Bringing It to the Table (9 page)

There are now probably more Cheviots in the Midwest than elsewhere in the United States. For us, at any rate, the inevitable source of breeding stock has been the Midwest, and many of our problems have been traceable to that fact. What I am going to say implies no fault in the midwestern breeders, to whom we and our breed have an enormous debt. It is nevertheless true that, for a flock of sheep, living is easier in the prairie lands than on a Kentucky hillside. Just walking around on a hillside farm involves more strain and requires more energy, and the less fertile the land the farther a ewe will have to walk to fill her belly. Knees that might have remained sound on the gentle topography of Ohio or Iowa may become arthritic at our place. Also a ewe that would have twin lambs on a prairie farm may have only one on a hill farm. Similarly, a lamb will grow to slaughter weight more slowly where he has to allocate more energy to getting around. We once sold five yearling ewes to our friend Bob Willerton in Danvers, Illinois, where on their first lambing they produced eleven lambs. On our farm, they
might
have produced seven or eight. We have noticed the same difference with cull ewes that we have sent to our son’s farm, which is less steep and more fertile than ours.

Our farm, then, is asking for a ewe that can stay healthy, live long, breed successfully, have two lambs without assistance, and feed them well, in comparatively demanding circumstances. Experience has shown us that the Border Cheviot breed is capable of producing a ewe of this kind, but that it does not do so inevitably. In eighteen years, and out of a good many ewes bought or raised, we have identified so far only two ewe families (the female descendants of two ewes) that fairly dependably perform as we and our place require.

The results of identifying and keeping the daughters of these ewe families have been very satisfactory. This year they made up more than half of our bred ewes. Presumably because of that, our lambing percentage, which previously hovered around 150 percent, increased to 172 percent. This year also we reduced our winter hay-feeding by one month, not beginning until the first of February. Next year, we hope to feed no hay until we bring the ewes to the barn for lambing, which will be about the first of March.
¹
In livestock breeding it is always too early to brag, but of course we are encouraged.

In the language of Phillip Sponenberg and Carolyn Christman’s excellent
Conservation Breeding Handbook
, we have employed “extensive” or “land-race” husbandry in managing a standardized breed. From the first, our flock has been “challenged by the environment”—required to live on what the place can most cheaply and sustainably provide, mainly pasture, with a minimum of attention and virtually no professional veterinary care. We give selenium injections to ewes and lambs and use a prudent amount of medication for parasites. We give no inoculations except for tetanus to the newborn lambs, and we have never trimmed a hoof.

Until recently, and even now with ewes, our practice has been to buy bargains, animals that for one reason or another fell below the standards of the show ring. But I don’t believe that our flock would have developed to our standards and requirements any faster if we had bought the
champions out of the best shows every year. Some of the qualities we were after simply are not visible to show ring judges.

I am not trying to argue that there is no good in livestock shows. The show ring is a useful tool; it is obviously instructive when good breeders bring good animals together for comparison. I am saying only that the show ring alone cannot establish and maintain adequate standards for livestock breeders. You could not develop locally adapted strains if your only standards came from the show ring or from breed societies.

The point is that, especially now when grain-feeding and confinement-feeding are so common, no American breeder should expect any
breed
to be locally adapted. Breeders should recognize that from the standpoint of local adaptation and cheap production, every purchase of a breeding animal is a gamble. A newly purchased ewe or buck may improve the performance of your flock on your farm or it may not. Good breeders will know, or they will soon find out, that theirs is not the only judgment that is involved. While the breeder is judging, the breeder’s farm also is judging, enforcing its demands, and making selections. And this is as it should be. The judgment of the farm serves the breed, helping to preserve its genetic diversity.

Because of the necessity of purchasing sires from time to time, the continuity of the locally adapted flock must reside in the female lineages. Studying and preserving the most long-lived, thrifty, and productive ewe families are paramount. But this need not be laborious, for your farm will be selecting along with you. You pick the individuals that look good. This always implies that they have done well; and sooner or later you will know the look of “your kind,” the kind that is apt to do well on your place.Your farm, however, will pick the ones that last. Even if you do not select at all, or if you select wrongly, a ewe that is not fitted to your farm will not contribute as many breeding animals to your flock as will a ewe that
is
fitted to your farm.

It is generally acknowledged that a shepherd should know what he or she is doing. It is not so generally understood that the flock should know what
it
is doing—that is, how to live, thrive, and reproduce successfully on its home farm. But this knowledge, bred into the flock, is critical; it means meat from grass, at the lowest cost.

 

NOTE

1
We did so the next year, and have continued to do so, except in times of deep or crusted snow. We winter our ewes on a hillside that is ungrazed from early August until about Christmas.

(1979)

I
HAVE JUST BEEN rereading Donald Hall’s lovely memoir,
String Too Short to Be Saved
. It is about the summers of his boyhood that the author spent on his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. There are many good things in this book, but one of the best is its description of the life and economy of an old-time New England small farm.

