The Matter of Rosy

Wild weather today and a lot to talk about. Gonna be a long post. Skip to the break at the end if you're interested in what happened to Rosy the cow. (No pics today forgot camera, gotta find it...)


The day started cloudy and wet-- became hot and sunny-- then thunderstorm/tornado warnings at closing. Temperature started at 65F, hiked up to 85F and now is back down at 72F.

Started real early today on account of a dentist appointment (still got to work a little late). My uncle, the one who swung by for a drink/smoke/chat last week, is the head dentist-- but this one guy (Rod) always cleans up my teeth. I only mention all this because of where our conversation led.  Rod lives way out west state in one of the towns pounded by the tornadoes early this spring. He grew up working on his best friend's family orchard-- small world, I met the old woman (the best friend's mother) at markets all last season. She would sneak me hunks of pumpkin cake (cream cheese frosting) every week. Coincidentally, last weekend Rod and his best friend got their old work crew together to replant 200+ of the old woman's trees torn up by the tornadoes. So in between business we talked farms and orchards, then things led to chickens.

Rod's wife is real easy going (never asks/needs for a thing), so when she asked him the big question he caved quick. She wanted to breed chickens. The have a good sized piece of land, so he built a massive coop which she filled up with 12 different varieties of fowl-- to test out the types and find her favorite. Sure enough-- and when Rod said this my heart plopped into my stomache, she decided to breed Barred Rocks. The whole appointment broke down-- we talked about their habits, their care, their eggs and meat. Rod has 2 kids who go crazy caring for the chickens. Their whole family is in love with these birds. He hasn't cooked any of them yet, but ownership had a few traumatic childhood moments all the same (his 8 year old son accidently stepped on a chick and crushed it, many tears where shed).

Rod gave me a lot of good chicken stories, I could fill the whole post with 'em (but I wont). We finally finished up and I told him-- hey, if you ever get too many Barred Rock chicks poking around gimmie a call. He was ecstatic.

On with the farm already.

Hustled in and we packed the boss/NYU up for market. Tuesdays mean one thing, Big Boy is back. I wrangled him, Stretch and Newport together--  and we hiked the hill top for some raspberry picking. Bah and Old Rudolpho's crew came up after a time to help out. The berries were in rough shape, wet weather had caused many to mold/rot. This variety didn't compare well to the taylor raspberries from the last couple weeks (plain in taste and the canes formed differently-- picking was a lot slower/more difficult). Filled up 2 trays and hiked them back to the store.

Next up: the day's big project, weed the field of winter squash. We climbed up the hill top, these squash are on a slope across from the potatoes. The foreman had used the hood-sprayer last week to clear the travel rows, but the 20 rows of squash were overwhelmed in weeds. This was gonna take a while. Worked though to lunch, clearing 1 row.


After lunch we got back up and hit the squash again. The foreman came to lend a hand. Pulling by hand is faster when the weeds are big and thick, so we pulled by hand. Big Boy muddled about in the dirt, bored out of his mind. The foreman wasn't impressed, he shouted-- get off your ass, either work harder or hide your slacking better.

Weeding is the hard work test-- it's endless, mindless and dirty. If you can't keep it clean (every weed means: every weed), consistent and move along at a decent speed-- then you might need to rethink working on a farm. Everyone deals with the weeding drudgery differently: the foreman listens to recorded talk shows on his ipod, Newport sings/talks to himself or anyone in earshot, Bah has a headset and talks to his wife on the phone, Old Rudolpho talks to his grandson Jay-jay (or teaches him to sing depending on the weather), NYU has his books on tape, Rhode Island shares his sexual fantasies (when off meds) or apologises for mistakes he made 5 years ago (on meds), Stretch stares into the dirt, and I think things over. To be honest, this stuff is what lead me to farming in the first place.  A person gotta work, but I didn't want to be paid to think-- I'd rather keep a price off my thoughts. 6 hours of straight weeding is the perfect time to think over whatever I damn please. They can have my arms, but I'll keep my head. --Ehehe didn't mean to get into, what the boys call, this 'heady shit.' So anyway, we weeded all day.

Around closing Newport called me over and pointed to some deep purple thunderheads coming from the west. The foreman had left to get in some spraying, so Newport split-- he ran downhill and drove home. I held Stretch and Big Boy back-- the row we started needed to be finished. Pulled the last weed right as a lightning bolt shot out west. 8 winter squash rows finished out of 20-- tomorrow is another day. We scampered downhill and met the foreman by the store radio-- severe thunderstorm/tornado warnings. We took down the awning, packed all the loose pick crates into the barn, closed up the greenhouse, put the chairs away in the ice cream area and battened down the store. The rain picked up and the lightning was close and loud as all hell. Sat smoking with the foreman out back-- chatting and watching the storm. He packed up and clear out-- time for home.


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The Matter of Rosy
(Rosy)

Crisis of the week-- the boss's brother auctioned off Rosy and her bull-calf. The boss's daughter was furious. When her aunt (brother's wife) came up to the store, the daughter asked real pissy-- so who decided to send Rosy to the slaughterhouse? To the auction-- her aunt corrected.

That all happened yesterday after closing. The boss pointedly decided he had nothing to say on the matter-- they are his brother's cows.

Today after closing and the foreman left, the daughter told me that the cow lady came by-- looking for blood. (The cow lady is a very heavy set, older woman who often parks by the side of the road and wanders out to commune with the cows.) Anyway the cow lady was mad as hell, she shouted down the daughter saying-- I offered to buy Rosy off the boss many times, how the hell could you monsters do this?!

