>Farming Apprenticeships (part two): The Verdict

>Note: This post is a continuation of last month’s, in which I gave an overview of farming apprenticeship programs and something of an explanation for their sudden popularity. This segment attempts to summarize my own experience as an apprentice – for those considering doing it, parents of young people threatening to do it, and those otherwise interested.

… Do I now aspire to possess my own ten acres, a cow and a pile of debt? Will the dirt ever come out from under my fingernails?

I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to develop an objective analysis of the apprenticeship program that defined my life for six months. It would be like sending your parents a report card for their performance during your childhood. Looking back over the journals I kept while working with the Collins, I see rants, reflections, stories about the people I met and many, many attempts to describe the beauty and wonder of the place I found myself living. My formal goal in undertaking the apprenticeship was to learn about what it takes to sustain a small farm; the day-to-day tasks as well as the personal commitment involved. Informally, I was really trying to see if I was up for it, if all my romantic ideas around farming held up to the reality of the job itself.

I worked hard to keep maintain my lofty ideas about farming over the months I spent living and working with the Collins. As they will be the first to admit, Bob and Ann are a bit worn out by the whole job. Granted, things are better than when they were dairy farmers, waking up at 4 AM to milk cows that eventually started costing them more per year than they earned. Still, most visitors to the farm become overwhelmed simply by being told what goes on here. It’s a lot of work, and by the end of the apprenticeship, I understood why most long-time farmers don’t share the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young wannabes. It’s hard, often thankless work. But I also learned why they’re still there, doing it. The energetic, gung-ho attitude may not be immediately visible, but their passion for the lifestyle they chose is still there lying just beneath the surface. Just as some city kids wouldn’t touch a manure shovel with a ten-foot pole, Bob and Ann would last about three minutes in an office. The animals under their care, the river that skirts their property, the 69 acres that they call home are as much a part of them as their hair or skin.

After a few weeks at Collins Farm, I started to feel this way a bit, too – attached to the place in a way that made me wonder, when it came down to it, whether I would actually be able to leave. Maybe it’s the seductive beauty of Vancouver Island or the fact that every day was a chance to play outside. Sure, there were some long hours spent bent over pulling weeds and picking vegetables, but since most of those activities were new to me, they took a while to get dull and repetitive. In between, I gorged myself on blackberries and strawberries, climbed trees to pick apples, wandered the woods aimlessly to find mushrooms (or to walk the goats), and shoveled around piles of dirt and manure under the guise of creating compost. Honestly, sometimes I couldn’t believe I was being paid, however meagerly, for that level of enjoyment.

Second to finding out that work didn’t have to be a miserable activity, the most valuable aspect of being a farm apprentice turned out to be the mentoring relationships that I was able to develop with Bob, Ann and people like Andrea, Connie and Crystal who were a near-daily presence during the summer months. Without a lesson plan, a schedule or any sort of formal discussion, they managed to impart a ton of valuable information on how to grow food and turn it into a semblance of a livelihood: the economics of homemade pie and hungry tourists, the “joys of backyard cheese making,” how to pick a perfectly ripe strawberry and catch a pig on the run.

Farming apprenticeships are criticized for being a product of privilege; an option only available to those who can afford to work for little or no pay for an entire summer. One commenter on the New York Times article mentioned in the previous post calls such positions “a time-honored tradition for children of the wealthy” to fill the summer months. It’s an interesting point. Although my mom quit supporting me as soon as I graduated, the fact that I had no student loans to pay off allowed me complete freedom in choosing the route I would take next. I assessed my personal and financial needs, looked at the state of the world and, deciding it needs more farmers, jumped into the apprenticeship program with both feet. Did I feel privileged? Absolutely. I lived in a place that people from all over the world pay through the nose to visit, ate almost exclusively organic, home-cooked, local food, and learned how to feed myself and come a few steps closer to self-sufficiency. Those non-monetary forms of payment added up to be more than any “real” job could have provided me with, especially just coming out of college in a major recession. Meanwhile, many of my fellow graduates languished in their parents’ basements, looking for nonexistent jobs and wondering if they should go back for a Master’s in business administration. I came away with skills that I’m finding a new job market for – in managing community gardens and CSA programs, helping restaurants and stores source food locally, or assisting small farms in going organic.

My last few days at the Collins’ place were difficult. It didn’t seem fair that I was leaving; the Christmas season was just upon us and there was so much to do. I went through the motions anyway, and Ann and Bob made sure I got to do everything one last time – go for a ride on Jesse the big Belgian mare, eat all my favorite foods, see all of our friends from around the community at a fantastic Thanksgiving Day potluck. The day before I left turned out to be the first sunny day we’d had in weeks (after record rainfall all November), and Mount Arrowsmith, the towering face of granite that greeted me nearly every morning for two seasons, appeared dusted with snow just as it’d been when I first arrived in June.

Before I left, Ann and Bob gave me a painting of that mountain, gorgeously rendered in watercolor by an artist friend of theirs. I put it carefully in the back window of my fully stuffed car. Then I got in the car with it and drove down the driveway, watching the two of them growing smaller in my rearview mirror. They were the ones I hated to leave the most. They weren’t simply friends to me or even surrogate parents. Our relationship was more similar to that of close accomplices. Although the Collins are the ones responsible for creating what is now a diverse farm that feeds the close-knit community around it, I felt like that season – the second one that they had grown for the local market – had been a milestone. The worldwide craze around eating locally and knowing where food comes from had started to hit our little valley, and real progress began to be made toward making the entire island more self-sufficient. I’d come to experience some of the joy of working on the land and with people who understood the value of that, for the guiltlessness of laboring for ideas that I believe in completely. At Collins Farm I think I glimpsed an outcome that was greater than the whole, something right in a world that usually seems wrong. 

As far as my own desire to become a farmer, well, as much as I hate making long-term plans about my future, it’s definitely tempting. But first, I need a few more seasons’ experience under my belt and a small mountain of cash – it’s as difficult to get into farming as it is to get out, it seems. Now that winter’s set in, I’m simply biding my time (and honing my couch surfing skills) until I can once again turn my efforts toward the worthwhile goal of feeding people.

That dirt under my nails? Long gone. My itch to put it back there? Stronger than ever.

>Farming Apprenticeships: Pitchfork Pastoralism

>Imagine an afternoon in mid-June sprinkled with late-arriving spring rains. Graduation rituals are being held all over the country, including here, at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The Environmental Studies program ceremony is held outside, and everyone’s too jubilant and excited to mind a few light showers. As the proceedings wind to a close and the distribution of diplomas is about to begin, the program head announces that graduates will be asked to state their post-graduation plans into the microphone as they cross the stage. In unison, the few dozen black-robed young adults in the audience gulp.

I quickly maneuver my way to the back of the line to give myself time to think. My immediate plans after graduation are to embark on a six-month apprenticeship on an organic farm. This is surely not what the esteemed administrators of my program want to hear about. I can almost hear my parents’ doubts about my unconventional career launch ringing in my ears. Why couldn’t I have a promising job as a wind power engineer or parks manager lined up? For the first time, I question my decision to postpone my entrance into the “real world” by following my passion for food and gardening to one of the lowest-paying professions in the world.

Luckily, unbeknownst to me, many of my colleagues had the same idea about their futures. After four or five graduates made their announcements (“Get a job”; “Live I my parents’ basement”; “Save the world”), somebody said something about going to work on a farm. He said it quietly, into his collar, but I heard it. A few others also made this admission. As I looked out into the audience, nobody was gasping with horror, fainting or weeping – just the typical “I’m so proud” sniffles.

By the time my turn finally came around, I hiked the stairs confidently, accepted the coveted slip of paper, and faced the audience. “Work on an organic farm,” I said, “Write. Save the world.” I could hear my father wincing, but I didn’t care. Suddenly, I was part of a movement.

