Suzanne Nelson Karreman, Author at Reverence Farms

Cows

Creating Silvopasture Out of Woodlands

April 7, 2022April 14, 2022
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

When we open up thick stands of trees to create silvopasture, our goal is pretty simple: To remove enough tree canopy in order to let sunshine flow through the trees in order to allow grasses, forbs and legumes to grow below. (See previous post on why more open savanna-like landscapes are more the historical norm than open pasture or closed stands of trees.)

Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Research suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique for counteracting the methane emissions of livestock and sequestering carbon under-hoof. Pastures strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless, storing it in both biomass and soil.
Project Drawdown

We established this silvopasture in 2015. Cattle keep this mixed ecosystem productive for both the trees and the understory grasses. On the right is a honey locust, which is a perfect silvopasture tree as its leaves allow enough sunlight through, even when mature, to grow grass underneath, and the pods it drops in the fall are high-protein feed for livestock and wildlife. (Our cattle are now bred to be polled, or naturally hornless, although when this picture was taken we used tennis balls on the horns to protect the cows from each other.)

When we create silvopastures out of thick woods, we leave the best trees, and quite a few of them. Our objective is to remove dying, diseased and dead trees, and we often pile them up to create habitat for ground-dwelling creatures. For the most part, we try to leave the most mature and healthy trees — the opposite of how many forest “thinnings” usually happen, where the most mature trees are harvested for lumber and the understory (mostly genetically inferior stock) is left to regrow. We are selecting for health of the trees, so we want to leave the trees that compete the best for sunlight and resources to propagate more of their own kind.

Most of the trees that we have recently taken out down near the Haw River were not healthy trees. Ideally they would have been thinned over the years with axes, chainsaws and mules, but it is now a much larger job.

These trees are a sampling of the trunks of the large trees that we removed. Many of the trees we took down were hollow in the center.

How close to the river are you cutting trees? How much land are you opening up?

We are leaving between 165’ to 215’ feet or more from the river untouched by large equipment. The line follows the change in slope and the change in soil type from Piedmont clay to the flood plain’s loamy sand. The flags are set on the topographic change, the vegetative change and the soil change line. Lines in nature are never straight, and we are paying attention to the soil changes rather than a hard-and-fast demarcation.

The total acreage for this project is around 6 acres. A roughly equal amount of land between the site we are working on and the river is going to be left as it is, for the most part. We have plans to collaborate with Hawbridge School students as well as volunteers to hand-remove invasive (non-native) privet bushes to allow the native spice bushes to proliferate.

What are the soils like? Don’t trees get compacted?

Except an area that we initially traversed into the flood plain (the error was ours and not the firm doing the work; we immediately repaired it, see photo below), we are staying off the alluvial soils where high river waters over the centuries have deposited silt and sand. The area where we are taking out trees has the same soil type, Piedmont clay, as our adjacent pastures.

As much as possible, we are leaving mature, healthy trees, and especially trees that provide fodder for livestock and wildlife, such as hickories and oaks. We are staying off the drip line of the trees as much as possible, and not dragging the slash across the bark of the trees that we are leaving. Operators of the equipment company we are working with have listened well to our desire to have as light of a footprint as possible, and to leave the soil surface in place as much as we can.

These types of projects are not common — large machines are usually used to level sites for housing developments and shopping malls — and to their credit, Carroll Contracting has learned quickly what we were after. Instead of grading the site with a bulldozer, they are using logs to level the soil where trees were removed (and fixing old gulleys from where water was not properly managed uphill decades ago, likely because of tilage and row-crop farming). We are keeping as much topsoil in place as we can. I have no desire to lose a precious ounce of it. The whole point of restorative livestock agriculture is to build soil.

In this area, about 150′ x 100′, we mistakenly went into the flood plain. We have since seeded the area with 60 different species of native grasses and flowers and covered the sandy soil with straw to protect the new seedlings. The ash pile on left would normally be buried in a pit, but we have elected to go through it with a root rake and take out the limbs and then spread the ash over the land — it’s a powerful soil amendment — helping the soil to sequester even more carbon. The trees on the right are the only salvageable trees from the 2-acre lot, and many show hollowness beginning to form in the centers. A poplar tree that looked okay on the outside was a solid tube of water inside.

