The End of Farming

Last night I paid a visit to our friends Keith and Janice who, for almost the last month, have been taking care of our guinea pig, Shadow. The pig was in the pink of health, and Keith ever so thoughtfully had purchased a big bag of Timothy hay. But not just any kind of hay. No, this was organic Timothy hay.

I couldn't help but chuckle to myself at what seems a bit ironic. Or perhaps just a bit ironic to me. Last week the New York Times opined that we may be on the cusp of the demise of traditional farming as we know it. Not just more family farms going under in an Isn't it Sad kind of way, but the end of individual farming, period. This because of the rapidly escalating price of farmland, due in large part--you guessed it--to the rush to make ethanol.

The boom in ethanol to fuel automobiles, a wasteful, polluting and energy-stupid technology supported and even spurred by our own government, has helped double the price of corn, resulting in record corn planting and now a rush to buy more land on which to plant corn. In addition to driving up the cost of food here in the U.S., creating a tortilla crisis in Mexico, and promising to widen the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by artificial fertilizers, ethanol is now putting farm land out of reach to anyone who might have thought of starting a farm or adding to his acreage.

What the Times foresees is a point in the not-so-distant future when all farming operations will fall into the hands of huge agriculture conglomerates and investment syndicates. The trends are heading in that direction: the average age of farmers in this country is somewhere around 65. Young people just don't want the hassles. Farm products are becoming ever more commoditized, driving prices down on the production end, meaning less income for farmers. The processing of farm products is becoming ever more consolidated and distant, meaning higher expenses on the production end and thus less income for farmers. Local zoning and land use laws hardwire the development of sprawling strip malls, parking lots and roadways, eating up farm land and further increasing the premium on acreage.

With land prices escalating, farmers--what's left of them--are caught in a vice grip. The act of farming, meanwhile, becomes ever more industrial and impersonal. The use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides increases, destroying the soil, eroding it, sending it out to sea. We are, in short, through our government and our taxes--through our indifference to the land and our allegiance to the automobile above all else--dismantling our heritage of local farming in the most pernicious fashion.

So when people say they're buying "organic," I have to chuckle, in a sad sort of way. Yes, there may be more of us every day choosing organic, choosing to buy local. But we are a small minority. The feeling I get is that the vast majority of our countrymen--our leaders, even--really could not give a damn. We are slipping ever so inexoribly into a Soilent Green future where we won't have any idea where dinner came from, and the family SUV will be running on corn.

Making Food is Hard Work

Another of the rites of spring is starting a new compost pile. I've been extremely busy lately--the warmer weather brings on a flurry of activities--and with the intermittent rains my lawn just kept getting taller and taller.

Not such a horrible thing, as the grass clippings make an excellent addition to the compost pile. The green clippings add lots of nitrogen to the compost, like and injection of lighter fluid--the bacteria love it, and heat the pile until it is steaming. That's very good for decomposition

But the process involves getting several different tools out of the garage, setting up a leaf shredding operation to add the necessary brown--or carbonaceous--matter to the compost for proper balance (I go around the neighborhood in the fall and collect the bags of leaves the neighbors leave at the curb). Mowing is no easy trick either, the lawn being interrupted by numerous vegetable and flower beds. And that still leaves the weeds that have begun to encroach on the beds. They need to be pulled, the edges trimmed and reshaped with a spade.

All of which is to say that before you can harvest those wonderful lettuces and greens and other vegetables, you have to work on the soil and the weeds and maintaining the tools. Food does not just happen, even though it might appear so if you are just strolling the produce aisle at the supermarket. There is much human toil involved. That is one of the advantages of shopping at a local farmer's market: You actually see the faces and meet the people who are responsible for bringing your food forth from the soil with their own labor.

