work

Good work is usually a combination of the physical and the mental.  It is, in any case, infused with wisdom.  It is wisdom that can orient work toward where it seems the universe is going, toward what we think the Creation needs.  And it is wisdom applied through work by which we humans are best able to approach the spiritual.

So then, my project of pulling up old barbed wire-a full mile of it, all of it five strand usually with the bottom one or two wires buried in the sod-has so far cost numerous scratches on my forearms, two tick bites and shredded beyond use one pair of leather gloves and the sleeves of two work shirts.  I am half done.

This is what is generally thought to be hard labor.  And it is hard and nasty.  And so far, it is done alone, which is a bad way to live a human life.  But it is not hopeless.  I work in the breeze and sunshine, surrounded by birdsong.  The wire is brittle with age and rust.  Most of my rolls are a collection of short broken pieces.  I learn a respect for the capacity of hard work shown by the long ago farmer who installed all this, before he gave it up and entered it into CRP

This is hard labor done for a reason.  This place badly needs grazing animals.  And grazing animals must be protected from barbed wire.  Around me I can see in the grass the swales created by tillage on too steep, highly erodible land.  The cropping system required as a prerequisite to CRP entry sent far too much soil down the creek, beautiful though it is today as it meanders through the grass.

I see where the wire was cut to let the tractor into one after another of the crop fields.  He had a better idea in the first place.  But he was supported in that by neither the agriculture industry or the government.  What is the future for us, a people that find it too hard, or beneath them to think of the care of our land?

University of Chicago economics

The Chicago school of economics, featuring thinkers like Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Hayek, students like Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, to name a few and populisers like Thomas Friedmann have pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of agricultural thought and practice with their monomaniacal focus upon profits.  Witness  Perdue the Secretary of Agriculture echoing Earl Butz once again on how the "big get bigger and the small go out."

And the people clump up in the cities looking for real employment and finding mostly "gigs" while the soil life disappears and the soil itself goes to the Gulf of Mexico.  We will not change any of this until we once again honor the profession of "agriculturalist", that rare person who attaches him/her self to place, who tries to understand this particular soil, this climate and these particular people, who understands that farming calls for physical and mental and emotional work and is among the highest callings for mankind.

"Farming" that focuses exclusively upon profit is not farming at all, but rather the grand old American tradition of enrichment by taking the gifts of Creation and turning them into money, broken people, and junk.  Just like the rest of our economy.

coronavirus

It seems evident that the corona virus likes to spread in slaughterhouses, as these have been the primary vectors for the pandemic here in the Midwest. The racist says that the susceptibility of brown skinned people to the virus is proof they are in some basic way different from us. There is another explanation though, one based in fact rather than prejudice. To see it we have to ask why it is that brown skinned people are slaughtering the hogs.

To know where we are, we must understand where we were. And in 1973 I was working at the University of Minnesota’s Veterinary Hospital where I was responsible for supervising veterinary students in their part time work at the University. I struck up a friendship with one of these and soon understood that this was his first experience working during the school term. He was a senior at the time, soon to graduate.

The usual route to a veterinary license at the University of Minnesota is by taking a four year course of study in animal science. Some are able to gain entry to the veterinary program after two years in animal science, more are allowed in after three years, and some spend the entire four years of the animal science program before they are admitted. Some never are. It is a pretty tough program. I cannot recall whether my friend got in after two, three or all four years. He was a pretty bright fellow, that I remember.

He told me one day that his entire time at University, through whatever number of years in animal science and then the four pretty intense years at Vet Med itself was sponsored by checks written by his father. As a condition he was allowed to work only during summers, not during the school term. Then he was expected to study. His father relented and relaxed the rule for his last few months at the program. His father was a slaughterhouse worker who often worked the evening shift because it paid ten cents an hour more. My friend loved and deeply admired his father. From today’s viewpoint this seems a fantasy. I cannot feature a slaughterhouse worker sponsoring his child at University today.