Certain trees handle compaction better than others, and we are taking that into account with our selection. Poplars, for example, like compaction less than other trees (primarily because they are heavy consumers of water). They are also faster-growing than oaks, and so all things being equal we will usually elect to keep an oak over a poplar.

Grasses are healing to soil structure, and keeping soil covered is paramount, and to that end we are immediately planting native grasses — and covering the soil with straw loose enough to allow seed emergence. Having the soil covered with vegetative life will help the trees retain moisture through the summer. Covered soils create healthy environments for underground life, which improve water-carrying capacity, fertility and diversity.

Our flood plain is not a wetland

As part of our investigation for this project, we dug with a tile spade for soil classification looking for subsurface water in the alluvial area, which would make the lowland soils less stable. We found no underground water at 40”, the standard test depth for soil classification purposes. We left some Piedmont soil areas in the alluvial flood plain. The 40” hole showed no mottling, thus the soil is technically well-drained, even in the flood plain, although we are not planning to select clear that area except to later remove invasives by hand.

Dr. K was a soil scientist before he was an organic veterinarian, and he happily got his trusty spade out to check soil types and determine where flags should go. He put the flags just uphill from where the soil type changes from Piedmont clay to loamy sand.

Disturbance is not a perfect process, but healing can and will follow

I will say that cutting trees with a large machine is not a perfect process. Habitat is disturbed. The birds don’t care where our line in the proverbial loamy sand is. We do our best to disturb the area the least, get off the soil quickly and replant. And we’ve already done so on a good portion of the site.

Yet, every one of our choices every day has an impact of a living system. Whether we like it or not, we were designed to eat three meals a day. That food has to come from somewhere. We can choose to buy corn flakes produced thousands of miles away, where no song birds sing anymore because their habitat was destroyed by destructive tillage, herbicides, pesticides and the loss of topsoil and habitat, or we can reconcile ourselves to eat in our foodshed and grapple with the choices therein.

“Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

The choices are not always simple or easy, and I’m not presuming as much. (Even the device upon which you are reading this is made with minerals that may have been mined by children, at great peril to themselves.) Two-thirds of the earth’s arable land mass cannot grow cultivated crops such as corn, wheat, broccoli and tomatoes because it’s either too steep, too infertile or too far from points of distribution.

If we are going to feed ourselves, we are going to have to come to terms with grass, clover and dandelion leaves as a source of food, and homo sapiens can’t thrive on those alone. We can partner with the mighty dairy cow, whose superpower is turning sunshine into butter through those very plants. Thus, creating a habitat she can dwell in amongst the songbirds, owls, turtles — even coyotes, and hopefully one day again, wolves — is a mighty and worthy task.

Although forests are the lungs of the world, lungs breathe out as well as in, and forests lose their trapped carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere when their leaves decompose. A mixture of trees and grass and herbivores comprise the most ecologically sound and productive ecosystems in the world, more productive and carbon-sequestering than forests, or even grasslands — which may be the only true carbon sinks other than oil left underground.

Grasslands are a net positive carbon sink, as grasses work synergistically with subterranean life to actually sequester carbon and keep it in the ground, provided the soil isn’t repeatedly turned over. Current research points to silvopasture as perhaps the most proven carbon-sequestration ecology.

We estimate that silvopasture is currently practiced on 550 million hectares of land globally. If adoption expands to 720–772 million hectares by 2050—out of the 823 million hectares theoretically suitable for silvopasture—carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by 26.6–42.3 gigatons. This reduction is a result of the high annual carbon sequestration rate of 2.74 tons of carbon per hectare per year in soil and biomass.
Project Drawdown

Cows

It’s time we imagine a life more beautiful than…

March 26, 2022April 8, 2022
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Our farm recently decided to thin trees to allow more sunshine and to create a more varied, open and historically typical landscape near the river. Here’s why:

1. Our vision has long included an accessible, edible and diverse ecosystem along the river that better reflects how the land would have looked 500+ years ago and allows trail-goers a view into a regenerative dairy farm.

