D is for Diversified

My kids were home on Fall Break this past week.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in our neck of the woods, a full week off from school at the height of the fall season.  We didn't have this kind of pause when I was in school in the '80s and '90s, or even when I was teaching in the 2000s.  But I'll take it.  I actually think it's a very good thing.  I'm generally in favor of opportunities for kids and families to extend their learning outside the traditional classroom.  Or just outside, full stop.  Much of the medicine our bodies and souls need can be found, free for the taking, out of doors.*

I might have planned a few outdoor family excursions for the kids' week off, had it not been for one giant magnet that has kept us close to home:  the birth of our dairy cow's new calf.  Stella was due to give birth the week before last – her official due date was October 6 – but since the broader calving "window" can extend ten days or so on either side of that, all the plans in our lives for the last few weeks have come with the caveat:  "unless Stella is in labor."

In the week leading up to her due date, Stella showed a new sign of imminent delivery almost every day: the disappearance of ligaments around her tailbone and hipbones, swollen lady parts, a bulge on her right side, and finally a sunken look below her ribs from the calf's "drop" into the birth canal.  So I was somewhat surprised when October 6 came and went with no baby. 

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long.  Stella went into active labor in the middle of the afternoon on October 8 and gave birth to a healthy little bull calf less than two hours later.  Leo had arrived!  And my girls got to witness the whole process from beginning to end.  What a gift!  Quite a way to kick off Fall Break.  And I'm pretty sure the barn counts as "out of doors."

The girls also got to watch as Stella's epic mothering instincts then went into hyper-drive: she eagerly licked Leo clean, lowing softly to him all the while, and finally nuzzled him to stand (with a little help from yours truly).  She had him up and nursing in just over half an hour.  Right off the bat, he got a good dose of colostrum, the "liquid gold" that precedes milk and carries so many of the antibodies crucial to a calf's health.

I milked out a gallon of colostrum the next morning – the first of many twice-a-day milkings that will bookend my days for the next several weeks, until Leo is big enough to consume a sufficient amount of Stella's milk that I can drop my milking for our household consumption to once per day.  I chilled and then separated the colostrum into small jars for freezing.  I texted two of my friends with beef cattle operations to let them know it's available, come next calving season. 

My ten-year-old, Emma, and I talked about how ranchers often find themselves in need of colostrum, if a momma cow dies from complications of calving.  It's not uncommon for ranchers to milk colostrum from the warm body of dead cow, in an effort to save the calf, who must have colostrum within the first 12-24 hours of life or their odds of survival drop to near-zero.  And though powdered colostrum can be found in many feed stores, a stash of the real stuff can be a boon to the whole local farming and ranching community.  Even a little bit can bridge a calf until some commercial colostrum can be secured.

Not a bad lesson for a fourth-grader's Fall Break.  We'll take it.

For that matter, I'll take all the lessons the farm has to give, whether it's Fall Break or not.  I'll take these two especially, which simultaneously came into focus at one point for me this last week: (1) accept help and (2) take full account of what's going right, so that what's going wrong – and something is always going wrong – doesn't unduly skew your vision. 

So I mentioned those twice-a-day milkings.  Like "two-a-day" sports team practices, these sessions structure my day during this intense period while Leo is small.  Having breastfed all three of my own children, I can vouch for the fact that twice-a-day milking of a Jersey dairy cow is easier than nursing a human baby.  But when I was nursing my human babies, I did not yet have a whole homestead to run.  And, while he couldn't share the nursing duties per se, my husband could take over with the babies when I was simply too tired to do all the things. 

Now, however, it's all on me. It just so happens that Brad is recovering from reconstructive shoulder surgery right now and can help with almost none of the farm chores. So the twice daily milkings feel like a lot on top of everything else.  Not that Brad could help with the milking itself anyway, even with two fully functional arms; Stella has previously made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she does not want Brad to milk her, not even with a milking machine.  But before the surgery, at least he could – and did – help with most other farm tasks, the biggest ones being moving our electric animal pens on a daily or every-other-day basis, since we practice rotational, multi-species grazing, sometimes referred to as "management-intensive" grazing. 

Oh, it's management intensive alright . . . or sometimes just intensive.  We've made the conscious choice, in designing and building our farm, to swap in our own time and attention for all of the chemical and most of the fossil fuel inputs that conventional farms run on these days.  This is one of the key principles of a regenerative agriculture practice, which I will discuss in more detail in subsequent posts.  Suffice it for now to say that while the benefits of this choice are numerous – ultimately outweighing the downsides – it is not without cost.  And when I'm bearing that cost largely by myself, in the form of my time and physical energy, it is, well . . . intense.

So I'm taking help from whatever quarters it comes.  Even with only one functional arm, Brad can still do most of the light housework – dishes, laundry, etc. – especially with the kids' help.  That's a blessing.  And you know what else can be a blessing?  TV.  Yep, I said it.  Of course, we usually put pretty strict limits on our kids' TV watching, preferring them to head outside during these glorious fall days, but an occasional movie can keep them occupied long enough to stem the tide of chaos they can so readily churn up.

