My Life and Why I Farm

My Life and Why I FarmBy Chris Kerston
June 1, 2007

            Agriculture is a trade that most modern folks have lost touch with.  Big business and modern science have so drastically changed food production that someone born as few as 150 years ago would not recognize most of the items in our grocery stores, and they certainly would not recognize our intensive confined food production systems.  It is my belief that many of society’s problems can be stemmed to a loss of connection with nature.  Health, social, and environmental problems all have some connection with food, and how it’s produced.  Humans are herd animals and from the dawn of time have relished in breaking bread as a community.  When agriculture emerged, humans gathered to grow food as a community as well.  Today it’s possible for a child to grow up without ever touching soil outside of maybe a municipal park or a sand box.  That makes my heart break.  In many ways I grew up that way, and it was not until I first met my wife and fell in love with her family’s ranch that my whole perspective changed.  Getting back to nature, learning to live within the seasons, working my hands through the soil, sweating under a hot sun, shivering in a freezing rain, taking the time to enjoy a sunset, creeping up on a coyote and simply staring in awe at his cunning behavior, listening to the birds sing, and staring at a clear moonlit night sky are all activities that I attest to giving me my life.  That might sound really foreign or even cheesy to some, but I have found that more physical work and less stress can be the answer to a whole world of happiness that would be completely unknown and missed by someone who resides outside of the realm of sustainable food production. 

The life that my wife and I have chosen to live is not always an easy one.  We have given up many creature comforts that so many folks would cringe at the thought of losing.  I don’t miss those comfort items; it’s amazing how simple it is to forget how easy life can be.  When I worry, I don’t worry about things like how can I get cable tv, high speed internet, garbage service, air conditioning, central heat, or a dishwasher.  When I am in the mood to worry, I worry about if my animals are healthy, are they getting enough food, are they happy, is my life richer from the activities I am taking part in, are the things I am doing things my family can be proud of, and my ultimate fear would be to lose this lifestyle that I have chosen.  If our society is going to save itself people need to become less material and follow their passions.   I have more than an inkling that many folks would be passionate about raising their own food if they simply were exposed to it.  My suggestion is, find a farmer/rancher who grows locally and start buying the bulk of your food from them.  Educate yourself on how to grow food sustainably (there are many great books available on this).  Then offer to volunteer with that rancher/farmer and start working with the soil, sweating under the sun, and soaking up life.  Give it some time, go through a whole season.  Learn about planting, growing and harvesting.  You will be amazed at how much clearer and simpler life will seem.  You might just realize how small humans are in this whole system, and realize that being small isn’t such a bad thing.  The experience is nothing short of spiritual and it can fill holes in your life you didn’t even know you had.  You just might reveal a whole new understanding and appreciation for life.  Once you have grown your own food you can take pride in knowing that you are saving the planet and enhancing people’s lives one bite at a time. 

The following is an article that was posted in the Feb/Mar issue of Mother Earth News.  I have never read any other article that better summed up how I feel about growing animals for meat.  It was like I was reading my own thoughts.  This article has been surrounded by controversy among sustainable growers.  Vegans and vegetarians came out of the wood work to point at that there are other options than killing animals.  Read this article and share your thoughts.

Why I FarmFebruary/March 2007 Issue #220
By Bryan Welch

Twenty-five years ago I was an enthusiastic hiker and backpacker. A skier and a climber. I probably spent 45 days a year in the outdoors and slept outside five or six nights a year. I lived in a city, and I tried to get into the nearby mountains every chance I had, but it wasn’t much.

These days, I watch the sun come up several times a week. I know what’s blooming and which birds are coming through. I know how it feels to be outside on the worst night of the year watching coyotes try to open the door of the henhouse. Now that I am a farmer, I see much more of nature than I did when I was outdoors purely for recreation. For me, the difference between hiking and farming is the difference between listening to music and playing music. As a hiker, I enjoy the dramatic rhythms and splashy vistas of the mountains. As a farmer, I am part of the dense, varied, vigorous symphony of the prairie.

Raising our Own Meat
I write this during the most bittersweet of our seasons: late fall or early winter, depending on the day and the weather. It’s the time of year when we kill the animals­ — the cattle, sheep and goats — that we raise for meat for ourselves and our friends.