As always, there are steps between then and now. Powerful people in industry were told in the early eighties that labor laws and rules would no longer be enforced. Soon after, local P 9 of the meat cutters union struck and were locked out by Hormel for about two years, in my memory. My friend’s father’s union. The workers eventually came back, some of them at least, for wages not much more than half of what they had formerly. Smaller slaughter facilities through out the Midwest followed suit. Increasingly immigrants and foreign nationals did the work.

Other changes followed, made possible by the lack of a strong union voice. Line speeds were steadily increased. Both bathroom breaks and speaking to others on the crew were disallowed in some facilities. Workers were crowded. Repetitive motion injuries skyrocketed.

Then, with the libertarian philosophy increasingly dominant in government, the job of meats inspection began to be passed from the government to the large meat companies. Today, if you want to be sure you are getting inspected meat, you really should buy as directly from the farmer as possible. Small plants must still be inspected, either by the USDA or the state’s “Equal To” system.

There are some questions we should ask before we jump to any conclusions about immigrants and foreign nationals. Where did the money go that was “saved” by underpaying workers? Is any of it still in mid America helping our families and communities or is it all on Wall Street? How bad are conditions in the home country that migration to employment in an American meat plant as they currently run looks like a good idea? And importantly now in this time of pandemic, can sickness be blamed on racial difference or is it rather a consequence of bad, stressful, and crowded working conditions and immune systems weakened by stress and high blood pressure related to coping with public hatred, bad housing and bad food? A quick tour of any grocery store will show that, in our country, cheap food is almost always bad food. Weak immune systems open the door for the virus.

The richer we get (some of us) the poorer we are (all of us)!

climate

I saw a story on the public last night about a place in Mississippi called Turkey Creek, a low area not more than three miles from the Gulf where black families have lived since they were freed in the 1860's  In the face of a stream of proposals out of the local development officials and the usual brood of developers for a traffic bypass and development of recreational facilities-hotels, golf courses, condos, etc-which would fill in the wetlands and vastly increase the flooding risk for the community, all of which got the protesting homeowners labeled "dumb bastards" by the mayor and "whiners" by Governor Barbour, the situation seemed hopeless.

Then they began to get conservation easements in place and "historical place" designations for some of the houses, all pushed and sponsored by relatively well off environmentalists and preservationists and their groups.  By the end of the story, the pressures had eased somewhat on the community, just in time, as it turned out, for the BP oil spill disaster.

But I wonder, for those of us battling to keep small farms and farmers viable, if there is not a lesson here.  We have put forward the human story of these farms and communities for several generations now, to no avail.  Now we have another "farm crisis" which will once again result in fewer farmers.  Perhaps we need to make our arguments based upon the need for a certain number of people on the land to facilitate the proper movement of carbon mostly back to the soil, where so much of it originated.  Will the very real threat from climate destruction motivate change where simple exposition of the local human misery caused by our current approach to agriculture has failed?  Maybe the deteriorating climate threatens the right people, the powerful people?

fence

Took down about one half mile of temporary fence this afternoon.  We had it up to protect the hay from winter foraging cows.  Took about an hour, spent in the sun walking and doing easy work.  I am lucky indeed!

Spring

Spring arrives!  Pastures show green from a distance now.  Cattle are sick of their winter feed and will begin leaning longingly on the fence. 

walk

Like a deer yarded up in the snowy river bottom chewing on the diminishing store of palatable twigs, I had become sufficiently disgusted with my winter’s restriction and wanted to get out on the prairie. Grabbing my walking stick, I headed for the fields beyond the yard full of hope that I might go some distance without the need of snowshoes on this warmer day in the middle of February. I was not disappointed for the snow was hard enough with the constant wind and the few warmer temperatures to bear my weight. I judged it to vary from eight inches to a foot and a half in depth, depending upon where the wind had left it. Nowhere did it fail to cover the land. This has not always been the case in my lifetime here, but it does seem to be an increasing trend lately.

