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-
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/
August 31st, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Your post made me think of this verse:
In their hearts humans plan their course,
but the LORD establishes their steps.
Hope you guys are all well!