Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food Page 15

  Grain, then, he considered not a diet, but a supplement, almost an emergency ration, to ensure health and growth in the flock during the time when he had no pasture. It must be remembered that he was talking about a kind of sheep bred to make efficient use of pasture and hay, and that the market then favored that kind. In the decades following World War II, cheap energy and cheap grain allowed interest to shift to the larger breeds of sheep and larger slaughter lambs that must be grain-fed. But now with the cost of energy rising, pushing up the cost of grain, and the human consumption of grain rising with the increase of population, Henry Besuden’s sentence of a generation ago resounds with good sense: “Due to the shortage of grain throughout the world, the sheep farmer needs to study the possibilities of grass fattening.”

  Those, anyhow, were the possibilities that he was studying. And the management of pasture, the management of sheep on pasture, was his art.

  In the fall he would select certain pastures close to the barn to be used for late grazing. This is what is now called “stockpiling”—which, he points out, is only a new word for old common sense. It was sometimes possible, in favorable years, to keep the ewes on grass all through December, feeding “very little hay” and “a small amount of grain.” Sometimes he sowed rye early to provide late fall pasture and so extend the grazing season.

  His ewes were bred to lamb in January and February. He fed good clover or alfalfa hay, and from about the middle of January to about the middle of March he gave the ewes their sixty daily rations of grain. In mid-March the grain-feeding ended, and ewes and lambs went out on early pasture of rye which had been sown as a cover crop on the last year’s tobacco patches. “A sack of Balboa rye sown in the early fall,” he wrote, “is worth several sacks of feed fed in the spring and is much cheaper.” From the rye they went to the clover fields where tobacco had grown two years before. From the clover they were moved onto the grass pastures. The market lambs were sold straight off the pastures, at eighty to eighty-five pounds, starting the first of May.

  After fescue became available, Mr. Besuden made extensive use of it in his pastures. But he feels that this grass, though an excellent land conserver, is not nutritious or palatable enough to make the best sheep pasture, and so he took pains to diversify his fescue stands with timothy and legumes. His favorite pasture legume is Korean lespedeza, though he joins in the fairly common complaint that it is less vigorous and productive now than it used to be. He has also used red clover, alsike, ladino, and birdsfoot trefoil. He says that he had trouble getting his ewes with lamb in the first heat when they were bred on clover pastures, but that he never had this trouble on lespedeza.

  His pastures were regularly reseeded to legumes, usually in March, the sheep tramping in the seed, and he found this method of “renovation” to be as good as any. The pastures were clipped twice during the growing season, sometimes oftener, to keep the growth vigorous and uniform.

  The key to efficient management of sheep on pasture is paying attention, and it was important to Mr. Besuden that he should be on horseback among his sheep in the early mornings. The sheep would be out of the shade then, grazing, and he could study their condition and the condition of the field. He speaks of the “bloom” of a pasture, referring to a certain freshness of appearance made by new, tender growth sprigging up through the old. When that bloom is gone, he thinks, the sheep should be moved. The move from a stale pasture to a fresh one can lengthen the grazing time by as much as two hours a day. He believes also that lambs do best when the flock is not too large. That is because sheep tend to bunch together when grazing, the least vigorous lambs coming last and having to feed on grass mouthed over and rejected by the others. He saw to it that his pastures were amply provided with shade, and he knew that the shade needed to be well placed: “I think the best lamb-growing pastures I have are the ones where the shade is close to the water. I have seen times during July and August when sheep would not leave the shade and go to water if the shade and water happened to be at opposite ends of a large field.”

  The crisis of the shepherd’s year, of course, is lambing time. That is the time that the year’s work stands or falls by. And because it usually takes place in cold weather, the success of lambing is almost as dependent on the shepherd’s facilities as on his knowledge. The lambing barn at Vinewood is an instructive embodiment of Mr. Besuden’s understanding of his work and his gift for order. He gives a good description of it himself in one of his columns:Practically all the lambing here at Vinewood in recent years has been in a barn especially made for the purpose, shiplap (tongue groove) boxing with a low loft and a window in each bent. The east end of the barn [away from the prevailing winds] is rarely ever closed, a gate being used. Often in extremely cold weather the temperature can be raised fifteen or twenty degrees by the heat from the sheep. Some thirty feet out in the front and extending the width of the barn [is] a heavy layer of rock. . . . This prevents the muddy place that often appears at the barn door and . . . pulls at the sheep as they walk through it, causing slipped lambs. Also at the entrance . . . a locust post is half embedded across the door.This serves as a protection in case of dogs trying to dig under the door or gate and helps to hold the bedding in the barn as the sheep go out. Any kind of a sill that is too high or causes the heavy-in-lamb ewes to jump or strain to cross is too risky.

  The barn is admirably laid out, with pens, chutes, and gates to permit the feeding, handling, sorting, and loading of a large number of sheep with the least trouble. There were lambing pens for forty ewes. There was also a small room with pens that could be heated by a stove. Above each pen was a red wooden “button” that could be turned down to indicate that a ewe was near to lambing or for any other reason in need of close attention. These were used when Mr. Besuden had an experienced helper to share the nighttime duty with him. “They saved a lot of cold midnight talk,” he says.

