Postcard Farms and Heroin Houses
The nature of nature
One morning a few years ago, I was consulting on a diverse raw milk farm as they went through an enforcement action against them and the court proceedings that accompanied that enforcement action.
There was conflict–as there always is in these cases.
And conflict generates clicks for savvy reporters and influencers.
So it was that on that particular morning, an influencer and her film crew sat in the spacious farmhouse kitchen. The reporter was looking for an edgy angle to share with her followers for fleeting engagement, clicks, and likes. This was a vegan influencer with mostly vegan followers.
She explained to me that taking care of agricultural animals–including bees–was enslavement.
Clearly, she had not spent a single day on a farm, or breaking the ice on water troughs with frozen cracked hands or had the slightest inkling what an actual relationship with animals or the land entailed.
And this farm’s adversity was an opportunity for clicks, likes, engagement without any depth of understanding.
It was a beautiful farm in part because of the animals present.
The rolling hills were lush with green grass where the dairy cows and meat cattle grazed. The pigs and chickens each had their places and were, by any standard, truly free range.
A few small cabins dotted the orchard fields, and a lush herb garden boasted flowers and herbs in all the seasons.
Old barns stood majestically calling attention to the details of the surrounding nature and the natural materials used in the creation of these buildings so long ago.
The farm was clean, as farms go.
Visitors come and go--some long-gone apprentices or friends, or new friends--and each are greeted with loving arms, broad smiles and belly laughs. Children fall in love with nature for the first time while overworked adults revisit that long-lost romance.
As the young influencer took in the surrounding scene–perhaps her first time on a truly diverse, regenerative farm–she looked at the weathered, determined face of the farmer and she said somewhat flippantly, “It’s like a postcard here,” gesturing to the surrounding farmland that she could see through the kitchen window.
Indeed, hearty flowers danced in the herb garden even in the frosty mornings. The cows were visible on the top of the hill just to the right of the weathered dark stone and wood barn.
One could clearly see the small orchard from the window as well as the chickens that cleaned the farm of unwanted bugs.
Snuggled behind the orchard, between the barns and lazily grazing cows, the fields of tulips greeted every passerby.
It was idyllic. More beautiful than “The Shire” or any other fictional green place bursting with life.
The farmer looked intensely right into her eyes.
“No” he said. “This is REAL.”
In that simple statement “this is real,” was a core knowledge.
“Saying it’s a postcard trivializes the work that goes into making this what it is.”
Because the farmer knew, unlike any non-farm reporter could ever understand, that the picturesque, momentary beauty of the farm didn’t show the way their hands cracked from the cold on the frigid northern mornings as they milked the cows.
She saw only the lush grasses on the rolling hills, not the decades of work that went into the soil that made the trees stand up straight and bloom every spring.
She didn’t see the natural progression of life–and inevitable death–that created the profound cycle of regeneration.
The work continues.
The relationship with nature moves us all together. Break that relationship, and something else gets broken that we can’t put our finger on or escape, but that impacts us all.
For some, dropping in on a gorgeous farm on a beautiful spring morning is an escape. It’s getting away to something beautiful, to something that reminds us of our connection to nature–however fleeting–the way you can smell cookies baking in the kitchen from a few rooms away.
But, as that farmer reminded us all that morning, farming isn’t an escape from reality.
It is the truest reality.
As we sat answering the young influencer’s questions, the cows came down the long lane and into the barn where a trusted farm hand led them into the milking parlor for the morning milking.
What the reporter couldn’t see through the thick stone and wood walls was the barn cats lining up at the milking parlor for a squirt of milk. She couldn’t feel the warmth that rises like steam off the cows’ bodies in those early mornings, wrapping around your face like a warm hug.
She couldn’t see the spiders weaving their webs between the tines of pitchforks hanging on the barn beams or the new kittens curled up, carefully hidden by their mother under the stairs to the hay loft.
Even the best video can’t capture the smell of the barn–old wood mixed with fresh hay and the richness of dirt. A blend so intoxicating it can transport any of us back 150 years in an instant.
And so we sat at the long wooden kitchen table telling the influencer stories of loss and grit, of new calves and kittens and the final goodbye of a favorite cow.
On the way to the courthouse the next morning, not too far from the farm, an abandoned house crumbled into the ground.
The house, I was told, was where a few meth or heroin addicts squatted for a while until their lives took a turn for the worse. Overdose and death.
What was a doorway to nowhere was now a crumble of cracked brick, rotting wood, and disheveled shingles, disappearing as the grasses and vines slowly mask the human pain and suffering only as Mother Nature can.
A beautiful farm is not a postcard anymore than a lonely, decomposing house in a field is a home.
And I wondered how many struggling souls this farm has helped to heal. Of the untold amount of visitors, apprentices and friends–how many drug overdoses has this farm prevented?
How many houses haven't crumbled because of the community this farm nurtures?
And yet, governments and policies continue to chase farmers off the land while nearby old meth and heroin houses crumble to the ground.
If you missed the podcast a couple week’s ago, I had a fantastic discussion with farmer Adam Kuznia from Farming Full Time about his “Operation Ground Truth” mission to get farmers’ voices heard more in the mainstream.
You can find that here.
Operation Ground Truth with Adam Kuznia
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What a beautiful representation of what is so damn wrong, ugly, with the way government (people) treat our small farms. It breaks my heart that so many consumers are willing to turn a blind eye to the struggles of our quality farmers while rewarding the greedy egocentric businessmen/women who sell inferior food laden with false truths as to their nutritional values and production quality.
Thank you for your unwavering dedication and advocacy in helping small farmers to once again be the cornerstone for food security within our communities large and small. As you so often say, hyperlocal food access is the ONLY way we as Americans can create a food system robust enough to get us through the hard times that are most assuredly ahead.