in the furnace of this afternoon

These are hot days. The earth cracks open in a prayer for rain. Every day the wounds gape a little wider. Sometimes deprivation ensures that when the blessing comes, it will reach the deep, dark places inside us. Sometimes it engenders a desperate neediness, a greedy draining of the blessing that stops even a drop of goodness from spilling over us to run back to the river. These are the two parables the earth confesses under my feet while I scythe hay in the furnace of this afternoon. I need them both.

It is to me an unfortunate irony that after hundreds of years of the prophets tying drought to holy judgement that today, in a climate crisis for which we are demonstrably to blame, we have lost the imagination to hear God's word in this drought, telling us some things we'd rather not hear about ourselves. That so many of my co-religionists are at the forefront of denying the signs of the times is painfully sad.

At least it has gotten oppressively hot enough that the city newscasters no longer broadcast an outlook of uninterrupted sunshine as if it were a proclamation of good news.

My Boy Oscar

Here's a baby picture of Oscar, shortly after he got here in mid April. One half Milking Shorthorn, one quarter Brown Swiss, one eighth Jersey, one eighth Holstein, all pretty boy bull calf.

I couldn't say if that feeling welling up inside me was due to his gorgeous dark eyes, or the thought that finally, I was beholding a way of farming that would not give me that sick little feeling every time it ran out of fuel.

More to come.

In the thick of things

O, Dear Reader,

Spring came upon me and had to be lived rather than blogged. Here it is mid-June and I never found time to write about the crazy burbling of the Bobolinks, or the mossy blooming of the oaks, or the goldfinches and the Harris Sparrows and the Cowbirds and the Tree Swallows showing up all at once; I didn't write about the poplar leaves the size of nickels and the potatoes in the ground; about the surge of life and the blue of sky and the gold of finches, dandelions and marsh marigolds; about the mind-clearing balm of Gilead in my nose and the exuberant orange of Orioles in my eye.

God, the world is beautiful and busy in the spring. What an adolescent season. All of life clamoring and competing to happen and to be noticed and to reproduce and suddenly it's June and all those baby plants you started need to be weeded, row upon mundane row.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi.

By the way, Matthew and I did buy a pair of bull calves, Oscar and Ben. I love them. I promise I will tell you all about them when I get a chance.

Ballad of the Brokenhead

I've referred to this story obliquely in this blog's title. I thought it high time to include ithere. The story came to me thanks to local historian George Lalor, the insights about the impact of the shift from subsistence hunting to fur-profiteering came from the late Cree elder Percy Bird, the melody and the rhythm for the verses came from Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," and the rhymes came from staying up too late one winter night.


Ballad of the Brokenhead


I live on the banks of the old Brokenhead,
A river with a name and a story of dread.
Long before you, and long before me,
These banks were the home of the Little Poplar Cree.

One day a trav'ler brought news from the East
Of the pale white faces, hairy like beasts,
Who traded in goods indescribably rare;
Their long sticks of thunder could fell prey anywhere.

Their blades and their pottery never broke, never burned;
But to trade for this prize, a new way must be learned:
To kill every beaver, every otter and mink,
To pile up their hides, and let their meat stink.
 Chorus:
Brokenhead
Brokenhead
What can't be undone
is oft left unsaid
What can't be undone
is oft left unsaid

They'd have to kill more than their families could eat;
What would this do to the harmony sweet
Of taking from the river no more than you need?
The old ones feared curses and sorrows of greed.

The hunters grew restless as questions were raised;
The young men had expected their ambitions be praised.
"But what of the women, the old and the young?
Who will protect us when you go for the gun?”
"When the willow's in bud, we'll leave you alone;
when the willow leaves fall, our canoes will come home
Then should ever our foes trespass on our lands,
We'll reach out and fell them with fire in our hands.

 chorus
And in the fall it was true, as the willow leaves fell,
The men sighted their homes, but caught no homely smell;
No fires were burning, no children were heard;
From the inside their lodges came no greeting word.

Dread warriors of the Sioux the camp had detected
And made easy prey of the Cree unprotected.
The white sand had swallowed the flow of blood red,
Where scattered and shattered lay the Cree's broken heads.

Now I'm haunted by spirits here long before me
I'm haunted by the cries of the Little Poplar Cree,
I'm haunted by the words of the old ones who said,
“Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead.”

