On living well - Reverence Farms

Tough times ahead. Get to know your food.

February 3, 2021February 3, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

It’s going to take some time to build relationships and develop skills. A seed takes longer to germinate than ordering take-out.

It’s time for some straight talk. At the risk of being inflammatory, I’m going to tell you what I see is going on in farming and food and encourage you, right now, today, to take a step closer to the source of your food. I am not talking about panic-buying food. I’m talking about getting to know your food a lot more intimately, and there’s no better time to start than today.

Grandma survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff. True story. Another true story is that during WWII, 20,000 people in Holland died of starvation, mostly in cities. The ones who lived had a connection to a farm in the country. That’s another way of saying that they knew their food relationally. I know this story of the Dutch starving intimately because Hue’s parents were in Holland while the Nazis blockaded the cities from getting food and fuel from the countryside.

Hue talking to some of the 104 pigs we rescued this summer from a confinement house before euthanasia. For a video of them dancing on grass for the first time, click here.

Hue is pictured here with the pigs we rescued this summer from grotesque euthanasia in the pork factories when the supply chain broke down and there were no processing plants for millions of U.S. farm animals to go, so they were killed in place in their fecal concentration camps by untold suffering (suffocation, extreme heat, gas, etc.; the previous link is to some incredibly well-done independent journalism).

Back to “normal” means back to basics

This is real stuff, folks. While we all attempt to “go back to normal,” all the signs are pointing wildly and clearly to one truth: Our stability and health are tied much more radically to our source of food than the veil of our instant-gratification culture has allowed us to see.

I am not telling you this today to sell a bunch of food. I’m telling you this today because I see what’s coming and I want to help you before you are in crisis. The time to get acquainted with where your direct sources of food are is this week. Do you know someone who grows something? What are you going to learn to grow? Time to start.

Images from my first garden in 2007. I had never grown food before. It was life-changing.

The time to start isn’t today because tomorrow is necessarily uncertain (although in a larger sense, it always is). The time to start is today because getting close to your food takes longer than ordering a movie on Netflix. You are going to have to make friends, learn new skills, build relationships in your community. That takes time. Start today.

All the signs I’m seeing with input costs means there are some really tough times ahead. I know that there are people in suits who spend lots of time with their fingers to the wind in economic models to tell you what I’m about to say in much more technical terms, but consider this the boots-on-the-ground version.

Input costs are going up radically. Time to radically simplify your food supply chain.

I just got off the phone with our fencing supplier. I’ve been trying to nail down our budget for this year to build and repair fences, and the gates are big bucks and we need a lot of them, so that number needs to get planned for in our FY2021 budget (for those who think that all farmers do is run tractors and work with cattle, well, that’s a column for another day…).

Our fence supplier is also a feed dealer, and he told me that in his 38 years in this business, he’s never seen input prices go up as fast for as many weeks in a row as what we are seeing now. He said last week his grain prices per ton increased by $60. That’s more than he makes selling per selling a ton of feed. He said his commodity clients understand, but the folks who come in and buy feed by the bag are hurting when he tells them that their horse feed just went up $2/bag, and don’t understand that he’s not pocking that money.

Markets are whacky — your food stability and health sovereignty is in your reach

The reason, of course, is international commodity markets are going nuts. China is buying massive amounts (in some cases double over last month) of grain due to weather-related crop failures.

Yesterday we got an email from a local meat packing plant that prices are going up. They’ve tried to hold the line as long as they can, but in one year’s time the daily cost of gloves for one employee has gone up from $0.68 to $2.08. Knives that used to cost $12 each now are $16.

Every single input cost, in every industry that I’m aware of, is going up, if people can get it at all. Supply chains are massively destabilized and volatile. And that takes awhile to show up on the grocery store shelves, but it’s coming. Price increases can be absorbed for a while but not indefinitely.

For Thanksgiving 2006, I bought this 30.5# turkey at the farmer’s market in New Orleans after asking the farmer what was his hardest-to-move bird. Getting close to farms can mean something as simple as buying what that farmer needs to move and developing relationship.

Do you have a skill that someone growing food needs? Can you build? Do web design?

So I’m going to ask you again: Where is your food source? What are your resources to grow something? Can you partner with someone who is growing something to help him or her with skills you have and develop a relationship that will keep you closer to the source of your food?

