Scrolling through headlines before the onslaught of morning chores, I read that in France, where a blistering surge of heat rolled over the country last week, 1,000 additional deaths over the average were reported. At least 40 people drowned during the heat wave—inexperienced swimmers seeking an escape from the unrelenting conditions. Two European Union Earth observation services, the Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Copernicus Marine Service, independently confirmed new records for Atlantic Ocean temperatures for June. The director of the CCCS stated that they were confident ocean temperature records would continue to be broken through the year, on account of El Niño. I slid the sweaty phone into my pocket, its battery already overheating from the ambient temperature in my bedroom, and slunk into the dewy swelter of early-morning Missouri, unperturbed by any suffering but my own.

The air is still and warm in this dark room where I’m writing, but not unbearable, like the attic room where I usually write. I like the view from my usual writing desk, where I can look out into the arching boughs of Osage orange and watch squirrels scamper along the swaying branches, nibbling slivers of kernel out of the growing pile of discarded walnut shells I’ve been working through since November. Today, while mixing together a porridge of rainwater and grain for the chickens, I watched a squirrel splay itself out on the bending branch tips of a silver maple, wilting in the fiery breath of a disturbed atmosphere, catching the sharp wind across its body, panting.

In the course of morning chores, when the temperature is as cool as it’s going to be, I sweat through two shirts, four socks, and a pair of pants, my body splattered in a fine patina of salt, pollen, and filth. The walk out to the sows is entirely without shade in the morning sun, and long. I’m running them along a wooded, north-facing slope where they can wallow beneath the thickets of pin oak sprouts. They breathe heavy, and act impatiently when I arrive with their ration of food and water, squealing greedily, and with irritation. This heat can generate a lot of anger—I’ve seen it in myself.

This particular pig pasture was chosen strategically. The dense cover and northerly aspect is as cool a place as I can provide to these temperature sensitive beasts. I am letting them waller in the underbrush, crushing and rolling the vigorous crop of poison ivy that has strangled its way through the wire cages placed around selected hazelnuts and white oaks planted here (I’ve heard it said that poison ivy is one of the plants that benefits the most from an increase in atmospheric carbon). It is also next to our swimming hole, which I can use for my own temporary relief. It releases some of the grime and sweat from my body, but by the time I make the long trek back home with my empty buckets and tools, I am again covered in a new layer of it.

At home, I pull the damn phone out of my pocket again, the screen fogged with sweat, the battery sizzling. I open my weather app and close it before it loads. No sense in looking. The same goes for the news—headlines like “Nearly 200 million under heat alerts this week”—I toss it on the table, next to ripped-open seed packets and empty jars, peel off my sweat-soaked clothes, and hang them in ceaseless, angry heat. Wanda, our youngest livestock guardian dog whimpers at the door, and I let her in to flop down on the kitchen floor. Our other two working dogs are passed out in the shade of elderberries, their fur sprinkled with wilted flower petals. Astronomically speaking, July 19th begins the “Dog Days” of summer, when Sirius, the “dog star” rises in the east, in this hemisphere at least, though others list July 3rd as the definitive start of the period. Depending on if you operate off a Julian or Gregorian calendar, or if your astrological beliefs allow for the star’s influence before its actual appearance in the sky, the time-frame shifts around a bit. Of course we now have climate observation tools to determine more accurately the cause of extreme heat on our planet, but divination by stars is still more convincing in many circles. Personally, I’d contend we crossed into dog days territory about a week back, judging by the splots of drool left in pools across the floor as Wanda pants and salivates, exhausted and indifferent to the wilting world.

In ancient Egypt, Sirius’ ascent portended flood-season on the Nile. The Greeks associated it as the precursor of particularly uncomfortable heat and fever. In the logic of the time, they believed the star itself brought this heat with it, and in Homer’s Iliad, the return of Sirius, with all its wrath, is used as a metaphor for Achilles’ approach toward Troy to slay Hector:

Priam saw him first, with his old man’s eyes,

A single point of light on Troy’s dusty plain.

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky

On summer nights, star of stars,

Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest

Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat

And fevers to suffering humanity.

Achilles’ bronze gleamed like this as he ran.

I may not be clad in brilliant, bronze armor, but I do carry enough filth on my body to tell you a few things about heat and wrath. For one, when the weather goes sideways like this, humans love to find convenient explanations, or even personify it. Maybe it’s easier, when people are dying in it, to believe it comes from a star that regularly enters the night sky, or a God who tests us. But we’re failing the test. The heat isn’t an enemy to defeat in battle, or our anger made material reality. But perhaps it is an evil portent, a symptom of our own actions and inactions.

At mid-day, the turtles have all buried themselves in shallow, muddy graves. The hogs are snoring on their sides, their bellies streaked with dirt, twitching as flies repeatedly land and take off from their hot flanks. The tips of the maples curl in a bit, and the panting squirrels are nowhere to be seen. My phone buzzes another heat advisory, continuing for the next 96 hours. The wasps are all active, and defensive of the nests they construct— searching the toolshed for a particular pair of pliers, I disturb a new colony, and they swarm my body, stinging my back. And I howl and cuss about it. In common folklore, they say the dog days not only portend heat, but anger, lethargy, madness in dogs, and bad luck. The crime rates in major cities usually do peak around these times, but all the dogs seem too lethargic to be mad.

The flip-side of all this anger seems to be indifference. I understand the indifference of dogs. When Wanda is too tired to patrol, and she comes into the house to drool and pant and absorb the coolness of the floor, she’s just trying to survive—even if she’s a bit spoiled. When dozens drown in the Seine because nobody in Europe has air-conditioning, what we are seeing is desperation. But here, in this nightmare country, with the highest density of wealth and refrigeration on the planet, nothing changes, except for the planting dates and the electricity bills. Is it that our access to comfort creates indifference? When I harvest garlic in the sultry haze that hangs around even at sundown, or walk the burning ridge-line out to my hogs, or, God forbid, use my outhouse in the afternoon, I get hot—and I get angry. And my anger sometimes moves in the wrong direction, like branches and wheelbarrows and people and animals, or the amorphous, bodiless form of the atmosphere itself. I suppose, I could even blame it on the stars—a futile, fruitless anger.

But perhaps, there’s a better place to direct all this fury. Maybe when these oaks and hazels have broken free from the twining chains of poison ivy, releasing their seeds down into the draw to be passed along floodwaters into the rich alluvium of abandoned bottomland farms that are no longer economically viable to cultivate, and the air-conditioners black out because the power to run them has all been diverted to speculative data centers, and the dogs are driven mad in the heat, maybe then, we will take vengeance upon the villains who have scorched this wilting world—the small population of men, who with all they’ve amassed, will ultimately be unable to insulate themselves from the fire they’ve lit. Or they’ll take off to a new planet to exploit and leave us here to drown and burn. I can’t reach those men now, nor is it advisable to put into print what I would do if I could, so here’s my plan, for in the meantime: predictably, I think I’m going to keep planting trees.

In the evening, when the air stills and the temperature drops a few degrees, and all the world smells of harvested garlic and damp earth, the bats come out and hunt for mosquitoes. While the mosquitoes are a given, I’m sometimes surprised to remember that I still live in a world with bats, and fireflies. The pigs are snoring, content in the embrace of pin oak thickets, after another day of indifferently working to cultivate a small bit of food-bearing habitat in their darkening pocket of Missouri side-hill, and the maples breathe out, releasing their crooked form, just a bit, in the gathering dew. And as sure as anything, that dog star will rise again, cold and blind to the choices that our species makes, leaving us here in the dark to figure out how to wake up and live through it all again tomorrow.

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In the stillness between storms, with the heavy air full of robin-chirrups and chatters, churrs, rattles and scolds of industrious house wrens, I sneak between the thunderheads to fulfill my animal husbandry duties: shrugging through the cool, dripping leaves of pin oak stands to slop hogs, wading across waist-high grass to set new paddock fence, and traipsing under storm-tossed sprays of elderblow to feed the growing flocks of chicks and ducklings in their shelter, the creamy, stellar blossoms dropping into purple-black mulberry manure like constellations on the soil surface. After a hot, dry May, June has been mostly mild, mostly adequate (if not overly so) in precipitation.

I’ve been through the ringer this month, performing those basic social/human tasks that don’t merit much in the way of prose, and I’d like to think I’ve handled it well, and not been too sharp with anybody, except maybe once or twice. There have back-and-forth trips to Columbia for my daughter’s art camp, days spent preparing for educational events, lots of deskwork and communication with assorted people in relation to work, book projects, logistics, grants, and budgets—the sorts of things I’d never imagined for myself in those salad days of bike rides, dumpster dives, minimal responsibility and an even more depleted state of hygiene. I don’t think about these things much anymore, except perhaps in those rare moments of stillness.

On my chores route, ascending a gentle slope with my trusty wheelbarrow, burdened with buckets of grain and baskets of eggs, I can see a dark form rising— a mountainous squall-line of storm clouds, black with rain. In progression, from far to near, the tops of distant trees whip and murmur in the approaching wind. The cottonwoods flutter, the silvery undersides of their leaves flashing, and then the oaks shudder and wail. They say not to stand under a tree during a thunderstorm, but I’d rather risk it and keep slightly dry, mostly on account of my currently dire laundry situation, so with baskets of eggs, I shelter under the nearest one: a finely formed, early-middle aged honey locust I’ve developed a camaraderie with over the years.

Now, honey locusts are not the best tree to stay dry under. They have fine, pea-like leaves that might break the rain up a bit, but do not form a solid umbrella. The highest density of cover under a honey locust is near the thorn-lined trunk, and in stiff winds, the flexible, spiny limbs are liable to flap wildly about, ready to snag clothes, puncture flesh, or perhaps impale my tender eyeballs. In my experience, the youngest honey locusts are the most fiercely armored, their spines hardening over the growing season from floppy green to sharp red to a steely black.

The thin bark of honey locusts is particularly palatable to browsing animals like deer and goats. Perhaps, like its young pods, it has a rich, sweet flesh. As a “pioneer” plant, the honey locust sprouts on battered ground, the seeds undergoing scarification within the stomachs of pod-eating mammals, projecting with thorny vigor from last year’s droppings. It is often deposited in degraded landscapes, making it vulnerable to browsing pressure. This is where the thorns come in.

The thorns of honey locust are considered an evolutionary anachronism, that is, a biological appendage developed under different circumstances than our current world dictates. As a child of the Pleistocene, honey locust had to contend with all manner of freaky big animals; mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and beavers the size of Buicks, to name a few. Wearing an armor of six-inch spines, the honey locust evolved to contend with the massive disturbance a mastodon could level at other trees, and in exchange for being spared, offered a thick crop of sugary pods, which carried in the guts of these beasts, would beget more honey locusts. This strategy of protection and dissemination was a winner. Eventually, groups of human hunters would wipe out the threatening North American megafauna, but the wiry, thorny honey locust would remain in place, weathering thousands of years of climate shift, natural landscape disruption, and even fencerow-to-fencerow agricultural industrialization.

Here in Northeast Missouri, and across the Midwest, the honey locust is, understandably, cursed. The younger trees project their thorns in a wide, defensive stance, making them hard to simply chop out. They sprout in deer shit along old fence-lines and quickly take form between rusted barbed-wire. As they mature, the trunks tend to gradually grow less thorny, but their spreading canopies often dip down to eye level in a sharpened veil of spiny twigs. As older branches die off, clusters of thorns rain in fields and pastures like caltrops, sturdy enough to puncture a tractor tire or send a foolish barefoot walker into the E.R. Granted, they do provide excellent firewood, and in some instances, fine timber for flooring and other uses, but the time and care needed to safely harvest and clean up after dropping a honey locust often dissuades timber cutters. Naturally, as a difficult tree, I love it.

When the rain breaks, I am able to step out from the tree’s thorny embrace, and take a wide view, as it dries in the brief sun and chirruping wind. A robin has nested in a firm crotch near the trunk, safe from tender-footed climbing predators, and as the sun climbs out from the passing veil of smoky thunderheads, the fine leaves cast the most pleasantly dappled shade of any tree, allowing tempered photosynthesis beneath its canopy. While great, wide-leaved oaks and densely branched cedars all but eliminate ground cover with their shade, the honey locust rises from a verdant foundation of healthy grasses, oftentimes thicker and greener than open pasture.

This tree, like myself, is firmly middle-aged, if allowed to live fully. I have pruned it, slightly, allowing the cows to laze beneath it in the summer heat. The goats sometimes congregate here in September and October, gleaning sugary pods from the thick tufts of grass. The thorns are no longer in your face, but they’re still there, formed in a stretching, spiny shield, parallel to the sweet, candy-covered earth. Sometimes, I snip a few spines off the trunk to allow myself a firm spot to lean along, but when under duress from rubbing, browsing, or climate vulnerability, the tree manages to sprout a few more.

When I can, in those quick moments of stillness, I come here to think about my own thorny nature. I grew up in my own Pleistocene, threatened by beasts and men and institutional insanities. In my youth, I threw a lot of thorns. Sharp ones, and on a few occasions, this probably resulted in collateral injury. There’s a list of people, fading and crumpling as it is, who have borne the brunt of my defenses. And I still sprout new thorns, from time to time. If they aren’t necessary to my own survival, I’d like to think they defend others, but sometimes, I’m probably just purposefully being a pain. Call it an evolutionary anachronism.

With the sun now firmly in the banner of sky, those constellations of elderblow and mulberry shit swimming in fresh puddles, and the churrs and scolds of house wren sharpening in the masses of thorns, I grasp my egg basket and move along. There’s much to do, some of it banal, some of it of the utmost importance. Squeaking uphill with my wheelbarrow, pressing myself along the path, boot by boot, I look back at a tree that has held its ground through ages of uncertainty. And looking ahead, toward the next volley of thunderclouds, I hope to hold this same ground, in a darkening future.

Some author’s notes:

1. A continuation of this piece is in order, but I am finding it best to write shorter pieces for the duration of my summer, on account of seasonal responsibilities… I also suspect readers’ attention spans might be limited this time of year, at least in this hemisphere. Part 2 will be probably be nittier and grittier, as it relates to honey locust / human relationships, climate catastrophe, and resource extraction—classic Almanac stuff.

2. I am currently deep in a black walnut writing project. If you have solid recipes to share, please contact me! Beyond standard baked goods, I want your weird ideas: ferments, cheeses, pickles… anything that highlights black walnut as an ingredient!

3. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that the Fox Holler Almanac has a new logo. Much gratitude to for the wonderful art!

4. Finally, as a matter of necessity, our kitchen co-op is hoping to host a workshop on earthen/cob oven building. We’d love to have folks out! For a refresher, I wrote about our kitchen project more or less this time last year, and a lot of folks seemed to like it:

I would be unable to create this work without the material support of readers like y’all! If this essay connected with you in a meaningful way, consider upgrading your subscription, or express your gratitude with a one-time tip. Thanks for reading!

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I have spent the past week or so stepping in mulberry shit. And by shit, I do mean shit: inky, purple bird droppings, studded with fine, pale seeds, jewelling the walking paths out along the old hedgerows and timbered draws where I heave carts of sprouted grains and sloshing whey out to flapping gangs of pastured poultry. Overhead, fat robins peck and gulp at the glut of fruit, absconding with their juicy quarry, their beaks stained black, always flapping, always shitting.

In recent days, I’ve done my best to tidy up the farm, while I wait for rain. I’m hosting a farmer field day, my first ever, in which two dozen strangers with preferences and opinions will allegedly learn from me how and why I use trees to support “resilient” agriculture, and the footpaths I’ve carefully mowed for the occasion are freckled with the bloody pomace of mulberry-infused poultry shit, throbbing plops of it, shimmering with worms and slugs and maggots. It isn’t a tidy place to walk, and in the violent heat and ungiving clouds, our forages look particularly poor this spring. Truth is, I don’t care about aesthetics, and I don’t even care about how “resilient” mulberries are when it seems likely we’re all going to drown, burn, or starve in the next three decades. I’ll take sweetness over resilience.

Assemblies of clouds pile into towers on the horizon, but after a whimper of a few raindrops, the sun breaks them. The squash-vines in our garden remain wilted, one row down from the sun-scalded peppers, but the canopy flaps, glossy-leaved and resplendent in the hot wind. This fenceline was planted to mulberry by perching birds, with seed-laden droppings, the trees undeterred by ax or saw or herbicide. The chickens spend their first half of June here, watching for sweet bloody rain.

Some say to plant a tree is to hope, but I’ve largely been doing it out of stubbornness. To plant a tree that won’t bear for two decades is optimistic in a month with no rain, when the forecast keeps backing off of precipitation and the sun hammers the gravel and simmers the dust. I’m neither hopeful nor optimistic this season, but I am maintaining my stubbornness.

We’ve been down in the bottomlands a bit this past week, transplanting pecan and hickory into dry earth. We work down there in the afternoon, when the air is hot but the western sun is partly blocked by hulking sycamores and nodding, twisted limbs of Osage orange. An investment of sorts is being made there, down among the waist-high grass, the borer-killed ash, and the hordes of questing ticks, laying in wait.

Among the splots of berry-shit knitted into the grass that refuses to grow in this odd, early heat, gnats and flies hover in the haze and rot. In the lengthening tree-shade of evening, congregations of slugs and nectar-drunk moths suck at the seedy shit. My irrigation tanks are running low, the viscous flow of green water and larvae barely tumbling out into buckets I carry out to seedlings. Drink it and like it; you were born into a hard, hot world.

So here I am, with ticks crawling up my legs, planting pecans in hopes that they’ll provide something to someone in a parched future. But looking a quarter-century ahead right now feels heavy. It’s better to just take what the hilltop gives me, and pick mulberries.

Here in the Midwest, we have two, maybe two and a half types of mulberry. Our native species, Morus rubra (the Red Mulberry), is less common than it once was. Morus alba (the White Mulberry) was brought to North America by colonists to develop a domestic silk industry. Silk never really caught on, but the white and red mulberries readily interbreed to produce a hybrid, which really ought to be called a Pink Mulberry—though I’m not in charge of scientific classifications. None of these ordered distinctions have bearing on the actual color of the ripe fruits. Most mulberries ripen to a deep maroon, some of them a pale gold tinged with lavender. Eat too many unripe ones, and you will get a bellyache.

Often the fruits taste very good. Occasionally, they taste insipid, with a hint of dirt. They seem sweeter when it’s dry though. The mulberry tree is dioecious, meaning individuals have either male or female reproductive organs. The females produce fruit and the males produce pollen. Both have leaves that are extremely rich in protein, palatable to animals and less picky humans. The leaves are used in some Korean cuisine, even being cooked into a tofu-like curd. Whether for human or livestock fodder, the mulberry’s long history of cultivation for leaf production has led to coppicability.