2. While our eyes are used to seeing a limited range of predictable landscapes — forests, fenced livestock, cropland, housing developments or shopping malls — there is an ecosystem that is far more imaginative and inviting: silvopasture — think of a cultivated savannah with more frequent rainfall.

3. Silvopastures are perhaps the most productive agricultural system and may be the only proven way of sequestering carbon while feeding large numbers of people.

4. Silvopastures create microclimates for forage species and animals that modulate the extremes of seasons and provides natural air conditioning for the cows during our hot summers and an extended growing season for plants.

5. Finding ways to create inclusive and productive food systems in the same contexts where we live and work is the only hope we have to restore balance to a planet that is showing many troubling signs of a declining ability to sustain life.

Our Jersey cows grazing on the natural gas line near the river last spring. We are thinning woods on either side of the grass, and both ecosystems need some attention. The Kentucky-31 grass contains a mold that is highly toxic to cattle, dairy cows in particular, and is not native grass to the region. Historically, the trees would have been a more diverse mix of ages and sizes, with more sunlight coming through to the forest floor to provide habitat for dozens of species of grasses, flowers and native shrubs.

The forest on either side of the cows has both native bushes and invasive privet, and our goal is to create a native ecosystem in this area that would be closer in appearance and function to the mixture of native shrubs, trees and grasses that would have been along the river during the time of the Sissapahaw Indians. Our hope is that the native grass species that we replant here will eventually spread (both naturally and with our help) over the entire farm.

Our Jersey heifers grazing in a silvopasture we are in the process of establishing. Soil is the foundation for all terranean life. To build soil organic matter, we feed hay here after trees were thinned. Instead of feeding hay in barns, we put it directly on the pastures and “waste” some by leaving it uneaten. But none is wasted! Every blade is food for thousands of tiny organisms that we call our underground livestock.

Our mission: to eat and transact in harmony with natural systems

The core philosophy of our farm is how we eat is inextricably tied to our ability to live in health and in harmony with each other and the larger community of species with whom we dwell amongst. It’s why we have built a 100-percent grass-fed, 50-cow dairy from scratch, with chickens, pigs, turkeys and sheep as co-laborers. And it’s why we deeded a dozen acres a few years ago to the Haw River Trail so that the community could begin to enjoy the fruits of our labors. (In a few years we hope to share some actual fruit: mulberries, persimmons, pawpaws, huckleberries, blueberries, muscadine grapes that we are planting both along the HRT and also on trails we are building on the farm.)

Everyday we work to rewed what has been estranged: animals and plants, farmers and eaters, living ecosystems and places of commerce. We all eat every day if we are blessed enough to do so. How we do that determines — more than any other single choice — what our world looks like.

The most ecologically light footprint we could have on the land is to all return to hunters and gatherers. Since few are discussing how to practically achieve such, our next best hope is to manage flora and fauna in ways that are in keeping with those principles.

The Native Americans that proceeded us on the Haw River had a lot of things right: they harvested their food and took in all of the sensory nourishment from their environment in the same place. Imagine a grocery store that was also your gym and your therapist and your social media feed. Imagine you didn’t need a grocery store, gym, therapist or social media feed… and all of your creaturely needs for beauty, nourishment, exercise, communion with the divine, healing and connection with all creatures (bi-peds, four-leggeds and hundred-leggeds), were all part of the same life-affirming experience.

We often see beautiful landscapes as something separate from ourselves, what Wendell Berry calls the “terrarium view” of ecology (do yourself a favor and stop reading this post and just read Wendell Berry instead). We protect parks but the places where our daily sustenance comes from have turned to wastelands. This segregated view of ecology doesn’t take into account our role as stewards. And it denies a core fact: if we eat something that we didn’t grow ourselves or connect with a person who did, somewhere a habit was likely destroyed.

