My fellow farmer and I, along with three chains, a come-along, four bars of various sizes, and an extremely excited puppy, recently spent a morning unloading nine big round bales off a borrowed trailer. The puppy loved jumping up on the trailer. Then he made several valiant efforts to get up on top of the bales, where my fellow was.
“Yip, yip,” the puppy said, “I want to come up and have fun too.” Finally I gave him a boost, and he ran around happily on the bales. Then he got so excited by the project that he started biting my fellow farmer’s shoes, which did not help my fellow to work the bar into the next bale that we were trying to tip off the trailer.
I distracted the pooch with one of his favorite toys – a piece of denim tied in a knot from our mending-jeans pile. First we played tug of war. Then I threw the denim, and he chased it, which gave my fellow and I time to tip off the bale.
We repeated this process nine times, bar in bale, tip bale, roll bale into barn, up ramp, over to wall, tip bale upright. Sometimes the bales were too big, and we needed the chains and come-along. Sometimes the puppy was too excited, and we needed the denim. But we finally got all the bales in the barn.
This method hadn’t exactly been our plan, but the man with a tractor who was going to stack the bales in the barn for us was frantically working on someone else’s urgent farming project. Since we needed to fetch more hay, while we had the sunny weather and the borrowed trailer, we were left with our own muscle (and some muscle-enhancing tools).
Having big round bales wasn’t exactly our plan either, but we weren’t able to make any loose hay with our horses on our own fields this summer. This also wasn’t exactly our plan, but since we hated to send away our retired work horses, we had six horses instead of four, meaning all the grassland went to pasture, not hay.
It also meant we were buying a lot more hay than usual for the winter, and we have been touched and grateful to receive hay fund help from our CSA members. One person wrote us a thousand-dollar check, another slipped us $40 in cash. Then there was the mysterious $50 bill.
Was the bill meant as a payment on a CSA share? As a donation to the CSA Scholarship Fund, which helps provide CSA shares to people struggling with job loss, or cancer, or young families? Was it for horse hay? Was it for the farmer’s pizza fund?
Soon we found out, in a phone conversation with a CSA member. “I trust you to do just the right thing with it,” he said. I think the trust meant as much to us as the $50.
Even after twenty plus years of small, sustainable farming, we sometimes wonder if we can trust ourselves: are we doing the right things, making the right decisions? The physical and financial realities of farming can weigh heavily on a body and mind, especially as those bodies and minds edge toward their later fifties.
Are we crazy to be farming? To be farming with horses? To be retiring our draft horses here, when our margins are already so slim?
Yet when we look at the alternatives, we still find ourselves saying Yes to this craziness. When we eat heirloom tomatoes all summer long and all winter long, too, from our canning jars, we say yes. When we can bury our horses under the apple trees after good long lives, we say yes. When people trust us, we say yes.
When the puppy yips to join the fun farming project, we even remember that sometimes farming can be fun. We keep saying Yes.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 18 - Sept 24, 2024