All mulberries readily coppice. A coppicing tree is one which can be repeatedly cut to the base to stimulate vivacious branch growth, like the mythological Hydra. Supercharged by a stubborn and disproportionately large root system, coppiced mulberries can produce luxurious leaf growth, with some cultivars’ leaves getting to be dinner plate-sized. They are nutritionally the same as alfalfa, and far more adapted to poor, eroded soils and climate extremes. Here in the Midwest, I tend to coppice or pollard mulberries every other year, but I’m soft on some of the trees, allowing them to become unmanaged grotesqueries. I’ve even experimented with hand-stripping the fresh green leaves into a bucket, incorporating them into goat, swine, and poultry feed. The hogs and hens prefer the fruits though.

The mulberry has been in cultivation for some 7,000 years, widely considered to be the first agroforestry crop. King James did his best to impose sericulture (silk farming) on the Virginia and Georgia colonies during his reign, partly because he hated tobacco, partly because he adored silk, but mostly because he wanted a piece of the economic action while England’s own silk industry underwent climate difficulties during the Little Ice Age.

The English had failed to synchronize silkworm hatching with the bud-break of the mulberry, as the hatchling worms prefer only the tenderest young leaves of the tree. Many women involved in the attempted British industry were made to clutch eggs and young larvae to their bosom to keep them warm and viable. When the climate persisted, King James decreed that Morus alba must be planted at a rate of 10 trees per 100 acres in the colonies under heavy economic penalty. Predictably, the price of seedlings skyrocketed, the labor carried a low wage, and the colonists eventually shrugged it off to focus on tobacco and cotton plantations instead. That shift would lead in part to the promulgation of slavery in the colonies.

The mulberry trees didn’t fade out with King James’ attempt at sericulture. They stretched, and shat seed and frass, and hummed with birds and flybuzz through the Little Ice Age, the end of slavery, and every subsequent state government plan to eradicate its spread. They sprouted along once newly built farm fence, rising in the wake of slain oaks and extirpated chestnuts, their orange roots coveting the wasted soils of agricultural extraction.

Today, the mulberry’s hunger for degraded land is not yet sated, and there’s lots of it to bite into. Morus alba co-mingles with our native rubra. Male mulberries eject their pollen at half the speed of sound—the quickest biological movement on earth. The tree is nothing if not persistent. Even in matters of gender, the mulberry is untidy. On occasion, mulberries will change genders and either begin fruiting or producing pollen, switching teams to maintain a balanced population in any given location. Normal ain’t natural.

One of my earliest memories of mulberries was when a stately, formerly male street tree in my childhood neighborhood did just this, and began to bloom, later in life. The man my mother was married to at the time possessed a hot anger and complete hatred for untidiness. My natural disorganization was not tolerated, but there was nothing he could do about the purple grackle-shit that was suddenly, regularly deposited on the impractical two-door Mitsubishi sports car he spent weekends detailing. For fifteen years, we were chopped down by his cruelty, plowed under by his oppression, but he could not control what the trees were doing.

I’ve spent more years up here with the mulberries than I ever did in that situation now. I don’t think about him much, and I don’t have the time to concern myself with the past. But maybe I still have some light staining.

The mulberry’s tendency to sprout and resprout keeps it present in the landscape, even where deer predation is high. After some years of deer browsing, the tree will take on a rugged, weathered form, but it won’t die. When it manages to fruit under these conditions, the berries appear low down in a place easy for swine, poultry, children, and wildlife to reach. Furthermore, many early-blooming fruits in Northeast Missouri get nipped by late frosts. The mulberry flowers late, and even if hit by a late freeze, it will often try again, and succeed.

Some folks are not fond of the fruit for aesthetic or cleanliness purposes. It is messy, and overhanging fruit-laden branches, replete with feasting birds, can be the bane of existence for that strange class of people who like to keep their sidewalks clean and lead shitless lives. Personally, I am filled with a rare, pure joy at the thought of fat purple sparrow droppings splatting upon the immaculate driveways, vehicles, and heads of those who might disparage this tree for its untidiness. O berry-filled birds of suburbia, take flight and dispense your dark, sticky sugar upon the properties of that kempt and antiseptic class!

The fruit drops when it is dead ripe. The first sign of mulberry season in your area may well be the purplish leavings of ’possums, raccoons, and other opportunistic climbers. As a very delicate berry, they often fall with a hearty splat, rendering some unsuitable for harvest. I have a technique for harvesting that begins with a large, home-fabricated wooden crook, about eight to ten feet long, padded to protect the bark. I then take a dedicated bedsheet, stapled between two sticks, and hold it beneath the limbs. I shake the branch with the crook and catch your quarry upon the sheet, rolling the ends so the berries naturally roll inward. A lot of other stuff falls along with them: dead twigs, leaves, orchard spiders, and long, thin, brown beetles.

Once collected, the berries are cleaned in batches. I nest a colander within a large bowl full of cool water. With the water level well above the berries, the twigs, bugs, frass, and underripe fruit all float to the top to be skimmed off. Using these techniques, I am able to produce about 8.5 pounds of good eating berries in under four hours, including scything down all the poison ivy around the trees.

Children, like chickens, don’t harvest with strategy, efficiency, or food safety in mind. They laze in the shade and eat, their feet blooming with maroon stains, their chins streaked lavender, watching for sugar rain. As adult humans, we are increasingly exhorted to “know where our food comes from.” But we rarely want to step in it. We want it clean, packaged, and comprehensible. But somehow, standing on this slope, I’d rather be like the fat sparrows and greedy hens—sated, messy, and caught in the beautiful, crude friction of survival without the dreadful knowledge of future scenarios.

Between the wilting pecans down in the bottomland and the shining, buzzing mulberries spanning the hilltop, is the slope we are farming. It straddles some place between the abundant present and the uncertain future; a burnt-out, clay-stricken, wind-battered hillside that wears the scars of depletion. But the mulberry stands here, undepleted, ready to offer a fecund crop, birdshit and all.

I’ve never been tidy, and I’ve never had a sense of order, cleanliness or organization beat into me successfully. The kids are tracking berry prints into the house. The slugs are having an orgy out in the middens of sugar and shit. I think I’m done cleaning up for this field day, let them step in it. And let them eat until their faces are stained; the heat really brings out the sweetness.

Author’s Note: This piece features a passage from an earlier piece on mulberries, from some years ago. Long time readers may recognize this. I’m not making a regular plan to revise older work, but between farm responsibilities, community responsibilities, and work responsibilities I felt like it was fine to revisit, with the ever-shifting perspectives afforded to me as a dynamic human being with lots of work to do. I actually wrote this as a homework assignment for a “food writing” class I’m currently engaged in, and between planning for my upcoming field day and coping with a serious lack of rain, I figured you, gentle reader, would allow me to be resourceful in these long days somehow full to the brim.

Yours in shit and sugar,

BB

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For many days in a row, pretty much whenever the wind cuts fierce across our little sloping segment of farmland, I find an immature starling squatting in the weeds of our poultry yard, blown from its nest which was haphazardly tucked up in the rickety purlins of an old shade structure. It meekly waits, out of reach, in the cover of a sickly elm tree to be rescued by its mother. In the great thrashing and churning of life and death and decay that is springtime in northeast Missouri, I have become familiar with the constant sight of windfall baby birds, often dead, their thin pink skin writhing with ants. This particular fellow, the starling, is a bit more robust in health, despite the repeated trauma of being blown from its shoddily constructed nest. And while I sometimes tend towards callousness in this season of windfall and rapid trophic cycling, I always take time out of my chores to carefully replace the unfortunate birdy back up in the nest.

While European starlings are indeed abundant and not native to this place, I would challenge the authenticity of any man who could watch their vulnerable and awkward young struggle, gap-mouthed with hunger, pinny with undeveloped feathers, lying on the ground so close to safety, and do nothing. I have never denied that it’s a hard world we’re all born into, and despite advancements in health-care, education, and the availability of food (in some parts of the world), it doesn’t appear that this hard world is trending towards ease. A hard world demands tenderness, or some small modicum of care and decency, when we can afford it.

A few days back, I had to euthanize Elton John— that is, our longtime stud billy goat, named Elton John. This day had been slated for winter originally, but like much of my work, was postponed repeatedly, partly due to circumstances, weather and schedules, but also maybe on account my distaste for the deed, if not his strong, pissy, musky odor and potential flavor. While I have used bold flavors and elaborate preparations to produce passable billy goat based cuisine, intact male goats are undeniably raunchy in their flavor profile— and surrounded as I am by wonderful food, I am embarrassed to admit that I think bucks are best suited to dog or coyote food.

And while Elton John (the billy goat and not the famed singer) was a particularly sweet and tame gentleman, by billy goat standards at least, he had shortcomings, both behavioral and genetic. He carried in his DNA some unfortunate traits which often lead to kids with mouth/jaw deformities and cryptorchidism. He was also a bit of a ringleader for bad behavior, knocking down electric fencing, leading the wethers he spends the summertime with on damaging walkabouts, even seeking out our doe goats for forbidden liaisons outside of our preferred breeding schedule. So when Elton jumped the fence and ended up at my house twice in 12 hours, it was obvious that we would have to crown a new king— the shy but powerfully framed Randy Joe.

After rounding up Elton and his fugitive comrades in the barn, it was time. We walked him around the side of the barn, allowed him a final taste of grain, and quickly, painlessly, and ignorantly, he fell to my gun. In a best case scenario, this is the plight of male farm animals. Years of eating, playing and occasional carnal delight, ended unknowingly with the pull of a trigger.

I’ve been fixing up little bouquets for a while now. Sometimes for graves, but more often for some small bit of joyous decor. Our kitchen cooperative is back in formation for the growing season, and when trying to make our meager spring rations stretch for a dozen or so people, I’d like to think that a floral centerpiece really distracts from the grim reality of survival. I like to find what’s bold and pretty like big red poppies or creamy bracts of black locust blooms, and contrast them with the mundane— stalks of rye cover crops, pale green seedpods of peppergrass, even the subtle, fleshy leaves of chicory. I understand that flower arranging is an art, and one in which I have no formal training, but some of the skills it requires, like observation, attention, and a good sense of personal, geographic placement come naturally to me.

Whether or not I agree with it or go along with it, we live in a deeply gendered culture. Even in 2026, when the constructs of gender are being openly and often bravely challenged, provisioning a bouquet —as a man— would probably be derided in some groups. Despite the fact that to make a bouquet is to be a provider, at least of some amount of joy, there are internet personalities out there that would have you believe that the only overlap between masculinity and “home-making” is to make my own bed, which to be clear, I don’t ever do (I’m just going to sleep in it again, what’s the point?).

Men who do not create joy, or beauty, or care or comfort in a world that needs so much more, particularly when those necessities are unpaid, aren’t real providers. Like stud breeding stock on a farm, they consume feed and mate and potentially earn income, but ultimately they can be led around the back of the barn and replaced. I don’t mind that simple functionality in a buck or a boar or a rooster, but human beings that are unwilling to engage in important and undervalued work on account of their anatomical bits just don’t have what it takes to bring our species through into the next century.

Of course, I’ve been considering this lately because of how many male farm animals I’ve killed in my lifetime. But mostly, I’m considering these things as the father of a son. A few days ago, my boy, out of the blue, confided in me that he feels upset when he hears stereotypes about “white, American males”, because that’s what he is. I’ve always stressed to my kids that we can’t just accept generalizations about whole groups of people, because we’re all individuals, but I’ve spent enough time around my fellow white guys to know that sometimes there’s a reason stereotypes exist. I thought twice in the moment about what to tell my boy, and what I settled on was something to the effect that we do not need to comply with stereotypes, and if they’re particularly harmful, we should specifically do what we can to be different. I did my best to explain that he does have an unfair advantage in this life, but that he can choose to leverage that privilege to help the less fortunate. I think it was a fine thing to say, but there’s something deeper to his anxieties that has been bothering me these past few days. Boys do need a grounded understanding of the way this world works, with all its unfairness laid bare. But they also need a map to their goodness.

There’s a whole media industry that profits from making boys feel insecure. Perhaps this has always existed, I don’t know, but as it stands, a lot of deeply disturbing ideologies are being aimed at boys right now, and in turn, everyone else. I don’t need to even name all the idiots, bastards, and ghouls out there promoting harmful worldviews to young men, and these people already receive far more attention than they deserve. Outside of taking these “men” for a walk around the back of a barn somewhere, the most I can do in response is to make a nice bouquet, something that creates value outside of profit.

I don’t allow my son to watch “influencers” or anything like that, and have always strived to model a masculinity that rings true with my own conceptions of what it means to “provide”. I’ve also never purposely allowed my own conditioning to seep through. I cook, I clean, I listen, and I yield the floor to others. But my boy is ten years old, and eventually, he will befriend other boys who were not raised this way. And I don’t know what to do. And ceaselessly, the violent world we inhabit keeps churning.

Another complex of storms sliced through our area overnight. This morning, the wet, leaf-laden branches of maples and mulberries were hanging low with rain, tossed by the wind. Twigs and nests laid in the mud, torn from the trees. Randy Joe and his emasculated pasture-mates strutted nimbly through the thickening grass, and our somewhat pushy or otherwise overly attentive tom turkey, Jellybean, boomed and danced and fanned his tail in anticipation of another hapless day ruling the roost. I hadn’t seen the little starling for these past few days and began to assume that the little bird had been doomed by the odds tacked against him, but as I hauled my bucket of feed out past the blooming locusts and across the threshold of the barnyard gate, a slightly less helpless, more full-feathered bird watched me from the wire a moment, before darting toward the storm-veiled horizon.

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For the first time in months, I can hear the swish of green, living leaves as a sharpened North wind rattles the branches of flickering cottonwoods, resplendent maples, and blooming oaks. Day by day, as the canopy further unfurls, that tired old winter view of open sky and leafless limbs is blotted out by a deepening pall of photosynthetic surface. The soil is warming, the sun rides a wider and wider horizon, and every plant in Northeast Missouri is stretching out to absorb sweet sunlight. Fragrant spring air lies trapped in pockets down below the expanding canopy– saccharine and heady with black locust blossom. The trees bear many birds and birdnests, more than have been present the entire winter, but in the concealment of new growth, all I can see is flicking tails and flashing movement, the birdsong dissolving in the cacophony of slapping leaves and distant tillage.

The grass, too, is stretching and thickening– lapping at the edge of footpaths, growing tangled in the fading wire of old fencelines, an expansive, photosynthetic flood. Grapevine tendrils slink along damp ditches and sharp, young bramble shoots arch into the open spaces. Rolls of fence, hoses, and small collections of detritus and half-finished projects vanish overnight in the racing vegetation, drowning in the embrace of chlorophyll and cellulose. The world which came before lies buried in a verdant grave. While those first early blossoms and budbreaks offer a sort of rejuvenating feeling, the onslaught of photosynthesis can lead me down the tangled path of overwhelm and claustrophobia.

The earliest white “explorers” of this part of the continent often expressed fear at the unrestrained growth of this vegetation. Unlike the thoroughly horse-trod and cobbled ground of high-density Old World European landscapes and their colonial outpost counterparts, the interior of North America was seen as a vast waste of head high grass known to swallow whole herds of cattle —and sometimes men themselves. While the original inhabitants of the area made judicious use of their material environment to adequately maintain their way of life and manipulated their surroundings through burning, harvesting, and agriculture, the vastness and density of seemingly wild vegetation led men towards fear. And when men fear, they tend towards domination, extraction, and control. I know this. As a farmer, I often experience control masking uncertainty masking fear— typically when weeding the garden.

With so many of us removed from a natural landscape, the human psyche often craves exposure to what’s ‘real’; things like plants, animals, dirt and weather. But in the highly competitive race for solar gain and trophic cycling, it isn’t all bluebirds and pretty scenery. Waist-high stands of poison ivy awaken, glossy with oils and marked with the bloody tone of rebirth, filling woodland understories. Ticks crawl into tender, private places, the worst of which is probably the belly button. The thorns of windfall locust twigs lie concealed in the racing prairie grass, and murderous garottes of bindweed choke the young seedling plants near the garden edge. With the skeletal clarity of dormant landscapes behind us, we enter into a season of pain and vines.

In my youth, I was more cavalier about these conditions, but a decade and a half of natural landscape exposure has removed earlier daring-do. No longer do I spend time in the woods wearing shorts, no matter the temperature. In fact, from June onward, I avoid the woods altogether, if possible. If I’m doing field work I wear boots, no matter what. I imagine there’s a cross-section of my readership who prefers barefoot walking— that might work where you’re at, but not in Northeast Missouri. If these glaciated till plains exhibit a consciousness, it clearly doesn’t care for human intrusion. There is a delicate balance here to protect, and this landscape will do its best to extract blood from those who would seek to manipulate it, drop for drop.

To derive an agricultural livelihood in this landscape requires one of two things: wholesale ecosystem upheaval aided by soil destruction and industrial chemistry, or just a nice pair of loppers. Hear me out on this one…

Tiger salamanders and ground-nesting birds and largely unknowable communities of soil biology cannot negotiate with a plow, nor can prairie orchids plead their case before an herbicide sprayer. When human beings are frightened of the landscape they are often so motivated to control, they usually climb into the cab of a rumbling, clanking machine, if only to drown out the sights and sounds of all the life they are about to end. Not unlike a stable atmosphere and climate, maintaining biodiversity is an indisputable requirement for long-term survival of our species. Eliminating biodiversity either by force or through the successive rippling of environmental tipping points brought on by human activities is, in economic terms, pulling from our collective retirement account to produce a commodity that gets less profitable every year. Mainstream agriculture is a bit like plundering long-term “natural capital” (not a fan of the term, but it works) for short-term returns that, by all indications, don’t really seem to be returns at all. But, of course, this is all abstracted by agronomic bailouts, immediate debt cycles that many American farmers are trapped inside of, and perhaps most importantly, not having our damned feet on the physical ground when we seek to control landscapes.

With a pair of loppers I can begin a good-faith negotiation with our landscape. If I’m walking somewhere and my hands are free, I take them with me. If I don’t like the way the brambles are touching up on me, I cut them down, but I don’t set out to cut them down all at once— only the main offenders. If sapling trees are encroaching into a space intended for grasses and forbs, I snip them to the base. If the problem tree is stronger than my loppers can manage, then it is likely large enough to provide bird or bat habitat, so I pause my intervention for the time being, and reconsider cutting it until the dormant season, when my view of the branches is clear, and the habitat is likely unoccupied.

If I am making an excursion onto new ground, either for tree planting or pasturing, I do not fire up the brush-hog first thing, but take my scythe with me instead, trimming just enough grass —and slowly— to get a lay of the land. I can hear the meadowlarks rustling in the thatch, watch the snakes slide through the thick forbs, see native bees clustered on the subtle blooms of early wildflowers that would be invisible from a rumbling tractor cab and stumble face-to-face with hummingbird nests knit between the thin stems of another “marginal” American elm sapling.