Brokenhead, Brokenhead
What can't be undone is oft left unsaid
 Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead

The Little Poplar Cree who hunted these shores,
Where the otter still plays and the eagle still soars,
Are gone like the mist that lifts in the morning
From the river whose name is a chill mournful warning.

Brokenhead, Brokenhead
What can't be undone is oft left unsaid (x2)
Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead (x2)

 
Brokenhead, December 2010


mr

A Titanic Metaphor

The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble. There was such a sense of bounty  in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down."

- filmmaker James Cameron

This mother of all shipwrecks, is, among other things, a motherlode of metaphor: the sinking of the "unsinkable," the flagship of industrial engineering and fantastical luxury, the very vessel of technological hubris; the once largest moving man-made object on Earth, too massive and cruising too fast to pull out of a collision course with a large, cold, hard fact of nature, of which the humans could only see the tip.

A hundred years and hundreds of dives later, this ship still holds many haunting metaphors, depths to be plumbed. I want to spend this anniversary thinking about the lifeboats.

A lifeboat is an interesting presence. A reminder that the much bigger boat on which it rides could fail, and that survival could depend on this much simpler, radically scaled-down version of the big ship. What other institutions carry such overt warnings and preparations for their own demise? Imagine a school, or a government, a business or a church openly prepping its students, citizens, customers, parishioners: There is a chance that this will all come undone. In the event of our institution's collapse, the essentials needed to preserve life are the following....

Noah built a boat like that once, much to the ridicule and chagrin of his neighbours. The ark was an embarrassment to their civic faith, their belief that their society had grown too big to fail.

But the sea suffers no fools, and sailors have learned that times do come to abandon the big ship, and get into those little boats.

The Titanic, famously, had far too few lifeboats. The White Star Line gave meticulous attention to the design of the Turkish baths and to the ten course dinner menus on their luxury cruise ship, but not to the essentials of preserving life. In the more than two hours it took for her to sink, desperate, painful decisions had to be made. Some women would not to get in the life boats, refusing to leave their husbands, for whom there was no room. One man dressed as a woman so he could jump the cue. Few third class passengers, male or female, ever made it onto the boat decks.

Now that I think about it, the interesting thing about the Titanic lifeboats is not that there were too few, but that there were any at all. There persisted a seafaring culture of caution, a humility before the sea, that even the opulent and overconfident "unsinkable" Titanic could not completely cast aside.

What are the traditions still carried in the DNA of the wider culture that caution and prepare us for cataclysm? Well, the biblical tradition, handmaiden to Empire though it has admittedly been, is really one of the most honest and sober accounts we have of the corruption and the collapse, again and again, of Empire: the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans - sometimes their machinations benefit the Jews, most often they hurt them, but never do they last.

The Bible contains a history of the Fertile Crescent's "cradle of civilization" as seen from the underside of the great powers. From this view is revealed not only the ugly violence of these grand civilizations, but also their vulnerability. Even Israel's own national history is often told in a way most unflattering to its officials and their schemes. Again and again, the Bible warns against seeking security in the designs of "the nations." Security, counterintuitively, is to be sought in an unseen God, and in compliance to a covenant of justice, drawn up with a people much smaller and poorer than their come-and-go imperial neighbours.

Is this our culture's lifeboat?

Wes Hartley, the leader of band that played on while Titanic went down, at first played showtunes, at the captain's behest, to mollify the nervous passengers. But then, when the unthinkable turned inevitable, he turned to hymns. The final song, with which Hartley prepared himself and the others left on board to enter the deep was, "Nearer My God, To Thee."

I was thinking about the Titanic nine years ago, when Ploughshares Community Farm was not yet a place, and barely a notion. Drawn to do something rural and agrarian, and ready leave behind more urban, more activist pursuits, I journalled, “I am giving up on shouting over the orchestra or winning the ear of the captain. But maybe some of us could see about improving the seaworthiness of those lifeboats.”

 

Big O, little o... (Part II)

At the very end of Judah's existence as a kingdom, when its defensive and diplomatic stratagems were all played out, the prophet Jeremiah hoisted the yoke of an ox to his shoulders and walked the streets of Jerusalem, in a dramatic enactment of Judah's future. People were appauled.

I think about this story as I contemplate yoking oxen to work our fields. The very idea is an affront to the narrative of progress.