The University of Oregon, apparently, is not the only postsecondary institution pumping out graduates who refuse to let a little higher education get in between themselves at a fulfilling back-to-the-land lifestyle. According to the New York Times, more and more students are spending their summers on farms, with  the goal of either being farmers or otherwise participating in organic food production. Those without immediate connections to the farming community – like me six months ago – can find positions relatively easily using online databases. One site has over 1500 entry-level, mostly unpaid farm work positions listed, and claimed to have nearly as many applicants in 2009 (for a complete list of farm internship databases, see the end of this post). If trends continue, the number of people wanting to learn about organic practices at the ground level will soon outpace the number of farms who are able to accommodate them.

The New York Times’ reporter on this story is downright cynical about the whole phenomena. “During a recession,” she says, “a summer on the farm provides respite from grim job hunts and as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe.” Sure, organic food is extremely trendy, and in this job market, most are lucky to find any work at all. Still, I think the fact that all of these educated, idealistic people are choosing to throw their energy and bright-eyed enthusiasm into farming – instead of, say, construction work – speaks less of our need for hipster credibility and more toward a fundamental change that is taking place in our society.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of these newly converted farmers have any idea what they’re getting into. Many seem to hold farming in some golden light, summoning up clichés of the value of working with your hands and getting in touch with nature. This attitude has deep cultural roots. Ever since the invention of agriculture – and its evil stepchild, civilization – agrarian lifestyles have been painted as the antidote to the moral corruption brought about by technology and urbanization. In endless lyrical passages about the beautifully simplistic lives of rural shepherds, the ancient Greek poet Virgil fantasized about life in the countryside. His characters spent a lot of time singing praises to nature and gathering wildflowers in May.

Of course, if Virgil had taken the time for a saunter into the countryside, he would have found an abundance of sheep but a severe shortage of the innocence and merriment he portrayed in his writing. Like modern people in urban and rural contexts, those blessed folk would have likely been struggling for survival on too little land under the burden of too many taxes, all the while quarreling with their spouses, neglecting their sheep and bumming food off their neighbors. They were human, after all, just as sheep herders are today, no less or more morally pure than those who make a career out of car repair or accounting.

Still, the idea that the pastoral lifestyle elevates standards for human interactions has stuck now for millennia, with hundreds more poets and artists adding to the grand illusion. Modern-day writers make the whole situation worse by proposing a “return” to our agrarian roots as an antidote to the confusion and complication of modern society. If only we could all live off the land, in harmony with mother nature, all our problems would be solved – or so the rhetoric goes. Enter the wave of agricultural internships, apprenticeships and volunteer programs.

The basic idea is this: Farm volunteers can work just a couple of days or up to a full season. An internship implies at least part of a season’s commitment, while apprenticeships can last even longer. Room (ranging from a tent pitched in the fields to private cabins) and board (meals with the family or free access to farm produce) is almost always provided. Apprentices sometimes receive pay – one article I read described a farm that provided “a salary of a $1000/month, room, board, a $50/month bonus for working until the end of the season, $30 extra for every farmers market they attend, and a performance bonus of up to $2000”. That right there is enough to activate the salivary glands of any liberal-arts graduate who has spent weeks unsuccessfully trolling Craigslist for work. (The farm ended the program after being sued for back wages – the hazy legislation around agricultural apprenticeships is one of the challenges its participants must deal with.) What kind of work is involved? Well, some farmers consider inexperienced but enthusiastic volunteers to be an easily exploitable source of free labor. Others expect a little self-direction and leave the worker to find his or her own work around the farm. Some apprenticeships, like mine, can include tasks like food preservation or even community outreach to build support for local foods. Although the words can often mean different things, for convenience’s sake, I’ll refer to volunteer, internship and apprenticeship program as “apprenticeships” here.

Other than a lack of standardization (and, let’s face it, standardizing things usually ends up making them boring and predictable) and sometimes bloated expectations on behalf of the apprentices, I believe apprenticeships are one of the most effective tools we have in revitalizing farming, its role in the economy, and people’s approach to food. The current generation of farmers is aging – in twenty years or so, they won’t be able to produce food for us anymore. Meanwhile, we import most of what we consume anyway, and our agricultural land is being gobbled up by subdivisions and freeways. But the realities of peak oil, climate change and economic collapse are making it abundantly clear that this is not the direction we want to be heading. We can’t all be farmers, but we can certainly do a better job of feeding ourselves, stop flooding the global market with agricultural surpluses, and clean up the planet a bit by transitioning to organic practices. A key step in this transition is training the new farmers. While traditional agricultural colleges are stuck in the old paradigm of industrial methods and bigger is better, organic farmers know better. When they open their farms up to apprenticeships, they have the opportunity to share their knowledge with clueless city kids in an environment that is unmatched in the world of public education. With the low student-to-instructor ratio (usually one or two apprentices per family farm), absence of tests, and abundance of real-world experience, learning in an apprenticeship is not simply an end result but a process that allows for personal as well as “professional” growth.

Granted, apprenticeships won’t work for every farmer or idealistic, world-saving graduate. As for my own experience in the trenches of hands-on agricultural learning, well, it was enlightening. Do I now aspire to possess my own ten acres, a cow and a pile of debt? Will the dirt ever come out from under my fingernails?

Stay tuned for next time.

In the meantime, you know you want to abandon whatever it is you’re doing to grow some vegetables, so check out the following sites:

Field Guide for Beginning Farmers  – This is a great place to start; it gives an overview of farming apprenticeships available in North America and what to expect.

Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms

SOIL (Stewards Of Irreplaceable Land) Apprenticeships (Canada)

United States Department of Agriculture – Sustainable Agriculture Internships/Apprenticeships database (North America)

Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association – Farm Apprenticeships (Maine, USA)

The Rodale Institute Classifieds (USA)

Northeast Organic Farming Association (Northeast USA)

Oh, and I now have a semi-professional blogging gig with Conducive Magazine. Read my posts here (and if you ever come across an ad on the site, by all means, click the heck out of that thing).

>The Sun Always Shines in Farmville: A critical analysis of FB’s most popular game

