Butter

Today we made butter.

                While the day from 8-5 is filled with the standard variety of farm work (today: harvesting garlic scapes and cabbage, remay rollup, and five hours of weeding carrots), the time thereafter varies more. My basic pattern is shower, food, and books. Food often involves cooking; reading often becomes derailed with random tasks or conversation. Over the past couple days, inspired by the sudden appearance of a rickety and twice-melted immersion blender, as well as an overabundance of ageing milk, we have made butter. (I also executed a highly successful horchata experiment).

                Reba, our farm mother extraordinaire, walked us through the remarkably simple process. First, we skimmed the cream off all the jars of ageing milk in the fridge. These date back to the 16^th- just under a week ago. Raw milk seems to stay unambiguously fresh for about a week. At that point, the cream is fairly separated on the top, and the milk smells a bit sour. It’s still safe to drink I imagine, but given the effectively unlimited supply of milk in our fridge (six or seven 1.5 liter mason jars at any given point), we usually toss the older ones to the pigs. Farmer Bill is looking to improve the cow barn to meet standards necessary for milk sale (primarily a poured cement floor), but in the meantime we’re saddled with more than we can possibly ever use. 

                The skimmed cream is left out for an hour or so to warm up a bit. Then we poured it into a larger mason jar dimensioned perfectly for the immersion blender. Like when making whipped cream, we blended the cream constantly until suddenly a portion of it coalesced into a fluffy mass. The cool thing is that while a portion of it becomes butter, a fixed fraction of it becomes buttermilk. Continuing to mix won’t change the fraction of butter to buttermilk that results from mixing the cream.

                We poured the buttermilk into a smaller jar (pancakes tomorrow?), and transferred the butter to a bigger bowl. To remove any remaining buttermilk from the butter, we sort of kneaded it with a butter pat, also adding cold water to “wash” out as much buttermilk as possible – this helps the butter keep longer.  Then we added a little bit of salt and put the butter in a little Tupperware.

                Despite my lack of any specific love for butter, I found this process really pretty cool. Butter is the simplest thing, but somehow exotically rural inasmuch as people generally have any sense of how to make it. Because realistically, why do people need to know how butter is made? However unnecessary, though, it’s a small thing that makes the world feel a bit more coherent.

Chicken Slaughter

Farmer Bill explains the necessity of cutting both arteries in the neck

 Today was chicken killing day. Months ago the farm bought 24 ‘meat birds’ – pretty, male, typical-looking chickens. Lately they have been starting to try to crow, signaling their maturity. A delay to the slaughter would risk fights among the proudly matured males.

Given my delicate sensibilites and vegetarian leanings (in myth, if not truth), I was spared participation by the need for a volunteer to deliver CSA shares into town instead of slaughtering. I was able to stick around long enough, however, to watch the first couple rounds and take pictures.

First is the capture of the chickens from their “chicken-tractor”, a coop partially shaded with a tarp that is dragged around the pasture for benefit both of chicken and soil. The chicken is grabbed by its feet, loudly protesting but resisting little otherwise.

Then the beheading- the chicken is stuffed into an open cone, with its head and neck pulled through the bottom. The same little serrated knife we use to harvest lettuce and pea shoots is all that’s required to cut through the neck (the knife is nearly identical to those I have used yearly to carve pumpkins for Halloween). True to reputation, both the chicken’s head and body continue moving after beheading for at least a few seconds.

Chicken head bemoans its fate

The plucking begins with a dunk in hot water- something like 150˚, for 20 seconds or so. This allows for easy plucking, which renders the bird recognizably edible. There is still the disembowelment process, though, which is possibly the most gruesome. After cutting off the neck/feet, the internal gutting starts. Starting with the anus, you carefully cut around and pull everything out the back. The intestines, spleen, liver, heart, and esophagus are all visible. This part looks tricky; the inexperienced risk unappetizing splats and glops.

So that’s chicken-killing. Reportedly not as difficult to stomach as it seems. I’m not sure- maybe I would have been up for it? In consolation for my potential disappointment, Farmer Bill promises ominously “there will be more death”. Next time?

The Why

      The only thing I did during my 36 hours home between college and farming besides pack (and unwittingly attend the GHS Senior Play) was meet my high school librarian and English teacher for tea. In a perhaps predictable transition, we are now theoretically on first-name terms. Although our relationship remains significantly that of teacher-student, the lines have blurred significantly.

      Conversation began with my impending departure, and the requisite WHY explanation. Especially now that I’m here on the farm, reclining on a decrepit couch and sipping fresh cow’s milk, any further justifications for farming seem unnecessary (why on earth is everyone not doing this?). However, at least at UChicago, explanations are inevitably in order. I’ve had this conversation over the past weeks with everyone from a 96-year-old rabbi to my department chair to a range of friends’ parents and miscellaneous museum acquaintances, all seizing on the perennial question posed to all pending graduates: what’s next?

