A Stranger in a Strange Land

Recently for work I attended a Veteran Farmers’ Conference in Boone, NC. I have long since realized that Asheville is a strange land, but Boone is not far behind. I will say something for the veterans in attendance–you could tell they had been trained extensively in the practice of self-control. Me, not so much. The only thing stopping me, a non-veteran, from storming the stage and wresting away the microphone–to put all of us out of our misery–was the fear that I would lose a fight to a pacifist. 

In the speaker’s defense, I don’t think she had the self-awareness to realize how poorly the presentation was coming off. The veterans were too polite. They just sat there, eyes diverted, hoping it would end soon. Eventually, she did end her hour-long treatise, which was supposed to be about improving farmers’ mental health, a worthy topic, given suicide and depression among farmers, especially veteran farmers, are high compared to other vocations.

But the talk meandered from Australia where the young woman, who was a new age psychological practitioner of some sort, spent time learning from the Aborigines, to Europe where she took a pilgrimage to Copenhagen, to Connecticut where she spent years at Yale studying mental health treatment, focusing on eastern philosophies. She said we needed to “decolonize” our mental health system and avoid “toxic masculinity” and live in tune with our “chakras” and that most mental health ailments arise from imbalances in gut health, for which she had a medicinal herb that could help with every possible affliction. She talked about how she was a vegetarian for ten-years, until her body revolted, at which point she suddenly realized that eating meat “aligned spiritually” with her development as a human being. At the end, she asked if anyone had questions, and if they did, nobody dared ask one for fear of prolonging our suffering. For me, the only question left unasked was how she could afford to travel the world and then attend Yale.

But while she was speaking, I was also thinking about the dichotomy playing out. Here was a young woman, white, likely of considerable privilege and obviously highly educated, bemoaning the very privilege from which she has benefited. I suspect many of these veterans she was talking to had come from much humbler backgrounds and would have probably loved to trade places with her–at least in the sense that when they had traveled the world, they risked being shot at or blown up. I talked to one young man who had spent four years as an infantryman in the Army, much of it in Afghanistan. He didn’t get into details but said he still struggles with PTSD from an ambush on his unit. He said that he was one of the lucky ones. 

Lucky, I guess, is a relative term. I think we’re all lucky to live in the United States, where men and women sacrifice their own lives, limbs, and mental health, so the rest of us can tune up our chakras and work on our development as human beings. The young woman meant well and had the audience been a typical Boone hipster audience, the presentation likely would have been received with much adulation. I guess what has struck me so much on my sojourns in the Asheville and Boone areas is the irony of it all, that the hipsters who are so vociferously pushing diversity and inclusion are mostly a non-diverse group, white and privileged, and that a woman lamenting toxic masculinity to a room full of veterans is free to do so because many of her listeners had been trained to exhibit behaviors associated with toxic masculinity, not only for their own survival on the battlefield, but for our survival as a free and democratic nation.

photography of usa flag
Thank you, Veterans!

The White Diaper Wipe of Surrender

As my wife and I navigate through the turbulent waters of raising a toddler, I’m quaking at the thought of landing on Thomas’s two-year-old shores. TII Day (Terrible Two Day) is T-minus twenty days and counting, and my intel suggests that Thomas is preparing to mount a stout defense against his parents’ future requests. He’s already mastered the word “no” and can fire it off in rapid succession, and currently he is working on arming himself with more stinging phrases like, “Go away, Deddy” and “Go away, Mommy.” I’ll be honest, the first time he said “Go away, Deddy,” felt like a metaphorical gut shot. 

And his tantrums are only growing in size and scope. If you notice a mushroom cloud forming over the horizon, you can take hope in the possibility that it may not be Putin ushering the end of the world, but merely my toddler melting down. Recently, he had a meltdown in one of the few places on earth where being quiet is strictly enforced by penalty of stern looks and shushes, the library.  

On the day of the implosion, I had the bright idea that I would take the day off, and Thomas and I would enjoy a fun-filled trip to the park and library, with the two destinations connected by a slight detour through a McDonald’s drive-thru for a happy meal. In Thomas’s defense, this was probably too demanding an itinerary, given he was on the mend from a stomach bug. In fact, I should have known something was up when Thomas actually grew tired, yes, tired after a mere hour of play on the playground. Still, this doesn’t absolve the library from some guilt–what right-minded public administrator would dare place a train set in the vicinity of toddler books? For one thing, the toddler will automatically be attracted to trains over boring ole books. Furthermore, after being informed the train set is government property and not, in his words, “my train,” the toddler will then proceed to audition for the starring role in a horror movie by screaming loud enough to rattle the innermost pages of the densest and dustiest tomes. 

And sadly, that was not the worst of it. As I extracted Thomas from the otherwise calm and peaceful sanctum of books, with many erudite patrons glaring in my general direction, I no sooner made it out the door before Thomas, as if testing the payload capacity of a toddler’s gastrointestinal system, proceeded to projectile vomit chicken McNuggets all over my personage. The only mercy was we were at least outside the library before Thomas unleashed the contents of his stomach. Still, at that moment, I think I would have gladly waved the white diaper wipe of surrender had I not been too busy wiping my face with it.

Animal Farm, more like Make-Believe Farm.

The following book review first appeared on Goodreads, a social media platform for voracious–and novice–readers alike.

Animal Farm by George Orwell.

