by Noel Perrin
I can best illustrate that with the story of a hitchhiker I once picked up. This was during mud season, an April afternoon when it was alternately snowing and raining. I was taking the back road between two remote villages, and came on a teenage boy with his thumb out. Of course I picked him up, and of course we got into talk. He seemed strangely cheerful for a kid in a wet blue-denim jacket out hitching in such miserable weather. When I eventually asked him where he was from, he said St. Thomas.
“St. Thomas? I thought that was one of the Virgin Islands.”
“It is.”
“But don’t the Virgin Islands have a perfect climate, just like Los Angeles, never too hot and never too cold, and always sunny?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you how you happened to come to Vermont for mud season?”
“Oh,” he said casually, “I just got tired of one god-damned perfect day after another.”
II
NOVEMBER 18, 1980 – The tenth snow of autumn was expected to be a mere squall, like the other nine. One pessimistic forecaster said there might be an inch or two.
But when we got up this morning, there was six inches on the ground. More snow was falling fast. That’s not supposed to happen before Thanksgiving – and in fact it hasn’t happened in about a decade.
All the stuff that careless people like me had left outdoors was buried. There weren’t even mounds to show where axes and garden hoses lay – just this smooth white sheet. It was a true winter scene. All the evergreens drooped their branches under heavy loads of snow; all the roads were salted and hideous-slushy. School was canceled in the whole region.
My neighbor Floyd and I had planned to spend the morning loading the last of his manure pile in a spreader and spreading it in the pasture that our cows share. After that we were going to store the spreader in my barn for the winter. In the afternoon Floyd had meant to go get his November sawdust at the mill. (He uses it for bedding the cows.) Me, I had meant to buck up a big ash log at the edge of our shared pasture, split it, load it, and deliver it to a firewood customer in the next village. It was one I had cut in the spring, and leaf-dried.
Naturally all these plans got changed. Floyd makes part of his winter-living plowing driveways. Before dawn he spent an hour mounting his plow, and was on the road in time to plow out people who leave for work at seven. Then he did the morning milking and went out to plow again. I spent half an hour feeling around in the snow with my boot toes for tools. (I found them all.) I brought in a lot of snow-covered wood for the stove, and fed the beef cattle. Finally, around nine o’clock, I trudged into the woods to rescue my tractor. I had it parked about half a mile off the road.
That’s not quite as foolish a place to keep it as it sounds. In fact, it’s a very sensible place. Every year when we’re finished cutting hay – this ought to be early July, but it is more usually around the first of September – I take the mowing machine off. Then I mount a hydraulic wood-splitter on the back and wiggle the tractor into whatever part of the woods I’m thinning that year. It stays there until just before I think we’ll have a serious snow.
I was lucky. Even though the snow was now seven inches deep, and getting more serious by the minute, the tractor wiggled back out of the woods without getting stuck even once. Because I didn’t dare take either hand off the wheel, I did get a few facefuls of snow, passing under hemlocks with especially low-drooped branches, but that was a cheap price for getting the tractor safely out.
What I should have done was take it right home, drive it into the barn, and mount my own snowplow blade. Then plow out my barnyard. But the ease with which I had wiggled through half a mile of woods made me overconfident – besides, there’s a certain thrill to taking risks. What I actually did was drive straight to the pasture and over to that big ash log. I lowered the splitter near the butt end of it. Then I walked back out on the tracks, got my truck and chainsaw, and drove them in, too. Two hours later I had half a cord of beautiful ash firewood neatly stacked in the back of the truck. Meanwhile, the snow had begun to taper off (there was just under nine inches on the ground), and the temperature had risen to a couple of degrees above freezing.
I thought I’d take the truck out first. It’s four-wheel-drive and quite nimble. Even though the pasture is a very old one, and you enter it through a little curving lane lined with granite posts that some farmer quarried on the place around 1800, I didn’t see why I couldn’t boom on out. The heavy load would make for beautiful traction.
