FOR THE LOVE OF HORSES

FOR THE LOVE OF HORSES

I have always favored a broad brimmed hat over a ball cap, especially so after working on the land out west. Without a proper cover on your head the mid-summer sun will crisp you to toast and the rain, sleet and snow of winter will freeze you solid as an icicle. I don’t know who or what first convinced the farmers of New England to give up their broad brimmed hats for the now ubiquitous ball cap, but I have my suspicions that it was all those tractor salesmen who were giving hats away as they sold tractors to the post World War II farmers who were letting go of their horse teams. The logic behind wearing a ball cap (complete with manufacturer’s logo) while working on the noisy tractor is that you can’t wear proper ear protectors with a broad brimmed hat on your head. At the same time that those early salesmen were giving away caps they were also offering the farmers trade-in value for their horses. Many fine teams were rendered into glue as a result of the turnover to the combustion engine.
The first time I ever rode a horse I was twelve years old. There was this girl that lived up the road from me that I was sweet on and her family was in the habit of going out to a riding stable on the north end of town for recreational outings and one time, probably because I was hanging around their house so much, I was invited to come along. I’ve always been partial to wearing hats. I had one in particular that I wore almost all the time until it got burned up in a house fire when I was twenty-two years old. I’d found it in my grandparent’s attic and I’d been granted permission to take it home. It was my grandpa’s World War I cavalry hat. It was a broad-brimmed Stetson, made of beaver felt, and sporting a four-pointed crown like that of Smokey the Bear. I didn’t fancy the crown much so I gave it a creased flat-top to make it look like any ordinary old cowboy hat.
Well, I don’t know what somebody wearing any ordinary old cowboy hat had ever done to that old nag I was supposed to ride at the riding stable, but when I approached her to step up into the stirrup for my first ever foray onto the back of a horse, she took in one big eyeball of that hat and whirled round as quick as lightning and shot off a double back-kick and split the board-rail fence into splinters about six inches from my head. The lady holding onto the horse’s reigns looked at my stunned demeanor and said, “Guess she don’t like that hat.” Now you might think that a sensible young fellow might not have wanted to climb aboard the back of an animal who had so recently attempted to stove in his hat-bearing skull, but remember, the girl I that I liked was looking on all the while. Needless to say I left the hat with the stable manager and thereafter had a very enjoyable first time experience in the saddle.
As with any craft, one of the key elements to becoming a successful teamster is repetition. Just as the skilled pilot must log many flight hours, building confidence through dealing with the unexpected contingencies, so does the teamster require the refining fire of hours spent practicing with a team of grounded sensible horses on the other end of the driving lines. This kind of practice and repetition involves a degree of kenosis---the emptying out of self. It’s like the old Zen parable about how you have to empty a cup before you can hope to receive anything new into it. This kind of practice can have a leveling effect on the personality so that the more effective we become at the task of driving horses, the less invested is our ego-force in the outcome. There is of course, a big difference between letting go of excessive ego and giving away your own power. As we come into our own as teamsters a power of a new kind might be sensed---a power of relationship and connection to a living reality.
On a sparkling autumn morning not long ago I was standing beside my harnessed team of horses as I addressed a group of twenty or so third graders from the local elementary school. Minutes before they had finished the task of broadcasting rye seed out of buckets onto the section where we had grown cucurbits (we apply about a 25% higher seed ratio when employing child labor). The horses were hitched to the disc-harrow so that after speaking I could give a demonstration of how we use the disc to cover the seed on rougher sections like the squash beds that still had a lot of dispersed mulch material and surface trash. I was busy extrapolating on the non-polluting, non-compacting, natural fertilizing, and self-replicating abilities of the horses in contrast to tractors. When I had finished, the young farmer, Steve Blabec, who was working with us that season, pointed at me and as he did so I became aware that I was leaning against the gelding with my arm draped in a casual embrace across his broad back. And Steve smiled his wide infectious grin and said, “Besides which, you can’t hug your tractor!”
If we are moved to treat the animals under our care with gentleness and respect, if we allow ourselves to be open to the small chance moments of rapture that the intimacy of our farm landscape holds up daily to our senses, if we are through with chasing the dollar and instead are inspired with a vision of attaining wholeness in our lives and fostering wholeness in the lives of our children---then we must finally admit that what ultimately drives our farming enterprises is not money, or fossil fuel, not composted manure nor even sunlight---but simply and entirely the love we hold in our hearts for the farm. This true love is like a fire that does not burn out, it is like that faithful and abiding flame that Moses witnessed on the branches of a bush high up on a mountain---the fire that does not consume.
For many men and woman who farm with horses, the realization that love is at the heart of what they do may never even dawn on them as a consciously explicated theorem or practice---but it will be evinced in their kindness, their care and concern, and in the reciprocal pride and joy with which they engage their draft animals. This love for our animals is also most essentially a love of beauty and a love of life and a love of the earth itself, but it even includes a love of this our most imperfect human proposition---with all its brilliance and all its tragic folly.
The horse is a highly sensitive and intelligent animal. Somewhere in the back of its mind every domesticated horse remembers that it is a prey species and that we two-legged creatures are a weird yet formidable sort of predator. It’s our job to convince them that all that hunting business is in the past and that horse and human can now be partners in work. Mind you, the human must assert its position as a lead horse in the herd. But amazingly---real partnership is possible. Once their confidence is gained and once they are rightly trained, and when they are treated with kindness and only asked to do reasonable tasks; the horses want to work. For the teamster a balance of a firm hand, a consistent and steady presence, and an enduring concern for the horse’s well being, all are a must. It’s not that the horse has no forgiveness, but there is a fundamental trust which must not be broken. What we are really trying to do is not so much master the horse, as to master ourselves.

