Hopewell Farms

I am so sorry for not having written this sooner.

Looking back over the things that I have written for a long, long time now I find that they aren’t always the truth. I omit the crappier parts of farming; the failures, the losses, the heart breaks, most of which are mine to bear. We write what we know, I have heard, or what we think we know at any given time and we always discover somewhere further down the pike that we didn’t know jack. I feel like that right now of course: that through lies or omissions I have made this life seem better than it is, filled with rewards and halcyon moments in sunlit pastures.  Of course life’s not like that, not by a long shot. Some days are darker than other, some nights are cold indeed.

And so I ask for forgiveness.

I apologize.

Mea culpa.

It’s been a tough six weeks.

I’m sorry for forgetting to tell you about the old ram that died alone in our pond the day after Thanksgiving, drowned because I was in bed with my arm in a cast, broken so badly in a fall that I couldn’t move it more than a few inches for a week. I kept that to myself because I was ashamed to think that I was a poor shepherd, but you’ve heard it here first, I owe you that.  Or that on the first morning of waking up next to my wife in another room in another state, free from the obligations and responsibilities on the farm for one day in the last two years it was also the same morning that I got the call that our barn was on fire. You probably heard about that by now, of course. If only I hadn’t gone away, I’ve thought…

If only I hadn’t done a lot of things…

The barn burned down, the old ram drowned and I broke my arm when I fell down.

Catchy.

Sounds like a C&W tune.

Our lives, last time I checked, are full of false starts and missed cues. As Shakespeare so eloquently put it, we (sic) ‘strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing…’

We put everything we had as a family into this farm, every effort, every waking moment, every red cent we ever had so that we could live a better life. We wanted our children to grow up in a healthy environment, eating good food, learning things of consequence and living responsibly. We wanted to be humane and open and to live like we thought we should live. We tried to give up consumption in order to produce and most of the time we did fairly well at it. We did a lot of things out of ignorance and more than a few out of good intentions but we did do something.

We wound up being the first farm in the state to raise tilapia in closed system aquaculture, the first farm to receive Animal Welfare Approved status for our pigs and goats and sheep and cattle. We were selected as a recipient of the the 2012 New Hampshire Farm of Distinction, restored and rebuilt both a 150 year old maple orchard and sugar house that currently produces some of the finest New Hampshire maple syrup ever made and we reclaimed a unique parcel of rock maples to preserve from clear cutting just in the nick of time.

We’ve farrowed and lambed, calved and kidded. We’ve offered a CSA, sold to restaurants and farmers markets,welcomed visitors to our farm daily, worked with local schools and colleges and done everything that we could think of to improve this land, serve this community and live our lives in peace. And when I found the time to write about it, it was a work of joy.

After the fire was like something out of a movie. By the time I got home the charred remains were still smoking, but already there were people there, unloading hay for our animals, carrying buckets of water by hand to the ewes in the field. The firemen looked as shook up as a I felt and I was so glad to see that our son was safe that I missed the other twenty blessings delivered by people I hardly knew. Everywhere there were helping hands. And every night a hot dish made in someone’s kitchen showed up on our steps so that we could eat upon our table.

How do you say thank you to that?

Where do you begin?

We’re not sure what all of this means yet- the things we’ve done here and the promise of the future is intoxicating when you think about it, but it isn’t something that lasts forever anyway and so we wonder if maybe we ought to pack it in. We are always finding evidence of the people who lived here before us, the “LIFE TIME RECORD” of deer shot by Doctor Jack Maxfield; sex, weight and point count carefully pencilled on a column in the basement of the milk house with the last date being a 196 pound 12 point buck shot in 1955, the same year that he moved away. We found a 1900 silver tablespoon next to a stream with the Shultis monogram and returned it to his great-great granddaughter Sally Harris who still owns the house down the hill.

I find foundations everywhere.

I know every family, every living soul connected to this land over the course of the last century and they know me and no matter what we do now, we’ve left our mark here and I couldn’t ask for more.

Sometimes I am convinced that we don’t own the land, but that the land owns us.

We feed the animals and they feed us.