Change happens slowly, so that I can know what the place I’m trying to manipulate actually is. Before shedding any blood, I give a bit of my own. It isn’t efficient in the immediate timeframe, but I tend to think this approach might “pay off” in the long-term, by bridging the increasing need for full-spectrum nutrition for my local community with the long-term health of this planet. In this culture, our relationship with land is transactional, to a degree. I’d prefer for those transactions to be fair and honest.

Over years, I have been able to use my scythe and loppers and ax to gradually shift a small portion of the landscape. Without running over birdnests or slicing down underrepresented prairie plants, I’ve gently made room for livestock, tree crops, and gardens which can feed people more completely than many of the other agricultural land-use systems in the Midwest. As these areas undergo gradual shifts, some of the wildlife naturally moves away from the frequent human interruptions, but does not outright die beneath tractor treads. This is what we’ve negotiated. If some degree of “mechanical efficiency” is required for the long-term viability of these crops, I can build up to it gradually, and steward nearby landscapes to meet the continued need for biodiversity.

It’s the last clear day to seed the ground before we are swept into another cycle of storms. Standing with my damned feet on the physical ground, surrounded by some unfriendly vegetation with a pair of loppers and a pocketful of purple prairie clover seed, I can hear the distant whine of screeching diesel engines pumping pistons, the soil crackling under treads. But soon enough, the gusts resume among the slapping branches of shimmering cottonwoods, and a house wren is scouting out a nesting nook in an old, dead locust, and a couple ticks have made their way into my belly button, and for a moment, the rumble of total efficiency is drowned out by the sound of sharp wind and living leaves.

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People can get pretty weird about milk.

As mammals, it certainly carries a heavy cultural –if not nutritional– weight. With exceptions (like most things), milk is a keystone component of our most vulnerable days and months; the only pure food we need in infancy. But as we develop into older human beings, the sacred bond between milk-bearer and milk-drinker becomes adulterated by distance. We move from suckling a breast to suckling a bottle– from human-derived milk onto milk from cattle, goats, sheep, or even camels and horses. The distance between where our milk is produced, and where it is digested grows far, and with that, our connection becomes abstracted, and this miraculous fluid, both life-giving, and very much alive, becomes a host to any amount of bacteriological processes, helpful or harmful.

In our industrial world, I’d wager that most folks do not care much about the provenance of their potatoes, or sugar, or apples. Save for the occasional (and likely increasing) e. Coli outbreak, they do not consider the purity or cleanliness of their grocery store lettuce. Irradiated almonds and waxen fruits are below concern. But people do get weird about the milk. We like a strong, funky cheddar, but we also need a flavorless, ice-cold medium for our Captain Crunch. Some of us consume our milk curdled in the harvested rumen of a young goat, others with the addition of pink coloring and artificial strawberry flavor.

With minimal effort, a gallon of milk can become either delicious cheese or a putrid health hazard within a few hours. Entire technological industries have sprouted up to control what is; an essentially living product. Like all ecosystems, humans take a considerable interest in altering the microscopic sea of proteins and fats and bacterial life present in our milk, according to our own (often economic) objectives.

As a person who hasn’t given up on having an intimate relationship with the dairy that I consume, somebody who knows the cows and goats, not to mention the plants and soil which feed their lactation, I view milk production as a necessary miracle for deriving human nutrition— at least in certain geographic and ecological contexts. At its best, the timeless practice of dairying is a wondrous symphonic relationship between people and beasts, grass and dung, bacterial and human culture. If you want to dive deeply into the magic of milk, I have to recommend reading ’s Milk Trekker – because I’m mostly here to talk about the weirdos.

It is often incorrectly stated that humans are the only animals to consume the milk of other animals— the wolf who eats the freshly killed carcass of a lactating caribou would beg to differ, but we are the only species to create taboos around food, not to mention make incorrect statements. Certainly, my pigs, dogs and chickens all love dairy, and the way they lap it up when I offer it, I suppose they’d probably pour themselves a big glass, if they were capable. Some folks are lactose intolerant— I live and eat with a few of these people, and I’ve got to tell you, the struggle is real. Much like dairy is endemic to some cultures, plant-based milks have also played a long and important role among others. But, as often happens, things change, and simultaneous with the uptick of interest in plant-based milks in this late-era of industrial agriculture, raw milk has become more than a re-popularized food in the affluent Western world— it is something of a political statement among the petite bourgeoisie. And this, dear reader, is where things get weird…

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In a lot of ways, this morning was no different than the morning Curly Sue arrived at our farm– a still, humid April morning when the sticky shells of unfurling cottonwood buds dropped from their swaying twigs down to the sodden prairie edges, with chubby robins pecking in the spring mire, and the dirty splashback of last night’s storms staining the gilded blooms of dandelions. Our infrastructure, while improved in those thirteen years (has it been thirteen?) since, is still unfinished, and as the grass still grows, a trail of mucky shovels, rain-filled buckets, and half-completed projects punctuates the footpaths that sprawl from site to site across this soggy slope of Northeast Missouri scrubland we’ve been grazing all this time. But this morning is different, now that Curly Sue rests curled into the earth, her thinning hide and worn horns buried embracing the strata of a long dead ash stump.

To be clear, Curly Sue was a goat —our very first, and a real goat’s goat, to boot. She struggled through her final breaths in the barn this morning, surrounded and slightly overtaken by prancing goat kids. It has been years since she’s had her own, years since I’ve tasted her milk, but she has remained as a nanny-in-retirement, often seen slowly ruminating with cracked horns, dozing in the sun, keeping a watchful eye, clouded by age, over the newest generation of dancing, playing kids.

Curly Sue was quite old for a working goat, thin and frail from the passing years, but she was also very spoiled, and retained her pushiness until the end. Originally, we brought her here in a borrowed little shitbox Hyundai, and at the time I was just living in a homemade yurt. We didn’t properly have a barn then, so for the first night we kept her, alongside her daughter and niece, in a workable chicken coop, outlined with poorly set-up portable fencing. The next morning, a neighbor walked her back at six in the morning as I was just stretching and drinking morning coffee— Curly Sue was eating one of his apple trees. Right until the end, in spite of her lost teeth and weakening mouth, Curly Sue would take every opportunity to slink away during the bustle of milking chores to steal chicken feed. A goat’s goat.

Now, as the cottonwood catkins splay themselves open, only to be nipped by the unsettled spring wind and laid to wet earth, we do our best to tuck her stiffened legs to her breast, curling her thin neck round the ghost of rotting stumps, allowing her to further nurture this dirt as she did in life, near the haggard form of the pear tree she repeatedly stripped down to root-stock during some of her many surreptitious forays into orchards, gardens, and yards she didn’t belong in.

A lot of thoughts go through my head when I’m burying an animal, or a human for that matter, and I’ve buried my share. Where she now lays, Curly Sue is a short distance from our old dog Judy, our first working dog Xena, our sweet little Ragweed cat, and our original matriarch hen, Henny Penny –one of the most motherly, and meanest chickens I’ve ever had the honor of working with. In addition to all the animals I’ve purposely killed to eat, I have buried many before their time and some few, like Curly Sue, after having lived the longest and finest life we’re capable of providing. Chopping gnarled roots from her grave with an ax, thunking through mud and brittle wood, I consider the strata of dead animals I’ve midwifed back to the earth over these years, and the nagging voice in my head that sometimes echoes in there returns; I don’t want to do this anymore.

After the first season or so passes by, you cannot trust a farmer who hasn’t cried a little– particularly when it comes to livestock farming, but I can see weeping over plants from time to time as well. I don’t cry that much– I really don’t have the time for it, but every couple-few years that catches up with me, and I at least get a little misty-eyed. In my experience, there’s a necessary hardening period, at least for those of us who weren’t raised on farms. In 2015, (or was it 2016?) we lost three or four goats to injury, strangulation, and illness. I’ve lost pigs during farrowing, seen piglets accidentally get stomped open, and arrived at chicken pastures strewn with feathers and gore. I have put down ailing goats and pigs and only regretted not acting sooner, not responding to terminal pain appropriately. It is fine, and probably necessary, to grow a bit hard in this work— but it is never fine to grow indifferent or callous.

Sometimes, I don’t want to do this anymore, because I fear the indifference; I fear that the human heart can only beat compassionately up to a certain point of injury, and that it might cease after it becomes too scarred. But then, after Curly Sue is well below that fresh crest of turned dirt, that uncertain voice fades again, and as a grower of things, I’m already considering what to plant in the nourishing earth of this newest grave. I went with serviceberry.

When I began to dig this grave, I’d forgotten about that tough old ash stump. It is the remains of an ailing tree that struggled through years of pest pressure from emerald ash borer, a deadly beetle introduced through commerce, as many ecological nightmares are. It tried to live for some years, throwing doomed shoots through the mud in vain, like all the other ash stumps lying brittle and silent down in the bottomlands. Finally, it died, and to put the ongoing loss of these trees out of my mind, I chopped at the rotting stump until its remaining portions laid well below the soil. While some cultures honor the dead with their continued physical presence —from sky burials to reliquaries– the culture I come from does its best to cover up the awkward and horrific state death leaves our bodies in.

The dozens of dead ash trees further down on this slope remain, many of their trunks cut for warmth, their limbs decaying slowly in the sodden grass, their stumps shrinking altars to their former status as forest sentinels and guardian trees spanning the expanse between open prairie and dense, riverine growth. I could not possibly hack them all out of sight– I can do it no more easily than I can lay to rest all the grief that comes with the gradual death of so many plants and animals and entire ecosystems. I don’t want to do this anymore, because I cannot possibly do it all, I cannot give each and every dying thing such a graceful transition to time and strata and microbes as I’ve done with these few beasts I’ve known.

Nestled into the soil, folded through the earth and roots, pressed against the decaying stump and its rock-hard heart, we have laid to rest a goat, and perhaps with that, a simpler time, when my grief was more manageable.

Of course, I’ve long considered nostalgia a disease, or at least a symptom of some wider cultural form of extreme mental anguish. The old days were hard too. Living in a hundred-square foot leaking tent full of rats stealing our food with nowhere to escape the elements, and death in every direction wasn’t so great, and neither were the constant welts and rashes and tick bites and occasional bouts of food poisoning or foul drinking water. I did this in 2013, as was approximate to our species’ living standards for most of our history, and many other folks continue to live in conditions like these or much worse throughout the world.

In hindsight, I think the thing that makes the old days seem so much better isn’t that I lived without major problems or considerable discomfort, but that the grief was much smaller. While I did have to bury the dead in those days, same as I do now, it always came with an understanding that it was just a part of the difficult work of building a better world. Now, I cannot dig a grave deep enough to offer service to the whole of the Holocene, as our planet teeters through final breaths. I cannot offer a graceful burial, cannot midwife death and decomposition into soil and hope with one half of the world in flames and the other half sinking beneath the rising seas. I can plant wildflowers and eulogize our dear matriarch goat, but I am incapable, both physically and in my heart, of doing the same for coral reefs and hummingbird bees and entire communities in Lebanon, or schoolgirls in Iran, or complete bloodlines in Palestine.

With the blank canvas of a freshly dug grave, I have decided to plant a pair of serviceberry plants over Curly Sue’s body. That I can do. Serviceberry (the genus Amelanchier) is a group of shrubs and trees native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere, particularly early-successional habitats. In addition to serviceberry, it is also known as sarvisberry, saskatoon or saskatoonberry, shadbush, shadblow, shadberry, and even chuckley pear. The etymology of Amelanchier’s common names is tangled– saskatoon is a derivation of the Cree term for the berry. Serviceberry and sarvisberry are linguistic corruptions of the genus Sorbus, or the old-world mountain ash trees, which apparently yielded a comparable enough fruit that early American settlers and colonists mistook Amenchelier, a relative of roses and apples, with Sorbus.

Of course, as with most folk etymology, serviceberry’s name has also become integrated into local lore and custom. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origins, it appears that in some parts of southern Appalachia, or perhaps further north in Newfoundland / Labrador, the early blooms of Amenchelier signified that time when the earth was thawed enough to bury the winter’s dead, who were sometimes kept in the cellar until they could be afforded a proper burial service. I did not know this when I planted serviceberries over Curly Sue, but I look forward to watching the blossoms burst in future springs so that I might consider my work and my grief a bit more deeply, if only for a fleeting week.

Watered in and protected from varmints, the serviceberries stand and wait for the sun’s return. The warm, still air gives way to a hot breeze, and at the peak of this soggy, scrubby slope, a dozen kid goats are frolicking and dancing upon the warm, muddy earth. Hummingbird bees have dried their wings and now hover down in the slowly greening draws and hollers, moving from bloom to bloom in the understory of redbud branches rekindled by another springtime. There is now a great roar of life, echoing up from the altars of ash stumps and the swiftly running creek— a cascade of chorus frogs and drumming woodpeckers and the subtle buzz of revived insect life, and all of it, soon enough will lie buried beneath my own layer of strata and the next.

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Thanks, y’all.

In the aftermath of heavy rains, when the scent of wet earth and wriggling worms collides with the aroma of sugary grass, our animals become restless, if not passionate. Until photosynthesis peaks and the vegetation, spurred on by consistent warmth, is able to utilize and absorb the excess rain that saturates the ground, we act as responsible stewards to limit the impact of livestock on this fragile landscape. The cattle are kept on hay in their barn with a small but adequate loafing yard, so that they cannot trample, compact, or ruin the infinitely complex and dynamic balance of the soil we’ve worked so hard to repair all these years.

Instead, they tromp out along the fenced edge to inhale the sweet scent of fresh pasture. It will only be a matter of days before they’re out grazing, as we have but days of hay remaining, but for now they must stomp discontentedly along the small tract of sacrificial ground that churns with hoof and mud, spent bedding and sweet, life-affirming dung.

The fence itself is an underbuilt, if mostly-functional, mosaic of scrap cattle panels, salvaged welded wire, and fifth-hand T-posts, woven together with an amalgam of frayed twine and rusted baling wire. I’ve seen prettier fence for sure, but the aims of our little operation tend to disregard aesthetic considerations for economic thrift and the intentional reduction in resource consumption. The result is that our farming infrastructure appears to be entirely stitched together by baling wire.

This morning, the air was decidedly too sweet for our cows to ignore. During milking, our youngest calf refused to nurse on his mother (we separate him at night and then use him to get her to let down with her cream before taking over) and instead began to gallop figure eights through the greening pastures, kicking clods of sodden earth, sending gangs of foraging chickens fluttering as he tear-assed back and forth along the damp pastures, pursued by my playful if overly exuberant dog, who has been smeared in cow shit for going on three days. It took three of us to rodeo the joyful calf back into the loafing yard, but not before his big brother, Bobby, decided today was the day for a run as well. Bobby immediately identified a weak spot in our scrapped-together fencing, and in one clumsy leap, took down a T-post and a steer-sized length of particularly flimsy woven-wire.

After some minor rodeo work interspersed with cussing, my socks totaled by the thick flows of loafing yard mud (wrong boots today), the cows were corralled, and after coffee, I worked to mend the new gap in the fence, making it perhaps stronger than the rest of the entire perimeter.

In an “end times” type scenario, some medium gauge wire and a serviceable pair of lineman’s pliers is going to be the first thing I secure. Luckily, I’ve made it a habit to stock up on these items regularly. I would imagine that across 30 acres of pasture, I have five or six sets of pliers, and half-a-quarter-mile of steel wire in various grades of tensile integrity. Add to that the hundreds of loops of jute twine slung over the stair-rail heading up to the hayloft, the coffee cans of nails and piles of boards with some life left in them, the congregations of partial cinderblocks piled into cairns near old hedge fenceposts, and the relatively tidy stacks of jigsaw-puzzle-pieces of tin roofing, and there is no piece of necessary infrastructure on this farm that I cannot temporarily fix… and as life often goes, the temporary fixes often age into permanence, at least on the human timeline. In a world that teeters on total brokenness, repair is more than a skill– it is praxis, a meditation, and as close as I allow myself to a spiritual pathway.

If we exclude humanity from the definition of biotic life on earth, the world has a way to repair itself in the long view, through adaptation. Even if the current death-spiral our species has engineered plays out in the ways I fear, and our climate spins out of control, and the broad spans of continental earth become uninhabitable to anything larger than a tick, and the oceans are chemically altered to the point of massive die-offs, so long as any life-form remains that can split cells, the deeper order of things will resume in due time. Or perhaps it won’t. But my concerns run a bit more immediate.

When my children are my age, even in the best case scenarios, they are unlikely to witness living polar bears or reef-building corals. Orangutans and African penguins will be extinct, and specialized bumblebees and green sea turtles will be unknown trivia of the past. There may be no short grass prairie, or tall grass prairie, or rain forest for that matter. If we humans remain until this time, if we’ve somehow managed to dodge our way out of the geopolitical and eco-material murder/suicide pact we’ve created for ourselves, all but the prosperous few will live through years of pure terror. These are the things I think about while I’m twisting wires between broken fence panels, standing in the loafing yard with muddy socks.

Despite knowing these things, knowing the end point of the path we’re on, I behave like an optimist most of the time. It’s probably a necessary delusion to do so, an instinctive brain-chemical reaction to the stress of impending doom– as nude, fleshy creatures without claws or fangs co-evolving with dangerous megafauna, the ability to cope with our improbable odds at survival might be the distinguishing factor between humanity and our fellow beasts.

We are not unique in our tendency to purposely manipulate our environment –go ask an ant or a beaver– but I would argue that our vulnerability as a species has given life to one particular skill, beyond delusion, which we express uniquely: repair.

In the aftermath of the recent deluge of rain, I traipse carefully through the delicate, sodden bottomland prairie to investigate our creek. Recently, I’ve committed myself to become more aware of our watershed, to take more responsibility for it, or at least build some kind of relationship with it. After months of freeze, drought, and stagnation, the Long Branch is running high and cloudy, undoubtedly turbid with the lost soil of extracted landscapes upstream. The water rushes over riffles and knit-together rafts of lichenous branches, foaming as it crashes through the muddy limbs that weave the creek-bank tightly –for the time being– like looped and knotted baling wire, as if the trees have offered this little stream a gift of deadwood to aid in slowing the violence of floodwaters.

In the gradually receding puddles of rain that flicker with wind and sunlight, terrestrial crawdaddies –with crawmommies and their little crawbabies on their backs– excavate muddy cathedrals, moving to higher ground of their own construction as they purge the inundated clay. A red-winged blackbird tucks fresh thatch into a storm-damaged nest, gliding hither and yon for salvaged scraps of last year’s grass. Dead stumps sprout fruiting bodies, and the prairie muck shimmers with young, green growth. Hummingbird bees feed at the spring beauties between storms, calves and kids feed at their mothers in the shelter of their barns, and at night you can hear worms crinkling beneath the wet leaves. Resurrection season is arriving, if only I can keep the fence mended another week.

