Support Local Farmers
A recent post on one of the communities I follow made me realise that I've been wanting to say this for quite a while. It was a bit (okay, a lot) off-topic to the actual post, so I decided it would be better put in my own journal.
For those that don't know it, I was a small dairy and poultry farmer for a few years before the economy made us lose our farm. I'm rural-identified (love that term, many thanks to whoever came up with it because I don't remember where I first saw it) and have been my whole life. I always wanted to live in the country, and as I grew up that desire became a desire to have a farm of my own - at least one big enough to make my family relatively self-sufficient. I finally got that wish when I moved to Nevada four years ago.
There's a saying I grew up with that goes something like, "You either have time or you have money, but you can't have both." Well, when you're a farmer you don't have either. Is it worth it? I most definitely thought so. Like becoming a parent, having a farm is a lot more work, and a lot more rewarding, than one could ever imagine before experiencing it. But let me paint you a picture.
Time:
My day started before dawn with sanitising the milking equipment. Morning chores lasted 2 - 3 hours, including hauling water to the animals and/or chopping the ice off of what they had, hauling feed to the animals, letting the chickens out of their coop, milking the goat and measuring, filtering and storing the milk. Evening chores started at dusk, took about the same amount of time, and went until after dark. I had a VERY small farm - only 5 goats and about 30 chickens and turkeys that I had to take care of, and no crops. And this was just the routine, everyday stuff. Once you add in coop- and pen-cleaning, hoof-trimming, deworming, slaughtering, cheese-making, buying feed, trying to get product to the few people I knew who would buy it, winterising the property, unwinterising the property, property maintenance and everything else that goes into keeping a small farm afloat, I was busy. Except in early spring, kidding season (yes, goats are just kidding :p) when I was flat-out exhausted. You don't pasture-raise milk goats or they learn to be skittish and untrusting - you bottle-raise them. This meant keeping the kids (twins - most goats have at least 2, and can have up to . . . seven, I think, is the most I heard of in one birth) in the house, in a playpen, and hand feeding them from heated bottles round the clock. Every two hours at first, tapering down to twice a day over 6 weeks. And if you want healthy, happy goats it also means taking them outside everyday to spend time with their dam and learn about grass and sunshine, and letting them out to play in the house frequently. And goat kids, let me tell you - cutest things on the planet, and it's the only reason they survive. They have the bladder control of a newborn (and I, at least, couldn't get a diaper to stay on them to save my sanity), the mobility of a five-year-old, the curiosity of a two-year-old, a one-year-old's insatiable need to put everything in their mouth and the destructive dental power of a beaver. And they generate about two loads of dirty laundry a day, since you can't diaper them reliably. (I honestly don't know how parents of human children do it. I was about ready to die by halfway through the first week, spent two weeks covered in milk, blood, iodine, slobber and pee with a LOT fewer showers than I would have liked, since if I had 5 minutes to spare I was going to sleep, gods damn it, and I was SO GLAD they were outside and relatively self-sufficient in only six weeks. I can't imagine living through a year or two of that.) I was lucky, also - none of my kids died, none got injured, none were born with dangerous defects, and none got sick. And it's not like the rest of the chores stop just because you have to take care of the babies. Nor do they stop just because you want a holiday. If you're going to leave the farm for more than 12 hours any time of year, you have to take all the stock with you or you have to have really fantastic, generous neighbours. And through all of this I was working a part-time job, doing free-lance computer work and trying to get to a professional level with my fiction writing.