Whenever I despair of the work involved in my food I remember Ward Sinclair. Ward for years covered the agriculture beat at The Washington Post. Then he succumbed and became a farmer himself. He bought a piece of land in Pennsylvania and sold his product at the farmer's markets here in the District of Columbia, as well as to several restaurants. He also started a column in the Post's food section called "Truckpatch."

To my mind, Ward's "Truckpatch" column was probably the best thing ever written about food in a newspaper. His personal essays brought home so vividly how the food we either take for granted or glamorize in slick magazines begins with the muscle and sweat of an individual who is committed to the soil. Most farmers, especially the small truck farmers we see in the farmer's markets, do not make a lot of money. They are just crazy about the work. And there is so much of it.


After all these years, one particular column Ward Sinclair wrote, republished in the book Truckpatch: A Farmer's Odyssey, sticks in my mind. It simply details all the chores that lay before Ward on one typical spring day as the new planting season approached and he contemplated his schedule.

Knowing how to plant a seed, nurture it, harvest it, and take the finished product to market is only a part of the demands of the truckpatch, he wrote. The to-do list requires the farmer to be mechanic, carpenter, supply specialist, labor negotiator and employer, writer and graphic designer, plumber, banker and a host of other arts.

Oh, it would be simpler to call in an expert and have the job done right. But there is neither money nor time enough for the farmer to rely on others. When a tractor goes dead, he can't wait on help from afar. When wind rips the cover off a greenhouse, it must be replaced immediately.


So the to-do list is the farmer's master. It determines how his time is allocated and in its cryptic code language reminds him every day that the work on the farm is never done if the place is to flourish and succeed.

Ward Sinclair, ran a farm near Dot, PA, with his partner, Cass Peterson. They started one of the first farm subscriptions, or CSAs, in the United States. Ward died too young in 1995. Whenever I think that growing food is too much work, I remember his words.

Stuffing Sausage: Matanza Day 2

By the second day of the matanza, the crew is showing signs of wear. Children are over-excited and sleep deprived. We missed much of the festivities the night before when our own daughter melted down for lack of sleep. Fireworks were canceled because of high winds. Some of the crew are feeling the effects of too much merry making.

The good news: we are way ahead of schedule. Six pigs have all been killed and butchered. Most of the meat has been carved. What remains is to package and organize the finer cuts, and turn the rest into sausages.


In past years, this was no easy chore. The group was using the most rudimentary of equipment. All of the sausage meat, for instance, was ground in a small Cuisinart in the farmhouse kitchen. "We had to throw bags of ice on the Cuisinart to cool it down," said Christine Bergmark.


One of the matanza participants, Bob Feldhaus, has solved that problem. Feldhaus operates a pet store in nearby Leonardtown with friend Ronnie Frederick. Both are frequent visitors to the farm to help process venison. They are avid sausage makers. This year Feldhaus has purchased a commercial-grade meat grinder and a Cabela brand sausage extruder that holds several gallons of meat.


Most of the "volunteer" help has departed. Now it is down to the matanza shareholders: Brett and Chris, Bobby and Ronnie and Rusty and Karen, two former neighbors from a time when the farmer-wife team lived in Arlington. For some reason, the men gravitate toward the heavy equipment, while the women begin vacuum packing and sorting the meat. I have cleaned the bathtub in the walk-in refrigerator. Now the hams and bacon slabs are curing under layers of kosher salt. I join Bobby at the sausage making station.






There has been extensive chatter and deliberation over what kind of sausages to make and which recipes to use. One of the sources the group relies on is Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by a fellow named Rytek Kutas. Kutas, a man of simple tastes and straightforward opinions, advocates a husband and wife team for making "up to 100 pounds" of sausage a day. His recipes call for quantities no smaller than 25 pounds of meat.

This year the matanza group has decided on 7 different types of susage: Kielbasa, Italian, Sicilian, Hungarian, chorizo, breakfast patties and a "mystery" blend. Actually, two kinds of chorizo sausage emerged when one faction declared that the recipe did not have enough heat. The mix was split in half and some of Brett's incendiary homemade Tabasco sauce, along with red pepper flakes, were added to jack up the heat quotient.