Standing with muddy socks in the loafing yard, wrapping wire round the oxidized forms of fifth-hand T-posts, I feel it is important to note that I’m not hoarding the pliers or the wire. I maintain a collection because I’m careless and forgetful with tools. I’m not even that great at using them, but I’m doing my best to fix everything I can, in order of urgency, beginning with the cow fence. I moved our pigs to higher ground in anticipation of the rains, hoping they would knock down last year’s thatch without disturbing the soil too much. This morning, their paddock is laced with muddy tracks, and so my next job is to soothe the dirt with seeds and spent hay and a sprinkle of biochar, before moving the offending swine somewhere less delicate– perhaps I’ll find some of my wayward pliers back behind the buck-goat shed after they’ve grazed it down.

I’m not hoarding the pliers so much as holding onto them, refining my own repair skills, until I can hand them off to the next generation of fixers to hold the perimeter. I hope that whoever inherits them doesn’t mind the rust, nor the mismatched wire, and I hope they believe I left things good enough, in this grass-sugar stillness between spring storms. At my most optimistic, and delusional, I sometimes hope to leave them more– some grand engineered plan to re-route the violence of a world in tailspin. And maybe that isn’t impossible. But if we’re to move beyond the next half-century as a species, a lot of us are going to have to get our socks muddy and learn how to twist wire… focus on repair and leave the resurrection to nature.

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At dawn, swooping formations of robins careen between the bare and sleeping boughs of Osage orange and waking willows shining with bulging buds, fluttering to earth, pecking along the cool soil speckled with worm-holes. They fill their fat crops and nibble in the duff, cycling worm-flesh back into the dirt. One of our nanny goats is in active labor– before my third cup of coffee she is working to logistically organize nursing three new kids. Brief bouts of rain and heat have urged the grasses into growth, and in the early green-up, the cows stand at their gates, anxious to graze after a long winter of hay and loafing yards.

For the casual observer, who needn’t tend to cold, wet kids, haul manure, plant potatoes or fulfill any other dozen tasks in this breaking of dormancy, it is a perfectly damned bucolic scene, with fat goats belching grassy breath in their barn, roving pigs nuzzling in the thatch, steaming piles of compost writhing with microbial life, hunted over by thick flocks of robins, and the faintest whiff of duck shit wafting in the barnyard breeze. But for me, it is once again the peak of vernal anxiety. The weight of growing task lists keeps me awake, and even in my dreams I am standing in fields, puzzling over notebooks. It would appear that if I am to accomplish my goals for the quickly fading month of March, I may need to convince some of these casual observers that the work is fun, easy and rewarding.

Past the equinox, with the demands of daylight greatly exceeding any opportunities for rest, life somehow resumes… the neo-natal buds on tired old trees stretching and swelling out from their dull, lichenous twigs, the symphonics of chorus frogs and timberdoodles growing more rousing in each brief sundown, the sudden spawning of wriggling mosquito larvae in old rain barrels affect me just as the cattle stomping impatiently at the gate with chlorophyll on the breeze. If I get sweet dirt on my bare hands just once in the morning, I will be found at the end of a long trail of half-finished projects and hacked-down brush. I do dread spring, and also, I’m compelled to become tangled in it.

I’m not particularly young anymore, and my physical peak lies some years in the past now; however, it would seem that my youthful ambition has only gained momentum. We’re planting another 200 or so trees and shrubs this year– possibly more. That isn’t a lot of trees in comparison with some plantings, but the difference here is that I want to do the best job possible, and I’m starting off with rough terrain and looming challenges. As folks in the affluent Western world become increasingly (and correctly) concerned with the state of our planet, they often find some comfort in paying some small sum of money for somebody else to fix it. Sometimes, that “somebody” is doing good and legitimate work, but often it is either woefully ineffective or an outright scam.

Well, as an ambitious person, I’m running my own tree-planting scam. The trees really are being planted, not to mention well-cared for and maintained, and nobody is making any money off of it– the scam is in merely convincing friends and neighbors that it’s fun and easy and that they should help me with it, a la Tom Sawyer.

This will be my fourth season of cooperative agroforestry, after a decade of solo tree-planting. I’ve never been big into writing “how to” pieces, mostly because I’m just guessing like everyone else, but I have gleaned a bit of experience in the course of this project, and I think the idea is sound enough to promote. There are advantages to developing a cooperative framework for agroforestry, like many farm endeavors– a major one is that you can gain access to a wider diversity of skills. One of the things that often holds individual, small-scale farm enterprises back is how many roles one person has to hold. A person might be good at raising chickens or growing carrots, but maintaining records, handling money, making sales or even smiling at people are also necessary.

Land access is another issue, particularly for a long-term crop like nut trees. Very few individuals who have clearly defined land access have managed to gain it by farming, but through cooperative models like land trusts, this suddenly becomes more affordable. Here in the US, a land trust requires a board, some agreed upon bylaws, and a non-profit tax entity. While this legal arrangement presents a degree of bureaucracy which can be difficult to navigate, it opens up the possibility of receiving grants and donations to make projects affordable for those of us with more ambition than material means to accomplish our goals. In most states, a land trust can provide a 99-year lease to tenants.

But perhaps most importantly, beyond resource-sharing and skill diversity, cooperative frameworks (when functional) are empowering, and enable different stakeholders to provide the necessary energy when others are either busy, distracted, or otherwise depleted. In solo farming, I can’t send an email asking somebody else to water for me or keep my pigs alive.

All this being said, there are a handful of pitfalls and challenges with this or any cooperative endeavor. Divergent values can be tricky– some folks may be involved for purely altruistic reasons, but others may be seeking tangible material benefits. While these two values aren’t entirely incompatible in an ethically guided enterprise, they can certainly cause some friction in regards to what goals and projects are prioritized. Work styles can be very different. Translating a tree planting map to real life can be extremely frustrating, or even grounds for divorce in some instances. Valuing every member’s contributions equally can be hard, when different folks have different skills. Also, not everyone has the same abilities, motivation, or work ethic, which can cause friction or resentment, particularly for high-stakes, time-sensitive work like tree planting.

Furthermore, diverse class backgrounds inform a wide range of approaches to expenses and money; if you think you can avoid the messy and annoying social piece of cooperation by just focusing on planting and maintaining trees, I am sorry to inform you that isn’t a possibility. Like all things worth doing, this work will frustrate you at times.

One thing we’ve been able to avoid thus far is assholes. I’ve lived long enough to know that they do exist, even in ethics-aligned projects. I don’t have any specific fixes for what happens when it turns out you’re working with an asshole other than to make sure they get the heaviest shovel, but my advice is to get really clear on what your shared values are and who you’re working with before you get financially or legally entangled with another party, and consider what constitutes a breach of trust in terms of your bylaws. While there are a handful of templates for land trusts and cooperatives available online, any group looking to formally protect their shared interest in a project like this is strongly encouraged to contact a lawyer. Many attorneys are required to take on an amount of pro-bono work to maintain their law license— find one who appreciates your work and wants to support your project. But ultimately, at some point, every pencil is pushed as far as it can go, and it’s time to plant. Do not let the “perfect” organizational arrangement become the enemy of the “good enough”. Outside of law and petty human conflict, the goal is to ultimately get some trees in the ground.

The drab little spent blooms of tired elms fleck the churning skin of the earth, slowly assumed into the digestive tracts of earthworms. The cycle of birth and decomposition reconvenes, relentlessly grinding as last year’s prairie seed bursts in the silence of soil. Down in the bottomlands, where the sleeping grasses gradually return to life, we are preparing for our next planting, lining out rows of fiberglass stakes representing willow and hickory, persimmon and oak. To raise a crop of trees is to farm in four dimensions, to take our two dimensional maps that translate to little more than “stems per acre” and extend the conceptual into the realms of elevation and time. We are doing more than laying out a crop– we are feeding complex interactions between shade and sun, soil and root, fungi and protozoa and squirrel and cow and human being. Perhaps, we are even building a different, collective culture, so long as new caretakers step in when our time here goes the way of worms and spent blooms. But like I said, I’m a very ambitious person.

Collective survival requires either a critical response to inherent danger, or an unlikely investment of faith in other humans. With civilization teetering somewhere between gradual failure and sudden, incomprehensible horror, planting a couple-hundred trees every year seems a bit quaint. But that’s the beauty of this particular tree planting scam– it provides simple, joyous work, in spite of whatever storms stand billowing on the uncertain horizon.

The nanny goats bask in the few moments of intense sunshine we’ve been allotted for the day, their babies warm and frolicking. The cattle sniff grassy air, and the hogs snuffle in the shade of cedars, in bliss and ignorance. As stewards and human beings, I don’t think we can afford the luxury of ignorance, but if our work is to have some meaning, it may as well be so fun you’d do it for free.

As a follow-up note, here is a link to an article I wrote a couple-few years back when the whole agroforestry “co-op” got started. To be clear, we are not legally a cooperative at this time. Ideally, when the time is right, we’ll pick an organizational pathway that meets our shared objectives. I would be interested and willing to discuss this with readers sometime soon as part of a “chat” or whatever they call it on Substack… let me know if that’s of interest to you.

I also recently put together this story map to explain the project a bit. It’s a work in progress— all of it. Thanks for looking.

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Those first bouts of harsh wind and cold spring rain have cleared us, leaving only the slow drip of water across furrowed bark, the plaintive peents of timberdoodles, and the faintest early sonatas of chorus frogs croaking from the muddy, swollen form of the Long Branch creek. Someone with their shit together would be planting trees now, but I don’t have my shit together. The winter here in Northeast Missouri has been dry, and while I’m plenty familiar with March rain and its accompanying mud, I feel unaccustomed to it on account of the extended absence of moisture.

Down in the bottomlands, where the vessels of this continent’s circulatory system gurgle and boil with muddy water lapping at time-worn logs and debris, the deeply crenulated form of Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) stands stark, rising through the chaos of decayed root-mass, overturned hulks of dead elm, and creeping carpets of moss and chickweed.

I’ve been told that the hackberries produce a fruit, one which I have never found or eaten. Maybe the pollination conditions are too finicky, or maybe the trees are younger than they appear. Folks say that hackberry fruits are dry, yet sweet, like a date. Perhaps I’ll never know, but I don’t seek rent from trees– they’re welcome to just stand there and host hackberry psyllids and tawny emperors. The lumber of hackberry is not particularly valuable to human industry either– rough, soft and prone to rot, it provides a more immediate benefit to forest-floor microbiota and enterprising woodpeckers than human carpenters or furniture-makers.

No, the human value of hackberry might well be a natural example of functional aesthetics. The bark is incredibly furrowed, mottled with plateaus and ridges, laid out like a topographic map, a playground of shadow and light. Among the stands of creaking hedge and pin oak, it offers some degree of inspiration, at least to my own mind’s eye. The warty, corky ridges of hackberry provide, if nothing else, a layout for what a Midwestern landscape that intercepts and slows water and erosion and promotes biodiversity might look like; dynamic, non-linear, and seemingly random.

Tomorrow I’ll be just up-slope of some of these hackberry trees, laying out lines, marked with little plastic flags in anticipation of a new round of spring tree planting– nice neat rows spread 120 feet part, punctuated by willows, persimmons, honey locusts, big-tooth aspens, bur oaks, white oaks, pecans, and shell-bark hickories every thirty feet or so. We’re receiving grant money for the project, which is for silvopasture –the intentional integration of trees into livestock pasture– and the amount of money we receive is correlated to the total “stem-count” for the USDA-mapped fields. In designing this project, we had to balance the requirements of the grant with the utility of the space, with my own desire to integrate tree species that enhanced and improved ecological functions of the site.

Even the best-intentioned, incentivized tree-planting programs inevitably turn towards grid-based designs. A grid of trees is (sometimes) easier to mark out and plant. A grid of trees is certainly more efficient to maintain and harvest. And while it is perhaps a subconscious choice, grids of trees appeal to human aesthetic concerns, particularly in mainstream agriculture. In fact, I regularly go out to our (mostly) square and precise chestnut planting to admire the uniformity of the rows, each unique seedling obscured by tall plastic tubes, if only for the dopamine hit of satisfaction that comes with allowing my eyes to flow across the linear space.

And look folks, if arranging trees in straight lines helps get more trees into the landscape where they’re needed, I suppose that’s fine. In an agricultural economy riding across the thinnest of margins, efficiency is a factor worth considering. As humans, we are perhaps on the brink of finally looking towards trees as providers of nourishment rather than obstacles, which counts for something. But still, I do not know that our attempts to standardize tree crop production by removing the very dynamic nature of woodland landscapes will offer the full-range of benefits that trees provide to the world outside our narrow, human needs.

One of the things the agroforestry movement is doing well here in the (currently) affluent Western world is perhaps strategic compromise. In order to turn the tide on the ongoing and impending environmental collapse as it relates to agriculture, some degree of “palatability” is probably necessary. In a country where political and economic power has long been built on land-grabs and territorial ownership, we probably need to adjust our practices to appeal to the landowner class and the assisting bureaucracies that require a simplified efficiency to effectively operate.

But that isn’t how a forest or savanna operates. There are unseen complexities in soil and landforms that we will probably never fully comprehend; interactions we can scarcely observe, a great push and pull between disturbance and regeneration that meanders through the living mosaic of soils, space, and time. A land-use pattern like agroforestry, if it fails to address the need for what we call “chaos”, is ultimately incomplete.

When I began farming trees and learning about agroforestry practices, the “riparian buffer” concept was maybe the least sexy practice to me. Planting organized rows of high-yielding, food-bearing tree crops certainly spoke to that prideful part of me that wants to be a provider, in addition to that painfully human desire for control and understanding which can become pronounced after years of farming. The deep, intentional interplay of silvopasture, alley cropping, and multi-story forest gardens held an appeal in the parts of my brain and heart that desire deeply-considered, almost byzantine models –that is to say– made me feel like a smart cookie. Riparian buffers felt like an afterthought; plant a bunch of stuff down by the creek, sure. But in my own process of erosion, I’ve found myself, much like the ever-crumbling prairie earth, gradually flowing down to the bottomlands, where chaos thrives.

If we are to regenerate a planet that remains viable for biotic life, caring for our watersheds has a lot of leverage. Lately, I’ve been considering the 9 Planetary Boundaries framework, developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The concept is fairly straightforward; Earth has certain physical limitations, which if overstepped, will leave our planet uninhabitable. Researchers at Stockholm University are focusing on nine of them: climate change, novel entities (toxins), ozone depletion, aerosol loading (air pollution), ocean acidification, modification of biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorous in waterways), fresh water change, land system change (habitat loss), and biosphere integrity (mass extinction). As a global culture, we’ve overstepped seven out of nine of these boundaries. Agroforestry practices address most of these issues to a degree, but I would argue that riparian buffers directly improve conditions in terms of biogeochemical flows, habitat loss, climate change, and freshwater change, at a very reasonable cost of implementation.

If the cost of inputs like fertilizer and fuel continue to rise and the price of row-crops continues to drop, planting the trees near creeks and rivers here in the Midwest to trees might become increasingly agreeable to farmers– with or without the overhanging doom of the 9 Planetary Boundaries. In a place like here, Northeast Missouri, where conversion from corn and soy to chestnuts and hazelnuts is a hard sell, extra hunting ground and improved stream fishing carries a bit more weight, particularly on marginal ground that is increasingly inefficient to farm on due to flooding and the high-cost of agriculture.

Riparian corridors also do the heavy lifting in terms of keeping waterways clean and offering habitat to a diversity of wildlife. While different arrangements of trees, shrubs and grasses will achieve varying levels of efficacy, implementing rudimentary buffers doesn’t require the high degree of expertise or initial cost of more production-oriented agroforestry practices. That said, according to an EPA review of research, well-designed riparian buffers are capable of reducing 90% of phosphorous pollution, 100% of nitrogen pollution, and 90% of sediment pollution. While the savvy steward can include tree species that might provide some future income, a diverse mix of cheap conservation department nursery stock will suffice. The reason for this high rate of efficacy? Chaos.

Back down in the hackberry, beyond the view of linear rows of flags and plastic tubes, I cannot walk a straight line between one tree and the next. I must scramble across the overturned root-balls and rotting hulks of dead giants, tramp down through muddy, deer-tracked pools, and around thickets of prickly ash. The fibrous base of hackberry, deep-running taproots of oak, sprawling below-ground branches of Osage orange twist and coil into different depths of soil strata, feeding exudates to distinct communities of microbes. With each new species of tree I stumble across, new sources of life for a diversity of insects announce themselves. In the chaos and clamor of creaking branches striking each other in the wind, new opportunities open for red-shouldered hawks, flying squirrels, Indiana bats, and wood peewees. I suddenly see what I failed to recognize before– riparian buffers are sexy.

There is no question that a tree planting will help to provide wildlife habitat, ameliorate soil erosion, absorb excess nutrients, and help to protect waterways. But if every tree is the same species, rooting down to the same point in the soil profile, hosting the same soil life and the same wildlife, then it isn’t necessarily matched to the complexity of our current environmental predicament. The full mechanics of impeding waterway pollution, microbially neutralizing it, and cycling atmospheric carbon into soil carbon with the aid of wildlife are not perfectly knowable; they’re simply too complex to fully understand, let alone efficiently monetize as a sustainable agriculture practice. In spite of, or perhaps because of the mystery of how riparian communities are organized, humans do find value in them outside of transactional relationships. And perhaps that’s the distinct advantage these buffers have over other agroforestry practices– they function on a scale and level outside of our attempts at organization and understanding, but tap into a sense of awe that is deeply human.

I want to recognize that land access is a huge privilege that many of my readers do not have. While I hope to examine how land trust models function in granting that access in future chapters of this Almanac, one pathway towards stewardship I’d like to offer is joining (or organizing) your local Stream Team. Here in Missouri at least, there is support for training citizens in water quality monitoring and watershed improvement projects, and you can even get free native trees for planting riparian buffers!

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Walking down in the dead thatch and frozen clay alongside the Long Branch Creek with my dog tromping near, I pause at the form of a crooked old maple, its stems tipped with bleak, bloody buds, unmoving. We’ve set nearly 70 or so taps in the past two weeks to collect tree sugar from maple, walnut and birch. I check the bucket lying at the gnarled base of the old mother maple, and it is entirely empty. Besides a short run in the first few days, the trickle of thin woody sap has ceased altogether– the days quickly grew too warm, and now, too cold. In spite of the battling air masses overhead, nothing much has changed down below.