>I realize I’ve been a bit negligent in updating my blog lately. Over the past few days, my time off has been absorbed by two practically useless but hopelessly addictive activities: TvDuck.com and Farmville.
The first allows me to catch up with favorite shows that I had previously believed were only available “south of the border” in the good ol’ USA. Where else can you experience the petty depravity of Desperate Housewives and the brilliant awkwardness of The Office, all conveniently on your laptop screen? When I arrived in the great frozen north, I was saddened and disillusioned to find a message on both ABC and NBC’s websites informing me that these cultural gems were “not yet available” for viewing in Canada. Looking back, I should have known there was a way around this, but I embraced the opportunity to wean myself of TV without questioning it too much. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the boob tube since it entered my life about five years ago (we never watched it when I was growing up). It always ends up leaving my brain feeling like jello, but at the same time, I feel like it’s very important to learn about the delicacy of extramarital affairs and just how insane life in the corporate world can be. So when TvDuck, which allows you to watch pretty much any TV show you want up here in the great frozen north, arrived on the scene, I waved goodbye to my grand schemes to learn German and read a dozen books now that the busy summer is over. Soon, any sense of cognitive strength I thought I’d gained since exiting the formalized educational system has completely dissolved. Woe is me.
That’s not what I’m here to discuss, however. While I’m waiting for my shows to buffer, I’ve been toying around with the Facebook sensation Farmville. As with most trend-driven activities that give participants a sense of social accomplishment among their peers, I’m sadly behind on this one. I try to be sort of a curmudgeon about technology and time-wasting activities (I may waste entire evenings watching TV online, but I am appropriately resentful while I’m doing it), and on the rare occasion I do attend that must-see film or buy a hot new album, I do it weeks if not months behind the pop culture schedule. Farmville only was released in June, but in just a few weeks it had become the most popular game ever to hit Facebook. and as of the end of October had 63 million users. As one news article put it, that means in the US, Farmville users outnumber real farmers 60 to 1.
Farmville annoyed me even before I knew these disheartening statistics, so I think it came as a bit of a surprise a few days ago when I appeared on my friends’ Facebook news feeds as the latest convert. Sure, my disdain still creeps under the surface, but so far, Farmville just fascinates me. For the Facebook-less (faceless?), I’ll just say that Farmville is an “application” that you add to your profile that allows you to play a game with friends that simulates the business of farming. You start off with a couple of “fields” and a limited selection of seeds. Your friends on Facebook that also play the game are your “neighbors”, and they help out by giving gifts of livestock, fruit trees and infrastructure. You can “visit” your neighbors’ farms and help out by dumping bags of fertilizer on their partially grown crops. There always seems to be things to do on the farm – one aspect in which this game actually mimics reality quite well. The crops take anywhere between four hours to a few days to ripen, and must be harvested before they wither. You harvest by clicking on the “harvesting tool” and then clicking on the finished crop. Follow a similar procedure to plow and replant the field. When you harvest, you earn “coins”, which you can then use to expand your farm and buy more stuff for it.
The first time I logged on to Farmville, I was greeted by hokey ragtime music that was probably intended to make me feel more agrarian. I chose an avatar, which defaulted to something looking like a wide-eyed blonde five-year-old in purple overalls. Everything in the game appears in this cartoonish, colorful style, a bit curious for a site mostly used by teens and adults. After I planted some strawberries and eggplants, I visited a neighbor’s farm. I did this by clicking on her avatar, which looked cooler with a purple Mohawk. When her farm loaded on my screen, though, I noticed that the farmer was nowhere to be found. Odd. On a virtual farm with no visible escape routes (not even a road or driveway), where does an avatar hide?
Despite the absence of the farmer, the farm looked quite spiffy. In fact, it made my strawberries and eggplants look like a weed patch. Fruit trees of every kind (banana growing with cherry), a bicycle, daffodils, a well, and something called a “horse topiary”. Herds of cattle and sheep stood around staring blankly into space and blinking occasionally (with an effect that was overall a little creepy, actually). My friend had clearly been at this a while. I briefly wondered if my little farm would ever attain this level of opulence.
The next morning, I checked my email to find a note from my sister, who I’d also added as a Farmville neighbor. Like the rest of the tech-enabled world, she’s already been playing this for a while. “Quick, go harvest your strawberries!” the email read. There was a sight note of panic to it. I clicked over to my virtual farm, where there were now withered stalks where my young strawberry plants had been the day before. I looked back at the email – it was sent before I’d even gotten out of bed. Apparently, the berries ripen in four hours, and the game expects you to sit in front of your computer watching this take place lest you miss the event. After all, avatars don’t take part in unnecessary outside activities like sleeping or going to work, so why should you?
Later, I called my sister up, and she explained to me the central rule of the game: “The sun always shines in Farmville.” I thought she was relaying a nugget of wisdom through some sort of cryptic metaphor, but then I realized it was actually quite straightforward. In a virtual world, there’s no reason for cloudy days or even night time. And without the physical restrictions of the berry ripening process, there’s no reason strawberries shouldn’t be ready in four hours. Or four seconds, for that matter.
I wonder if some Monsanto engineer didn’t create this game as an extension of some sort of genetically engineered, chemically controlled agricultural fantasy. After all, it’s the perfect, predictable environment for growing crops – the type of environment agricultural scientists are working hard to perfect. With hydroponics, you can deliver exactly what plants need to the root system without the inconvenient medium of soil. Animals bred to a robot-like level of complacency and stupidity perform the duties of looking cute and growing meat without the worry of pasture and fences. Of course, rather than standing and blinking on a flat green surface, those real-life animals are kept in decidedly un-pastoral pens and cages in enormous barns. But that would be the dark side of Farmville that we don’t see.
But maybe I’m looking too far into this. After all, the game clearly wasn’t structured to stand up to critical analysis; in fact, its profit motives are rather thinly concealed. This evening, as I explored the game a bit farther, I clicked on the “market”, where you buy the seeds, animals and infrastructure you want. Under the “homes” tab, I found manors, villas and a variety of other domiciles for my avatar to occupy. I clicked on the “homestead,” the most basic option, but was informed I didn’t have enough coins to buy the place. But I didn’t have to worry! I was redirected to a page where, using my Visa or Paypal account, I could simply buy more coins. Suddenly, I was the federal reserve of my own farm nation, churning out my own money as I needed it. If I didn’t want to fork over my hard-earned dollars, I could also participate in a carefully selected variety of online scams that only required my personal information to load me up on enough farm coin to purchase the homestead of my avatar’s dreams. This particular feature has generated some ire on the interwebs – apparently quite a few people have fallen for the scams and aren’t happy about it.
So Farmville’s not the perfect model for real-time agriculture, and I don’t think anything but a physical piece of land ever will be. I’m curious what this newest gaming trend – which is unique in its lack of guns, fast cars, or any of the usual computer game fare – indicates about our evolving culture. Is the appeal here, as one Zynga (the software company that developed Farmville) VP told BusinessWire, in “people’s instinct to nurture”? Are we collectively so desperate to go back to our agricultural roots that we must turn to virtual reality to fill that need? Or is Farmville just another iteration of the standard monopoly-style game, where the player must make smart economic decisions to win? If so, I wonder how good this is for the situation of real farmers – if farming’s just a matter of harvesting your strawberries on time and picking the best place for your horse topiary, why can’t these hayseeds pull it together and make some money at it?
Farmville will probably go the way of Donkey Kong, Neopets and Lemonade Stand, but it is an interesting stop on the internet train and a fun diversion for my down time between cooking giant batches of tomato sauce and shoveling goat manure. In case some Farmville game creator happens to be reading this, though, I’ll offer a few suggestions to make it more realistic. Make a mortgage payment due daily, and if the player doesn’t fork it over, take a square of ripening eggplants and magically place a condo on it (you were forced to subdivide and sell). Send a crop blight through every so often just to liven things up a bit, or announce at random intervals that the twenty squares of soybeans you planted are now worth a third of what they were yesterday. Allow the cute, blinking animals to reproduce so that there can be even cuter baby animals running around. And when an avatar goes to visit a “neighbor’s” farm, make that other player’s avatar be there to offer a cup of coffee and a slice of pie. It’s things like that, after all, that make this whole farming game worthwhile.

>New kids on the farm scene: Succession and the future of food

>Over the past couple of millennia that agriculture has been around, it’s overcome some major hurdles. Be it disease, drought or pestilence, our species has so far managed to invent our way out of trouble, keeping the food supply just ahead of the human population. Lately, though, it seems we’ve hit quite a number of limiting factors: the availability of land, water, and new variations on the genetic code that fool the pests for another generation of crops. But while we might have expected to eventually run out of space and technological fixes, another looming shortage involves a different kind of resource: manpower. Farmers are aging, and there doesn’t seem to be a new crop of them to take over the job of growing our food.
This fact was illustrated for me a couple of weekends ago, when Bob, Ann and I climbed into the old farm truck to rattle down to the Shannon farm and pick up some plastic sheeting. The Shannons run a dairy farm – the only one left in the valley, actually – and use the plastic to wrap the feed for the cows. They can’t reuse it, but the Collins find it great to lay down in the garden and keep the weeds at bay.
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The sun doesn’t seem to want to succumb to the typical fall gloom here on the island, and was out warming the golden leaves of the maples lining the Shannon driveway. We pulled up to the house and knocked on the door.
The Shannons are old friends of the Collins. Before Bob and Ann quit the dairy business, they and a small cohort of other farmers constantly relied on each other for equipment parts, emergency help and moral support. Old bonds die hard, and so this visit was just as much about catching up with each other as it was about recycling plastic.
Terry answered the door and his wife, Donna joined us in the kitchen to sip Earl Grey and discuss the state of agriculture in the valley. After a bit, the conversation turned to the upcoming Christmas party organized by the Farmers’ Institute, a group that advocates for farmers and serves as a sort of social catalyst for those who often have a limited off-farm life. But neither the Collins nor the Shannons were too excited about the party this year, actually, considering last year’s disappointment. The ladies who planned the event had decided that since nobody usually danced at the party, they wouldn’t have music, either. They also put a ban on alcohol and shut it down at 9 pm.
“The good thing was, you were done early enough to get drunk at home and not have to worry about who was driving!” Donna noted.
“Maybe there’ll be more young people this year,” somebody said. Terry laughed.
“Last year, we were the young people.”
There was a time, apparently, when the Farmers’ Institute Christmas party was quite the event. Everybody came down and had a good time. Ann used to be the one in charge of planning them, and one year, she even hired a belly dancer. That was about the time some of the older folk decided she wouldn’t be the one to plan them anymore. The problem was not that everyone suddenly got conservative. It was simply that there were so few farmers remaining in the area, and most of those who did remain couldn’t handle more excitement than a hip replacement.

