Tag: agriculture

A Broken Connection to the Land

My wife, Glenda, our two Labradors, Tok and Fundy and our third Nova Scotia garden

In 1971, after college graduation — I moved to the Nova Scotia shore and began rebuilding a 200 year old farm house still standing because of its massive hand-hewn and pegged beams. That first winter I immersed myself in gardening books and magazines, extending my limited gardening knowledge while trying to pick the right varieties that would thrive in the North Mountain’s short, cold and foggy summer. That first May on the homestead, we had a cold frame, and we started working the land as early as possible. Even with the huge, years old piles of chicken manure getting a garden going in the heavy clay sod was a real challenge for us first time serious gardeners. While we had a tractor, three furrow plow, and manure spreader, we had not gotten them early enough to plow our garden plot the previous fall before the snows came.
In spite of the challenges, it was a bountiful garden, yielding even corn and tomatoes which aren’t easy to grow in the coastal fog. My mother and her sister came up to teach us how to preserve our food for winter. Had I studied colonial American history after that first season of farming instead of before going back to the land, Jefferson’s thoughts would have meant a lot more to me.
Thomas Jefferson believed that “independent, land-owning farmers (‘yeoman farmers’)” were the bedrock of American democracy. Over fifty years of getting my hands dirty have been convinced me that a connection with the land is one of the most important spects of our lives. Being on the land was part of my consciousness well before I started gardening in the summer of 1972. I came from a long line of farmers and millers.

My powerful desire to have land and work that dirt was deeper than most topsoil.
I am certain that I will never understand how that came to be.
But the city was never for me. The strange unnatural color of the night made sleep hard to find.
The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when our lives are gone.
The land was at the center of it all, so how could you understand anything without being on the land?
You take whatever road you can find to get to the land even if you have to build the road yourself.

Paraphrase of Page 22, paperback version, The Road to My Country —David Sobotta

That connection to the land teaches some powerful lessons. One is that you can do everything right and end up with nothing except the choice to push yourself and try again with the hope that this time you will be successful.
You learn to appreciate the unyielding will of a seed to germinate and grow sometimes only to fall victim to a crow, cutworm, or insect.
One of the most important lessons is that when you are successful, that success is directly porportional to the effort that you have expended.
Once you throw animals into the mix, it becomes clear that when you have responsibilities to animals or others, you cannot just blow them off. Your responsibility is a sacred trust.
The great lesson of all is that there are jobs that need to be done and some of them will not get done unless you take them as yours. You can be sure you have grown into the role when you know that you cannot walk away.
These lessons are not easy ones, and not surprisingly they are best learned on the land.
In today’s world it seems impossible for everyone to have their own piece of land. For a young person to become a farmer requires far more resources than almost anyone has.
However, if the connection to the land is so important why not teach it in our schools. Educate the children of today about the importance of farms, especially family ones. I believe that schools in non-urban areas could add gardens to their campuses. Why not have today’s children learn about composting, building soil, planting seeds, and transplanting vegetable plants. Small orchards could be established and students could learn pruning and horticulture. Learning how their food is grown and what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate are valuable lessons. Any food grown could be taken to food kitchens.
If it is important to teach student financial literacy, writing, math, and computer skills, surely it is important to teach them life skills relating to growing food for themselves and others. Courses like this could be intertwined with the history of our population shifts to urban areas and the rise of factory farms. In learning about growing plants students are learning about recycling and composting required for building healthy, sustainable soils. In teaching students about the land we are creating a potential pipeline of young people interested in farming or at least cognizant of the challenges faced by farmers.
People talk about the importance of national service. What if an option for a national service program is helping family farmers for the summer. When we had our cattle herd in the seventies in New Brunswick, I got a call from a friend who asked me to take in his teenage son and teach him responsibility. He was sure his son was headed down the wrong path. He came to stay and work with us. He had a bedroom in our house and ate meals with us. We worked him pretty hard for several months. He learned to drive tractors and he made his share of mistakes.. I don’t take credit for turning him around but I do think we helped him appreciate hard work and attention to detail. He left our farm ready for college. He went on to get his doctorate and become a professor at an American university.
Even urban schools could adopt vacant lots and turn them into gardens. Failing that we could set up summer farm camps where the efforts of campers help grow food for food banks.
It is really time to realize the importance of giving a new generation a connection to the land which could create a generation of young farmers who care enough about the land to maybe put down their cell phones occasionally. If we don’t create farmers, at least we will have a group of much more educated young voters.

Years on the farm, calving season

Calving barn under construction 1975

Many years ago in the seventies my wife and I were running a cattle farm located about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. This is the first in a series about our life on the farm

We eventually had about two hundred head of cattle with around 65 calves being born each year. The calves were typically born in February and March which as you might guess is a cold, snowy time in the part of Canada where we lived. For some reason, most calves like to be born at night.

Raising cattle is not the kind of thing where lots of help is available unless you have a a large family. Calving season is especially tough because it demands 24 hours a day attention. I would make two to three trips a night to our calving area which was in the woods around the second barn we built. It is hard to get out of a warm bed, suit up for the cold, and head outside not knowing what you would find.

The walk up the hill to the small field by the woods where the cattle were fenced was not a long one. Even with the walk back to the house it was only about six tenths of a mile. It seemed much longer in blowing snow especially since a good part of the walk went through the grove of tall spruce trees that separated our farm house from the barns.

Of course there were no street lights in the spruce forest. You had to go on that walk no matter what the weather. If I found a cow that had calved, I would walk the new calf to the barn between my legs and the new mother would follow. I would put the calf and cow in a stall filled with nice clean straw. Sometimes there would be more than one birth during a night. Depending on the weather the cow and calf would stay in the open front barn two to three days and then go back to join the herd. I had a larger pen in the barn where I could turn the cow and calve if things got crowded in the individual pens.  

Once the cow and calf went back with herd, the calves had a special place for protection. The front part of the barn was arranged so that the calves could get under cover on dry straw during wet weather. With the barn facing south it made a nice place for them on a sunny day. Sometimes the straw looked like it was blanketed with calves. I remember looking over there one time and my oldest daughter who had just started school was sitting there in the sunshine in the middle of a dozen sleeping red and black Angus calves.

My relatives who were back in North Carolina asked me more than once if the walk in the dark scared me. I would always calmly tell them that walking through the dark woods in area most would call wilderness was safer than walking around Boston when I was in college.There was nothing in the woods that could harm me especially in the winter. All the bears and there were lots of them were hibernating. The moose were deep in the swamps and the rest of the critters were more afraid of me than I was of them.

There is one thing almost certain about the northern woods. When the temperature is down around minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit, there are no crazed muggers hiding in the three to four feet of snow in the spruce forest. They would be frozen like a Popsicle pretty quick.

The only good thing about calving season was that it was over in six to eight weeks. Getting the calves out of the snowy, wet weather was a good prescription for healthy calves. No one at the department of agriculture told us that this was the way we should raise calves. We figured it out ourselves. They also though that it was impossible to raise cattle using round bales. We put up over two hundred each year and proved that they worked. We could have used another barn for the bales but there was not a lot of money in cattle at the time.

In our ten years raising cattle, we never had a vet on the farm for a sick calf. I sometimes struggle to believe that myself and the fact that I cannot remember ever losing a calf. There were plenty of other adventures like the time a teenager on a motorbike chased a dozen heifers deep into the woods. It took most of the summer to get them back but that is a story for next time.