Dear Folks, Well, now there are FIVE! Five calves! Maple, Butternut, and Linden, who have graduated from bottles to buckets. And now two newborns, Alder and Birch, on bottles, of course. They came from the farm in Woodstock that gave us Maple. Birch has white markings on her legs. I’d swear she has some Holstein blood, but Stephen and Kerry assure me that Jerseys come in many colors. Alder is solid maple colored. They are adorable, eager to suck on any part of you, from a finger to a pocket flap (to each others’ ears). They’re not nearly so lively as lambs. I’m amazed at how calm cows are, compared to my old friends the sheep. But they have their moments of hijinks. I’m enjoying getting to know them.
Stephen and Kerry assure me that this is as big as the herd will get until we get over to the larger farm. Once these babies turn into teenagers, they will fill our small barn. But given the rate of increase around here, and my own delight in these new creatures, one never can tell.
No more this year, though. We have enough to do.
Fall and spring are the busiest times for us, because the sun and the weather change so fast. If we don’t keep up, we lose out. In spring the time to plant passes, at this time of year, the winter clamps down. So we’re hustling. Stephen and Kerry have their two acres mostly harvested and are working on cover crops and garlic planting and preparing the soil for next spring. The last farmers market was today, and the last CSA deliveries go out next week.
I’m farther behind than they are; I still have carrots, rutabagas, turnips, and beets in the ground, raspberries to prune, lots of garden cleanup to do. I like to leave the root crops in as long as I can, to give the root cellar time to cool down, and to let the cooler weather develop the sugars. Jen dug some of the carrots today, while I pulled up dahlia tubers and gladiolus corms, which can’t survive hard freezes.
We got our first killing frost on October 1 (and 2 and 3 and 4) under a brilliant full moon. Hasn’t frosted since. This weekend it’s in the 60s and 70s, a fine Indian summer. Protected by the hoop house, my peppers are still bearing and the fall greens are shaping up well. In the garden the frost-hardy Chinese cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, leeks are still thriving. For dinner tonight I made a huge salad of many greens and a broccoli-tofu stir-fry and, at Jen’s suggestion, a fiery tofu-horseradish dip — horseradish freshly dug — for dipping sweet fall carrots and celery and kohlrabi. And sourdough rye bread. Kerry cooked up a big Russian squash, part of which I froze, part I turned into a squash flan (a sort of pumpkin pie without the pie). Tomorrow morning I’ll make squash biscuits for the community meeting. Mmmmm. Delicious time of year!
Around us the valley has turned magical. The colors are strange this year; the famous maples, normally the stars of the show, are muted. Many of our biggest trees just turned brown and dropped their leaves early. The papers say that the trees are stressed from a too-wet early summer and a too-dry late summer, and that we should go easy on sugaring next spring. But the sumacs and Virginia creeper and oaks and other fall charmers are as beautiful as ever, and some of the maples are just fine, so the countryside is lovely, if not eye-popping spectacular. Someone said on the radio, the fall foliage is like sex — even when it’s bad, it’s good.
Jim Hourdequin is away for a month in Thailand. Ben has graduated to team leader at Simon Pearce and uses his spare time to make curvy, fluid pieces that Simon Pearce would never approve of. Chrissie and Scot have moved away from the Whybrow house next door and Ruth’s daughter Helen has moved back in. Chrissie and Scot have a normal grad-student apartment in town, where Scot can concentrate on the last year of his thesis without the distractions of a farm. I think they both feel cramped and citified (only real farmers like them would feel citified in Hanover NH!), but I also think it’s a good idea to bear down on the thesis now. We miss them though.
I’m feeling stressed. Too much, too much, too much to do, all of it wonderful, but just too much. I just managed to finish an 80-page Balaton Bulletin. Diana Wright and I are trying to update Beyond the Limits, which is a massive research task, and for me a writing task. The commodities teams are keeping me busy with their good work. We all met in Concord one day last week to exchange notes on each others’ progress. Then the next day Don and Drew, the forest-products team, had a day-long meeting there with some of the forest-industry folks and environmentalists in the region, to present the idea of their model and begin to get their input. It went really well. They were enthusiastic, and they see the model as a tool to help them express and explore their differences. We’re hoping to put together a similar meeting in December in the Midwest for the corn team, and one in January for the shrimp team.
That shrimp meeting will be a doozy. In all these commodities (and probably in all commodities), the players in the system are not exactly buddies. Even within the industry, the loggers have issues with the mill-owners, the aquaculturalists with the fishers, the farmers with the elevator-owners or feedlot owners, and the retailers with the suppliers. Everyone has issues with the financers, shippers, importers, exporters. And the environmentalists, of course! With shrimp the problems are magnified by the global supply chain — production in Asia and Latin America, consumption in Japan, Europe and North America — and with the pioneer nature of the enterprise. This industry is just evolving from hunter-gathering to farming. Its technologies and markets are still fairly primitive, controlled by interesting characters, from Japanese investors to Taiwanese mafias to Ralston-Purina, which supplies feed for shrimp ponds, and Monsanto, which has dreams of genetically engineered feed and, for all I know, shrimp.