At 1,000 miles away, we don’t have to reconcile ourselves with those choices. The corn and soy products that are the foundation of all the packaged “foods” we eat result in man-made deserts that stretch for thousands if not tens of thousands of acres at a time. When we eat in our backyard, we can’t escape the consequences. There is no more broccoli in Iowa — the nation’s breadbasket by and large grows feed for cattle and cars. The resulting loss of soil is perhaps the biggest non-topic affecting our nation’s future (amazing and readable and hopeful book on this subject: Perilous Bounty).

A more integrated path forward means we participate in living food-scapes

We believe that the social contract works best when we create places where people can interact in a meaningful way with the landscapes that provide our sustenance. Other than two small areas on the farm that have long been kept cleared because of the now-abandoned power lines and the still-active natural gas line, the 180 acres that comprise the creaturely habitat for our milk cows and their calves is otherwise not visible from the river trail. (The 120 acres on the other side of Hobby Creek, pictured above, is home to our young stock and sheep.)

Iris, one of our matriarchs, teaches her still-nursing calf Ilene how to eat multi-flora rose, an invasive, noxious plant.

We are proud of how we raise calves on cows, sharing milk with their rightful offspring — and the sight of cows and their frolicking babes, who grow up in a biologically normal and intact matriarchy — is something that is almost non-existent on dairy farms in modernized cultures. We get calls and letters every week from people all over the country who want to emulate these “back-to-the-future” practices. It seemed silly to us that our own neighbors weren’t able to easily see something so simple and joyful.

Our need for ruminant (four-stomached, vegetarian) animals is irrespective of our diet choices: Grasslands, and particularly silvopastures (mixtures of trees and grasses in the same ecosystem), are perhaps the only way to mitigate the atmospheric disaster of removing carbon that was sequestered below the earth’s surface in the form of oil (captured sunlight from eons ago) and burning it as fossil fuels. We desire to live in a present-day solar economy. Blades of grass are really effective solar panels, and double as antenna for carbon sequestration. Humans have yet to develop a system as elegant.

Siri is grazing a 12-seed cover crop mix that also serves as butterfly habitat. The diversity helps to build soil.

We believe animals, particularly large animals, belong in savannah as they would have been in this region for thousands of years — and those savannahs would have likely been to the river’s edge. We are leaving a 165′ to 215′ buffer from the river for riparian habitat (more on that in our next post).

We know that buffalo, panther, wolf and elk were along the Haw River in the 1700s. Journals of an early European settler, John Powell, enumerate buffalo sightings in the area, as close as Mebane, and as late as 1737. The last buffalo was killed in North Carolina in 1799, almost a century before these magnificent beasts — so vital to the sequestration of atmospheric carbon in the ground in the form of soil fertility — were wiped out of the American West.

Although most artifacts in the area point to deer and rabbit being the most likely source of protein for Native Americans along our section of the Haw, and some people doubt that there were bison near present-day Saxapahaw, the large ruminants are certainly native to the region. Large, grass-eating animals certainly were here before we were, including the mastodon, and they would have kept the areas near rivers more open than we are accustomed to seeing today. John Lawson described the riverbanks in the early 1700s as full of deer, raccoons, turkey, and even bears. In order to sustain life for herbivores, the plant community along the river would have almost certainly included many more grasses.

One of our modern-day savannah beasts, Frank, a Jersey bull. Don’t worry, this guy lives up the road from the river trail.

Using modern bison (a.k.a., cattle) to keep grasslands sequestering carbon

A savannah is an open or semi-open landscape dotted with trees and is primarily a grassland ecology that can support a diverse mix of animals. We have been working for years to open up our woods to more sunlight. Large grazing animals depend on a landscape prolific with grasses, forbes and legumes, and all of those species can exist in a treed understory, provided that sun can reach the soil surface.

