Sex and Politics in the Barnyard

       Of all the animals on the farm, cows most easily lend themselves to personification. They are large mammals with relatively complex needs and relationships, and their heads are approximately at human eye level.

       Recently, the intrigue surrounding the cows has been Bill’s ongoing attempts to breed one of them. His priority is to assure that at least one cow is milking next season. With the two currently milking cows running dry in the next few months, this means that one needs to become pregnant this summer.

First, the personalities:

DB doesn't take nonsense from anyone

Boston- the dignified matriarch of the herd. She is old, old (nine or more?), and a retired commercial milking cow. She has lived out her retirement thus far at Hatchet Cove Farm giving birth once and milking since.

            Fluffy – Boston’s son. Once he became too old to milk Boston directly, he was ostracized from the barn to hang out alone on pasture elsewhere on the farm. Somewhat lonely, and useless as a steer, he is set to be ‘beefed’ later this autumn. 

DB (a.k.a. PrettyShiny, or Big Lady. DB stands for Dutch Belted, her breed.) – DB is the current darling of the cows. She was bought in the past couple months, and is huge and beautiful, presumably with years of fertility ahead. Her teats are irregularly sized, and her udder is covered in long hairs. More challenging to milk than Boston, her milk is judged by some to be vastly superior.

Fluffy the loner enjoys pasture

            

           (Nameless) Calf – the adopted son of DB. When the farm purchased DB, the agreement included taking this male calf. Male calves are not really of use to anyone unless you need a bull (to impregnate cows), or want to train an ox (to haul your things around for work or sport). Because of this, calves are sometimes foisted on buyers of more valuable milking cows.

Cookie – the lapsed favorite. She was bought with eventual milking in mind. Bill raised her to be accustomed to people and easy to handle. This summer, she was sent to a neighboring farm where she lived for two months on pasture, with access to bulls who would breed her. In a dramatic fall from her previous stature, she returned not only not pregnant, but entirely unruly and resistant to people. She breaks out of the barnyard to eat tiny spinach, moans ferally, harasses the other cows, and resists approaches by humans. Not only is she not pulling her weight, she is generally a nuisance.

Elton – a bull visiting from another farm, for the goal of impregnating one of the cows. He is however submissive, unskilled, and timid. He has demonstrated his lack of skill in mating, and routinely lets Cookie browbeat him. He is also reportedly afraid of grass (preferring the safety of the concrete barnyard).

       Cookie was the first best candidate for pregnancy. Young and moderately docile, she would release Boston from calf-bearing burdens. With her failure to breed and fiendish conversion, however, no bets remain dependent on her. DB was purchased in order to take the pregnancy mantle. The first time DB went into heat though, was comic and unsuccessful. We would watch the barnyard as the Elton uncertainly circled DB, who would occasionally mount him as if in demonstration. Ultimately, though, Cookie bust in and threw everyone for a loop by taking an interest in DB and repeatedly mounting her, apparently to their mutual delight.

cows enjoy turnip leftovers- DB, Boston, Elton, Cookie

       DB went into heat again this week (unsurprisingly- between Elton and Cookie there was never a substantial chance for pregnancy), and Bill immediately borrowed a ‘proven’ bull (“Grata”) to visit for a couple days. As Bill arranged the trailer containing the bull and the cows within and without the barnyard, excitement among cattle and apprentices was palpable. DB mooed her emotions to him, and he stomped and snorted intimidatingly through the grating. Bill released the bull into the pen we closed the double-gate behind him. While Boston stood aside (and Cookie howled her protests from the pasture), DB and the Grata began to circle one another. Grata’s intermittent efforts at mounting are often undercut by DB’s ceaseless circling, as well as his significantly inferior size. Human observers are lined up along the gate, watching as if at a sporting event. We chatter and spectate, simultaneously cheering on the underdog Grata, and sympathizing with Cookie’s cast-aside sorrows.

       Possibly almost entirely constructed by the observers, this drama nonetheless defines human-cow interactions on the farm. One hand, they are almost entirely our pawns, with their shelter, food, lactation, and reproduction entirely under our control. However, there remains some room for them to exert their own will. We can put a bull and cow in heat into a pen, but if she resists then there won’t be a pregnancy. If it turns out she would rather spend her time in heat mounting other female cows, then no one will get pregnant either. While it’s likelier that we exist on the outermost periphery of their awareness, it’s nice to take credit for and joke about the spread of our permissive and gender-role-undermining culture.

