Shedding my fur
Roadkill, personal domestication, and becoming human. And some fun facts about atmospheric nitrogen.
Most days of this dreary week, the quilt patch plots of corn stubble, exposed earth, infrequent fields of tender winter wheat, and short cropped pasture specked with angus cows, all stitched together by leafless threads of ditch elm and sleeping mulberry undulate by, from along the muddy gravel roads that trace through Northeast Missouri’s somber windblown hilltops and tilled out bottomlands. These sleeping fields, isolated and somber beneath the gray, homogenous banner of cold, humid, vaporous air are dotted every few miles with the distorted remains of whitetail deer, roadkilled or poorly shot, dragged off by packs of yipping coyotes at night and left to the bald eagles at day. It’s carrion season, in the almanac year, that time when we can be somewhat assured that dead flesh will not easily become host to living microbes.
Domestically, our own bits and ends are stacking up in a food safe manner, albeit without being ravenously or immediately consumed, but rather preserved in our larder for future sustenance, a way in which I relate more to foxes, weasels, and badgers than coyotes and eagles. Slush melt drums on our roof as it traces its way down from dormer to gable and eventually, the sodden earth at the foot of this particular cache of winter provisions, that is, our home of earth and straw. We have many forms of water catchment on the farmstead, gutters spanning the broad length of barns, buckets and barrels and tanks lined up at the drip edge or downspout, but the work of plumbing our roof has yet to be finished, and so for now, we’re gonna let this recent bout of rain and slush sink into the soil, still parched in this year of exceptional drought.
If this rain sinks in, and better yet, if we are lucky enough to receive deep snows while the soil remains thawed, we may well rejoice in the next growing season for the recharge of both soil moisture and nutrient retention provided by dormant season precipitation. What little of our topsoil remains here can certainly use this kiss of December sleet, so long as it remains rooted enough to hold together in extreme melt-offs or heavy storms. The correlation between snow and fertility is a bit more complex. Farmers have long held the belief that snow deposits fertility. Our atmosphere contains large stores of nitrogen, specifically NH2. Falling precipitant (and even lightning) brings this the NH2 to earth, where under cover of insulative snow it can enter the soil profile and become NH3, commonly known as ammonia, with the help of slow, but not entirely dormant soil microbiota. Heavy rains and lightning both bring more nitrogen to earth than snow, but the nitrogen associated with lightning is distributed in an extremely localized manner, and the heavy rains tend to wash away before sinking in, and so snow cover is most effective as a form of providential fertility, at an average rate of 5-10/lbs nitrogen absorbed per acre per year in the Midwest. Not much, but unlike synthesized anhydrous ammonia, this naturally occurring form of nitrogen has no known negative effects on soil life.
I use information like this to cope with the mildly adverse and generally yucky conditions we find here on the margins of winter, as there remain many days ahead of mire, darkness, and cold to push through. Our winter barnyard is a bit mucky in high traffic areas already, and the splashback of cold sleet and slush melt covers every vertical surface within two feet of the uncovered soil with a patina of scuzz. Each morning, after performing the ritual fire-building, coffee making, trip to the cold outhouse, preparing the kids for school and feeding and watering of the livestock, I take my scythe down to a densely thatched corner of the barn yard and slash down dried grass stems, bundling them up in my arms and hauling them off for bedding and mulch. This time of year, the pasture offers us diminishing returns, and so the we’ve brought the goats and chickens and cows in for winter shelter, with only one group of pigs still out in the field. I’d bring them in too, but I still have a few more to butcher, and its easier to heave their lifeless bodies over the electric fencing than to have to haul them out through the high, permanent perimeter of the barnyard.
As the grass dies and recedes and all but a few oaks release their leaves, the world of our detritus reveals itself: an armload of rakes and forks leaned up against a half-dead elm in the draw, a soggy work shirt hung up on a fencepost in the garden, and umpteen odd buckets scattered on the edges of grazed down paddocks mark the prior migrations of our now sheltered herds. There are bonepiles for the coyotes to scatter, hefty bundles of electric fence to retrieve and stow in barn lofts, great runs of irrigation tubing and a slew of abandoned projects, all cropping up among the frost-shriveled vegetation. Thin spots, scars, muddy ruts, and the pock-marked sod all appear, reflections of mistakes I made this past year of grazing all announce their presence in the slumbering field. While my work for this year isn’t finished (beyond daily maintenance of our herd, three more hogs, four wether goats and a few dozen birds still stand before my blade), I am nonetheless finding myself in a reflective place as my circle of responsibility tightens and I take my activities from forest and field to home and hearth.
I am preparing to enter my 39th year this week, which I will use as justification for if this entry seems particularly self-indulgent. Or morose. I no longer qualify as a young or beginning farmer on grant applications, and much like those worn-out autumn paddocks, the scars and thin spots and muddy ruts are apparent for all to see. Not to be dramatic, but I too, stand before the knife, perhaps more knowingly than the wether goats loafing and grazing. I have aches, shredded socks, busted pants, and more than a little existential doom as I round the corner of this decade. At night I must pee, frequently, and standing out in the darkness, where I prefer to urinate, distant howls from the coyotes, frequently heard and never seen, sound a taunting call, the far off and ever-present laughter of my mortality drawing nearer to my current placement than my youth. Or at least that’s how it feels at 3 AM when I’m weary, worn out and tired in this busy season. There have been times I would’ve taken an easy out, had the opportunity presented itself, but outside of participating in the homesteader ponzi-scheme (marketing content about how liberating and wonderful this life is so that I don’t have to do it anymore), the only way out is through. In a way, this year, the first edition of this Almanac, has been about that, the way through.
