is the cornerstone of the farm, the great converter. She takes grass—that ubiquitous terrestrial plankton—and uses the four-part trick of rumination to unlock its cellulose, release its energy. There’s a liturgical sound to our names for her stomachs—omasum, abomasum, reticulum—and in old words for these parts, you can hear a certain reverence: king’s-hood, the second stomach, and psalterium, the third. The word cream is related to the word chrism, to anoint. Royal words, holy words, for a very humble process. It makes sense, though, when you consider that from the cow comes a whole farmstead of abundance. Milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, cream, and the by-products—skim milk, buttermilk, whey—to fatten your pigs and feed your poultry. And she gives you a calf every year, which you can raise (on grass again), for a year’s worth of beef for a family. All this flows from a cow.

  I was getting better at milking, faster, the milk no longer dribbling down my wrists or jetting erratically toward the barn wall. I’d learned to keep my nails short and smooth, and to strip each teat gently but thoroughly. My forearms were bigger every week.

  Milk was uncharted territory for me. Aside from the half-and-half I put in my coffee, I hadn’t drunk it in years. I was mildly lactose intolerant, and the thought of milk as a beverage kind of grossed me out. But raw milk from a Jersey cow is a totally different substance from what I’d thought of as milk. If you do not own a cow or know someone who owns a cow, I must caution you never to try raw milk straight from the teat of a Jersey cow, because it would be cruel to taste it once and not have access to it again. Only a few people in America remember this type of milk now, elderly people, mostly, who grew up with a cow. They come to the farm sometimes, looking for that taste from their childhood.

  Once you’re used to farm milk, commercial milk has a lot of drawbacks. First, there is the taste of cardboard and sometimes, faintly, the taste of the chemicals that are used to wash the udder and flush the pipes of the milking machine. There is the homogenization process, the ubiquity of which puzzles me. Why would you not want your cream on top of your milk, where it is ready to be sloshed into your coffee in the morning, leaving the now-skimmer milk for drinking purposes? And then there’s pasteurization, which changes the taste and nature of milk as much as heat changes any food from raw to cooked.

&n
bsp; Fresh raw milk is wonderful, but as it ages, things get really interesting. Milk as it comes from the cow is a warm, sugary, proteinaceous substance, a lively medium for bacterial growth. When the bacteria multiply, they acidify the milk, changing its taste from sweet to tart, eventually thickening it. When you look at old cookbooks that call for “sour milk,” this is what they are talking about. If you leave good, clean raw milk from a healthy cow in a warm place, the “wild” bacteria in it will cause it to solidify into something that’s always interesting and almost always edible. Humans have been exploiting this property for a very long time, breeding specific strains of bacteria for desirable and predictable qualities. That’s how we turn milk into yogurt, kefir, and various types of cheese. Pasteurization kills almost all bacteria in milk, benign and pathogenic alike. Without the “good” bacteria, pasteurized milk is vulnerable to the kinds of putrefying bacteria that make it rot instead of sour.

  Another difference comes from the breed of the cow. The milk you get in the store almost certainly came from a Holstein. These are big cows, and in commercial dairies they are bred and fed to maximize production. But as a general rule, as the volume of milk goes up, the amount of fat and solids in the milk goes down. There’s an old farmer’s joke about the Jersey dairyman who keeps a Holstein in the barn in case the well runs dry, so he’ll have something with which to wash the dishes. Jersey milk is richer by far than Holstein milk, with a higher fat content and also a higher percentage of milk solids. Moreover, because the Jersey cow does not completely metabolize the beta carotene in grass, the cream is tinted a pretty, warm, pale yellow. When you make butter from such cream, especially in spring, the color becomes vibrant.

  More than breeding there is the issue of feed. The taste of milk is directly influenced by what a cow is eating. This is most obvious when things go wrong and the cows eat something that gives the milk a taint. Wild garlic in your pasture will give you milk redolent of scampi. Catmint, lamb’s-quarter, and goldenrod impart a lobsterish flavor—not terrible in itself but not exactly what you want in a glass of milk. If you feed cows your extra cabbages, you must do it several hours before milking time or your milk will taste like skunk. The texture of the butterfat changes depending on what the cow is eating, too. Butter made from spring milk, when the cows are on lush grass, is soft and easily spreadable. In winter, when the cows are eating hay, the butter is hard and brittle even at room temperature and must be smushed down on a piece of bread instead of spread. There are more subtle effects, too. Milk from a cow grazing a pasture rich in clover tastes different from the same cow’s milk when she is in a pasture full of orchard grass, and even the same pasture varies according to season, to weather. Milk, like wine, has a serious goût de terroir, characteristics inextricable from the environment in which it is produced. Most commercial milk comes from cows that never step hoof on pasture while they are lactating. Instead of grass they eat what’s called a TMR—a total mixed ration. It is carefully calibrated to maximize milk production while minimizing cost and might consist of haylage or silage—chopped, preserved fodder—ground with protein boosters like soy or the malted grain left over from brewing. If you think of milk as a commodity, one squirt pretty much the same as any other, then the TMR makes perfect sense. But if you begin to think of milk as a food with seasonal and regional character, the TMR begins to seem as crazy as making wine out of hydroponic grapes.

  Our first blizzard began on a Friday. The weather radio was making grave predictions, but the morning dawned prettily enough, cold, with weak sun filtering through high clouds and a light snow falling straight down. We spent the morning at the farm, battening down the hatches. We locked the chickens in their coop and fired up the tractor, dragging the coop slowly along the driveway to a sheltered spot near the west barn. We locked Delia in her stall, and closed all the barn doors, and headed back to the house in town to wait it out.