Indeed, there’s tons of evidence that grasses under trees make both the grasses and the trees more productive, especially in low-fertility environments such as the Southeast (where the soil respires much of the year, thus making carbon less likely to stay in the soil without active management).

Charles, a retired Alamance County dairy farmer, spends many of his days at Reverence planting trees.

Silvopasture is the most proven agricultural system in the world for sequestering carbon. We also create it in our open pastures by planting native trees. The trees and understory grasses are symbiotic and together produce far more biomass than either alone. Furthermore, silvopastures seem to sequester carbon in the soil more permanently than even tropical rainforests, which give up the carbon they capture when the leaves decompose on the forest floor. By contrast, grasses store carbon in the soil, where it remains, if undisturbed.

“Unlike tropical forests, where the majority of the carbon is stored in the vegetation, as much as 90% of the carbon pools in grazing-land ecosystems are located in the soil, hence, it can be readily transferred into more permanent storage in the soil. Because carbon stored below ground is more permanent than plant biomass, soil carbon sequestration in grazing lands provides a long-term alternative to mitigate atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions.” [emphasis added]
Assessment of the Carbon Sequestration Potential of Common Agricultural Systems on Benchmark Soils Across the Southern Region of Climate Gradient, M. Silveira

Life-affirming landscapes and turning sunshine into milk…

We believe how we choose to eat is an extension of who we are and preserving and restoring life-affirming landscapes has far more to do with what rests at the end of our forks than how much we banter online about the abominations that abound in the world. Many landscapes will not exist into perpetuity without at least some stewardship, and grasslands cannot remain without ruminant animals. We are doing our best to steward the land on our farm. And we are cooperating with the four-footed wonderwoman, the humble cow, in order to do so.

Why? Because ruminants make more life than they take. And 100% grassfed milk, which we share with all of the calves, while producing enough milk to justify having a barn and a parlor to milk them in, requires the land to be blessed with sunshine in order to grow forage. The economics of dairy are nigh impossible, but we are doing our best to help restore family dairy to the rightful center of a whole community. Alamance county used to have 100 dairies (Charles’ dairy was one of them; and several of our neighbors from whom we now purchase hay used to run still others).

Liquid sunshine. 100% grass-fed butter on sourdough. #nofilter

Only 5% of Alamance County dairies remain …

We are down to five dairies in our county — a couple of years ago it was down to three. To my knowledge, we are the only 100% grass-fed, “commerical-size” dairy in the region. The upside-down economics of family-scale dairy nationally and the prohibition of the sale of raw milk for human consumption in N.C. couple to make new dairy ventures highly unlikely. Corporate obliteration of small farms through non-scalable sanitation laws has been destroying real food for a century, which Wendell Berry talks about in this link that I’m going to encourage you again to read. Those same realities also prevent me from selling the above-pictured butter to you. If you want to live in a beautiful world, work to legalize food.

North Carolina is now a net importer of milk, and we used to be a dairy state. We cannot separate our eating from our living. The false notion of specialization that “preserves” small, isolated patches of wild surrounded by concrete, shopping malls and housing developments is not sufficient to save other species or ourselves. We are going to have to learn to eat and dwell in the same community if we are going to survive.

Doing so amidst brokenness — of relationships, ancestral knowledge, a degraded soil resource base that precedes our lifetimes — isn’t simple nor easy, and defies quippy solutions. One of the things that has been estranged since the Industrial Revolution is our living and working in the same landscapes. There has been a lot of talk in the past few decades about women working outside the home, but the truth is that the men for the most part left homestead economies first — to work in town.

Historically, people lived, worked and ate and found community in the same place. We believe there is great value in doing so, and it’s why it was so important to me from the very beginning of my homesteading-turned-farming dreams that agriculture be deeply imbedded in enlightened commerce and remaking the proverbial and brick-and-mortar village. (To that end, this open letter from the president of the Sierra Club is worth reading. He invites us to move beyond “traditional wilderness protection, land conservation, and outings” to engagement with issues related to agriculture, sprawl and transportation and how those issues are inextricably tied to issues of race and economic justice.)

“Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed for more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.
“Even if you never touch meat, you’re costing something its blood”, she said. “Don’t patronize me. I know that. Living takes life.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

So the question is, how can we interact with life, while recognizing that we need to eat three times a day, in a way that creates more life than it takes? It’s a big question. Would you join us in answering it together?

You can help by buying your meat from us, your vegetables from Eat Dirt Farm (Jake has milked cows at Reverence for five years, and he’s delightfully obsessed with soil health), sundries from the Saxapahaw General Store and donate to the Haw River Trail. We are working on a community project to remove invasive privet down by the river; stay tuned for details.

It’ll all be more beautiful with your participation… So, how are you going to eat? Can you make beauty the byproduct of a thrice-daily communion with the divine?

Cooking

“Mama Butter Churner”

June 27, 2021June 27, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Tips for making butter, from a farm kitchen

I told Vivian the other day to start calling me “Mama Butter Churner” because pretty much all I’ve done with my free time in the past 6-8 weeks is make butter. She thinks it’s hilarious to call me that, even though we don’t have a churn, and instead use the Cuisinart (less splatter than the mixer and more surface area to touch the “paddle,” aka blade, than the blender — but all three will work).

And lately I’ve learned why making cultured butter makes so much more sense, practically. The digestive and nutritional benefits are real, too.

When I say “make butter,” I’m talking an epic amount of butter. We probably have 50 lbs of butter in the freezer, easily. I’ve started slicing it like cheese and using it commensurately. The cream from this time of year is the brightest because it has the most quantity and quality of nutrition from rapidly growing grasses, forbs, legumes and woody plants that the cows miraculously convert from difficult-to-digest vegetative matter and make them bio-available to us. Although making butter is super simple, I’ve learned a lot over the past couple of months about making it well, which is to say, in a way that goes fast and produces a good end result. This post is borne out of a desire to share a few tips that I’ve learned along the way.

Butter really does make everything better, and vegetables much more digestible. I like to think of foods as a vehicle for eating butter!

Since the cream really has to be at least 55 degrees before churning (otherwise you get a homogenized mess of milk and butter droplets, that you can press out but it takes a lot of patience), 60+ degrees is better, I’ve found that presents a unique challenge. I’ve been using food-grade 5-gal buckets to store the cream. It takes a long time for one of those to warm up at room temp (8+ hours). That would be all fine and good if I could perfectly plan what life would be like in 8 hours from now. But bulls get out, calves get lost in the woods, fireworks and tannerite get blown up at the neighbors (freaking out the guard dogs, causing escapes or entire days spent fixing fencing), and any number of things can precent me from spinning butter when my cream is at a perfect 60 degrees.

The cream comes out of the bulk tank at 40 degrees and then I usually put that 5-gal bucket in the fridge. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong or keep me from churning that butter at 60+ degrees. Right picture shows butter being washed after I’ve pressed milk out.

That’s where the culture comes in, and I stumbled upon the perfect culture and I wanted to share it in case it blessed someone else like it has me. I got it from Homesteader’s Supply, where I got my butter mold. This is not a paid ad. I just really appreciate the craftsmanship that these folks put into their products. My cherry butter mold came with a free sample of butter culture. It’s dreamy stuff!

This is the intermediate step between cream and washing the butter. This is where the milk gets pressed out of the butter. I use a colander with small holes, but not mesh, because that just makes a mess. If butter is spun too cold, this part is very challenging and takes a lot of patience and time. If the cream is room temperature, this part happens in seconds. Butter culture keeps the end product from souring.

When it’s 11p at night and I don’t have the courage to start making butter, I just add the tiniest pinch of culture and it prevents the cream from souring and instead makes a delicious cultured butter. From now on, I’m just going to start adding the culture when I take the cream out of the fridge as an insurance policy. This culture tastes so good that I don’t mind all of the butter being cultured and not “sweet cream.” In fact, I think it tastes better than sweet cream.