Money:
The most basic expenses are easy to tally. We were paying 2.5 times as much rent as the average for the area because of the size and quality of the property, and we were spending over $500 a month on feed. Once again, that doesn't include deworming, the milking equipment, the water, the electricity for the heat lamps, hoof trimmers, castrating equipment, storage space (I learnt the hard way that you don't have room to store all the milk, meat and eggs from a farm in a typical refrigerator), disbudding equipment (that removes the horns from kids), transportation or any of the other miscellaneous expenses that seemed to come up constantly. Or startup costs - we designed and built our own chicken coop from scratch, which cost about $300 in materials and took more than 3 days of labour with three people working on it, we had to buy the goats and the chickens, fencing, etc. We cut corners wherever we could, transporting our goats in the (covered) bed of our pickup truck, since we couldn't afford a trailer, jerry rigging anything that broke (baling twine is a ubiquitous and useful thing around a farm), making from scratch anything we could manage to. And the farm never came close to making back even a fraction of what we spent on it. I didn't have a business plan going in - this was only going to be a hobby farm, right? Well, once I had five dozen eggs and three gallons of milk in the refrigerator I realised that there was no way three adults could consume what the farm produced. I had friends who loved the idea of farm-fresh milk and eggs, but there weren't that many of them, and they all lived over an hour away. Keeping things fresh on the drive in summer, and having the time to leave the farm in the first place, were both huge challenges. Even when I managed both and everyone I knew was buying, we were making something like $20 a week. On a good week.
The other, more difficult side of the money is a broader political and economical issue. Agriculture is big business in America. Well, everywhere, I suppose. And that's exactly what it is - business. There are lobbyists working every day specifically to ensure that small family farms can't survive or compete. These are corporations that will crowd thousands of chickens into a building - caged, or "cage free" on the floor, meaning they don't have room to turn around and they have to have their beaks and claws cut off so that they don't attack each other - and put them under bright artificial lighting to ensure they produce an unnatural amount year round. They try to bolster the birds' overworked, overstimulated, overcrowded bodies with hormones, supplements and antibiotics, and if it doesn't work for long it doesn't much matter, because they kill them all after every year, anyway. Seriously. No family farm can compete with that. No organic or humane farm can compete with that, which is why organic produce, animal or vegetable, is so much more expensive. No one who cares the slightest bit for animals, or for sustainable agriculture, or human health, or for anything but the bottom line can compete with that. And in addition to the economic crunch of everyone being used to priced-for-mass-consumption food, the government makes the family farm a legal tangle that is almost impossible to unravel. It is illegal to sell unpasteurised milk for human consumption in most cases in the US. Why? Because if you've ever been in a commercial dairy - even a small one - the idea of drinking anything that comes out of it will horrify you. They're gross, to put it simply. I wouldn't touch commercial milk that hadn't been sterilised, especially considering the long shipping and storage times before it gets to the consumer. And there's also the risk, when transporting unsterile product round the whole country, of spreading pathogens. Even pathogens that are harmless to humans can infect distant herds, causing huge losses in profit. So yes, I agree with the pasteurisation laws as a general rule. But heating all your milk takes time, equipment and money that most family farms don't have. And in most cases there's no need - but I'll get into that later. Also illegal, and this blew me away, is selling milk for human consumption that has been milked by hand. In order to legally sell it, you HAVE to have a milking machine. Why? Honestly, I'm not certain. A pair of hands is easier to sanitise than feet of plastic tubing and gentler on the animal's teats than a machine, which means fewer udder infections and less contaminated milk. My best guess is that either it's health laws - they can't enforce sanitation standards for commercial dairies as easily with hand milking, or they never want the milk coming in contact with the air - or it was one of the laws put in place by lobbyists specifically to reduce competition by small farms. But once again, the milking equipment is not something very many small farms can afford. And, of course, there are the Byzantine laws around animal registration and farm inspections and certification and etc. that surround having the official seal of approval to be a "farm", let alone to sell food products. I don't know much about that, because I didn't try to sell my produce at farmer's markets or through restaurants or anywhere else official . . . which is why I made $20 a week. I once traded a gallon of raw, hand-milked goat's milk to a friend for marijuana. Can you guess which part of that trade was more illegal? That's right - it wasn't the drug.
Now that I've described everything that makes farming a horrible, back-breaking, impoverishing life that we all had the industrial revolution to get away from . . . here's the other side.
