Trauma Farm (15 page)

“
SHE HAD AN EXPRESSION
on her face,” Mike Byron said, “like a horse eating a thistle flower.” He was describing a pompous shopkeeper, and it cracked me up—especially since I’d seen my horses eat their share of thistle flowers. When we bought our farm it was riddled with thistles. Sheep don’t eat thistles, but horses do. In fact, they take a certain masochistic delight in gingerly deflowering the thistles with their rubbery lips. They eat only the flower, but this gradually eliminates the thistles from a field. Upon being offered our next horse after Tie Me Down, a twenty-year-old semi-retired show horse, we decided to do the charitable thing and give him a retirement home while reducing our thistle nightmare and supplementing our desperately needed manure.

Stonewall Jackson stood eighteen jet-black hands high. He was a beautiful, stubborn, and affectionate creature, with a tendency to mug any strollers on his land, thrusting his big nose into your pockets for sugar cubes—a good, easy horse to ride before we finally put him out to permanent pasture. Plus he could eat thistles as if they were caviar. By the time he died he’d cleared both our main fields. Unfortunately, he could also suck the lower leaves right off a plum tree, so I had to keep the orchard double-locked. Whenever he managed to pop a gate he’d seek the sweetest clover within a square mile, and his Houdini tricks soon taught me where the best pasture was in our neighbourhood. He was a terrible beggar and would always come up to the narrow front deck and practically stick his head into the house if the door was open. His favourite trick, when we were foolish enough to let him into the front yard, was to upend the bird feeders and vacuum up the seeds.

Sometimes on a sunny morning I’d bring out a few carrots to the deck, along with my breakfast, and we’d eat together, until the day I dropped a carrot and it rolled under the table. I put my dish down to fetch the carrot, and before I was back on my feet he had licked the eggs, bacon, toast, and hash browns off my plate with one big slurp. I guess he was going for the toast but decided to hoover it all up. It didn’t seem to bother him any, eating my bacon, though it sure irritated me.

During the years we rode him he could still perform his show-ring moves, and it was a delight to pretend I knew what I was doing. Sharon loved sitting on his back, letting him take her for relaxing tours through the tastiest grasses in the ditch beside the road, grazing his way home. Jackson kept his independent mind and private life until the end. Some nights I would see him out there galloping alone in the field, scaring the sheep and the ducks, prancing like a teenager. A friend, the poet Lorna Crozier, once told me the story of a white horse on the prairie, a show horse, that under the full moon, alone, would practise its fancy show-ring routines. Jackson wasn’t that glorious, but he had some good moves.

After Jackson died we didn’t want any more horses, but a few years later we ended up with both a horse and a tractor when our kindly neighbours moved away. La-Barisha, a glamorous Arabian grey, reminds me of a fading beauty queen. She thinks she’s God’s gift to horses, and the smug expression on her face when she’s having her hooves trimmed is so arrogant I tease her about “having her nails done” and promise to paint them red one day.

THE COW’S TONGUE IS
just as amazing as the tongue of the horse or the sheep, meatier yet equally sensitive. Cow tongue is also one of my favourite meats. A boiled tongue, peeled and thinly sliced onto a hunk of homemade rye bread with good mustard, is a disappearing delicacy. Fifty years ago it was a common lunch meat, but times have changed. Betty, our sole cow, had a tongue that looked a yard long, and she could lap a bucket clean, along with your hands and anything else that tasted good, and she could savour a pasture the way a gourmet can savour a good sauce or a bottle of wine.

With its near-supernatural tasting skills, a cow can lick the air and analyze the protein content of a pasture, the acidity and the alkalinity of grasses and clovers, and what part of the field is in its prime. Cattle, like horses and sheep, change their diet depending upon the time of day and the season because the protein content in grass changes according to sunlight, moisture, and heat through the year. The cow’s olfactory world is so complex it’s difficult to understand for simple-minded creatures like ourselves, but some organic farmers are learning to be grass farmers, as farmers once were—smelling the grass in the morning and the evening, looking for colour gradation and the shapes of the stem. It’s easy to tell when a fence is broken but a lot more difficult to know when a pasture is broken and how to fix it. These New Age farmers might not be as smart about grass as a cow, but they are attempting to learn from their cattle—as well as reinventing traditional practices of cross-fencing and tending to the health of mixed grass, only with more scientific finesse. This way their cattle will inevitably become cheaper to raise and certainly healthier than the abused prisoners of the modern feedlot.

During the twentieth century agriculture shifted away from traditional practice and adopted the production efficiencies of the factory—raising cattle on minimum pasture and feeding them hay, grain, and silage. The cattle are then “finished” in feedlots where, as most people know by now, up to a hundred thousand cattle are imprisoned in obscenely filthy enclosures—sometimes knee deep in excrement—and are given corn-based feed, which acidifies their stomachs and provides a perfect host environment for the toxic bacterium
E. coli
O157:H7, the poisonous, deadly child of the feedlots.