What are you going to do, today, to take a step closer to what’s on your plate and how it got there? When are you going to start participating in what nourishes you?

My first garden in 2007. It was perfectly kept until I had a baby and got a cow in the same year… Then the tomatoes didn’t always get watered. The rest, as they say, is history.

Diet by addition: Healing, hope, breakfast by the fire

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac”

I think about the above quote a lot, even though keeping our home fire burning in the winter does more for my soul than for frigid finger tips, as it’s not set up to really heat our home (although I certainly wish it was…). I have also been thinking a lot about adding things to my diet rather than subtracting them. I’ve been calling it “diet by addition,” and I’ve decided that I’m going to eat eggs, lamb or beef as the center of every meal. Sounds silly for a livestock farmer to say this, but I wasn’t doing this despite the food abundance in which I live. It’s been life-changing.

This morning’s breakfast, 5a. Reverence Farms’ eggs (2 whole, 1 extra yoke), spinach from Community Greens (get yours at the Saxapahaw General Store), Carolina Moon cheese from Chapel Hill Creamery, scallions from Dinner Bell Farm, mushrooms that I pre-cook weekly from my Haw River Mushrooms CSA (one of my favorite investments I make annually in my health), and butter that I made myself.

(YES! Eggs are back in stock and on sale!)

One of my most highly prized skills is that I can flip an omelet in a stainless steel pan. Get the butter adequate and the temperature just right, and a toxin-free nonstick pan is not only possible but preferable. I’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Andrew for teaching me to make a proper omelet. I eat an omelet every. single. day. Just ask my family what happens to my mental and emotional health when I don’t have one… Eggs are incredible.

What if we only ate food from people we knew? What does it meant to really support farms?

While by the fire last night I was watching a live video from Grass Grazed Farm and thought something they said was amazingly right on, and I’m glad someone is saying it: If we want to support farms, we have to eat farm food. This sounds simple, and it is, but they were very clearly articulating why that doesn’t mean going to the farmers market for “onesie-twosies,” a bunch of flowers, a piece of meat and a couple of vegetables. Is that all you are going to eat for a week, really? Where are the rest of your meals coming from? They spoke about when they are out of bacon, they don’t eat bacon. Radically simple concepts, but totally transformative.

How to talk to a farmer? Ask her what she needs to move and learn to cook it.

I remember reading something Joel Salatin wrote years ago in one of his books about how radically different our landscape would be if we bought most/all of the food that we eat from farmers. That means, just for my little family of three, that we buy carrots, celery, sweet potatoes, etc by the bushel full. It means we need an extra fridge in the basement just for produce. (I just picked one up another one on Craigslist last month for 50 bucks.)

It also means that for every single meal, I can share with Hue and Vivian every single ingredient and it’s source. It means we eat seasonally not because it’s trendy, but because it’s what our friends are harvesting right now. It means that when the peaches are coming off the tree, we better get preserving, because the harvest will last only a week or two. And when we have that peach jam later in the year, we are going to eat it in moderation. Why? Because it’s limited and we know what went into making it. When it’s out, it’s out.

Diet by addition makes life deeply satisfying

I have started to call it “diet by addition,” and what I mean is this: if I fill our plates and mugs (1-2 pints of bone stock per day is part of this) with nutrient-dense food three meals a day, and source 90+% of our diet locally, I can eat all the snacks and have my little cheats to my heart’s content and still stay in the same belt loop. Why? Because my body and soul are satisfied enough to not want much of those things. It’s not the discipline of saying no so much as the much easier discipline of saying yes to the right things.

Have you considered how being deeply satisfied with your food affects your health?

This is for all the farming mamas — you got…

December 26, 2020December 26, 2020
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Vivian at about six months old while I’m holding a goat named Doodle. Most days weren’t this picturesque, but the time Vivian spent on my back was foundational to our relating now.

This is for all the mamas out there farming and doing your best to raise a kid with all the modern expectations of child-rearing layered over the increasing clarity you get from every day pursuing a more simple life. You feel torn because you are torn. And you are not alone. All of your efforts towards finding a place to stand between the world you were given and the one your heart longs to create will amount to something, and with the abundance of God’s grace your kids will learn from you to also find a place to stand in truth and love, straddling the world that is crumbling and, with better skills than you had because you taught them by doing, a place of more solid footing.

