The Honorable Harvest and the Work of Small Farmers
content warning — some abstract discussion of animals as food
My first memory of the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference was a session on raising sheep, taught by an MSU Extension agent. I’m certainly misquoting him, but the gist of his lesson was “wait until you’re having a really bad morning, feeling grouchy and mad at the animals. That’s when you make your cull list.” The point, he then clarified, was that running a sheep farm is a difficult business with thin margins, and a farmer can’t afford to let an attachment to an underperforming animal get in the way of good business. A sheep with sub-par genetics or a bad temper should be first on the trailer to the butcher.
Much of farming instruction comes in this mode, an unspoken argument that there are two kinds of farmers — those that commit to efficiency and best practices, and so thrive, and those that putz around with a few acres for fun, and so never get to quit their day jobs.
I’m not opposed to this argument, or those best practices, delivered sincerely by Extension agents and others of their kind. They’re absolutely right — farming is damn hard, with the thinnest of margins and all sorts of uncertainty. In the face of so many risks, following a set of well-studied best practices is the surest route to success. About those risks: dangerous chemicals, large equipment designed to cut, shred and pulverize; the highly unpredictable outdoors, and, most importantly, a farmer’s ongoing responsibility to produce food that’s safe to eat. Any error in these small margins can cause injury, illness, or death. The history of farming is basically one long cautionary tale. Many of the sessions at the conference are focused on these dangers, and cover policy compliance, insurance, and other necessary acts of paperwork. FISMA, GAAMP, MAEAP, OEFA, GAP, GHP, and HACCP are just the beginning of the processes and policies designed to protect people and the environment, and the workshops devoted to these topics demand clarity, nuance, and authoritative delivery.
Can you tell I’m prefacing? Because I’m prefacing. Because I also want to talk about Mary Donner.
Mary and her husband Kevin run Mshko’Ode Farm in Brutus, Michigan. Mary is also the Executive Director of Ziibimijwang Inc., a project of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians dedicated to regenerative agriculture and food security for the Odawak. Mary is a direct descendent of Odawak displaced by the Burt Lake Burn-Out — a fact I’m including largely so you’ll click that link and learn how genocide works no matter what the treaties say, but also to understand why food security and self-reliance continue to be important to many of the Little Traverse Bay Band. Mshko’Ode, friends, is rocking. The Donners know how to farm, a fact readily evident by a visit to their land or a brief conversation with either of them.
Mary facilitated a roundtable session at this year’s conference called Restoring Relationship with the Land. As Mary explained in her welcome, too often the voices of the original regenerative farmers — the Anishinaabe, in this place — are being left out of these conversations. Too often, we focus on specific practices (usually with a modern sheen covering up the old traditional knowledge) rather than cultivating a set of timeless values.
She then invited us to reflect on a powerful quote from Robin Kimmerer, which she read aloud twice. Here it is, below. Do me a favor — read this twice, yeah?
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
–Robin Wall Kimmerer, from “The Honorable Harvest” in Braiding Sweetgrass
She then asked the assembled group some questions. The question that I remember best, and that is lingering with me, and that is driving this essay that I’m now writing the day after the conference, is “what do these words call you to do?”
Like I said, I’m writing this essay now, right after the conference, in a fit of inspiration. My thinking from here fractures into a few places and times, which in an essay of greater length or longer gestation might settle back into coherence. But this is not that, so bear with my hopping around:
(1) Waltzing Stella Farm, the summer of 2020, when Amanda and I raised three Tamworth/Old Spot pigs on a few acres of pasture in Bellaire. Y’all, pigs are a joy. They are charming and enormous and always hungry and smell bad and have gorgeous long lashes and an abiding intelligence and they love pushing each other into the hot-wire fence and pushing on your knees hoping you’ll fall into the much with them and they love running through the sprinkler and they hold grudges and have ridiculously strong feelings about apples and turnips and, yes, they taste delicious. I say all of this because our relationship with pigs is complicated, and that’s pretty much everything that I love about farming all wrapped up in one massive happy strong-nosed animal.
(2) Danu Hof Farm, just a few hours before Mary’s session two days ago, walking and talking with Caitlin McSweeny-Steffes and Larry Steffes during a session called Farrow to Finish Pigs. See, lots of people, like Amanda and me, buy “feeder” pigs — you get a few pitbull-sized piglets in the spring, watch thousands of pounds of grain disappear into their bellies (and quickly out again) all summer and fall, and butcher them as fat happy monsters before it gets too cold and in time to put a smoked ham on the holiday table. At Danu Hof they don’t buy feeders — they keep the boars and the gilts (what you call a female pig before her first litter) and sows (same lady, after), and they manage the whole cycle of life right there on the farm. That’s what most of the session was about, and I loved it.