So I did not object when Brad queued up the 2006 film version of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web for the littles to watch early in the week.  We've had several Charlottes we've tracked in the years we've been out here on the farm, always in the fall.  One built her web in the protective cage around one of our peach tree saplings, another on the front porch next to the firewood rack.  This year's Charlotte actually built her web and laid her egg sac in the upper corner of the barn door.  Classic.  So now, watching the movie rendition of the story, my two younger kids would see why I always call these spiders "Charlotte."  A little cultural literacy (albeit visually mediated) never hurt anybody.

But what struck me about the story, immediately, was its portrayal of a small, diversified farm.  The domesticated animals that "people" Wilbur the pig's barnyard include geese, sheep, dairy cows, and a horse – a range of species (narrow as it is) that one almost never finds on any farm or ranch today, at least not one from which a family might actually expect to make their principal living, financially speaking.  By 1952, when Charlotte's Web was originally published, the forces that would push farms and ranches toward bigger footprints, fewer (or no) animal species, mono-cropping, and hyper-mechanization had already been set in motion and were gaining a ferocious momentum.  In the wake of World War II, the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower dubbed it, turned its massive stocks of chemicals and machinery away from the battlefields of Europe and out of the Asian skies and trained them on America's still-fertile heartlands.  And now, several generations later, we have the degraded soils, poisoned waters, and sickened people to show for it.†

But in 1952, the small, diversified farm was still enough of a reality in enough places that E.B. White's portrayal would have seemed far less jarringly idealized.  The notion that good farms need a wide array of plant and animal species to thrive would still have formed something akin to a basic assumption, as opposed to the "radical idea" that it represents today.  The notion that a diversity of animals and plants was a sign of biological strength, as opposed to an economic liability, was still viable.

Today, the logic of "get big or get out" has largely played itself out, such that farming and ranching in any form, diversified or no, is a barely viable proposition by either biological or economic measures.  The economic viability of American agriculture, writ large, has long been a function of government subsidies.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in theory; given the fundamental importance of food, basic economic support for the people who grow it makes sense.  But when, in practice, the vast majority of government subsidies go to prop up food production practices that undermine the biological viability of agriculture in the long run (or, increasingly, in the medium or even short term), such as the mono-cropping and overproduction of grains and the feedlotting of animals, those subsidies are doing more harm than good.  So much in subsidized conventional ag – which is most of the agricultural sector – destroys soil and water systems (not to mention our bodies) and leaves society dependent on the petrochemical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex.  And still, due to artificially low food prices (enabled by the same agricultural subsidies), a staggering percentage of farmers and ranchers have to work off-farm jobs or otherwise generate some source of non-farming income just to make ends meet.  Something is wrong with this picture.  Something is rotten in Denmark.

Now, let me be clear: I am not blaming farmers and ranchers for this situation.  They, and the rest of us, find ourselves trapped in a food system that we did not create, a system that was created over decades, out of a heavy admixture of good intentions, bad information, and perverse incentives.  And there is far more here to unpack than I can possibly attempt here, at this juncture. 

What I can say is that there is growing consensus within agricultural networks that re-diversification of farming and ranching is essential if we, as a society, are to begin to heal the wounds we have unwittingly inflicted on ourselves.  It would be nice if government subsidies could be redirected toward this goal, and there are some indications of movement in that direction.  But is it like attempting to turn the Titanic – too little, too late?  Perhaps.  And, in any case, I think a healthy (and hopefully constructive) skepticism about the ability for centralized government to administer sound agricultural policy, in light of the U.S. government's track record over the past seven decades or longer, is warranted.    

Fortunately, an increasing number of farmers and ranchers – largely small-scale producers, by modern industrial ag standards – are moving ahead without waiting around for government programs, re-diversifying their operations, or in the case of new farmers, setting them up as diversified and diversity-enhancing operations from the get-go.  These growers have internalized the bedrock principle that healthy food comes from healthy soil, and healthy soil is alive, teeming with microbiology, the hosts of beneficial bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic critters that give soil that rich, loamy smell and activate its powers to transfer nutrients to plant and animal life.  These growers have integrated into their operating frameworks the fact that a teaspoon of healthy soil can contain billions of living organisms, over a billion bacteria alone!  And they have come to understand that our heavy machinery and petrochemicals (in the form of pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides) have deadened most of the life in our soil, deadened the soil itself, and thus deadened the food that we produce from it.  Most importantly, these growers are demonstrating, in real time on their own farms and ranches, that what feeds the soil microbiome, enabling it to feed us in turn, is the strategic movement of diverse megafauna (e.g., cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, poultry) across landscapes and the wise management of diverse cover crops over topsoil.‡

The good news is, our soils can be regenerated through these and other diversity-enhancing practices.  The bad news (or "bad" news, depending on your vantage point) is, it takes time.  And I mean that in at least two senses:  yes, it takes time in the sense that it does not happen overnight; it is a years-long, arguably decades-long, process to restore soil health.  But it also takes time in the sense of hours in the day; it literally takes the devotion of one's waking hours to move animals and observe field conditions and respond to the myriad contingencies that arise when trying to rebuild soil health.  It is not a "set-it-and-forget-it" process. 