It's worth it. Oh, gods, is it worth it. My goats were a part of my family. I held my kids even before their dam touched them, helped birth them and taught them how to nurse, named them and loved them and rejoiced to see them grow. My doe, Hazel, followed me everywhere when I let her out of her pen. Cried for me when I left her sight. I raised my chickens from yellow-fuzzed chicks to smug, matronly hens, watched them fledge and learn to fly in my dining room, sat with them the first day I had them outside to make sure the hawks didn't eat any of them. And they brought their babies back to me when they had them. To be up in the crisp, early-morning air, newborn sunlight shining pink on the fresh snow, to lean my head against Hazel's warm, sweet-smelling flank and listen to the metallic hiss of steaming milk squirting into my pail and the contented crunch of grain being chewed - I can't put it into words. Quite literally. It was such a perfect bubble of love and spirit and wholeness. I'll write novel after novel trying to capture what those moments meant to me. I could look out my back door and see the mountains embracing our valley in snowy arms, would walk outside and hear only the cry of a hawk. I thanked by name the animals that fed us with their bodies and their flesh, and knew that we'd fed them to bursting with love (and hay) before the year cycled round to slaughtering time. I still crave the taste of fresh goat cheese, warm from the stove and savory with sea salt and thyme. Even the hard parts, the scary parts, weren't something I would have traded for the world. Chasing chickens down through calf-deep icewater when an all-day downpour had turned to snow so that they didn't catch their death of sudden cold, until my asthma kept me from breathing entirely. Locking my kids, my babies, into a tiny box and holding a red-hot iron to their heads to burn out their horn buds. (I hated having to do it, though I knew I had to - you can't have horns in a dairy herd without risking horrible injuries and infections in all your goats. I cried for hours after, long past when the kids had forgotten it had even happened.) Drinking half a gallon of milk and eating half a dozen eggs every day (and not much else) because after feeding the animals we didn't have enough money left to feed ourselves. The first time I held a chicken I'd raised from infancy and made myself cut her throat - it took me almost two hours to work up the nerve, I was so afraid I'd hurt her. Helping my doe give birth by myself, hoping she wouldn't have a breech birth or a hemorrhage or a sick kid or milk fever, not knowing how to tie the cord off or clean the wet, squirming newborn in my arms or convince it food came out of the bottle. The night we spent slaughtering before we left the farm - eighteen hours of plucking and gutting and cleaning until my kitchen - and all of us - were splattered with blood like a scene from a bad horror movie. We're still eating those turkeys, though the chickens are gone. They've got us through weeks where we've run out of money to buy food more than once.
So by now I hope I've shown you why small farmers desperately want and need you to support them. What's in it for you?
First, if you care about animal welfare or sustainable food sources, the benefit to supporting small, holistic farms should be obvious. You're directly supporting well-cared-for, healthy, happy animals. You're directly supporting people who care about their land and their stock and, in the case of farms slightly larger than mine, the people that work for them. These aren't people who are going to jeapordise any of those things for profit. They're not going to dump toxins in their neighbours' fields or back yards, either. Do a little reading on the standard procedures of almost any large, mainstream, corporate agriculture - and if what you find out horrifies you, the best way to fight back is to stop giving them your money and give it to the little guys instead. Not that they're all perfect nurturing earth mothers, of course, but the odds are a lot better and, if you have doubts, ask their neighbours. Or the folks in the nearest town. They'll know who cuts corners, who abuses their animals, who disregards the safety of their product or processes. And by buying produce from local farmers, you'll be directly benefiting your local community and economy.
Second, human health. Fresh, organic food is better for you, provided you trust the source. By the time a gallon of milk has reached your refrigerator, it's probably already a week or two old at least. It usually contains hormones and antibiotics, it has had all of the organisms cooked out of it (which is good when those organisms are E. Coli or other pathogens, but pasteurising kills the good with the bad). It's been shown that fresh, clean, local raw milk is better for you than pasteurised milk - and I guarantee you that you'll get sick less often, even with all of the safety standards enforced in commercial dairies. Eggs on the grocery store shelves are just as old as the milk, and very likely to carry salmonella or other taint. Commercial eggs are often lower in cholesterol (but,though I can't swear to the veracity of this, I've read that ingested cholesterol actually has very little impact on our blood cholesterol levels; what we really need to monitor is the agents that encourage our internal creation of cholesterol) but they are also lower in all of the vitamins and minerals and wholesome organic components that chickens pick up from fresh, growing grass and bugs. Raw local honey can reduce or eliminate seasonal allergies. As a side note, goat milk is actually a lot better for you than cow milk. It is easier to digest, won't bother people with cow milk allergies and won't be as bad for people with lactose intolerance. It's close enough to human milk in digestibility and nutrition that you can feed a (healthy) infant on goat milk alone, without adding formula. It's lower in fat - about 5% vs 30% for cow milk - and is naturally homogenised. I do not recommend the goat milk you can buy in stores, unless you grew up drinking traditional goat milk such as is common in Mexico, the Middle East or many other places. The smell people associate with goat milk - the dirty-socks smell that will tell you someone's opened a jar of goat milk from across the room - is wholly due to husbandry practices. The milk from any animal will pick up the smells and tastes of the environment it's created in, and the "goaty" smell is from keeping does in milk housed with bucks in rut, when they are producing that distinctive, overwhelming, pungent scent. And doe that's housed at least 30 feet away from bucks in rut will produce milk that is almost indistinguishable from cow milk. A little sweeter, a little creamier (even though it's lower in fat - that's because of the smaller fat molecules), but if you put two glasses of good milk in front of someone the only way they'll be able to tell the cow milk from the goat milk with surety is by colour.
