Every morning the sun gives rise to a mob of easily over a hundred robins, riotously coasting from tree branch to soft, open earth. For the moment, they do not fight, as is their wont once it becomes time to break up their winter flock and territorialize, prior to nesting. It’s difficult for me to precisely figure what all their current diet is composed of. Robins are insectivorous as well as frugivorous– usually about 40% invertebrates to 60% fruits, but the soil is uncommonly dry for late February and one has to probe deeply to summon earthworms. While I imagine the broad stands of eastern red cedar, among which this particular flock has settled, offer much in the way of juniper berries, the hunger gap which deprives humans and livestock alike little more than staple nutrition must certainly extend to the wildlife as we scrape through the ecological Lenten season. Our manure piles offer much in the way of soft-bodied protein, and perhaps a few ice-softened rose hips remain, but much like our own diet at this time of the year, the robins of the field must eat humbly and bleakly, in spite of their throaty, cheerful exhortations to warmth and daylight.
Worm charming is a technique employed by many birds, wood turtles, and a handful of talented humans. Some shorebirds are known to perform a dance, the vibrations of which drive worms to the surface, where they are gulped up in droves. In the case of humans, this skill is sometimes known as worm grunting, and it involves the grunter driving a wooden stake, or “stob” into the earth and drawing across it a “rooping iron”, or in the case of worm fiddling, a dull saw. In a 2008 study from Vanderbilt University, it was claimed that the vibrations exhibited by worm grunters closely simulated those of moles, a voracious consumer of earthworms. The vibrations put the worms on edge and send them above ground to be collected for fishing bait. But the American Robin does not charm worms, it merely listens, running, stopping, cocking its head and darting its beak through the dirt. And ‘til this oddly dry and brittle spell is ended with the return of seasonal moisture, the beaks of robins shall find little purchase in the hard clay of Northeast Missouri.
Dry, brittle earth in the dormant season is vulnerable. Last evening’s cold front has ushered in a river of continuously rushing winds. The unseasonable warmth this last half of February has even coaxed a few row-croppers into their tractor cabs to begin spring tillage. I even heard (second hand) that the state extension service has been telling folks to go ahead and plant because it seems like Spring is coming early this year. I suppose that’s what crop insurance is for. On a day like today, you can go down in turned over fields in the broad river bottoms and see long streaks of fine, blowing dirt out among the thin layer of overnight snow, the earth bleeding dark rivulets of long-deposited glacial till. Downdraft gusts whip up walls of dust carried off to places unknown. Should these fields ever encounter significant rainfall or sudden snowmelt between now and whenever they become rooted, they may well wash into the Fabius, the Mississippi, and eventually, the Gulf of Mexico, along with the other 57.6 billion metric tons (approximately) that the Midwest has lost to erosion since the introduction of white man’s agriculture here. If you stop to consider it, that’s a lot of dirt. I’ve heard it said that topsoil is our nation’s largest export.
This is not only a particularly egregious example of erosion, it is an incredibly pressing and relevant one for all of us, and the root causes of it are both stunningly simple (risky agricultural practices) and remarkably complex (risky agricultural economics), and chances are that something as mundane and nap-inducing as crop insurance reform would substantially improve the situation. Our congressional rep said he’s be more likely to budge on food assistance policies than crop insurance policies, if that gives you any idea of how far the Farm Bureau can get their hands up a congressman's ass. I’ve always pointed out that the Farm Bureau is largely composed of white-collar agribusiness goons who don’t look good in boots, but someone in their lobbying arm seems to have veterinary skills.
As for my own erosion, nobody has yet cut me a check whenever I degrade my environment, and in fact I largely try to avoid doing so. Nonetheless, in the course of attempting to meet significant community food needs, mindful stewardship and good intentions aren’t always enough to stave off erosion– extreme weather, bad luck and ignorance can all play a role that leads to soil loss. Farming on almost any slope is compromised in the face of an eight-inch rain, like we had last year, and there are some slopes that should never be farmed. Most of us probably instinctively understand this, but when confronted with the unceasing hype about “regenerative” agriculture, a well-meaning steward might find themselves applying a marketed-regenerative principle to conditions that result in degeneration. In other words, chicken tractors are not magical, they can and do destroy topsoil under a whole host of conditions, and unless you are farming on the same land as your great-great-grandpappy, you probably don’t know what all those unique variables actually are yet.
Anthropogenic degeneration, erosion, and environment/ecosystem decline are all the result of some initial wound to the earth, and compounded by poor timing and/or an unwillingness to address the underlying issue. In some instances, the wound was drawn by our economy of extraction, and in others it is the result honest mistakes or misinformation. Sometimes, the wound is old and deep like the compacted plow-pan we are preparing to work with this March as we do our best, planting 5 acres of trees that might shift the regeneration/degeneration dynamic on this land slightly. Erosion is degeneration plus momentum. Once the wound is made, all that’s left for us to do as stewards is disrupt the momentum to come.
Sometimes, my concerns for the soil outweigh my concerns for my own bodily erosion. To stretch the metaphor, I have accumulated some wounds over time. Under certain environmental stresses, these injuries precipitate further cascades of minor pain and light debilitation, which over time, take longer and longer to heal from. This getting older stuff stopped being fun, and I’m a bit young to be saying that. I’d like to consider myself healthy, active, and in tune with my body, yet as each winter passes I find myself increasingly creaking into the next season. The same is true of our eldest working dog.
