Why Such A Lack of Common Sense About Dogs?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I can’t believe what I am seeing in dog food advertisements. Good old Rover is shown licking people on the face, once even licking a child on the lips. This is so disgustingly unhygienic to me that I have to wonder if there is something going on here I don’t know about. Doesn’t the present generation of pet owners understand where else that dog might have been licking moments earlier? Do I have to spell it out?

We all used to know that dogs carry parasites that can be transmitted to humans. By parasites I mean worms. Yes I know that the well-cared for pet dog is routinely wormed and medicated just like children are, but you don’t want any dog licking your child on the lips. The risk is too great. If you don’t believe me, read any straightforward discussion of animal hygiene and note how widespread is the problem of humans getting worms from pets, especially dogs.

I am constantly amazed at people who get so distraught over the idea of using composted dog manure for garden fertilizer but who think it is just so cute when cuddly little Bow-Wow drools all over them. I think the problem traces directly to the lack of experience in husbandry that our present culture suffers from. You can deify or humanize pets if you wish and provide them with luxuries even lots of humans can’t afford, (and then complain about paying taxes to help people on welfare) but in the end, an animal is an animal and it does not think like a human. Dogs have been known to pick up a baby and shake it to death in innocent play.

Gene Logsdon: Writing “A Sanctuary of Trees”

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Writing books is a precarious business. I’ve been foolish enough to do it now about 28 times and I never know what is going to happen. I expected to get scolded for my novels (too irreverent about religion) and for titling a non-fiction book “Holy Shit.” But oddly enough, most readers seemed amused, as I had hoped, rather than irritated in these cases.  Much to my surprise church ministers who responded were especially positive in reaction to my criticisms of institutional religion. Obviously there is a great upheaval bubbling up right below the surface of traditional religious sects of all kinds. A professor of theology and stalwart defender of Christianity at one of our leading universities, after reading my irreverent novel, “Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food,” which he says he enjoyed, now calls me, not altogether jokingly, “one of the good atheists.”  In return I call him “one of the good Christians.”  We get along wonderfully. This is precisely the kind of relationship that I think is becoming more the norm.  You must remember how bad things used to be. When I was a Catholic kid seventy years ago, we were told it was a sin to go to a Protestant church service. Although there is still much conflict between various religious groups, and between religion and non-religion, more and more I see a joining of hands to get to the real work of keeping our civilization plodding along.

So I wrote “A Sanctuary of Trees” and even in such an uncontroversial book (I thought), I am getting scolded more than from previous books. My underlying intention in everything I write is to try to show, in what I hope to be a humorously wry way, the direct connections between agriculture and urban culture as human activity plays itself out in history. In the first part of “A Sanctuary of Trees,” I conjoined silviculture with my early years in a Catholic seminary studying for the priesthood. What I learned from the forests surrounding the several seminary locations I attended influenced me more than what I was hearing in the classroom. What I learned in both places led me eventually to choose the forest and leave the seminary.

Now I am being taken to task for rejecting my “call from God.” I am surprised since I thought this was a minor part of the book. But that’s okay because it is another indication to me of how closely culture and agriculture can be linked

Gene Logsdon: It Pays To Stay Home

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home. A back forty even as small as an acre can be an exciting, fascinating adventure into the farthest reaches of the earth. The great entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, spent much of his life making amazing discoveries about bugs on the few brushy acres behind his house and writing about them. With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

Staying home has to be one of the most unpopular ideas in America where the whole culture embraces faraway travel as essential to happiness. Many of us don’t really have homes that can provide as much enjoyment as travel promises. Rather than spending our money to acquire such a property, we are taught to buy such enjoyment with far away travel. Perhaps what we need is proper publicity. To advertise traveling at home, a documentary could open with unbelievable close-ups of ants herding and milking aphids on an apple tree, a raccoon destroying a bluebird house, a hawk dive-bombing a mouse, a flint arrowhead sticking out of a creek-side cliff. Then a roll of drums and a voice sonorously introduces the docudrama:  “Today we are going where no explorer has gone before— YOUR BACK FORTY.”

Also, in earlier times, a home could not electronically provide all the connections with the outer world that now make travel almost obsolete. You can visit just about everything now in your living room.

Gene Logsdon: Gardening In The Nude (or New Use For Rhubarb)

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer
[Repost]

One of the greatest mysteries of life for me is society’s ambivalence about the naked human body. People line up by the hundreds every day to get a look at Michelangelo’s anatomically-correct statue of David. But if a real live David were to stand naked beside that statue, the sex police would haul him away, even in Italy where nude statues are as common as pizza.

I once did a lot of “research” into the subject of outdoor nudity. Research for a writer means I “asked around.” What gives here, anyway?

You’d be amazed. Actually most of you would not be amazed because what I found out was that most people, given their druthers, would not wear clothes in their back yards or even front yards, if they could get away with it, at least not when the weather is nice. People I asked drew the line only at going beyond the home environment unclothed or where the environment inclined excessively to poison ivy and mosquitoes. One person put it this way: “If everyone took their clothes off while they mowed the lawn, in twenty minutes no one would take a second look. If the nude person was as ugly as I am, no one would take a first look.”

I have a hunch that there are plenty of backyard swimming pools whose waters reflect bare backsides more than they do swimsuits. For sure what passes for a swimsuit in many of them would make a typical thong look kind of klutzy. But people also expressed a yen, if they trusted that I was not going to name names, for gardening in the nude. In fact the practice has been sanctified into folk tradition, at least in the Ozarks. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, writing in the 1930s and 40s, the spring planting ritual in the hills involved a sort of celebratory session of love making

Gene Logsdon: Nature’s Promises Kept Again

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From GENE LOGSDON

Every year in the brown, sere days before the great greening in spring, I begin to have doubts. Will the flowers come again?  Will the birds return? Will the trees leaf out? With all the despair and calamity rife in the world, the ancient fear that the end is near is as believable as ever.

