Farming Archives

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.

The colors after Acorn’s burial were even more stunning than usual and the whole farm was infused with purple, the color of royalty.

Ruminants make more life than they take

April 29, 2021May 7, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Does your food create, restore, caress and nurture life in you and around you? I’m about to say a radical thing… Maybe two or three or six!

Victory the bull contemplates me as I contemplate the majesty of the morning and the incredible symbolism of this photo.

There is so much about this scene that makes me happy. Moving the bulls and steers to a fresh break of grass before the sun was really up. The massive improvement in the pasture in just a year. This is the third year of adaptive grazing on this property, and the fifth property I’ve witnessed this principle come true: during the third year, things start coming alive. It’s a long slog to get there, and you feel like you are not making any progress.

The natural laws of disturbance and rest are not interested in our impatience. They are laws and they work. The earth’s crust needs the right kind of disturbance — and the cloven hooves of bovines are especially adept at this responsibility — and the right kind of rest. Ruminants make more life than they take.

Too little and the grasses don’t have time to bank carbon from the air in the form of sugars in their roots to store up enough energy to grow again. Too much rest and the plant goes to seed and the nutritional value of the forage for the animal goes by. It’s a delicate and intricate dance.

The plow is a violation, too big of a death for too little life in return. Centuries worth of bison following their instinctive pattern of disturbance and rest created a rich loam that is the key to our survival. Ruminants make more life than they take.

We are willing to sacrifice everything — massive, incomprehensible amounts of life — for a few years of corn and beans. And then tell ourselves that we aren’t killing anything to eat as we go on consuming non-foods manufactured with machines that tore up the earth to create substances that make us feel good while they are killing us. Bread and circus. The annihilation of the substrate that sustains us on the earth’s surface is so complete that we cannot even see our participation in our own destruction. Hubris wrapped in delusion.

Everything, everything, is always being created or being destroyed. There is no static in a dynamic universe. And ruminants make more life than they take.

Yet… Yet. It can come back. The soil can come back. We put the genie back in the bottle. The toothpaste can go back in the tube. All the carbon that doesn’t belong in the air BELONGS UNDER OUR FEET. And we must collaborate with four-footed wonders (aka ruminants) to do it. I’m tired of the lies that eating less meat is going to save us. “Eat less meat, eat better meat.” It’s not true! Eating plants takes the plow. The plow is death. The life in these picture makes more life, in us, and in the world. Ruminants make more life than they take.

A fresh break of grass. A fresh measure of hope. The truth will wrestle you to the ground until you listen. There is more life because these animals lived and grazed and yes, eventually die, than there would be without them. There is life-giving and life-taking death. We choose.

I say these words with both boldness and trepidation. Long ago I learned that we make decisions about food in the same place in our brains that we make decisions about God. I don’t think that is an accident. And I also know that means that there’s a whole lot of emotion for a lot of people when they learn that their beliefs may not line up with natural laws. There are some things that are true whether we believe them or not.

Life takes life. There is no escaping this law. We can destroy the soil, ground-dwelling birds, thousands of species of soil critters that are food all the way up the food chain, bunnies, frogs and insects by the trillions so we can tell ourselves that nothing died so we can eat. That is a lie. Something died so you could eat today. And despite popular opinion, the further down the food chain you eat — unless you are no-till gardening in your backyard with a shovel to grow your own vegetables, and even then there is death every time you put a spade in the ground — the more death you are participating in because eating lower on the food chain requires the plow. And make no mistake, the plow is death.

“The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” And so began this tome, July 5, 1943. It soon became a best-seller, but the ideas therein are so radical that it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to gain acceptance.

We are living in radical times. Radical really just means “root.” I believe we are getting to the root of the matter, in so many places, in so many ways at one time that it is dizzying. But there are two things about truth that I’ve learned: It always sets you free. And truth always comes out. Winston Churchill said that the truth is so valuable that it is protected by a bodyguard of lies.

If we all ate a traditional diet, including a lot of meat raised in keeping with natural laws, the planet could support more of us. If we eat more processed food, the planet can support less of us. Check out this really well-referenced scientific paper by our friend Fred Provenza. If it comes in the box, it’s processed. If it’s in the center of the grocery store, it’s likely processed. If it’s even sold in a grocery store at all, it likely contributes to your ill health and that of the planet.

As I was contemplating all of these before breakfast, I thought of the wonderful Alice in Wonderland quote about believing impossible things before breakfast.