What's in my CSA basket

Garlic scapes are the curly garlicky smelling green vegetable. They keep for a long time in a plastic bag in the refridge. They are best eaten cooked. Slice diagonally and fry in a little butter or oil. Add to pasta dishes or stir fried greens. They can be pureed with olive oil, parmesan, nuts and salt for pesto.
The fresh kale and chard from our green house can be steamed lightly and frozen in a ziplock bag for later. The zucchinis are the first ones from the high tunnel, with many more to follow.

CHEAP FOOD

When we first began to set up our horse-powered organic farm most folks thought that what we were doing was at best quaint and at worst foolhardy. In the context of the booming 1990’s---government deficit eliminated (budgetary sleight of hand?), a mega-boom of internet start-up companies, wholesale deregulation of Wall Street, and an ever expanding housing market---in the eyes of the world our little horse-powered organic farm scheme looked less like the incorporation of a business and more like the construction of a second Noah’s Ark. Remember, all his neighbors thought that old Noah had gone stark-raving mad.

Seventeen years down the road things have changed and are changing fast. Everywhere around us now we hear talk of food security and re-invention of the local food web. And all around us there are lots of these little farm-arks established and more springing up everyday. These small farms are signs of hope and promise at least as powerful as Noah’s rainbow. Small farms and small farmers are like anchors to the human community. Society without ties to a sustainable agriculture becomes like a rudderless ship. The rituals of life turn less meaningful when they are abstracted from the cycles of the soil.

After Noah and all the occupants of the ark had survived the flood Yahweh made a promise to never flood the earth again. This promise was made not only to Noah and his family but to every creature that crawled on the land or flew in the sky or swam in the sea. Humans were not elevated above all else but were charged to be good stewards of all creation. The sign of the rainbow that Yahweh set forth to seal this promise was further evidence that the transcendent would be known to humans within the imminent---within the wonders of creation.

To be alive---to be human---is to transform acreage. If you don’t take that process into your own hands, if all your food, clothing, and shelter are procured through the earning and expenditure of dollars, then you leave it to others to transform acreage to sustain you. In this way you remain ignorant of the impact on the environment of your chosen lifestyle. This is the ghost acreage that stands unseen and hidden behind the modern urban artifice of unending economic expansion.