A thin shelf of algae-riddled ice clouds the mirror of a low pool in the stasis of the Long Branch– sheltered from the sun by root-mat and muddy bank. The Long Branch is a ragged, intermittent watercourse with well-defined, steep banks locked by knotted roots. In the dry times, such as these, it is a mere linear collection of pools, strung together through ramparts of muddy logs, the mucky bottoms speckled with raccoon prints, deer trails scratched across her banks. In the spring rains, she swells with brown water, alluvium and detritus, wood ducks dabbling in the muddy calm, rising above her banks in floods to inundate the quilt of woodland and farmfield that rolls alongside her for a dozen miles, crusting the leaves of overhanging maple in fine, gray silt before depositing into the south fork of the Middle Fabius, and on along towards the Mississippi. She is a minor waterway, like so many here in the patchwork of plowed-out slopes and narrow wooded draws that make up our corner of Northeast Missouri, enough of a landmark to be given a name, but mostly lying silent, stretched between the sycamore leaves and rotted-out carcasses of old oak, like a snake retreated in the duff.

Bucket by bucket, my dog and I skulk along the sleeping bottomlands, kicking at the empty vessels. Some crows have returned to watch us, the only thing moving up in the bare-leaf canopy, the buds of oak and elm not even gleaming with spring renewal. A muted sun is pressing against screens of haze, the air neither particularly cold or warm. The brambles are barren of flitting birds, the matted balls of oak-leaf woven together as squirrel dreys swaying vacant in the skein of gray vapor. Without bushy-tails to rouse or turkeys to flush, my dog even seems to be bored in the unchanging expanse of faded, sleeping grass and shiftless, frozen clay. At the end of the bucket-line, we veer up through the dormant prairie slopes and towards home with no sap, hearing only the echo and groan of creek ice grinding against branch and mud.

But of course, there’s what I can see, and what I can’t. A few inches behind her rough bark, the maple’s stasis has already shattered. Somewhere down deep, like the groan of ice melting, an alchemical hum is amplifying in the xylem. In roots pushing through the unyielding clay, last summer’s sunlight starch is stirring, becoming sugar, pulsing like a heartbeat without a heart. I don’t know how much we’ll collect before leaf-out, when enzymatic shifts turn the sap “buddy” and unpalatable, which is why I’m experimenting with slower to awaken trees like walnut and birch– in a climate where early spring hot spells are becoming increasingly common, maple sugar is the canary in the coal-mine, if not the passenger pigeon. A stretch of just a few warm days can end the harvest, breaking the vacuum of freeze and thaw.

Anyone who has made their way into and out of these kinds of bottomlands, especially with cartloads of sugaring equipment, understands that traversing riparian areas can be a bit perilous. Pathways that appear relatively clear from a distance are suddenly, inevitably obstructed by the slumped corpses of wind-fall limbs. Spreading thorny growth reaches out to snag human trespassers. Stumps, branches and ankle-breaker sinkholes lay in wait, concealed beneath the grass. When the sap is running fast and the buckets need to be gathered, the earth often melts into a tractionless mire. I have fallen on my ass along the Long Branch for a decade and a half— there is no skillful way to navigate it in mud season, as a bipedal animal. At best, it is a landscape best suited to raccoons, blue jays, beavers and frogs, and only minimal human intrusion. In the pattern language of ecological spaces, a Northeast Missouri creek-bottom is architectured to whoop your ass.

Or at least that was the case before steam power. 1850 saw the passing of the Swamp Land Act, a federal law that entitled previously un-farmable swamps, wetlands and bottomlands to state ownership. The states were then tasked with channelizing watercourses in order to move water off the landscape faster, then re-selling the newly arable land for agricultural production, often at an extremely low cost. The land sale proceeds were legally bound to be used for channelization, a “drain or default” clause. This channelization not only increased the mass of “productive” (and hence taxable) land, but paved the way for easily-crossed waterways; in order to increase and encourage the burgeoning railroad industry, the meandering and unpredictable course of our waterways needed to be subdued. The main tool of river and creek subjugation was the steam-powered dredge boat, and to a lesser extent, the walking dredge.

In the Florida Everglades, some 20 million acres of unique ecology were sold off to be bled dry. Thousands of acres of virgin cypress wetlands in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya basin were girdled and scalped by hissing machinery and steel teeth so that industry and state revenue might progress. Indiana’s Kankakee River was re-routed through a lacerated landscape to force the old form of ox-bows, meanders, and curling plumes of riverine life into that geometric symbol of complete and efficient resource extraction, the straight line. The river was no longer a great depositor of silty wealth to the maze of wooded bottomlands threaded through Eastern half of the continent, but a conveyer of waste, flushing sediment –and soon nutrients and chemicals– downstream to the eventual hypoxic zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

Where humans once travelled the sleepy, striding waters alongside sturgeon and gar and snapping turtles in boats that needed the safe, deep waters of lazy rivers, channelized cuts of rapidly running drainage ushered in the new era of rail travel, a technology that would not bow to the natural obstructions of a complete, balanced hydrological landscape. The ever-running lifeblood of mutilated swamps and plow-torn prairies began to down-cut the re-engineered waterways, gradually scouring the banks, tearing off immense chunks of that newly “reclaimed” farmland.

The cost of that ease of travel and increase in agriculturally productive land was erosion, habitat loss, and a slow poisoning of the continent’s most extensive watershed. By the turn of the 20th century, much of the US was carved into bureaucratic drainage districts, tasked with implementing this great straightening of the wild waters. It happened here on the North Fabius and the Wyaconda, a river some old-timers still refer to as “The Canal”*. Over in the Chariton River watershed, a channelization project performed in 1950 disemboweled the river of nearly 130 miles length to create the shortest path between two points– nearly half of its pools, riffles and meanders starved of water for the sake of corn and bridges.

But in some of those places where the screaming dredge boats bit off slices of riverbank, ripping root from earth, sucking dry the deep breeding pools of paddlefish and sturgeon, the earth’s broken circulatory system has found its old form, at least in floods— and in a world where floods are on the increase, straight lines cannot endure. In fact, they might get their ass whooped.

It’s above freezing now, and my dog is laid out in the tenuous sun that has threaded its way through the pall of morning cloud cover. A strange wind has picked up, shredding the last of the marcescent white oak leaves from their branches, revealing glossy buds, begging for heat. The leaky plumbing on a rain barrel drips, and the barren branches have begun to sway– a tinkling of golden-crowned kinglets flits up and down the stems of waking maples. The sap has begun to trickle, slow but consistent, and the glassy pools between the steep banks of the Long Branch, pregnant with roots, have begun to shatter in the thaw. I’ve begun to stick little flags down in the open pasture near the bottom edge of this slope, in places where I’ve seen the floodwaters rise on a handful of occasions, each one marking future plantings of crack-willow, pecan, sycamore, swamp white oak, and bald cypress; survivor trees for when this creek remembers its course.

The autumn of 1992 and spring of 1993 were exceptionally wet here in Northeast Missouri. The clay soils, without the buffer of wetlands and pump of native vegetation to regulate excess moisture, became saturated to a breaking point. Levees in the Fabius and Gregory drainage districts failed from within after months of saturation and high-water. The continued hydrologic pressure began to force water through the sand beneath the clay levees, and on July 16, 1993, the river decided to return home. Across the mouth of the Fabius, at the Mississippi River confluence in West Quincy, a levee was breached catastrophically, and a section of the bank blew out. In a short time, 14,000 acres of land were underwater– not just cropland, but businesses and homes. Water moved with such velocity that “scour-holes” were formed in some fields running 50 feet deep. Sand was deposited on the corn, returning the ‘reclaimed’ farmland back into a riverine sand bar.

Now, it would be remiss of me to not mention probably the only contemporary news story to come out of Northeast Missouri, which is that a man was convicted of sabotaging the levee, and he remains in jail today. James Scott was 24 years old at the time, and had a history of arson. He was volunteering on July 16, shoring up the compromised levee with sandbags. In a barstool confession, Scott bragged that he purposely removed sandbags and cut some protective plastic sheeting on the levee so that he could stay in Missouri and party while his wife was stranded on the Illinois side of the river.

He was convicted of an obscure “causing a catastrophe” law and sentenced to life in prison, which he is still serving, over 30 years later. In the trial, expert testimony from soil scientists from the University of Missouri stated that the levee failed on its own accord, that the stress of water saturation was too much, whether or not Scott moved a few sandbags around. At this point in the flood, 11 other levees upriver had already failed. Depending on who you ask around here, some folks say that Scott was set-up for vandalism, because documenting the flood damage as such allowed insurance payouts, since the flooding was defined as an “Act of God.”

The 2008 flooding was a bit different– while the 93 floods were due to saturation, 2008 was velocity. Significant snowmelt from the upper Midwest paired with an intense series of thunderstorms caused a series of violent surges in river level. While a meandering, naturally formed waterway has a tendency to reduce the velocity of surging waters, channelized rivers increase in speed and “headcutting” under such conditions, leading to what is known as “subaqueous scouring”. The fast moving water in channelized ditches moves so fast that the banks are annihilated, and levees are completely undermined by the surge. Areas that made it through the 1993 flood were inundated in 2008, because the water surged so incredibly fast– flash flooding on a massive scale.

In each instance, the river performed what is known as an “avulsion”, or a violent return to its previous route. Human beings can engineer, dredge, dam and levee these rivers, but ultimately, the water has its own way.

Returning to the mother maple, my dog curled in a ball near her root, her chest heaving with breath, I rattle more buckets for the faint splosh of sweet sap. As inefficient as it feels, to meander the bottomlands, checking on jugs of nothing, there’s at least some comfort in spending time with some survivor trees from decades of flood and drought, knowing that whether or not I gain anything from it, their cycles of xylem and phloem, rise and fall cannot be made to work on my time. Neither crooked trees or winding waters care for human measure.

The Long Branch sleeps, for now. Too jagged and wild for the engineers, it hums with cracking ice, soon waking. I can care for the banks to the best of my ability, monitor the water as it flows for a dozen crooked miles, but beyond that our control ends. I think these rivers remember… I know they do. The Chariton knows she was robbed of 130 miles, the Wyaconda, with its ghosts, recalls every lost meander, and the Fabius still echoes with the steam-powered shriek of dredge boats, made louder with new forms of fatal efficiency, from drain-tile to discharge pipes. Perhaps we’d be best to remember, too.

*There’s an old story from around here about a girl who drowned in those days. She was serving the boat crews working on the canal, walking planks from dredge to dredge with platters of food and drink… one dark evening she fell into the muddy water and was lost to the river, but they say you can still hear her clanking platter if you listen close out under the old bridge on Highway A.

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Note to readers: I don’t normally do poetry, but I’m very busy, so I’m trying something new. Thanks for looking.

-BB

Date: Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Lunar: New Moon in Aquarius (The Hunger Moon)

Liturgical: Shrove Tuesday (The Shifting of the Fat)

Currents: Low-Level Jet (S/SW); Surface calm; Poor sap pressure.

---

I have spent the winter gripping fat from this land,

pulling it from the viscera of goats and pigs,

fed on the solar gain of a season gone dormant.

My dog mauls a weak starling,

rolling in frothy feathers

between the veiled sun and the crumbling clay.

In the canopy, the squirrel drey—

a matted ball of dead-oak heat—

shudders in a stream it cannot see.

The red-shouldered hawk anchors her talons

to a cradle of twigs interlocked,

tasting the low-level jet in her feathers

while the forest floor holds its breath.

Spongy marrow between fangs,

the skillet seeking its grease—

a tired spring padded out

with chickweed, nettles, and thin, woody sap.

Bring starch to lignin,

carbon to protein—

the tooth to the pyre of last year’s slaughter.

Field Note:

The heat today is a ghost; it lacks the substance to move tree sugar. But the clay is crumbling and the moon is dark—the precise void required for an investment. I am casting the clover and bundleflower seed into the stillness of the floor, trusting the the thatch to catch it.

It’s Shrove Tueday! Make breakfast for dinner, or at least find a nice, fat donut. The wind is screaming three hundred feet up, along with the fat, pattering squirrels. We are just waiting for it to find the ground.

The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee.

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Earlier this winter, before the snow and ice came, I would only see small groups of dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) out further afield, most commonly flitting from the thorny edges of leafless draws down to the spilled feed and detritus sprinkled through my pig paddocks, kicking and pecking through frozen manure for a nibble while the swine snored, contented, in the shelter of their galvanized huts. Now that arctic air has careened deep into the heartland, bringing with it fine, cold sheets of snow, the juncos have flocked near to my own dwelling, finding relief in the cover of hazel, willow, and disorganized collections of resources like buckets, wagons, and icy piles of logs. They need very little and work hard to get it—navigating hundreds and thousands of miles from their breeding grounds in Canada and Alaska down here to Missouri, where windblown prairie seeds mingle in snow.

Now and then, a Northern harrier will circle silently, bracing its scythe-like wings in the wind, hovering like a drone. Harriers are very fond of rabbits and small mammals for food, though they are also known to partake in everything from frogs to bats to passerine birds, like the little slate-topped, white-bellied juncos hopping and pecking like frantic ping-pong balls in the snow. Northern harriers, like owls, are careful listeners—they similarly sport dish-shaped faces that act like a parabolic dome, collecting the slightest sounds of shuffling juncos or panting rabbits across the snowscape. They circle and stop, suspended by the air, watching for the faintest movement. As the juncos huddle in the shadows of frozen cedar fronds, all that can be seen or heard is the slight lilting of last year’s dried and spent milkweed stalks, their skeletal stems scratching the icy crust, the pods emptied of seed, stratifying and prepared to resprout for the ever-decreasing caravans of migrating summer monarchs.

A twig snaps. A dog barks. A chicken cautiously crows a hushed alarm. Two more guardian dogs begin barking, and the harrier careens off to another field to hunt, while the juncos re-emerge from the sanctuary of snow-laden branches. The lives of migrating animals, while existing within a natural order, are perilous but fair. The juncos, unencumbered by fences, walls, or political boundaries, do fine so long as they can find cover and forage. Ocelots, jaguars, and others, not so much. This is the unnatural order of human boundaries projected onto a living landscape—once vast plains shackled in barbed wire, rivers diverted and channelized, prairies and deserts and forests all dissected by asphalt, steel, and uncaring death; the once-fluid spectrum of landmass, water, and life cracked and isolated. And as a species, it seems, we are not content enough to enact this fragmentation against all other species—we do it to ourselves as well.

While I care for the juncos and do what I can to provide for their safety, there is at least some fairness in the cycle of predation in which they flit and forage. In the harrier, there is no malevolence, just a will to survive. The same can’t be said for ICE agents. I can only surmise as to whether or not these men are evil—and watching them gun people down in the street would naturally lead me to that conclusion—but I tend to believe that isn’t my call to make. Their actions, however, are certainly evil. Separating a child from their parents is evil. Putting humans into camps is evil. And while I don’t rightly know if these evil acts are a result of pure and deep hatred or complex manipulation, I can confirm that these men are cowardly and bigoted, displaying an irreconcilable apathy to what it means to be human. They are the largely unemployable set against our hardest-working people, the unjust set against those merely seeking survival. Evil or simply weak, I hope that meaningful reprisal and atonement is in order. In the meantime, the rest of us do what we can, I suppose—create food, create shelter, engage fully with the mutualized project of survival, and, in time, tear down the damned walls.

Xenophobia and “borderism” have existed for at least as long as agriculture has produced wealth. As has labor exploitation. In this country, industrial agriculture has heavily relied on exploited migrant labor since at least World War II, though there are many notable instances from history prior to that time. Previous editions of this Almanac have featured the story of the Wheatland Hop Riot of 1913, which involved farm laborers from all over the world. Mexican and German-Russian families were at the center of exploitative sugar beet production in the West and Midwest. And while the hateful core of these events is often rooted in racism, the “Anti-Okie” laws of the 1930s, like California’s Indigent Act, were born of a general anti-migration, anti-poor sentiment—Los Angeles even had its own municipal border patrol posted at train yards to dissuade hobos seeking work from entering the city, often by violent means (see also: Gavin Newsom).

Of course, while politicians and propagandists alike kindle fear and suspicion of anyone who is poor, foreign, or otherwise unanchored for their own gain in power, the borders they build are never exactly closed. Take, for instance, the Bracero Program, initiated in the summer of 1942 to make up for shortages in agricultural labor on account of the war effort. From 1942 until 1964, 4.6 million manual laborers, or braceros, from Mexico were contracted through the U.S. State Department, Department of Labor, and the INS (one of ICE’s precursor departments) to enter the U.S. for the purpose of filling gaps in farm and railroad labor created by the war. The agreement with Mexico was that braceros would be allowed temporary guest-worker status, though they would be tracked and returned to Mexico after their time was up.

Under the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, braceros were to be granted adequate living conditions, a minimum wage of 30 cents an hour, protection from being drafted into military service, and required to have 10% of their wages kept in a Mexican bank account for their eventual return home. Braceros were also granted legal protection from discrimination and access to “white-only” spaces—at least on paper.

Labor conditions for the braceros were rough. Entrance to the U.S. often began with full-body “sterilization” with DDT, the pesticide responsible for the near-eradication of bald eagles, among other living things. While awaiting work assignments, the men were housed in crowded conditions in “bachelors only” camps that kept them from raising families or otherwise putting down roots. Letters to family and loved ones were censored or destroyed. Mistreatment and even lynchings along the border caused Mexico to place a ban on braceros working in Texas. A common symbol of the program was el cortito, a short-handled hoe commonly issued to braceros for farm labor, which forced the men to stoop tirelessly in the fields. This cruel implement was formally banned in California in 1975, though back-breaking labor in agriculture is still present.

Soon, corruption became an issue for the Bracero Program. The Mexican government selected eligible workers at federal, state, and municipal levels, and this decentralization gave local officials considerable power over the selections, leading to instances of bribery, favoritism, and corruption. Opposition to the ruling political party and disputes with labor unions also had an influence on who had the opportunity to work abroad. Between 1942 and 1947, the program was not working quickly enough to feed labor demands, spurring an increase in undocumented migration encouraged by U.S. companies that saw an opportunity to provide fewer protections than the official program.

In 1951, top-level scapegoating began when President Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor proclaimed that the presence of Mexican labor economically depressed American farmworkers. Simultaneously, migrant labor programs were still being encouraged by the U.S. State Department as a way to counter the growing popularity of communism in Mexico, among other reasons. As layers of bureaucracy thickened and the market for exploitable, undocumented labor increased, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began “Operation Wetback” in 1954. This operation was a precursor to today’s ICE raids, using paramilitary tactics (Donald Trump alluded to “Operation Wetback” during his 2016 campaign). In the first year alone, over one million laborers were sent back to Mexico; 3.8 million would be deported by the time the operation was finished. Many, if not most, of the braceros never received the promised 10 percent of wages allegedly held back for them in their native state. Adjusted for inflation, it is estimated that a half-billion dollars is still owed to them.