And so it would have, except for the unfortunate matter of its having got so warm. Snow at thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, lying on frozen grass, makes something close to a friction-free surface. I did get halfway up the lane. I might even have made it if the truck hadn’t begun to side-slip right into a granite post eight inches by eight inches and five feet tall. There was nothing to do but stop and get out.
A few years ago I would have panicked. I would have unloaded all the wood, right there in the snow. I would have walked home and gotten the kind of hand winch that we call a come-along. Then I would have spent the rest of the afternoon hand-winching. No one wants to have his truck and tractor trapped out in the pasture from mid-November until sometime in April.
But there are a few advantages to our climate, and one is that you can always count on it to get colder again. What I actually did was go do other things, and wait for dark. By 6:00 P.M. the temperature was well below freezing and the snow nicely crisped up. Truck and tractor came briskly on out – and their headlights on the untrodden pasture snow even had a kind of beauty.
At six-thirty I came crunching into the yard of my customer. He’s a newcomer from the city, a former New York accountant who’s been accounting in Vermont for just a couple of years. For that reason I called ahead to see if he really wanted his last load of wood to arrive on a snowy evening. Customers are expected to help unload.
“Sure, why not?” he’d said casually. “Wait any longer, and the cellar doors may be buried.”
He was waiting by the open bulkhead – off which, of course, he had just shoveled nine inches of snow. We began to pitch the wood down. I was wearing thermal boots, and overalls over my pants, and a wool jacket, and leather gauntlets. Snow-covered wood does get to feeling cold. But though he, too, had boots and a jacket, he hadn’t bothered with gloves. With his white accountant’s hands he gripped those icy logs and pitched them down cellar as lightly as if he’d been tossing grapefruits.
“I’ve got another pair of gloves in the truck,” I said after a minute. “You want to borrow them?”
“Oh, hell no,” he said. “It’s only half a cord. And the weather’s not very cold, anyway.”
If this is how a city accountant behaves after two years, what will he be like after ten? Probably be getting sore if we don’t have frosts in July. As for southern Californians, if any of them ever move here I firmly expect to see them riding down the hills on their surfboards, snow spraying up on both sides, dressed just as they would be at Hermosa Beach. Floyd and I will watch respectfully. But we won’t join them.
[1980]
How to Farm Badly (and Why You Should)
IN ONE OF Albert Payson Terhune’s dog books, there is a background figure of a rich city man who has bought a farm. His first act is to stock it with prize cattle and pedigreed sheep. Then he buys a lot of expensive farm machinery. Finally, eyes shining, he sets out to improve the pastures (he wants to grow prize hay), build the best fences in the county, and in general turn his farm into a showplace.
Terhune wrote that account sixty years ago. But the tendency he describes is still very much in evidence. When city people buy an old farm, not just as a venue for lawn parties, but because they are converts to country life, they usually get carried away. They start to fix up the whole farm the way you might fix up the interior of an old house.
This impulse is highly understandable. I have a bad case of Improver’s Itch myself. A month seldom goes by that I don’t fix up something or other on
my own farm, even if it’s only rebuilding a couple of rods of stone wall. Over the years I’ve handled a surprising amount of stone that serves no farm purpose whatsoever, and hasn’t since wire fencing came in. But I love doing it.
Furthermore, in the case of people who have bought a rundown old place, the impulse to fix is not only understandable but necessary. There are apt to be dead cars behind the barn. It makes every kind of sense to get them quickly off to a junk dealer. The fields are likely to be growing up to brush. The faster you start clearing, the better. Old fruit trees are sure to need pruning. The day you move in is not too soon to start – provided you know how to prune. All that I concede.
But the minute anyone starts thinking “showplace,” he or she is inviting about six kinds of trouble. Unless like Terhune’s Wall Street Farmer, you want to sink an annual fortune into the place – and unless like him you have a crew of hired hands to solve all the problems you are certain to create – you will be well advised to start out farming badly.