Perhaps global warming will burn us up.

Oh no, it’s global cooling on the way. Watch out for glaciers.

No, no. The real fear is bombs and chemicals.

Not to worry. Disease outbreaks will get us before that.

Going into March I am gripped by a madness that has nothing to do with basketball. I am torn between despair over a political process descending into lunacy and an economic process that guarantees only an ever-growing poverty class.  I am glad I do not know how to tie a rope into a noose.

Then I look out the window one morning and see the great miracle. Snowdrops are blooming by the house wall. I blink my eyes and shake my head. They are still there. In a few more days they are joined by winter aconites, merry yellow jewels against the melting snow. Slowly but surely all the spring wildflowers return— actually this unusually warm spring, they came fast and furiously— and I feel that great uprising of joy and hope once again.

Gene Logsdon: Watching Hens Eat

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I’ve learned more about the economies of small scale food production from watching chickens than from any library or university.  The hens reveal a world almost foreign to our human experience. Ever since farming became a capitalistic enterprise, husbandry has been organized around the idea of making money, not making food.  When the farmer is freed from the yoke of money-making, wonderful alternatives become possible in food production. More people can do it, for one thing. It doesn’t take a quarter million bucks to get started.  If more people do it, eventually the gardeners will become the farmers and the economics of food production will be turned upside down.

It amazes me how, as a farm boy, I learned to raise chickens the money way and thought that was the only way. We lived on a farm that was close to nature, but we were already evolving factory farming. The factory way meant that farmers had to raise lots more chickens in one place than nature ever intended, and the more they raised, the more they had to raise to try to squeeze out a profit. The chickens were penned up, which meant that they had to be provided all their food and water. They developed various diseases in unnatural captivity, started pecking bloody holes in each other, got lice,

Scars Keep The Record of Our Lives

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer 

If you want to get a lively conversation going among farmers, bring up the subject of scars. For some reason we glory in telling about the marks of maiming or near death that decorate our bodies like so many road signs along the trail of life. Hardly a one of us doesn’t have a crooked leg or missing finger, or a lost limb from getting tangled in a power take off shaft, the most dangerous (and handiest) thing technology every invented this side of the automobile. We all know of someone who lost his or her life trying to argue with power take off shafts. Perhaps it is the gravity of the situation that awes us into wanting to talk about it. I am only here today because once in my very stupid youth, I was lucky enough to be wearing a pair of jeans that were so rotten they were about to fall off from shear gravity. When the jeans caught in the power take off, they ripped completely off my body in a split second and wrapped tightly around the shaft. Better pants and my leg would have been wound around the shaft too. I remember standing there in my underwear, giggling like the idiot I was.

As a child, one of my fascinating past times was sitting in my grandfather’s lap while he rocked and sang. I was totally enchanted by his fingers. His middle and forefinger on his right hand were cut off half way down and I would search out the short stubs as he rocked, hold them in my chubby fists and stare up at him until he told me once more the story. He had caught them in the mechanism on top of the grapple fork which was used to lift great gobs of loose hay from the wagon to the loft. In only a few more years, I would be “setting the fork” and being careful where I set my fingers.

In our local coffee shops

Gene Logsdon: Our Hidden Wound

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From GENE LOGSDON (1992)
The Contrary Farmer
[Repost]

I’m a hayseed, I’m a hayseed,
and my ears are full of pigweed.
How they flop in stormy weather—
gosh oh hemlock, tough as leather…

—From a children’s rhyme heard in the Midwest in the 1930s and forties.

Most of us grew up in a society where farmer was often merely a synonym for moron, and I am quite sure that many farmers are still haunted by feelings of inferiority laid on them by this kind of urban and urbane prejudice. In fact, I suspect that many of the most competent farmers among us continue to expand their farm empires not out of greed or an insatiable desire for wealth, but because they feel compelled to prove again and again that, by God, they are not inferior to anyone. They want to cram that fact as far down the throats of their boyhood taunters as they can, and, sadly, they spend their lives doing it.

In my high school days in the late forties, supercilious town girls routinely claimed that milking cows

Secret Crying Places

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer 

I was up in the haymow throwing hay down to the sheep the morning after our grandson scored the winning points at the buzzer in a high school basketball game. It had been a thrilling moment in our lives, of course, and I was still riding high on the memory. I happened to look over in the corner of the loft and saw lying there in the corner, a basketball, now partially deflated. Nearby the old homemade banking board hung from the wall with cobwebs streaming down from the hoop. Over the last decade, there is no telling how many hours Grandmother and I played there with Evan and his brother, Alex. I joked that I had taught the boys everything they know about the game but the truth was just the opposite. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wondering if all that dribbling, passing, and shooting might have contributed to Evan’s dramatic drive to the basket with just four seconds left in the game. And yes, as I sat there on a bale, staring at the old deflated basketball, I was crying my eyes out.

My barn has often been the place I go to cry. No one can see me there except the cats. We must never let the young people know about secret crying places. Perhaps oddly, I go there to cry more over happy events than sad ones. I went there to cry when our daughter and then our son grew upand left home as they must do, to start their own families. Now the grandchildren too will leave, nevermore to ripple that old basketball net, and I will go to the barn to weep even as I cheer them on.

I knew I needed a secret crying place when my mother died. We were living the suburban life then, but had managed to turn our big backyard into a kind of secluded garden with a chicken coop at the center of it.

A country for old men…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Unless you suffer from an overactive bladder as many of us do, you may find this essay a bit on the crude side. But nevermind, you will get there too eventually unless you are lucky. In terms of overactive bladders, there is an advantage to living on a farm that rarely gets mentioned, even though the “fall out” from it is quite significant for society at large. Farms provide owners with a private place far from any bathroom where they can relieve themselves.