Setting out for the back corner where I had set temporary fence around the new hay seeding to protect it as the cow herd foraged and rummaged through the corn stalks, I resolved to walk that fence if I could and see how much of it was held in the icy crust on top.

Polywire held in the grip of the icy crust cannot often be pulled loose without straining and breaking the wire. And if it is left til spring, the melt will bear it down getting it within the reach of the mice that have spent the winter under the snow feasting on the residue meant for the farm’s cows. And they will chew the wire apart at various intervals. But all of it hung in place between the posts.

I noticed the color of the snow. Most of it was quite white but those areas along the west and north boundaries of the farm, just down the prevailing north and west winds from the neighbor’s tillage were beginning to gray and some of the leeward edges of the snow drifts that were high enough to slow the wind showed delicate patterns traced in black. The same was true of the edges of the hay field we had tilled to prepare it for corn planting in the coming spring. The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) regards all soil in my part of the county as non highly erodible land (NHEL). The elements beg to differ, and if I am serious about farming responsibly I must hold myself to account for my role in it.

But it was in a sense, a walk over the wind made visible, for the snow lay in drifts on top of drifts, some of it fantastical in shape with irregular scoops underneath the forward edge of the original drift where the wind had managed to scour out some of the softer snow underneath the icy surface. Much of the snow surface was pockmarked with the effects of a short prior thaw, but this was overlaid with oblong drifts of newer whiter snow. The soil life and the new dormant hay plants seemed safe to me, not always the case here when snow is lighter and the winds are able to move it all to the protective tree groves and the winter livestock areas.

There is an earnest teenage Swedish girl traveling the earth these days using whatever mode of transport that is not a jet plane which she regards as unnecessarily wasteful of the earth’s gifts. She means to go wherever world leaders gather and lecture and harangue and shame them without mercy for their lack of attention to the deteriorating situation with the climate. I find myself cheering for her. Go Greta! But what I fear she is finding is that even though she has somehow slipped through the cracks in the wall that allows these masters of the universe types to determinedly ignore any who rise to challenge them, her words are not as effective as she must wish. And I think that is because these elites know very well that even if they were inclined to impose upon themselves the discipline to give up some of their advantages in favor of a better world for all people and a healthier earth, they are in reality powerless to effect this kind of change.

Top down management decisions cannot cure what ails the earth and its climate, though such people could resolve to try to get out of the way of those that can. And those that can are all of us, if we choose to. But there are major issues with us:

• How do we care for the earth if we are not at home on it? Because we as humans are limited creatures, our care is necessarily so. When I took my little wintertime walk, I was repeating what I had done many times over many seasons in my seventy odd years of life. I am familiar here. There is no such thing as being at home on all of earth. Globalization is a delusion. A home must be human sized, because we are. And that means there must be many of us to properly care for what we have been given.
• How can we try to help heal the earth? Are we not allowing technology increasingly to come between our life and other life on our farms? Don’t we each year have fewer people on the land? And do we not have the economy forcefully separating us from the work we ought to be doing?
• We have a long tradition, both political and religious, of despising that which is close and yearning after what is afar. Why do we understand Pluto better than the soil and its life under our feet?
• Do we have the nerve and resolve to get our wants under sufficient control that we do not destroy that which we did not make and which sustains us in order to fulfill our every whim?
• Lifelong care of something precious must be preceded by taking delight in it. But delight is far too much an oddity in the world we have built around us. If we knew how to delight, that world would not be what it is.

I was not always the man who just took a walk in the snow. The idea of walking slowly in the cold, of noticing the wind scallops in the snow, of musing over the difference between what is and what was would not have given me pause twenty years ago. But the time in farming here and coping with agribusiness as it appears in our country have made me sober up and think that I must have missed a lot of sign posts on the way to where I am now.

And so I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land. And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets hitting the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and gone on on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot tall prairie grass, the sound that our grandfathers heard in this place.

The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry. They cannot be theorized and imposed from above or bought and paid for.