We make our plans and God laughs…

And so I leave you with what I consider to be the greatest passage in the English language, a green light at the end of the dock…

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Sunday morning, January 8th 2012, one of the most heartbreaking moments we have ever faced as a family took place when our barn caught fire and burned to the ground. Making matters worse was the fact that our 14-year-old son was left to deal with that tragic event while the rest of the family was away from home. Within minutes, the first units of the Newbury N.H. Volunteer Fire Department arrived on the scene and began a daylong effort to battle the blaze in high winds and freezing temperatures.

Community Support

Over the course of the past three years since we first moved to Newbury, N.H. and began farming, we have been blessed repeatedly by the kindness and respect of our community, welcomed as neighbors and as a business. Until the fire, we cannot say that we experienced anything other than joy and pride in our decision to start our life over in a new vocation and in a new home.

In the aftermath of that awful day, we have been overwhelmed by the ensuing response. From the hugs and handshakes of well wishers, to the selfless and confident professionalism of the men who saved our house and risked their lives to extinguish the blaze, each day has brought another unexpected barrage of human decency and community support. In the following days, a seemingly endless stream of people arrived at our farm with casseroles and fresh baked bread, pickup trucks loaded with hay and feed for our animals, and countless gloved hands ready to pitch in and to help us try and clean up the devastation left behind. What could have been one of the worst moments in our life has suddenly become one of the brightest. We may have suffered an enormous loss, but we have been given a gift of incalculable value by learning firsthand how much a community means to each of us.

Our Heartfelt Thanks

We would like to thank each person personally but the list would be too long to print, but for those who gave of themselves on our behalf, the firemen of Newbury, Sutton, Bradford, Sunapee, New London, Goshen, Newport, Warner, Springfield, Wilmot and Henniker, the neighbors who provided our meals, the farmers who brought feed for our livestock, the volunteers who gave their time to sort through the remains, the people from UNH Co-operative Extension who have offered to help plan our new barn, the local businesses that gave our requests for equipment and supplies top priority, our children’s schools and their teachers and classmates, our extended family, even those people whom we have never met who sent emails of support, we offer our most sincere and profound thanks.

The Moran Family

We’re happy to announce that our farm has just been awarded the New Hampshire Farm of Distinction award by the NH Department of Agriculture. The NH Farm of Distinction program was started in 1997 as a way to recognize New Hampshire farms that go above and beyond when it comes to aesthetics and cleanliness.

The recipients must be commercial working farms that strive to keep their operations neat and orderly.  Equipment must be clean and stored properly, buildings, fences, and hedgerows kept in good condition, and sanitary conditions must be met for all livestock.

We are so pleased with this award. It couldn’t have come at a better time!

Once again, despite my best intentions I have failed to keep up with the blog, not due to a lack of things to write about, of course, but to my own failure to sit down and knock something out. We just finished up our second season of sugaring with stellar results. We produced more than twice as much as we did last year with fewer taps and ended up with a wider range of colors and varieties. We were written up in the Spring issue of Edible White Mountains-

up with

and we’ve decided to abandon our CSA experiment to concentrate on producing for our restaurant market and the ever increasing number of drive up customers. We’ve brought in our newest stock of poultry, we’ve got new lambs, cattle arrive tomorrow to take up residence in the lower pasture, the hogs have moved into a newly cleared section of maple orchard for the season and we’ve made it through a long hard Winter with our tilapia stocks thriving. We made it through the AWA* audit to become the first farm in NH to receive certification and I am now Serve Safe certified if that means anything to anyone.

I can’t say we haven’t been blessed with good luck, incredible memories a growing base of friends and supporters and yet I find myself worried about the future. We’ve had some incredible difficulties with the folks at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services Food Safety Section concerning our aquaculture operation. I will likely write in greater detail about the issues at some point if they can’t be resolved, suffice it to say that there are people who do not fully understand what it is we are doing and yet would prefer that we don’t in order to make it easier on them- or that we become something we don’t want to be in order to conform to their previously established set of rules. To us the basic premise is that locally produced foods, done seasonally and with humanity is superior to mass produced foods imported from great distances and processed in mass quantities using questionable practices. It seems to be almost a no brainer, and yet there are folks who think that the opposite is true. They have actually used McDonalds as an example of how to do things properly in a conversation with me, leading me to believe that there are fundamental differences between those with a conscience and those who would seek to limit them from actually bringing their food to market. Of course due to my wife’s belief in giving people every opportunity to do the right thing regardless of how many times they have demonstrated their inability to do so in the past, I am awaiting a final verdict to be issued from the Food Safety Section before saying anything further on the subject. Perhaps it is my own arrogance in thinking that what we are doing is somehow right and moral as opposed to something sanctioned and regulated that leads me to bump heads with bureaucrats, but I know from our past interactions with other departments that there are plenty of helpful and encouraging people who do work for the apparatus of state who have made our journey thus far a pleasurable and positive one.