You know all the old jokes, even if they aren’t all that funny. How old men develop the habit of checking every building they enter for the location of the bathroom before they do anything else. How the farmer with the round barn had an “accident” as he frantically looked for a secluded corner to pee in.

Until I joined the legion of men with enlarged prostates, I did not appreciate the full meaning of tranquility on the farm. In public, I must keep a furtive eye on the nearest bathroom and make sure I do not move more than a minute or two away from it. If I have to give a speech, I am usually safe beforehand because I am too scared for any bodily function to work no matter what. After the speech, however, if I avoid eye contact and abruptly breeze by you as if I am trying to steal second base, please understand. Even in my office at home, absorbed in writing, I have to make mad dashes for the bathroom. This is another unsung advantage of cell phones. You don’t have to hang up in this situation.

But in the field or garden hoeing, or among the trees sawing and chopping, or in the barn trying to convince my sheep that Lucretius said it all over 2000 years ago, no problem.  Believe me, knowing this adds another dimension to the calming effect that a rural environment can bestow.

But using your farm for a bathroom has social significance too. What if, as in my perfect world, some 50 million Americans (out of 300 million) lived and worked part of the time on their own little farms. Let us say they committed half their bodily waste directly to the soil or to the animal manure bedding in the barn

Gene Logsdon: Cold Weather Conundrum…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I say that a love of nature is at the root of my love for farming, but in fact I hate cold weather, an integral part of nature in the north. How can I explain the contradiction? I’ll give you my line of reasoning as long as you don’t hold me to it too strictly. I argue that cold weather is the biggest threat to human existence on earth. That’s why I hate it. We seldom think about it but humans, unlike other animals, can only survive in northern climates with some kind of artificial heat, which means burning up the earth’s supply of stored sunlight as fuel. We are not polar bears. We live through northern winters by plundering the rest of nature.

What made me think of this again is that, much to my surprise, fur prices are on the rise. Muskrat pelts are selling for $8 and up at auctions, coyotes at $60 and up, red foxes from $25 to $50, and raccoons from $13 to $19 each. China and other “newly rich” countries are driving up the prices because the people there not only think fur coats are fashionable but because animal fur is a very good insulation against cold weather. Muskrat belly fur for example, makes an excellent lining for cold weather boots because it is nearly impermeable to moisture.

Obviously, as humans migrated from their natural environment of warm weather, they not only had to discover fire but gird themselves in animal skins until they figured out how to make insulated underwear out of polyester. Before that there must have been eons of migration from warmer climes to colder and back again as winter approached, a practice still honored by migrating birds and quite a few corn-beans-and Florida farmers. With furs and fire, humans slowly learned how to stay in the north through winter. This led to the whole silly culture of clothes and heaven only knows how much that has cost the earth. Even with clothes, humans had to have shelter to survive bitter cold. They used caves or built structures out of wood or stone or ice, leading to the ultra-extravagant housing industry of today.  All of this, in the beginning, just to stay warm.

As fuel supplies seem to diminish now and dreams of grandeur soar, this kind of un-sustainability continues. We cover entire sports arenas from the weather; we set up acres of solar panels to produce electricity. More and more, greenhouse tunnels and hoop houses become part of agriculture.

At Last, The Plowgirl Has Arrived…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement.  Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it. Farming is a man’s world, American culture wants to believe, and, as is true of all culturally-treasured myths, no amount of plain everyday evidence to the contrary matters. Oh sure, women were the milkmaids of yesteryear but men pretended that milking cows wasn’t farming. Few males wanted to be tied down to what they considered boring barn jobs if they could escape it. Chickens too were “wimmenswork”. No real he-man farmer wanted to get off his tractor or step from behind his team of horses to do sissy work with a bunch of clucking hens.

Fieldwork was real he-man stuff, the men insisted, even though women ended up doing a lot of that too. Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl.  In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn’t plow.)   The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

At any rate, after the plow became the symbol of agriculture in America, the role of women in farming did recede from the public eye. Women were supposed to stick to the kitchen and leave the real business of farming to their menfolks. This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines.

Gene Logsdon: Talking To Animals…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Have you ever had this happen to you? You stop at a friend’s farm. Knowing he or she is in the barn doing chores, you saunter across the barnyard unannounced. You can hear your friend carrying on quite an animated conversation with someone. You walk through the barn door and there indeed is your friend and he is indeed talking but there is no one else in the barn. He sees you and abruptly falls silent. He gets a look of awful embarrassment on his face. He has been talking to his animals as we all do but don’t like to admit it.

During the days when I was milking a hundred cows, I was often caught carrying on learned discussions with my Holsteins. If the visitor were a friend, especially if he had been caught talking to animals himself, he might put on a big show of mystification, going to great lengths to look around to see whom I had been talking to.

A milker of cows is sort of like the blacksmith of yore. Morning and evening you are always in your office, so to speak, and the whole neighborhood knows it. You are a captive audience to every fervent Republican who wants to pleasure you with his latest joke about stupid Democrats. Or vice versa.  Salesmen know you can’t escape them.  Every righteous crusader for every righteous cause wants to practice his pitch on you. Every hunter has a new escapade to tell you about how he saw the buck deer with the biggest rack in the county but of course did not get a shot at it.

Animals are great to talk to. They can be trusted to keep any secret, will not point out to you embarrassing contradictions of logic in your arguments, and they never argue back. They just nod and keep on eating. They will only interrupt your flow of brilliant reasoning if they run out of food.

Conversing with animals can be quite effective.

“I tell you, they should just throw all those politicians out of Washington and start over.”

