Palpable life

We have three goat kids, now a month old. They are so full of life and fun. They will climb anything and jump to huge heights, almost from birth.

On advice we had their horn buds removed because we want the grandchildren and their friends here to be able to play with the goats without risk of a horn in an eye or whatever. So, at ten days old these creatures go in the back of the truck to the vets for a general anaesthetic. I try not to be too emotionally involved with the animals but everyone at the vets was all over these totally lovable kids.

The kids had their little op and then we had to wait for them to come round to make sure everything was OK. I held the first in my arms and it was like a sack of fluid. There was no structure there. It was impossible to believe that this bundle was acrobatic and full of fun. I found the experience quite hard to bear.

What I took from the experience was a sense of palpable life. The kids climb not by being naturally good or talented at climbing but by doing climbing. They run at vast speeds that are pure feeling of speed. The liveness is its own thing, emphasised by the slightness and extreme youth of the kids’ bodies.

At some other unlikely extreme, we have three lambs, hoggets now, that we had as orphans last year and bottle fed. They have always been affectionate to a fault and knocked my wife flying the other day just by being too friendly. And they will take the shock of pushing through an electric fence just to nuzzle up to me when I am working nearby.

The two wethers are particularly large to the point that I am concerned that they are too fat and have too much weight to carry. Last week when I moved them to some new grass they galloped and kicked their legs in the air and showed all the signs of pure sheep joy.

People who know these things say life will find a way, and it is so good to be so forcibly reminded of the sheer vitality and joy that will get us there.

Duck tales

We have a few Muscovy ducks and, this time of year, they decide to nest. They choose well-hidden but generally unsuitable spots to build a nest which they line with down they peck from their own breasts. They lay eggs over a period of days and weeks and then decide to sit tight on them to hatch them.

We often only find the nests by finding eggs that have rolled out of the nest, perhaps down the bank onto the road. We mend and reinforce the nests and put the eggs back. It takes five weeks incubation — a long time to sit still. Last year a duck died on her nest, maybe of starvation. This year a duck wandered off her nest in the night (the others are shut up tight) and was eaten by a fox. Another had her eggs stolen and a third who nested on the pile of straw in the barn also seems to have been dispossessed. Meanwhile the small hut we provided as a nest site that gets shut up at night has only just been colonised.

We could remove the eggs and put them in an incubator, but the time we tried the eggs failed to hatch at the last hurdle: they are known to be awkward. So, this also is a story about life. We will get ducklings and the ducks will get us there. Lots of events on the way that seem like failures to us, but the ducks will keep going. They will get there where we would not.

One of the signs of this is flexibility and constant change. The patterns of behaviour of birds and animals are always changing. Daily things that we assume were settled change in bizarre ways. The ducks will move in to eat the hens’ food and to use the henhouse. The hens will make sure they get first call on the ducks’ food. The cockerel, Ignatius, will lead his gang on the attack on territory or the (much larger) ducks will push them out. When the hens escaped from their quarantine enclosure it was nigh impossible to catch them and put them back. When I excluded some hens to work out whose eggs were whose they fought their way back in.

I check myself whenever I feel a lack of control to see where the outcomes are going. Life will do its thing and over-control is counter-productive more often than not. My wife was an infant teacher and has more need to say how things should be.

Farmers do not love nature

It is not only gamekeepers employed on English estates by Arab princes who break the wildlife laws. There is a general attitude that wild animals and birds are trouble. Foxes, badgers, moles, ravens, rabbits and of course polecats are thought to be an economic problem. Direct action is not uncommon.

We share the frustration. Raising vegetables is much harder here than on my old allotment. We have had foxes take hens, turkeys and ducks as above. I could wish that the buzzards and kites were better at keeping the vole population down and that the owls were better at mice. Fewer rabbits would be great.

There is a general appreciation of clean or tidy meaning monocultures and lack of cover for birds and small animals. There is some opposite attitude to the sheer bursting through of life which is where we started. Something about the economic framework imposed by society and markets makes it hard to revel in diversity and living solutions. And there is certainly no incentive to be playful and see what life itself can generate given a chance.