The daughter told her-- 'No, you couldn't have taken Rosy. A cow requires acres of grazing (plus heavy labor to keep it cleared and then a tractor to plant/harvest grasses), a fence, a barn for heavy weather, hundreds (or thousands) of dollars worth of feed over the winter (and again, a tractor to transport the feed bales), lots of water, a place to put thousands of lbs. of poop and an experienced owner-- someone who can catch/herd them when they escape (happens at least once a year), a person who can recognize/intervene in cases of sicknesses/physical medical problems, someone who can work with them objectively/from an emotional distance: because cattle die, sometimes for what seems like no reason at all.'

When the cow lady offered to buy Rosy the first time, the boss and his brother went to check out her place-- she lacked the space. She could afford to buy the cow, but not to care for it. The daughter continued, 'You can treat a cow like a pet, but farm livestock are not dogs or cats or birds. Rosy was a beef cow. I treated her like a pet growing up, but truth is-- we got rid of her because she was a terrible mother. She never took to her calf. Every year from here on, she would bear another calf that she wouldn't be able to raise. Left alone, each of her calves would starve to death. My uncle is too old and can't afford to raise another 10 years worth of calves by the bottle-- creating future generations of female cows who can't mother in the process. It's sad, I was upset too, but this is a farm and they are beef cows-- that's how it goes.'

I've been thinking over all this a lot (it's what I do).

 I agree for the most part with what the daughter said to the cow lady (that I heard second hand). Then again, it figures they'd auction the one cow with a name-- but she was the only one with a major social problem. And if you haven't guessed, the boss's brother isn't the sort of person who'd really consider bringing in a 'cow psychologist' to sort out the issue. All the same, I'm sad an animal I've worked around for a while is now gone. She was curious about people, liked attention and being patted. But I gotta remind myself sometimes, this isn't a show-piece farm-- it's a working farm. It has one purpose: to produce food-- food for the boss and his extended family, food for the crews, food for me and my family/friends, and then food to be sold so that the farm can continue to exist. For all that can be said about them, the boss, his brother and foreman take that purpose very seriously. Maybe the boss's brother felt a little bad about selling Rosy, maybe he didn't-- after auctioning off hundreds of cows over the years, maybe he stopped emotionalizing each sale. Maybe that's a bad thing, maybe it isn't.

And again it occured to me, this is the ideal farm and these are the ideal beef cows. This isn't supermarket manufactured hormoned grade C chuck hamburger. Rosy is the ideal-- the healthy, grass fed, spaciously raised happy cow. She's the one that people eager to escape the pitfalls of industrial-agro dream of at Wholefoods.

I talked this over with Darlin last night. She is a strong proponent for animal rights, so she had an entirely different perspective on Rosy. We talk over these sorts of matters a lot to be honest. I like thought wrestling, picking into my assumptions is necessary to keep my feet on the ground and: I like to be proven wrong-- maybe I'm a masochist or something.

(Warning: 'headier shit' inbound/an opportunity to get my food sermon out there)

The Rosy situation is sad, it's a shame. I feel bad this cow is going to be slaughtered, but I'm sticking to omnivore-- my meat diet isn't changed.

Generally speaking, big M morality stuff (particularly in the case of food) isn't my thing. Yes, I go out of my way to eat good/ healthy food-- working on the farm gives me a physical aversion to shit food (won't ever eat a supermarket tomato or apple again). But none of this has much to do with what I'm talking about with Rosy and my eating meat.

When it comes down to 'right' and 'wrong', I just can't pull the punches to let myself off easy-- there is no difference between killing Rosy/ killing a cow at the mass sprinkler-cooled meat 'ranches' out in the west/midwest. One is just as serious/weighty/or weightless an act as the other. ('Because it's my cow' doesn't mean she's more a cow than another cow, though losing her might hurt a lot more emotionally.) One's meat may be healthier, but the killing is the same.

Time to put on my King Lear hat:

We've put a lot of distance between many things and ourselves, especially in the US, here in 2011. Death is something we've cast far, far, far out of mind and our day-to-day routines.
But I'm a firm proponent:
Death is to life as life is to death. Or to put it differently-- there cannot be life without death.

And I mean that literally, in the big all-inclusive heavy sopping-wet sense.
For example (this one came after one very, very long day in the cold early spring fields):
The soil itself is composed of and contains all the dead and decomposed animals/plants/people that lived before us (plus their excrement). They provide the very nutrients that allow today's life to live-- from oak trees, to algaes/molds, to the grass the cows eat, to the lettuce and tomatoes I eat (every step up the food chain relies on that decomposed dead turned soil, otherwise: no soil, then no greens, then no rabbits and there's no hawk). I think to seperate or to hold myself adrift from that food chain, for whatever reason (even when that chain is broken/artificialized), is to confuse or fool myself about how near and interdependent death is to my life.

But still, I feel bad that Rosy is gone-- I am human and emotionalize my relationship with this one cow-- that's how it goes.


To put it differently (again), one of my farm heroes said: How is it that, at the age of 38, and having consumed some unthinkable number of chickens in my life, this will be the first time that I’ve personally killed a chicken?

But yadda yadda, from all I'm saying here... it's not like everyday I'm staring out over a burning marsh-wasteland of cascading death. I'm not wringing my hands at dinner, weeping at the grave atlas-responsibility I've assumed in order to munch on a hambone. The act/memory of Death (an animal's, a plant's, a person's) is whatever we make it. When someone dies: some cultures mourn the death, others celebrate the life-- maybe both haven't got it entirely pinned down. I dunno, you think about it.


I'm spent. To wrap it all up: long live Rosy, sad to see you go, but I hope the folks that chomp ya are well fed.

As for me, beer and cigarettes are in order, then back to doin' all this over again tomorrow.
Where's that damn camera.

Take it easy and don't think too much.