It’s not lost on me that having this much cream to make butter with is a situation that most people dream of, and it’s really not possible without having not just one but several cows, or a good source of non-homogenized cream. There is a sweetness to this process for me, as it’s been almost 13 years in the making. There was a time that I dreamed of just one gallon of milk from my own cow without her kicking over the bucket, getting mastitis or any number of other challenges. Believe me, I get where you are in this journey, even if you don’t have a cow at all and just dream of really good food and it seems impossible to get there. The best advice I have is to just start where you can, and be faithful in small things.

If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones.
Luke 16:10

May your butter be golden, your children’s cheeks rosy and your land be blessed with your good stewardship. Happy churning!

Dogs

Goodbye, our sweet friend

June 15, 2021June 15, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

We will miss you, dear Acorn, and may we all live and die with as much courage, grace and love as you embodied

livestock guardian dog — You will be missed, our dear, dear Acorn. You were a mighty force for love and carried on until your last day with courage.

Farming isn’t for the faint of heart. But it will teach you, often daily, just how beautiful and precious life is.

It is with great joy and a little sadness that I tell you that Acorn passed on last night after having a great (if hot) last day. He and his best friend, Andy, managed to escape chicken duty for one final romp around the farm. He was probably looking for a place to leave us —and he did so mightily, on his own terms, seemingly not in pain (thanks to the medications that we’ve given him with food 3x a day like clockwork since his bone cancer diagnosis). He has been walking on three legs for the past six weeks or so, and in the past two weeks not walking much at all, but he has been so happy for his frequent visits (even if he didn’t like getting the pills).

“Can you take them? My neighbor is about to shoot them.”

Acorn is a beautiful story of redemption and God’s bountiful grace and provision. He came to the farm 8 years ago as adolescent dog with his brother, Dots. A wonderful neighbor came to our old property (where the new Hawbridge School is being built now) and told us she found our “two white dogs.” I looked behind me and my two white dogs were where they belonged. I told the kind woman that those weren’t my dogs. She said, “Well, can you take them? My neighbor is about to shoot them.”

I had more than my hands full at the time. I was recently single, and Vivian was small. I was working 30 hours a week at the Saxapahaw General Store, while trying to move hastily from one farm to another after losing my lease, and having exactly zero infrastructure on the new farm (no roads, no paths for roads, no electricity, no barns, no fences, no water). Even the crazy animal-lover that I am, I said to myself, I can’t take these dogs. But I happened to have an empty outdoor dog cage near the old barn, and I told her that if we could easily corral them in the cage, that I would take them. Sure enough, they went right in. It was just as though they were supposed to be there.

Vivian and Huckleberry, one of the two “white dogs” we already had (Eva was the other) when Dots and Acorn arrived.

Vivian named them Dots and Acorn, and they remained in that cage for 6 months. I moved it every few days to fresh ground and they had shade and cover from the rain with a tarp, but that was all I had the ability to do. I tried to put them in the pasture with the sheep and chickens, and they started hunting both species and killed a few animals before I was finally able to catch them again (days later — they were nearly ferrel dogs). That’s that part about livestock guardian dogs that is challenging: they make painful mistakes when they are young. It takes a long time and a lot of patience to get them to be excellent dogs and then the best thing to do is have an older dog to train the younger ones, but that’s the kind of farm maturation that takes many years. Farming isn’t for the faint of heart.

The upside of their solitary confinement was that it tamed them. I was their only contact when I’d come in to feed and pet them, which they didn’t much like at first. But because they were in a small enclosure, they had to reconcile with me as their food provider. I don’t remember when it was exactly that I let them back out, or trusted them with animals, but neither of them did anything to any of their charges ever again. Dots went on to be the wandering dog of Saxapahaw, no fence/fortress/castle would keep him contained, so he just wandered on the farm, except during thunderstorms, when he would go to the village and fine a porch to get under (it’s not at though we didn’t have adequate barns for him to hide in by that time, but he was always convinced that he could flee the sounds, and nothing except a metal chain would keep him at home). He passed on a few years ago, unfortunately and tragically when he got himself in a bad situation in a storm with a chain. We spent literally hundreds of hours chasing that dog around hither and yon, trying to contain him, and he still died tragically. Farming isn’t for the faint of heart.