Third, taste. This is personal preference, obviously, but almost everyone finds that farm-fresh eggs, milk, vegetables, meat, anything taste better than the store-bought versions. I still can't eat "normal" eggs - they taste like plastic and their colour's so anemic that when I scramble them it looks like I'm making a lemon souffle. Fresh food, not grown on ground bleached dry with chemicals, just tastes . . . more. Richer. Deeper. More alive.
And last, they'll probably let you visit. You can bring your children - or just yourself - and let them pet the cows and chickens and goats and pigs, teach them where their food comes from and have a lot of fun doing it. Let your son or daughter drink a cup of warm milk direct from the teat - they may not prefer it over chilled milk, but they'll be fascinated by the experience. Let them learn to milk (I've taught three-year-olds the basics) or feed the chickens or get lost in a corn field. Seriously, I had random strangers stop by with their children and act like my farm was a petting zoo. Which I wasn't happy about, but I was always thrilled to have friends or acquaintances over. The farming life isn't for everyone, or even for most people I suspect, but almost everyone likes to visit it at least once. And really, I think the lifestyle has intrinsic value. It fosters an awareness of the seasons, a sense of the interconnectedness of all life, understanding of and a working partnership with nature, and a healthy system of mutual respect, love and nourishment between people and the animals that feed them. With some adjustments for climate and technology, it's the way our ancestors lived for thousands of years. It's what allows everyone, rural or urban, to eat. It gives space to live for those of us who are unhappy (read: on the edge of homicidal mania) living in the city, and provides a place for those who prefer the city to come for a change of pace. It fosters small, rural communities where people actually know and support each other. (And, for those of you who live in metropolitan areas and think that everyone outside the coasts is a cross-burning KKK member, I say this as a queer, heathen, trans person with decidedly geeky interests who moved from suburban California. I have found more tolerance and even unconditional acceptance among country people than I ever did in cities. I can't speak for small towns; I haven't really lived in one. Once rural people know you respect their way of life or are at least willing to learn about it, aren't afraid of hard work, are willing to be friendly and neighbourly, and will take them at their word and abide by your own, they usually don't care what you believe or who you sleep with. Amazing how a night spent fighting hurricane-strength winds to cover the hay before the rains come will help you find common ground.)
I apologise that this is so long and rambly and awkward. It's been struggling to come out for a long while now, and I wanted to get it down as honestly and as immediately as I could.
The existence of small farms is only just now struggling back to life. Commercial farming, and the huge land grabs it necessitated, nearly wiped out this life a few decades ago. People are starting to realise what they're missing, and thanks to the organic movement a small niche is being created again for the small farmer. It's not an easy life, nor a financially rewarding one, but I think it's an important one.
I'm not a political person. I'm grateful that others are doing the necessary work in that arena, but I hate it and I'm not very good at it. The most important kind of advocacy I feel I can do is to live the life that matters to me, with as much integrity as I can manage. That and hope that my words, fiction or otherwise, will inspire in others the same things I value.
I was a small farmer for three years, and only had the goats for the last year and a half or so. In that short amount of time, I gained a lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience. And I still only scraped the surface. I hope to have property again someday soon, if not another farm, but even if I never manage it I wouldn't give up those memories for anything.