This is my proud-mama post. Pregnant with the idea of this farm and Vivian at the same time, I learned to milk a cow with her in my belly. I carried her as an infant everywhere for five months on my chest (it’s like being pregnant for 14 straight months…), until one day I threw the guidebooks and modern caution to the wind and realized that if indigenous peoples carried babies on the backs from birth, I could certainly learn to do it at 5 months.

That’s when I got my chest and arms back and could really work again (but that’s also when she figured out she had her own hands, and grabbed branches and gates and animals everywhere we went). Despite 11 months of being attached to her, I still needed to put her down sometimes, and my mom made it all possible with her devotion to me and to Viv.

Having a baby and birthing a farm: twins!

Having a baby and birthing a farm together was like having twins, and the farm often stole my attention and time because its demands are always immediate and the bedtime stories and meals together often had to wait indefinitely. If I didn’t tend to the newborn lamb, it may die of hypothermia. Bedtime stories are important, but they are also too easily put off. Vivian learned an important lesson early — she’s not the center of the universe. None of us are. That’s one of the core deceptions that modern conveniences allow us to harbor: if I need/want it right now, and I get it right now, if my desires for comfort and ease can be met, I must be really important.

Life in the dirt teaches otherwise. But the historically abnormal practice of putting children in the center of our worlds is pervasive in our culture and I often had deep pain that I somehow wasn’t giving her enough of my attention.

From one working mama to another, if you are feeling that guilt, let it go. It’s going to be okay. You’re giving your kids the gift of observing you do something hard and worth doing, and doing it anyway, even when you don’t feel like it.

Grit meets grit

On her own a couple of months ago, Vivian decided that our 25-yo horse needed more care than she was getting, so she set up a feed room, begged for a way to have a sliding door that she could operate to get Shauna in/out on her own, and set her alarm for 6a every day to go feed her before school. She isn’t a morning person. It’s often cold and wet and unpleasant at that hour. Still, she does it, and again after school, without prompting. Kids see your grit and meet it. Keep going. They are expectantly observing and readying themselves for their own purpose-filled life.

When rainy days aren’t office days: A day in…

December 17, 2020December 19, 2020
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Blue rounding up the sheep to show them the barn. Not pictured: cold rain.

Let me just start off by saying that getting to spend our days toiling to leave the ground better than we found it, care for critters and work amongst a team of people who also pursue such as life calling is pretty awesome. Please also indulge me to add the following: If you are ever interviewing for a farm job at Reverence or anywhere else, pretty much the worst answer you can give to an inquiry as to why you want to work on a farm is “because I really want to work outside.”

I guarantee you that any farmer hearing that is going to think of days like yesterday and struggle to maintain composure. On days like yesterday (34 degrees and raining in sheets with just enough of a breeze to make it interesting), we work outside because our work is outside. Outside is not an attribute.

Our goal, every farmer’s goal, is to get our outside work done when the sun is shining and it’s pleasant-enough. The day before yesterday, I was walking the farm with Niti Bali and I distinctly remember informing her what a miracle it was that we were getting to enjoy a beautiful, crisp, sunny winter day. My dream of doing desk work on rainy days and outside work on amazing days has a way of not always aligning. I guess I had a premonition that the following day would be the kind during which my hands could somehow simultaneously be both numb and very painful.

A perfect day

Anticipating the incoming freezing rain, two days ago, Hue, Jake and I sorted some heifers out of a group across the creek from the dairy barn so that the 35 ewes with the ram and the heifers could get in the hoophouse. The heifers have been hogging the shelter during recent inclement weather, and we knew yesterday was supposed to be particularly nasty. We ended up peeling 8 yearling+ heifers out of that group and had a very pleasant walk over the creek and through the woods to reunite them with the main herd. It was the kind of farm day that dreams are made of. (Hue even carried me over the creek, which was spontaneous and amazing, because I wasn’t wearing my tall boots.)

8 heifers cross Hobby Creek from the Austin Quarter side of the farm to the Haw River side.