One of our funders, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, has offered to bring some of these folks together at Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller estate in New York. So far we’re having a bit of trouble getting them there. If we ever do, it will be quite a meeting. Stay tuned. Fortunately, all three modeling teams are far more than modelers; they have experience facilitating dicey groups.
That’s all work of the new Sustainability Institute, which is roaring along, though we won’t have an office till we get to the new farm, and though our budget, except for the commodity work, is close to nonexistent. I don’t let that stop me, though. Last week I appointed three new directors, two of whom have to raise their own pay. Rachael Cohen, a sharp Chelsea Green editor is Director of Publications. Alan AtKisson is Director of Arts and Culture. Ellen Furnari is Administrative Director. Good crew. We’ll have fun!
The other big-time commitment is the new community and farm, of course. We had a historic meeting last weekend in which we finally decided on two essential things: a site plan and a name. The name is Cobb Hill, which is the hill upon whose eastern slope the farm rests. (The peak of the hill is on the farm just to our north, which I covet for its hayfields.) The name may be just plain Cobb Hill, or Cobb Hill Farm, or Cobb Hill Cooperative or Cobb Hill Something Else — we couldn’t get to consensus on that second part of the name, so postponed it till next time. It took us two years to get to Cobb Hill, so we thought that was enough for now. It’s one of those plain names that was everybody’s second choice, the first choices all being just a bit too rosy or too cute or too reminiscent of a housing development, a hippie commune, or a retirement home. We would have been Four Corners Farm a long time ago, but someone else already got that name.
The site plan, with the building arranged around an open common (as opposed to around the commonhouse, which was another option), is still subject to tinkering — in particular we still tend to slide it up and down the slope a bit — but it’s enough for the design team and engineers to get to work, figuring out the specifics we need for our Act 250 permitting process. We’ve been waiting months for our well-drilling permit and are still waiting. Our numbers make it necessary to be licensed as if we were a municipal supply, which we are, I guess, and that requires notices to all abutters (of which there are a lot) and a hearing, if they request it, which three of them have. We hope that hearing will happen soon, so we can get drillers up there before the ground seizes up.
Marie Kirn and I also made a preliminary visit to the Hartland Planning Board, which is by definition a party to the Act 250 permit. That went well, I think. We are surely exceeding every requirement in the town plan.
Another big decision we made last week was for composting toilets. I had taken that as a given — always a mistake in a community. Not all of us understood what they are, how they work, whether they smell, what they cost, why they’re an ecological improvement. When they started asking questions and saying, “hey, I don’t remember coming to any consensus about this,” I had to backtrack and prepare a presentation. In the process I discovered that Miss Sustainability Smartypants had a lot to learn herself on this subject (and probably still has a lot to learn). One can get into endless detail about Clivus versus Phoenix versus Carousel and ventilating fans and how to handle insects and accumulating liquids and whether to separate #1 from #2.
This made, as you might imagine, a memorable community discussion, which took place with high humor and a final enthusiastic consensus. The clincher came from the report of Judith Bush, one of our members who had had concerns (she admits to being anal-compulsive) and who took it upon herself to call up people with composting toilets and interview them about smells, bugs, and other possible regrets. Her report was glowing; the users all found them sanitary, manageable, even pleasant, and they as were proud of themselves as any other kind of adventurer or pioneer. Their only regret was that they feared for the resalability of their houses. One said he’d put in normal toilets if he ever had to sell.
Well, so a-composting we will go. I have used modern composting toilets in several places, including Helen and Scott Nearing’s Forest Farm, the office of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, and the Vermont Law School. But I have never lived with one. Some day I hope to deliver to you a full report.
In addition to making a million design decisions, the community is also working hard on PROCESS right now — on upgrading our skills of discussion, consensus, and conflict resolution. Tomorrow we have an all-day meeting with two facilitators to work specifically on that. It will be interesting; I think there is nothing more important than process work; I think improving our ability to think and decide and learn together is a crucial ingredient of learning to make a world that works and is sustainable and just. AND I feel much too busy and overwhelmed to spend a whole beautiful Indian summer day sitting and talking, instead of working on the garden.
Which is, I guess, why the world works so badly. We’re all too busy to learn to talk together constructively. So I will do my best to go to the meeting gladly and to be present at it, instead of being mentally in the garden. Such is the price of community. Sigh.
Love to all, Dana