“Munch, crunch, munch, crunch.” The sound of a cow chewing hay is as soothing as the sound of a waterfall.

“Well, yes, of course, somebody has to run the government but why can’t they compromise more.”

“Munch, crunch, munch crunch.” The big round cow eyes stare placidly out on the world, unperturbed.

“As long as they don’t kiss up to those rich Republicans too much.”

“Munch, crunch, munch, crunch.” One ear wiggle-waggles.

Can a Godless Farmer be a Good Steward of the Soil?

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From GENE LOGSDON

There is a growing realization in organized religion that something is awry in our industrial food delivery system. Churches are actively urging their members to become more involved directly in local and family gardening and farming. This is great news for those of us who have been fighting this battle for a long time. Organized religion can be a very powerful force in getting society’s feet back on the ground (literally) and we welcome all the help we can get.

But I am not sure how this is going to turn out. Hardly a week goes by now that someone doesn’t send me a book about church involvement in food production or I am not invited by a member of the clergy or a professor at a Christian college to give a talk, which pleases me deeply. But it also causes me a problem. I hardly qualify as a Christian anymore. I don’t know what I am. Sometimes I lean toward Buddhism but then I read a little more in that direction and don’t much agree with that either. I sort of envy Christians and Muslims because they believe in something so fantastically wonderful as an eternal life of utter bliss. I’ve tried to believe. Just can’t. Sorry.  So anyway when I am asked to give a talk about farming at a private religious college or, horrors, in a church, I get nervous. If the inviters knew that I was a godless contrarian, would they really want me to speak? America is a place where “godless” suggests “sinner” or certainly not saint. So I retreat into hypocrisy, giving my talk while cagily hedging my words so that I do not sound too heretical or hypocritical.

Last week when a professor of religion at a private college wanted me to give a talk, I decided it was time to be honest. I told him he might not like what I would say especially about how religious institutions so often glorify rich industrial farmers who practice destructive farming but who give generously to the churches. I told him I was sort of a godless heathen. Did that bother him?

Here was his reply, verbatim: “I am not offended one bit by the approach you are outlining in your email. I am more offended by the vast majority of religious folk who are gleefully ignorant of how their behavior affects the environment and the others around them

Hail, the mighty pocketknife…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Time was, a farmer would feel naked without a pocketknife in his bibs. Even today, it is the handiest tool of all. There is always a bale twine to cut, a splinter in the skin to remove, a fingernail to trim,  a scion to be grafted, a hoof to be cleaned, a pig testicle to be removed, a marshmallow stick to be sharpened, spark plugs to be scraped clean of carbon, an apple to peel, a hide to skin, a seed potato to cut, a lid to pry open, a beer bottle cap to pop off, string holding a sack closed to sever, a hole to be poked in fabric or rubber. It would be fun to hold a contest to see who can come up with the most uses for a pocketknife on the farm.

As boys, we used our knives mainly to play a game we called “mumblety-peg.”  (I have a hard time believing this, but Merriam-Webster says the first known use of that word, mumblety-peg, was in 1647, and that it first referred to what the loser in the game had to do— pull a peg out of the ground with his or her teeth.) The essence of the game was to stand the open knife vertically on arm, head, knee, whatever, and flip it so that the blade stuck in the ground. That’s how I learned that any knife will fall, end over end, and stick into the ground every time if allowed to fall from the right height using only gravity without any extra push or flip. Experienced mumblety-peg players knew that and had rules about how the knife was to be flipped or not flipped. Often it had to be flipped from between two fingers, going consecutively from one pair of fingers to the next. Off an arm, the player might have to execute a double flip before the knife stuck in the ground for the maneuver to be legitimate. We also spent a lot of time throwing our knives at trees so that they would stick like in Tarzan movies. This was a good way to ruin a pocketknife in a hurry.

Any of you readers ever play mumblety-peg? I asked my grandson and he never heard of it.

Today, everyone, country or city, needs a pocketknife handy. Anyone who has to open packages (and that’s everyone) encased in the latest impenetrable

Gene Logsdon: Maybe Old Tractors Do Die

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

After the conversations we had here recently about old tractors, I began to hear about a problem that really does affect their longevity.  Ethanol in gasoline is not the wonder fuel it has been made out to be. It is causing problems when used in off-road vehicles— lawn motors, chain saws, boat motors, four wheelers, not to mention old tractors. Although I have had no cause to complain yet myself, I first heard rumors of these problems when 10 percent ethanol was added to gasoline (E-10 fuel. Now that the EPA has approved 15 percent ethanol in gasoline (E-15 fuel) the complaints are increasing. Ethanol corrodes plastic and rubber and even some metal not made to handle it. It also absorbs water into the fuel. You don’t want to leave a can of gas set around very long unused if it has ethanol in it.  And recently out of California came reports that E-15 gas pollutes the air more than pure gasoline (can you call gasoline “pure”?) — contrary to all the propaganda the champions of ethanol have been putting out for several years.

I called a local small engine repair shop whose proprietors I know and trust and asked them if the problem is serious. The mechanic’s first reply was a long drawn out groan. “Oh yes, unfortunately,” he finally replied. “Our carburetor repair work has at least doubled lately.”

What can you do about it since there are now reports that E-10 gas is causing problems too? He sighed again. “Well, you just have to get your carburetor worked on more often. There are additives now to put in ethanol gas, but I am not yet sure if they are all that effective. And they are expensive. It looks like manufacturers will have to design and develop new carburetors for their motors. Right now, it you look at the warranty on your new lawnmower or chain saw, you will see that the carburetor and attendant parts are not covered. Manufacturers are washing their hands of the whole problem.”

