Welcome to the Farm!

and a quick tragic story

Hello all!

Thank you to all my new subscribers. If you found this account via my Free Press article, thank you for following me to Substack! If you didn't catch the article, in which I described lessons learned in farm camp, it's here:

What City Kids Learn on My Farm

In the piece I present myself as a bit of an expert on farming. This wasn’t always the case. Look at us in 2007, a typical Brooklyn family heading out for brunch:

In 2010 we sold our Park Slope house, left the city, and bought a farm upstate in a red rural county. We knew next to nothing about how to run a farm.

Visitors often ask how we learned. The truth: one crisis at a time. For example, I now know how to recognize the symptoms of a meningeal worm infection in a sheep. I also know how to reach inside a laboring ewe’s uterus and dislodge a lamb’s shoulder from behind the mom’s hipbone. These were rough experiences but now I know.

I’ve also learned when to call it quits on an animal. This is still the hardest lesson—I keep having to learn it—and it explains so much to me about the rural personality.

Here’s one watershed moment: In our second year on the farm we had a pet goat named Jimbo, who one day began screaming when he peed. I called the breeder."Oh, too bad,” she said over the phone, hearing his screams. “That's urinary calculi. He'll have to be slaughtered. Don't bother with antibiotics. It won't work and then the meat's no good."

Slaughtering Jimbo was as unthinkable as slaughtering one of our dogs. We'd bought him as solace after another goat had died giving birth just a few weeks earlier. We couldn't take another tragedy. I called the local agricultural vet. He was just as brusque. "Bring him over this afternoon. I’ll slaughter him in my shed." 

Also unacceptable. So I called a pet vet (incidentally, a city transplant, just like me). She agreed to try to save him by operating on him. It was experimental but she was willing to try. She basically fashioned a new exit hole for his urine to bypass his blocked urethra. After the surgery she kept him for observation and gave us daily reports; he was quiet but alert and seemed to be improving—and then suddenly he died. She autopsied him and discovered his bladder had burst. 

In trying to be kind I'd given this animal an excruciating death. At that moment I began listening to farm people with more respect. Sometimes what looks like cruelty is the bigger kindness, especially when it comes to a quick death. 

I thought of this event (and many others) when I read this piece in the NYTimes about the rise in academic rural studies. (Thanks, Christine, for sending!)

Short summary: the rural character has been misunderstood largely because the people investigating, writing about, and polling rural communities don't understand them and have no connection to them. Remember the outcry over the book, Rural Rage? (Subtitle: The Threat to American Democracy). That was a prime example. (In turns out the authors’ claim that white rural people were more prone to political violence was wildly overstated and based on unstable data.)

I appreciate this discourse. I’ve been endlessly fascinated by the discord between the parsimonious even contemptuous view of rural America that I brought with me from the sophisticated urban lands where I grew up—and the far more complex reality I encountered when I got here. So much of my learning arc in the last 14 years has been about clearing that fog and coming to see basic elements in rural life — and farming, and life itself— more clearly and generously. This affects my personal outlook, my politics, my food, and pretty much everything else I think about. I'll be sharing those observations and more in this account.

Anything in particular you'd like to know? Ask me in the comments! 

Thank you all!

xxLarissa

PS Here’s us in 2022. Have we changed that much? Most of the changes were internal!

Family portrait by Val Shaff.