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Editor's
NOTE
New
Farm Introduces "Intern Journal"
In this biweekly column, interns on farms across
the United States and beyond climb out of the
trenches to share the details of their day-to-day
grind and the lessons learned in the field.
This next generation of farmers offers insights
into what motivates them to go against the tide
when so many farm families struggle to keep up-and-coming
generations interested in farming.
As they will tell you, it’s a combination
of love for the land, good food, sharing community,
and a sense of purpose that keeps them going.
--NF Editors
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Laura
Rickard
Lake Placid, New York. February.
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Laura Rickard, our newest
intern journalist, recently graduated from Brown University
with a degree in environmental studies. She is currently
in the middle of a 12-month farm/garden internship at
North Country School/Camp Treetops in Lake Placid, New
York. For more information on North Country School,
visit http://nct.org. |
When Steve first caught the cockerel mounting the
hen, he nearly tipped over a tower of egg baskets.
The coupling was quick and precise. Had he been bending down
to re-hang the water bucket, he might have missed the show
entirely. But instead, Steve, a seventh grader from Korea,
stared intently at the rooster, which had adroitly dug its
toenails into the hen’s back and was clinging on for
dear life. Poor Steve considered the couple’s amorous
death grip. “They’re making … doing …
making … SEX!,” he exclaimed, both shocked and
smug at the same time, as only middle school children seem
to be. And how could I argue?
“Try to find a way to connect the subject to sex,”
advises my boss, John, on teaching farm and garden-related
lessons to our students. I’m still contemplating the
sexual innuendo I could extrapolate from the compost pile
(it does generate a lot of heat…), but in the barnyard,
the parallels are more obvious. In this area, perhaps, our
school veers wildly from mainstream. (Case in point: our sixth
graders recently informed the entire school about the process
of llama gelding during a lunch-time announcement.) So instead
of expecting children to turn a blind eye to a rooster’s
daily duties, we turn these inescapable truths into lessons.
Steve is no stranger to the drama-turned-curriculum that is
our brood of chickens. He and his fellow classmates participated
in the annual North Country School chicken harvest in October,
an event in which the entire community takes part. With striking
maturity and composure, the students helped in each stage
of the laborious process—from rising before 5 a.m. to
catch the roosting birds, to washing each carcass. Todd directed
the plastic-wrapped gutting table; his ninth-grade students
hovered around the birds, plucking out goopy piles of organs
as part of their biology lab.
Four months later, the formerly-fuzzy chicks—the October
babies—are now full-grown and the henhouse is overrun
with cockerels. It seems we overlooked a few males in our
autumn slaughter. (Interestingly, determining the sex of young
chickens can be as difficult as remembering the birthdays
of your entire extended family.) Steve and the other children
now complain about the “mean” (in other words
“libido-driven”) chickens, and Liz, my fellow
intern, tells me to make time in my schedule for a rooster
harvest on Wednesday. I acquiesce and put off the seed order
for another day. (John and I are still in negotiations about
the makeup of the annual flowerbed, anyway.)
We begin just after breakfast. John hurries off to the maintenance
shop to pick up a sharp hatchet while I gather the blue plastic
tarp, vinyl gloves, and cutting boards. Liz meets us at the
outdoor cabana, roosters in tow. We don aprons, plastic raingear
and boots. The chickens squawk and caw in muffled tones from
underneath the towels draped over their cages. The tension
is palpable. Roles are determined: Liz and I will hold the
birds and shuttle each carcass to the plucking station. John
will wield the ax. It begins to sleet.
I don’t feel much of anything until I hold the first
dead bird, warm ribbons of blood running down my rain pants
and collecting in oblong splotches on my yellow rubber boots.
As I grip its body to my shin, the headless rooster writhes
and twitches. We dunk the bodies in boiling water, hang the
birds by their feet, and begin the plucking. Somehow I can
handle my hands and forearms coated in chicken innards, but
it’s the smell of singed feathers—a scent reminiscent
of wet dog and charred meat—that turns my stomach. For
all my college friends tucked away in offices or library carrels,
I can’t begin to offer an analogous experience. John
was right to ask how I felt about killing poultry before offering
me this job.
The whole process is over in a few hours, leaving us with
six plucked, washed birds that our kitchen staff transforms
into a substantial pot of soup. After lunch, I find a red
and gold-lettered card that Curtis has stuck in my mailbox,
its delicate Chinese characters wishing me a happy lunar new
year. As chance would have it, we’ve timed our slaughter
impeccably: the first day of the Year of the Rooster! Curtis
reassures me that we have neither offended a culture nor damned
ourselves to a year of bad luck. Besides, I reason, in just
a few short months we’ll be far too busy raising a greenhouse
full of seedlings and a new brood of chicks to notice.
Diana Oleas Chavez
California. February.
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Diana is a visiting intern
from Ecuador, who recently relocated to an organic farm
in Vista, California after working the summer at Dripping
Springs Gardens in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
Diana is a participant in the MESA (Multinational Exchange
for Sustainable Agriculture) program. For more information
on MESA, visit www.mesaprogram.org. |
These days I have learned a very big lesson
about lettuce post-harvest. I harvested it the day before
delivery but I didn’t wash and I didn’t cover
the lettuce boxes with plastic either. So the next day when
I was trying to wash them, some were so dehydrated that I
had to take them to the compost pile. This, unfortunately,
happened on a day that we had a lot of orders, so we had to
short at least one restaurant. It was a very helpful lesson
about post-harvest handling that I will never forget.
Now that I have been here for almost three months, I have
found that marketing is a very important tool, especially
if the farm just sells to restaurants and a few families and
doesn’t participate in farmers' markets. because if
one doesn’t advertise one’s products, one can
loose some money. I am glad we always have two deliveries
on Tuesday and Friday; on Fridays this place is crazy and
we are always in a hurry because we have a lot of orders—like
40 bunches of carrots, 7 bins of three-pound lettuces, 20
bunches of beets, and more.
When I talked about differences between my new farm here
in Vista, California, and my last farm in Arkansas, I forgot
to talk about one very important difference: the irrigation
system. In Arkansas they use water from the creek, and for
this it is necessary to use a pump. Here we use city water,
which comes partly from the Colorado River and partly from
north of California. Also, in order to attach the drip tape
to the pipe here, we insert a spaghetti pipe into the main
pipe and into the drip tape; then we just tie a wire around
the drip tape. But I have found in it a big disadvantage because,
if the wire is not tied very secure, water can drip from it
and eventually the seeds or seedlings won’t get enough
water. In contrast in Arkansas, they use a connector between
the main pipe and the drip tape, and one is able to close
or open each one individually.
In January, I went to a Chinese supermarket in China Town
in Los Angeles, here I found a lot of dried products from
meat to vegetables and also sea horses (but I am still wondering
what they use them for). I found many different kinds of tea
too, and some of them are very expensive ($38 a pound) but
Chinese people buy and use these because they know it helps
to clean their system.
These were my farm assignments for this month:
- Take string and logs out for tomato trellises
- Pull old tomato plants out
- Weed lettuce beds
- Harvest lettuce, parsley, cilantro, collards, kale, mint,
chives, oregano, sorrel, thyme, radishes, carrots, beets,
bok choi and mei qing choi
- Dump weeds in compost
- Replace drip tape
- Prepare soil mix for sowing tomato seeds with peat moss,
biodynamic compost and dried fertilizer mix
- Clean paths
- Repair drip tape
- Sow ‘Big Beef’ tomatoes
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