That statement needs immediate clarification. There is one kind of bad farming that is pure laziness or sheer ignorance, and that is a matter of not taking the one stitch now that will save nine later. In no way am I recommending it. Then there is a second kind that is bad farming only by the standards of agribusiness. What it requires is accepting your own limits and the limits of your land, and having the sense not to try for results that exceed those limits. This is what I am talking about.
Let me be as clear as possible. I don’t mean letting a hillside field erode into gullies because you plowed it wrong. Certainly I don’t mean getting a little flock of sheep and then watching them die of intestinal parasites because you didn’t know about boluses and balling guns. I don’t mean anything that harms the land.
What I do mean is avoiding most high technology. Not trying to achieve the “best” anything. Ignoring most (not all) advice put out by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Or to put it positively, being content with moderate yields, modest improvements, slow changes, old equipment. Being content with this for the first five years, anyway, and probably even after that, unless you’ve meanwhile turned into a professional farmer. (In which case you may not be reading books like this, anyway, which you’ll regard as sentimental. You’ll be reading Hog Farm Management or Agrichemical Age.)
Enough of exhortation, though. Examples are what convince. Let me give some. They’ll be Horrible Examples, of people who did try for the best, that person most usually being myself. Let me start with sheep.
Sheep have made a comeback in America since 1970. It is increasingly common for city people with country places to buy a few as their first venture into farming. Most do a little preliminary research – and quickly discover that they have a complicated choice to make. That’s true with anything one looks at closely. When I was a boy in the suburbs, I thought there were three kinds of potatoes – or would have if I had ever bothered to concentrate on so boring a subject. I thought there were real potatoes, sweet potatoes, and something called an Idaho potato, which you baked. Since I’ve been a farmer, I’ve personally grown fifteen varieties of potato, including the purplish ones shaped like and called Cow Horns, and am aware there are hundreds of others.
So in the ovine world. The newcomer finds that there is not just one woolly animal called “sheep,” as in the cute kids’ ads, but instead breed after breed. Nearly all sound appealing: tall lordly Suffolks with their dark faces and rapid weight gains, Romneys that yield such tasty legs of lamb, Finn crosses that are so incredibly prolific. The newcomer sits around ticking off the advantages of each and wondering which to get, as one might compare gas mileage, comfort, and acceleration when buying a car.
The one thing the newcomer doesn’t consider, usually, is getting an unpedigreed sheep. True, they’re cheaper. (Last year a friend of mine got a sort of mongrel ewe at an auction for $22 – and within a week she had twin lambs, which makes three sheep at $7.33 each. But that was an exceptional case.) The difference isn’t likely to be huge. You can usually get a good pedigreed lamb for sixty or seventy dollars, where you might pay thirty or forty dollars for a common animal. To a middle-class American, used to shelling out two or three thousand extra for a car that pleases him, what’s thirty bucks? Go for the good stuff, he thinks.
Certainly it’s what I thought when I got my first two lambs, which were Dorsets. What I failed to reflect on was that nearly all pedigreed sheep are highly specialized creatures. They’ve been bred for maximum wool yield, or maximum meat yield, or maximum breeding speed. They’ve had that done to them for hundreds of generations. What human beings have cheerfully sacrificed on their behalf is versatility and resilience. All sheep die easily, but on the whole pedigreed sheep have an even feebler grasp on life than ordinary sheep. They’re also more likely to need assistance in birthing. Owners of high-class sheep are often in the barn at 3:00 A.M. on a cold March night, helping to deliver high-class twins.
Neither of these, though, is the reason I wish now I had started with a couple of common lambs. My reason is grazing habits.
I had several aims in mind when I bought lambs. One, of course, was fresh lamb chops, organically raised. Another was sheepskins to put on car seats – it really does keep them cool – and daughters’ beds. But my main motive was to acquire a mobile weed-trimming unit. I had a small orchard that I wanted to clear of weeds and brush without getting into plowing and reseeding. I imagined my two little Dorset ram lambs tirelessly chewing away at the hardhack and goldenrod.