  We spent the day in a fit of joyful enthusiasm, mapping out the next year of work on a calendar that had come in the mail and was decorated, ironically enough, with a painting of a colonial-style farmhouse, a red barn, and three fluffy white sheep. The lettering read “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty.” We filled in the days and weeks with our ambitions, which even then we must have known were too big to be contained in the boundaries of a single year. The first week in February was reserved to FIGURE OUT GREENHOUSE—BUILD IT! In the second week of that month, we would aim to BUILD DISTRIBUTION AREA and also, somehow, cut and split the next year’s FIREWOOD. The day in October when we planned to get married Mark had written WEDDING, and below that, on the same day’s square, 50 CHICKS ARRIVE. The letters were the same size, and the only thing that set the first event apart from the second was a pair of conjoined hearts. The following week he had written HONEYMOON and also, neatly, EXTRACT HONEY from the hive.

  We got so wrapped up in our plans we failed to notice it had begun to snow in earnest. The sun was low by the time we looked up, and Delia needed milking. Mark was in the middle of making an experimental cheese, waiting for the curd to solidify, so I volunteered to go to the farm to milk for him. It was only a mile, I reasoned. How bad could it be?

  I drove at walking pace, hunched over the steering wheel, peering desperately out the window for a glimpse of yellow lines, the only car on the road. Before I’d gone half a mile the road in front of me was dark, and I had to pull warily to the shoulder to wipe a thick pad of snow from the headlights. I got to the barn, and as soon as I turned the wipers off, the windshield went opaque.

  Delia was snug enough in her stall, listening to the wind blowing around the corner of the barn. I brought her to her stanchion and milked her, grateful for the warmth of her teats, and put her back home with an extra bale of straw. I watered her and opened her bale of hay, and then went out to catch the horses, who were sheltering in the trees, the snow building up on their backs. By the time they were in their stalls my car was drifted in, so deep I couldn’t have used it even if I had been foolish enough to try. I walked in the climax of the storm, feeling like King Lear, face to the wind and mostly blind, through the soughing stand of hemlock, to the road. One truck passed, at a crawl, the sound of it muted by the snow on the ground and the snow so thick in the air that the headlights were useless, little stumpy cones of light. The road disappeared after that, and I had to look for glimpses of the power lines above so as not to lose my way. I arrived home sweating and exhilarated, grateful that the farm and its imperatives had forced me out into the middle of that storm. I imagine that when I am old and immersed in memory I will relive that night and tell the story of it to whoever is around and willing to listen.

  The blizzard continued through the night, but by dawn the snow had stopped falling and had begun to blow. We walked back to the farm at milking time on snowshoes, no traffic at all on the road, the setting moon just visible through the clouds. The hemlock branches were weighted almost to the ground, and the snowdrifts were ten feet deep in places. My car was nothing but a wide white hump.

  Now that we had the horses we needed equipment for them to pull. We used our snow day to make a list of the tools we would need by spring. First, a plow. All the land that we were planning to use for growing vegetables was covered in thick sod. We would need a plow to turn it, and then more tools—a disc harrow, Mark said, and a spring-tine harrow—to smooth the turned land into a seedbed level enough to plant. Once the crops were up we would need some way to keep the weeds in check. The tool for that would be a two-horse cultivator. If we were going to do any haying with the horses, we’d need mowers they could pull. Sam and Silver came with harnesses and collars, but we needed the pieces called eveners that connect the horses’ tug chains to the tongue of a machine, and neck yokes, to hold the tongue off the ground in front. A stone boat, a sturdy sled that slides flat along the ground, for hauling a plow to the field, would be nice. A forecart would be even nicer. It’s a simple, two-wheeled cart with a hitch in the back, for pulling tools or wagons. We wou
ld need a drill, for planting grain, and a potato digger. There were other things on the wish list, but this was the minimum. Our budget was slim.

  The tractor had come late to this sparsely populated region, and plenty of the neighbors had used horses on their farms through the 1950s. Some of their old equipment had already gone for scrap, or been sold to antiques dealers, or plunked to rust in the front yard as decoration, encircled by impatiens in the summer, by mums and pumpkins in fall. But a good deal of it was still around, stored in the backs of barns, and we scouted those dusty corners. Sometimes, we found horse-drawn machines with their tongues lopped off, evidence of the transition time when farmers hooked old tools to their new tractors. We found other tools that had been put away whole, lovingly, all moving parts smeared with grease, and never touched for sixty years. Some we bought, other pieces were given to us. Shane Sharpe loaned us a disc harrow he’d bought but never used. An elderly woman, recently widowed, contributed her husband’s old wooden grain drill, plus a hand-cranked root grinder that would make it possible to feed Delia our extra beets and carrots. Then Thomas LaFountain stopped by with an auctioneer’s flyer. It didn’t say so outright, but from the long list of horse-drawn tools for sale and the location of the farm, we could tell it was an Amish farm selling out. Pay dirt.

  The farm was a three-hour drive southwest. We left before dawn. Yet another winter storm had been blanketing the area for a week. The farm was on a windy plateau precisely in the middle of nowhere. The snowplows had bigger roads to worry about, and the last five miles were nearly impassable, heavily drifted over with snow. We skidded and spun along, less sure of our traction than the man in the bobsled in front of us, who was driving two steady Belgian mares. There was a crate of brown hens and speckled ducks in the sled; the long hairs on the horses’ chests and flanks were frosted white from their breath. We slid into the field that was serving as a parking lot, and the man driving the team whoaed his horses to ask if we would like a lift to the barnyard, his Pennsylvania Dutch vowels as flat as the wind-scoured landscape.