I occasionally hear stories of farmers under duress, who lose their cool and kill all their burdensome livestock. While improvised acts of depopulation are less common, there have been recent government-assisted livestock depopulation events, such as early in the pandemic when chickens were being gassed and piglets were being aborted on account of bottlenecks in industrial processing. More often, and less reported, are farmer suicides, both prevalent here in the affluent West as well as abroad, particularly in places like India. I can’t say I don’t understand this compulsion to drop the yoke of responsibility like this and leave the mess to someone else, but in my case I’m both privileged in the support I receive from the folks close to me and our handful of committed eaters, and so I am steadfastly dedicated to seeing things through and doing right by my human and animal dependents. (To be abundantly clear, I am not describing any personal self-destructive ideation, just an intrusive thought about giving up and getting a real job, like YouTube homesteader…)
I could sell my stock for cheap, or have them unscrupulously sent off to Campbell’s Soup.* I could sell an ebook on how to begin a self-sufficient homestead on a quarter acre with no trust fund or credit and reach upwards for the next course of the pyramid. I could lay down and die, though I’d probably end up hungry. Those are all ways out, but I’m seeking the path through. I continue to believe that agriculture is worth my time, worth our collective time, deeply necessary, and that a potential future spent manufacturing and consuming protein powders, and keeping clean while robots tend to soilless crops would be more of a dystopia than the overly-confident tech set actively working towards these types of “solutions” can comprehend. Similarly, without a deep dose of reality, the “solutions” offered by alternative ag proponents (decentralized infrastructure, self-sufficiency, permaculture and the like) will just as certainly, if not more so, lead to dystopian levels of starvation and unrest. And you can bet your last turnip that it’ll be the poor who suffer the most. For the record, I doubt that the robotic AI-powered ag-tech future will ever truly arrive, so long as human labor remains as cost-effective to exploit as it is.
But still, I can’t help myself. I’m in a world of dirt, and refuse to keep my hands clean. There is something in tending a crop, caring for a plot of dirt, learning the conditions of our environment and the seasons that humans are hard-wired for. Hunter-gatherer origins aside, it is inherently human to cultivate and steward land and crops, and I think it goes beyond the survival of our culture and civilization, and cuts somewhere deeper to our role within the larger ecosystem. We’re born to steward, and forced to create capital. Somewhere in between those two is the toil I’m somehow engaged in. I’m tempted to leave it at that for now, because it’s probably about as spiritual of a statement as I’m willing to make, but it’s cold and miserable outside, so indulge me a bit longer, won’t you?
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I envy the coyotes. Constrained as I am by human words and understanding, I find their feckless lives and scavenging ways quite appreciable. I have been living among them for over a decade now. Near nightly I hear their yips and wails, sometimes very nearby, and on pasture walks I find their purposefully placed scat dead-center of my footpaths, or deposited neatly atop distant round bales of hay, a mocking notice posted for us humans about where we stand. Somehow, in all this time among them, I never see them out on the land. When I was younger, before I became rooted here, I engaged in a more coyote-like existence: nocturnal, scavenging, sometimes traveling in packs or on my own, leaving little trace of my time in most places excepting my own scat. I suppose I have become domesticated, having even lost my predilection for roadkill, now existing in a world of my own cultivation.
But that wily, meandering, independence hasn’t totally fled me yet. It is a day dream for many of us inhabiting this lifestyle, that of the ‘modern homesteader’, to carry this streak of untameable independence with us to an activity so domesticated and human. The affluent Western homesteading and alternative agriculture community is and has long been chock-full of ungovernable loons, coots and egomaniacs across the political spectrum, some of them cantankerous and contrary to the point of aggression (I think some of these are the folks who write in to Countryside Magazine**). These fringe pioneers scavenging on a continent long made tame and safe through manifest destiny, smallpox, and modern convenience come in a few different flavors, like essential oils, from free-market libertarian private-enterprise barons to well-meaning if overwhelmed do-it-alls like myself. Sometimes we pull it altogether and end up writing a god damned Substack, our version of a scat-pile on the footpath.
I envy the coyotes, but I don’t find them human enough to relate to anymore. And I’m not content to entertain the world with my own personal brand of dogshit, even if it’s wild dogshit. It took me a while to become domesticated, to become human, and so I’d like to do what humans are best at: providing for each other. And sometimes that requires a bit of reevaluation.
I see some light in the path through, and if I can remain committed to the scrupulous performance of my necessary duties these next few weeks, the possibility of creating and demonstrating a functional agrarian alternative is waiting on the other side of the solstice. Approaching the second year of the Almanac, having literally cut my way through this burden of a well-intentioned, if off-track, attempt at feeding some people and living simply, I will be exploring functional models for alternative agrarian communities. And not just in theory. But I promise to you, gentle reader, that I will continue to step aside from a “solution” oriented focus often, to bring you the griping and disparagement you’ve grown to appreciate, or chosen to ignore. I’ll even recalibrate my contempt for my favorite “get rich quick farming” prophet towards the National Farm Bureau, ‘cuz he’s small potatoes anymore, and we have greater work ahead. I may be shedding my fur, as I discover when I sometimes find myself in a well-lit mirror, but I won’t be dropping my thorns yet.
For now, there’s still more darkness to penetrate, more burdens to bear, more mire to trudge and shit to slip upon. Best get to it while I’m still young.
39 and holding,
BB
*I’ve heard it told that all of the organic laying houses in our area call up Campbell’s Soup when culling their hens, at around 18 months of age, because their rate of lay is no longer efficient. They get something like 10 cents a bird.
**No offense to Countryside. I would contend it is a much better publication that Mother Earth News, with nary a glossy advertisement for unaffordable side-by-sides for city billies, and a finely textured stock that makes it essential outhouse reading.