It will come as no surprise to faithful readers of this space that Larkspur Farm has never achieved any of the higher planes of agriculture. We are not organic or even particularly sustainable, although we have made some good college tries at it.
In my first year at the farm, I tried growing organic apples with free-range chickens under the trees to eat the plum curculio, the most destructive of apple pests. Then I ordered in a host of beneficial bugs from a shady mail-order house in Kansas City – lacewings, ladybugs and Trichogramma wasps. The chickens ate the bugs, my dogs ate the chickens and hunters came around in the fall to eat all the apples. By the end of the season the natural cycle was complete and the only population that hadn’t been wiped out was the plum curculio and the dogs. Since then, in the great church of the whole food movement, I have remained a stumbling sinner in search of redemption.
My hens are not free range; for their own protection they are allowed out only on the occasional supervised day-pass. Even then it’s a risky business. Twelve go out and only eleven come back.
I haven’t figured out how to keep livestock upright without vaccinations, de-wormers and something that controls flies more consistently than a Muscovy duck. Grass-fed beef is a great concept on paper, but when the grass dries up in mid-July as it did this summer, I’m not sure what else they are supposed to eat. Steers can survive on hay but they don’t get fat. I don’t use chemical fertilizers, but that’s because I’m cheap, not because I’m pure...I buy my livestock feed from Hamilton Bros. farm supply down in Glen Huron, an establishment most food clerics would classify as a vertically integrated agribusiness conglomerate and a place of sin. But the staff behind the counter there are an entertaining group and offer a reliable source of inspiration for this writer.
However, my children are insisting that I can do better. All of them grew up working restaurant jobs while they were in school and they have become foodies, partly because of their restaurant experience but mostly because of their connection to the farm. They have vivid memories of those golden years of long ago when they kept gardens and raised their own chickens and lambs. It’s been decades since they got on the business end of a hoe, but they have evolved into discerning consumers with high standards for other people, like their father.
They are suspicious of the grocery chains that have launched a flurry of high-fibre, low cholesterol, Omega 3 rich, sodium-reduced confections onto the market and they want me to crank up my production of simple staples. It’s all part of their yearning to return food production back to local culture, i.e. their father. My eldest son is the loudest voice for this change. He says we must stop eating food that comes in a box or a pouch. It doesn’t really matter if it’s grown conventionally or organically. But it should be grown locally.
He insists that our lives depend on it.
“We stand at a fork in the road,” he says. “We’re either going to get used to chronic disease…or we’re going to change the way we eat.”
The countryside offers nothing but roads with forks in them these days. There are giant billboards at every crossroads ordering you which fork to take. Sitting down to a meal with my children is like attending a political rally. Vegetarians, fair traders, anti-globalists, slow foodies and health faddists surround me. The only groups not represented are the weed-choppers and the bale-tossers, activities that were discouraged years ago by a local campaign to stamp out child labour.
I hardly need to consult a book to see how our industrial approach to food production is destroying the health of land, animals and human communities everywhere. I sometimes wish I had my children’s messianic certainty about these issues, but the older I get the more I am struck by just how little we know about the complexity of the human body and the way it reacts to the natural world.
“You’re just like Socrates, Pop,” chirps my son, who just this week dropped by to show me a You Tube video on how to start milking my sheep. “You know nothing except the fact of your ignorance.”
“Which is the beginning of wisdom, little grasshopper,” I reply gravely. “Now grab a shovel and help me dig some of these potatoes.”