They did, I admit, eat the poison ivy patch that had come into one corner of the orchard. And sometimes they would nibble daintily at young dandelions. Otherwise, they ate only grass, and only certain kinds of that, and only at certain early growth stages. I’m not blaming them. They had been bred to put on weight fast; and to do it at the rate they were genetically conditioned for, they needed the best high-protein grass. Plus grain on the side.
Low-bred sheep, on the other hand, are used to making do with what’s available. They have their preferences, to be sure, but lacking first, second, and third choice, they can keep hide and hoofs together on almost any kind of pasture. They’re what in New England used to be called thrifty keepers. They’re what I should have bought. I might not have had any papers to show, but I would have gotten my orchard cleared. (Especially if I’d bought half a dozen lambs, instead of two.)
Time for another example. Following the Wall Street Farmer, let’s turn now to land improvement. Almost anyone buying an old farm is likely to get a worn-out field or two with the place. The grass is thin; there are ferns coming in; whole patches are spotted with moss. Sure signs of acidity and poor soil.
There is a natural and healthy tendency to want to restore such fields to good condition: have some soil tests made, order the lime and fertilizer, maybe get some clover and vetch going. I’m for it. So is everybody else. The county agent may be able to show you how you can get the government to help pay for the lime. Any agricultural text, old or new, is full of instructions to fertilize. Even poetry points that way.
What is more accursed
Than an impoverished soil, pale and metallic?
What cries more to our kind for sympathy?
says Robert Frost in the poem “Build Soil.” Horace and Vergil held the same view.
So, fine. Lime and fertilize. Spread manure, if you have any. But if you take my advice, you’ll do all these things in moderation. Try for good grass, but not exceptional grass – because if you have exceptional grass, it’s going to require exceptional care. Again, an example from my own experience.
Behind my house there is a fairly good hayfield. Seven acres. It has only a few stones and no slopes too steep to mow. With a little lime every decade and a little manure every year, it consistently yields 250 to 300 bales of hay a year. I mow it, and a neighbor with more equipment comes and does the raking and baling for me. We need only two sunny days. If I start mowing on Tuesday morning as soon as the dew is off, he can r
ake on Wednesday afternoon and bale before supper. That night the hay is safely in the barn and it’s nice bright dry hay. Then we let the grass recover for two or three weeks and turn calves in for the rest of the summer.
A decent seven-acre field can, of course, yield much more than 250 to 300 bales. Even in a single cutting, it can be made to yield twice that. Once a few years ago, when I had some horses to winter as well as my usual two or three beef cattle, I decided it would be silly to buy the extra hay when I could just as easily have a prize field. So I loaded it with chemical fertilizer.
The results were apparent right away. Grass that had been ten inches high the year before went up to twenty; and in the swales where it had been high to begin with, it looked something like a bamboo grove.
You can see what’s coming. That year I harvested the smallest quantity of good hay I have ever gotten. The mowing went all right, though slower than usual because the swathes were so heavy, and I kept bunching it up at the turns. But after that I had a steady series of disasters. I knew that heavy hay would be hard to dry, and I had been able to borrow a hay conditioner (an old one that worked something like a laundry wringer). In the intervals between getting the conditioner jammed, I was able to wring the juice out of most of the really tall grass. That helped – or at least I’m determined to think it did – but it didn’t help enough.
When my friend came to rake, he took one pitying look, and went home and got his tedder. In case you’re not familiar with tedders, they’re spidery-looking devices that turn thick grass over so that the sun can get at the bottom side. Then he waited a day and came back and raked. Some swathes were fully dry, and some weren’t. On that third afternoon, the sun still holding, we baled about ninety bales of good hay – and about thirty more with green locks, that would probably go musty. The rest we left. I spent until dark with a pitchfork, fluffing up the windrows. What I accomplished was to enable the nice rain we had the next morning to soak in even better.