TheMisfitFarmer rated this book three out of five stars.

Shelves: agriculture

After an slightly embarrassing incident of misidentifying a sheered sheep for a goat, I took my neighboring farmer’s advice to heart and began a thorough study of animal husbandry, starting with old and forgotten books (#freeonKindle) to gain a solid foundation of practical farm know-how. That’s how I ran across this slim volume with such a direct and promising title.

I had high hopes for this work, but recommend it only for the most novice of farmers as it imparts merely basic farming advice–and relies on a distracting (and silly if you ask me) depiction of talking farm animals to do so. For instance, in the first few pages, the pigs get together and decree, “No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade.” As you can see, that’s pretty much stating the obvious when it comes to farming advice, though I imagine some oddballs might be tempted to dress chickens in baby clothes when no one’s around. 

The major flaw in Mr. Orwell’s farming guide is obvious, namely that it lacks any instruction on fence building, which is a strange oversight for a book focused entirely on raising livestock.

Still, a few gems of animal husbandry are found scattered in this work, which I might as well tell you so you don’t waste time reading all the extraneous bits: 1) Never let animals hold secret meetings in the barn 2) Never let pigs attain positions of leadership 3) Names of farm animals can be self-fulling, so it’s best to stick to names like Bacon and Porkchop and avoid those of dictators like Napoleon. 

For a more in-depth and nuanced look at livestock management, I highly recommend E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.

(If you’re on Goodreads, friend me to follow my agricultural reading progress.)

How to Achieve Pet Status on a Hobby Farm

Raising bottle dairy steers is not for the faint of heart. As purchasable animals, they rival only goldfish in price and ability to keel over. I’ve seen healthy day-old Jersey calves sell for less than five dollars at the sale barn. I’ve never seen a day-old Jersey bring more than fifty dollars, which is top of the market and still a reasonable value, considering some goldfish can sell for hundreds of dollars per piece. I guess koi is good eating, probably best fried with hushpuppies.

three bottle calves in a barn stall.

Dairy breeds, however, produce a bony carcass, so most of the bigtime cattlemen don’t want anything to do with a Holstein steer, and they wouldn’t be caught dead with a puny Jersey steer on their farm. “There is more meat on a big deer,” they might say. These days cattlemen just want big beefy angus cows. This may seem rather discriminatory, but it works out in favor of some dairy steers. Many are destined for hobby farms where they live a life of leisure and get a lot of entertainment out of watching people play veterinarian. I think it’s a well-known fact among dairy steers that the way to achieve pet status on a hobby farm is to get as close to death as possible without dying and then let the farmer nurse them back to health.

We’ve raised a lot of bottle calves over the years. The ones we remember the most are the ones we nearly lost and somehow doctored back to the living. Oftentimes, they’re a little stunted afterwards, which works to their advantage cause they last longer on the farm. My philosophy with raising dairy steers is most of the work is upfront, so even if it takes longer to feed them out, it’s still worth it to recoup the time spent bottle-feeding and doctoring. We grow our own grain and run it through the old hammermill, so we don’t really have a shortage of feed.

Eventually, whenever we take the calves to the sale barn, the handlers always comment on how tame the steers are. “They’re just big pets,” I respond.

Then I walk the catwalk one last time. Though the paycheck is nice, I still hate to see them go.

a group of our steers on moving day.

There’s a New Sheriff in Town

Lowry, my wife’s eighty-four-year-old poppaw, likes shooting from the hip. He’s pretty accurate. From ten-paces, he can nail a wasp mid-flight. He prefers dual-wielding two cans of Raid while clearing the riff-raff out of the barn’s nooks and crannies. Normally, he escapes these shootouts unscathed, but last summer, he took a stinger to his forefinger; it swole up like a corn dog. 

Afterwards, Lowry hung up his Raid cans for good. He said he was “gittin too old for this line of work.” He handed over the peace-keeping duties in the barn to me. His granddeddy once did the same with him. In fact, Lowry said, “I can remember granddeddy reaching up and crushing a nest of red wasps with his bare hand. They don’t make men like that anymore.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I thought. 

To be honest, I’m glad we’ve advanced beyond bare hands for wasp removal. We now have such technological advances as Raid. One of these days Raid will come out with an organic option, so we millennial farmers can feel less guilt about massacring insects with synthetic chemicals–“at least we killed them organically,” we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren.   

Until then, I’m going to keep killing rogue wasps and yellow jackets by conventional means of cypermethrin and prallethrin. I don’t take plesure in killing them–well, usually, I don’t. Last year I got jumped by a vicious gang of yellow-jackets living in an old hay bale. I barely made it out alive, which, to be fair, technically wasn’t the yellow jackets’ fault (it’s not the venom that gets you; it’s jumping from the hay loft). But I felt some vindication when I returned in a bee suit with two full cans of Raid Wasp and Hornet Killer. I doubt Lowry would have worn a bee suit; he would have just moseyed in there, hands dangling from his side, and said, “Let’s dance.”

All this is to say, I saw my first red wasp flying this past weekend when it was nearly 80 degrees. I gave him the business and told him to get out of Dodge, to not come back round these parts, that I didn’t want no trouble. But the rascal drew on me, at which point I promptly turned tail and ran. 

Yep, there’s a new Sheriff in town. 

OLD SHERRIFF
NEW SHERRIFF