      When possible, I opt for ambiguity. “What are you doing after graduation?” “I’ll be working on a farm.” Although improbable, it’s possible that my interlocutor could take the explanation at face value and assume that my initial employment reflects my long-term career plan, as with many graduates; someone interning at a law firm will become a lawyer, someone apprenticing on a farm will become a farmer.

      More frequently, a further explanation is prompted and I give my piece about future possibilities for the Peace Corps or agricultural policy. Realistically and initially, this explanation was the most accurate. Friends who witnessed me apply broadly and unsuccessfully to a range of air-conditioned-health-insured jobs knew that I came to farming in part because of the absence of other palatable options. And in that sense, a farming stint had to fit into some sort of trajectory aimed somewhere.

      In other cases, still, I would try to pass farming off as a year off/summer camp/vacation sort of situation. “Having spent all this time with my nose in books, I’d like to get my hands in some dirt.” I primarily found myself doing this when, despite my convictions otherwise, I felt prodded to be impressive or pressured to simplify. If someone was confused or unimpressed by the virtues of farm work, it was easier to plant the impression that I was simply “taking a break,” with the ultimate intention of realigning myself to a path toward bigger and brighter things.  

      Interestingly, though, this decoy reason has increasingly rung the most true. Tired or flustered or possibly just thoroughly done with the question, I sputtered to my former teachers a sloppy amalgamation of my usual reasons. My English teacher, in one of her turns of oblique wisdom, responded by telling how horses, when injured, are often sent out to pasture for long periods of time. It turns out that a drastic change to manner of activity heals injuries better than complete incapacitation.

      When I rushed here almost directly from Chicago, maybe it was not related to any requisite long-term scheming, but instead some other murkier and more fundamental necessity. Not entirely maimed, per se, I have still become incredibly lopsided in terms of daily energetic output, and am in severe need of a reprieve from libraries/ideas/papers/people/careers/table manners/business casual dress codes/et cetera, and am long due for some pasturing.

      Now every day I wear cut-off shorts, a tie-dyed undershirt and sports bra, and rubber boots, bend over in the sun and sweat while becoming coated from head to toe in a variety of schmutz, and blissfully take an outdoor shower followed by a dinner haphazardly thrown together almost exclusively from farm-grown ingredients. I can think of several ways to problematize this dreamy glorification of farm life, but for the time begin it has exceedingly therapeutic effects.

The Where and What

(the Why to follow)

       I have moved to Hatchet Cove Farm, a small-scale organic vegetable farm located in Warren, Maine. I’ll be working here for the next five or six months as an apprentice. I arrived yesterday with Mom, who stayed long enough to observe in horror the composting toilet (dubbed “Astrotoilet” for its likeness to sputnik) and the muddy wooded path toward my cabin

      Shortly thereafter Mom left, and I became acquainted with the other apprentices. We are an ambiguously intentioned group- variously freed from school obligations and seeking rusticity in some form, but not obviously with a farming future in mind. There are five apprentices staying through the season, and two WWOOFers moving on tomorrow.

      Wednesday means group meal, and the WWOOFers and other visitors mean a big crowd. The seven apprentices, farmers Bill and Reba, their two children, a visiting cousin, and another farmer friend fit around two tables in the farm kitchen. On the table were several enormous bowls filled with hot kale/bean/corn salad, a sort of hash of cauliflower/zucchini/tomato/cumin, fresh mesclun salad with dressing, corn bread, crumbly cheese, baked chicken. Emily, the cousin, had been cooking for the better part of the day exclusively from farm ingredients, save the flour in the corn bread and the oil/spices. She divided her attention between a finicky ice cream maker and a pot of strawberry/rhubarb compote for dessert. The windows were open, Bob Dylan playing on a radio, and Reba walked in with a gallon jug of local beer.

       This morning at seven I trekked from my cabin to the “L”, an appendage to the main house where the kitchen/common area and two apprentice bedrooms are located. I haphazardly cooked rolled oats in cow’s milk and went outside to see about chores. The farm day began and saw through a predictable series of tasks: harvesting of various greens, washing and counting, extended lunch, strangely idyllic weeding, deliveries to nearby natural foods stores, and finally a lesson in cow-milking. Immensely pleased with the work, weather, and the pace of farming camaraderie, and completely pooped, I opted for an outdoor shower rather that joining Reba for her roller derby practice. (Roller derby!)

      I didn’t fall in the compost toilet, I made it to my cabin with the help of a headlamp, milked a cow, and consumed the last of a cantankerous rooster for dinner.  Farm life is agreeable.