Trauma Farm (16 page)
A friend, an Anglican priest on Pender Island, has in his possession a hundred-year-old letter from his great-grandfather in Scotland. The man was writing to a relative about his eighteen dead children, how he walked miles across the hills to a meadow and hand-scythed hay to provide a good supply for the family cow during winter, so it could deliver enough milk to feed and strengthen the young bairns who kept dying on him and his wife. It never occurred to him that the cow had tuberculosis and he was slaving to feed the tubercular milk to his children. Tuberculosis can be a dangerous business—though it’s now nearly extinct in cattle. Despite the tragedy of that Scottish farmer a century ago, enthusiasts claim today’s well-handled “wild milk” is far more healthful and less dangerous than a drive to the corner store.
HISTORICALLY, THE MIXTURE OF
animals and humans on small farms provided opportunities for immune systems to interact on modest levels—with a few virulent exceptions (almost all caused by the unhygienic conditions provided by war, famine, or overpopulation). Unfortunately, in a bizarre way, the domesticated animals used by Native Americans— llamas, dogs, guinea pigs, turkeys—didn’t have immune systems that allowed bacteria and viruses to leap into the human species as easily as the more agreeable immune systems of Eurasian livestock like sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, horses, and especially pigs—whose digestive infrastructure is so similar to the human gut. As a result, Native Americans were overwhelmed by diseases introduced by the European invaders.
Edward Jenner has been rightly praised for noting that milkmaids who’d encountered cowpox never caught the much nastier smallpox. However, it’s been claimed that while inoculating people with the pustules from cowpox in cattle, he also, unknowingly, transferred tuberculosis, as well as the syphilis virus, which moved from maids to cattle when the cuts on their hands met up with cuts or wounds on the udders of cows. Although the smallpox vaccine saved millions of lives, the rate of syphilis infections in children skyrocketed, along with tuberculosis, which killed Jenner’s wife, son, and two sisters. As so often happens when the scientific method arrives at the small farm, a beautiful monster had likely emerged, combining immunity and infection in its early days.
With Betty long gone, I have to search out raw milk—a secretive endeavour for most old-style islanders, who love the real world and accept its dangers. Raw and unprocessed milk becomes more difficult to find each year as small farms disappear. Also, the milk police are becoming shiftier, and they masquerade as friends of friends and go around to farmers and tell them a neighbour sent them over for some milk. If a farmer relents and gives them raw milk, she will be busted for her generosity. Underground milk has become like the drug world, a kingdom of whispers, politics, and draconian policing.
Pasteurization, although it doesn’t totally sterilize milk, eliminates potentially bad bacteria, protozoa, moulds, and yeasts as well as good bacteria. There’s a growing revolt against it for just that reason, with enthusiasts declaring that the rise of autoimmune diseases parallels the elimination of real milk. This interesting argument, it should be noted, is also used against several other food processes that appeared during the past century. The worst legacy of pasteurization is that, like most initially plausible farming schemes, it’s been captured by industrial production economies whose main purpose is to increase profit and reduce perishability (milk can last up to three or four months after some processes) at the expense of quality. This is why milk products no longer go deliciously sour; today’s commercial milk rots. Homogenization, which somehow snuck into the pasteurization process, destroys the cream’s structure, allowing it to be watered down. All pasteurized and homogenized commercial milk is watered. Manufacturers blithely claim the water is added “accidentally” during processing.
Even more strangely, people want their milk watery and defatted these days because they eat too much fat at the fast-food restaurant down the street, and thus they’d rather sacrifice the healthy qualities of real milk and its thick, sweet cream rising to the top of the glass bottles that we all used to keep floating in our cool streams and wells before the days of refrigeration.
When I was twenty-two I lived on Texada Island a few miles from an enormous woman who sold wild milk. I’d saunter along in the heat of summer down to her farm and buy a jar of cold milk from her cellar. The top third would be cream. I never had the heart to shake the milk and distribute the cream evenly. I would suck it up off the top, delirious from its rich fat, and then cleanse my palate with the thinner milk at the bottom. My favourite time for buying her milk was when the wild strawberries were out, and the neighbours would encounter me, moustached with cream, sitting on the roadside, picking at the tiny strawberries, which were more addictive than the milk. The neighbours would laugh and wave as they drove by, and I would smile a big, milky, strawberry smile while the dragonflies partitioned the air and the crickets clacked in the meadows.