The government requires service stations that sell E-15 gas to have labels on the pumps which say: “Use only on 2001 and newer passenger vehicles and in flex-fuel vehicles.”  The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers think the warning labels ought also to include specific instructions directing consumers to check their owner’s manual to determine the appropriate fuel for their vehicles but so far the EPA evidently does not think that’s necessary. But that complaint might be beside the point because some mechanics say that E-10 shortens the life of small engines too.

Obviously, owners of old tractors are going to be hard hit by this situation because no one is going to start making ethanol-proof carburetors for them, I don’t think. You are going to be forced to buy a new tractor whether you can afford to or not. Or better yet, move forward to draft animal power.

This situation seems to me unconscionable. If you look at only the ethanol news from the corn industry or ethanol manufacturers, you would never know there is this problem because most of these sources simply ignore it. Ethanol from corn is, furthermore, so expensive that it requires huge subsidies from the government

Gene Logsdon: Any “Tidings of Great Joy” This Sad Christmas?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Yes. I was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer the other day when I came across the most intriguing photograph. It was of a dark-skinned woman in colorful clothing with a huge basket of fresh vegetables balanced on her head. Behind her was a large, immaculately neat and verdant garden. Probably someplace in Africa, I thought, but why on the front page of an American newspaper? Then I did a double-take. The caption under the picture said the locale was near downtown Cleveland, and the woman in the picture was a Clevelander from Burundi, Veronika Inabigo, who works with the Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program. REAP helps refugees adjust to new communities. These refugees were doing what they did in their homeland, that is raise their own food. Their example was helping native Clevelanders understand that they too can gain food independence, even in the city.

I think this is good news, good tidings of great joy this Christmas. All over our cities, vacant lots and deteriorating residential areas are being returned to food production and verdant landscapes. There are the naysayers who worry that some of this soil might be tainted with too much lead or other contaminants, but tests can easily find that out. Although it is rarely pointed out, much of this soil is fairly pristine, not ever having been farmed and not even disturbed except right around cellar excavations. Much of this land went from forest to city with little disturbance except for lawns and landscaping.

When in Cleveland recently, we drove to one of the new “food hubs” that are being established (Community Greenhouse Partners) around old closed churches and in ghetto ruins. Not much is going on there yet, but looking at the lay of the land around the empty church and crumbling parsonage, a gardener’s fingers just itch to get in there and rehabilitate the surroundings. The old church has lots of room for various kinds of food processing and storage too. The forlorn landscape of weeds, abandoned houses, and crumbling fences around it indicates land that has just been abandoned, not abused like the eroded soil of old farmed out fields.

Food hubs are happening in inner cities all over and we ramparts people should rejoice. Our domain is not only out in the country on the fringes of industrial agribusiness but also in the cities on the fringes of industrial degradation such as you can see in Detroit. Parts of Detroit look almost as bad as bombed out Dresden in World War II. But Detroit is one of the places where gardens and a real farm are being established in the inner city desolation.

Gene Logsdon: The Ramparts People

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From GENE LOGSDON
Introduction to The Contrary Farmer

I remember clearly the day when I was twelve, hunting morel mushrooms with my father, when I informed him excitedly that I had decided to take my dog and my rifle and go deep into the wilderness to live. I would build a cabin on a mountainside by a clear running stream, and live out my days happily on broiled trout, fried mushrooms, and hickory nut pie. I would achieve advanced degrees in the art of living, bestowed on me by Nature, and I would know many things not even Einstein or my stupid schoolteacher dreamed of.

I thought that he would approve, since he was forever retreating to the solitude of woods and river bank and farm field himself But he almost frowned, suggesting gently in a voice that sounded as if he were saying what he thought he was supposed to say, not what he really felt

Sanctuary

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

The breathtaking photo accompanying this blog post shows a grove of young black walnut trees growing above a lustrous carpet of wild hyacinths in late spring. But what the picture does not show makes it even more wildly beautiful. I would bet that very few readers can guess, in environmental or geographic terms, where photographer Dennis Barnes found this lovely scene. I would never have recognized the locale myself, even though seventy years ago I played many a day right there in that exact spot. You are not looking at some lush tropical jungle, or wild sanctuary in a national park, or institutional arboretum, or wildlife preserve, or refuge far from the haunts of humans.  The location is a nondescript patch of Ohio farm country only a few yards away from a world of gullied corn fields. Seventy years ago it was open, park-like woodland used as sheep pasture and had been used that way for about another 70 years. The sheep kept new trees from coming in and limited the growth of wildflowers and brush. When the sheep were withdrawn, sure enough new trees and these wild hyacinths, which as children we had never seen, began to return.

At first there was nothing spectacular about this rejuvenating forest, but then Brad and Berny Billock

Gene Logsdon: Occupy Absentee-Owned Farms

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I know something I would much rather occupy than Wall Street. I wonder if the typical young critic of the moneychangers realizes where the wealth that drives Wall Street comes from. How much of it, for example, resides in the land out here in corn and soybean country that is owned by wealthy people who have never set foot on it? A typical if somewhat fictionalized example is Mrs. Petunia Luckybirth who inherited 1200 acres of good Illinois prairie simply because she slid out of the right womb at the right time (as a friend puts it) 84 years ago, but who long ago moved to California and married a man wealthy in his own right. He left her with a million dollar mansion and about 3 million in his own investments when he passed away a few years ago.

Her Illinois farmland is worth some $9,000 an acre at the moment and earns her about $24,000 a year in rental payments which she (actually her lawyers) has been investing dutifully in the stock market at an average return of around 6% over the years which means it about doubles the money every ten years. Industrial corn growers farm her land. She has never had to spend a penny of her farm income. She has never thought of selling it. One thing her father and grandfather had drummed into her head: never sell farmland. It is the best long term investment there is.

