Goodbye Brightwood; Hello Roma!

My experience at Brightwood Vineyard & Farm has had lasting effect: I’ve learned to care for animals with whom I had no previous experience, I can drive a tractor and gut a chicken, I have new ideas about food and growing things, and I can no longer walk through a city and see a patch of grass (or concrete) that I don’t think would be improved without a few bean plants to climb that chainlink fence, squash to spread across the ground, with okra and tomato plants punctuating the scene.  I’m a changed person, in more ways than I can probably recognize at this point.

One of the most important realizations I had while working at Brightwood is that I don’t want to be a farmer.  I didn’t exactly dream of falling in love with the country and settling down with a little homestead of my own, but I did expect that I’d find the work more engaging than I experienced.  I can now say with more confidence that, while knowing where my food comes from is of even more importance to me, it’s not crucial that I grow the food myself.  Farming is not just a lifestyle; it’s a LIFE.  A life with little to no time for any other activities.  My respect for farming and farmers has grown tremendously, though I have to limit my admiration for farmers of smaller-scale diversified operations – there’s not much to say for farming when all it involves is riding various pieces of machinery all day, applying chemicals left and right.  But diversified or not, living in the country with non-stop farming responsibilities is not for me.

So, I’ve ruled out farming as a way of life, but where to go from here?  I’m still deeply invested in understanding the hows and whys of food production, especially when it relates to taste and health.  The taste side – cooking and cuisine in general – has always fascinated me, and as I’ve watched and felt my body change over the years, the health aspect of food and farming has become a subject I’ve studied with growing interest.  I’m not ready to jump into culinary school or a nutrition program, but I pay a lot of attention to both academic worlds.  But what next?  To be honest, I’m not quite sure.  I have a little dream of a future non-profit that connects an urban garden to teaching kitchens to gourmet soup-kitchens, but the reality of a project like that is far off.

In the meantime, where better to study food and farming than in Italy amongst people who care deeply for the land they live upon, the foods the land provides, and way those foods are prepared?  I decided to go to Italy about a month ago, but it has only been over the past weekend that my plans have fully materialized.  In a few short days, I’ll be living on a huge, historic property an hour’s drive from Rome, caring for olive trees, a biodynamic garden, and some of the same animals I met at Brightwood.  The property includes seven guesthouses, a bed & breakfast, and some of prettiest scenery I’ve yet to experience.  More soon…!

Goodbye Brightwood sheep!

I’m not sure when I’ll next have a chance to update you on my progress.  In the meantime, I encourage you to read Michael Pollan’s food agenda for the next president (see sidebar on right).  Ciao!

Day in the Life of a Virginia Farmer

You might’ve guessed it – long days of manual labor don’t lead to evenings of leisurely writing about the day’s activities.  Most nights we don’t get around to dinner until after 8pm, and not because it’s in vogue or we’re on schedule following a lengthy siesta.  It just doesn’t happen any earlier, despite waning daylight.  In lieu of a daily record of farm happenings, I offer this instead – observations of an average day on the farm.

7:15am – Wake up and hit snooze until 7:30 or so.  The sun isn’t emerging from behind the mountains until after 7am now, so there’s little reason to get up earlier.  Morning showers are a luxury reserved for Sundays, so by 7:40 I’m in the kitchen drinking coffee and saying hello to my farm parents and fellow farm-hand, Marshall.  We root around for breakfast, which usually involves lots of our free-range eggs and toast, and whatever vegetables are lying around from the previous day’s harvest.  Right now that means peppers, which seem to make their way into every meal.  

Hungarian Hot Wax peppers (not for the faint of heart)

8:15am – Marshall and I usually split the morning animal feeding, which consists of two groups of chickens, two groups of goats, the dogs, the donkeys, and the sheep.  The main goat herd lives down hill on the other side of a creek and are typically ravenous by the time we get to them.  Some of the goats’ horns are chest-high on me and come close to knocking me over when I’ve got a 15lb bucket of grain on my shoulder, so I usually leave this job to Marshall (a full foot taller than me) and head for the main crowd of laying hens, whose rolling houses are currently far out in the fields in front of the house.