So these are the impossible things I am going to imagine before I go get intimate with 2.5 eggs (an extra yoke, just because I can; the third white goes to the piggies), carmelized onions, cheese made by friends, mushrooms grown by other friends and bok choy grown by still other friends… Because I’m about to be late for my meeting. (Yes, farmers have meetings….) Then I’ll have a steak or hamburger for lunch, from an animal that grazed these very pastures. Here we go:

1. It’s possible to heal the earth and not nearly as difficult as you may imagine.
2. We can heal the earth while also healing ourselves. And nobody loses. Through the alchemy of grass, everybody actually wins. Ruminants make more life than they take.
3. Eating higher on the food chain is more healing to the earth and ourselves when done in keeping with natural laws than eating lower on the food chain.
4. Intimacy with what sustains us is beautiful, edifying and life-affirming.
5. All death is not the same. There is death that affirms life and death that destroys life.
6. We can choose in every moment to move towards the healing of ourselves, our relationships with one another and our ecological umbilicus. Things really can get better, and the more we believe that the more powerful that truth becomes. I know this because the world is too beautiful to have not been created on purpose by a loving God, who is Love itself. Creation is groaning for us to retake our rightful place as stewards.

We can choose to live in a garden or in a wasteland. How we choose to eat — and thus live — is a reflection of how we see ourselves.

The life — and death — in spring

April 19, 2021April 19, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Spring is so full of life. But it’s also life on the edge. This new ram lamb was born yesterday, our first out of a beautiful Katahdin ram gifted to us by dear friends at Abiding Pastures Farm. (We plan to keep replacement ewes from this St. Croix x Katahdin cross.) Yet, even as this was happening (and Nathan was sending us these photos), Heidi and I were working at the edge of life and death that is spring.

Heidi has been intensely helping a little ewe lamb for a couple of days. She’s spent hours warming her, feeding her from a bottle and from her mom and generally sticking with her very late into the evening and and very early in the morning. Why? Because the lamb wants so much to live, and her dam, a new mom, is especially fond of her. Not all new moms are fond of their babies or are willing to co-parent with two-leggeds, but this ewe and lamb are remarkable for their willingness and desire to be together and to live. Heidi sweetly talked the new mom through it all.

Usually when there’s a will there’s a way in this area, but I can’t say what the outcome of this is going to be. Dr. K helped me crawl belly crawl on the ground in a little nook last night to squeeze some milk from the ewe’s teat into the lamb’s tired-but-willing mouth. I felt cockroaches crawling on my back as we huddled to get the lamb some last drops of her mom’s rich milk before bed. This morning Nathan fed her at dawn, and Hue and Heidi tubed her some milk replacer. We are hoping that today is the day she makes the big turn. Yesterday we thought she was on her way out, but then she rallied in a big way.

Even when we don’t win, the struggle to preserve life is balm in an irrational age of disconnectedness

Life is sometimes hanging on by a thread, and it’s all we can do to preserve what’s left of it and encourage its growth. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But the love we put into these animals endures beyond each one. It’s that love that keeps us going, and encouraged when the balance of death and life seems to not be working in our favor. Yet, if we just look around, there is far, far more new life than death. But death is part of life, it just is, and that inescapable reality is what makes farming so grounding. It’s the only balm in the irrationality of our age, which is so disconnected from both.

In the same 24 hours, we had a ram die sort of mysteriously of Listeria. It’s a fast-acting bacterial disease that comes from eating poorly ensiled feed or rotting feed hay off the ground, but he was exposed to neither during the period of incubation. We put him down as an act of mercy after trying to get ahead of it with antibiotics (it is possible, but unlikely after the animal is down). The strain on his face gave way to peace, although it was still sad. He was robust just 24 hours earlier. Spring is like that. The environmental conditions that allow for new life also provide opportunities for death to sneak in. The membrane is thinner this time of year.

First-time moms sometimes need help

Not 12 hours later we pulled a stillborn heifer out of a first-calf heifer. I didn’t know until last year that the background rate of stillborns in first-calf heifers is 7%-8%. That’s almost 1 in 10. Usually we do better than average in terms of animal health metrics, but we don’t win them all.

The blood with what should just be straw-colored translucent discharge told us that Mildred needed help getting her baby out. We give our springing cows and heifers homeopathic Caulophyllum 6c daily to help soften the cervix but this heifer calved 30 days earlier than her predicted date. As it turns out, she had been successfully bred 21 days before we thought and calved 7 days earlier still. Even as Hue and Heidi pulled out the sadly dead calf, who had been alive just 6-12 hours earlier, this little life was looking at them in the bonxstall next-door.