To season the sausages, Bobby has brought bags of spices mail-ordered from Detroit: fennel, marjoram, paprika. After the meat has been pressed through the grinder, and after the seasonings are added, Rusty, a carpenter by trade, itches to apply his half-inch drill. The drill holds a three-foot-long mixing tool that makes child's play out of blending the meat and spices in a large plastic tub.



From there, the meat makes its way to Bobby's big Cabela extruder. Bobby's hands are practically numb from handling the cold meat. Wearing a pair of bright blue, neoprene gloves, I pitch in to keep the extruder loaded. Bobby slips a sausage casing onto the extruder. As he pulls down on the extruder's handle, the meat is forced into the casings forming one long, long sausage. I guide the finished sausage to prevent any tangles or pile-ups. As the hours pass, we cover several plastic-lined tabletops with the different varieties of sausages, about 300 pounds in all. They are laid out in long coils to dry. Later, we will twist the sausages into smaller links before cutting them into lots of five and vacuum packing them for distribution to the matanza members.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, chef Jeffrey Heineman is hunched over a small Cuisinart, making filling for his jumbo hot dogs. The meat for hot dogs must be finely ground and emulsified. Once in their casings, the dogs are then poached slowly in a water bath in the oven.

The work, the cold, the long cocktail hours--all are taking a toll. I yearn for a nap. It's just about this point that Brett taps me to join him in one of his two greenhouses to "pick bones." The bones from the butchering operation had been placed in a huge kettle and simmered the day before. Now we get to pull a couple of milk crates up to the kettle, sit in the warmth of the greenhouse and sort through the bones for bits of meat that can be used in sauces and possibly scrapple.


I am happy to pass an hour with Brett this way, sitting and picking. We talk about the business of farming. We gab about the huge rains that fell last June, about tomato blight, the fungus that killed my squashes, planting seeds early, and whether my collards will come back from last month's snow and ice storm.

For lunch, I return to the house and help my wife prepare a platter of fresh hot dogs wrapped in baguettes. Chef Heineman has not used any nitrates in the meat, so the dogs, pink at first, look more like weisswurst--a pale greyish tan--once they are cooked. But the flavor is still there. We savor them with mustard and chopped onion and a cup of beer from Brett's keg.


When it is finally time to go, Brett points to a large cardboard box containing our reward for helping: two large, bone-in loin roasts, a slab of ribs, two pint-sized bags of breakfast sausage and an assortment of sausage links. Not a bad haul. Thanks, Brett and Christine. We had a great time.

How to Skin a Pig

I find nothing repulsive about butchering an animal. Where others see gore, I see the miracle of evolution. The innards of a pig are utterly pristine. To me this came as a revelation. It does not matter how many of the animals you slice open: on the inside, each is identical to the one before it, a marvel of genetics and mammalian engineering. The organs glisten. They are squeaky clean--the liver crimson against the steely grey of the intestines; the kidneys perfectly ovoid and efficient; the heart a mighty muscle, a compact little machine.

During the first full day of the matanza, or pig slaughter, we will kill and gut six pigs. As we work around the viscera, the first order of business is to tie off the colon, to avoid any contamination of the animal's cavity. Then these few organs--liver, kidneys, heart--we seek out and keep. The rest becomes feed for the chickens. We wrestle an empty carcass into position and hoist it off the ground with rope and pulley for skinning. Four of the original six pigs will be handled in this manner, skinned and broken down into pieces. Two others, being white pigmented, are immersed in a hot water bath, a giant metal drum filled with water heated from a fire pit underneath. These two pigs are then scraped to remove all hairs, revealing a smooth skin that will crisp up nicely around the succulent hams.