For those that don't know it, I was a small dairy and poultry farmer for a few years before the economy made us lose our farm. I'm rural-identified (love that term, many thanks to whoever came up with it because I don't remember where I first saw it) and have been my whole life. I always wanted to live in the country, and as I grew up that desire became a desire to have a farm of my own - at least one big enough to make my family relatively self-sufficient. I finally got that wish when I moved to Nevada four years ago.
There's a saying I grew up with that goes something like, "You either have time or you have money, but you can't have both." Well, when you're a farmer you don't have either. Is it worth it? I most definitely thought so. Like becoming a parent, having a farm is a lot more work, and a lot more rewarding, than one could ever imagine before experiencing it. But let me paint you a picture.
Time:
My day started before dawn with sanitising the milking equipment. Morning chores lasted 2 - 3 hours, including hauling water to the animals and/or chopping the ice off of what they had, hauling feed to the animals, letting the chickens out of their coop, milking the goat and measuring, filtering and storing the milk. Evening chores started at dusk, took about the same amount of time, and went until after dark. I had a VERY small farm - only 5 goats and about 30 chickens and turkeys that I had to take care of, and no crops. And this was just the routine, everyday stuff. Once you add in coop- and pen-cleaning, hoof-trimming, deworming, slaughtering, cheese-making, buying feed, trying to get product to the few people I knew who would buy it, winterising the property, unwinterising the property, property maintenance and everything else that goes into keeping a small farm afloat, I was busy. Except in early spring, kidding season (yes, goats are just kidding :p) when I was flat-out exhausted. You don't pasture-raise milk goats or they learn to be skittish and untrusting - you bottle-raise them. This meant keeping the kids (twins - most goats have at least 2, and can have up to . . . seven, I think, is the most I heard of in one birth) in the house, in a playpen, and hand feeding them from heated bottles round the clock. Every two hours at first, tapering down to twice a day over 6 weeks. And if you want healthy, happy goats it also means taking them outside everyday to spend time with their dam and learn about grass and sunshine, and letting them out to play in the house frequently. And goat kids, let me tell you - cutest things on the planet, and it's the only reason they survive. They have the bladder control of a newborn (and I, at least, couldn't get a diaper to stay on them to save my sanity), the mobility of a five-year-old, the curiosity of a two-year-old, a one-year-old's insatiable need to put everything in their mouth and the destructive dental power of a beaver. And they generate about two loads of dirty laundry a day, since you can't diaper them reliably. (I honestly don't know how parents of human children do it. I was about ready to die by halfway through the first week, spent two weeks covered in milk, blood, iodine, slobber and pee with a LOT fewer showers than I would have liked, since if I had 5 minutes to spare I was going to sleep, gods damn it, and I was SO GLAD they were outside and relatively self-sufficient in only six weeks. I can't imagine living through a year or two of that.) I was lucky, also - none of my kids died, none got injured, none were born with dangerous defects, and none got sick. And it's not like the rest of the chores stop just because you have to take care of the babies. Nor do they stop just because you want a holiday. If you're going to leave the farm for more than 12 hours any time of year, you have to take all the stock with you or you have to have really fantastic, generous neighbours. And through all of this I was working a part-time job, doing free-lance computer work and trying to get to a professional level with my fiction writing.
Money:
The most basic expenses are easy to tally. We were paying 2.5 times as much rent as the average for the area because of the size and quality of the property, and we were spending over $500 a month on feed. Once again, that doesn't include deworming, the milking equipment, the water, the electricity for the heat lamps, hoof trimmers, castrating equipment, storage space (I learnt the hard way that you don't have room to store all the milk, meat and eggs from a farm in a typical refrigerator), disbudding equipment (that removes the horns from kids), transportation or any of the other miscellaneous expenses that seemed to come up constantly. Or startup costs - we designed and built our own chicken coop from scratch, which cost about $300 in materials and took more than 3 days of labour with three people working on it, we had to buy the goats and the chickens, fencing, etc. We cut corners wherever we could, transporting our goats in the (covered) bed of our pickup truck, since we couldn't afford a trailer, jerry rigging anything that broke (baling twine is a ubiquitous and useful thing around a farm), making from scratch anything we could manage to. And the farm never came close to making back even a fraction of what we spent on it. I didn't have a business plan going in - this was only going to be a hobby farm, right? Well, once I had five dozen eggs and three gallons of milk in the refrigerator I realised that there was no way three adults could consume what the farm produced. I had friends who loved the idea of farm-fresh milk and eggs, but there weren't that many of them, and they all lived over an hour away. Keeping things fresh on the drive in summer, and having the time to leave the farm in the first place, were both huge challenges. Even when I managed both and everyone I knew was buying, we were making something like $20 a week. On a good week.