Once the cattle are fat enough, their muscles slackening from disuse, they are shipped to slaughterhouses that resemble medieval torture chambers, where they are sliced open and cleaned, usually by immigrant labourers in the United States, people with the courage and desperation to work in these horror houses. The unrelenting assembly lines force the workers to clean and gut up to a steer a minute. Anyone who has ever gutted a steer knows how insane that is. It often leads to accidental piercing of the stomach and the spraying of shit and intestines and their bacteria all over the meat. By the time we see that steer it’s washed and wrapped in plastic. The bacteria aren’t necessarily eliminated. Then we eat it.

CONSIDER LIVE STOCK FEED. OR IGINALLY
it was pasture. As grain grew more common the farm industrialized. Then mixed-grain feeds came along. They were soon manufactured with animal by-products and mineral supplements and hormones. Unnaturally elevating the protein, fat, and starch levels can create larger livestock faster. It didn’t matter that many of the ingredients—such as bones, feathers, blood, fish, canola oil, enzymes, soy meal, antibiotics, and alfalfa—were not part of the livestock’s original diet, which is why b se suddenly broke out. Feeding beef and other livestock by-products to beef is now banned. Yet when the outbreak first occurred in Britain, there were so many millions of tons of feed in circulation that the feed mills cleverly recalled and reprocessed the contaminated feed into chicken and pork feed, because chickens and pigs have yet to show symptoms of bse. A dangerous economic decision that worked in that case, but do we want to trust these companies?

Antibiotics in feed constitute up to 70 percent of North America’s consumption of these drugs. Owing to the growing wave of revulsion, the use of animal by-products and antibiotics is diminishing, but animal While these feeds reduce the time enhanced livestock to market, they are term coined by Ronald Wright. Simplistically that what appear to be good ideas often become evolutionary dead ends. Some livestock less healthy and too fat, and environmental damage and disease. That’s The big question is, Where do you draw is good feed? This is difficult because the environmental, and health issue—not merely one. How can you legislate that? Or common nutritional knowledge is constantly changing, are difficult to enforce—unknown material to rendering factories despite the current legislation.

I feed our livestock good pasture, the appropriate grain, ground or whole. industrial feed production has led to increasing of regular grain, since the feed companies, of modern breakfast cereals, from processed feeds. Relatively few farmers now use traditional feed.

Progress traps that arise out of modern structures can lead to strange results. The reasons for the foot-and-mouth panic in Great Britain were economic. They had little to do with the health of humans or animals. Foot-and-mouth is a nasty disease—a livestock version of measles. But it goes away in a few weeks, and then the animal is safe to slaughter. Nor will its immune system be susceptible to same variant of the disease (there are several strains) again. However, if you are holding fifty thousand feeder pigs in a factory, calculating daily the digestible protein and fat ratio pouring into the rotors that distribute feed to the troughs, time is essential to the financial equation. Slaughterhouse delivery is calibrated to the exact hour. A twenty-four-hour delay would make tens of thousands of animals unprofitable. A longer delay would mean economic collapse for the factories. That’s why the British agriculture bureaucrats ordered the slaughter of everyone’s livestock in the affected regions, not just those produced by the factory farms. The enormous carnage and the great heaps of burning corpses, including endangered varieties of livestock, were a symbol of profit protection, not safety.

BETTY WAS A JERSEY-HEREFORD
cross—Hereford for the meat and Jersey for the bountiful milk to nurse a calf. She was a cow bred to raise a hefty dinner. She even came with a good calf, and the plan was to raise her calves for meat— one a year. Alas, Betty had a different plan. It consisted of eating everything in sight. Cattle, understandably, don’t like being tied up. Mike used to tie his Jersey cow to his truck bumper and milk her. Then he sold the cow to a good friend, a knowledgeable farmer, and when Mike told him he just tied the cow to the bumper, his friend did the same, ensuring she was double-tight by tying her hind leg to the back bumper. He had a new, expensive pickup and didn’t want to take chances. Maybe that was the fatal mistake. The cow decided she didn’t like the arrangement, or the new truck—whatever—and started bucking. She flipped off the back hobble and kicked the shine right out of his truck, ornamenting it with her personal hoofprint design from bumper to bumper.

Betty had similar feelings about the split-rail fencing between her and the orchard and soon was ginger-stepping between the rails and reaching for the lower branches of the fruit trees. Once she’d wrecked our cross-fencing to her satisfaction, she settled into eating everything she could reach. Thankfully, she didn’t crack the higher fencing that kept her in the field.

Betty was a cranky cow, according to her next owner, but I got along with her fine once I rebuilt the fences stronger. I milked her every morning in the field where I’d dug a deep hole and stuck a post in it. When the early light fell on the land I’d bring her a bucket of feed, and she’d mosey up to the feed and start eating while I clipped her to the post, pulled up a chunk of firewood for a stool, and began milking her. She’d munch contentedly until I had our pail of milk. Sometimes, I’d hand-whip the milk of summer into a rich, golden butter that has forever given me contempt for that dyed, silver-foil-wrapped trash in the dairy section of the supermarkets. You can practically get stoned on real Jersey milk, especially in early summer (real milk and butter change flavour according to the season), when it’s so rich and real, but, of course, it’s illegal to sell anymore.