What her entire current net worth amounts to is hard to say, but if suddenly her farmland disappeared, she wouldn’t even know it until someone told her. She would have a hard time finding it if she did go back to her roots because she has been away so long all the old landmarks are gone. Even on the county plat books, her farmland is no longer listed under her name but under an investment company her lawyers cooked up to shield her from nosy people like me who used to be able to use plat maps to figure out how much land a farmer owned.

Pope Mary and the New Wave of Food Hubs

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From GENE LOGSDON

When I wrote “Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food,” I thought I was proposing a rather preposterous idea. In my fictional story, the congregation of a church that was closed much against its will decided to turn their property into a sort of food center to grow and process fruits, vegetables, and grains for the neighborhood. But when Susie Sutphin visited us recently (Foodchronicles.net) she told about a closed church, St. George’s Lithuanian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, that was doing very much like what my fictional story described. The people turned their church building and land around it into what they describe as a “food hub” called Community Greenhouse Partners to grow food for the surrounding neighborhood. CGP is the brainchild of Timothy Smith who is its executive director. Can you imagine?

A few days later, Ed Searl, a Unitarian minister in Hinsdale, Illinois who was inspired to base a whole sermon on Pope Mary, gave me one of his annual Gannett Awards for my blog posted here a couple of weeks ago about how farming could increase jobs. (searlsermons.blogspot.com). When I thanked him and mentioned the Cleveland church, he told me of other churches turning themselves into “food hubs” including one in Youngstown, Ohio. He said maybe I was on the “forming edge of wave.”

I get nervous about being part of any new movement except maybe healthy bowel movements, but I confess to feeling very elated about this food hub idea and any part I may have played in it. For some reason, when I write novels that sort of make fun of organized religion, it is organized religion that seems most appreciative. Amazing. Mike Mather, who is pastor of a Methodist church in Indianapolis (www.broadwayumc.org) came to visit me too. He had a message we all need to hear. He and the people in his church are part of the new “food hub” wave, although he didn’t call it that. He just wants to encourage the people in his church to start asserting their food independence. But instead of going the usual route of venturing forth and trying to teach the people how to grow food, Mike decided to ask the parishioners themselves how to go about it. Much to his surprise

Gene Logsdon: Small Farms Create More Jobs

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

All the talk about creating jobs strikes me as another example of how so many of us sneakily drink one way and piously vote another. Oh how we voice our concern, how much we pretend to support more jobs but we go right on conducting real business on the basis of replacing human workers with machines whenever possible. All the ways being proposed to increase jobs right now are the same old methods that do not face the real cause of the dilemma. The awful truth is that we have created an economy that can’t afford people to do the work and so every year there are fewer meaningful jobs and more pretend jobs. Pretend jobs require pretend money. We are capitalizing costs on money interest not on human interest.

No where is this truer than in farming. We boast about how many people one farmer feeds—155 is the latest number I think— as if that kind of efficiency is a sign of progress. I don’t hear a single business person or government official pointing out that if the whole economy of the common good is considered, one farmer feeding 155 people is not a sign of true profitability but of gross and unsustainable inefficiency. So gross in fact that while the 155 are getting fed, others are going hungry.

It is fairly easy, I think, to demonstrate the inefficiency of one person feeding a hundred and fifty five especially when some of the hundred and fifty five are having a hard time earning enough to buy their food.

Why I Farm — A City Version

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From BARBARA AYERS
The Contrary Farmer

I hope everyone won’t mind if I contribute my story. I have often wanted to comment on this wonderful, thought provoking site, but felt too shy because I don’t have a farm. My husband works in the entertainment business, hence we live in Pasadena, part of the giant suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, California. I didn’t grow up on a farm either — suburbs, again, outside of Washington, DC. But my maternal grandparents were farmers who emigrated from Romania to Western Canada. I believe the urge to farm must be passed down in one’s genetic code.

I’d always made flower gardens, and I’m a good cook. Somewhere back during the culinary revolution, I came upon a cookbook by Alice Waters, who can’t help but be inspiring. So I planted a pot of basil and parsley on my apartment balcony. Alice was right — picking that super fresh basil whenever I needed it, instead of spending two dollars for it, half wilted from the grocery store, was absolutely life changing. I spent the next fifteen years growing fruits and vegetables wherever they could be squeezed in, and dreaming of life in a more rural setting. Then, one happy day, my young children were accepted by a school that had, among other attractive features, a small organic farm. I spent the summer driving stealthily past the school’s farm property, stalking it, wondering if there would be any space for me to sponsor a project or two. It turned out to be a dusty acre of weeds with a pretty, tiny pond

Bill Gates Wants To Solve The Poop Problem

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From GENE LOGSDON

I can’t write about this without sounding like I’m blowing my own horn. Bill Gates, bless him, has discovered manure. I don’t know if he has read my book, Holy Shit, or Joseph Jenkins’ book, Humanure, but he’s acting like he might have. He is offering $42 million in grants to spur new designs and ideas for handling our bodily wastes in a less bankrupting way than we are using today. There are already good compost toilets out there, and other ways to handle or replace flush toilet water are in the process of development, but I am sure, and Mr. Gates must think so too, that the more brains we can get involved in this, the better. Clint and Bobbi Elston, founders of the Equaris Corporation in Afton, Minn., tell me that they have already applied. They have invented an impressive array of home appliances

Corn Pros and Cons

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

This is my favorite time of the year, even with the horse and deer flies. I sit under the oak tree next to the garden and husk sweet corn. I love to husk sweet corn because I love roasted corn. There’s a way to pull down a sliver or two of husk from one side of the ear, and then grab the rest of the husk, silks and all, and strip it down clean off the cob. Well, clean enough for me. My wife fastidiously removes every last strand of silk from every ear.

