life in the land Archives

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?

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.

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?