We buy our goat’s hay from a local grass farmer down along the valley. This year it’s wrapped haylage—the season was too wet to make hay. Hay needs good drying conditions and this summer rained from late June and didn’t stop.
Our hay guy is an astute, respectable, late middle aged man, with a keen interest in current affairs and a sharp intellect. He sees through all the shit and tells it as he sees it, and I like that. He’s been growing grass on his flat, fertile land along the river for decades. He keeps shiny, prize-winning show ponies, stallions with crested necks and flared nostrils that he breeds only to his own, flashy, dish faced mares, and rears the finest looking calves on the cleanest straw beds I ever did see. He only buys the best calves, he tells us, but I’m more impressed with the conditions of their keep, the contentedness of his animals always munching happily on liberal heaps of sweet, fresh silage, breath steaming from their nostrils in the crisp November air. He’s not a money-rich man, and he works hard. That’s just how good his land and his grass are. That’s the diligent care and pride he takes in his land and livestock. And more than that, it’s the decades of learning what works on his land, for his farm.
We always stop for a chat—our regular trips into the valley to buy our goats’ hay are a morning’s outing. We load our hay, hand him our cash that’s never checked but trustingly folded into a pocket with a promise he’ll replace any bad bales, because you don’t know what you’re getting in a wrapped bale until you unwrap it and there’s almost certainly going to be a bad one or two in a batch, and then he launches into politics.
He tells us stories of old ways and older folks of the locality. Last week he told us of an older farmer he knows of eighty-seven years farming in this valley his whole life, whose prudence was always to store enough winter forage to last until the first of May. Indeed, we still do. You just never know what winter might throw at you, or how long it might hold its wet and icy grip into spring. I compliment the quality of his haylage, considering the difficulties of the season. It could’ve had another day to dry, he counters, but it’s been a bad year and it could be a long winter, a hard one for a lot of folk, and assures us he won’t see us stuck, whatever we need. He’s an honest man, of real, no bullshit, old school integrity, and I like that.
Somehow the conversation moves seamlessly on from the weather to the plight of farmers and country folks living close to the land and close to the bone being dictated to by technocrats flown in private jets to their conferences on how the rest of us should live, how we should farm and what we should eat. A conversation I am certain is echoed on small farms and in rural communities around the country.
Resistance is imperative, we agreed. Let them have their bugs and beans, we’ll keep our grass raised beef and hand dug spuds, look out for ourselves and each other, take care of the people around us, and live by our own conscience. Build strong community. Resistance is resilience.
In A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth, author, social scientist and farmer Chris Smaje says:
“Small scale farming has persisted to the present often in hostile policy environments. If political institutions and scientific research were devoted to actively supporting it, there’s a good chance it could produce higher returns per acre than existing forms of capitalist farming (in fact, sometimes it already does), while producing copious low-carbon, labour-intensive employment…”
and
“…the most realistic and promising future for humanity given the present historical moment is one in which [we] turn to small-scale farming for self-provisioning and mostly local marketing.”[1]
I was given a huge compliment a little while back by someone I greatly admire, someone whose drive and commitment to her principles motivates and inspires me. She said (I’m paraphrasing but it went something like), “Carly, you have just become my new go-to. When someone says, yes but… , instead of, well so-and-so can and she lives in Alaska… now it will be, well Carly can do it and she’s a shepherdess who lives in a hut! Thanks for the upgrade!”
This was in reference to our local food challenge, in which my husband and I pledged to eat exclusively of foods grown from within a thirty-five mile radius of our farm, for one year. We’re about six months in. Every weekend, we take a drive down into the valley to get our butter, eggs, cheese and honey from local dairy farm shops, and potatoes from a farm stand en route. It’s a morning spent every week making and maintaining connections with our locality while sourcing our sustenance from local soils (community resilience and local economy aside, there are untold benefits to our health and physical resilience by eating from local soil and sunlight). We make it a break from farm and work, bring the dogs out for a spin and maybe a swim in the river, and treat ourselves to a coffee from the buffalo dairy in the valley. We don’t drink or party—a good coffee to go and a romp with the dogs on a Saturday morning does it for us. We buy beef and veg from our local butchers’ shops who are more than happy to tell us exactly where everything they sell was grown or raised, and by whom. Occasionally we make it to the farmer’s market where we can get delicacies like mushrooms or courgettes grown by small scale local producers to break up our monotonous veg staples of carrots, onions and turnips. We eat simply. What we can’t get from local soils, we don’t get.
It would probably be more of a challenge if we hadn’t already been eating and shopping predominantly this way for years. It’s just how we live. But we didn’t always, and I get that for a lot of people our lifestyle and adherence to eating locally may seem extreme. But I also sense that a local, small farm future is inevitable, it’s what people want, and part of our rationale for going all in on the challenge is to prove that it can be done.