Eventually, the program would officially close, supplanted in part by the H-2A worker visa program and the continued, concealed acceptance of utilizing highly exploitable undocumented migrants. By the 1960s, migrant labor began to organize and strike, led by the likes of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez—all stories worth reading more about. Despite the eventual move toward farmworker unionization, the legacy of the Bracero Program remains—from dangerous and sometimes fatal work occurring under the H-2A program to this most recent flare-up of paramilitary enforcement, similarly intended to not only scapegoat migrants but continue to perpetuate the concealed acceptance of exploitable, undocumented labor.

The juncos are still out there in the dimming snow, kicking along the iron earth, harvesting scattered grain and bits of detritus. At the edge of another storm, light squalls of snow—flung into spirals by harsh arctic wind—cascade along the edge of the draw, burying the dropped and forgotten prairie seed. It piles in small drifts, gradually climbing over the sagging barbed wire of fallen fences. The milkweed pods, gray and emptied of germ, quiver. But someday, dormancy will break, and I wonder just how hot this summer might get.

In the larger scheme of things, I don’t know where home really is for the juncos, or for myself, for that matter. I suppose, regardless of fences and hawks and cold and ice and iron ground, home is just the place we need to be to survive. I watch the juncos flit up into the embrace of eastern red cedar, fluffed and huddled. Surviving. As inhospitable as it feels here this week, it’s probably more pleasant than a Canadian January—at least for a bird.

My house is pretty cold, and the work here is often very hard, but I have a lot of advantages being here. I’m not in any danger. I have lots of good places to hide if I were, and the architecture of surveillance barely appears here in my part of the world. As wild growth reclaims the edges of old fencelines, those old fragments of field seem to dissolve into the woods, and there’s plenty of food and shelter for more than just myself. I can’t be in the streets to sound the alarm and maintain watch over a world gone increasingly amoral and hateful—we don’t even really have streets here. But I’d like to think that, milkweed and all, we’ve begun to build some sort of safe harbor for mutualized survival and the continuation of some larger project: to meet the needs of a natural, borderless world with us in it. And in the morning, the juncos will be back at it again, re-emerging from the branches for a time determined only by the seasons.

The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee.

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Dear reader:

I guess I had to say something. A brief inventory of my personal assets does not reveal evidence of an abundant understanding of financial investment; just some good dirt, sweet cows, and a handful of shovels ranging from good to great condition suffice as my primary capital investments. Needless to say, the following is not financial advice, and asking me for that would be like asking an investment firm about the best time to plant turnips– and maybe that’s the point I’m trying to make here.

The following essay might fit in somewhere as part of a series on tree-crop adoption I’ve been writing for awhile now, which is moving along at the same pace that a tree grows: slowly. I tried my best to approach the subject matter with a high degree of nuance, and even assume good intent among those folks who are throwing lots of cash at regenerative food systems, but alas, decided this piece is —at best— a rant, and ought to be paywalled as such. And in it, I will argue that if we’re not careful, all the money in farming is going to end up being in paywalled content rather than food.

Apologies to all those in the cheap seats, but please enjoy the previous essays in this series, freely available for the public good:

Look folks, nothing may be more concerning than the concept of “market optimism”. When people are ready to throw lots of money at something is often the moment preceding when that thing will break. Name your bubble— anytime shit goes sideways on the economy, it begins with someone else’s money games. The 2008 financial crisis, otherwise known as the death throes of the American dream, didn’t arrive out of thin air; it was directed at vulnerable people by predatory institutions. And the same story may well hold true, albeit on a different scale, in the world of tree crops, if we aren’t careful.

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In the thawing draws, where tired and dying American elm rots to the core, I am raking seeds into the mud and duff ‘neath pin oaks. They are everywhere here, standing like caltrops, like great, vertical wooly bear caterpillars, marcescent, projecting their tough side branches like a living barricade along the tender, eroded scar of this slope, balanced deep in the clay on deep-reaching roots. Pin oaks, like eastern red cedar, are defenders of our vulnerable soil here in Northeast Missouri. They are also, like eastern red cedar, a pain-in-the-ass tree, which I find endearing, at least here from the writer’s chair.

The pin oak (Quercus palustris) is so named because its trunk is studded with low-hanging, almost-contorted branches, or pins, which some accounts suggest were actually used for wooden pins for carpentry and timber-framing in earlier times. The thick, flexible “pin” branches, in addition to making pin oak sawlogs not worth the effort, are also extremely dense to move through. As a person who has been stumbling through pin oak for going on 15 years, I can assure you that these branches are both very tough and very springy– several times I have pressed them out of the way, only to watch the swinging limb swat back at whoever may be following me. I have also been victim to this action, both on account of friends (because friends don’t let friends fell trees in the woods alone!) and goats alike. Mostly goats.

These inconvenient limbs can form a barrier that slows or dissuades human/large animal intrusion into sensitive, healing areas, as pin oak is a relatively short-lived “pioneer” oak, arriving early on the scene to scab over the ruts and scars of anthropogenic disturbance and extraction. While pin oak is less intimidating than say thorny Osage orange or honey locust, I have been discouraged from cutting across draws and gullies hundreds of times by young, dense groves of pin oak and their tangled walls of intertwined branches that snarl across regenerating woodlands.

Pin oaks, particularly when young, present a trait known as marcescence, that is, they maintain their leaves throughout winter, not like an evergreen, but as an orange, desiccated canopy of spent photosynthetic surface, remaining on the tree until next spring’s bud break. These stubborn leaves act as a vital umbrella for winter rain and snow, protecting the fragile soil below from excessive precipitation that can lead to dormant-season flooding, while also providing excellent shelter for wildlife. In yesterday’s drizzle, my pigs spent more time out under the embrace of marcescent pin oak boughs than in their portable shelter, preferring the cozy layer of soft duff accumulated at the base.

Raking seed into depleted pig pasture near a rising stand of black locust, a mix of native warm-season grasses and palatable, pollinator supporting forbs, my rake catches the edge of a squirrel cache of a few dozen small, pin-oak acorns. Squirrel drays lilt and wave in the canopy, nests of twigs and oakleaf lined with empty shells and fine, nibbled bark. In September and October, as jays and crows swept in for the season, I would watch them hop and glide from pin oak to pin oak, plucking the small, bitter nuts on their raids, accidentally dropping a few here and there for the wild mice or to resprout.

While particularly unappealing to most humans, the pin oak acorn is a prized food for turkey, deer, and even wood ducks. In mast years, pin oaks can produce heavily, ready to resprout in the flooded-out tails of rootless gullies, the forgotten seeds caches of pouncing squirrels, and the decaying crops of ducks and jays and turkeys and crows dead and reabsorbed into the thin-soil clay. The seed is small, light, and round– perfectly suited to be carried point-to-point, or rolled down hillsides towards sodden bottomlands and deepening wounds in the earth, each sprout a stitch, weaving together broken networks of bacteria, fungi, microfauna and mineral dirt.

Pioneer plants, that arrive after disturbance and upheaval on the landscape, are different from pioneer people. I do not know of any examples where pioneer plants create the disturbance that they later exploit, but pioneer people have. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it advanced through the Indigenous population well ahead of the actual geographic settlement of the continent’s interior. By the time pioneer people made their way to Northeast Missouri, most of the original inhabitants may have already been killed by the disease, their legacy of fire-management and stewardship already fading as the wooded bottomlands gradually expanded from the boundaries, thousands of acres slowly creeping into a tangle of pin oak and thriving elm.

Good sawlogs of hickory, walnut and white oak were taken, and then came the plow, penetrating the strata of 10,000 years of prairie grass cycling from growth to dormancy to decay and back. The hills and plains were gutted for their rich earth, left to bleed mud in the creek-beds, channelized and without beaver. But the pin oaks that lingered at the edge of creek-side dales, sprouted from squirrel cache and bird’s beak would remain– too hard to saw and likely to bow for high-value lumber, too difficult to access for all but the most desperate homesteaders seeking fuel for woodheat. Seed by seed, pin oak has regained ground against the now fading settlements of those pioneer people. With every season, as our town squares crumble and main streets lay quiet under falling brick-piles in Northeast Missouri, pin oak creeps further up the slopes, stitch by stitch, the final seed sown after extraction fades into depopulation.

Pioneers, both botanical and anthropological, tend to grow fast and die young. Oaks, generally, are renowned for their longevity, but the pin oak seldom lives longer than 120 years. There are a handful of great big pin oaks here, doubtlessly matriarchs to the thickening groves that spring up along the sagging fences and cow-stamped draws quilting this township together. They themselves were progeny of an elder generation, cast down in those times when the sod was killed furrow by furrow, plot by plot. Due to those wide, low, spreading branch-walls, a grove of pin oaks is less hospitable to troublesome generalist invasives like bush honeysuckle or multiflora rose. Pin oak was here well before we arrived, anticipating the wounds we would create, and will be here long after our communities have been entirely bled from the land by the economics of tech-pioneers and autonomous, machine-operated extraction.

Despite its reputation as a pain-in-the-ass tree, alive or dead, I have managed to survive largely on pin oak for many years. I have raised generations of turkeys, swine and ducks on the seed, heated my home, built with it (despite its reputation), harvested the logs for propagating mushrooms, used it as shelter for my stock, and pruned backwoods pathways beneath its canopy for both recreation and tactical concealment. I won’t be here forever, but pin oak will, repairing what I could not regenerate, soothing the wounds that I myself am culpable for.

I cannot side-step the fact that our world has gone mad here by just writing about some of my favorite trees. The efficiency with which resources can be extracted, the complete ability to bulldoze entire ecotones for valued minerals and oil shale, is something that even persistent pioneer plants like pin oak cannot compete with. Unlike those old pioneer people, who at least needed to physically engage with the resources they took, the work today is done with drones, aircraft carriers, late night phone calls, a few electronic transfers, a God knows what else.

I think about the big old witness trees, those haggard matriarchs lined with thick vines of poison ivy and razored briar whips, who stood as young saplings at the end of the furrow and watched successive waves of progress and regress, injury and repair, and wonder who will do the work when they’re gone. Who will stand long enough to tell the next story? Will it be humans? Obviously, the greater balance of power in this world must be restored, but in the meantime, we need repair. Who will provide it, if not the pin oaks? The work of extraction is done from a clean distance— the work of the woods remains dirty and intimate.

I’m a pretty amateur forester. I like looking at trees, walking among them, and even measuring them, but if given the choice, I never really like to cut them down. That’s not for sentimental reasons either; it’s hard dangerous work and I’m accident-prone and increasingly lazy. Still, we have a bit too much pin oak here. Pin oak holds its ground against other trees pretty resolutely. Without selective cutting or some form of natural disturbance, those original trees that were cut for their economic value –the white oak, the hickory, the walnut— won’t regenerate in the woodlands. Pests and disease have done much to reduce the population of elm and ash, and so in order to reintroduce some diversity into our damaged woodlands, a few oaks need to go every year.

We create openings and experiment with restoring other tree species. At times, we graze or pasture our animals among the pin oaks, carefully; pruning and seeding and creating new opportunities for forest diversity to express itself. But whenever I find a nice stash of pin oak acorns, I tuck a few in my pocket— you never know when you’ll find some place that needs them.

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The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee.

Thanks, y’all.

“I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours”

Bob Dylan

Talkin’ World War III Blues

Greetings from deep in the heart of an empire in decline. I have been unable to write a clear update to this Almanac for the past couple weeks, largely on account of an increase in time-sensitive winter labor, seasonal depression, and a lack of inspiration. Truth be told, nothing much has changed on those fronts, but in preparation for another year of oppression and humiliation, I thought it might be helpful to offer you, dear reader, if not myself, some buoy of hope in these darkening currents.

I’ve watched my country consume itself my whole life. From time to time, when this self-inflicted cycle of extraction eats its way too close to the spine, I’ve watched it strike out at other nations. Each and every time this happens, it is clearly in pursuit of hydrocarbon energy. I cannot dress this up as a piece of thoughtful prose for y’all. Oh, there’s suitable, if well-trodden metaphors; we are subjects of a cannibal state, an addict state, a state that has entered a murder/suicide pact with the biotic world. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but our planet is hemmed in by a handful of physical/chemical/biological boundaries, and the world’s leading military-industrial power is thrashing up against those boundaries like some injured beast in its death throes. Do not, for a moment, assume that this will work itself out, or that cooler heads will prevail.

Words are as cheap and plentiful as oil these days. For three years, I’ve added to the increase of cheap and plentiful words on this platform, and I stand by a good two-thirds of them. Why watch the world die if I can’t paint a pretty picture of it? I’ve long wanted to depict something different– a world engaged in solutions, repair, and regeneration. It has felt important to me that I do my best to illustrate a viable alternative, but I haven’t quite done so, yet. My experience, not to mention my intellect, are limited to what I can see from 700-something feet above sea level in rural Northeast Missouri. I can dream up utopias all day long, but I do not know what essential spark causes some folks to strive for a better world, and others to actively destroy this one.

It is the first sunny day in nearly two weeks here. The ground is bare of snow and beginning to thaw into a muddy, dormant mire. The still, sleeping thatch of the prairie stands empty of birds, without wind, or so much as a flicker of movement. If I were to take the proper route, I could walk down to the Long Branch Creek, climb over fallen logs and low, icy pools, from confluence to confluence, deep in the cleft of the Mississippi watershed, going back in time or forward toward some potential future without humans. This is my strange, comforting daydream, though I have worked years at fighting my most misanthropic impulses. I sometimes wonder if the world’s most earnest do-gooders are motivated out of some form of shame, or if that’s just me.

I do believe that we are capable of righting our course, even without the support of the world’s most powerful people. It’s at least a possibility, a game of chance whether or not they take everyone down with themselves. Recent actions by this crumbling empire have been violent and scary, but they do hint at a kind of animal desperation. Still, we can’t merely rebuild after a collapse, we need to lay the foundation for a sane and safe future now. I’m not sure what my value as a writer is, in that larger project. I know I can paint a pretty picture, even of a dying world, but that isn’t enough. I’ve made some attempts to describe a strategy for change, but I’m afraid of being wrong; in a world with so many cheap ideas and cheaper words used to describe them, I don’t know that mine are helpful enough.

I haven’t made a New Year’s Resolution this year, though I could stand to improve myself in many areas of my life. Perhaps I can resolve to do more than paint pretty pictures of a dying world, or an impossible one. When I began writing this Almanac, it had been my intention to merely stay in the practice of writing, to compel myself to do the work steadfastly, no matter what. I didn’t believe it would become my main form of livelihood. It has, and gratitude for your support is in order. But I’ve been unable to write for two weeks now. It happens I suppose, but I’m not clear on how to break through yet.

It’s as if I’m standing down in the still grass, halfway between my home and the distant, sleeping creekbed, where I can finally shut my eyes and return to a world that maybe never existed, but I don’t know where to go. The earth is still hard with ice, though a thin layer of sliding mud is forming in the bare wounds. Maybe the words will return. This world needs the right words, and only the right ones.

The very reason I began writing on this platform was to reinforce my practice with external pressure from an audience. I’ve been surprised and amazed by how much this little Almanac means to some of y’all, which is precisely what makes writer’s block so hard. If I felt truly alone here, sitting in front of the flashing cursor on this blank document, I’d have turned the computer off and walked down the hill awhile, but I am ultimately among you, and in your debt, dear reader.

And in a way, that’s the problem with Substack– it reduces writing to content and creates competition for scarce economic resources. In other words, it is a mirror of the larger, dysfunctional economy we are hostage to. A person might feel forced to write when they’re uninspired, and the world doesn’t need any more uninspiration. I suspect things will shift for me, that the freeze will lead to a thaw, that the sedentary ice clouding my view will begin dripping down the eves in due time. And I resolve to write something that matters this year.

–

As for that buoy of hope? I don’t know. The best I can offer at this juncture is advice— watch your corner. Do what you’re good at. Take care of your neighbors, even if they suck. And do more than demand a better world… build it.

I got a lot of new readers this last year, so until the time is right and my words return, I’m doing the lazy thing and re-posting what I think were my best, most essential pieces from the past 12 months or so. Many of them were written in more optimistic times– may we all recapture that urge to save the world and be strategic about it in the process.

For now, here’s my most “optimistic” picks from the past year. Thanks for looking.

Sincerely,

BB

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In recent days, I have brought many animals to slaughter, with more slated for harvest throughout winter. Today, a cold rain is falling on the bloody slush where I wiped my knife between throats. Sparrows are hopping and kicking in the mud underneath wet and windblown tussocks of goldenrod and aster, nibbling at fallen seed near the gory brambles and blood-flecked thatch. The rain brings a sharp whiff of earth, copper, and decomposition, a depression in the nearby dormant grasses washed with diluted red puddles.

In my best moments performing this work, I am just another animal, killing animals. I do not hesitate. Without malice, I shoot them quickly and accurately. I test their reflexes, to be sure they are insensible, unable to feel pain. I stick my knife in the soft cleft of their throats to end it quick, forcing blood from the cut in small bursts as I pump their legs to empty their veins. I do my best to be quick, painless, and un-traumatic in my approach. As their life fades, they depart with no loss of trust for me.

In past editions of this Almanac, I’ve usually erred on the side of caution when detailing slaughter. Hopefully the title of this piece is enough of a trigger warning. In the process of raising and killing animals over the past 13 years, I’ve accumulated a long list of apologies to make, but few of them are to other humans, at least on account of my lived experience. I don’t seek forgiveness, or even understanding from anyone with different values on animal agriculture anymore. Understanding comes at a cost few pay in the age of industrial slaughter.

I kill animals, sometimes like a higher predator, but often like a mere human. I have killed hundreds on this farm, and among the things I’ve learned is that I don’t trust anyone who speaks callously about harvest and consumption. Paleo-podcaster-meatheads and their ilk do not impress me. In the process of killing an animal, there are moments of sadness, regret, disgust, and eventually hunger, appreciation, and even humor. But I’ve found that those who are most vociferous in their lust for meat never seem to really have what it takes to midwife death to living things with the requisite care and personal fortitude. Killing animals doesn’t make you a man, but with enough clarity and care, it might make you a human being.

Last week it was Smiley, a particularly sweet pig with an exaggerated face, all tongue with a compact rooter. Smiley was beginning to suffer from a jawbone fistula, a somewhat common issue in her breed, in which a hole forms in her facial bones. This hole can become compacted with food and lead to infection, pain, and gradual loss of condition and death. Smiley was always the first pig to greet me at feeding time. From a technical end, killing her was easy.

