Where I live in Vermont, there are still some rock walls. These are old and falling down in places, but back in the day, they were what fenced in much of the livestock kept around here. I always wondered if they were very good at keeping the animals in. For one thing, they are not particularly tall and for another, it seems like a determined cow and a less determined sheep or goat could just clamber right over it.
Well, as I was cruising the archives over at Sweet Juniper, a blog well worth your time, I found a series of posts about the author's time on an Irish farm in the late 90's. (I too worked on an Irish farm for a while but it was not nearly so amusing as this account. Maybe sometime I will tell you about watering a secret stash of my boss' pot plants while the members of Sinn Fein were knocking at the door, though.) Along with many other hilarious memories, he gives you the lowdown on the joys and sorrows of fencing with rocks. Also, if you get to the part about pulling the calf and wonder "is it like that?" The answer is, "yes, it's exactly like that."
part 1
part 2: "In which Dutch conquers the Irish countryside riding on the shoulders of a gentleman who has just consumed 23 pints of Guinness"
part 3: in which Saint Patrick causes Dutch to betray his own countryman for twenty quid
part 4: In which Dutch finds himself elbow deep in bovine vagina under a full moon
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
serve your country food
Would you like to be a migrant farm worker? Now's your chance to work in the hot sun doing back breaking repetitive labor for hours on end on a farm that is not yours. You'll probably get paid by the pound or the piece, so learn to work fast cuz there's no retirement fund. You (and your children too if they come along) can come in contact with the dangerous pesticides that are used to keep our food cheap and beautiful. But then again, since you're an American, you won't get to go back to your home country when you're old and sick and have free health care. But maybe some pinko commie country in Latin America will take you in if you tell them you were a farm worker.
In response to the latest backlash against undocumented workers (some of which is taking place in Vermont as well) the UFW (United Farm Workers - a farm worker's union) has launched a campaign called "Take Our Jobs" inviting legal American citizens to become farm workers.
here's the website: takeourjobs.org
A representative from the UFW is also scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report on July 8th, so check it out if you're into that stuff.
In response to the latest backlash against undocumented workers (some of which is taking place in Vermont as well) the UFW (United Farm Workers - a farm worker's union) has launched a campaign called "Take Our Jobs" inviting legal American citizens to become farm workers.
here's the website: takeourjobs.org
A representative from the UFW is also scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report on July 8th, so check it out if you're into that stuff.
just like blade runner
After Lou-weeze refused to cooperate in my dreams of fluffy baby chicks peeking out from a proud mother hen, I decided to hatch some the way god and Philip K Dick intended, in a machine.
Judy had an incubator that she used to hatch chicks every year in her 4th grade classroom. It looks like a styrofoam cooler with a heating element stuck to the top. I felt skeptical that it might work, especially after we found the heating coil broken and super glued it back together. But I put 18 eggs in it anyway and turned them by hand three times a day, every day for 17 days. The instruction sheet that came with the incubator said to stop turning the eggs on the 18th day and that on the 21st day they should hatch.
Yesterday after work, I was home having a snack when I heard
"PEEP!"
I looked at Peter. "It sounds like there's a bird in here," he said.
"peep PEEP!"
BABY CHICKENS!
I ran over to the incubator and opened it (which, by the way, I later read not to do because it screws up the humidity) and saw that one of the eggs had a crack in it!
I immediately went on the internet and learned that it can take up to 24 hours for a baby chicken to make its way out of the egg. All evening we heard peep peep PEEP!!! PEEP! as the chicken tried to get out. If you peeped at the incubator it would peep back at you. The cat took to sitting on the machine, his motives probably not all together altruistic, but awfully cute anyways.
Last night at 2:30 Peter woke me up. "It sounds like there is alot of rattling going on down there." I sleepily went down stairs and shined the flashlight through the little window. There was a tiny chicken staggering around inside! I cheered it on and went back to sleep.
This morning there were 2 more! They were mostly dry so I moved them to the brooder I had ready in the other room. Peter called me this morning at work with the news that 3 more had hatched and there were 2 more working on it.
If I thought getting chickens in the mail was fun, hatching them is even better. They are even more cute and disoriented at birth than they are when they're 2 days old. They stagger around, taking 2 steps and then flopping over flat on their stomachs to sleep for 3 minutes before jumping up again. It's totally hilarious and adorable.
Welcome to our farm, chickens!
i used my very best community college photoshop skills to fix the red tint the heat light gives the pictures, but they still aren't very good. However, I feel like I've given them a sci-fi cast that goes along with being birthed from the womb of a Styrofoam box full of wires.
Judy had an incubator that she used to hatch chicks every year in her 4th grade classroom. It looks like a styrofoam cooler with a heating element stuck to the top. I felt skeptical that it might work, especially after we found the heating coil broken and super glued it back together. But I put 18 eggs in it anyway and turned them by hand three times a day, every day for 17 days. The instruction sheet that came with the incubator said to stop turning the eggs on the 18th day and that on the 21st day they should hatch.
Yesterday after work, I was home having a snack when I heard
"PEEP!"