By mid-morning there are 13 adults working at various phases of the pork production. I am already weary. My day began at 3:30 am, when anticipation shook me awake in our motel room. We had agreed to serve breakfast and lunch for the workers. We made the meals ahead, so they only needed to be reheated and displayed on platters. We'd been told the men-folk would be up at the crack of dawn. It was still dark when we arrived at the farm, where farmer Brett Grohsgal, greeted us with a flashlight and guided us into the house. We started coffee. We heated the oven. We checked the menu: My wife's special strata of Panettone and Challah breads with pancetta, rosemary and Gorgonzola cheese; Tennessee smoked bacon and chicken-apple sausages; scones with dried fruit and lavender-vanilla sugar; chocolate chip banana bread; tropical fruit salad. There was food for a crowd.


One by one the shareholders in the pig operation wandered into the kitchen. The house was utterly full.


"Having a lot of people over is my favorite part of the matanza," says Christine Bergmark, the second half of the farm team. "Most years we have someone sleeping on the couch."
The matanza is into its eighth year. It started when Bergmark was trying to figure a way to deal with all the leftover tomatoes at the end of the season, the ones that weren't good enough to send to market. The tomatoes were being thrown back into the fields to rot. Bergmark thought a farm animal might take care of the tomatoes.


"I thought maybe we should get a pig," Bergmark said. "Brett went out to get a pig. He came back with five."


"They get lonely," Grohsgal explains sheepishly.


They tried raising other animals for the matanza: goats, sheep. But goats and sheep find a way to break out of their enclosures, and then they are in the fields eating Grohsgal's prized greens.


"They were eating my collards!" he declares. "You can eat my arugula, but don't mess with my collards. That sealed their fate."


No more goats and sheep.

These days there are six pigs, making plenty of work at killing time. And most years the weather is much more of a factor. The slaughter usually takes place in January, sometimes in bitter cold. But this year the sow was not impregnated on the first attempt. The pigs are a mixed breed adapted to local conditions. Weeks passed before the sow was ready to mate again, which pushed the matanza into March. Not so bad if you like warmer temperatures, and a little more daylight on either end of the workday.


Inside the barn, things are humming. Besides the skinning operation, there are several stations where workers are carving big hunks of pork, cutting and sawing loins into manageable pieces, separating choice cuts from sausage meat, trimming slabs of bacon from the bellies. Inside the walk-in refrigerator, a bathtub is filling fast with hams, shoulders and rib sections.


My job, it turns out, is official Cleaner and Sharpener of Knives. I am constantly running back to the house to the only source of hot, soapy water. I wash the knives, then give the blades a quick tune-up on the Chef's Choice grinder. There are lots and lots of knives. Knives of every size and description. My personal favorites are the ancient carbon steel chefs knives, of which Grohsgal seems to be a collector. They sharpen to a mean edge. Before the day is out, I am using one of them to separate pig heads from pig skins, then trimming the bristly skin off the jowls so they can be cured for guanciale, a bacon-like specialty.


Chef Jeffrey Heineman, one of the shareholders, will turn the pork cheeks and tongues into incredible braises. And that will be my last memory of the day: dinner of tongue and cheek, a bottle of red wine, a piece of bread. Call it a night. I'm done.



Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting conclusion...

Killing a Pig: Matanza Day 1

The farmer raises his rifle shortly after 8 am as the sun emerges from behind a stand of oak and hickory trees. We've been waiting for full light to illuminate our deadly business. Now the moment has arrived. Except for the soft grunting of the pigs, all is calm. Then a single report from the farmer's .30-calibre Winchester cracks the air, and the first pig slumps to the ground: It is dead instantly with a bullet in the brain, but still thrashing and kicking involuntarily. We wait for the animal's spasms to subside, then grab its legs and drag the 325-pound carcass out of the holding pen. The farmer cuts a long incision along one of the pig's Achilles tendons and runs a steel chain through the hole. Moments later, the hydraulic lift on the back of a John Deere tractor hoists the pig into the air. We watch man, tractor and pig rumble and bump their way toward the barn where the pig will be gutted, skinned and cut into parts.

