Hunger and Harvest

or Enough is Enough

Hours before the arrival of our first significant frost, ambling through cool darkness, we bring buckets and boxes of tomatoes and okra, peppers and sweet potato and great sheaves of basil into our already cluttered dwelling, having pulled from the gardens that which will not be spared, tripping over stumps and pails and wagon handles, barely moonlit among the swishing and wailing of windblown hedge limbs. The darkness has been settling in ever earlier, the field edges shaded for much of the day while a low angled sun arcs along heaven’s cloudless banner. The harvest of field crops has begun, the high whine of combines ringing in thin air, sometimes through the night– the hiss and shriek of harvest, of extraction.

Storms of soybean chaff and farmed out topsoil, interspersed with Asian lady beetles, roll across harvest roads cut through a quilt-work of dried down autumn cropland, desiccated stems and pods shredding as the beans rattle through the steel gullets of combines, the accumulating economic value of each acre tinkling like coins.  The bushels of beans will be dried, stored and held in bins for the ideal market conditions, before they are ground or solvent extracted or pressed to become biofuels and lubricants and feedstuffs for confinement livestock, but not before the bare skin of the earth is stripped out and blown on the stiff winds of autumn– a prelude to coming storms.

I have awoken to a changed world, the kiss of frost deepening on walks downslope toward our pigs, huddled in slumber at the edge of swamp white oaks, frost evaporating from their bristled backs and rising as cool steam in the glittering dawn. Each loose parcel of grass seeds has formed a spiny crown of faint ice, and also on the dormant heads of bergamot and blown out blooms of goldenrod rests a halo of jagged frost. Soon enough, the combines will begin their endless scream down perfect rows, their hunger ceaseless as each speck of life dwelling in the soil is jettisoned out o’er the channelized river bottoms, coming to rest on torn earth, or to later be swept downstream when these low and still tributaries swell again in the spring thaw. 

As sun creeps out over the icy horizon of slumping, sleeping grass and gold-flecked maple, our turkeys, alert and chirping through a slippery new petrified world, arch their neck low into the frosty thatch and gulp down slow, cold grasshoppers, loading their crops with the crispy, twitching, cream-filled morsels before the dawn’s resurrecting light reaches down into the tussocks of grass and reanimates them. As the sun’s rays probe further along the broad throat of this slope, the frozen leaves of squash and tomato, crumpled with ice, their cell walls broken in the freeze, release a heavy scent of vegetable death– a grassy, herbal trace of chlorophyll, of spilled plant blood, or steamed spinach. Jays shriek madly from the crimson tips of marcescent pin oaks, howling a death knell for the garden as they hungrily loosen acorns from the canopy. Sap-filled stems on hedgeballs burst with milky latex and release volleys of heavy fruit that ricochet through thorny limbs and thud in the deepening duff, soon to be buried ‘neath their own leaves. Death is only the beginning– we enter a time of burial, and slow decay, sweet as spinach in the rising breeze. 

Not nearly so sweet, but thoroughly pungent nonetheless, is the almost cheesy musk of our buck goat, Elton, who after 10 months of separation from our nanny goats, is back with them in the shelter of a black locust hedgerow, in order to perform his carnal duties. In October, while the goat browse is still palatable and plentiful, but perhaps reduced enough to dry off our nannies from milking, it is time to begin breeding. The ritual of caprine fornication is at times a complicated dance of nimble hoof play, charges and struts, facial and vocal signaling, but inevitably ends in a quick and seemingly awkward moment of mounting. That said, were our roles reversed, and our goats interested in the similarly fanciful yet awkward customs of our own human bodily congress, they too might be some combination of amused, perplexed and perhaps bewildered. 

But it is truly the initial act of buck foreplay which makes me, a relatively vanilla participant in such bio-physical necessities, blush a bit. To put it bluntly, goat courtship all comes down to strong smells, and there is no smell stronger, nor apparently more attractive to a nanny goat, that buck piss. In this season of rut, the sour musk of goat urine is something of a cologne, and a particularly randy buck (which is basically all of them) will dampen himself with it, particularly on the face and forelegs, all day long in order to develop the perfect olfactory signal, arching his beard into the steadily spurting stream. Now, with the goats in the best potential health for gestation after a long season of browsing and grazing, they are enticed by this overwhelming fragrance, and throughout the daylight hours, Elton pirouettes and treads fancily in the duff, his dewy, gleaming beard whipping in the north wind. He projects his upper lip above his nostrils in a maneuver known as the flehmen response, unleashing his upper gums which are embedded with an auxiliary olfactory organ, known as the vomeronasal organ. With this he can detect the subtle pheremones associated with estrus, and upon receiving clear signals and, I choose to believe, consent, consummates the act vigorously, if briefly. To our eyes, not to mention noses, this may not be an elegant ballet– but it gets the job done. 