Scalding Smiley’s carcass in a hot bathtub to loosen her hair and create as much food value as possible with her body, I probed the deep hole running from beneath her eye down into the roof of her mouth, loosening wads of rotting grass, leaves, and acorns. This may have nominally been a mercy kill, but the others can’t be justified like this. At the end of these days, I sometimes see the meaning in it. But sometimes I don’t.

When the gunsmoke clears and the patches of spilled blood cease their steaming, we lay our hands on the body and clean it, like one might do for a wake. Bloodless, with her eyes shut tight and her arteries evacuated of blood, my relationship with Smiley becomes even more intimate. I clean the mud and grass from her hooves, scrape off the bristles, moving my hands across the warm shape of her back. I work to unclamp her jaw, and push her tongue back into her head before rigor mortis sets in… this will allow me to harvest it cleanly the next day. There is little more than half a bucket of viscera I cannot use, and this too is cycled through living beasts until returned to earth.

I don’t exactly relish the process, but I feel good when the kill is clean and painless and nothing is wasted. There is little time during the work to feel grief– that comes later. Even after a hog has been killed, the risk of injury continues. There’s hot scalding water, heavy carcasses, steel cables under immense tension, sharp knives and slippery surfaces. A skilled butcher has more than deft hands. The work requires a deep awareness of my surroundings, and a flexible, sober brain. While I approach the first steps of swine harvest somberly and with a depth of gratitude, and then follow with reflex-like predation and careful consideration of all safety factors, the transition to evisceration requires a bit of wonder, if not humor, to get through what is the most objectively gross part of the work.

There’s probably no dignified way to say it: carefully avoiding any post-mortem excretion requires a lot of physical attention to the anus. Humor is a way to regulate the attendant anxiety of the situation. As it is said, you can’t spell slaughter without laughter. Then comes the wonder, when I marvel at the way these beasts are put together. Pressing my fingers between connective tissue, removing the hot livers and delicate webbing of the caul membrane, visualizing the metabolic process which made this vital energy from grass and tree seed, the gratitude all rushes back. I wouldn’t do the work if I didn’t believe it was of value to something larger than myself.

Our global level of meat eating is entirely out of balance, along with many other facets of human extraction and consumption. The degree of environmental harm caused by animal agriculture is unjustifiable at our current scale. But neither can I advocate for a global vegan approach to human nutrition, insofar as it will never happen. People in the affluent world should absolutely derive more of their protein from plant sources like legumes and tree nuts. However, as a species, we act against our own self-interest almost pathologically as it is– let alone the needs of our biosphere.

With the increased popularization of “regenerative” agriculture, people are beginning to ask if animal products can have a positive impact on the environment. This is a vital area to focus scientific research, and unfortunately, the nature of scientific research makes it challenging to integrate any set of findings into a larger, holistic understanding of our planet at this stage of peril. Perhaps the question isn’t whether or not animal products can have a positive impact on our environmental systems –nature has demonstrated that animals within the natural ecological cycle of predation absolutely do, and death is the great engine of biotic energy on the landscape. Perhaps the question of regenerative agriculture is how the animal piece necessarily fits within the larger need for nutrient cycling for the less-resource intensive crops humanity will need to transition to.

I was vegan for environmental reasons for around half-a-decade, and I wasn’t easy-going about it. I suppose my reevaluation of animal agriculture came when I began to learn everything I could about organic food production. While I’m sure that a sustainable, veganic system of food production is possible in certain climates, the fact is that most plant-based foods available to consumers are only available on account of the heavy use of synthetic, fossil-fuel derived fertilizers, and other agricultural chemicals. A “bloodless” agriculture is just as effective as anything in killing the soil, when practiced without care or focus. To be clear, this is also true of most grain-fed meat, milk, and eggs. I began to understand that food might be considered the by-product of animal stewardship, not the goal itself. The goal of animal agriculture, in an integrated, functional, long-term food system should be to cycle nutrients and maintain calories “on the hoof” as solar storage.

In terms of death, there is death in all farming. If the concern with death is spiritual, and all souls are to be weighed equally, the habitat loss from plant-crops certainly exceeds that of pasture-based systems. If the concern is ethical, I agree, to a point. I can kill an animal without pain or emotional distress, but I cannot do it with consent. You’ve got me on this one. If all farms needed to pass a purity test, our species would starve. There are some days in which this is perhaps “up in the air” for me, but on the whole, I firmly believe in the reduction of human suffering.

It is hard to look at this world and not want radical change. Perhaps, as I enter my creakier years, I’m undergoing a softening of sorts, but I think I’m firmly in favor of a thoughtful, coordinated shift towards functional, sustainable systems. It might make me a damned optimist, but it beats the alternative. Appropriately raising animals —and killing them— at a measured scale, feels possible to me. If the bottom dropped out of the grain industry tomorrow, it would happen fast, too.

The rain has washed the blood and slush deep into the pores of this clay-stricken slope of Northeast Missouri sidehill. Where wolves once roamed before colonization and extirpation, my dogs now stand and tear at the last bits of bone and waste. Where bison ranged, our cows loaf, building flesh and hide and milk from grass, and through fermentation and alchemy, feeding hungry soil with their dung. Curious hens peck and range across the thatch, and the remaining hogs snuffle down in the icy draws for acorns– the same draws I am managing for their retirement.

I’m human. Killing animals takes its toll. This will be the last year I raise pigs for meat, for a while, at least, though I’m holding onto a small group of my favorites, just to keep the cycle moving. I have done the work for a decade, and we all need to rest– myself and my pigs. If we want to create regenerative food systems that include livestock, there’s a lot of things we need to sort out beyond stocking rates, grazing duration, and forage per acre. A part of it is a matter of our consumption patterns, but there are also matters of the heart. To raise meat sustainably will always put somebody’s heart on the line, and it seems to me that the more sustainable a livestock operation is, the closer the heart of the farmer and the heart of the beast are intertwined. Even with a quick, clean kill, this work will always inflict pain somewhere.

While the instinct needed for killing animals is rooted deep across many cultures, the global industrialization of food has rendered many of us unalert and unfocused, closer to scavengers than hunters. The question might be, if we are no longer killing animals, what is our right to eat them?

Chances are pretty high I’m going to lose a few subscribers today, so your support is extra appreciated!

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The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee.

Thanks, y’all.

Dry, charcoal stems of last summer’s coneflower rattle in the wind, protruding from the prairie’s snowy crust, a gift of fine, spiny seeds shattered and sprinkled among the sparrow-shit and small tracks of flitting, foraging birds that gradually fill with the next of round of flakes. From the icy gravel road running along this slope that serves in the transportation of millions of calories in the form of live, trailered beef cattle, and grain wagons overwhelmed and bulging with golden corn kernels, our prairie pastures might appear barren of food value, especially now, in the whipping wind and deepening snow. But each stem and spire of grass contains a cache of seeds; every clump of brush some freeze-dried fruit or leafy frozen fodder, suspended above the tundra for alighting cedar waxwings, or wandering turkeys. With the earth robed in ice, all that remains to eat is that which has escaped the smothering snows— the seedheads of later flowering prairie plants. Even a world that appears barren will feed us, if we get to know it up close.

I’m fine with the snow. Just fine. Not particularly happy about it, but appreciative enough for the necessary moisture and ample tracking and bird-watching opportunities. As my body begins to weather –advancing as I am into the middle act of my remaining time– I find my once-invigorating winter tasks to be more like drudgery. A day of clearing heavy, wet snow from greenhouses, solar panels, and pathways leaves me sore and exhausted. The novelty of hauling hay and grain and jugs of water on sleds down icy paths has worn away this past decade, along with my flexibility. Sometimes, I dare say, I even feel a little winded.

The row-crop farmers who barrel down these roads with their overflowing wagons will often spend winters down in Florida— at least that’s how it used to be. With commodity prices veering towards the marginal while equipment and input prices continue to climb in a world of increasing instability, there are very few row-crop farmers in our our area who only raise row-crops anymore. As land ownership in our region transitions away from old-timer “English” farmers and toward Mennonite and Amish growers who tend towards a more diversified farming scheme, there’s fewer snow-bird farmers in Northeast Missouri. I, for one, am all for it.

The project of land stewardship is not one for the jet-set. Stewardship, at its core, is the application of feedback one receives from spending complete cycles of seasons in one place. It requires that the steward experience more than a growing season, but those subsequent days of hunger, exhaustion, and barren drudgery. Anything else is fair weather farming, and probably soon-to-be-replaced by precision ag tech from my nightmares, at least in those places geographically suited towards GPS-guided self-driving planters and harvesters.

Prairies like this one, as barren as they may appear, feed a vibrant if unseen network of living things year round. Living roots feed pudgy voles snatched by careening owls. The gems of prairie seeds cling to wind-battered stems for fidgeting flocks of white-throated sparrows. Gangs of dark-eyed juncos flit through the fresh plops of cow-pie for pre-digested bits of hay and grain. Cottontails dance from bramble to briar, evading foxes and coyotes, and foxes and coyotes will still find plenty of cottontails out in the brush some of my fair weather farming neighbors scoff at. Even without autonomous tractors or a personalized AI agronomist, this prairie works year round to feed something— which cannot be said for the vast, plow-gutted bottomlands of rootless, mineral earth, impregnated with plastic drainage, the great, humid deserts of the Midwest which hold no life for half the year, and an extractive crop of considerable expense and minimal dinner-table value the other half.

I can’t say for sure if I am a “good” steward of this place. I have, however, struggled against it enough, been caught in the thorns and dragged through the mire enough to have received some amount of applicable feedback. I leave some seedy thatch for the birds. I burn the woods to make way for new seed in the winter, after the frogs have grown quiet and the salamanders have returned to the cool, safe mud. I herd the pigs quickly through the woods, and only when they are dry or frozen, fattening them on surplus mast while leaving ample acorns for the squirrels and jays. I see every patch of thin or overgrazed vegetation as an opportunity for me to add a diverse mix of seeds— if I don’t do it, less desirable or even invasive species are liable to show up. I traverse the rolling slopes in winding, staggering patterns to avoid rutting and erosion. I thin the woods with an abundance of forethought and conviction. I would be unable to do this if my farming was performed with an app connected to a satellite connected to a tractor, let alone from Florida.

Today is a good opportunity to sow seed— specifically, prairie seed. Most prairie forbs, and some grasses as well, need a period of cold stratification to trigger germination on the other side of winter. Without preparing a seedbed the conventional way, which is some combination of tillage and harrowing, I am left to experiment with alternatives: fire, livestock disturbance, and snow-seeding.

The seed mix in question is very special: a mix of native grasses and forbs (mixed warm-season and cool season) with some degree of partial-shade tolerance and nutritional value for livestock, meaning adequate protein. This is the first batch of this experimental mix that Hoksey Native Seeds helped me put together, listed below by Scientific and Common name:

Elymus virginicus- Virginia Wildrye, Bromus kalmii- Arctic Brome, Elymus villosus- Hairy Wildrye, Carex molesta- Troublesome Sedge, Carex brevior- Prairie Oval Sedge, Andropogon gerardii- Big Bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium- Little Bluestem, Sorghastrum nutans- Indiangrass, Bouteloua curtipendula- Sideoats Grama, Zizia aurea- Golden Alexander’s, Desmanthus illinoensis- Illinois Bundle Flower, Desmodium illinoense- Illinois Ticktrefoil, Helianthus maximiliani- Maximilian’s Sunflower, Desmodium canadense- Showy Ticktrefoil, Silphium perfoliatum- Cup Plant, Silphium laciniatum- Compass Plant, Chamaecrista fasciculata- Partridge Pea, Heliopsis helianthoides- Oxeye, False Sunflower, Helianthus grosseserratus- Saw-tooth Sunflower, Coreopsis palmata- Prairie Coreopsis, Dalea candida- White Prairie Clover, Oligoneuron rigidum- Stiff Goldenrod, Rudbeckia hirta- Black-eyed Susan.

These seeds will perform a variety of functions– while our primary economic concern is that they provide some degree of palatable nutrition for our cows and goats and even turkeys, our animals will likely graze each patch of plants for no more than a week or two out of the year. The other 350 odd days, it will become native cover that provides nourishment, shelter, and pollen for insects, birds and other animals. While timothy and clover will give the kind of tonnage livestock need to thrive, these unique native plants are being seeded into woodland-edge areas that we can emergency graze our livestock in during excessive heat and sun. And so, adapted native forage can offer some degree of nutrition in the shade of trees… many of which also provide additional forage value on account of leaves, shoots, and stem-tips. Mulberry and Osage orange are particularly nutritious, as noted over and over again, in this Almanac. Another key component of my gambit here is that animals in general, and ruminating livestock specifically, do not perform well, metabolically speaking, under heat stress. In pure agronomic terms, these native seeds do not provide as much feed-value per acre, but the dappled shade they’ll be grazed in is overall more beneficial than having hot cows in a field of “high value” forage they are too stressed to digest.

The native cool-season grasses will push their way through the winter leaf litter in earliest spring to provide a quick burst of vegetation in the shelter of old-hedgerows, gradually supplanted by robust, heat-tolerant warm-season grasses as the summer wears on. The fleshy, palatable leaves of saw-tooth sunflower and black-eyed susan, complimented by the protein-rich tangles of desmodium and bundleflower will offer a diverse mosaic of nutritive qualities for livestock and wildlife alike in the doldrums of summer. And in deepest winter, as the snow settles in icy strata out and along our “barren” and brushy fields, juncos and sparrows and finches will flit from stem to desiccated stem, reaping rich seed from the fallow pastures, perhaps dropping a few along the hundreds of miles of barbed wire that hems in this patchwork of Northeast Missouri hardpan… at least until the hedgerows are plowed for the benefit of driverless tractors urging ever more caloric monoculture out from the thinning earth. We aren’t just feeding livestock, we’re feeding native bees, threatened butterflies, and dozens of birds species at risk of habitat loss.

For something that was once plentiful and common here, this seed isn’t cheap. Anyone in the native seed business will tell you that the level of specialization required to produce it, from equipment to maintenance to labor, necessitates a high initial cost. But, as adapted perennial plants, a thoughtful and successfully executed plan for establishment pays off over the coming decades. Developing that plan takes experience, observation, feedback, and a fair bit of winter drudgery. I have the latter part down pat.

In their original ecological context, these seeds would have made it to the soil by a few different mechanisms. Many of them, like the desmodiums, are sticky, and manage to work their way into animal fur, to subsequently be scratched off in bare dirt wallows or along tree trunks and thickened thatch. Fires would clear the ground as a seed bed, the more low intensity ones also singeing the stems of these plants, allowing the unscorched seedheads to drop in place. Herds of bison and elk, or in my case, cattle and goats, might trample ripened seed into the moist soil during periods of dense grazing and browsing. And in the snowy season, exposed seeds would be spread by wild birds or small mammals, dissolved into the ever growing strata of snow to be tempered by ice and gradually pulled into the freezing, thawing cracks of the dormant soil.

We can simulate these natural modes of dissemination by using fire, livestock trampling, grazing, and a good sense of timing. And while my seed project, yet the latest in a series of Jack-and-the-beanstalk-style magic bean schemes I’ve gotten involved with in the past few years, is unlikely to be 100 percent successful, I have thrown a diverse amount of high-potential genetic material at a dynamic variety of landforms with a fair bit of care, observation, and conviction. If I yield nothin else, I’ll have some baseline data of what establishes best under the wide variety of conditions I’ve applied the magic mix to.

In areas I cover cropped in sorghum/sudangrass, we threw seeds before scything the cover down. We also played around with a “human-scale” roller crimper– two people trampling the cover crop down over the scattered seed with a big board. We’ve also burnt some woodlands, using rakes and leaf-blowers to eliminate leaves, twigs, and brushy growth, allowing for direct seed-to-soil contact right before the first round of snow. Today, I am sowing seed into the falling snow out among a grove of pin-oaks where one of my swine herds is trampling about, snuffling for acorns and kicking over the leafy duff. In all, I’ve sown about 2 acres of land to this diverse mix in the past week. Now, I just need to wait four or five months to see the results. Ecological repair is not a practice for the instant gratification crowd.

The snow-bird farmers aren’t snow-birding as much this year. In part, there’s fewer of them, and those with all their chips in annual row-crops aren’t exactly laughing all the way to the farm loan office anymore. Also, no one expects to have this much snow this early in the season– this current storm arrived three or four weeks ahead of when we’d expect to see it. And so, they sit in the cafe, hands clasped or hung around over-all straps, the price of donuts increasing like the price of anhydrous ammonia, staring out into the blanket of white that gradually fills in over the rough, plow-broke ground that rests lifeless until the next planting. If there is a next planting. On occasion, the acres of rootless earth might host a wake of bald eagles, tearing into the red flesh of roadkilled deer, or waddling gaggles of white-fronted geese, dabbling through the pulverized earth for spilled corn. Mostly, they sit in silence, the farmers in their slushy boots with styrofoam cup coffee, the fields barren of all but snow and wind.

From the attic window near which I write in the winter, I can see a full-time resident white-crowned sparrow, conspicuous among the drab house sparrows that huddle under the eaves of our farmstand. He ventures out, along with a few cardinals and juncos, to peck and flit in the shelter of hazel stems, spreading the crumbled crowns of coneflower into spiraling trails of seed and chaff, fading under consistent snow.

The rhythm of winter chores is at times halting and exhausting. Our second-hand hoop house frame has a concerning bend in one of the steel braces, and in order to keep it from collapsing, I need to occasionally use a ten-foot wooden stick with a board nailed to the end as giant snow remover. It takes about 15 minutes to clear, and my shoulders remain dropped from overuse the rest of the day. Walking from paddock to paddock can be tiring in six inches of snow, but I haven’t prepared the barnyard for pigs yet, thinking we had a few more weeks, and so with sled in tow, I shuffle through the hardened drifts, hauling water and flinging my magic seeds, directing the slumbering hogs over the vanishing trail towards feeders full of grain, so they might trample next year’s grasses and forbs into the frozen duff.

We haven’t seen sun in days, and to maintain enough power to cook by LED lamps tonight, I frequently must tromp up to the solar panel on our roof and push off the thickening carpet of snow. Then, I trudge to the logpile, pick out a good-sized two-hour chunk of oak, carefully stomp my boots clean before entering our humble cabin, and try and decide if there’s enough time to write between now and the next time I need to check for eggs before they freeze, or bed down the pigs, or break ice on the cow waterer. I’ll spare you details from my morning foray into the snow-dusted outhouse for now, but it suffices to say that the experience is seldom an act of pleasure or enjoyment. This isn’t fair weather farming, but without the struggle, the feedback, I wouldn’t know how to care for this place.

Where the wooded edges are now cloaked in snow, they will eventually burst with flowers and bees and contented cattle. Trudging down to the hogs, I pass by a very conspicuous persimmon tree, entirely leafless, yet still bearing pendulous orbs of sugary orange fruits. They are fairly frozen but not rock hard, the consistency of snow; I fit two in my mouth, spitting their seeds strategically along the path where I scatter handfuls of my magic mix, feeding the future as best as I can fathom.