An ear of corn, just past the pimply stage but not yet fully mature looks more beautiful to me than any of Victoria’s Secrets. I understand why native Americans celebrated their corn feasts with such joy and gusto. Nothing tastes as good as a roasted ear five minutes from the garden. The only fault of today’s super delicious sweet corn varieties is that the smell of the ears boiling in water is not as redolent with the ultimate soul of corn-ness as in the days of Yellow Bantam and Country Gentleman.

So why do I sometimes bad-mouth corn in print? Corn has become a sort of symbol of over-industrialized farming. I wish it were not so because corn is certainly a triumph of humans over nature, or rather humans in cooperation with nature. The ear of corn is one awesome seedhead and growing the stuff is fairly easy, all things considered. That’s the whole problem. Corn is sort of like sex. It is such a wonderful thing that it is easy to carry to excess.

Fascinatingly enough, this is not the first time in human history that corn has been overdone. From what archeology thinks now

Gene Logsdon: Why Do Humans Congregate In Big Cities?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

One of life’s mysteries for me is why country people have inevitably migrated to the cities in every civilization that I have studied. In the United States, where there has been little of the kind of violent upheavals that send third world countries into instability, the reasons for migration to cities seem especially specious to me. Some say we move because rural life is boring or stifling with puritanical overly-conservative life styles. Actually agrarian society has often been shockingly wide open as I tried to point out in Mother of All Arts. What happened to me just yesterday seems appropriate. I was parked along the edge of a country road jawing with a couple who were harvesting wheat. A very long-haired individual, naked to the waist, came flying by on a motorcycle, tresses trailing in the wind. Trying to be funny, I opined: “Well it must have been a man because it wasn’t wearing a bra.” One of the farmers replied, rolling her eyes: “That’s a dangerous conclusion to reach around here.”

Others move to town because they want to escape what they consider the hard work of farming. That is no longer all that true either and I wonder if it ever was. Millions of factory and construction workers perform harder physical work than most farmers do today or ever did. A friend likes to tell how thrilled he was to get off the farm 70 years ago because he had to work there every day milking cows, no weekends off.

Gene Logsdon: Basketball Patches and Plastic Jug Blossoms

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

People who pass on the road sometime slow down considerably when they see our patch of basketballs and our plastic jugs in bloom. Our gardens are beginning to look like a modern exhibit of recycled trash art. But we have gone berserk only in the sense that wild animals are driving us there. We spend as much time now protecting our food supply from predators like deer and raccoons as we do planting and weeding.

The basketballs are holding up black plastic netting above the strawberries to keep the infernal deer from eating all the plants and the infernal birds from eating the fruit. If we laid the netting directly on the plants, it would depress plant growth too much and the robins would be able to get to the berries through the netting. Spaulding may not have realized it but basketballs are perfect for this job. The netting is barely visible from a distance so there seems to be no reason for the basketballs to be there. Friends like to make jokes, like what’s our yield of basketballs per acre this year.

The balls in the strawberry patch won’t hold air anymore. We have a fairly large supply of them because our grandsons are bent on sending me and their grandmother to an early grave playing basketball in the barn all the time. The stupid balls keep bouncing up against the roofing nails projecting through the roof… More at The Contrary Farmer here…
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Gene Logsdon: Backyard Clotheslines and Washboard Secrets

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The Logsdon Farm Clothesline

From GENE LOGSDON (1985)
The Contrary Farmer
Garden Farm Skills

Most people would not want to be without their clothes dryer, but there’s something lost for every gain. What you lose with a dryer, besides the money and the energy it costs to run it, is that heavenly fresh smell of clothes and sheets dried out in the fresh air and sunshine. For both economical and aesthetic reasons, folks with yards like to hang the wash out during the warmer months, even if it is more work.

For a clothesline, use nylon rope, not wire. The wire will rust and the clothes will get stained from it. The easiest way to erect a line is to tie the rope from tree to tree, if possible. Otherwise you have to set poles in the ground — and very solidly, since the weight of a line full of wet sheets is considerable.

Steel or wood posts are fine. If wood, use a kind that resists rot. Put the posts 3 feet in the ground and pour cement around them to a thickness of 3 to 4 inches. By notching a crossarm solidly in the top of each wood post, you can run two parallel lines. If using threaded pipe for a post, a T-union and extensions of pipe at the top will provide a sturdy crossarm.

Gene Logsdon: Praise Be Baling Wire and Binder Twine

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I know farmers who can fix almost anything except the economy with baling wire and a pair of pliers. The geniuses who came up with wire-tie knotters for hay balers didn’t know that they were saving agriculture because of all the secondary uses for the wire after it is removed from the bales. Baling wire is just the right gauge to bend easily and still strong enough to hold stuff together until you can at least get back to your repair shop. I used a length of the stuff to replace a chain that raised and lowered the tines of my ancient side delivery rake. It lasted five years before it rusted enough to break. I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve used baling wire to keep mufflers from dragging on the ground when their holding straps rusted off.

Just this week, the metal cover over my elderly rotary mower rusted through so badly that I had to do something to keep from getting killed if a rock or something flew up from the blade and hit me on the tractor seat. As usual, I had to figure out something that did not cost much money. A board fitted nicely over the gaping hole, but how could I hold it in place? Aha. Baling wire. I drilled holes at appropriate places in the board and threaded baling wire through them and around the iron braces of the mower cover. I have a notion that repair will last as long as I do…

More here…
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Gene Logsdon: Stay Home And Make Some Real Money

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Walt Curlee Art

From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Far be it from me to criticize the American way and it wouldn’t change if I did. But it seems to me that another way of looking at life needs to be presented occasionally. Those of us who choose to live the home-centered garden and farming way have some built in advantages when it comes to profits and losses.

