"Get Me Out" - Farmer's Fever

 

One February farmer is quietly carving a new handle for the hammer out of ash wood.  The other February farmer is trimming the ragged scraps of a wool coat to make patches for the still functional wool shirts.  These are both excellent winter-farmer projects: useful, thrifty, satisfying, sustainable.

And yet.  One farmer, generally a quiet, slow-moving, long-thinking farmer, is suddenly, violently overcome with squirrelly-ness, with sitting too long-ness, with thinking too much of all the other excellent winter-farmer projects-ness, with sheer inside-the-house-ness.  I leap up.

“I can’t stand being in this house another second!” I holler.

“Wow,” says the other farmer, sitting back a little in his chair.  Normally the farmer-always-in-motion, bound-up-the-stairs-two-by-two kind of fellow, he is taken aback by my volume, if not my vigor.  “Why don’t you go outside?”

“I am going outside!” I continue at full voice.  “I can’t stand it in here another second!  How you can stand it?”

“It doesn’t seem so bad to me.”  This farmer has already been outside, and is not feeling the least bit squirrelly.  He’s fed the horses, watered them, brought firewood over for the stove.  “But I’ll go back out.  Do you want to work on the tool area in the barn?”

“No!  No!  No!”  The sudden violent, vision of a tool area cram-packed with the buckets and pails and boxes that the nice man at the dump saved for us, knowing how thrifty we are, and containing every tiny imaginable tool or part or bolt or screw or nail or hook or hinge, all jumbled up together, all desperately needing a meticulous, fiddly sorting and organizing and labeling, is horrendous.  “I’m taking a walk!”

“Well, good,” says the second farmer, mildly, nodding.  “I’ll just keep working here.”

The first farmer stomps out, swadddled in winter coats, hats, scarves, mittens.  She stomps through the snow, up the hill.  She stomps through the hayfield. 

Who cares if it’s twenty degrees out?  It’s invigorating!  It’s outside!  It’s big and open!  There is lots of room to breathe!  And you have to move or you’ll freeze!

Every tiny detail of insideness, the sitting, the thinking, oh the wool shirts, oh the broken tools, oh all those worthy fiddly greeny winter-farmer sustainable projects, all gradually dissipate as I stomp and swing my arms.

At the very top of the hill, I pause briefly, puffing a little.  From here I see everything: the house, barn, greenhouses; the two black horses and the two brown horses finishing up their hay lunch; the gardens and fields, covered with snow. 

Then there is the valley where the village lies, the village tucked in so that we can’t quite see it.  Next is the valley where the Connecticut River runs, the river also tucked into the folds.  I’d sure like to be able to see that wide old river, but at least the cars on the highway make a pretty flash on this no-trees-on-the-leaves sunny day.   

And then there are the wooded hills, the mountains, all the way to Vermont.  And then there is the sky, all the way to everywhere. 

This is good, thinks the farmer.  This is big, and I need some big.  In fact, this is the biggest, worthiest, greenest, most sustainable project of all, right here in front of me: all this sky, all this land, all this human and animal and plant and element activity, all these realms we might know and see and understand, and all the realms we don’t.

I breathe it in, knowing that what I recognize here is only a tiny bit of the whole world and all its big life.  Tiny, but good.  Tiny, but worthy.  And then I go back down the hill, feeling good, feeling big, back to my fields, to my horses, to my house, to my fellow farmer, and yes, to our tiny, worthy, greeny projects.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 20 - Feb 26, 201

Winter's Farming Fire

 

 

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On our vegetable farm, we use both organic and biodynamic methods.  Most people are familiar with organic practices, but biodynamics is a little more mysterious.

The word itself has a lot of pep in it: bio, meaning life or living organism, and dynamics, which suggests motion, change, activity, progress, vigor, energy.  It’s enough to make a farmer want to leap up off the couch and start plowing and planting. 

Well, almost.  Because it’s January, when everything goes inside, including the farmers.  We are in our house more this month than any other time of the year, in our house looking out:  oh that restful January snow!  so soothing!  so harmonious!  so completely covering everything we didn’t quite finish out there!

We are more inside ourselves too, in January, inside our minds: thinking, planning, reviewing the last season and imagining the next one.  We are studying seed catalogs, inventorying seeds and supplies, making seed orders. 

We are also, we hope, storing up mental and spiritual energies that will sustain us next season.  We are concentrating our forces, internally, in the same way that the earth concentrates its forces this time of year. 

One of the beautiful and sustaining images that comes out of biodynamic thought is this notion that the earth is most alive during the cold season here.  All the energies that are expanding, burgeoning, growing, shifting, blooming, fruiting in summer are now drawn into the core of the earth.  All that incredible vigor is in the ground now, right under our feet.  Things are happening down there! 

I love that idea of the concentrated force, the fire of the seed, the earth, that intensity and purpose renewing itself yearly.  And I love that the biodynamic farming that we do here is not just a way to make a living, but a commitment to life, physical, mental, spiritual. 

Biodynamic agriculture is both a practical and a philosophical approach to farming, with the mission to revitalize the soil and to renew an understanding of the spiritual task of farming.  Rudolf Steiner, Austrian thinker and activist, developed biodynamics, as well as founding the Waldorf School movement and working in medicine, economics, social and cultural life, among other spheres.

Steiner was originally approached by farmers in the 1920s in Europe, farmers who were asking his suggestions for an agriculture that was losing its vitality, in its plant, animal, and soil life, primarily due to the overuse of chemicals.  Steiner responded with a series of lectures that grew into biodynamic agriculture, practiced worldwide now for over ninety years. 

Biodynamic farmers see the farm itself as a living organism, and use herbal and mineral remedies to help compost work efficiently, enliven the soil, and maintain the farm=s optimum health.  This in turn provides for healthy plants and healthy food, which can nourish both the physical and spiritual lives of those who eat it.

Biodynamics also incorporates organic farming principles, as well as recognizing that the rhythmic cycles of the farm have a connection to the larger cosmic forces, such as cycles of the stars, sun, moon, and other planets.  This is green, sustainable farming at its most ambitious!

It can be heady stuff, imagining our little New Hampshire hill farm as part of the spiritual renewal of agriculture and the world.  But what better way for a farmer to inspire his or herself than to believe that the very vegetables matter, that they make a difference in and to the world? 

And what better time of year to do it in, when the fire is strong in the earth, and the earth is covered in snow, so that the winter farmers don’t have to tend it?  There is only the internal fire to fan now, and, of course, the fire in the wood stove.  And gosh, it’s cozy there, cozy and conducive to the dream of spiritual farming . . .

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 23 – Jan 29, 2013