Dear Folks, It’s a slow spring. I haven’t even got the peas in the ground yet; the garden’s too muddy. We had a frost last night. The top of Mount Ascutney, visible from our front door, is still white with snow. The rivers are surging with a combination of snowmelt and heavy rain.
And — an amazing sign — this morning I heard the breeding whistle of a white-throated sparrow — “poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.” That sound used to dominate this farm in the spring, but I haven’t heard it for years. The whitethroats seemed to have shifted permanently north with the warming. I’d see them passing through with flocks of migrating juncoes, but they no longer stayed to breed, or to sing. This year, though, they’re at the feeders every day, and this morning I heard the song. They still might move on as the days warm, but still … it’s great to hear a whitethroat again, even if it’s a sign of a spring so cold the peas aren’t yet in the ground.
Thank heaven for the hoop house Scot and Chrissie and Marcia built last fall! We’ve got lettuce and radishes coming up nicely in there, and it’s stuffed with the zillion flats of onions that Chrissie started in the house in February. (Chrissie foresees making a bundle selling bunches of braided onions with pretty dried flowers twisted in. We have zillions of flats of everlasting flowers too.) It was 25 outside this morning, 35 in the hoop house, and 45 in the lean-to greenhouse that attaches onto our basement. By this afternoon, with the sun shining, it’ll be 80 in both greenhouse and hoop house.
The spring is slow, but so beautiful! The front yard is dancing with daffodils. Our two forsythia bushes are in bloom. (For a long time we couldn’t grow forsythia here; it would kill down to the roots every winter. But the warming is firm enough now that our five-year-old bushes are doing fine.) There are Barred Rock chicks feathering out in the chicken palace — they arrived by air mail on Easter morning. The maples have put out their subtle, deep-red blossoms that in the sunlight make the forests look pink. The robins and phoebes and yellow-bellied sapsuckers are back, and the pastures are green. Yesterday we put the moms and their lambs out for the first time.
Oh, I haven’t told you yet about the lambs. Or about Holland. Or about the new farms. Or Chrissie’s job or Narayana’s acceptance at Smith. Gee, a lot has happened this month!
Lambs first. They came just fine, twins popping out like clockwork, such cute little buggers. And then one morning I came out and found Rosemary, our fattest, laziest, greediest ewe, flat on the ground, eyes rolled into her head, looking dead. A black lamb was half out of her; I pulled him the rest of the way fast, and he shook himself and gurgled a few times and was fine. Oriented right, not too large, I couldn’t imagine what was wrong with Rosie. It took a long time for her to rally and start licking her new baby, but eventually, gradually, she did. I felt around for the next one (knowing Rosie’s lambing history, and seeing the relatively small size of the firstborn, I was pretty sure there was a next one), but nothing was on its way. I was late for work, so I put Rosie and baby in a lambing stall and drove off to Dartmouth.
About mid-morning Narayana called me and asked, “how many lambs was it that Rosie had?” Well, by then she had three — two little white ones had appeared without help from any of us.
That was cause for rejoicing, but Rosie wasn’t well. She wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t feed her babies, would eat if we brought the grain right to her, but otherwise didn’t bother to raise her head. I milked Daisy, who had obligingly produced twins that same day, in order to get colostrum for the triplets. And then we had three bottle babies on our hands.
Bottle babies are so sweet, and such a nuisance. Normally baby lambs hit their mothers up for little bits of milk very frequently. Their tummies are never quite full, and never empty. Ideally we’d give those triplets a bottle every half hour, but we’re not sheep moms, we’re people with lots else to do. So we aimed for every four hours, day and night. Those of us with the 1 AM and 5 AM shifts began showing signs of sleep deficit. Furthermore, a bag of “lamb replacer,” (extra-fat, vitamin-supplemented dried milk) costs $28, which is more than the profit margin on a grown lamb sold for meat. It takes about one bag per bottle-raised lamb, so, if you look at them in purely economic terms, these babies are walking deficits.
They are SO cute, though. By the second day, they’ve adopted you. They follow you everywhere, looking for their bottle. They suck your fingers, your chin, your pockets. They’re the only lambs in the barnyard that like to cuddle. That lamb that followed Mary everywhere in the nursery rhyme was a bottle baby.
The vet came to look at Rosie, shot her up with penicillin, cleaned out her uterus, and speculated that the two last-born lambs got tangled and probably made a puncture with one of those sharp little hooves. If so, there was nothing to be done for Rosie. Peritonitis would do her in.
For four days we gave antibiotic injections to the mom and fed bottles to her three wiggly, increasingly strong and hungry kids. We tried to tip Rosie over and help the lambs suckle, to relieve her milk and give them a more natural diet. The two white lambs were enthusiastic and sucked Rosie down every time we gave them a chance. The black one, the firstborn, never caught on. On the fourth day he started to fail.
So for another four days, we had Rosie down but strengthening, two bottle babies in the barn, and an ailing lamb in a box in the kitchen, warming by the woodstove, receiving solicitous licks from Emmett and hugs from Chrissie and me. In the end, he didn’t make it, but the wonder is that Rosie did. She’s not only up now, she’s actually nursing her two white lambs. We never even used up the first bag of lamb replacer.
Now every night at sundown we have the hilarious lamb dance in the barnyard. I don’t know why they go crazy just at that hour (but I notice that human babies do too). They gather in a gang, black ones and white ones, they go racing around, they bounce, they prance, they leap, they go sideways and backwards and straight up in the air. As soon as the shearer shows up, we’ll be able to put them out to pasture full time.
