Dear Readers - Letters From the Country

Can you believe this? A subscriber from Ohio bought something from us that cost five bucks. When he came time to pay us, he sent five dollars all right --- in genuine Confederate money! Shoot, if I’d known he was going to do that, I’d have sent him two of whatever he wanted.

WE’RE STILL STUMPED!

You still have time to name the Fillies. If you want to try your hand, just think up two names, write one or two paragraphs explaining why yours are the most fitting names possible, and send us your entry along with a $10 donation. Entries must be postmarked by March 31st, and we’ll announce the winner in the April Moneychanger.

THINKING AND DOING ARE NOT THE SAME

I have been steady learning that experiencing the agrarian life differs utterly from thinking about it.

PIG KILLING

The pigs from Princess’ first litter, born May 24 of last year, just keep on getting bigger. Since nobody keeps pigs as pets, at least not for long and not in great numbers, sooner or later somebody had to kill them.

So herding us all down the road to reality, Susan appointed Monday, February 26 as E-day for two pigs (and the "E" didn’t stand for E-mail). We selected two of the four in the garden behind the Top. The week before Susan read up on butchering (as if reading anything ever prepared you for the reality), negotiated with the butcher, and made an appointment for us to take them in. The Catch: transported pigs are excited pigs, and the adrenaline in excited pigs toughens the meat. Solution? Kill them where they stand, and transport the carcass to the butcher.

So before 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning, when the sun had just finished winking over the horizon but was still to stingy to warm anybody up, we foregathered by the garden. From somewhere in all our disorganized stuff Susan had fished out a game hoist for butchering. Justin produced a suitably sharp knife and a .22 rifle. The process is in two steps: (1) shoot pig, (2) slit throat. In silence I will pass over who got elected executioner.

The pigs were on one side of the light electric fence, and we were ranged on the other: Johnny Ray Bain in his impossibly clean white duster; Justin in army green and his knit cap (looking like a conscripted Laplander longing for his reindeer), Liberty holding Bedford and wearing pink plastic shoes, Zachariah in camo, and Susan and I. It looked like a lunatic asylum had burst open and spilled inmates all along the side of our garden.

Susan had kept the pigs fasting the day before, and we scattered some corn next to the fence which they greedily attacked. The executioner did his work, and then exploded a flurry of throat cutting and bleeding and wrestling and hanging up. What seemed like a lifetime later we had two pig carcasses in the back of the truck ready to drive to the butcher.

Once we got to the butcher his Amish hands took over, and they were adept. We saw some other hogs while we were there, and I really felt proud of my yard-raised hogs. We had never fed them anything but grain, table scraps, and dehydrated storage food, and had never used any chemicals or antibiotics on them. Certain local acquaintances had sniffed at them, remarking that it was taking an awful long time to feed them up to killing size. Well, I saw a couple of other hogs there, and I was not impressed with the product of feeding them fast in confinement. Instead of a pale pasty color, our hogs had a healthy glow. There was only half as much fat on them as the others, and the carcasses still weighed 190 and 226 lb.

About a week later we went and picked up the meat. The butcher had asked Susan what size pork chops she wanted, and without reflecting she said, "Two inches." For our first home-raised pork feast she pulled out a package of pork chops wrapped in butcher paper. When she unwrapped them, they stood up about the size of your spare tire. Huge. But she patiently grilled them, and I modestly must say, it was some of the best pork I’ve ever eaten.

Let us not wax too philosophical, but also let us not pass this point without remarking on the difference between buying pork chops out of Kroger’s meat cooler and raising your own -- the difference between looking in the eye the butcher who sells the meat and the pig who is the meat. Once you have lived through all that, raised the pigs from newborns, fed them twice daily for months, and killed and slaughtered them yourself, you will never look at another pork chop or slice of bacon quite the same way.

On the other hand, let us not wax too vegetarian or vegan, either. If you need convincing animals have no souls, just hang around at killing time. Our surviving pigs never blinked when the others were removed, they just stepped over to their brother’s corn.

Believe me, all this is a far cry from Kroger.

COW WORKING

Once or twice a year cow working time rolls around. Cows have to be vaccinated and pregnancy checked and little bulls have to be converted to steers. (When our cows calved last year, they gave us five little bulls out of five.)

So we called our longsuffering veterinarian, Dr. Bell, and made an appointment for what promised to be several hours’ work. Now, remember, you can’t work cows until you herd up cows.

At which we are not very good.

Admit it. We are almost as good at herding cows as we are at building and launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Not that we didn’t put a lot of thought and work into it. Rather, there’s always some little thing that trips you up, like cows noticing an escape hatch you didn’t notice.

Because the cows are trained to electric fence, they won’t even walk between two white plastic electric fence posts without wire. Nor will they test an electric fence wire. If it’s there, that’s threat enough for them, so you don’t really have to electrify it. We plugged up the wrong turn on the road with a couple of fence posts, and actually put in posts and strung wire in the driveway and through the barn. The plan required that with a bucket of feed we lure them out of the pasture across the road, turn left out of the drive way, then immediately back right into the drive leading to the barn, through the barn, and into the paddock behind the barn where we could shut them up. From the paddock they could be led a few at a time into the holding pen for the chute, and then through the chute.

Simple. Clean. But not cowproof.