The walk out to the chicken houses

When I reach the chickens, I have to disengage and open up an electric fence we’ve been putting up at night to discourage foxes from evening attack.  The chickens need about 20lbs of grain to supplement their insect & grass diet, which I shovel out from large trash cans that are carted around the fields with the chicken houses.  Once the chickens are busy eating, I set to work cleaning the nests that line the roosting houses. In the past few weeks we’ve found that adding fresh cedar to the nests each morning (and removing whatever nastiness has been left overnight) produces cleaner eggs that require less washing in the evening.  I don my gloves and scoop handfuls of chicken poop out of the nests and replace the bedding as needed.  In the meantime, I usually collect a half dozen eggs laid by the earliest risers in the flock.

Opening the chicken fence (the grey-blue birds are guinea fowl who seem to think they are chickens)

8:45am – After feeding the chickens, I compost the dirty bedding and take the eggs into the house.  I head out to feed our three donkeys and clean up the barn where they spend their days.  After a night of grazing in the fields, it’s hard to imagine they’d be hungry, but the donkeys are so thrilled at the prospect of grain that they make these obnoxious shrieks that sound something like a hyperventilating horse.  It’s loud and shrill, and is apparently the way donkeys express excitement.  I don’t love it.

Sadie & Rosie, eager for food

9:00am – The last group of animals I typically feed are the chicks living in the front yard.  When I first arrived at the farm, this group of chicks was only about two weeks old.  They were tiny and adorable.  Now, six weeks into my farm stay, their fuzzy bodies have transformed into small, sleek chickens.  Soon they’ll be big enough to join the main chicken flock, which means another round of night-time chicken transport as they desperately try to return to their previous home in the front yard.

The chicks on September 9th

The chicks on September 23rd

The chicks on October 13th

9:15am – If it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, the end of morning feeding signals the beginning of a long day of berry picking.  On Mondays raspberries are picked for freezer storage, to be later made into various jams.  On Wednesdays and Fridays the berries are picked into market boxes (plastic half-pint clam shells) for sale at the Saturday farmer’s market in Charlottesville.  I don’t know how many rows or acres of berries are on the farm, but do know that it regularly takes 12-16 hours of picking to cull all of the ripest berries.  Thankfully, I share this work with one or two other day labor berry pickers (who drive 35 miles each way to earn $8/hr at this job – what a different economy from San Francisco!)  Berry production has slowed in the past few weeks, but the raspberries will continue to make new berries until the first frost.

Caitlin in the thick of the raspberries

3:00pm – Afternoon activity varies widely.  Some days are devoted to weeding, while others are spent planting fall crops (mostly salad greens), harvesting squash and other veggies for the market, or doing general farm maintenance like mowing, fence building, or moving animals from one field to another.  Last week we spent an entire day chain-sawing and wood-chipping a giant hickory tree that fell over onto a fence during a storm a few weeks ago.  Other recent projects have included enlarging the netted enclosure for the front-yard chicks and constructing a device to keep Charlie, the sheep guard dog, from chasing the sheep.

The hickory tree before it was dismantled

Swiss Chard, before a major weeding project

Swiss chard you can see!

Charlie & his PVC "device," which slows his ability to run

6:00pm – Collect & wash eggs, put the donkeys out to pasture, and continue with afternoon projects until it’s too dark to see or you just can’t work anymore!  Most days I end up clocking 9-10 hours with an hour out for lunch.

Washing eggs

I help with dinner and the dishes, sometimes am elected to erect the chicken fence, which must be done after dark when the chickens have gone into their houses for the night, and disappear to my room for my first alone moments of the day around 9:30pm.  I shower off the day’s dirt, but am usually too tired to do much more than read a few pages in The Earthcare Manual, a book about permaculture techniques or knit while watching an old movie.

My bedroom in the farm house

Things we do in the dark

The most exciting thing I’ve done at the farm so far has involved tromping around the pasture in knee-high rubber boots well after dark with nothing but a weak headlamp to guide me.  No, we’re not sneaking up on the farmhouse down the road, nor am I planning my escape from this place (at least not yet!) – we’re moving chickens.  Which sounds pretty boring until you get to put on warm clothes, turn your headlamp to the infrared setting, and slowly creep up to a mass of perched chickens and snatch them away one by one.  I’m telling you: it’s the most fun I’ve had in weeks.