  But experienced help was not always available, and then he would have to work through the days and nights of lambing alone. Staying awake would get to be a problem. Sometimes, sitting beside one of the pens, waiting for a ewe to lamb, he would tie a string from one of her hind legs to his wrist. When her labor pains came and she began to shift around, she would tug the string and he would wake up and tend to her.

  And so the talent for what he “had to do” was in large measure the ability to bear the good outcome in mind: to envision, in spite of rocks and gullies, the good health of the fields; to foresee in the pregnant ewes and the advancing seasons a good crop of lambs. And it was the ability to carry in his head for nearly half a century the ideal character and pattern of the Southdown, and to measure his animals relentlessly against it—an ability, rare enough, that marked him as a master stockman.

  He told me a story that suggests very well the distinction and the effect of that ability. On one of his trips to the International he competed against a western sheepman who had selected his carload of fifty fat lambs out of ten thousand head.

  After the Vinewood carload had won the class, this gentleman came up and asked: “How many did you pick yours from, Mr. Besuden?”

  “About seventy-five.”

  “Well,” the western breeder said, “I guess it’s better to have the right seventy-five than the wrong ten thousand.”

  But the ability to recognize the right seventy-five is worthless by itself. Just as necessary is the ability to do the work and to pay attention. To pay attention, above all—that is another of the persistent themes of Mr. Besuden’s talk and of his life. He is convinced that paying attention pays, and this sets him apart from the mechanized “modern” farmers who are pushed to accept more responsibility than they can properly meet, and to work at freeway speeds. He wrote in his column of the importance of “little things done on time.” He said that they paid, but he knew that people did them for more than pay.

  He told me also about a farmer who couldn’t scrape the manure off his shoes until he came to a spot that was bare of grass. “That’s what I mean,”
he said. “You have to keep it on your mind.”

  Elmer Lapp’s Place

  (1979)

  THE THIRTY COWS come up from the pasture and go one by one into the barn. Most of them are Guernseys, but there are also a few red Holsteins and a couple of Jerseys. They go to their places and wait while their neck chains are fastened. And then Elmer Lapp, his oldest son, and his youngest daughter go about the work of feeding, washing, son, and his youngest daughter go about the work of feeding, washing, and milking.

  In the low, square room, lighted by a row of big windows, a radio is quietly playing music. Several white cats sit around waiting for milk to be poured out for them from the test cup. Two collie dogs rest by the wall, out of the way. Several buff Cochin bantams are busily foraging for whatever waste grain can be found in the bedding and in the gutters. Overhead, fastened to the ceiling joists, are many barn swallow nests, their mud cups empty now at the end of October. Two rusty-barreled .22 rifles are propped in window frames, kept handy to shoot English sparrows, and there are no sparrows to be seen. Outside the door a bred heifer and a rather timeworn pet jenny are eating their suppers out of feed boxes. Beyond, on the stream that runs through the pasture, wild ducks are swimming. The shadows have grown long under the low-slanting amber light.

  This is a farm of eighty-three acres that has been in the Lapp family since 1915, five years before Elmer Lapp was born, and he has been here all his life. Three years ago a new house was built for Mr. Lapp’s oldest son, who is his farming partner, father and son doing all the carpentry themselves. Except for the four or five days a month that the son works off the farm, the two households take their living from this place, plus fourteen acres of rented pasture and forty acres of hay harvested on the shares on a farm some distance away. They are farming then, all told, 117 acres.

  Because this farm is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in an enclave of Amish and Mennonite farms that has become a “tourist attraction,” the Lapps are able to supplement their agricultural income by selling farm tours, chicken barbecue, and homemade ice cream to busloads of schoolchildren and tourists. But as profitable a sideline as this undoubtedly is, it should not distract from the economic and ecological good health of the farm operation itself. At a time when so many small farms are struggling or failing, it may be easy to suspect that this farm survives by dependence on the tourist industry. I do not think so. Here, at least, the opposite would seem to be true: The sideline succeeds because the main enterprise is a success.

  Standing in the stanchion barn while the cows are being milked, I am impressed by how quietly the work is done. No voice is raised. There is never a sudden or violent motion. Although the work is quickly done, no one rushes. And finally comes the realization that the room is quiet because it is orderly: All the creatures there, people and animals alike, are at rest within a pattern deeply familiar to them all. That evening and the day following, as I extend my acquaintance with the farm and with Elmer Lapp’s understanding of it, I see that quiet chore time as a nucleus or gathering point in a pattern that includes the whole farm. The farm is thriving because what I would call its structural problems have been satisfactorily solved. The patterns necessary to its life have been perceived and worked out.

  THE COMMERCIAL PATTERN

  IN ITS COMMERCIAL aspect, this is a livestock farm. Its crops are not grown to sell, but to feed animals. The main enterprises are the thirty-cow dairy, and eleven Belgian brood mares.

  Mr. Lapp’s dairy herd is made up mainly of Guernseys because, he says, “Big cows eat too much.” And the richer milk of the Guernseys brings a premium price. His few Holsteins are red ones, because their milk is richer than that of the blacks. Their milk “tests with the Guernseys’,” Mr. Lapp says.