With Dr. Bell scheduled to arrive at 11:30 Susan and Zach got busy early in the morning putting out fence posts while I strung wire. Unfortunately, some unnamed person left the gate to the cow pasture open. And he left the bucket of feed just outside the gate. Not surprisingly, we discovered this about the time we got ready to move the cows. Pilgrim, our 1800 lb. bull had already found the feed, pushed aside the gate, and begun munching contentedly out of the bucket. Behind him worked a moil of anxious cows, all fretting that they were about to miss breakfast. When we spied this situation, we tried to mend it by grabbing the bucket and leading them out the drive.

About that time things started going wrong. Across from the gate was an unfinished wooden fence, mostly uprights but with a few slats. Rather than follow the bucket, the cows all walked across the drive, under the fence, and into the front yard. Remember, now, that cows are not individualists. There is a lead cow, and everybody follows her. Belle, our lead cow, came right behind Pilgrim. Rather than try to explain what happened next, I have just drawn a map. On that map you will find the planned cow trajectory and the realized cow trajectory. One glance at that will show you what went wrong.

In addition, in the field behind the tractor shed we had a cow and a young bull, Hero. When Pilgrim got across from the tractor shed, Hero spied both him and six cows and four calves. This sent him into a fit of bellowing and running up and down the fence on his side of the road. Pilgrim, two cows, and a calf got out in the road and headed for California, in a hurry, with Hero hot on his heels on the other side of the fence, bellowing his head off. Susan and Zach hopped into a car and headed down the road after Pilgrim and his posse while I rode the four-wheeler into the pasture to pull off Hero. Again, you probably won’t want to hear the details of this excursion. It’s enough to say that I got to apologize to everybody after we finally got all the cows safely into the paddock.

Dr. Bell arrived and little by little we got the cows pushed down the chute to him. (I will pass over in silence as too embarrassing for a 54-year old to recount the episode where one of the cow herders got in front of one of the cows in the chute and had to be rescued by Dr. Bell pounding on the cow’s snout. I really did appreciate it, though.)

The results were great. Out of our seven Highland cows, five are pregnant. Two, Dr. Bell said, were within 30 days of delivering. I had him check the Demon Milch Cow, Mollie, too. Even she is pregnant! In addition, he successfully fixed five of our four bulls, and doctored on the horses.

HORSES

Don’t even mention horses. That filly with the star is a little too smart for her own good. Sunday a week ago we came to feed everything and she knocked out the top boards in her stall and jumped into the next stall. Then she started pounding on the gate and knocked the latch off the gate. We’ve been working with the fillies every morning and evening for just a little while, and their abilities and dispositions are improving rapidly.

THE DEMON COW

Molly the Demon Milch Cow has settled down quite a bit. She has some sort of antenna that can tell that when she’s making you mad, so you have to really keep the lid on your patience, and watch her every second.

The milking team consists of Fast Finger Eddie (a.k.a. Johnny Ray Bain), Zachariah, Justin, or Christian. These are the best milkers and the rest of us just get drafted into it when these are absent. It takes at least two, and better, three, to milk her. One to milk, one to stroke along her neck, and one to wrestle her back into place when she bolts.

So Johnny Ray and Justin and Zach were milking a few mornings ago, and made several big mistakes. Do you recall that we have lots of dogs around here? And they follow us to the barn. So Johnny Ray finished milking, and set the pail down outside the milking stall – Mistake Number One. While he went back into the stall, one of the pups stuck his head into the pail and helped himself. Johnny stepped back out just in time to witness his work going down the drain.

He went back in to clean up the stall. Justin was working on the panel that closes off the back of the stall, and Mollie was outside in the paddock. Mistake No. 2: For one brief moment there was a straight line of open apertures – gate to the paddock, panel at back of stall, door to stall. That was all she needed – whoosh! She blew by Johnny Ray, down the drive to the road, and took a left, murmuring something about a hair appointment in Lawrenceburg. Happily Justin and Wright had witnessed the escape attempt and could angle across the field to head her off.

I tell you, I’m losing my taste for milk.

A HEIFER CALF

On Tuesday after the Friday that Dr. Bell had worked the cows I went to feed them and found a new calf, still wet, and this one was a heifer! The picture shows Zach and me holding the calf. Yes, she does look like an Ewok.

The next morning Justin was out harrowing (har-row-ing) the pasture and my grandson Tucker remarked that there were two calves in the pasture. Justin looked closer and saw that, sure enough, there was another little calf that had just been born, this one a bull.

THE CLOVER FUEHRER

You certainly don’t have to live in the city to get yourself all in a knot about work. Last year we spent a lot of money planting red clover and almost none of it sprouted. There’s only a short time window to plant it, from February 10 to March 10. Before you plant it you have to lime the fields, because it won’t germinate on too acid soil (Check! Did that last fall). Then you need to mow and harrow so that the seed doesn’t fall on grass but gets good ground contact. No check. It has rained and rained and since January one thing and another has kept us from getting into the fields with the horses.

Days kept passing without any progress and the Clover Fuehrer – me -- got more and more anxious. Naturally, it did no good whatever. I cannot stop the rain. I cannot make the ground dry any faster than it will. I cannot spread seed any faster than I can spread it. Once it gets on the ground, I cannot make it sprout.

A friend of mine tells me that the "soil is a discipline on your soul." Jean Calvin wrote, "Ignorance of the providence of God is the cause of all impatience." Planting clover or doing any other work, we depend utterly on the providence of God. Under the sky with your feet on the ground, it’s harder to avoid that than sitting in the air conditioning in front of a computer.

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