The official court prophet Hananiah grabbed the yoke from Jeremiah's hunched shoulders and angrily broke its bars. Jeremiah's "word from the Lord" predicted a future of servitude under the Babylonian Empire. Hananiah's "word from the Lord" insisted that any such humbling would be brief; that Judah's manifest destiny was to carry on the Davidic line in an unbroken trajectory of growth and success. Servitude could never define the throne of David. It was unthinkable that the Lord could let a son of David - his Annointed One - suffer the humiliation predicted by Jeremiah. History (and Jesus) showed Jeremiah the true prophet.

Gas prices went up by 8 cents a liter this week. Already there are those arguing that this jolt to the economy is artificial and uncalled for. It is the result of market "speculation." Suddenly, rankled Americans are borrowing arguments from the despised socialists: these out of control gas prices need to be legislated down. A few lone voices in the wilderness offend us with a more blunt assessment: Oil is finite; so oil-eating cultures must be also. We cannot make cheap again what we are busily making scarce.

Back to the oxen, then. Here's what I've learned:

When compared with horses, there are a number of reasons why oxen have historically been the traction animal of choice for small-holders. Cattle offer the triple benefits of milk, muscle and meat. Of these, milk and muscle power improve the livelihoods of poor farmers far more than meat. I remember reading a sociology paper that argued that this was the root of beef-eating taboos in India. In a hungry year, an Indian peasant might be tempted to slaughter his cattle to feed his family the rich protein walking around in his bare fields. But the short-term gain is far outweighed by the long-term supply of milk protein and work-energy offered by a dairy-traction animal.

Another advantage is that an ox yoke is a simpler and cheaper device than horse harness. Harness is tricky to make: lots of precise measurements and lots of stress points that need excellent fastenings. A yoke is basically a (carefully shaped) thick wooden beam with an iron loop or two. A lot of the simplification is possible because an ox has horns. These prevent the yoke from slipping forward over the head of the animal when braking or walking downhill.

But the biggest selling point for me is that the typical fear response of oxen is opposite that of horses. Horses tend to bolt, oxen tend to balk.  Picture a stampeding herd of wild mustangs fleeing their predators, then picture a group of musk oxen circling tight around their young and holding formation against nipping, harassing wolves. Scared oxen stand still.

As a novice teamster and father of  two girls I want to involve in my farm adventures, I would much rather deal with an animal that is occasionally difficult to get moving than an animal that one day takes off with me, with sharp and heavy field equipment clattering menacingly behind.

As for breeds, I am learning about "dual" and "triple purpose" cattle. Cows, like everything else in the industrial economy, have become single-purposed specialists. Holsteins put everything in their body into milk; Angus put on meaty pounds, quickly.

For oxen, the ideal is a mix: animals with the easy handling of a dairy animal, but the bulk of some of the beefier cattle. I am learning about old breeds: Milking Shorthorns, Dexters, Brown Swiss and Gelbvieh - breeds more befitting an ancient, energy-constrained, small-farming future.

I should acknowledge somewhere soon here that I could not be contemplating this transition to a more ancient normal on my own. What I am learning about oxen, I am learning with the help of friends. I have the strange privilege to have as friends two graduates of the Tillers International ox-farming school, Russ Dyck and Bernard Cook. And here at Ploughshares, I have Matthew as a co-conspirator on oxen. Everytime I make a phone call or read something new, Matthew matches me stride for stride with his own research and enthusiasm. Alone, I would not have the hutzpah to try this. But together...we seem to be, as the saying goes, equally yoked. Together, we might pull this off.

There's a pair of Shorthorn-Brown Swiss calves expected in Vita, that, if they're both male, and if another regular buyer opts out, could be ours for $75 a piece.

Why do we want to farm like peasants? You might say, I suppose, that we are actually coming to believe in a kingdom wherein the meek inherit the earth. In the land of progress, this is heresy, we know. Please don't be angry with us.

Big O, little o, what begins with O? (Part I)

On the front cover of the most recent issue of the Canadian Organic Grower is a photograph that fascinates me: two Milking Shorthorn oxen standing in yoke. Somehow, they are the picture of both humility and of tremendous power, all in one: Their heads lowered, their shoulders massive, their horns straight ahead, obediently bearing the burden their teamster has laid on them. They could gore him with a single flick of the head; instead, they quietly work his field.