Lots of reports come out about the “succession” problem in agriculture, reducing the facts to dry figures. The average age of a farmer in the United States is 57. One-third of all farmers in Canada will retire before 2035. Seventy percent of US farmland – most of it owned by family farms – will be changing hands in the next 20 years. Behind those numbers, the human face of the problem was made clear to me in that conversation at the Shannons’: No more parties. No more young people. No more farmers once those who remain sell off their land – whether to developers or to agribusiness – and retire. If the land is paved over, food will have to come from elsewhere. If the land goes to a corporate farm, the control of our food supply is consolidated even further. There just doesn’t appear to be enough people stepping up to the plate. Although the whole local food trend is on the up and up, farming still isn’t quite “sexy” enough to be considered a career option by most people my age. In the popular eye, agriculture doesn’t have the prestige of law or the heroism of medicine. Not to mention what usually is cited as the most important factor: There’s no money in it. I’m not sure which of these reasons is actually causing the profession of farming to die off with my parents’ generation. But the results are immediate and self-perpetuating. Universities all over North America are shutting down agriculture programs because of a lack of interest, taking with them valuable extension offices and other services to the agricultural community. As farmers retire, they are more likely to give up their land to urban sprawl or sell it to the nearest mega agribusiness operation than pass it on to their children, who are understandably reluctant to consign themselves to a lifetime of earning less than the minimum wage (one farmer at a recent meeting here said that, all told, he earns about $5.00 an hour at his job). Because of constantly rising real estate prices and the sad truth that farmland is worth more when the crop is condos, if a young person does happen to decide on a career in agriculture, they have a hard time finding a place to do it anymore.
When the world’s population increases by a third in the next 40 years, I imagine that a lot more of us will be rushing to what’s left of our agricultural land to try to crank out some more food. We’ll probably not want to wreak further environmental havoc, so organic methods will be in demand. But who will teach us how to do it? Unless we cryogenically freeze the farmers we have today and find some way to harvest their knowledge in the future, we could be up a creek, and the brown stuff in the water will probably be more chemical than animal.

I don’t want to preach gloom and doom here. While most children of farmers go off to find employment that actually pays a salary, there are the few that hang on. In fact, the Shannon farm will soon see a fourth generation of the family take the reins. Terry and Donna’s son Josh is the next in line, and he’s committed to making the farm work for another few decades. Since Terry’s grandfather came out from the dust-choked plains of Alberta in the 1930s, the farm has weathered economic ups and downs in the region, survived the mad cow outbreak of 2006 that did in other dairy farms, and managed to expand to over 500 acres. But their story is not typical. In fact, as far as the Collins can tell, the Shannons are currently the only farmers in the region with a successor. Their position of relative financial security probably has a lot to do with that.
Still, one way or another, those who want sustainable livelihoods based on producing food are finding their way into farming. And the new generation of farmers – even if they’re smaller in number– are doing things a bit differently this time. They understand the difference between growth for growth’s sake and sustainably managing land for the long term. Today, farmers can look at historical disasters like the dust bowl and modern-day tragedies like the droughts in Australia and think twice before over-plowing and freely sucking rivers dry. Not that all farms that started before our current problems – climate change, peak oil, water shortages – started spiraling out of control were operating unsustainably. Most just didn’t know better, and when squeezed by low commodity prices, were forced to try to pump higher and higher yields out of each acre. In comparison, for farmers starting out today, it’s almost impossible not to take environmental and social equity concerns into consideration in the business plan. This new ethic is reflected in the “manifesto” of a (highly inspiring) website dedicated to cataloging young farmers in the United States, Serve Your Country Food: “[We are] motivated by a force of intention that cannot be rationalized economically, with lives driven by an instinct for direct action and stewardship that honors the planet, people, and place, we are the allies of every American.”

So there are young farmers out there, and some of them are quite radically committed to making up for agriculture’s previous errors and energizing their peers into joining the cause. This leads me to another way to view the “succession problem”: by recognizing that farming itself is changing. While farms will always be an important source of food and other agricultural products, the conventional agriculture model that requires trading hard-earned cash for food sometimes isn’t the best option. It doesn’t work, for example, for those who don’t have much cash to spare but still want – and have a right to – fresh, non-polluted food. Instead, more people are planting their own gardens, working agriculture into the urban infrastructure and finding other ways to grow food other than on traditional farms. They are farmers in their own right, although the census will never count this as their primary occupation. On the other hand, farmers are seeing more income coming from agritourism (combining tourist accommodations with farming), educational programs and value-added food production. They still produce food on the side, but perhaps they, too, are not considered “farmers” under the black and white definitions of labor statistics. And that’s ok. It doesn’t mean farmers will ever be obsolete. Not every city or region is suited for agriculture, and for the majority of communities, a completely local food economy is simply impossible or impractical. For example, places like Pheonix, Arizona will probably always be better off importing their food from elsewhere rather than trying to bargain for some of its water so they can grow their own tomatoes. After all, we sustainability-pushers have to be realistic: Not everyone is going to move to a lush river valley so they can grow their own food and trade with other farmers. In fact, that would be impossible. It’s the 21st century. Compromise is key. And so is hope. Those who can’t run out and take over for aging farmers are at least becoming aware and supportive of family farms. Others, like those listed on Serve Your Country Food, are working on filling in the gaps. I, for one, plan to do my best to make the annual Farmers Institute of Port Alberni Christmas party as raucous as possible.
Update: Yes! magazine has an excellent photoessay on young farmers across America. 

>Summing it all up

>I don’t normally post other people’s writing/research, but this piece is fairly straightforward, somewhat frightening and hopefully, inspiring. The source is CommonDreams.org, a great source for humanitarian and environmental news.

