Summer's End
Summer's End
stags, stinging nettles and the stories we tell, and some recommendations and readings from the archives
The sika stags are screaming summer’s end. The eerily human sound of them fills the hills like some tortured, wandering soul, echoes through the mist at dawn, punctuates the changing season. It is the end of the shepherding year and the beginning of a new one, the reason for the stags’ anguished screaming: breeding season. Well, almost. Our sheep are a bit behind the stags. Our rams are still lazy and fat on the summer’s forage, eyeing the ewes languidly from their ridge where they stretch their rolling bellies and chew their cud with the casual coolness of old players. They’re in no hurry. They know the game. Their season will come around. The ewes will come looking for them, wagging their tails and flashing their eyelashes soon enough.
It’s been a difficult year for us, as I’m sure it has been for many others. But I won’t go there this time. I believe that words have power, especially written words, so I’m not going to bemoan the challenges of changing weather patterns and rising costs, or perpetuate the oft repeated, oft read and oft heard woes on how impossible it has become to make a living as a small farmer. Or tell you about all the farmers we know personally, within our circles, who can no longer afford to run their farms and are culling their animals and leasing out their land to conglomerate dairy farms that grow ever bigger on the whims and subsidies of the export trade. Or the strifes of the small farm-to-table business owners we know who are facing ever tighter restrictions that seem only designed to put the small out of business. No. I won’t go there. Because words have power. The stories we tell ourselves become our stories. And maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist but I also believe that in spite of the challenges and in spite of, or perhaps because of, the indomitable greed of the corporate capitalist market and its drive for intensification and monopolisation, it will all come back around to a more localised, place-based, community-based system. It has to. It’s inevitable because global supply chains are unstable and unsustainable and so is the intensive, fossil-fuelled agriculture required to supply them. And then what else have we got besides our neighbours, community, and the soil beneath our feet? But change is never easy. And it requires action. Last week I wrote about learning to accept what is. There’s a time for graceful acceptance. And there is also a time for personal agency and using all of our grit and steel to forge our own path. A time to resist and reject the prevailing narratives and write our own story.
Speaking with a farmer in the valley last week, he told us that when the nitrate restrictions become impossible to work with, he won’t be giving up his farm. He’ll grow nettles and make his own nitrogen-rich fertiliser from them. I like this guy. We’ve never used nitrates on our farm and I didn’t mention that I think the nitrate restrictions will ultimately lead to a positive outcome—the smaller, organic, localised system I believe we’re headed for—or that we already encourage nettles around our duck pens and manure heaps where they clean up any run-off and then can be cut and fed back to the goats or the soil. But I like his thinking. Let’s all grow nettles.
If you’re on my paid subscriber list and caught the end of my last week’s essay, Two Tales of Faith, you’ll already know this, but for everyone else, I’ll be taking a break from writing on here for the rest of September. We’ve got some big things going on in our home and I will have no time or space to sit or write for a few weeks.
I will leave you for now with some recommendations of other writers I think you might enjoy on here to quench your thirst for words whilst I am away, as well as a couple of older essays from my archive for anyone who may not have seen them yet.
Island Shepherdess — Jo writes about life on a traditional, family-run hill sheep farm on the Isle of Skye, on the west coast of Scotland. I followed Jo on Instagram for years before she came over here and love her sensible, down-to-earth style and the little real life snippets she shares. This piece echoes the sentiment felt across our rural landscapes.
The Fox Holler Almanac — Benjamin Bramble got me with his bio, “I eat well, keep all my other standards low.” Yep, sounds familiar. Brilliant, relatable, and often hilarious essays on the struggles and strifes of the small, independent farmer in increasingly difficult times, and, I sense, a kindred soul with similar thinking on where we fit on the land, as farmers, in community, albeit in a very different context, climate and landscape across the great pond. Here is Benjamin’s latest essay with “lessons from crickets and sunflowers, and questions about scale and independence”.
The Peasantry School Newsletter — Lastly, but certainly not least on my list of weekly must-reads, Adam Wilson writes “Stories about disentangling food and feeding from the market” and he has a way of moving me to tears with every single piece. I can’t put the admiration I have for what this man is doing into words. We all like to bang on about restoring community, localism, neighbourliness. Adam is not just writing about it—he is living it, being it. Truly inspirational. Please check his newsletter out.
From my archive, keeping with today’s theme I’ve opened up this essay I wrote a year and a half ago, on revolution, making a living and the nature of giving.
And back to farming through the seasons, before it disappears behind the paywall in a few days, on the hard decisions to be made at the end of our green season and the close of the shepherding year.
By the time this lands in your inbox I’ll already be off screen and won’t see any comments until I’m back in a few weeks. I’ll be back in October refreshed and renewed with new stories to share.