The farm of Kate and Wesley Wells, as their grandson knew it, was already a relic. It was what would now be called a “marginal farm” in mountainous country, in an agricultural community that had been dying since the Civil War. The farm produced food for the household and made a cash income from a small hand-milked herd of Holsteins and a flock of sheep. It furnished trees for firewood and maple syrup. The Wellses sent their daughters to school by the sale of timber from a woodlot. The farm and its household were “poor” by our present standards, taking in very little money—but spending very little too, and that is the most important thing about it. Its principle was thrift. Its needs were kept within the limits of its resources.

This farm was ordered according to an old agrarian pattern which made it far more independent than modern farms built upon the pattern of industrial capitalism. And its energy economy was as independent as its money economy. The working energy of this farm came mainly from its people and from one horse.

Mr. Hall’s memories inform us, more powerfully than any argument, that the life of Wesley and Kate Wells was a life worth living, decent though not easy; not adventurous or affluent, either—or not in our sense—but sociable, neighborly, and humane. They were intelligent, morally competent, upright, kind to people and animals, full of generous memories and good humor. From all that their grandson says of them, it is clear that his acquaintance with them and their place was profoundly enabling to his mind and his feelings.

One cannot read this book—or I, anyhow, cannot—without asking how that sort of life escaped us, how it depreciated as a possibility so that we were able to give it up in order, as we thought, to “improve” ourselves. Mr. Hall makes it plain that farms like his grandparents’ did not die out in New England necessarily because of bad farming, or because they did not provide a viable way of life. They died for want of people with the motivation, the skill, the character, and the culture to keep them alive. They died, in other words, by a change in cultural value. Though it survived fairly intact until the middle of this century, Mr. Hall remembers that his grandparents’ farm was surrounded by people and farms that had dwindled away because the human succession had been broken. It was no longer a place to come to, but a place to leave.

At the time Mr. Hall writes about, something was gaining speed in our country that I think will seem more and more strange as time goes on. This was a curious set of assumptions, both personal and public, about “progress.” If you could get into a profession, it was assumed, then of course you must not be a farmer; if you could move to the city, then you must not stay in the country; if you could farm more profitably
in the corn belt than on the mountainsides of New England, then the mountainsides of New England must not be farmed. For years this set of assumptions was rarely spoken and more rarely questioned, and yet it has been one of the most powerful social forces at work in this country in modern times.

But these assumptions could not accomplish much on their own. What gave them power, and made them able finally to dominate and reshape our society, was the growth of technology for the production and use of fossil fuel energy. This energy could be made available to empower such unprecedented social change because it was “cheap.” But we were able to consider it “cheap” only by a kind of moral simplicity: the assumption that we had a “right” to as much of it as we could use. This was a “right” made solely by might. Because fossil fuels, however abundant they once were, were nevertheless limited in quantity and not renewable, they obviously did not “belong” to one generation more than another. We ignored the claims of posterity simply because we could, the living being stronger than the unborn, and so worked the “miracle” of industrial progress by the theft of energy from (among others) our children.

That is the real foundation of our progress and our affluence. The reason that we are a rich nation is not that we have earned so much wealth—you cannot, by any honest means, earn or deserve so much. The reason is simply that we have learned, and become willing, to market and use up in our own time the birthright and livelihood of posterity.

And so it is too simple to say that the “marginal” farms of New England were abandoned because of progress or because they were no longer productive or desirable as living places. They were given up for one very “practical” reason: They did not lend themselves readily to exploitation by fossil fuel technology. Their decline began with the rise of steam power and the industrial economy after the Civil War; the coming of industrial agriculture after World War II finished them off. Industrial agriculture needs large holdings and large level fields. As the scale of
technology grows, the small farms with small or steep fields are pushed farther and farther toward the economic margins and are finally abandoned. And so industrial agriculture sticks itself deeper and deeper into a curious paradox: The larger its technology grows in order “to feed the world,” the more potentially productive “marginal” land it either ruins or causes to be abandoned. If the sweeping landscapes of Nebraska now have to be reshaped by computer and bulldozer to allow the more efficient operation of big farm machines, then thousands of acres of the smaller-featured hill country of the eastern states must obviously be considered “unfarmable.” Or so the industrialists of agriculture have ruled.

And so energy is not just fuel. It is a powerful social and cultural influence. The kind and quantity of the energy we use determine the kind and quality of the life we live. Our conversion to fossil fuel energy subjected society to a sort of technological determinism, shifting population and values according to the new patterns and values of industrialization. Rural wealth and materials and rural people were caught within the gravitational field of the industrial economy and flowed to the cities, from which comparatively little flowed back in return. And so the human life of farmsteads and rural communities dwindled everywhere, and in some places perished.

 

IF THE SHIFT to fossil fuel energy radically changed the life and the values of farm communities, it should be no surprise that it also radically changed our understanding of agriculture. Some figures from an article by Professor Mark D. Shaw help to show the nature of this change. The “food system,” according to Professor Shaw, now uses 16.5 percent of all energy used in the United States. This 16.5 percent is used in the following ways: