Aphid and Goliath – An update from the Thompson Small Farm

Jonathan Wright is a Calgary-area farmer and co-founder of one of the city’s first community supported agriculture programs. Jon operates a zero-emission farm called Thompson Small Farm near Carbon, Alberta with his partner Andrea.

This year began as a drought year. This turned around in June, but by then it was too late for the hay crop. Hay in the fields is in terrible shape, and it is selling for over a hundred dollars a bale in some cases, up from a norm of twenty to forty or so. The best looking hay now is in the ditches and on the verges of roads, where the moisture gathers and where the drought resistant bromegrass reigns.

We began cutting some hay from the road verges this month. Our old #9 McCormick-Deering haymower, circa 1948 and rebuilt last year with help from, among others, CSA member Mat Schaeffer, is doing a skookum job when hitched to the girls, Raven and Gwyneth, or alternatively, Raven and Emma. This model was the pinnacle of horse-powered technology, an elegant machine that was the last of its line before being replaced by unsophisticated tractor implements that substituted brute force for excellence of design. Up and down the road we go, laying down the green grass; the “high-gear” scissor-action blade whirring gently, the gearing positioned mostly behind the axle (unlike other models) which, in tandem with my bodyweight in the seat, takes much of the weight off the neck of the horse. The horse machine spreads the grass thinner over a larger swath than the tractor machines, and it dries in one hot day because of this, ready to rake. The verge hay cures a nice bluish colour – blue hay. Two calories back for every one expended, we’re told, in contrast to one back for at least ten expended when a tractor is your power source. (Who said the latter was efficient?!)

We’ve got a nice pile of loose hay started, and we’re hoping to claim more. Last winter our small herd lived on it, and came through well. Ted Andrew of Dunphy sold me a 12’ wide dump rake that we hitch behind the cart. Sebastian, the wwoofer from New Brunswick who falls asleep so suddenly in the truck that he drops anything he may be holding (don’t ask him to drive!), rides on the cart beside me and gives a mighty heave of his strong arms when the rake fills as the horses continue plunging forward, dumping windrow after windrow for later forking. The Clydesdale horse has a longer, more fluid stride than any of the other heavy breeds, and the resulting smart clip can get things done in short order. We are honored to be working in partnership with them.

Normally, only a few of us small aphids do this, as the big chest-beaters mostly have hayland on a scale larger than entire eastern farms. But lo-and-behold, this year most of the good verge-hay around our place got cut just before we were able to claim it. Our new neighbor – (Mighty Joe Young we’ll call him) – whose self-built mountain range masquerading as a house now dominates our eastern horizon so he can overlook his newly purchased 20 square miles plus claimed the grass. He made a few bales of it, and is now letting 90% of it sit and spoil. I gave him a call. The wife, who is friendly enough, asked me what they should do with it. Use it, I more or less told her. “I’ll need to tell my husband,” she answered, “we know nothing!”

Another irony of our times, I thought. The largest new farmers – some of whom promise to be the largest farmers yet, in a world already dominated by giants – may well have utterly no idea how to farm – even less than the drive-and-spray sons and daughters who’ve inherited most of the land out here. (Hell, even less than us – HA! ) Well, of course they don’t – you don’t buy 20 square miles with farm money. (Mighty Joe’s apparently came from Arizona real estate, or so I am told. Some aspect of the colossal Ponzi scheme that is America, anyway.)

Anyway, it ought to be a crime to let what is basically a public resource rot in a year it is needed so badly. A farmer knows this on principle, bad year or good. The question remains why someone who lays claim to such an instant empire needs to cut verge hay? But here is something again that is ominous for us on our little patch. This man intends to purchase every farm he can. Word on the street is that twenty square miles is not nearly enough for him. If he gets a hold of the adjoining land we are renting, and he intends to, the odds of him honoring old agreements are nearly nil. “Might as well sell it to me now,” he apparently told the owner. “I’ll get it anyway.” We would lose most of our grazing land if she craters, and men like this are emphatically not about sharing. Theirs is the Walmart approach to survival – life is a competition, not a collaboration, best won by owning everything. We tell ourselves there is lots of verge-hay, but now Mighty Joe wants that, too. So here’s another hurdle. What effect will such newbie empire builders have on sustainability efforts? Now that the global economy is collapsing, their advisors are all telling them, “Buy farms!” And they are. Oh well, cross that bridge we tell ourselves. Or can we avert a return to feudalism if we act today? This is where this trend is headed. However we are to act, we must do so now.