It’s not easy. It takes time and effort to get out there to find and make connections. After we moved onto our land and into a new locality last year, we had to start over finding local growers and suppliers of everything from our goat’s hay to our firewood. We knew no-one. We talked to our new neighbours and asked them for connections, we called to the local sawmill over the hill for our building timbers, we drove around looking for farm stands to buy spuds and whatever other goods were on offer, we rang phone numbers painted on roadside signs for hay and firewood. And we made connections like our hay guy above who won’t see us stuck through a tough winter, and the beekeeper in the village who gifts us the most incredible honey I’ve ever tasted and gave us a day on a digger in return for an old, iron cauldron he saw and liked in our yard. When the dairy shop ran out of butter the dear old lady on duty gave it to us from her own kitchen.
It would be a lot easier to pick up our groceries from Aldi or SuperValu without a thought as to where it comes from, especially given we live without power, plumbing or refrigeration and our freezers full of our own meat are plugged in miles away—convenience is a slippery slope. But then we wouldn’t have made the connections we have, we wouldn’t have the safety net of a new community, and who would I be to preach for a localised food system?
“Decentralising our food supply is not a nice little label slapped on an apple that says ‘local’. Decentralising our food supply is connecting and nourishing, yes, but it’s also survival. If we do not do what must be done to encourage and support our small, local farmers now, there will be no small, local farmers. Look what’s happening to farmers in the Netherlands and other parts of the world.” Tara Couture[2].
The same is happening to small farmers here. Ours is still a strong, small farm culture, but our farmers are struggling. If we are to keep our rural communities alive, the time to support our local, small farmers, in whatever ways we can afford, is now.
We have ordered our Christmas turkey this year from Tim, like we always do. We eat no other turkey. Tim’s free range, bronze turkeys are reared outdoors on his organically certified small farm. They’re three times the price of a cheap supermarket turkey, and rightly so—it is not humanely or healthily possible to raise a turkey for the price our big brand supermarkets are selling them for. Our turkey is expensive, as it should be, the price of Tim’s bird reflects the actual cost of raising it, and we stretch for it. We don’t buy each other expensive gifts at Christmas—we invest in good food and knowing the hands that grew it. Our turkey will feed us for days, her liver will be pâté and her bones will be broth and there will be absolutely no waste, because to waste a mere morsel of such a gift that we have stretched for, that comes with a story of local hands and gratitude, would be a crime. We buy our turkey live, and then Tim is kind enough to kill it and give it to us oven ready—a shady exchange of cash and contraband at the back of the Fairfield. We’ll be our own judge of Tim’s hygiene standards, knowing our turkey was swiftly and freshly processed on the small, organic farm she was reared on by the hands that raised and fed her. Knowing Tim has a reputation to maintain, an honour to keep, and wants our business next year. Word would soon get around if Tim’s turkeys weren’t fresh and clean.
“Resilience comes more easily in close communities… Resilience isn’t just an individual trait or attitude, but the emergent property of a wider social fabric in which real people take care of other real people.” Peco and Ruth Gaskovski[3].
We get there by putting in the effort. By seeking out and supporting our local small farmers and producers with our cash. By stopping to chat. You don’t have to live in a farming community—start with butcher shops and farmer’s markets. And you don’t have to have money to burn—learn to cook cheap cuts, learn what grows seasonally and in abundance in your area. Talk to the farmers selling their produce who are always eager to meet new customers and talk about their produce. Meet people. Make it a social outing! Give the people who are growing your food your time, effort and cash, and they will reciprocate with gifts of abundance and the warmth and gratitude of community. Resist the convenience and ease of the shiny packaged supermarket lines. Resist the corporate agenda to keep us separated and dependent on easily controlled external trade for our basic sustenance. That is how you build resilient, local communities.
References:
[1] A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje.
[2] decentralize the centralized to realize the real lies, Tara Couture, Slowdown Farmstead.
[3] Pandora’s Devices: Managing the Miseries of the Machine, Peco and Ruth Gaskovski.
The link for the third quote from Peco and Ruth Gaskovski that went out in the email is wrong (my bad), I have updated the link here. This is the correct link to read their article https://pilgrimsinthemachine.substack.com/p/pandoras-devices-managing-the-miseries
Right on! Whether we farm or not, we all need to get to know our local farmers and support them. Keeping these farms going is an investment in a sustainable future of wholesome food. And even though world politics tries to convince us that raising meat is bad for the environment and that eating meat is bad for us...(both factually incorrect) we need to unite and speak against this propaganda. As I age, I see the importance of collagen for my joints, so I save bones for bone broth. I frequent my local Amish farm for locally raised and butchered meat. As well as fresh veggies. Poor diets is the root cause for most chronic illnesses and I mean to stay off the pharmaceuticals. Thanks Carly...your journey is inspiring!