This image, and the accompanying article, speak to me of a parallel tension in the organic food movement, a tension between the way of power and the way of humility. Oxen, as the article makes clear in the first sentence, represent a radically downscaling approach: "Cattle have always been, and continue to be, the most common source of traction power on small farms throughout the world." (Read: this is how the little guys do it everywhere other than the wealthy West.)

Organics is at a crossroads. Go big or go home. There are the Gary Hirshbergs of the world - CEO of Stonyfield Farms, which sells its line of organic dairy products on the shelves of Walmart - who warn us that for meaningful decreases in pesticides, growth hormones and carbon emissions, we have to convert the big food system to organic practices. To fret about the grassroots, small-scale, local, "small o" organic movement losing its soul is to "make the perfect the enemy of the good."

You can bet Tractors to Tonka Trucks Stonyfield Farms are not tilled by oxen.

In many ways, Canadian Organic Growers has championed the Big O approach in recent years. The push for a national organic standard, the legal protection of the "o" word only for those with official certification has caused many of my "little o" organic, locally oriented farmer friends to distance themselves from COG and its associated certifying agencies. We ourselves have decided to drop our certification this year. We may re-certify in future, but for now, the paperwork and the financial cost of certification is not justified by our small-scale enterprises, and means little to the friends and family who buy from us.

So, is COG really serious about promoting oxen-scaled farming? Or are the oxen on the cover of their magazine like the little red barn on the logo of Stonyfield: a notional image, a marketing fiction designed to create a romantic association, and obscure the very destruction of this way of life which industrial upscaling entails?

Which raises another question for me: How serious am I about reading up on oxen? Is this a romantic dream for me, a pleasant diversion from "real" farm planning, or is renewing this ancient tradition, as the article concludes, a way of "closing an energy loop on the farm?" Does the climate/energy crisis reveal tractor-farming as the actually soft-headed and rosy future vision?

We have friends who farmed with water buffalo oxen in Burma all their lives. Our Karen refugee friends tell a creation story about the this animal that reveal its centrality in their economy:

Once, God summoned the water buffalo to deliver a message to the people. "Tell them that this is how often they can eat: Adults twice a day and children three times a day."

The water buffalo went to the people, but when he reached them, he told them, "This is what God says: 'Adults can eat three times a day, and children can eat as often as they like.'"

Upon the water buffalo's return, God asked him. "What did you tell them?" When the water buffalo told God what he had told the people, God became angry with the water buffalo for changing the instructions: "If you want to make big promises like that, you will have to help deliver on them. Now you must spend your life helping the people with their crops, so they can eat that often."

And that is how the water buffalo became a beast of burden.

There are many-layered teachings in this agrarian wisdom-story:

• There are sacred limits on how much one ought to eat.
• Humans and the creation are bound together in divinely ordained interdependent relationships.
• There is a tendency to tell people what they want to hear, rather than a harder truth.
• The difference a water buffalo ox makes is the difference between a life where adults eat only twice a day and children three times, and a life where adults eat three square meals and children can eat as often as they like. As our friend Naw Kay Seng says, "a simple life, but a good life."

I am reminded here of an echoed wisdom, this time by way of Wendell Berry, another farmer-sage:

"Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits. They understand and agree to the proposition that there is “this much and no more.” This is the understanding that induces thrift, family coherence, neighborliness, local economies....The agrarian sense of abundance comes from the experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits." (from The Agrarian Standard)

How does a culture that honors limits: the limits of soil, of animals, of workers and watersheds, help turn around a culture founded on defying limits? By getting out in front and proving we can play ball with the big boys, that we can ramp up, mechanize and standardize organic food to penetrate the mass-market?

I suspect the limits will assert themselves. I am grateful to the Big O movers and shakers, for blunting some of the damage being done by the industrial food system. But when the real limits of cheap energy, of ecological carrying capacity, soil depletion, etc. do assert themselves, any peacable future one can hope for will count on humans who have learned to imagine, then live, "a simple life, but a good life."

I imagine the farmers among those humans will be working their fields with grass-, rather than oil-eaters.

My next post will look at some of the practical considerations I'm gleaning on ox-farming, mixed with some biblical tangents.

Until then....

Big O, little o, what begins with o? Oxen on organic outposts getting off of oil, that begins with o.