On World Food Day: Crunching the Numbers

by Roger Doiron

• 1: number of new kitchen gardens planted at the White House this year AP
• 1943: the last time food was grown at the White House White House
• 20 million: the number of new gardens planted in 1943 LA Times
• 40%: percentage of nation’s produce coming from gardens in 1943 LA Times
• 7 million: estimated number of new food gardens planted in the US in 2009 NGA
• $2000: amount of savings possible per year from a 40′ x 40′ garden KGI
• 90%: percentage of fruit/vegetable varieties lost in the US the last 100 years CNN
• 3500: number of vegetable varieties owned by Monsanto Monsanto
• 18,467: number of new small farms counted in the last agricultural census USDA
• 4,685: number of farmers markets nationwide USDA
• 4,100: number of Wal-mart stores and clubs in the US Wal-mart
• 187,000 ft² : average area of a Wal-mart superstore Wal-mart
• 60,112 ft²: average area of a farmers’ market USDA
• 9.5 million: number of imported food shipments arriving in the US each year Huffington Post
• 226,377: number of establishments registered to export food to the US Huffington Post
• 200: number of on-site inspections of these establishments conducted by the FDA last year Huffington Post
• 76 million: number of people who fall ill each year due to food poisoning CDC
• 50 gallons: volume of sugared beverages consumed per person in the US each year LA Times
• 22,727: number of Olympic-sized swimming pools those beverages would fill Answers.com
• $15 billion: annual estimated revenue of a penny-per-ounce tax on soda LA Times
• $20.5 billion: Coca-Cola’s gross profit in 2008 Coca-Cola
• 72 million: number of American adults considered obese CDC
• 33%: percentage of US children likely to develop obesity or Type 2 diabetes CDC
• 10-15 years: average number of years their lives will be shortened as a result CDC
• 57 years: average age of the American farmer USDA
• 25 days: average shelf-life of a Twinkie Snopes
• 350 parts per million: sustainable level of CO² in atmosphere 350.org
• 390 parts per million: current level of CO² in the atmosphere NOAA
• 31%: percentage of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions attributable to food and agriculture IPCC
• 2020: year by which many geologists feel the world will have reached “peak oil” production UK Research Centre
• 10 calories: average amount of fossil fuel energy required to produce 1 calorie of food energy in industrialized food systems Cornell
• 29,100 calories: estimated fossil fuel calories required to produce one order of Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries Men’s Health
• 1 billion: number of hungry people in the world in 2009 FAO
• 9.1 billion: projected world population in the year 2050 US Census
• 70%: percentage increase in global food production required to feed that projected population FAO
• 70%: percentage of world’s fresh water used for agricultural purposes UNESCO
• 1.8 billion: number of people expected to experience “water scarcity” in the year 2025 UNEP
• 0: number of new, oil-rich, water-rich, fertile and inhabitable planets we are likely to discover in the next 40 years
• 1: number of people needed to make a positive difference in any of the above: you!

Roger Doiron is Founding Director of Kitchen Gardeners International, an IATP Food and Society Fellow, and, if you believe the folks at Huffington Post, one of the top Green Game Changers of 2009. After the heartbreaking sweep of the Red Sox Sunday, he recently changed his own game from baseball to football.

>Blight Fright: Wheat’s precarious position in the food supply

>Your average aspiring self-sufficient, food-conscious home or community will likely contain a few staple ingredients or food sources that are local and sustainably produced (or at least as close to sustainable as mere mortals can achieve). You’ve got your farmers-market veggies, free-range eggs, organic dairy products, perhaps even some meat from a local grower if you’re so (gastronomically and financially) inclined.
But there’s one key ingredient missing from this happy pie of wholesome foodery. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to make any sort of pie without it. It’s grain – more specifically, wheat. In most parts of the world, its production is still stuck in the industrial, grossly unsustainable way of doing things, which is unfortunate because it’s such a central part of the Western diet. Had any bread, shredded wheat, crackers, pasta, or doughnuts today? Then you’ll see my point – wheat is everywhere. And while it may not seem to be in short supply, any person on a low income will tell you that the price of all of the above items has risen sharply in the last year or so. That’s because wheat is facing some serious global problems – disease, drought and heightened demand – that is causing the price to skyrocket on the global commodity market.
Clearly, wheat is another example of a food staple that is vitally important to re-localize. Having grains nearby, in the hands of hundreds of small farmers (or better yet, individual consumers with backyard gardens), instead of under the lock and key of four or five global conglomerates, makes their availability a surer bet. Only problem is, if you’re trying to be a locavore, bread and wheat products are one area in which you’re likely to break the local-food diet on a regular basis. Farmers growing for a local market tend to stick to vegetables, meat and eggs. Because of the processing (grinding into flour and other products) needed, wheat and other grains have managed to stay centralized, distributed from regional mills.
Let’s follow a typical pound of flour from the field to your morning pancakes. Once the grain is harvested (whether that farm is organic or conventional) it goes to a regional collection point. In Oregon, for example, all the wheat grown by farmers in the Willamette Valley (the main agricultural part of the state) gets trucked up to temporary storage somewhere near Portland. From there, it goes onto containers headed for Asia. That’s right. For all the millions of acres of grain produced close to home, only a tiny percentage of it makes it to the state’s only commercial grain milling facility in Eugene, and an even smaller percentage is actually consumed in the state. So those pancakes you ate this morning were more likely to be made from grain from the Midwest than from close to home. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure, thanks to centralized distribution.
Sounds crazy, you say? Sorry, it’s all economics. The lowest price can only be obtained by controlling the supply through a limited number of processing facilities and shipping it out to retailers as needed. Do you like your cheap box of pancake mix? Do you? Well, then don’t ask so many questions.

In the meantime, local-food advocates keep harping on the need to circumvent this consolidated system – which applies not only to wheat but also just about any food product you can think of – and reestablish direct producer-to-consumer relationships. But why? Put simply, it’s a matter of food security. This means two things: the safety of the food we actually consume, and our ability to obtain it in the first place.
Let’s go back to the bag of mix you used to make your pancakes. Contamination in centralized processing plants (which is what recently compromised the safety of peanuts), isn’t the only problem. Black stem rust, a fungus that attacks wheat plants, is a looming but under-reported threat to wheat harvests around the world. It’s been around a long time – probably as long as wheat has been domesticated – but modern-day strains have been bred to resist the fungus. Now, as if it’s starring in its own terrible sci-fi flick, it’s back – with a vengeance. The fungus has finally evolved the genetic upper hand to destroy previously immune plants. Scientists are calling the new strain Ug99, for the country, Uganda, where it has hit the hardest, leaving behind acre upon acre of ashen, inedible wheat. It seems to be getting more virulent as it progresses, and is so immediately devastating to crops that the US (who else?) once bred it as a biological weapon.
We shouldn’t have bothered – Ug99 is wreaking havoc all on its own, causing famine and strife all over Africa and the Middle East. We’re not hearing much about it now, but as soon as it spreads to developed countries, I imagine that we will hear more.
Ironically, even Norman Bourlag, the much-lauded father of the “green revolution” and industrial agriculture, had to admit that the Ug99 problem is an unintended side-effect of the way conventional agriculture seeks to extract the most production out of a given piece of land. According to this article in NewScientist:

Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. “Forty years ago most wheat wasn’t irrigated and heavily fertilised,” says Borlaug. Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon – just right for fungus.

What Borlaug fails to mention is that not only do wheat plants grow closer together now than ever before, those plants are genetically identical thanks to hybridization. Farmers don’t save their own wheat for replanting, they buy it from a seed company (ie, Monsanto), which has developed wheat genetically programmed to produce the highest yield possible. So when a disease or fungus like Ug99 hits the genetic jackpot that allows it to destroy a wheat plant, it can destroy virtually all wheat plants, because there are only a few varieties grown in the world.
Ug99 isn’t the only threat to the world’s food supply, either. Since the beginning of the year, farmers in Canada and the Midwest have noticed a sharp increase in cases of Fusarium head blight, another fungus that affects wheat, barley, oats, rye, corn and grasses used to feed livestock. This one is sneakier: it doesn’t destroy plants right away but makes their grain toxic to consume. That means any slip-up in our notoriously shaky food-safety inspection system could poison hundreds or thousands of innocent pancake-eaters.
The most frustrating part about all of this is that there’s not much the average consumer can do to voice his or her protest against the way wheat is grown and distributed. Sure, we can buy organic, but organic grain is no more resistant to the diseases bred by conventional agriculture than its chemically nurtured counterparts. And “big organic” uses centralized distribution systems that, like any centralized system, erase the connections between producer and consumer until it’s impossible to tell where any given bag of flour was grown.
Still, one thing organic growers can’t do is spray their fields down with fungicide at the slightest hint of black stem rust, which is what conventional growers will surely do. And there is one way to ensure both the supply and safety of your wheat: grow and mill it yourself. I’m not being facetious. It takes surprisingly little grain to feed a family (ten families can live off one measly acre, according to an anonymous informational signboard at the Port Alberni fair last month), and there are actually super-compact mills built today that you can squeeze under your kitchen sink. Unless you live next door to a giant commercial wheat farm, there’s little chance of any global wheat pandemics affecting your plants.
Unfortunately, I have no personal experience with wheat cultivation, so I won’t instruct you on it here (perhaps in a future blog!) Instead, I’ll post yet another recipe, one that I’ve become quite familiar with since becoming the designated baker of Collins Farm. I’ve been making bread practically since I could reach the kitchen counter, but only started making yeast-free bread this summer. It has a unique flavor and texture but a dedicated fan base at our farm market. I’m a bit conflicted about selling it since bread is so deliciously simple to make, so I’m hoping making the recipe public will make kitchen revolutionaries out of a few of you.
The most important step is to find some local flour. If you live in Oregon, the local grain I discussed above is sold under the name Bob’s Red Mill. You can probably also find local farmers that grow grains if you ask around (try Willamette Farm and Food Coalition’s directory) If you live in Port Alberni, find Wayne Smith at the Farmer’s Market at the Harbor Quay – he sources his own organic grain and grinds it up fresh. It’s incredible stuff.