Just a few months ago they were the spirits of spring, filling the pastures with the joyful, bouncing exuberance of new life. In a few weeks their meat will be in my freezers, and my friends’, on our tables and in our bodies.

People often ask, “How can you eat your own animals?” Sometimes it’s a sincere question, meant to explore the emotions associated with raising your own meat. But often it’s more of an accusation, as in: “How can you be so callous?” So in response I might ask, “How can you be so cruel as to eat animals without knowing them? Without knowing how they lived? Without making sure they were treated kindly and with respect?”

My father, both my grandfathers and all my great-grandparents were grass farmers. It’s quite likely that every generation of my family since prehistoric times has followed a herd of grazing animals — either wild or domesticated — through its lifetime and down its nomadic path across the ages. We have always lived in direct contact and in a kind of kinship with the animals that provide our food. I believe it’s a “natural” relationship in the deepest and most profound sense of that word.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should raise their own meat. But it’s perverse, isn’t it, that many people in our society seem to consider it more civilized to eat animals they don’t know? Meanwhile, industrial agriculture treats meat animals as nothing more than cogs in the machine, without regard for their happiness or basic well-being.

From the time I could walk, I was invited to help my relatives care for their livestock. I was about 10 when a neighbor hired me to milk his goats and feed his rabbits. I took to it. I enjoyed the animals and I enjoyed the people. I found that people who shared their lives with livestock were, on the whole, caring but not sentimental.

There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the lives of the animals, and that we should provide as much simple comfort and dignity to our fellow creatures as we can. After all, aren’t simple comfort and dignity among the most important things we wish for ourselves and our children?

So we’re careful, on our little farm, to let the animals live in ways that seem natural to them. None of our creatures lives alone. For any social animal, to be alone is the worst thing. All of them have access, every day of the year, to natural food and clean water. They reproduce just as they were created to reproduce. They live their lives on healthy, familiar pastures where they feel secure. When we handle them, we handle them as gently as possible. When we can’t be gentle, we try to be quick.

Even though I’m proud of the happy, healthy lives we give our animals, I feel a profound twinge of sadness as I watch them grazing in the colorful autumn grass. But it’s a feeling I want to embrace, rather than avoid. It’s the sadness associated with life’s astonishing richness and vitality. It’s the sadness associated with mortality. It’s the sadness we feel as we consider our own impermanence and the impermanence of everything on this planet, everything mortal we hold dear, the sadness that makes life poignant and sweet.

It’s sad when animals I know well and care for reach the end of their lives. But it would be far worse if I didn’t feel this profound connection, this profound gratitude, this profound mortality.

Life in the Pasture
A few years ago I was working on a fence far out in a new pasture, and I kept smelling food. I checked my pockets for old sandwich wrappers. I checked the toolbox for snacks. I smelled the cuffs of my work shirt. Then I realized I had been sitting in wild onions, the wild onions that stay green all the way through the Kansas winter. They smelled like hamburgers.

I’ve noticed lately how the sheep and goats sometimes dine on the green onion shoots. If I sit still, they’ll come over to visit, and I can smell onions on their breath. I like to watch goats eating the seed-heads off sunflowers, and I puzzle over the way sheep like to trim the grass down to a slick butch, like the manicured greens on a golf course.

At the end of a day of farm work I smell like the animals — I reek of them. I also never come in at the end of the day without a new story, some new bit of amusement provided by one of our animals, each of them whimsical, imaginative and utterly unique. I’m outside every night, checking on the livestock and closing the chicken house. I watch the night sky and see the ice crystals when they form a halo around the moon.

I get a lot of blood, dirt and manure on my hands and clothes these days. I get calluses and scars. I get a lot of laughs watching my animals figure out their lives and I get pretty sad when it’s time to kill them. I have a lot more death in my life than I did before. And, ironically, that’s part of the reason why I feel like I have a lot more life in my life. That’s why I farm.

— Bryan Welch is the publisher and editorial director of Mother Earth News. He and his wife, Carolyn, raise grass-fed cattle, sheep and goats on a small farm near Lawrence, Kan. For more stories about the farm, visitwww.MotherEarthNews.com/blogs/bwelch/.