The reason I’ve become a midnight chicken snatcher has to do with the “pastured, free range” part of my description of the Brightwood chickens.  Since the hens scratch around in the grass and weeds all day (rather than live in cages, or within a gigantic coop with a tiny door leading to the outside as most “cage free” hens do), at some point they exhaust the insect and seed supply of any given pasture.  In order to allow the pasture to re-grow, and to keep the hens well fed, we have to move the chickens.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Moving the chickens involves dragging their houses (where they lay eggs and sleep) to a new pasture, and then keeping them there.  Chickens are creatures of habit and tend to return to the places they remember, setting up a steady stream of wayward hens who need to be caught and returned to their new locale.

The chickens and their roosting/nesting houses

This is where I come in – former city girl, now accomplished chicken-catcher.  Before we began this operation, there were three groups of chickens: the main group of hens & roosters who roamed a large pasture, an enclosed pen for a few mother hens and their baby chicks, and a group of adolescent chickens who had full access to the front yard and whichever pastures they wandered to.  The adolescents needed to be merged with the main chicken herd, but moving their roosting house out to the new pasture with the other houses wasn’t enough.  Each night after the move they’d return to the spot where their house had once been, send out some confused coos, and finally perch themselves around the base of the trees in the front yard.  We’d show up with our red lights and long sleeves and grab them from behind, tucking one under each arm like a football, and head for the new pasture.  We did this three nights in a row before the hens stopped coming back to the front yard, where there was no longer any food, water, or shelter.

Still, some of the chickens don’t get it.  In the past two days, I’ve carried the same hen back to the new house three different times!  Chickens are easy to catch at night; once the sun has gone down, chickens become strangely docile.  They hardly squawk when we snatch them up under our arms and an entire house of 70+ hens will happily sway on their roosting perches as they are hooked to a tractor and dragged a few acres away.  But during the day, catching a chicken involves nets and running.  Usually the only option is to carry them by the legs… upside-down a chicken is as calm as if it is dark outside.

The wayward hen

Later that same day...

And again the next morning

On to the farm!

Food ethics aside, I’m excited for the change of pace farm life presents. My life in San Francisco consisted of lazy mornings, regular and lengthy hours of computer use, and frequent travel. I ate in restaurants several times per week and spent the majority of my social time in urban parks and bars.

Since arriving on the farm in early September, I’ve become an early riser, a regular coffee drinker, and haven’t once left the property to do anything that wasn’t farm-related. I wake to roosters crowing (some of the chickens roost in the front yard, right outside my window) and hear them practice their calls throughout the day. (Fact: it actually takes a young rooster quite some time to perfect his crow). I spend the early morning hours trudging around with buckets of grain, feeding the sheep, goats, donkeys, and chickens who all come running at the sound of their gates opening. My days are filled with endless hours of berry picking and/or vegetable garden weeding, and the evenings – or what’s left of them once the day’s work is finally over – are spent around a communal dinner table over food that has mostly been grown or raised on the property. Definitely a change of pace!

Morning feeding in the goat pasture

The information I’m learning here doesn’t appear in neat, organized notes or primers. Instead, it accumulates over days of repeated activity, through my own observations and experience, and from the barrage of questions I ask my farm family each night. For instance, I have learned quite a bit about chickens by collecting and washing eggs each evening. Though the Brightwood chickens range freely through huge pastures, they still have a hen house to rest and lay eggs within. Each evening I detach one of the walls of the house to expose the back side of the laying nests. The hens tend to lay eggs in certain nests on certain days, and on some days there are more eggs than others. Though I haven’t figured out why they prefer certain spots, I have learned that a healthy and happy hen can lay an egg each day at the peak of summer. Chickens are greatly affected by daylight hours, so now that autumn has set in, the best hens probably lay an egg every day and a half or so. Others might lay one every other day. These natural rhythms cause variation in egg production each day. The various breeds of hens lay different colored eggs, so it would be possible to track which are the most productive.