The current industrial model of agriculture only gives the illusion of providing “cheap food”. We are deferring the costs that will eventually result from the loss of top soil, contamination of the surface and ground water, and pollution of the atmosphere. The costs, though now hidden from the purview of the average consumer, are all too devastatingly real. Among the direst consequences is the contamination of rivers, lakes, and estuaries. Factory farms are virtually unregulated in their use of fresh water; a toxic strew of excess nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizer and concentrated animal wastes, as well as antibiotic and pesticide residues, are destroying fresh water habitat. Cheap food comes out of a factory farm system that crowds meat animals and poultry into filthy and inhumane systems. These overcrowded facilities are breeding and mutation grounds for virulent new diseases like “mad cow” and the Avian flu. Most of the cheap food that North Americans consume comes in a highly processed convenience package. This food is full of empty calories and is so denatured that it is a direct culprit in the high incidence of diabetes, heart disease and obesity that are now pandemic in all the wealthy nations.

Each year our government pays out massive subsidies to the corporate farms that grow the major commodity crops of corn, soy, wheat, and cotton. These crops are all either genetically modified or in the process of becoming so, in order to be able to withstand herbicides. They are all hybrid crops that are heavily dependent on high nitrogen applications. They are all grown under conditions that are fossil fuel intensive, both in terms of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and in terms of the heavy equipment required for tillage, fertilizing, seeding and harvesting on such a massive scale. The transportation system that moves our “cheap food” over land and air and sea is also highly subsidized by the government. The farm workers who do the majority of work raising and harvesting our “cheap food” are treated worse than slave labor. As property, the lives of slaves are safeguarded to live and work another day. If an undocumented worker loses a limb in a meat packing plant there are twenty more workers waiting outside to fill his or her place---cheap food at the cost of blood. Whole families pick the cucumbers that we eat as pickles from a jar. Children who will never see the inside of a school pick the tomatoes for the catsup bottle on our table. Who do you think is really stalling immigration reform in this country---grass roots “Nativist” movements fearful of losing the “American way of life”---or the well-padded lobbyists of agri-business?

I am no preacher of Hell-fire nor prophet of doom---I am just a little dirt farmer from Vermont---but I know right from wrong. This hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that is leaking oil like a wound into the ocean is a sin against the Mother Earth. Yet where are the voices of remorse and repentance? All we hear are accusation and excuse and assurances that with more regulation and improved technology we can go right on drilling.

The real cost of cheap food must be measured in our collective confrontation with the realities of peak oil, peak water, and peak soil. These are the hallmarks of the unprecedented environmental degradation resulting from humanities depletion of natural resources at a rate that increasingly outstrips the earth’s ability to renew them. These are the signs of the times that call us to a new consciousness of our interconnectedness. This new consciousness contains the seeds of hope. To the extent that we participate in the fossil fuel economy each and all of us are culpable. It is imperative that, if we haven’t begun already, we ask ourselves how we can reduce and replace our reliance on oil. At Cedar Mountain Farm we are pledging ourselves to becoming a FOSSIL FUEL-FREE FARM. We don’t know how long it will take us---but each day we are trying to make new choices and follow less energy intensive strategies for managing the farm. Getting clear of the fossil fuel addiction is a lofty and difficult aim to acheive. But the important part is not some future achievement but rather making the effort now. Be strong. Eat real food. Chew it well. Love your Mother. To love the Mother Earth is to love all of life.

Busy week on the farm. The wooden silo was taken down because it was no longer being used and had become a hazard. Our best cow had a lovely heifer, Jenna born on May 29th. The high tunnels has lots of greens ready for the CSA and the local restaurants. All the first cut hay has been made and away in the barn. Justin has been giving the cows paddocks of fresh grass daily. We transplanted 1200 peppers and eggplants this week. About 600 tomatoes went in on Thursday and Friday, with 500 more for next week. The corn is growing, the peas have climbed up their new trellis.















Justin and Ben have spent hours on the tractor emptying the cows' bedded pack,loading the spreader and making windrows of compost. Stephen and the fjords joined Justin with the spreader to fertilize one of the hay fields with 100,000lbs of compost.