Nor is it a "hands-off" process.  Agricultural diversity also involves – gasp! – manual labor, the kind that actually requires use of our physical bodies.  Shocking, I know. Go ahead, clutch your pearls.

Here's the bottom line:  diversification in agriculture – which is just one strategy for maintaining and restoring biodiversity more generally – does not mesh well with lifestyles organized around the principle of convenience.  Quite the contrary: rebuilding and preserving biological diversity is decidedly inconvenient.  But you know what's more inconvenient than biological diversity?  Starvation.  Mass famine.  That's inconvenient. 

Are these really the stakes?  Is starvation really what our society faces if we don't change our ways when it comes to agriculture?  Surely, our technological advancements can save us, right?  Haven't I just crossed the line over into hysteria? 

Possibly.  But the risk seems significant enough to me to take very seriously – seriously enough that I want to know from the inside, in my bones and with my hands and by muscle memory, what it means to participate in the building of biological diversity of soil.  I suppose I've made a kind of Pascal's wager: since it's impossible to know with certainty whether our society is nearing the total collapse of the food system due to biodiversity loss, I've assessed the downside risks of both sides of the proposition, just like Blaise Pascal evaluated the downside risks of commitment to the Christian God in the absence of strictly rational evidence for the existence of the Christian God.  For Pascal, the choice was clear: if it turns out you're wrong about the existence of God – wrong either way, whether by belief or disbelief – what you purportedly "give up" in the way of some finite earthly pleasures by "erroneously" embracing a life of faith pales in comparison to what you will definitely lose (eternal life with the divine) by erroneously rejecting the Christian life.  And in any case, what do you really have to lose by following Christ?  In essentially all relevant ways, Pascal's argument suggests, the committed Christian life is an intrinsically better life in the here and now than a life of entrenched atheism.

We can, of course, quibble today with Pascal's specific conclusion about Christianity, but his heuristic of comparing downside risks in situations of inescapable uncertainty remains helpful.  It is a useful tool in many situations, including the one in which we appear to face the near-term threat of food shortages stemming from profound losses of biodiversity.  What do we really stand to lose by taking this apparent threat seriously, even if we're wrong about it?  I can't answer this question for everyone – and I suspect it might prove counter-productive to try to do so – but my own answer is evident in the way I spend my days now.  As Albert Schweitzer once wrote, my life has become my argument.  What I've "given up" in the way of some conveniences and financial security/social status, I've traded for fresh air, tired muscles at the end of each day, and sound sleep.  Our family has swapped out many processed foods for whole and homegrown ones, and we gather for just enough family dinners around the kitchen table to make it all worth it.  So even if I'm wrong in my belief that our society needs to make significant changes to reverse the damage we've done to our soils and mitigate the consequences of that damage, my family will have lived a more fulfilling and joyous life than if I had continued down a conventional path, disconnected from real food and the processes that make it possible.   

So I'll milk Stella twice a day for now, rotate my other cows and my goats and chickens to fresh ground every couple of days, and keep up my quixotic relationship with my vegetable garden, inconvenient as all these things are.  I will accept the help that Mother Nature offers, by learning to operate on her terms rather than imposing my own foolish ones on her.  And I will train my attention on what seems to be going right: that there are farms and ranches – including my own! – reconnecting to the health that is possible through healthy soil, soil that is alive and continually enlivened by a diversity of life forms, ranging from the microscopic to the large and cuddly.

*Of course, I realize that precious few families in socio-economically disadvantaged areas like ours can use a Fall Break in this way.  Even "solidly middle class" families these days may find it difficult, without significant advance planning and saving, to break away from the work-school routine multiple times per year.  This is why programs such as the Boys & Girls Club are so vital in communities like ours.  They fill in a necessary gap, providing low-cost childcare for working families with school-age children during school breaks.

†Again, the literature to support this claim is vast.  To orient yourself, start with Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America (1977), then read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), then watch the documentary film Kiss the Ground (2020).

‡Google these practitioner-advocates, just for an initial sampling (and one that is admittedly idiosyncratic to me):  Gabe Brown in North Dakota, Joel Salatin in Virginia, Richard Perkins in Sweden, Jean-Martin Fortier in Canada, Will Harris in Georgia, Charles Massy in Australia, Greg Judy in Missouri, and Dr. Allen Williams who ranges the southern U.S. from the Carolinas to Louisiana.