If time is money, I’ve lost thousands of dollars waiting for traffic lights to change or traffic jams to clear up or planes to get back on schedule. The fuel and blood pressure burned up in the process could cost me a whole lot more than four dollar gas. On trips, if you don’t pack some food, a meal on the road is going to average out at about eight dollars a head. If you stay at a motel, deduct another bunch of bucks. But the bedbugs are free. All this is what you get for the thrill of staring at the scenic sides of huge semi-trucks as you roar down the highway always three feet and three seconds away from death.

Gene Logsdon: A Field Guide to Farmers

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Now that farmer-watching has become more popular than bird-watching, urban people need a way to help them distinguish between the various breeds in case they want to rent one, or buy one for a personal pet. Farmers actually resemble other members of the human race in most respects. They walk upright if there is no wheeled vehicle available to ride, have cell phones hanging on their ears most of the time, and feed at short order restaurants more than in their natural environment of open fields.

Like the ivory-billed woodpecker, farmer numbers are decreasing because of urban encroachment on their natural habitat. Little is known about their behavior because they shun the public eye whenever possible.

A Pigpen for the Backyard

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From GENE LOGSDON (1985)
The Contrary Farmer
Garden Farm Skills

[Please visit the upgraded pages for Gene's Books here and Post Archive by Title here. -DS]

Loose talk about pigpens in the yard will send the blood pressure soaring in the veins of local zoning officials, if not your neighbors. It’s perfectly all right in our culture to keep a dog half the size of a cow in the yard, letting it bark all night and running all over town dropping manure in its wake. But a quiet, clean hog producing something useful like pork chops? Heaven forbid.

People think hogs are dirty because hogs will survive in crowded conditions. Because hogs will survive in crowded conditions, humans have always raised them that way, the better to make a buck. Try raising cats like we do hogs, and you’ll know what dirt and stench are really like.

A neighbor woman has for twelve years

Gene Logsdon: The Gentle Approach to Animals Saves Time and Money

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From GENE LOGSDON (1985)
The Contrary Farmer
…with 2011 update
Garden Farm Skills

With a very small number of animals on a homestead, the whole tenor of livestock management differs from that of the commercial farm. You get to know your few animals well as individuals, and you become almost friends with them. Chore time becomes pleasurable. If you have hostile animals, you can get rid of them and buy others. And, if after a while you cannot find gentle animals, nature is telling you something. I have always believed that a good dairyman would be successful in any working relationship with humans because if you can get along well with a bunch of cows, you can get along well with anyone.

Animals are creatures of habit, too. Domesticated, they will tolerate being trained to a routine somewhat foreign to their instincts, but once that routine is established, they do not look kindly upon an abrupt change. Change only confuses and alarms them. You must be patient, or suffer the consequences.

A totally gentled cow — the only animal I can talk about with conviction — is a pleasure to be around, more relaxing companionship than most people.

Gene Logsdon: Are Food Prices Too High Or Not High Enough?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

These days I doubt there is a correct answer to any of our social problems. We can only choose to act on which wrong answers do the least harm. Recently I listened to a news report on the rise in global food prices that didn’t quite add up to me. The foregone conclusion was that climate change in the form of too much rain was causing food shortages and rising food prices around the world. No attempt was made to give evidence that climate change was the cause; it was simply presumed to be the case. The report focused on what farmers were doing to cope.

I can’t speak to the rice problem because I’ve never grown any, although I do know that much of the crop spends quite a bit of its growing season standing in water so maybe heavier than usual rain could be helpful. If we could get our corn and wheat to grow in standing water, we would be way ahead of the game right now.

A Wallet Full of Scrambled Eggs

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Something happened to me recently that I’m willing to bet is new to the annals of farming.  All of us “country folk” know that carrying eggs in your pockets, especially in tight jeans, is not a good idea. Should you bend over, the eggs are very likely to break. But I was not thinking. We had just come home in early evening from two strenuous days on the road and I just wanted to go to bed for about two years. But being a country folk, I had farm animals to look after first. I had left enough feed and water in the coop so I could leave the hens penned up while we were gone to keep them safe from raccoons, mink, foxes, and various other dragons of the woods. Now, running on empty, I staggered zombie-like to the barn to let the hens out to roam a little before dark after two days of imprisonment.

I decided to gather the eggs too. Having been penned away from their favorite nesting sites in the barn, the hens had laid 14 eggs, 8 in the nest boxes and 6 in a corner on the floor. I did not spy the 6 on the floor until I was about the leave the coop, with four eggs

Gene Logsdon: Archeology Not Agriculture Teaches Good Farming

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

I’m thinking lately that a farmer can learn more about sustainable farming from history rather than from current science. Agriculture has been taking giant leaps “forward” and archeology giant leaps “backward,” both with intriguing and absorbing results. Both work under a handicap. Archeology studies a silent past and has to worry that it’s getting the story right. Agriculture assumes a future that may not turn out to be true either. The two sciences have markedly different philosophies. Agriculture is interested in making farming a money-profitable business. Archeology is interested in finding out why profitable farming invariably leads to wrecked civilizations.

Archeologists are discovering new information all the time, especially in Central America and in North Africa because in both cases the past is not so silent after all. Written records and datable non-written records are coming to light especially for the Mayan empire on this continent and the Carthaginian Empire and its aftermath in North Africa. For example, researchers are reporting new evidence indicating that the Mayan Empire was maybe a thousand years older than it had been thought to be. The Yucatan Peninsula supported a population of millions more people than historians previously had concluded. Supporting those millions was an extremely advanced maize or corn agriculture, the profit-farming of that time. But whenever the Mayans figured out yet more clever ways to increase corn yields, the population increased and that required yet more yield increases. One example: the people literally built upland fields for corn by carrying rich mud up from swamp land that they could not otherwise drain. Sadly, the Mayans used the wealth from their profit-farming