The New Agrarian

Here in the upper South we don’t have winter so much as three months of T. S. Eliot’s April, vaccilating between cold and cold comfort. Deep self-confident winter permits acclimation, the body and soul to put on layers of fat and wool against the cruelty without, but the occasional dip from jacket weather into parka cold promotes only whining. An inch of snow and traffic tangles like unused Christmas lights; six and we huddle in our dens as if beset by flaming hailstones. The forecast of a subfreezing afternoon comes with instructions on how to dress.

Survive thirty inches of snow or thirty degrees below zero and one has at least stories to tell one’s children, photographs for the album, video worthy of YouTube. Bitter cold and blizzard might stoke the fires of hardy stoicism or join neighbors in forced cheerfulness, but here even commiseration is half-hearted; the shared experience of not bothering to own a snow shovel is as comforting as unheated soup. Our winter’s banality is its most painful aspect: We don’t, after all, have all that much to complain about, and less to teach us not to. And so we shiver and wipe our soggy feet and wait for the spring we believe to be our birthright, when we can forget this whole sorry business ever happened.

I wrote this essay in 2003 and for various reasons am only now (January 2009) publishing it. Much has changed in six years: The market for organic food has grown tremendously, and alongside it the idea of “eating local.” Much also has been written, and some of the ideas here are more commonly discussed now than then. I would frame the essay differently today, and may one day reframe it in another context. But much else has not changed, and I believe the argument still sound.

You may find this too long to read online, and I’ve made a PDF available. Whichever version you read, I’d appreciate your comments.

Last spring my wife and I began raising ducks. We bought seven Khaki Campbell ducklings, set up a brooder in a spare room, raised them to adulthood, watch them take their first wobbly flight across the yard, and now each day collect their eggs for our table. When we have extra eggs — which is most of the time, for our ducks lay prodigiously — we give, sell, or barter them to friends. On one occasion, accepting a dozen eggs from me, a friend asked, “Are they organic?”

Well, I thought, it depends on what you mean. By a commonsense, dictionary definition, the eggs are organic; they are laid by ducks who are raised outdoors, who eat a diet that includes the bugs and tender greens that ducks naturally eat, and who are integrated into the life of our household. They are, I could have answered, part of an organic whole that includes my family, my local ecosystem, and now my friends and community.

But that isn’t what my friend meant, and so I answered as he expected. The eggs were not produced in accordance with the USDA’s organic standards, I explained, because the commercial feed that is the basis of their diet in winter and supplements it in summer was not mixed from organically grown grain. Organic duck feed is not widely available — as far as I can tell, it is not available at all. So no, they are not “organic” after all.

But, I told him, I can tell you anything you want to know about the ducks and how they were raised. You can come visit, if you want, and see how they are raised. Read on

Before Christmas I received an email from someone who seemed to be quite angry with my whole “new agrarian” idea. I won’t embarrass him by quoting extensively (it wasn’t a particularly nice email), but he made this point:

All the agrarians I know… became agrarian so that they could get away from “luxuries”.

Apparently he believes, based on various things I’ve said around here, that I indulge in too many luxuries and am therefore not worthy of the term “agrarian.”

Wednesday night a windstorm knocked our power out, and I got to thinking: What’s a luxury? Read on

My daughter, who is five now, has been interested lately in helping me in the workshop. This is good because it means I can spend time woodworking without abandoning her all Sunday afternoon, but it also limits the complexity of my work, because a woodworking shop is, obviously, no place for an unattended child. I’ve been trying to find projects we can work on together; we made a few squirrel feeders back in the fall, with simple nails for holding cobs of dry corn, and now we’re building a winter warming shelter for chickadees (since a bird house would go unused for a few months).

For Christmas I bought her a few tools of her own — hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, try square, and carpenter’s pencils — never underestimate the value of rectangular pencils in making a child feel like a real carpenter! More important, I built her a workbench of her own. Read on

New Year’s Eve winds knocked down another big old loblolly pine across the nature trail, and so I had to start the year by playing lumberjack. This pine was just big enough to make a lot of work with the bow saw and just far enough from a power supply that my electric chain saw was no help, but it was rotten enough that the work went quickly. Two-thirds of the way through with the saw was enough, and then a good whack with the poll of an axe finished it off. I wasn’t about to repeat the process unnecessarily, though, so a freshly sawn cross-section of pine the diameter and height of an eight year-old’s head watches you coming round the bend.

Our woods are at the age when the first-generation pines are dying off and being replaced by hardwoods, but in this little section of woods the secondary succession is going slowly, with only two skinny sweetgums in an area several yards square. That section is lower than the rest and stays wet much of the year, and I wonder if the trees in the surrounding woods simply don’t propagate well in such damp bottomland, or whether saplings are more easily felled by vines (we are overrun by fox grape and, until I started ripping it out last summer, oriental bittersweet) when their roots have only loose wet earth to cling to. Come spring I may try clearing out the tangle of vines and pine stumps down there and transplanting a few saplings that won’t make it elsewhere.

Meantime the trail is clear, even if alongside is still a bit of a mess — but that’s the wild woods, and by June the foliage will have hidden it all anyway.