The other, more difficult side of the money is a broader political and economical issue. Agriculture is big business in America. Well, everywhere, I suppose. And that's exactly what it is - business. There are lobbyists working every day specifically to ensure that small family farms can't survive or compete. These are corporations that will crowd thousands of chickens into a building - caged, or "cage free" on the floor, meaning they don't have room to turn around and they have to have their beaks and claws cut off so that they don't attack each other - and put them under bright artificial lighting to ensure they produce an unnatural amount year round. They try to bolster the birds' overworked, overstimulated, overcrowded bodies with hormones, supplements and antibiotics, and if it doesn't work for long it doesn't much matter, because they kill them all after every year, anyway. Seriously. No family farm can compete with that. No organic or humane farm can compete with that, which is why organic produce, animal or vegetable, is so much more expensive. No one who cares the slightest bit for animals, or for sustainable agriculture, or human health, or for anything but the bottom line can compete with that. And in addition to the economic crunch of everyone being used to priced-for-mass-consumption food, the government makes the family farm a legal tangle that is almost impossible to unravel. It is illegal to sell unpasteurised milk for human consumption in most cases in the US. Why? Because if you've ever been in a commercial dairy - even a small one - the idea of drinking anything that comes out of it will horrify you. They're gross, to put it simply. I wouldn't touch commercial milk that hadn't been sterilised, especially considering the long shipping and storage times before it gets to the consumer. And there's also the risk, when transporting unsterile product round the whole country, of spreading pathogens. Even pathogens that are harmless to humans can infect distant herds, causing huge losses in profit. So yes, I agree with the pasteurisation laws as a general rule. But heating all your milk takes time, equipment and money that most family farms don't have. And in most cases there's no need - but I'll get into that later. Also illegal, and this blew me away, is selling milk for human consumption that has been milked by hand. In order to legally sell it, you HAVE to have a milking machine. Why? Honestly, I'm not certain. A pair of hands is easier to sanitise than feet of plastic tubing and gentler on the animal's teats than a machine, which means fewer udder infections and less contaminated milk. My best guess is that either it's health laws - they can't enforce sanitation standards for commercial dairies as easily with hand milking, or they never want the milk coming in contact with the air - or it was one of the laws put in place by lobbyists specifically to reduce competition by small farms. But once again, the milking equipment is not something very many small farms can afford. And, of course, there are the Byzantine laws around animal registration and farm inspections and certification and etc. that surround having the official seal of approval to be a "farm", let alone to sell food products. I don't know much about that, because I didn't try to sell my produce at farmer's markets or through restaurants or anywhere else official . . . which is why I made $20 a week. I once traded a gallon of raw, hand-milked goat's milk to a friend for marijuana. Can you guess which part of that trade was more illegal? That's right - it wasn't the drug.
Now that I've described everything that makes farming a horrible, back-breaking, impoverishing life that we all had the industrial revolution to get away from . . . here's the other side.