It wasn’t helpful that I set out for the Netherlands with that sleep deficit from the 5 AM feeding. The meeting itself was so intense that I fell farther and farther behind, sleepwise. In the Balaton Group we had been frustrated with the many meetings on sustainable development indicators that have been happening around the world, all designed to help the UN come up with indicators that every nation can keep that can measure and inform its progress toward sustainable development. The trouble has been, no one quite agrees what sustainable development is. Every expert wants to measure what that expert knows how to measure. Some governments aren’t eager for report cards on the actual state of their people or their environment. And the human economy evolving within the biogeochemical systems of the planet is a goldarn complicated thing to measure.
I thought if anyone could throw some light on this subject, it would be Balaton folk, with their years of thinking about sustainability, their practical, interdisciplinary orientation, their systems training, and their experience at working constructively together. So we organized a five-day workshop with just 20 of us, to go at the indicator question full out. One of our members, Bert de Vries, offered to host the meeting at RIVM, a massive Dutch government research lab, the equivalent of our NIH. (RIVM stands, in Dutch, for the Federal Institute for Public Health and the Environment.)
We came together from Kenya and India and New Zealand and Costa Rica, Russia, Latvia, South Africa, many European countries, Canada and the U.S. As always with Balaton, it was a terrific group, hard-working, well-informed, creative, and fun. I’ll eclipse the report here, since the five days was rather a blur to me anyway, as I tried to take notes, further the group process, do my own thinking as the conversation went on, and keep track of expenses. (Note for future workshops: these activities should not all be done by just one person.) I think I’ve never been at a meeting where I came up with so many totally new ideas myself, absorbed so many ideas from my colleagues, and put ideas together in such creative new ways.
In the end we produced a) a 57-page cobbled-together document drafted in groups and badly in need of editing, b) enough insights to expand that document into a book, c) an attempt to condense them into a few essential summary points for the UN, d) a research agenda that could keep us busy for years, e) some striking new ideas especially about time budgets and social indicators, f) an appreciation that the indicator-finding process is as important as the actual indicators, g) great visions for indicator presentation, including an animated control panel and a dynamic Web page, h) long lists of indicators (too many), and i) a rollicking Indicator Song (thanks to our songmeister Alan AtKisson, adapted from a Latvian drinking song taught to us by Valdis Bisters).
We can go lots of directions from here. I can see future Balaton meetings and joint projects, especially on the business of time as a numeraire. But for the moment it’s my job to produce a short, readable report for the UN Council on Sustainable Development, which began a 3-week meeting in New York the day after I returned from Holland. I’m sorry to say that report isn’t quite done yet, but I hope to finish it today, and I’m happy with the way it’s turning out. It’s certainly not the final say on indicators, but I think it’s moved the discussion much farther and faster than any other I’ve seen — at a fraction of the cost and with a lot more fun.
I have to circulate it back to the group for editing, but we’ll make it into a Balaton publication soon, for any of you who are interested.
So. What about the Great Vision of new farms, new community, new institute? Well, I’ve been lambing and I’ve been away, but we are moving forward. Had a great meeting at MIT with a number of interested folks down there, mainly postdocs and graduate students who are already starting on a modeling project for the institute and who are interested (to varying degrees) in the farm and community. It really helps to talk about it, gather ideas, spin out our visions, make it real and make it into what we want.
I’ve been over walking on the Curtis and Hunt farms several times in the past month, watching them turn green, showing them to prospective community members. They still dazzle me, and also daunt me. So MUCH farm there, compared to my little ledgy, swampy 70 acres! And so likely to pass into the hands of someone who’ll subdivide the land and take it out of farming forever. Both the Trust for Public Lands and the Upper Valley Land Trust are going to work with us to help us buy them at an affordable price and put permanent conservation easements on them.
Jeanie McIntyre of the Upper Valley Land Trust went with Scot and me last week to talk to the Curtises, to begin formal negotiations on their farm. I hate this process. I want to give the other parties to the negotiation everything they want. I’d love to pay the Curtises a bundle for their farm and grant them lifetime tenancy, so they could go on living there in comfort, giving us advice about how to manage the place — but of course I can’t afford to, and I’m negotiating for a lot of people beside myself. The good news is that the price of that farm has come down by $100,000. The bad news is that it’s still way too expensive, and the Curtises are probably not going to be patient with fancy processes like 2-year options or pre-protecting the land to get tax breaks for themselves. They’re elderly, sweet, simple folks, and they’d like a sweet, simple, quick process, which, given the complications of what we’re trying to do, we’re not likely to be able to offer them.
Well, that was only Round 1. We’ve a long way to go.
Meanwhile, back in Plainfield NH, Chrissie is working at one of the two farms down by the river that are a model to me of what we might be able to do on the Hunt and Curtis farms. Edgewater Farm and Riverview Farm, right next door to each other, are run somewhat jointly by two young families who work their tails off but produce a constant stream of products, from bedding plants to pick-your-own strawberries to veggies and flowers for their beautiful farm stand to sweet corn and apples and pumpkins. As Chrissie says, they’ve got a hundred angles going. Chrissie is our industrial spy, learning how they do it. So far she’s been working in their greenhouses, transplanting pansies and petunias into six-packs for the bedding plant business. She comes home pretty tired every night.
Narayana has been off on an excursion to western Massachusetts and Boston, interviewing for jobs and graduate school. The great news is that he’s been accepted into a graduate biology program at Smith, though he doesn’t yet know about financial aid, so he doesn’t know if he can afford it. I’ve offered to hire him in the meantime to run a nature-education program here at the farm, so we’ve banished the deportation wolf from the door for the moment.
Scot has returned triumphant from the Pacific Northwest, bearing tons of good data for his thesis, and having impressed the B.C. Forest Ministry so thoroughly that he can probably work there any time.
It’s good to have everyone home again. The frantic season is just beginning — as soon as the garden soil dries. The beautiful season, the productive season, the green season, the warm season, the season when everything, including us, comes alive. Happy spring!P
Love, Dana