Within a couple days of each other I bruised or cracked a rib, and Xena, who has been living with degenerating hips, sprained a front paw. To Xena’s credit, I’ve been doing most of the complaining, but she’s been doing most of the resting. A busted rib is painful, and other than taking painkillers or chewing willow bark there isn’t much anyone can do about it, according to Google. So every day I trim a couple chunks of cheese off the block and stuff aspirin into them– one for me, one for my dog. We both seem to hover around the line between stubborn and pathetic in regards to our conditions, but she’s at least getting better. I don’t reckon a hurt rib will be my undoing, but on some metaphysical level, I’ll admit it has given me pause.
My father was a union pipefitter, and my mother a postal service clerk. In other words, I’m not of gentleman farmer stock, and I have seen the ravages that physically demanding labor has wrought on others. I’ve never held any illusions that farming is easy on the body, though as a long-time commuting and touring cyclist I’ve experienced the overall benefit of regular, even strenuous physical activity. But the labor of farming is dynamic, and an awkward swing of the mattock or stumbling plunge of the shovel can suddenly tear and tweak muscles, while the bones and joints erode. And, if like most folks, I exist in an economic realty where my labor is to be exchanged for livelihood, I much prefer to not split my profit with an employer. I must believe there is some virtue in toil, and that the alternative of externalizing the labor which benefits me far outside my local community often results in the exploitation of others. Even when the physical work of raising food hurts my body or exasperates my spirit, I am in too deep to just quit, or even take a break longer than a day. But over time, the wounds are made, and our earth of our bodies washes away.
The weather has been ideal for much necessary work these past few days, for Xena and myself. On her end, the warmth and sun mostly lend themselves well to barking at eagles and carrying the same discarded bacon rind from hole to hole as an obsessive, almost ritualized habit, and for me, carting loads of composted manure from bed to bed in a similar fashion. But neither of us has felt very up to these activities. Xena and I are both aging, she somewhat more rapidly than myself, but I try to stay aware that injuries happen, that I’ll heal. But it’s also true, that sometimes people break, and farming has broken many people before me, if not suddenly, then gradually; a degeneration of the body, if not an erosion of the spirit.
As a dog, Xena is fairly inscrutable. She likes burying bones and stealing milk, sleeping for 12 or 15 hours at a time, and sometimes, stealing socks off the laundry line. She clearly cares for her people and livestock, but she does not seem to express much in the way of contentment or distress, happiness or sadness. As a working dog, the burden of her labor has been bred into her psyche– she is compelled to perform her duties, but luckily for her, the duties of a good livestock guardian mostly involve sleeping, sniffing, and barking. In her own plodding, bumbling manner, she has taken to a life of semi-retirement somewhat gracefully, and I hope to emulate this in due time.
Heal I must, for a new season of work is almost here. March will bring early peas and fields of newly planted trees, goat kids and broody hens, and I hope, ample rain and wriggling worms for the grunting. There is erosion to check, manure to spread, and a rapidly amassing surplus of eggs to inspect, sort and pack. I expect to be back to pasture work soon, so long as I do not crumble like the thin and rootless earth left wounded year after year by the same old mistakes.
In my previous almanac entry, I mentioned that I would not acknowledge spring’s arrival ‘til the hazel catkins were gold with pollen and the spring peepers began their cacophonic amphibious anthems. These markers of vernal awakening have now begun. Still, today started off at eleven degrees, and my ribcage, if not the heart held within it, could benefit from one or two more weeks of wintertime idleness.
There’s a phrase they kick around in the permaculture world: “let the designer be the recliner”, or something to that effect. If this is meant to get at the notion that we must consider the labor cost of our food systems, I’m all for it. But how I think it is often presented, and taken to be understood, is that a clever enough person needn’t work very hard to grow food. It’s certainly true that a wealthy enough person doesn’t need to work very hard to obtain food, but a world where nobody farms and everyone eats isn’t possible, even if you draw a really cool map. It’s true that we can build efficiencies and deploy technologies in our food systems, acknowledging that the list of shortcomings, trade-offs, and newly created vulnerabilities associated with them may be worse than the problems they are designed to solve, but I don’t even think that’s what permaculturists are describing when they talk about designing and reclining– I think some of them might actually be describing a world where people either quietly rely on the exploited labor of others to eat, or everyone starves because nobody works. I’d like to advocate for a happier medium that doesn’t require magic thinking, labor exploitation, or replacement by robots and machine learning.
So, if any of y’all have that all figured out, holler at me.
This afternoon, one of our most reliable nanny goats, Mocha, dropped our first four kids of the season, two boys and two girls. The first one, a reddish, lanky and loud boy, was laid in the hay, shining and fairly clean as a second kid emerged head first– not the ideal presentation, but also not immediately alarming. Lacking a vet or a Farm Bureau lobbyist, I sought help after a few minutes of the new kid gasping silently into this new, cold world, and with some minor repositioning, boy number two fully exited the painless void of the womb, followed by two girls a few minutes apart, both encased in their primordial amniotic sacs. Crouching in the bedding, breathing through the mild discomfort of my bruised ribs, I watched Mocha’s widening eyes and broad, foggy breaths, her neck tensed with waves of deep sensation, and looked back at the silent, painless world of tissues and nerves and hormone rich jelly encasing the stirring kid within, a collision of two planes of existence and two states of being– regeneration and degeneration, renewal and erosion— one of the rare moments of equilibrium we’re sometimes afforded as animals. It’s a big wide world out there kid, and we’ve got a lot of work to do in it, before our bones join the washed and windswept earth.