Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

May 1, 2008
This past Friday, we at NoHo Town Farm were handed a reminder that farm life is unpredictable and can be awfully disappointing. Last Friday, my co-apprentices and I arrived at work to the news that the second of my bosses’ goats set to kid this spring had gone into labor.  Things were progressing slowly, but Ben, my boss, promised that he would call us over to the goat shed when the action began to develop.

After a couple hours of site work, Ben called.  Flannery, the goat in labor, seemed to be getting closer.  My two coworkers and I rushed over to Ben and Oona’s house, a quick half-mile from the farm, and raced down their sloping backyard to the goat pasture.  Flannery was on the ground breathing heavily, clearly uncomfortable, Ben sitting patiently beside her.  False alarm.  After nearly two hours of waiting and watching, Flannery’s state still seemed stagnant. So the other apprentices and I were sent back to the farm to get some work done, again with the promise that we’d get a call when the time came.

Less than half an hour into our afternoon’s tasks, Ben called again. I quickly switched off the hose I was using to water the newly transplanted blueberries and hearty kiwis and we all zipped over to the house again.  By the time we arrived, it was too late- Flannery had finished kidding, and the news wasn’t good. Her first, a male, had been stillborn, and her second, also a boy, didn’t seem to be doing well.  We sat and waited anxiously as Flannery tried to nibble at her kid’s umbilical cord, and watched in wonder as he gingerly tried his luck at the teat.  None of us wanted to think about or acknowledge the stillborn kid.  After a short stint, Ben sent us back to the farm once again, eager to get the onion and leek starts transplanted into the beds before the weekend’s predicted rain arrived.

As I buried the delicate green stalks of the alliums into the freshly tilled soil that afternoon, I found myself thinking about the rhythms, or lack thereof, of farming.  So much of the farm life is built upon repetition, what you know, what you can predict, and good planning.  But then there are the curveballs. Whether it’s a drought, a blight, or a joyous event turned sour like the stillborn kid, farmers face great unpredictability.  In trying to harness the elements of the natural world to work to our advantage, to raise domestic animals and grow food, we as farmers must learn to compromise, to let go of control.  The poet May Sarton wisely noted, “I am, I think, more of a poet… if to be a poet means allowing life to flow through one rather than forcing it to a mold the will has shaped; if it means learning to let the day shape the work, not the work, the day, and so live towards essence as naturally as a bird or a flower”.  A good farmer works with the unexpected detours from the well thought out plan, constantly being reminded that we cannot exercise our power over nature, we can only coax her to be gentle and kind with us as we attempt to reap her gifts in order to sustain ourselves.

Early Sunday morning I found an email from Ben to the apprentices in our inbox.  The new kid was doing well, nursing like a champ, and it seemed like he was going to make it after all.  They had named him “Maybe” in light of his feeble first forty eight hours of life.  Despite the uncertainty, the sadness, and the frustration at thwarted plans, “Maybe” things on the farm will work out just as they should, even if it’s not the way we thought they would.

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