Tuula’s Whole Grain Bread
Makes 2 loaves

To make from starter:
Starter takes about 48 hours to ferment, but it makes awesome bread and eliminates the need for yeast. I start in the morning two days before I want to make bread. Combine a cup of water and a cup of whole wheat flour in an airtight container. Keep it in a warm place where it won’t be disturbed (in the oven with the light on is good). The next morning, “feed” it by adding another cup of flour and another cup of water. It should be bubbly and smell “yeasty”. Set it aside again until you make your bread (that evening or the next morning). You can keep the starter going for as long as you like but it will turn into sourdough starter after about a week (you can find lots of instructionals online for making sourdough bread this way).

To make from yeast:
Use active dry yeast (not instant) or fresh yeast, which is available from bakeries.
In a large bowl, dissolve 2 tablespoons molasses or honey* in 2 cups lukewarm water (no hotter than 115 degrees). Sprinkle in 1 ½ tablespoons yeast and allow to sit for ten minutes, or until it looks bubbly.

*Molasses gives a nice dark color to the bread but some prefer the flavor of honey, so use both if you like.

Bread recipe
2 cups starter or 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 ½ cups water (in addition to water used in yeast method)
2 tablespoons molasses or honey*
2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or olive work fine)
½ teaspoon salt
7 cups whole wheat flour
½ cup dry 7-grain cereal
½ cup cooked brown rice (or substitute more cereal)
½ cup any combination flax seeds, sunflower seeds and/or pumpkin seeds

1. Add 1 cup hot water to the 7-grain cereal, set aside to soak.
2. Prepare yeast mixture as above or pour starter into a large bowl. Add molasses (if using starter), oil, salt and 2 cups of the flour. Mix well (lumps are ok) and add soaked cereal, rice and seeds.
3. Continue adding flour until a dough forms. Turn onto a floured counter and knead for 10 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic.
4. Place dough in a clean and oiled bowl, flip to coat both sides. Allow to rise two hours at room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator.
5. When dough has risen (it will not double in volume but perhaps get close depending on the strength of your yeast/starter), punch it down. Divide it into two loaves and place in bread pans or on baking sheets. Brush the loaves with a beaten egg and sprinkle on some extra seeds (this is optional but makes the loaves look prettier). Make a ½ inch deep cut lengthwise along the top of the loaf.
6. If dough was refrigerated, allow to rise an additional hour in the pans. If not, half an hour or so should do the trick. Again, the dough will not rise significantly but should grow a bit.
7. Bake at 375 for about an hour. Bread will brown on top and sound hollow when tapped. Allow to cool in pans for a few minutes, then turn onto racks to cool. Do not bag until completely cooled.

>Milk of the Gods

>My adventures in goat milking on Collins Farm, in five parts.

I. Inspiration
Food is delicious. We all know this. But there are some foods that are extra delicious, foods that make you drool at the very thought, foods that one would go through great lengths to obtain. These foods, of course, are different for each person. For me, chèvre, or goat milk cheese, is quite high up on the list.
Most people know goat cheese as feta, the tangy, crumbly stuff usually thrown on Greek salads and pizzas. Chèvre can also be made like cream cheese, a flavorful spread that’s excellent on toast, crackers, salad, apples and right off the knife. This substance is one of the things I would take onto a desert island; I would marry it if only it had a better personality; I would sell my own grandmother if it came right down to it (not really, but you get the picture). Actually, that’s the only downfall of chèvre: it’s darned expensive. At Safeway, a potato-sized log of low-quality goat cheese runs around five bucks. For a really good, locally made kind, you can pay three times that much. In fact, in my college days, my monthly grocery budget looked a little like this:
Fruits and vegetables (organic, of course): $60
Dry beans, rice, flour, tofu and yogurt: $50
Coffee: $20
Chèvre: $50
Well, something like that, anyway. Anyway, the point is, I like chèvre. Since coming to the farm, however, I’ve adopted a mostly local diet (my new motto is, “Will work for vegetables”), which meant no goat cheese. Until now.

II. The Goats

I have to admit that the goats have played a sadly minor role in my life on the farm so far. I don’t think I’ve even mentioned them on this blog before, and seeing as how everyone’s online these days, they’ve probably noticed that. So I’ll offer a formal apology and waste no more time in introducing them.

Miss G (left). This old goat belongs to Andrea, the fiercely independent mother of four who works with me at Arrowvale. In her prime, Miss G produced a gallon of milk a day, effectively nurturing Andrea’s kids through their formative years in addition to her own. When Andrea moved into a house without a yard, Miss G shacked up here, where she seems pretty happy. She’s fourteen, which is older than goats are even supposed to live, but though she’s a gummy, graying, rack-of-bones old granny (probably a granny several times over, in fact), she is the indisputable matriarch of the goat pen. Miss G loves kale, sunflowers and banana peels, and will head-butt anyone who gets in the way of her eating her fill. She’s too old to be milked, so I’ll move on to the stars of this story.

Spotty (center). Surprisingly enough, Spotty is white with black and brown spots. This spring, she gave birth to two little white goats, who we recently weaned along with Dotty’s single offspring. (Among goats, giving birth to twins or even triplets is the norm.) Spotty is a friendly goat who keeps her beard clean and would never dream of stooping to the shenanagins of her younger pen-mate. She loves just about anything, especially squash, banana peels and carrots.

Dotty (right). True to her name, Dotty is black with white spots and crazy, but more like a motorcycle racer than an eccentric aunt. She wears a blue dog collar, which helps when you’re trying to catch her, but getting close enough in the first place is the real challenge. Dotty has simple tastes, preferring goat feed (grain) to most other foods, but likes to try what the other goats are eating so she can spit it on the ground and crush it under her hooves. She smokes Marlboros and has a tattoo of a snake on her left shoulder.

III. The Milk
A few fun facts about goats and their milk:
Goat milk is consumed by more people worldwide than cows’ milk.
Goats are the earliest known domesticated farm animal.
Goat milk takes on the flavor of whatever the goat eats. If the goat has lots of sweet clover, the milk will be sweet. If she gets into something really bitter, watch out.
The ancient Greeks and pagans worshiped a god named Pan, who had the legs and feet of a goat and played the original pan flute. He was notorious for his lustfulness, going around making love to nymphs and instigating orgies. It is said that in order to remove this clearly dangerous being from the cultural lexicon, early Christians modeled the devil after the goat.
In Hindu mythology, the god Shiva also appears with the horns of a goat or bull, an incarnation known as “Pashupati”.
Male goats (“bucks”) smell foul. I’ve never smelled one, but numerous sources have told me they are fond of rubbing urine in their beards and generally being disgusting. If you keep a buck around the doe goats, their milk will also start to smell this way.
Goat milk can be consumed by people with an intolerance to cow milk, but scientists aren’t really sure why.