There is a risk averseness too. The point of the goat kids, if they need to have a point, is milking their mothers. Raw goat’s milk is up there high in the pantheon of nutritional wonders. I love it. But is it safe? How do we think about the benefits and risks? Are we up there celebrating life leading to life and health and abundance, or are we calculating the possibility of TB or Brucellosis?

Ducks can lose their lives and/or their eggs. Goat kids can hurt themselves. Children can have accidents and/or fall ill. It is the way natural systems works in and through these negatives that is the wonder. People who don’t understand self-organised education in (young) children want to say they have assessed that these children are not learning what they need to or as quickly as they should, thereby illustrating the whole point of self-organisation.

Intervention

People intervene in these situations. I do. They act through instinct, or they think through some hypothesis about the effect their intervention might have. Very few people are humble enough to observe closely and accurately all the mismatches between what they expected and what happened. Some people just double down on what they did that did not “work”.

The advice of someone experienced and kind can be really useful. But it may well be based on a narrative or a theory that is different to the ones you use yourself. In which case it may be destructive. To stay with agriculture, the theories about the soil that are basically chemical rather than biological may yield some results but will also be damaging. If you fertilise a tree you limit its ability to build the fungal partnerships it needs to thrive.

Last year we operated a chicken tractor for six months. I moved a frame housing our meat chickens every day to new grass. This benefits both the grass and the chickens. My brother, a dairy farmer for half his career, asks me “can you see the difference, where the tractor has been?”. Since the immediate answer is no, what would I look for to understand the difference? That takes me into the realm of what a healthy grass sward might look like. Refer to a previous blog about Brix for whether a Brix meter might reveal a difference, good or bad.

Stewardship

From the palpable life of a goat kid to taking responsibility for the life of a place. People set out to manage animals and plants and in the name of control and maybe financial outcomes they do things that damage their medium term chances. Civil servants want to take that to a cost-benefit economic analysis. Nothing could be further from palpable life.

The key is on the wish for control and predictability that is thought to be a prerequisite for rational decision making. Its opposite would be a celebration of the life that can emerge. If that sounds irresponsible, good. I saw a study saying that the farms that are resulting in carbon being sequestered in the soil are profitable. Notice the subtlety of thought there. Sequestering carbon and building a healthy soil is not a recipe for profits. But if you use farming practices that build this fundamental, your farm will make profits.

We are one step further removed. We steward a smallholding and are not looking to trade or make a profit in that sense. We want to improve the feel of the local environment, to raise great food, to become robust to droughts and excessive rainfall, to play a part in the local community. This is half using sound and soundly based farming practices and half becoming sensitive to what the place wants to become, how it wants to look and function. It will only be beautiful and useful and healthy if we can understand what needs to be.

We are blessed with an already diverse ecosystem with old woods, scrub, grazing, rocky outcrops, streams and marshes. Some farms are excessively tidy, some are dominated by monocultures, very few manage water properly to keep it on the land. It takes years to understand how land works, and how interventions can limit how it works. What one person sees as stewardship, another with a different set of eyes will see as criminal damage. The proof as ever in these blogs is in healing and flourishing.

Timescales

Of course nothing happens overnight. I started scything bracken when we arrived here and am seeing results three years later. We planted lots of native trees and of the ones that survived, most are now starting to thrive, again three years on. Stewardship has a timescale of generations: I am in a twenty year project and that is probably the time that I have to see things work out.

But sometimes. We planted herbal ley seeds in the landscaping for a barn we replaced. It is thriving and looks fantastic. But the other day in the spring sun and breeze, the goats were browsing busily on the herbs, and I thought “that fodder is being transformed into the raw milk I now drink every day”. And it is that tangible. The deep roots pulling up minerals from the subsoil. The great variety of plants that make up the diet. The contentedness of the goats in the steep field. And my own gratitude.

Many things are better slow. The slow food movement in Italy. A chicken that matures in six months not 32 days. Cheese and wine. An oak rather than sitka spruce. An apprenticeship. I don’t need or want results this year or next, I want to know that the direction of travel will unfold the potential of what is there. I am not rich in time or energy: I need to work with the grain of what can be.

Palpable life is the guarantee of our investment. The sheer exuberance that spans animals and plants and soil is what I need to pay attention to. Living with what can be and what is appearing changes what I can see and changes it forever.