Farm Life: Part II

Sunday pickling project

     Farm life, phase two! : gone is my incessant reading, 8 PM bedtimes, cooking experiments, carefree attitude toward the future, free time. Also, the majority of aches and pains, lack of social life, boredom in the fields. Marked by a trip home and subsequent sororal visit to the farm, a shift has occurred for me in most aspects of the pace and tone of my life here.

     Mostly, the change is caused by concrete differences. First of all, the workload on the farm has increased with the volume of the harvest needing to be done. Squash and cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil really started to thrive, green beans are ready, carrots and potatoes need to be dug. Combined with the departure of two apprentices, the increased workload has taken its toll.

     Additionally, a summer romance has taken up not only a good amount of my free time, but the majority of my spare thought-space as well.

     This decreased extra time, as well as the general sense of busy-ness, has changed my once-productive farm lifestyle. Most alarmingly, I’m scarcely reading a thing anymore. I finished my first books (Omnivore’s Dilemma, Love in the Time of Cholera), and have casually started and quickly discarded another set of books (Gone with the Wind, A Book of Salt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom) purposelessly. If I read, it’s in the form of low attention-span magazine or newspaper articles that either appear in the el (apprentice common space), or on my internet radar.      Correspondingly, I’ve also stopped writing. (Devoted followers of this blog have probably noticed a precipitous drop-off in posted entries.)

     Relatedly, I’ve given up on a lot of cooking endeavors. Initially, I made bread, butter, fritters, pickles, and horchata. Each week’s new harvest meant new things to cook. With my loss of enthusiasm for reading and writing, though, disappeared my will to spend Sundays cooking. Instead, I spend a lot of time daydreaming and eating eggs or raw vegetables.

     Not everything is lethargic waste, though. When the shinyness wore off weeding and harvesting, I slowly started bringing my ipod to listen to during more solitary activities. With this came a flood of excitement for all the podcasts I’ve never before had time to listen to. I’ve also, by necessity, once again taken a serious interest in my future and have begun applying to various internships and jobs.

     Overall I spend less time doing productive things, but I use the time well. As my new pace settles (and my fleeting romance flets) I hope to re-incorporate at least a bit of the farm-life things I did in the beginning of the season. In the meantime, however, the new pace is dizzying, but good.

Real Farmer

Three-year-old CJ is uniquely positioned to arbitrate certain disagreements on the farm. Accustomed to the process of city-fied apprentices showing up on the bus only to be churned out months later as farmers, and unsullied by many societal mores, she has an honest and pure perspective on whether someone has become a “real farmer” yet. One day after a morning of transplanting in the rain and mud, Alex comes inside to CJ who says, “now Alex is a real farmer.”    Amused, her mother prompts her to judge me as well. “Is Faith a real farmer yet?”

“No. Too clean.” I glance at my hands and knees ingrained with dirt and shirt coated in pollen, mud, and leaf mold, and touch my unwashed hair matted under a dirty baseball cap. “Clean?”

Reba interprets that even when dirty, I maintain an aura of cleanliness.

After three months on the farm, it seems I have established merely a “thin veneer” of farmer. Somehow despite the dirt, knowledge of vegetables and farming, and occupation working on a farm, I still don’t entirely pass for a farmer. What is it? My posture? My speech? A short life spent striving toward intelligentsia apparently runs deep.

       For the most part, I’m just amused by this (effortless schmoozing with the well-traveled, well-read, well-cooked suburbanites who constitute a good portion of CSA members). Sometimes, though, it takes on tricky overtones. We have a livestock farmer friend who comes to weekly farm dinners. Cheryl grew up in a farming family, and owns a livestock farm with cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys. Cheryl is tough, serious, and competent: she sees right through me. What did you study in college? What will you do after this season? My answers to these questions yield an incredulous “Why on earth are you farming anyway?”

       Very reasonably, a born-and-bred farmer would have doubts about the farming aspirations of an over-educated recent graduate fixing to head back to the city for a comfortable, health-insured, air-conditioned yuppie career. Sensing this, I have no adequate response to her questions. How do I explain the necessity for a spiritual farm-work cleanse following too many months of intellectual labor? How do I avoid the inevitable implications of luxury in time spent frivolously trying on a lifestyle? My responsibility as a privileged member of the upper-middle class to find happiness in work? Even my class angst itself feels offensive.

       Luckily, this issue has a quickly-approaching expiration date. In all likelihood, by the new year I’ll be setting up in a city somewhere beginning one of the aforementioned career paths, never to play at farmer again. In a smaller possibility, eventually I’ll come back to farming for good. I’m assured that over the course of years, any city person can be entirely transformed. For sure, there will always be a farm child around to tell me if I’ve made it yet.