It's worth it. Oh, gods, is it worth it. My goats were a part of my family. I held my kids even before their dam touched them, helped birth them and taught them how to nurse, named them and loved them and rejoiced to see them grow. My doe, Hazel, followed me everywhere when I let her out of her pen. Cried for me when I left her sight. I raised my chickens from yellow-fuzzed chicks to smug, matronly hens, watched them fledge and learn to fly in my dining room, sat with them the first day I had them outside to make sure the hawks didn't eat any of them. And they brought their babies back to me when they had them. To be up in the crisp, early-morning air, newborn sunlight shining pink on the fresh snow, to lean my head against Hazel's warm, sweet-smelling flank and listen to the metallic hiss of steaming milk squirting into my pail and the contented crunch of grain being chewed - I can't put it into words. Quite literally. It was such a perfect bubble of love and spirit and wholeness. I'll write novel after novel trying to capture what those moments meant to me. I could look out my back door and see the mountains embracing our valley in snowy arms, would walk outside and hear only the cry of a hawk. I thanked by name the animals that fed us with their bodies and their flesh, and knew that we'd fed them to bursting with love (and hay) before the year cycled round to slaughtering time. I still crave the taste of fresh goat cheese, warm from the stove and savory with sea salt and thyme. Even the hard parts, the scary parts, weren't something I would have traded for the world. Chasing chickens down through calf-deep icewater when an all-day downpour had turned to snow so that they didn't catch their death of sudden cold, until my asthma kept me from breathing entirely. Locking my kids, my babies, into a tiny box and holding a red-hot iron to their heads to burn out their horn buds. (I hated having to do it, though I knew I had to - you can't have horns in a dairy herd without risking horrible injuries and infections in all your goats. I cried for hours after, long past when the kids had forgotten it had even happened.) Drinking half a gallon of milk and eating half a dozen eggs every day (and not much else) because after feeding the animals we didn't have enough money left to feed ourselves. The first time I held a chicken I'd raised from infancy and made myself cut her throat - it took me almost two hours to work up the nerve, I was so afraid I'd hurt her. Helping my doe give birth by myself, hoping she wouldn't have a breech birth or a hemorrhage or a sick kid or milk fever, not knowing how to tie the cord off or clean the wet, squirming newborn in my arms or convince it food came out of the bottle. The night we spent slaughtering before we left the farm - eighteen hours of plucking and gutting and cleaning until my kitchen - and all of us - were splattered with blood like a scene from a bad horror movie. We're still eating those turkeys, though the chickens are gone. They've got us through weeks where we've run out of money to buy food more than once.
So by now I hope I've shown you why small farmers desperately want and need you to support them. What's in it for you?
First, if you care about animal welfare or sustainable food sources, the benefit to supporting small, holistic farms should be obvious. You're directly supporting well-cared-for, healthy, happy animals. You're directly supporting people who care about their land and their stock and, in the case of farms slightly larger than mine, the people that work for them. These aren't people who are going to jeapordise any of those things for profit. They're not going to dump toxins in their neighbours' fields or back yards, either. Do a little reading on the standard procedures of almost any large, mainstream, corporate agriculture - and if what you find out horrifies you, the best way to fight back is to stop giving them your money and give it to the little guys instead. Not that they're all perfect nurturing earth mothers, of course, but the odds are a lot better and, if you have doubts, ask their neighbours. Or the folks in the nearest town. They'll know who cuts corners, who abuses their animals, who disregards the safety of their product or processes. And by buying produce from local farmers, you'll be directly benefiting your local community and economy.
Second, human health. Fresh, organic food is better for you, provided you trust the source. By the time a gallon of milk has reached your refrigerator, it's probably already a week or two old at least. It usually contains hormones and antibiotics, it has had all of the organisms cooked out of it (which is good when those organisms are E. Coli or other pathogens, but pasteurising kills the good with the bad). It's been shown that fresh, clean, local raw milk is better for you than pasteurised milk - and I guarantee you that you'll get sick less often, even with all of the safety standards enforced in commercial dairies. Eggs on the grocery store shelves are just as old as the milk, and very likely to carry salmonella or other taint. Commercial eggs are often lower in cholesterol (but,though I can't swear to the veracity of this, I've read that ingested cholesterol actually has very little impact on our blood cholesterol levels; what we really need to monitor is the agents that encourage our internal creation of cholesterol) but they are also lower in all of the vitamins and minerals and wholesome organic components that chickens pick up from fresh, growing grass and bugs. Raw local honey can reduce or eliminate seasonal allergies. As a side note, goat milk is actually a lot better for you than cow milk. It is easier to digest, won't bother people with cow milk allergies and won't be as bad for people with lactose intolerance. It's close enough to human milk in digestibility and nutrition that you can feed a (healthy) infant on goat milk alone, without adding formula. It's lower in fat - about 5% vs 30% for cow milk - and is naturally homogenised. I do not recommend the goat milk you can buy in stores, unless you grew up drinking traditional goat milk such as is common in Mexico, the Middle East or many other places. The smell people associate with goat milk - the dirty-socks smell that will tell you someone's opened a jar of goat milk from across the room - is wholly due to husbandry practices. The milk from any animal will pick up the smells and tastes of the environment it's created in, and the "goaty" smell is from keeping does in milk housed with bucks in rut, when they are producing that distinctive, overwhelming, pungent scent. And doe that's housed at least 30 feet away from bucks in rut will produce milk that is almost indistinguishable from cow milk. A little sweeter, a little creamier (even though it's lower in fat - that's because of the smaller fat molecules), but if you put two glasses of good milk in front of someone the only way they'll be able to tell the cow milk from the goat milk with surety is by colour.