Dots, Huck, Acorn (in the way back, center, always the shiest one) and Eva lumbering along like the mountain of a matriarch that she was. This picture was take in August 2014, the first day they arrived on the new farm. All these dogs have now passed on.

It ain’t easy to become the A-team

When it was time for Eva to retire to the house yard (she died two years later after a beautiful and heart-warming retirement, read her story here), and after Huck had passed on, Acorn got Andy as his new pasture friend. He taught Andy about how to be a good chicken dog. I just think that’s amazing: the dog that used to hunt and eat chickens and sheep taught his new and younger friend how to be a good guardian. Maturity and wisdom bring peace and service to others.

And so it has been for years, Acorn and Andy together, with occasional visits from Charity, who has the same “I will not ever be contained even if you build a wall of stone to the sky” mentality that Dots had (it’s a common trait of these magnificent dogs), although she’s smarter about it, and stays home (unless another dog is out, then all bets are off!). The three of them went on a not-so-great adventure almost two years ago that ended in Andy getting hit by a car in a foggy storm. Three surgeries and a lot, lot of TLC later, he lives on, albeit with a significant limp.

Acorn, foreground, with his best friend and protege, Andy (left), under their favorite oak tree in Pasture 3.

If you haven’t gathered by now, containing these dogs is no small feat. They were bred to roam over hundreds if not thousands of acres and guard sheep in the Pyrenees and don’t take easily to confinement, even if that means a pasture fence with a hundred acres or more. The reason why Great Pyrenees are still the breed of choice for many small farms is that they are excellent with people and especially children, even though they are fierce protectors of their herds and flocks. Many livestock guardian breeds are not so good with people and work better on open range in the West, where they never have to interact with people.

As they get older and wiser, Great Pyrenees tend to stay put more. For lots of different reasons, we missed a few critical periods in some of their lives to get them to bond to their flock/charges as young dogs, and working with them as older dogs takes a lot more effort, and is prone to error.

We haven’t decided yet who is going to be Andy’s new partner, but he will get one for sure.

Scenes from our little funeral for Acorn last night. He is buried in the pastures he guarded so loyally. And the heifers, Lorin the bull and sheep were attending. Wes graciously and skillfully dug the grave, while Pops looks on.

Farming isn’t for the faint of heart, but it does teach you how to live, every single day

The beautiful thing about life is that it goes on. Acorn’s funeral was simple and beautiful. It was one of the only times that I can remember that my family got together with just the four of us, Mom, Pops, Connor and me. For various reasons, all the people who didn’t grow up in our house in Long Grove, Illinois, couldn’t attend. So it was just us, the lovely Wes, and the animals grazing in the top of Pasture 12, where we chose to bury Acorn so he could look out over his kingdom. This was our first proper burial with a digging machine. We usually wear ourselves out with shovels and use a tractor or the skid-loader to dig, but neither are digging devices. Then we’ve had to cover up our shallow graves with many rocks to prevent wild critters or another dog from digging up the hole. Farming isn’t for the faint of heart. It isn’t always as pretty as the pictures, but it is always beautiful in its raw, living, breathing way — and even in dying.

After our simple and short ceremony, my mom put a cross made of sticks on his gravesite, and we all went back to our evening routines. There was so much peace on the farm last night as I checked the cows before bed. Simone and Cora, our two newest heifer mamas, both had their babies with them, Sylvie and Aiden. (It’s not uncommon to have to look for a new baby in the first week in the pasture to make sure we find it instead of the coyotes, as we don’t have sufficient fences for livestock guardian dogs yet on the side of the farm where the milk cows abide.)

Everything was just as it should be. And I could feel Acorn smiling down from the Great Pasture in the sky.