She Will be Humbled
Recently I have noticed an increasing amount of farm-related business workshops. These sound wonderful and seem to include a coverage of the basic necessities to operate any small business these days: finances, staffing, and (importantly) social media presence. For the fair price of just “xxxx$$” YOU can learn how to follow YOUR DREAMS! In just two short days, this in-depth seminar will give you all the tools needed to turn your goals into a business (jazz hands)!
I love it. It’s optimism in it’s purest form. And probably it’s got a solid dose of helpful information included as well. Probably! Probably. Maybe.
Depends on the business.
Over the years, and increasingly, I’ve come to believe that farmstead dairy production fits into no box, no category, no true sector. Certainly the work cannot be adequately quantified, a topic which I’ve probably covered to some extent in every single post of the previous 3 years. Now more than ever, the deeper I wade into these murky waters, I begin to feel more isolated from the larger, more conventional world of agri-business, and realize I’m out here treading water with a small group, many of us flailing, some of us succeeding. Most of us just trying to keep these threadbare remnants of our original dreams intact.
This morning, after I photographed a particularly gruesome pile of muck mysteriously expelled from a goat 3 days post-kidding, sent it to my dairy sister Rachael of Lost Peacock Creamery, she responded “Our cheese is too damn cheap.” Then sent me a similar pile from her own barn which was just recently battered with historic snow under which she had to deliver a historic number of babies.
It is probably a bad time to be writing publicly when I’m so deeply bruised, terrified, exhausted, uninspired. Or maybe it’s exactly when I should be the most open about what this work actually entails. Perhaps this would be a more helpful seminar for a prospective small dairy owner to attend which I will title Farmstead Dairy: You Will be Humbled.
How much would you pay to take that class?
We put Patsy to sleep today which is a euphemism, actually – we killed her. That’s the first thing I’d talk about in my dairy seminar. The things most of us don’t know about food production could fill an entire grocery store, not with the saccharine flavored, wax coated, plastic wrapped fairy tales that normally stock the shelves- but with the stories of thousands of farmers just like me, foregoing a Sunday afternoon with the family to fall in a puddle beside the remnants of a week’s worth of triage, realizing these lives are in her hands, playing the part of God for the sake of some fresh milk, some fresh cheese, hopefully enough profit someday to justify the entire operation.
I was the person sending emails of introduction a few short years ago, asking dairy farmers to teach me all they know! Because I was so excited! And so in love with the process and the beauty! Feeling disheartened when I was lucky enough to get a response that was usually curt (at best) but angry/frustrated/annoyed most of the time. I am trying so hard not to be “that guy” these days when I receive the same wide-eyed notes from prospective farmers. I am trying hard not to tell you to stop NOW, turn around, take a road more traveled. But I won’t do that, I won’t say that, I will not try to discourage anyone else. This is a journey you must love enough to pursue, be strong-willed enough to continue, be brave enough to endure. I do not know how these experiences will sit with others, can you digest them any better than me? Will you ever learn to juggle the birth, the death, the milking, the making, the packaging, the marketing, the storytelling, the birth the death the…well you get it.
What I do know for sure is that you will be humbled.
Rachael is right, the cheese is too damn cheap. Most of the food in this god forsaken American food system is too cheap, for that matter. But a thorough investigation of the economic reverberations of our devaluation of nutrition and humane food production isn’t the purpose here. The purpose is to thank you if you’ve read this far, to consider exactly what you feel merits your support, understand that all of us in this isolated community are offering our goods not as a means to wealth (ha!) but as means to support our love for the animals we live beside/for/with.
There is beauty in this work, beauty powerful enough to guide me through these treacherous decisions and dark days. I will see it again, soon. I hope. (I hope).
Until then, I am prostrate at the feet of the dairy altar, looking for signs, trying to remember the reasons – working to be devout – so completely humbled by the work.
This is a picture of my daughter who I have not seen for days so I could focus on saving a life which I ultimately decided to end. In our 2 hours together today she witnessed her mama slumped and crying, was given a warm sticky bottle, asked to feed the babies Patsy left behind. It’s a circle, it’s a cycle, it’s maybe not a life I wish for her but one that perhaps she will choose for herself.
She will be humbled.