Third, taste. This is personal preference, obviously, but almost everyone finds that farm-fresh eggs, milk, vegetables, meat, anything taste better than the store-bought versions. I still can't eat "normal" eggs - they taste like plastic and their colour's so anemic that when I scramble them it looks like I'm making a lemon souffle. Fresh food, not grown on ground bleached dry with chemicals, just tastes . . . more. Richer. Deeper. More alive.
And last, they'll probably let you visit. You can bring your children - or just yourself - and let them pet the cows and chickens and goats and pigs, teach them where their food comes from and have a lot of fun doing it. Let your son or daughter drink a cup of warm milk direct from the teat - they may not prefer it over chilled milk, but they'll be fascinated by the experience. Let them learn to milk (I've taught three-year-olds the basics) or feed the chickens or get lost in a corn field. Seriously, I had random strangers stop by with their children and act like my farm was a petting zoo. Which I wasn't happy about, but I was always thrilled to have friends or acquaintances over. The farming life isn't for everyone, or even for most people I suspect, but almost everyone likes to visit it at least once. And really, I think the lifestyle has intrinsic value. It fosters an awareness of the seasons, a sense of the interconnectedness of all life, understanding of and a working partnership with nature, and a healthy system of mutual respect, love and nourishment between people and the animals that feed them. With some adjustments for climate and technology, it's the way our ancestors lived for thousands of years. It's what allows everyone, rural or urban, to eat. It gives space to live for those of us who are unhappy (read: on the edge of homicidal mania) living in the city, and provides a place for those who prefer the city to come for a change of pace. It fosters small, rural communities where people actually know and support each other. (And, for those of you who live in metropolitan areas and think that everyone outside the coasts is a cross-burning KKK member, I say this as a queer, heathen, trans person with decidedly geeky interests who moved from suburban California. I have found more tolerance and even unconditional acceptance among country people than I ever did in cities. I can't speak for small towns; I haven't really lived in one. Once rural people know you respect their way of life or are at least willing to learn about it, aren't afraid of hard work, are willing to be friendly and neighbourly, and will take them at their word and abide by your own, they usually don't care what you believe or who you sleep with. Amazing how a night spent fighting hurricane-strength winds to cover the hay before the rains come will help you find common ground.)
I apologise that this is so long and rambly and awkward. It's been struggling to come out for a long while now, and I wanted to get it down as honestly and as immediately as I could.
The existence of small farms is only just now struggling back to life. Commercial farming, and the huge land grabs it necessitated, nearly wiped out this life a few decades ago. People are starting to realise what they're missing, and thanks to the organic movement a small niche is being created again for the small farmer. It's not an easy life, nor a financially rewarding one, but I think it's an important one.
I'm not a political person. I'm grateful that others are doing the necessary work in that arena, but I hate it and I'm not very good at it. The most important kind of advocacy I feel I can do is to live the life that matters to me, with as much integrity as I can manage. That and hope that my words, fiction or otherwise, will inspire in others the same things I value.
I was a small farmer for three years, and only had the goats for the last year and a half or so. In that short amount of time, I gained a lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience. And I still only scraped the surface. I hope to have property again someday soon, if not another farm, but even if I never manage it I wouldn't give up those memories for anything.