I looked at Peter. "It sounds like there's a bird in here," he said.
"peep PEEP!"
BABY CHICKENS!
I ran over to the incubator and opened it (which, by the way, I later read not to do because it screws up the humidity) and saw that one of the eggs had a crack in it!
I immediately went on the internet and learned that it can take up to 24 hours for a baby chicken to make its way out of the egg. All evening we heard peep peep PEEP!!! PEEP! as the chicken tried to get out. If you peeped at the incubator it would peep back at you. The cat took to sitting on the machine, his motives probably not all together altruistic, but awfully cute anyways.
Last night at 2:30 Peter woke me up. "It sounds like there is alot of rattling going on down there." I sleepily went down stairs and shined the flashlight through the little window. There was a tiny chicken staggering around inside! I cheered it on and went back to sleep.
This morning there were 2 more! They were mostly dry so I moved them to the brooder I had ready in the other room. Peter called me this morning at work with the news that 3 more had hatched and there were 2 more working on it.
If I thought getting chickens in the mail was fun, hatching them is even better. They are even more cute and disoriented at birth than they are when they're 2 days old. They stagger around, taking 2 steps and then flopping over flat on their stomachs to sleep for 3 minutes before jumping up again. It's totally hilarious and adorable.
Welcome to our farm, chickens!
i used my very best community college photoshop skills to fix the red tint the heat light gives the pictures, but they still aren't very good. However, I feel like I've given them a sci-fi cast that goes along with being birthed from the womb of a Styrofoam box full of wires.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
if you liked a mosh pit, you'll love this
I think cows must like summer. Days spent roaming the pasture, looking for just the perfect place to eat. Nights spent quietly resting in the barn. Not too hot and not too cold. They just look happier. But the height of summer for farmers … that’s different. Haying makes summer an extra busy time. Any day that’s sunny must be seized. The old adage “Make hay while the sun shines” doesn’t exist for nothing. There are only a few short months to collect and store all the food that will feed the cows through the long cold winter. While the cows relax in the grass, everyone with two legs must work harder faster and longer than any other time of the year.
This sometimes causes other, more standard chores to slip a little bit … or sometimes a lot. First this task and then that one are sacrificed on the altar of grass preservation. While we have been haying, I had been feeding the calves and heifers in the barn. But then I had to work later at the store a few nights so someone else was doing it, someone else who already had many other things to do. By the time I got back to the barn to check up, things had gone from busy to chaotic to comical.
As soon as I walked in the door I was calf (human calves not cow calves) deep in shit. I had almost come to the barn with my sneakers on, but thankfully I stopped to grab my boots. Somehow all the boards that form a walk way over the gutter had been removed and that left a 18 inch deep trough of poo with the gutter cleaner waiting patiently at the bottom to do its job. I am over almost any squeamishness involving mammalian bodily fluids, but to be suddenly pitched into a moat of fecal matter I realized the hurculean task that was going to await me.
After returning to the milk house to hose off and re enter the barn with care, I saw the pigs were loose. I hate pigs. Until I was 25, I had always imagined them to be pensive and thoughtful like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. But infact, they are huge and freakish, with human eyes and bizarre muscley neckless bodies. They have sharp teeth and another group of pigs on our farm once got loose in the night and plucked 3 turkeys off the perch where they slept and ate them. We realized what had happened the next day when white turkey feathers appeared in the pigs’ excrement. While my brother in law’s kids chase them around happily and my husband regales me with happy tales of his childhood that include a pig that would let him ride it around, I remain creeped out. There is a reason that the one thing Jews and Muslims can agree on is the taboo on pork.
Due to the loose swine, all of my other chores were done with an eye on the pigs, to make sure they didn’t come too close to me. If they did, I shook a large screwdriver at them and they returned to rooting around in one of the calf pens.
I gave everyone hay and grain and cleaned their pens out. I put down fresh shavings and ran the gutter cleaner a little bit. Then, I turned my attention to the baby calves. Due to a chronic lack of space in the barn, the newborn (and usually not so newborn) calves hang out for a while in the large center aisle of the barn that serves as manger in the literal and biblical sense of the word. As I mentioned before, things had slipped a bit and there were now seven calves resting gamboling and mooing for dinner in the manger. I fed the ones that would drink from a pail while holding back the ones that didn’t yet understand the concept and would do nothing but get in the way and kick the pail over. Then I fed the ones that needed a bottle, holding the older ones, who would only get over excited at the thought of a bottle and butt you hard in places that would cause you to wish for veal for dinner. This whole trick is not for the faint of heart and is, I believe, akin to keeping 20 ping pong balls underwater at the same time except the ping pong balls are sentient, mobile and weigh between 50 and 150 pounds.
Everyone was starting to chill out and lay down with full bellies when I realized that there were only 6 calves. I thought back … yes 4 buckets and milk and 2 bottles … that’s only 6. I looked around in all the bigger calf pens, in the pig pen, still empty of pigs and calves. I went outside and looked for little calf prints in the driveway.