Yesterday’s walk to the barn started off easy enough. Just feeding our 25-yo horse, Shauna, with Viv, and straight back to the house, I told myself… Didi (the 3-legged pit mix) and Dolly (the Blue Tick Hound) — our normal 7a companions to the barn — elected to stay home. Dolly wouldn’t leave the porch even with a coat on.

While Vivian was with the horses, I decided to take a look at the 50 or so sheep in the market group — they are apart from the main group on a separate property so that the ewes in the group don’t get bred to the ram, as these are sheep that haven’t made the grade as breeding stock and will become part of our grassfed lamb program. They were in the rain. They didn’t look terrible, but nor did they look especially content. We had specifically given them access to what we call the Long Barn (a run-in shed where we store equipment and straw but that also dubs as shelter) for weather like this.

Okay, I thought, it’s time for you guys and gals to learn that the barn really is accessible to you, even though the entrance appeared obstructed by one of our mobile shade structures. Blue — the rescued Border Collie who is not a perfectly trained sheep dog but whose instincts are pretty dang good — and I successfully had the sheep down to the barn in two minutes. And then we waited.

The sheep could get in this barn, but they’d rather stay in the rain. Why? Lots of folks think sheep are stupid, but we just don’t see what they see… The only area around the shader has a puddle, and puddles reflect light in a way that is often scary to livestock. With the water continually hitting the puddle from the roof, it can appear like a hazard to them.

When working with livestock, it’s best for them to move along in their own will. When you start forcing them to go where you want them to go, you better have good handling equipment to keep them contained. We rarely do, and we mostly rely on good stockman-ship, which is better for everyone anyway. Just because you can force livestock doesn’t mean you should…

Sheep have their own notions

They wouldn’t budge. Blue was perfect and twice went out to bring back an escapee on his own, no words from me. Clearly the shade structure was too much of a visual barrier.

So now I’m going to move the shader. No problem, really. It’s super easy to move with our UTV. But then one of the poles got stock on the barn post, and so now I need a second person to hold it back while I drive it out. No problem. Fred happened to arrive for morning chores at the same time Hue came out to help, so now I have two sets of hands. Easy. Then the UTV lost it’s little bit of charge while I was waiting for them (we are in process of repairing it’s electrical connections). Farming…

So now we connect it to the truck, get the shader out, and planned to just get it backed into another barn so we are ready for the next impending ice storm. But turns out the shader’s wheel base wouldn’t fit in the barn unless we re-organized the barn, which I’ve been meaning to do anyway, yet it’s still 34 degrees and raining, and now I can no longer feel my hands.

This was a sunny-day project

Fred and Hue ended up backing the shader into the barn by hand because double-axeled wagons are really challenging to back up with tinted-windowed trucks in the rain into a really tight space. My job was to prevent the shader poles from getting stuck on the barn posts on the way in (yellow arrow, below) — for which I was about 50 percent effective, because by now the only time I can feel my hands is the acute pain when they try to hold something. I had not worn gloves as a hopeful measure to prevent any kind of unnecessary activity at the barn that morning … so determined I was to come right back inside!

It’s now 10a and the barn is clean and I’m spent. I should have just given myself a 30-min respite and TLC, but now I’m several hours behind on office work and so I foolishly pushed ahead and got myself feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed, an unwelcome friend that pursued me until 10:30p last night when I finally collapsed after making some soup. We did have a fire, and the soup was amazing.

Truthfully, I didn’t need to put the shader in the barn yesterday (although it did need to be moved out of the other barn). It could have waited for another pleasant-enough sunny day. But sometimes it’s worthwhile just to get something done so you don’t have to come back to it, because 14 other things will come up in the meantime, and when an object is in motion, it’s best to just keep rolling. Some of it was just stubborn persistence.

Can you see the canine? Blue is proudly looking over his good work. You’re a good boy, Blue.

Lesson? When the sheep weren’t going in the barn at all, even when it was just a little crummy out over the previous 7-10 days, that was the time to listen to the quiet inner voice that said, “I wonder why the sheep aren’t using the barn?” The next pleasant-enough day would have been a perfect time to move the shader and reorganize and clean the barn, instead of lamenting that I was looking at spreadsheets when it was 60 degrees and sunny.

The other, and bigger, lesson? Like Eisenhower said, planning is indispensable, but plans are useless.