My favorite moments were during an extended tour of the Danu Hof porcine medicine cabinet, talking shop about sick pigs, when Caitlin, nursing her own infant, would look knowingly at the other women in the group when talking about the challenges of birth, suckling, and weaning, and they would nod or grimace or laugh in this shared experience — a circle of understanding and concern which clearly included the mama sows in the barn. Caitlin and Larry made it clear that the health and happiness of their pigs was a value they held well above economic return. Caitlin has learned to care for these animals through careful veterinary study, patient observation, and, most meaningfully, an empathy created by the shared experience of childbirth.
(3) Same session, different context — we were talking about the market for pork and poultry products, and learned that the market for chicken feet and pork bones was growing, especially in the winter and fall, as more of us learn to simmer a good bone broth. But lard hadn’t caught on again yet, nor had organ meats, so those either sat unpurchased in the freezer or never came home from the butcher to begin with.
Going back to Mary’s question — ”what does this call you to do?” Well, sitting in that circle, my mind went to thrift, which now takes me back to —
(4) Facebook, Feb 11, 2017, day 23 of #100days of posting on Facebook starting with the inauguration of Mr. Trump. Here’s the post in full if you want to read it. Notice how these introductory quotes from Gary Snyder call back to the words of Robin Kimmerer above:
“Other beings (the instructors from the old ways tell us) do not mind being killed and eaten as food, but they expect us to say please, and thank you, and they hate to see themselves wasted.”
“An ethical life is one that is mindful, mannerly, and has style. Of all moral failings and flaws of character, the worst is stinginess of thought, which includes meanness in all its forms”
“One must not waste, or be careless, with the bodies or the parts of any creature one has hunted or gathered. One must not boast, or show much pride in accomplishment, and one must not take one’s skill for granted. Wastefulness and carelessness are caused by stinginess of spirit, an ungracious unwillingness to complete the gift-exchange transaction. (These rules are also particularly true for healers, artists, and gamblers.)”
These three quotes are from “The Etiquette of Freedom” by Gary Snyder (collected in The Practice of the Wild — high on my list of recommended reading, along with Braiding Sweetgrass).
As I say in that post, Snyder (and now Kimmerer) call back to an older sense of the word “economy,” one that denotes both thrift and frugality, but not “meanness” (another older meaning, not about spitefulness but an impoverishment of spirit, a base miserliness).
Also from the post, now quoting myself:
Of all the ways to illustrate this, my mind keeps coming back to one, which is close to home — the simple, frugal, graceful act of making broth from bone. It’s an act economical to its core, but one which doesn’t say ‘we must skimp and suffer or else starve’ so much as ‘this gift unto us contains a deeper gift.’ Anyone who has eaten soup, well made, can immediately understand its capacity to be ‘mindful, mannerly and [having] style.’
Does an ethical life begin with bone stock? More importantly, is a graceful thrift a part of an ethical life? Yes.
I love that Mary’s question brought my mind both to Danu Hof that morning and then to this short post from 2017, and those two things then wove together through the beneficence of our cousin pig. Thank you, pigs.
Just a bit more from that post:
“My favorite part of these quotes, though, is Snyder’s repudiation of ‘an ungracious willingness to complete the gift-exchange transaction.’ This could be disdain for the ungrateful hunter, but it also judges the industrial economy, which makes neither room for or need of grace. There is efficiency, which removes waste but without adding care, and which celebrates the ‘stinginess of spirit.’”
Instead — as Mary and others so beautifully noted during the conference conversation — we can choose to allow our give and take with the living world to entangle us in myriad relationships with the other members of our place. These relationships protest being valued by economic means. You can’t buy your way out of a gift economy, you can only trade your way deeper in.
Which now pulls me to that small farm conference session well over a decade ago.
What would that sheep-culling Extension agent have to say about empathizing with your fellow moms, even though they are pigs? And is there a middle ground? I think there is, and I think it starts with “Introduce yourself…”
I was going to end here, but then I read the next paragraph of Kimmerer’s The Honorable Harvest and it tied right back again to my early experience at my first Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference, and that difference between the way we encounter policy compliance and the way we encounter the living world. Here it is:
“The state guidelines on hunting and gathering are based exclusively in the biophysical realm, while the rules of the Honorable Harvest are based on accountability to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit — and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it. When you regard those nonhuman persons as kinfolk, another set of harvesting regulations extends beyond bag limits and legal seasons.”
There’s so much more to say. In the next essay I’m going to lean on two dear friends of mine, Caitlin Strokosch and Teri VanHall, in order to apply some of this thinking to how we develop place-based institutions. But for now, friends, I’m out of room again. See you at the full moon! Oh, and I hope it goes without saying, but read Braiding Sweetgrass, please.