E
VERY FARM HAS
its specialty, but a truly mixed farm like ours needs various creatures, made of leaf or flesh, to become an organic whole, not only for my lunch today but for sales and healthy cultivation. Like the few surviving mixed farms on Salt Spring we raise sheep. Salt Spring lamb is world renowned, and though the taste difference is obvious, I always wondered what accounted for that difference, so I asked the Byrons. Mike told me it was the diet of Gulf Islands vegetation. The majority of factory-style lamb operations run their lambs on big, grass pastures, especially in New Zealand. Salt Spring lambs historically have been raised on small farms of mixed shrub land, orchards, mahonia, ferns, and pasture—bush lambs. Apart from a few big farms, the local farms usually raised between a half-dozen and twenty almost hilariously babied ewes until the government regulated island sheep into near-oblivion in order to make them better. The bureaucrats told local farmers they’d help us improve our traditional butchering. We soon recognized this meant we were doomed. At Trauma Farm we kept ten ewes, and produced about fifteen lambs a year, until the new slaughtering legislation ensured we’d lose more money than we could afford. We had to shrink our flock to a half-dozen ewes to manage the pasture. Many farms gave up altogether.
FARMERS HAVE MADE
a few mistakes with sheep bloodlines, breeding stupidity into a once-brilliant animal, along with docility. I often say sheep have to be smart to be that dumb, and a sadness invades me when a young ram stupidly butts at the food bucket. Still, sheep are impressively intelligent in certain ways. Like horses and cows, they’re artists when it comes to the qualities of grass. They might crap indiscriminately, but they also avoid grazing near potentially parasite-laden excrement. In late winter they will suddenly attack tree bark and branches and foliage they scorned all year, because they can sense their own mineral or enzyme deficiencies. A British study proved that sheep can recognize over fifty friends among their flock, a striking number when I consider my own hopeless ineptitude at recalling a casual friend’s name. They know their society. The same study tentatively showed that rams prefer to mate with ewes that resemble their mother, but I won’t go there. In another study, only of people, the extended family typically comprised around twenty of us. That’s the closeness zone of our species. The village, a hundred or so people, is about the most we are capable of becoming acquainted with socially. Everyone else is a stranger, and our species has a long history of disliking strangers, the aliens who live in the next valley. What’s really scary about this cultural behaviour is that it has many parallels with the social structure of the sheep in our field.
DOMESTICATED LIVE STOCK CAN PROVIDE
their share of comedy. Our favourite ewe was Butterball, a Hampshire cross with unlimited patience and a benevolent, really dumb expression. One day, at feeding time, she got her head stuck in the bucket while I was distracted by the dogs. We happened to have our camera handy, so we now possess a photograph of a bucket-headed Butterball. She’s standing, bucket upright, surrounded by the other ewes staring at her as if she were an alien. She started walking around blindly, so the rest of the flock fled in horror. She followed their fleeing footsteps, crashing often as we dived and skidded after her, until we caught up and yanked the bucket off her head.
Shortly after we arrived we’d bought a classic island herd, all mixed and scrambled, and we have been mixing them more ever since. Cheviots and Suffolks and Dorsets and Romneys and Jacobs. Our first ram was a gentle Romney and we named him Romeo. When the ewes went into heat he’d stand behind them and kiss the air, making cheesy pornographic gestures with his lips. Over the years we bought a few black sheep and bred them into our gang. Since we weren’t going to make any money on sheep, we decided we might as well have the amusement of a flock of black sheep.
The problem with a small flock is keeping a viable ram. You want to avoid inbreeding, so island farmers naturally developed an irregular system of ram exchanges. If someone has a good ram, it might become community property. After the ram has finished with all the ewes on the original farm, you take it, feed it, maintain it, and then pass it on. This process can involve a skewed breeding season, but in our temperate climate that doesn’t matter. Moving the ram becomes a social event. Dinners and wine are often involved. It can also get dicey.
When I mentioned that our last ram had gone infertile, Mike Byron showed up the next day with a honking big ram in the back of his truck. This behaviour was unusual for Mike, who often operates months behind schedule, being of the class of farmers who always have far more tasks than any normal person could handle. I was suspicious immediately, but we sorted out ewes, lambs, dogs, and pastures and unloaded the ram, who pranced off the truck like a superhero, took one look at the ewes, and made himself at home. This is good, I thought, forgetting my initial suspicions.
The ram was a real gentleman and went about his business mating with the ewes. He also figured out feeding time soon enough. A week later he took his first run at me. I thwacked him with the bucket and that backed him off. I didn’t quite turn my back as I walked away, and that was smart. He charged again. I rotated quickly, kicking him in the chest, and deflected the charge. This wasn’t looking good. Within a week I didn’t have to turn my back before he attacked. A 250-pound charging ram is no fun. I slapped his face, but he charged again, and I slapped him again. I abhor hitting animals, yet he had no qualms about hitting humans. This was not fair. Worse, he regarded every slap as an incentive. He chased me around our small stand of birches. That day ended in a standoff, and I thought I’d calmed him down. He didn’t make another charge. But one week later, after Sharon fed the sheep, she declared she wasn’t doing that again. No story, no explanations. The decision was final. I didn’t dare ask what had happened.