Across the road at the neighboring feedlot, groups of bellowing cattle push their hooves through filthy snow, nosing through fat bales of timothy and clover, their faces speckled with chaff and seed. Out on the edge of the lot, where the unmown margin meets the dirty slush of tire tracks, I spit a couple persimmon seeds for good measure. Even a wounded world can feed us, if we throw enough seed at it.

The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee. Thanks, y’all.

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PS: It’s been a busy and unpredictable season thus far. This current edition of the almanac is coming to you later than planned because I spent the better part of a week working on this piece in Civil Eats. Feel free to check it out. Also, I really enjoyed working on this seed mix with Hoksey. Very thoughtful, conservation-focused folks. If you ever need something to listen to while you’re throwing hundreds of dollars of seed into the snow with your fingers crossed, I recommend giving their podcast a listen, especially if you’re in the Midwest. Also, holler at me if you want a specific breakdown of the “magic mix”… seeds per square foot, quantity by volume, etc….

We built our home in the thorny embrace of an old hedge tree, a sprawling spray of hardwood tendrils that bend in autumn wind, its battered and bug-eaten leaves trembling with the slow creep of icy death. If I had to make a guess, I would contend that this tree drops 400 pounds of seed in the form of “hedgeballs” each year. They are dense and green, weeping white latex as they careen downward and slam on the tin roof of our farmstand, echoing the rifle-blasts of deer season that ring out among our rolling slopes of patchwork woodland and open pasture.

Before we built our home here, this mother tree stood, perhaps intentionally planted on this old fenceline, or maybe risen from the squirrel shit lining the base of old wire-tangled posts. It shelters us now, breaking the winter wind and blocking snowdrifts some of the season, shading our home from the burning heat that only gets hotter for the rest. When we hired an excavator all those years ago to dig out the foundation of our home, I built ramparts up along the trunk of the old hedge tree to protect it. One of our first duck hens (we had livestock before we had a house for some reason) was setting a nest under the dense shade of the old hedge tree, the breast feathers she plucked for her nest lining flitting in the tangle of gooseberry thorns underlaying the canopy.

As the teenage Mennonite boy hired to dig our home site pushed aside dense hillocks of orange clay to make way for our house with a 6 ton excavator, my rickety assemblage of pallets and baling wire held the front between the generative environment of root, thorn, and bark and the diesel-powered destruction of long-resting earth. Later that summer, ducklings would hatch out in the haven of wood and leaf. By October, we had appropriate shelter –400 square feet of indoor living space, insulated by straw and earth, makeshift shelves lined with pressure canned jars of duck meat– and a considerable repository of Osage orange seed in the form of heavy green fruit pelting us from above.

Any sensible farm family would have cut this tree to its base before building here. While the proximity to a tree that could potentially wipe out our roof in the wrong wind is certainly one reason, the risk of traumatic brain injury by hedgeball is probably statistically higher, let alone the likelihood of tripping on one. Like a lot of trees, Osage orange makes what “civilized” Americans refer to as a mess. Civilized Americans strongly prefer a tree that keeps in line– symmetrical, predictable pines and firs, impotent little dwarf ornamentals, boring boxwoods, and status-seeking Norway maples with their flashy crimson displays. Trees that know their place and don’t cause any inconvenience. Further outside suburbia, in agricultural zones like Northeast Missouri, trees are still largely considered an inconvenient mess.

I have met many a cattle rancher who will cut the hedge from their pasture because they claim the cows choke on the hedgeballs. I won’t rule out the possibility, but I have yet to hear of a confirmed first-hand account. To all those readers who might argue counter to this, I politely remind y’all that this is Missouri, so you’re going to have to Show Me. Still, I’ll acknowledge that hedgeballs can be real ankle breakers sometimes. I have a fading memory of skidding out on my bike as a kid while trying to navigate a sidewalk covered in hedgeballs– we used to call them “monkey brains” for some reason.

This is all to say that for all the benefits trees offer us, they come with their inconveniences. We cannot merely enjoy the shade, wind protection clean air, carbon sequestration, soil health, habitat, food, lumber, and firewood they provide without tolerating the “mess”. If we want to continue existing on a liveable planet, we’re going to have to choke a cow or two, or at the very least bust our asses tripping on hedgeballs from time to time.

I’m going to be honest with you– for all the carefully cropped images you see here in the Almanac, my homestead objectively looks like dogshit most of the time. It isn’t a seasonal thing either, it’s year round. It looks particularly bad today, but as an amateur photographer, I mostly know how to avoid sharing some of the more shameful aspects of my landscaping aesthetic. Aesthetics never meant much to me. I’ve always preferred functionality. But aesthetics do mean a lot to other people… and practically-minded Midwesterners are no exception. Perhaps this is a piece of why we’ve struggled to embrace trees as a part of the agricultural landscape here.

One many several occasions, when chatting with local folk at our little diner here in Rutledge, I will be asked where it is that I’m farming, and when I reveal my location, the response is: “Y’all sure grow a lot of brush!” In the Midwest, vegetation that can’t be planted in rows, mown or run through a combine is called brush. What cannot be controlled is to be feared, and this is understandable, given the many opportunities I have to break my ass or receive a concussion right in my own yard, from our mother tree. I surmise that this is a largely Euro-settler viewpoint, passed on through the generations to become things like precision agriculture, or the lawn care industry– landscapes evolved out of fear, artifice, and domination.

Imagine if you will, the work of clearing timber and plowing the prairie during early settlement. No herbicides, no internal combustion, just draft animals and moldboard plows. The level of toil and drudgery and potential bodily harm that earlier generations had to endure to cultivate profitable land here was exceptional. When the work was done– the timbers felled, the stumps burnt, the wild grass uprooted and buried– settler families looked on their work with pride, probably having no contextual understanding of the deep history of damage and extraction they had begun to create.

Watching their work fade as the native ecosystem they struggled to tame regenerated itself would have been unthinkable, and from that time forward no future generation would want to be viewed as the one that let things get weedy again. In the agrarian Midwest, if your great-grandaddy cleared a field, growing a lot of brush is something of a taboo. A serious one at times.

As far as old-timers go, our part of Missouri was settled by uppity Kentuckians who wanted a bigger piece of the new frontier, and are therefore largely of Scots-Irish descent. However, Missouri and the Midwest in general was settled and homesteaded by a lot of German immigrants as well, and I think I’m probably allowed to say that Germans are known for having a fairly high degree of tidiness. Sometimes pathologically so. Take for example the spate of German-immigrant housewife suicides that took place during the Dust Bowl era. The inability to maintain a clean house during the torrents of dust-storms that continually left every surface in the home in a layer for fine, wind-blown Earth has been cited as a major factor in this phenomenon. Some of these people could not bear the constant stream of dust any longer. People who truly chose to place cleanliness next to Godliness.

While times have changed, and we’ve somehow managed to avoid another major Dust Bowl event thus far, I really do think this compulsion to create and maintain a degree of aesthetic order on the farm is a significant part of why we don’t see much needed trees on the Midwestern agricultural landscape, and when we do, they are often hemmed in by the severe human boundaries imposed on them.

While I distinguish aesthetics from functionality, there is something to be said about form following function. While the human eye is naturally drawn toward patterns and lines, I think the reason that farmers find particularly straight lines the prettiest is because a straight-line increases a narrow economic margin. Straight lines are efficient in terms of labor, fuel, and resources. Sometimes I like a nice straight line of crops myself, to be honest. Mostly if they’re my own. A disruption in that line is a visual reminder of a shrinking yield and a smaller paycheck.

The stakes are increasing as we enter the era of “precision ag”. AI operated harvesters, drone seeding and spraying, driverless, GPS guided tractors and increasing layers of technological abstraction being sold to keep farmers further away from their crops are not going to necessarily lead to more efficiency, so much as increased scale and decreased humanity. There is nothing precise about GPS in comparison with putting your damned feet on the ground and walking your field, as is the actual job of a farmer. Trees are inconvenient in precision ag. It’s part of why I like them. They require consideration.

How some folks are approaching agroforestry is to implement and promote tree plantings that mirror this modern linear-efficiency model, which may even mesh well with broad-scaled precision ag. I grudgingly acknowledge that this is a good strategy (and occasionally follow it), and important work to be doing. If farmers normally see a tree in their field as an economic inefficiency, sometimes the only way they can be convinced of the potential economic boon in tree-cropping is to put those trees in straight lines. Straight lines equal dollar signs to the modern agrarian brain, and this impulse is tangibly correct in our current mainstream system.

At best, we find the type of diversity and complexity that we need to balance our current agricultural activities on the margins. Oddly shaped tracts of land, broken chains of old hedgerow, and steep creek-side banks are where I go to find the rarest birds, the most precious trees, and the most cover from elements when I’m out there with my own damned feet on the ground. These areas are often chaotic– I emerge from them covered in burs most of the time, and I can loose myself stepping through the brambles and thickets arising in the regrowth and neglect.

I don’t consider myself an optimist, but I’m always hoping for the best. I usually work for it too. I believe that tree-crop based agriculture has a large role in a sustainable future, and that we are technically capable of transitioning to it before we’re entirely doomed. But unlike earlier projects like the Great Plains Shelterbelt, I don’t think the political willpower to fix catastrophes by applying common sense practices exists in this country anymore. The solution will be decentralized, growing from the margins, and it won’t be very tidy.

The rain today is icy and driving, piercing the thinning canopy of our mother-tree, taking battered leaves and fat hedgeballs down to the cold clay. Our most recent flock of young ducks, great-great-great-grand-ducks of those who were hatched here at the base of this old hedge, is waddling and nibbling through the bucket-strewn middens of our yard. As they grow bigger, they leave more of a mess, get a little less cute. Newly hatched ducklings are objectively aesthetically pleasing. The muddy teenagers, not as much. But I don’t feel any fear here.

Every once in awhile I might get clocked in the head by a hedgeball, or caught up in some thorns, and my neighbors might snicker (or worse) about our little brush farm. But I do have lots of food, and roots to hold the sweet earth, and rugged boughs of Osage orange to hold and protect our home, which is more security than any straight line or clear field has given me to this point. We can try to build a world that appears tidy, but out past where the road faces, down in the margins, it’s a mess regardless. It all is. Better to manage and propagate the chaos that feeds creatures and creates homes, than to accept the order which denies these things to the most vulnerable.

But I do need to pick up some of these damn hedgeballs.

The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee. Thanks, y’all.

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Frost has returned to our rolling hills, and with it, the sweet stink of garden death– of ice-bruised sweet potato vines, limp, dark tendrils of defeated squash, and the slumping form of once proud pepper plants, buzzing with rot-eating flies. Shards of ice have formed on the leaf edge of elms and mulberries, and the dried down tops of prairie plants gone to seed wear crystalline halos in the blue-jay quiet. Acorns and walnuts tinkle out in the duff of distant, wooded draws and the sun makes brief visits in low arches around a world going darker each day.

In baskets, barrels, and boxes, the spoils of summer rest, half-ripened. We have taken food from the earth, and in a chicken-wire pen at the garden’s edge, a few fat ducks are strutting nervously, moments before they are to be killed. A few months from now, awaiting the widening arc of the sun, as early blossoms of cherry and pear burst forth and the bones of our birds molder in the thawing compost, I will anticipate the renewal of pressing seed to earth again. But for now, we take what we need.

For ceaseless months I have acted in an advisory role between the sun and the dirt. A facilitator of sorts. It has been exhausting, to lead negotiations between the two, but ultimately, isn’t that the nature of agriculture? At least a more conscientious agriculture… the sun gives, and the soil takes. And I am here to harvest the sun through stewardship and propagation, and give the earth what is due to the earth, distributing the surplus to those who need it. It is hard work, and sometimes the surplus is disappointingly commandeered by voles, or deer, or foxes. But what else would I do, merely consume?

The meaning of this work is much easier for me to find in moments like this where I can sift through my thoughts and string them together for you. It isn’t as obvious when I’m covered in shit and feathers and have had my hand inside a dozen ducks before lunch, nor is it obvious when I trade those ducks for legal US tender, which I then use to consume materials. But in the cold dimness of evening-time, when I sit with some meager bowl of this food I’ve raised, the meaning comes back again, I s’pose. After all, an adequate meal is no longer a guarantee for many of us in the affluent western world.

Scoured of mulch, the vines fed out to livestock, a gray garden bed harvested clean of sweet potatoes lies hungry in the howl of autumn wind. It collects a few desiccated leaves overnight, but it must be fed soon. We trudge from last year’s manure with wheelbarrows and lay down a deep mat of rich compost, settling it in with half a bucket of bloody dish-water from the duck harvest. The negotiation between sun and soil never ends. We never allow the soil to grow completely vacant of plant life… soon this bed will cradle sprouting garlic. Other beds will be planted to annual rye and winter vetch. Some will naturally become inhabited by dead nettle, henbit, and peppergrass. The bond is never to be broken– whether by means of blood spilled or seed sown or shit spread, the cycling of resources, of biotic energy, must not falter, in sun or total darkness.

On ever-waning down-pressure days, when the sun is missing and the air is thick with cold, gray vapor, the natural urge to retract, withdraw and conserve becomes present. I have been running some pigs out in an undermanaged tract of sloping, pioneer woodland, allowing them to snuffle through the duff of crumbling maple leaves and pin oak acorns. My objective is to carefully trample the brushy understory in order to expose the base of multi-flora rosebush, honeysuckle, and autumn olive to my axe. In order to complete this objective for the year, I would need to move them further afield for at least another month, but with the dark banner of autumn rains bleeding into the shadowy horizon, I begin to steer them, paddock by paddock, back to their winter shelter, nearer to home.

As the sun recedes, so do our activities– we collect the disparate and scattered inventory of farm tools that have made their way to far-off field edges. We herd the cows nearer. We gather sweet potatoes and squash and good, dry kindling in preparation for the dark and cold. It is work that tests my gradually aging body, but the privilege of land access is undeniable– my family will not starve or suffer malnourishment this winter, when others will. Make no mistake about it– austerity measures that threaten hunger against a domestic population is an act of civil siege warfare. One in eight Americans receive SNAP benefits, and I have no doubt that the people responsible for cutting them off from this form of food aid want these people to hurt, and do not care if this vulnerable part of the population lives or dies. In fact, much like other globalized examples of restricting food to certain populations, the people in power here most likely prefer death. We have heard their words, and seen their actions, and their cruelty is clear. And in the confines of my food-packed house, I don’t know what to do about it. At least not exactly.

I have many young trees, in pots and nursery beds, that could help to feed future generations, if only they could find their way to a plot of soil some hypothetical commoners might access. I have seeds and tools and some experience and motivation to improve and increase the food security of my immediate community, but outside of the broad-scale implementation of a functioning utopian society, the vulnerable people in this world will not gain an equitable level of self-determination, or even survival, without access to land. Some have suggested that political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but I would argue that true power is derived from the ability to hold and share arable soil. Do not forget that our current administration is headed by a man who, above all other things, is a real-estate baron.

It took very few years, and incredible violence, to dispossess America’s original inhabitants of broad swathes of this continent, and it has taken even less time and only economic violence for a handful of multi-national corporations and wealthy individuals to do the same in the last half-century. While enough gun barrels pointed in the opposite-of-traditional direction might be a(n improbable) strategy for shifting political power, it is not the source.

I began to seriously consider the necessity of land access during the 2008 financial crisis, but only understood it then in more selfish terms. I believed then that the key to my future freedom and well-being was directly tied to the control and production of my own resources. It turns out, that’s only half-true. I believed then, and still believe, that if I can provide my own food, I don’t need to take part in systems of control. But without a wider community of support, without a higher level of interdependence, without a commons, we aren’t free, only isolated and vulnerable, no different than the one in eight Americans facing a hungry November. Cloistered security is no security at all without community stability, or a safety net.

If we’re outgunned anyway, how do we hold ground? How do we gain it? As I horde the meager resources my closest people and I will need for the coming cold, I’ve given this some thought, and would shakily conclude that seizing power will require that everyday people get good at organizing themselves and each other, and that they quickly learn to share their own surpluses for the common good. If some of us have extra food, and others have extra land, and others have extra money or time or skills or nothing at all, pockets of sovereign, interdependent power can sprout up over time. Land trust models are one example of how resource-sharing can become highly organized, but they are dependent on non-profit corporations for their legal existence, and non-profits are potentially vulnerable in the current environment– now that the executive branch has declared anti-capitalism a thought crime, publicly committing to egalitarianism is a possible risk. Still, re-learning how to share (something human beings have done since before we were human beings) is probably a safer bet than getting into a stand-off with militarized federal partisans over “your” resources.

The gun-metal gray banner of clouds which darken the horizon have finally erupted in a slow, cold, infrequent rain, like the atmosphere is holding back tears. It weeps for ten minutes, then fades into little more than a heavy dew, and flocks of house sparrows flit out from beneath wet hedge leaves to strip down the dwindling stocks of foxtail seed that poke through the rank, dead garden. Once the foxtail and sunflower and the chicory has all been stripped clean of its nourishment, I’ll do what I do every year and fill up bird-feeders with purchased seeds. I’ve never had a considerable excess of money in my life, but any disposable income I’ve generated seems to go into seed in one form or the other. I like to watch birds, even trash birds like house sparrows, get fluffy and shiny and fat off my surplus during the cold season.

Soon, real rains will come, according to the forecast at least. I work to move my pigs to higher ground– and nearer to their winter shelter. I use a heavy mallet to pound the fiberglass fence-posts for their next paddocks into the hard, dry clay. After coaxing the hogs onward to their new paddock with a bucketful of surplus pumpkin, I watch them snort through the weedy duff for acorns– they snap and growl at each other at first, but with adequate space they fill their stomachs a bit, and eventually cuddle against the cold in the embrace of a spreading cedar. It’s amazing how warm and caring they become for one another once they’re fully fed.

The spiral of waning solar collection grows tighter as we move from feeding the soil to feeding ourselves. Where once the sun fed the soil, I now provision our survival, by taking from the soil in times when the sun is ungiving. But I’m hoping that the ground will grow soft enough before it freezes so that my planting shovel might place the hungry roots of my little trees into this earth which ceaselessly gives and takes. And I’m also hoping that these trees will be found and cared for by the people who will need them. But if not, perhaps they’ll at least offer shelter to some fat trash-birds.

The Fox Holler Almanac is a reader-supported publication— I couldn’t do it without you! Share or leave a comment if you liked it. Hell, leave a comment if you didn’t, though I might ignore it. And if you feel moved and able to materially support my work, upgrade your subscription or buy me a coffee. Thanks, y’all.

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