So began the first day of our matanza on Even' Star Farm outside Lexington Park, MD. For two years I'd been hearing stories about this annual weekend pork fest, named for the Spanish custom of community gathering and merry making around the slaughter of a large animal. The farmer, Brett Grohsgal, his wife, Christine Bergmark, along with several friends pool their funds to purchase and feed six pigs for the eight months or so it takes the swine to reach butchering size, then take the booty home to fill their freezers. I had heard there was much toil involved in turning the animals into roasts, chops and sausages, but that periods of hard work were bracketed by aggressive consumption of excellent vittles, spirit-enhancing liquids and lively camaraderie. I had groveled, pleaded and harangued for an invitation. And this year I came up lucky in a somewhat circumscribed fashion. I would not be one of the actual shareholders in the matanza, but a volunteer helper and chronicler of the event. Oh, and might I and my wife be able to provide breakfast and lunch for the first day's activities?

You bet!

So we loaded family, grub, buffet platters and a few bottles of booze into the ol' Corolla and headed for St. Mary's County, about two hours south of Washington, DC.

Right here I will address some of the thoughts I know some of you are thinking, such as, Ew, yuk! Are you really going to look those pigs in the eye and then kill them? Don't you think that's cruel? And then you're going to cut them up and get blood on everything. Isn't that disgusting?

To which I respond, yes, no, yes and no.

In fact, I wish I could reply that I've given these matters a great deal of thought, but I haven't. I don't consider myself a deeply philosophical ethicist where animal rights are concerned. Perhaps that is a failing on my part, but certainly it is a common fact of our current condition. First and foremost, I consider myself a human who exists at the top of the food chain, and who is happy to occupy that position and not one farther down. Humans are omnivores, meaning they have evolved to eat almost everything, including other animals. I eat other animals. It only follows that the other animals must die and be made ready to eat. The question is, how humanely was the animal raised and killed that was meant for my consumption? And I happen to believe that the most humane treatment for such an animal, in this case a pig, is to give it plenty of room to romp out of doors, to feed it regularly with wholesome food, and then make its death as swift and painless and reverential as possible. Most of us--even the most sanctimonious--have simply removed ourselves from the process. We don't care to know that the animals we eat were raised in factory feedlots, then killed and sliced in assembly-line fashion by human drones. We sleep so much better at night oblivious to the way our food is mistreated on an everyday basis. We prefer to imagine that the pork chop staring at us from our dinner plate arrived there by some bloodless miracle of modern science, the spiritual connection having been drained out of the equation in the interest of efficiency and corporate profit.



The plain truth is, we are complicit any way you look at it. You can't eat meat without first killing an animal and spilling blood. And although I did not come face-to-face with this truth until later in life, I do not flinch from it. I have helped Brett Grohsgal butcher deer that he has shot on his farm. I have helped him kill and butcher sheep. Brett may be unusual in that he does not shrink from the fact of death preceding life. He lives off the land and is reconciled to that most primal of needs to kill in order to survive. He brings life out of the ground with his crops, and he puts meat on the table with his gun.

Fortunately, he also knows how to have a good time in the processs. So we spent our first night on the farm not with polemics, but with some excellent prosciutto made by one of Brett's cohorts in the matanza, chef Jeffrey Heineman, owner of Grapeseed restaurant in Bethesda. We followed that with grilled burgers wrapped in baguettes, a pleasant malbec wine and eventually a few rounds of some potent homemade schnaps.

Memories of the evening are a bit vague. We were steeling ourselves for the work to come. At one point there would be 13 adults and five children involved; pigs to kill, gut and skin; roasts and chops to carve; fires to stoke; fat to separate for rendering lard; hams and bacon to salt; 300 pounds of sausage meat to grind, season and stuff into casings; many more pounds of meat to label and package. All that awaits.

To be continued...