I just don’t know. Maybe we are entering a time when lines are drawn everywhere, not just in the political and economic issues that seem to divide us these days, but in everything where people actually take some sort of stand to do what they believe in. I am not an end times sort of person, but the way that events and perspectives have somehow seemed to rush together with increasing frenetic energy makes you wonder if maybe something bigger isn’t going on under the surface, something we couldn’t grok if we wanted to, pitting one side against another even as people struggle to remain neutral and above it all.

I think about how we found this place, how propitious and unexpected the discovery of this property was for us at a time when everything was at a crossroads in our lives and how, as we uncovered the bones of the old farm underneath a half a century of benign neglect, we became aware of the efforts of another farmer a hundred years ago who shared an almost carbon copy vision of our own for this acreage. We think we do things of our own free choice and under our own steam, but that’s an illusion. Everything we ever learned, every step we’ve ever taken has been made possible by the contribution of thousands of untold helpers whose hands have held our own, whose words inhabit our thoughts, whose dreams have filled our destiny. We dance to the ancient DNA of our forefathers, sleep under the stars of the ancient past and move through a world populated with billions of others just like us, all of whom move to the same inexorable call of the future. Maybe we don’t have as much to do with our own choices in life as we think we do and maybe how we respond to every choice we’re presented with defines us more than what we do for a living and how much we have or do not have, I don’t know. But I do know that tomorrow will come sooner than I think and with it will be the inevitable chores and motions that define my day, and if I do things right, even partly, even poorly, I will make that day a little bit better than if I wasn’t here at all and that is something I can live with and take pleasure in.

Outside a soft rain is soaking into the soil and the grass is greedily drinking in the darkness. And like the article in Edible White Mountains says, everything old is new again.

* Animal Welfare Approved http://www.animalwelfareapproved.org/

So here we are again, sugaring.

It’s been almost one year exactly since I started this blog with expectations of keeping some kind of journal about the joys and challenges of running a homestead farm with next to no experience in New England with my family. I think I’ve posted about ten entries. Things aren’t always as easy as they seem.

We’re still not done with tapping all the maples, most of the big orchard in the back of the property is still waiting on me and despite that we’ve still got about seven or eight hundred gallons waiting to boil. Plus whatever we collect tomorrow. Right now I have a gallon boiling on the stove and you can smell it in here. My father is down for the week to help out, our oldest son was just accepted at a very respectable private school and only two of my fingers are wrapped in band-aids. You could say that in many ways it’s been a great day and yet I realize that I am right back where I started, one year ago, less about 500 taps and wondering why I couldn’t find the time to write a single post a week. Kunstler knocks one out every Monday morning and nine times out of ten it’s not much different from what he wrote last year, minus the adjectives and arcane references to tattooed tribesmen of the Dark Ages.

So here goes.

I promise to keep up with this blog this year. To me it begins with sugaring anyway. New Years comes at a weird part of the year and doesn’t seem like the right time for starting over, but when the sap runs it feels like the whole world is waking up and getting ready to start over, so I’m going to go with that. The fish are doing well, we have a few steady accounts week to week who act excited about our food and I can see patches of earth here and there beneath the snow. Spring is coming and with it new chores, new projects, new ways to stay excited about the hardest thing we’ve ever done, but now? Now the sap is flowing, the steady plunk-plunk-plunk of fat sweet droplets falling into the bucket out in front echoes across the dooryard and I am jazzed about it. Tomorrow I will probably wind up exhausted again, but that will be then and I will likely have bottled the first thirty gallons of syrup of the year and will smell like taffy when I finally come in for supper.

Until then I will just try and enjoy the moment as long as I can.

Like Brian Reagan says, “you, too.”