On living well 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.

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.