Life is irrevocably intertwined with death

Life takes life. And death is just as part of spring as life is. Spring is hard on farmers. Hug one today. Yet, the joy that comes in participating in stewarding life is worth the pain of loss. Because we can’t have one without the other. Being intimately involved in the birth of life and the joys of spring also means we are perilously close to the reality of life and death’s interconnectedness. It starts with the life and death in the soil: what died last year is this year’s renewal. As above, so below. We press on towards life.

An abundance of white and red this spring

April 12, 2021April 12, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Red lady bugs are repopulating our ecosystem and white is repopulating in our Jersey cows. How do we get more lady bugs and Island-type cows?

Good morning, world! Heidi caught this great lady bug’s eye view of October grazing. In the process of showing you the farm’s breath-taking beauty of spring, I realized how red lady bugs and white on our Jersey cows are part of one beautiful story.

October 922 is the daughter of September (looking from behind). Front right is November 015, September’s daughter from this year, along with Mary 025, Maisie’s daughter.

We’ve been seeing a lot more red lady bugs recently — as opposed to the pinkish ones, which are non-native. Red lady bugs are a sign of ecosystem restoration.

Look at these beauties! This second one under the clover leaf evaded me before I could get my camera to focus that close, but every time I see a true red lady bug, it’s a beautiful sight.

The miracle is sometimes messy along the way…

In order to restore ecosystems, we first have to make a really big mess, and that’s why I am showing you this “ugly” shot of our cow feeding area after a rain. We roll out fresh straw every day when it’s muddy. I’m showing you this picture to show that sometimes beauty first means we have to get down and dirty. After six months of rest, this muddy lot (where we feed the cows hay overnight after they graze during the day) will be a verdant Eden. But first we need lots of animal impact, manure, straw and uneaten hay to feed the microbial life. Microbial life means that the mineral cycles, water cycles and carbon cycles can begin to work again. Life in the soil means life in the plants and life in the animals, and that life makes more life in us!

Mary, Maisie’s daughter, nurses on her while Polka finds a clean place to lay down (along with the heifer in the hay ring!). This is about the muddiest our feeding area gets.

Farming is not always beautiful and it would be unfair of those of you learning along side of us if we showed you only the glorious shots and picture-perfect clean cows on green grass. We get more of that every year, but like most of you just starting out, we started out with worn-out soils (in our case from tobacco, cotton and continuous grazing), and in order to feed the soils and restore life back to the ground, we use whatever hay and straw we can get to feed both the cows and the worms.

Little Nathan the bull carries his clover prize from the grazing area onto the cows’ feeding area. Notice the fresh straw and clean place to lay down. Vital for health and milk quality.

How do we get these islands of white on our Jersey cows?

I also included the picture of Maisie so those of you who are fascinated with color pattern inheritance in Jerseys can see how super-white Maisie (a pedigreed, full-blood Jersey) only passed along flecks of white to her daughter. Yet September, who only has small patches of white, had a super-white daughter. October has small patches of white like mom, and her sire, Hawthorn Grove Zeus, also has some small white islands.

November’s sire (Holt Creek Bozeman) had a lot of white but Mary’s sire had virtually none. In our experience, white has to be somewhere on each side of the cross to come out in the offspring. We do not breed for white specifically because otherwise we could end up with undesirable recessives in other traits.

In my experience observing color-pattern inheritance in Jerseys, the strawberry blonde coloring (like Lorin-P) also can lead to white patches or lighter-colored offspring. Most of our Lorin daughters are lightly colored, almost peach in color.

Lorin-P’s strawberry blonde color leads to light coloring in his daughters.

See our bull catalog here. More bulls added soon, including Lester-PP (shown below)!

Lester-PP. Neither his dam nor his sire had much white, but as a recessive trait, it sometimes comes through like a blond baby can come out of two dark-haired parents.

Today I’m grateful for red lady bugs and beautiful islands of white on our Jersey cows. Why? Because both make my world more beautiful, and both are the byproduct of seeking beauty and excellence in all things. We focused on land restoration, and the lady bugs have shown up. We have focused on bringing back traits of Jersey cows from the Isle of Jersey (sturdiness, grazing ability, medium frame size and high butterfat), and the white showed back up, just as it had on Island cows.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t intend to relate those two things. They were just both a beautiful part of spring to me, and they happened to tie together in my photo captions of the farm right now. But as I reflect, I remember again that everything is related to everything else, and we are all tied together in one amazing story.

What are you going to do today to make the world, and particularly your world, more beautiful?