  He now sells manufacturing milk to the people who make Hershey chocolate. He used to ship Grade A, but quit, he says, because “The Grade A guys got under my hide. You could never satisfy them. They always wanted something else.” At several points in our conversation Mr. Lapp showed this sort of independence. He is not a man to put up long with anything he does not like. And this, again, I take as an indication of his success as a farmer. He is independent because he can afford to be.

  At present, in addition to the thirty milking cows, he has twelve heifers, six of which he has just started on the bucket. He likes to have a couple of heifers coming fresh each year. He sells his bull calves as babies. His heifer calves are started on milk replacer, which he considers better for the purpose than milk. They are given two quarts at a feeding.

  When I ask Mr. Lapp what a farmer could expect to make from a farm of this size, managed as this one is, he replies by saying that he sells $20,000 to $30,000 worth of milk each year. Last year his dairy grossed $25,000.

  I ask him how much of that was net.

  He can’t tell me exactly, he says. He bought $5,000 worth of supplements, but that included extra feed for his chickens, horses, and calves. And, of course, some of the expense was offset by the sale of bull calves and heifers. Aside from this information, he describes his income by saying “I pay taxes.”

  Mr. Lapp offers no information about his income from his horses. But the market for draft horses is booming, and one must suppose that the Lapp farm is sharing in the payoff. Last year Mr. Lapp sold nine head. This past season he has bred eleven mares. He also has an income from his stallion who serves, he says, “all the outside mares I can handle.” Besides the brood mares and the stallion, he presently has on hand a two-year-old filly, two yearling fillies, two yearling stud colts, and two foals.

  He prefers the draftier type of Belgians, but wants them long-legged enough to walk fast, and because he works his horses he is attentive to the need for good feet. Along with those practical virtues, he likes his horses to show a good deal of refinement, and in selecting breeding stock pays particular attention to heads and necks. Among his mares are several that are half or full sisters, and this gives his horses a very noticeable uniformity of both color and conformation.

  Because for some reason his land will not produce oats of satisfactory quality, Mr. Lapp grows barley for his horses. If barley was good enough horse feed for King Solomon, he says, it is good enough for him. He crimps or grinds the barley and adds molasses.

  Unlike many horsemen, Mr. Lapp has no elaborate lore or procedure for breeding mares. He serves a mare only once, on whatever day he notices that she is in heat. And he sees no sense in pregnancy tests or examinations. Even so, he says, he has no trouble getting mares to conceive—or cows either, except with artificial insemination.

  But just because his major income is from dairy cows and brood mares, Mr. Lapp does not shut his eyes to other opportunities. “You stay awake,” he says. He knows what will sell, and so far as his place and time allow he has it for sale. He feeds three hundred guineas at a time in a small loft. He raises and sells collie pups. He sells his surplus of eggs and honey. Even the barn cats contribute their share of income, for when he gets too many he sells the surplus at the local sale barn.

  THE PATTERN OF SUBSISTENCE

  THOUGH THE LAPP farm is commercially profitable its balance sheet would fall far short of accounting for the life of the place, or even for its economy.

  Elmer Lapp is eminently a traditional farmer in the sense that his farm is his home, his life, and his way of life—not just his “work place” or his “job.” For that reason, though his farm produces a cash income, that is not all it produces, and some of what it produces cannot be valued in cash.

  In obedience to traditional principle, the Lapps take their subsistence from the farm, and they are as attentive to the production of what they eat as to the production of what they sell. The farm is expected to make a profit, but it must make sense too, and a part of that sense is that it must feed the farmers. And so a pattern of subsistence joins, and at certain points overlaps, the commercial pattern.

  For instance, the Lapps drink their own milk. I know that a lot of dairying families buy their milk a
t the grocery store, and so I ask Mr. Lapp why he doesn’t buy milk for his own household.

  He answers unhesitatingly: “I don’t like that slop.”

  He also grows a garden. He has an orchard of apple, peach, and plum trees for fruit, and for blossoms for his bees. He is feeding four hogs, bought cheaply because they were runts, to slaughter for home use. He slaughters his own beef, and produces his own poultry, eggs, and honey.

  He is also aware that the pattern of subsistence is a community pattern. He says, for instance, that he deals with the little country stores rather than the supermarkets in the city. The little country stores support the life of the community, whereas the supermarkets support “the economy” at the expense of communities.

  THE PATTERNS OF SOIL HUSBANDRY

  UNDERLYING THE PATTERNS of the farm’s productivity is a stewardship of the soil at all points knowledgeable, disciplined, and responsible. And this stewardship, necessarily, has evolved its own appropriate patterns.

  In any year, Mr. Lapp will have twenty-two acres in corn (twelve for silage, ten to husk), twenty-five acres in clover or alfalfa, ten acres in barley or rye, and the rest in permanent pasture. The rotation is, mainly, as follows:First year: Corn for husking.

  Second year: Silage corn.

  Third year: Barley, planted in preceding fall, with clover and timothy sowed broadcast onto frozen ground in spring. After the barley is harvested, the field produces one cutting of hay.