Why Farm Heresies

Why Farm Heresies? Because as much as I try to capture the Wendell Berry moment of farm life, my prose invariably devolves into something less idyllic, less wholesome than the visions of fresh baked bread cooling on the hearth mantle while your favorite chicken scratches contentedly in the earthen floor, occasionally strolling over to your aging dog sleeping by the fire to groom him of fleas and ticks – because you know that dog is not fantasizing about ripping that chicken’s leg off for his afternoon snack.  (See what I mean? I can’t help myself.)

Don’t get me wrong.  I love being a farmer, and farming, and farm life, and my dog, and my chickens (for breakfast and barbecue), but not all the time or all at once.  Sometimes my dog gets into the compost and throws up on the carpet; the chickens get out of their coop and hide their eggs in random places in the shed and poop all over the tractor; crops fail, pestilence rains from heaven, and actual rain is nonexistent between June and September when we finally get a cataclysmic flood.  So, yeah, my prose might be a little too edgy for purists, and some people will be upset by my opinion on the real purpose and nature of chickens,  but that’s just the nature of an urban transplant whose skeptic nature has consistently drawn a trajectory away from the path of the true believer.  Quite honestly, if I had believed what I was taught about life when I was growing up I wouldn’t be dithering around complaining about farming.  I’d be dithering around complaining about working in the basement of a museum.

In many ways, heresy runs in my family and I attribute this propensity to raise your hackles to my mother, an Irishwoman whose reputation for unvarnished opinion often irked her audience, especially her children. (She was also a kick-ass scrabble player much to the consternation of her overly diplomaed offspring.) So I will begin this segment with a tribute to her, because in some strange way that’s how I wound up doing what I do. Here’s the first post.