IV. The (not so) Tragic Departure of the Little Goats
All summer long, Andrea and I have been eying the udders of Dotty and Spotty wistfully. Their three young ones, given the opportunity to nurse long past the time they might have otherwise been weaned, got all the milk. There wasn’t anything we could do about it but laugh at the overgrown kids when they crawled on their knees to get under their short mothers. Really though, these little goats were a pain in the neck. They crawled through the manger where we would feed them and stand in everyone’s food, pooping on it and causing Miss G to roll her eyes in disgust. They dug a hole under their little barn so they could escape. And they cried whenever they thought they could trick somebody into feeding them.
Finally, last week, the little goats found a new home (a relative who needed them to give her bored border collie something to herd), so we undertook the difficult task of separation. The three little ones went down to a pen by the barn, and the moms stayed in their pen at the top of the campground. They cried for a day straight and Spotty escaped several times to go see her little ones. It was all very heartbreaking and would have made a very good Disney film where the baby goats are sold to a cruel circus master and embark on a long journey back home. In reality, all that happened was that Spotty and Dotty seemed to get over it pretty quickly, and the little ones started to get hoarse, sounding like squawking seagulls by the end of the second day. In the meantime, I closed in on our milky bounty at last.

V. The Milking
The day of the first milking was also Andrea’s day off, which put the duty of training me on Ann’s shoulders. I was desperately in need of instruction, considering I’d never gotten milk out of anything but a plastic bottle and my interaction with the goats has been limited to giving them their grain, filling their water bucket, and poking kitchen scraps to them through the fence. In preparation for milking, I found a four-gallon bucket and scrubbed it clean, then reported back to Ann. She eyed my bucket doubtfully. “Don’t you think that’s a little large?” she asked, politely. I shrugged my shoulders, so without another word we headed over to the goat pen.
Spotty and Dotty are pygmy goats, which means their heads reach no higher than four feet, and their udders dangle a scant eight inches or so above the ground. In fact, pygmies aren’t even bred to be dairy goats; they’re supposed to serve as petting zoo animals or as companions for lonely elephants in captivity. I observed their unfortunate lack of height when the first goat was on the milking bench in front of us, and immediately realized why Ann had had doubts about my optimistically sized bucket. I went to the kitchen for a smaller plastic pail and returned.
Spotty was the first one to come through the gate, so we started on her. Luring her onto the stand with grain, we placed a halter around her head. I tried to hold her still while Ann, who grew up on a dairy farm and ran one here for fifteen years, bent over behind the goat and began pumping out white jets of liquid like she was brushing her teeth. Good, I thought. This isn’t so hard after all. After a bit, she gave me a turn, so we switched positions. I placed my hands on the two fleshy teats and squeezed.
Nothing happened. I tried again, putting a little bit more muscle into it this time. Still nothing. Ann tried to explain how the trick was in closing your fingers one at a time, starting with the top one. I couldn’t seem to relay this information to my fingers, which simply pressed the teat uselessly into my palm. I had a the sudden, draining feeling that this was one of those skills bred into farmers, like knowing when the rains are coming or how to grow a pumpkin to the size of a wheelbarrow, and I would never get it.
In the meantime, the good-natured Spotty was putting up a heck of a fight. She and Dotty hadn’t been milked before, and I imagine the feeling of it was pretty weird. She kicked, she squirmed, she shook her head. I stayed stubbornly in place, my hands between her back legs, trying to gain in thirty seconds a skill that I knew would serve me well for the rest of my life. All I could manage, though, was to avoid her hooves when they came flying at me.
At that point, Ian, a friendly Australian from the Yukon who is on an extended camping stay here with his family, strolled up. “Want me to hold a leg for you?” he inquired. “Sure,” Ann and I said, and he grabbed one of her back legs. That put an end to the kicking. I applied myself with renewed determination, squeezing and pulling and muttering under my breath. Then, suddenly, I saw a white mist erupt from one of her teats. I tried to duplicate this result on the other side. After a few tries, a small stream of milk sprayed sideways into the air. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
When Dotty got on the stand, the project turned into a group effort. Reinforcements were called; Bob stood at Dotty’s head with Ann while John, Ann’s brother, and another fellow he works with joined Ian in holding various moving parts of the goat. A few other campers strolled up to watch this diversion. Farmer Bill, a neighbor who cuts our hay, rolled by in his tractor and threw in a few pieces of sage advice. I could feel sweat tricking down my hairline, fueled by frustration and the bright early September sun. After I’d gotten about half a cup, I handed it off to Ann. She milked most of it out, then gave me one last turn. I gripped her udder more confidently this time, observing that it was significantly less full-feeling now. We were nearly there. I squeezed out a couple of jets of milk, and Dotty kicked the pail over on me.

The next day, Andrea instructed me in the fine art of milk storage before we got to milking. In essence, always use a cloth to filter your milk, and use it up within a couple of days or it starts to get, as she put it, “goaty”. This factor may explain why goat’s milk isn’t popular in developed countries like the US and Canada, where milk travels long distances and sits on shelves before being consumed in a deteriorated, super-goaty state.
After we had gathered our clean containers, our udder-cleaning cloth and the all-important grain bait for the goats, Andrea and I went out to the pen. Spotty volunteered first again, hopping up onto the new milking bench that Bob had constructed the night before. Rather than hunching behind the goat to milk, Andrea showed me a different technique – sitting next to the goat, facing the rear, one shoulder into her side. I gave it a shot and slowly but steadily began coaxing milk into the pail. With my ear to her belly, I could hear the food gurgling down to her stomach and smell that clean barn-y smell that is one of the best parts of being on a farm. Gradually, I developed a rhythm, which worked for about ten seconds until my hands started to cramp up. Andrea expertly finished the job and we moved on to rebel Dotty.
Goats are smart, and Dotty figured out this game fast. At the sound of grain hitting the feed bucket, all three goats rush to the gate like cats after a can of tuna. Since Spotty is the boldest, she usually gets there first and slips out before the others when we open the gate. Dotty, though, hangs back, looking at me with wild eyes that seem to say “Come on in here and catch me. I dare you.” So I slip in, shutting the gate behind me, and face off with the little black goat. We size each other up, locking eyes and planting our feet firmly on the ground. Dotty makes a feint to the left. I charge directly forward, putting the rock pile in the center of their pen between us. She gallops joyously around it and to the other side of the pen. I follow slowly, keeping low to the ground, arms outstretched. Cornered, she makes a desperate lunge to sail by me. I grab her collar on the fly and stumble sideways for a few feet as she continues her trajectory. Andrea cheers and opens the gate, and I drag her to it. Before long, she’s on the milking bench. The fight isn’t over, but it’s certainly less intense than yesterday’s. Half an hour – and a few sore fingers – later, I’m in the kitchen following Andrea’s recipe for home made chocolate pudding.
This pudding is deliciously rich and not a bit goaty, but my craving for chèvre has not yet been satisfied (it takes at least a gallon of milk to make cheese, and we get about six cups a day). The adventure, in other words, is not over yet. But my fridge is now stocked with jars of milk and the time of the cheesemaking is near. In the meantime, go make some chocolate pudding – just be sure to use whole milk for maximum fatty goodness.

Andrea’s Fabulous Chocolate Pudding

1 c sugar
1/4 c flour
½ c cocoa powder
4 c whole milk

Whisk together dry ingredients in a small, heavy-bottomed pan. Add enough milk to make a paste (about 1 ½ cups) and whisk until lump-free. Add the rest of the milk and whisk smooth. Heat over a medium-high flame until mixture boils, stirring constantly. This will take about 20 minutes. (We recommend doing your pudding exercises in this time: squats, leg stretches, curls with heavy objects lying around the kitchen. You can then enjoy pudding guilt-free. Alternatively, grab your internet access device of choice and watch this video repeatedly.) Once boiled, remove from heat and cover, stirring occasionally until cool. Eat warm or refrigerate and consume within three days.