Last winter, a cow who was loose in the barn in order to find a spot to have her own baby lay down on a different sleeping calf, crushing her to death. This is the disadvantage of running things a bit looser than you would really like had you the time resources and energy. I had cried a lot when I found the calf and still felt quite bad about it.
It is unusual to have a calf that likes to go off on her own, but it does happen. She could be hiding out anywhere in the tall grass and if she got a little ways from the barn with no cows to protect her, coyotes could find her at night.
But as I was thinking about where she might be, I heard a scuffling and a struggled little “meeeeh!” The missing calf had returned and was in the midst of squeezing through the gate which I had left open just enough for a person or a calf to get through. She looked as though she had swallowed a basketball. She waddled over to the manger and lay down. Peter was behind her. “She was in the free stall eating off the cows, the little bastard.”
With the arrival of my final baby, my work was done. Peter put the pigs back in their pen while I “helped” by chasing them with my screwdriver. Then he went to mow for the next day and I went home to take a nap before bed.
This sometimes causes other, more standard chores to slip a little bit … or sometimes a lot. First this task and then that one are sacrificed on the altar of grass preservation. While we have been haying, I had been feeding the calves and heifers in the barn. But then I had to work later at the store a few nights so someone else was doing it, someone else who already had many other things to do. By the time I got back to the barn to check up, things had gone from busy to chaotic to comical.
As soon as I walked in the door I was calf (human calves not cow calves) deep in shit. I had almost come to the barn with my sneakers on, but thankfully I stopped to grab my boots. Somehow all the boards that form a walk way over the gutter had been removed and that left a 18 inch deep trough of poo with the gutter cleaner waiting patiently at the bottom to do its job. I am over almost any squeamishness involving mammalian bodily fluids, but to be suddenly pitched into a moat of fecal matter I realized the hurculean task that was going to await me.
After returning to the milk house to hose off and re enter the barn with care, I saw the pigs were loose. I hate pigs. Until I was 25, I had always imagined them to be pensive and thoughtful like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. But infact, they are huge and freakish, with human eyes and bizarre muscley neckless bodies. They have sharp teeth and another group of pigs on our farm once got loose in the night and plucked 3 turkeys off the perch where they slept and ate them. We realized what had happened the next day when white turkey feathers appeared in the pigs’ excrement. While my brother in law’s kids chase them around happily and my husband regales me with happy tales of his childhood that include a pig that would let him ride it around, I remain creeped out. There is a reason that the one thing Jews and Muslims can agree on is the taboo on pork.
Due to the loose swine, all of my other chores were done with an eye on the pigs, to make sure they didn’t come too close to me. If they did, I shook a large screwdriver at them and they returned to rooting around in one of the calf pens.
I gave everyone hay and grain and cleaned their pens out. I put down fresh shavings and ran the gutter cleaner a little bit. Then, I turned my attention to the baby calves. Due to a chronic lack of space in the barn, the newborn (and usually not so newborn) calves hang out for a while in the large center aisle of the barn that serves as manger in the literal and biblical sense of the word. As I mentioned before, things had slipped a bit and there were now seven calves resting gamboling and mooing for dinner in the manger. I fed the ones that would drink from a pail while holding back the ones that didn’t yet understand the concept and would do nothing but get in the way and kick the pail over. Then I fed the ones that needed a bottle, holding the older ones, who would only get over excited at the thought of a bottle and butt you hard in places that would cause you to wish for veal for dinner. This whole trick is not for the faint of heart and is, I believe, akin to keeping 20 ping pong balls underwater at the same time except the ping pong balls are sentient, mobile and weigh between 50 and 150 pounds.
Everyone was starting to chill out and lay down with full bellies when I realized that there were only 6 calves. I thought back … yes 4 buckets and milk and 2 bottles … that’s only 6. I looked around in all the bigger calf pens, in the pig pen, still empty of pigs and calves. I went outside and looked for little calf prints in the driveway.
Last winter, a cow who was loose in the barn in order to find a spot to have her own baby lay down on a different sleeping calf, crushing her to death. This is the disadvantage of running things a bit looser than you would really like had you the time resources and energy. I had cried a lot when I found the calf and still felt quite bad about it.
It is unusual to have a calf that likes to go off on her own, but it does happen. She could be hiding out anywhere in the tall grass and if she got a little ways from the barn with no cows to protect her, coyotes could find her at night.
But as I was thinking about where she might be, I heard a scuffling and a struggled little “meeeeh!” The missing calf had returned and was in the midst of squeezing through the gate which I had left open just enough for a person or a calf to get through. She looked as though she had swallowed a basketball. She waddled over to the manger and lay down. Peter was behind her. “She was in the free stall eating off the cows, the little bastard.”
With the arrival of my final baby, my work was done. Peter put the pigs back in their pen while I “helped” by chasing them with my screwdriver. Then he went to mow for the next day and I went home to take a nap before bed.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
the great reskilling
so ... how did people teach their cows to take picketing? I have two little calves that I have been picketing for 3 days and I go find them every 4 or 5 hours to untangle their sorry asses. Do they just eventually get the hang of it?
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