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The whine of machinery restarts as chaff and beetles billow like prairie smoke across the exhausted fields. The reapers hunger for more– more yields, more land, more profit. Simultaneously, the stock in our own fields respond to increasing darkness and cold by seeking the fat and richness of mast. With each gust, further volleys of acorns rain in the duff, and the turkeys and hogs have become aware of the pattering of these energy dense treats, scouring the draws in search of the abundant windfall. Each night, with successive freezes, different species of trees let loose their leaves– first the rusty splotches of elm and mulberry, then the pale gold of cottonwood, the flaxen and curled and deeply forked foliage of boxelder, the bloody feathers of wild cherry leaf, laying upon sleeping roots. 

As Appalachia and the Southeast have endured torrent and flood, the result of increasing climate instability, it has been quite dry here in the Midwest, as a winter drought appears to be settling in. The effects of this may grow challenging as we enter dormancy, with increased wildfire risks and the threat of a perilously depleted water table, but for now, the opportunity to graze further in the bottomlands, seeking persimmons and walnuts and pin oak acorns all without the risk of compaction or deep disturbance has been something of an asset to our program. The dry, frost killed leaves of trees make for a nutritious fodder source for the ruminants grazing along the old fence lines, and masses of clean, dry honey locust pods litter the slope. I am hoping to do some work raking and milling the pods as a winter feed source, and to get some amount of data on to what degree they can be utilized. As with the acorns and leaves, we will exercise some amount of caution in over-harvesting these unique, native foodstuffs– being sure to leave enough for the winter wildlife. In the thick piles of pods, I see the tell-tale sign of cottontail nibbles, and evidence of deer mastication. 

Layer by layer, leaves lie at the base of sleeping elms and cottonwoods, blanketing the skin of the draws, providing shelter for rodents, amphibians, insects and microbes. What goes up must come down, and as the life-giving warmth and light of sun recedes along the horizon, slinking lower and lower each short day, we too prepare to recede from the landscape, gathering in the warmth and light that we can provision within the insulation of our own dwelling of earth and straw. We are cleaning the woodstove, making some semblance of the boxes and buckets of harvest that litter the floor space, dusting the cabinets and lining them with preserves and ferments. All the while, geometric fields of corn and soy quake with combines, left to become stripped-down squares as the well of extraction is dug deeper through strata of mammoth bone and glacial debris.

We hope to have enough. Enough hay for the barn loft. Enough fuel for the stove. Enough cash to make it through the lean season. Enough solar collection and battery capacity to illuminate the long darkness. Enough tomatoes and squash and sweet potatoes for winter, and enough fat formed by grass and mast to carry us through ‘til solar expansion. But enough is never enough in the face of gross domestic production.

We leave some acorns for the squirrels and jays, some locust pods for the rabbits and deer, some leaves for the unseen world of creepy-crawlies of the woodland floor. I hope we all have enough. In traditional European agrarian lore (and likely elsewhere), the final sheave of grain is left to stand for the spirits of the field, but also, perhaps, as an acknowledgement of enoughness, as an offering to the wide ecological web upon which our agricultural concerns perch upon. Some seed for the sparrows, some assurance of another year spent tending and planting, on the opposite side of this growing darkness. This is, of course, agronomically unsensible. As field margins shrink alongside profit margins for those who work the soil, the spirits of these fields find less refuge in a tamed, depleted landscape. 

Hunger is present in all things, from the turkeys strutting through frost-glazed forest duff to the ghosts at field’s edge, and the world of markets and apartheid colonies in between, which we have devised through our own earthly pursuits as a species. The combines cease for church this morning, and in the dusty stillness, mourning doves glean the bare earth for grain fragments. The faithful gather in pews of timber, harvested generations ago from these contracting field edges, anticipating the abundant light of a life after this, while the doves prostrate themselves among the chaff, pecking and cooing, praying for enough. 

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And now, a few notes— in previous editions of the Almanac, I have covered the field spirits (feldgeisten) of German folklore, as well as the phenomenon of Asian lady beetle swarms. I believe these pieces have been pay-walled in my archives, but for the benefit of casual readers I will adjust the time that some of my work remains open to the public, as I have quite a lot of writing altogether. These pieces are now unlocked, or will be shortly (links below).

Another note for folks who are relatively nearby— we are hosting the Holistic Harvest Swine Butchery Workshop here on the farm November 7-11. I will teach you, in an inclusive learning atmosphere, how to humanely and efficiently slaughter, butcher and preserve meat with limited resources and infrastructure, including refrigeration. Please feel free to reach out for details.

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