>100 chickens, 50 carnies, one camera

>Port Alberni’s Fall Fair last weekend opened my eyes to a whole new spectrum of rural life. Over the course of twenty-four hours (sleeping in a borrowed tent-trailer with Andrea, the biggest Fair enthusiast I’ve ever met), I witnessed not only the usual puke-cyclone rides and pie judging, but also power tool racing, tractor pulling competitions and logger sports. The real reason I was there, however, was to man an agricultural display put together by a group of local farmers (including Collins Farm). We brought out our prize produce, grains, canned goods and mysterious food preservation implements (dehydrator, pressure cooker, juicer, etc) and explained it all to fairgoers as they strolled by. Hopefully, they learned something and didn’t confuse us with the sideshows. I also had a chance to chat with Wayne Smith, who for the last few years has been growing grains like wheat and rye in Port Alberni, filling the “last 100-mile-diet niche”. Thanks to him, eating 100% locally is now slightly more realistic for people living in the area. It’s a very exciting time to be on Vancouver Island, at least from an agricultural and food security standpoint (especially since where I left off in Oregon, the Bean and Grain Project was just in its second year). I feel like I’m seeing the local food revolution unfold before my very eyes. But more on that in another post.
Rather than try to piece together a bunch of photos into the blog format (Blogger is wonderful, but its photo uploader is as useless as a flat wheelbarrow tire), I’m trying something different this time. The entire album of fantastic, fur-filled, foody fair photos – with captions! – should appear in the slide show below. (It’s not perfect, either. Click the big green “play” button, then push the smaller “pause” button that appears toward the bottom of the photo to scroll through them manually.) Better yet, click here to go to the album directly.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

>Farm Tour, part 2

>Aaaaand we’re back. Moving on from the strawberry patch, we venture out into the cow pasture. Watch out for, er, manure patches.

This is most of the herd, converted from the dairy fleet that the Collins kept for thirty years. Now they’re raised for meat, which we sell along with the produce on the local market.

These are the calves that were born this summer. The black one in the middle has grown quite a bit since the first part of the tour! (That’s virtual reality for you – the time dimension doesn’t always line up.)

This is the hay field, which was just cut before the photo was taken. A neighboring farmer baled it for us and we picked it all up and put it in the barn. With the help of the Collins’ sons I learned how to drive a tractor and how not to stack hay bales, and earned myself three red blisters for the effort. Turns out lifting 100 pounds of hay by thin pieces of baling twine a few dozen times is tough on an ex-city-person’s fingers.

This is the hay field that was cut earlier in the summer, now hosting a flock of real Canadians (geese!). Behind them are three huge cottonwood trees, probably some of the biggest on the island according to some forestry people who paid a visit recently.

We just hiked all the way back across the fields and returned to the garden. These sunflowers are grown for the market, where they’re sold along with the cosmos and dahlias here. Although Andrea and I first considered flowers an almost criminally useless thing to grow, we have conceded that they really are quite pretty (and, as Ann points out, people buy them).

Tour guests Jordan and Madison, aged 7 and 4, stop for a photo with some tomatoes they found in the greenhouse before heading up to see the pigs living in the pen beside the barn.

Henrietta and Hernia, the two pigs who swam the river. They’re a lot bigger now but excitable as ever. Hernia earned his name by herniating part of his intestine through his belly button. They usually running a lap or two around their pen whenever people come to see them, and they go crazy rolling in the mud pit in the middle of their pen.

The pigs love berries, potatoes, and being scratched on the back. Turn on the hose on a hot day and they’ll go hog wild, so to speak, frolicking like pups and grunting the whole time. (The pigs are probably my favorite, so please avoid discussion of bacon at this point in the tour.)

Hernia: “Pigs are smarter than dogs.”
Carmen: “Well, at least I don’t lie in mud all day and get fat.”
Hernia: “I hear your mother has fleas. Oink.”

And that concludes our farm tour. This view is from the far pasture (where we saw the geese). The property ends here at the river. You can just make out the house, the barn and the greenhouse beyond all that grass – about 40 acres of it. I still can’t believe I live here.
The farm is doing well and people are coming out to the market in far greater numbers than last year. For the time being, then, it seems this piece of paradise will stay paradisaical and continue producing food for the valley. Hope you enjoyed the tour.

>A Virtual Farm Tour, part 1

>Collins Farm is in the full swing of summer now. Each morning we haul in a couple flats of strawberries, a bin of tomatoes and a bucket of lettuce, and we’re barely staying ahead of the harvest. Luckily, Port Albernians have also shown up with reinforcements to buy all the goodies at our Saturday markets and even during the week.
In the afternoons, we often take groups of curious campers to see what’s “down the hill”. Kids are fascinated with the chickens, piggies and horses, and the grownups usually walk back up to the campground full of plans for their own gardens. On Sunday, I took the afternoon off of kitchen duty and followed one of Ann’s farm tours with my camera.

First stop, the barn, home to the horses, donkeys, cows and one cat.

Buster the barn kitty. No, you can’t have him. He’s mine. I mean, he’s the farm’s. We need him to catch mice and keep the cobwebs off the top of that old milk tank.

It was an exciting morning a couple weeks ago when we went down to the barn to find one of our cows giving birth. She was the last of our herd to do so this year, and the only one I actually got to see in the act.

Well, sort of. We watched the feet hang out for a little while, then decided she probably wanted her privacy and went up for breakfast. When we came back, the little guy was already wobbling around under his mom.

This is the view of the farm up by the barn. We’ll look at the garden first, then the chickens (just outside the frame to the right) and stop in the strawberry patch between the two big fields. Then we’ll pay a visit to the cows and head through the hay field towards the three big trees in the distance. Hope you’re wearing your walking shoes.

Ripley, Phoxy and Paris, three of our Canadian horses out in the pasture for the evening.

In the garden, Ann picks some cucumbers for the tour group. Behind them, the corn has reached gargantuan heights.

Peeking under the giant squash leaves, we find these baby pumpkins – a sneak preview for Halloween.

Lettuce, carrots and beets. Behind them on the fence are the peas. We’ll get to the sun umbrellas in a minute when we visit the chickens.

Our laying hens (plus one watchful rooster) roam around in this pen, pecking at kitchen scraps and harassing their roommates, the three paranoid little ducks.

Although the ducks have their own little barn away from the chicken house, they never quite seem to feel safe and cling together like a gang of teenage girls, yakking away at each other in duck-ese. Of course, if they feel like going for a swim, they are capable of swallowing their fears and jumping in the water trough. This utterly disgusts the chickens, who would much rather take a dirt bath.

Sun umbrellas provide shade and protection from the eagles, who have been known to swoop down and steal the poultry.

The chickens share a laying box, which they enter through a door from the inside of their house.

The box has a little door on it that we open to gather the eggs.

This chicken has kindly modeled the laying process for us, but I think today she is just sitting on them. Once she leaves we peek into the hay and find…

Breakfast.

Now we head out toward the strawberry patch and cow pasture, on the way checking up on the apple trees.

These sunflowers are “volunteers”, but they make great shade when picking strawberries out here. It takes two people about an hour each morning to pick just half of the patch.

Yum. These plants are the “ever-bearing” variety, which means they started putting out berries in June and won’t quit until the frost comes. In the meantime, we’re filling up our freezers and jam cupboards.

Bees are fun to photograph, and they actually don’t sting because they’re so focused on harvesting the pollen.

In the early morning when we’re picking sunflowers for market, the bees are sleeping on the flowers and refuse to be woken up. They hang onto the flowers no matter how much blowing, shaking and wiping you do. If we were braver, we could probably just remove them by hand, but usually we just leave them on and let them fly away later – hopefully not in somebody’s house!

We now interrupt this exclusive tour for lunch. Join us again tomorrow for more cute kids and animals, this blog’s first concession on its hard-nosed anti-flower position, and yet another pretty view of the farm.