Close to a month later yet, ‘his’ verge hay remained un-raked. I decided it seemed obvious he had given up on it. I had a look at it. It had almost disappeared by now into the weave of new growth coming up, and was long past prime. Still a little better than snowballs, mind-you, as my one neighbor says. We could use it for bedding. We were driving the girls raking some we had cut a mile or two up the road, and we got a start on raking some of Mighty Joe’s old cut. Four hours later, there was a message on my answering machine… “This is Mighty Joe Young. Someone is raking my hay. I’m not saying it is you, but maybe you might have some leads…”

Oh yeah, Mighty Joe. I got leads for you alright. If you’d listen…

This month our delivery truck broke down. This raised a lot of conflicting emotions, as the vehicles here always do. We are of the belief that if we as a society going down a tube into a pit of unsustainability, we are doing it in our cars. And they are most certainly driving us, not vice-versa. So many ironies, here. First, there is the fact that alternative farmers cannot farm close to the centres they serve because they simply cannot afford one that close. Then, there is the fact that when you farm, you have to have a vehicle – the days when there was a town on the railway lines every nine miles so you could get there sustainably by horse and wagon are long over. And then, you need a BIG vehicle, because you will be hauling heavy stuff. Our farm truck is a diesel Ford, 1994 (again, doing this, you don’t buy a new $50 k rig), with a massive 7.3 litre engine – a vehicle that can go a million miles – with repairs of course. A trailer full of heavy horses alone demands this. So the cart is now pulling the horse – a once efficient system turned on its head. Well, at least the thing is good on fuel, on the highway anyway, but this is a relative statement. Fact is, using the term “efficiency” in reference to any motor vehicle – be it our truck, or a Smart Car or Prius – will always be more or less oxymoronic by definition, unless perhaps it is in speaking of the freight train.

The repair bill for our truck could be in the neighborhood of $4,000, which sounds like a lot (it is), but is pretty standard maintenance on such a conveyance. (I could buy a very good team of horses for the cost of this one repair, by the way, that would serve me for 20 years.) This bill will need to be paid for out of a business venture, which, this year, will gross less than $20,000. When you look at these sorts of numbers, you can understand the conundrum we are in not just here on our little patch, but as a society. We must find sustainable systems. By definition, this is not optional. This means, usually, de-industrialization. But to attempt to be de-industrial when surrounded by an overwhelmingly industrial world, not only makes one intensely vulnerable, it may well prove impossible for individual families. Once you drive a motor vehicle, that single act alone invests you heavily in the industrial economy. And the industrial economy, it seems, demands an industrial wage.

So once again, we are trying to imagine a way to cut the motor vehicles completely out of the farm system. We are not yet sure this can be done at this point. What we are contemplating, however, is making more of our errand trips to the local towns with the horses and wagon. This will not alter an extremely precarious small farm economy as long as we are doing distant deliveries, but it will help bring back to our towns an imagery that we believe needs to be back in peoples’ heads. We will be stuck in a purgatory of mere gestures towards sustainability until we hit some critical mass; one of more trains, more horses, more CSA and other alternative farms, far less personal motor vehicle use. More visionary landowners who see their land as something other than a commodity, who are willing to share. More landowner-philanthropists, even. More intentional farm communities, where people share burdens (including the major one of essential machinery), labor, laugh, relax, and live together. Live together in the spirit of cooperation, as community, the fundamental reason our species made it to an era where the power contained in a black goo from the ground afforded us the luxury to forget that if cooperation is how we live, competition, when taken beyond the level of play, is how we die.

We can all contribute to this critical mass in some way. And try not to do it quietly! If you can serve as an example, make sure you get as much exposure doing so as you can. Not for the sake of ego, for if that is your primary motivation, you will not last, but for the sake of inspiring change. The late Milton Friedman of Chicago School of Business fame, a sociopath and probably a lunatic, was nonetheless right when he pointed out that it is precisely in crisis times that we need to make sure the right ideas are “lying around,” as it is in such times that people are most open to radical changes. His ideas were centred around the aggrandizement of self and circle, but the concept is equally applicable when the intention is to create good.

Make sure the right ideas are lying around. An important motto for these times, I think. And as ideas will only take us so far, I would add…

Make sure the right actions are visible.