The removable hen house walls make for easy egg collection

One day when I was collecting eggs, I noticed a chicken lying in the hen house. Usually the chickens are scampering around the pasture or perched on one of the crossbeams in the house. This hen was laying on her side and every minute or so another curious hen would peck at her. She didn’t move. So, I had my first dead chicken to deal with, which involved gathering it up in a garbage bag and making sure the bag ended up in the “to the dump ASAP” garbage bag. But this was last week and no one has made a trip to the dump and I’m now breathing through my mouth whenever I’m in the garage (which thankfully is not attached to the house).

The dead chicken

Apparently the hens occasionally die of natural causes. Because this hen had keeled over in the house without any visible injury, it’s safe to assume she was one of the oldest chickens (three years old) and died of natural causes, though free ranging chickens can live at least ten years. If the hen had died out in the pasture, or appeared mangled in anyway, it’d be more likely that was killed by another animal, like a fox. At night, the chickens are guarded by Ben, a Maremma sheepdog that is traditionally used to guard livestock in Italy. There are four of these dogs on the farm. Ben’s brother Charlie watches over the three sheep at night. The other dogs, Hermes and Athena, are Maremma-Great Pyrennes mixes and weigh nearly as much as I do. Hermes spends all of his time with the main goat herd while Athena acts as an oversized house dog because of an injured leg.

Ben & Charlie

Hermes with the goats

Introduction – Why does a city girl become a farmer anyway?

My interest in food began soon after I graduated from college and found myself living in a small, rural town with little to entertain me during long winter evenings. I began making frequent trips to the 24hr grocery, wandering the extensive produce aisles. I purchased the most unusual items I could find – foods I’d never cooked before, and some I’d never heard of. Week by week, foods like Brussels sprouts (never cooked), fennel bulbs (never cooked), and celeriac (never heard of) appeared on my kitchen table in unique and often tasty dishes. I cultivated a collection of cookbooks and culinary magazines and began to experiment with a variety of ingredients and types of dishes. I used my grandmother’s pasta machine to make my own noodles, worked to perfect my French bread recipe proportions and technique, and spent countless hours in front of my vintage stove stirring something. Though I was still crazy for the thin burgers and hand-cut fries served up at the local summer-only ice cream shop, I was quickly becoming a foodie. A move to San Francisco seemed imminent.

Through all of my culinary adventures, I always paused to wonder where my ingredients had come from. Where do kumquats grow, anyway? If horseradish is a root, what does the plant look like? How do all root vegetables look above ground, for that matter? Why are raspberries always so expensive when I can find black raspberries growing wild each summer? I began reading about the history of food – broadly and liberally, from high-brown culinary exposes in Gourmet magazine to the history of food policy in the US. I, like most Americans, had never imagined that something as simple as an ear of corn could have so much politics and controversy behind each kernel. I wanted to know more so I could answer my questions about the ingredients I was using, but more importantly, so I could be conscious about what I was putting into my body. What better way to learn than to live as a farmer?

San Francisco proved to be a great place to eat incredible food and be a part of a community largely cognizant of their power as food purchasers. Still, much of the food consumed in the city isn’t grown in the city, and though California has incredible food resources, many foods come from far and wide. With abundant small farms surrounding the Bay area, why does much of the organic produce available trace back to large-scale “organic” operations? How do small farmers make a living? And if I want to grow my own salad mix, what will it take? I decided to find out.

I worked on an organic farm one summer during college, so I sort of knew what to expect. I say ‘ort of because the farm I worked at then was more of an oversized garden, and the owners practiced what I’d call “farming lite.” We weeded and harvested vegetables much of the day, but never worked between lunch and 3pm, and always finished in time for an early dinner. Though there was a small degree of grunt work (endless wheelbarrows of mulch and compost) much of the summer was spent doing easy work like washing salad greens and picking flowers for wedding arrangements. So, I only knew that my experiences traveling to farms around the world were likely to prove more challenging. With the hope that added challenge would amount to added knowledge about food and plant systems, I set off to my first stop: Brightwood Farm & Vineyard in Madison County, Virginia.

Brightwood Sign on Lillard's Ford Road