"Kayaking with Lambs" by Brian Miller

I grew up in a rather stereotyped suburb of New Orleans. Except for residents' last names, which reflected the post-World War II migration out from the city center, it could have been a suburb in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, or any other American city. Suburban kids learned early that food came from grocery stores and supermarkets. An uncle had a small farm across Lake Pontchartrain, and we visited a time or two. There’s even a picture of five-year-old me on a horse to prove it. 

Decades later, I found myself working for a company in the agriculture business. I had one the best jobs imaginable – I gave money away. For years I traveled back and forth across the country, funding programs for wheat growers, corn growers, soybean producers, farm youth, farm broadcasters, and more. I’d visit farms, tour grower associations, and visit research centers. And I’d attend their conventions – in Nashville, Des Moines, Reno, Denver, San Diego, Orlando, Phoenix, and more. Once I was even forced to spend a week – on business – in Honolulu.

 

I was a latecomer to agriculture and farming, but once I was in it, I learned that farming is something for life. Even when you retire from it, you still pay attention.

 

Brian Miller came to agriculture considerably earlier. I found his blog, A South Roane Agrarian, through a site called Front Porch Republic. Miller posts weekly about weather, raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, weather, farm life, neighbors, weather, crops, life in rural East Tennessee, family (he’s a southwest Louisiana boy), weather, and more. Oh, did I mention weather? (No one in the planet is more concerned about weather than a farmer. That’s true for every culture, climate, and continent.)

 

The book arm of Front Porch Republic has published Miller’s first book, Kayaking with Lambs: Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer. The title is based on a true story. Yes, it may not be the most expected of activities on a farm, but kayaking with a lamb can happen, not unlike the Biblical story of leaving the 99 and searching for the one lost sheep. Except in a kayak. 

 

Brian Miller

Miller’s farm is not Big Agriculture. It’s diverse, not monoculture. It’s him, his partner Cynthia, and (usually) one of the neighbor’s farm kids. And, as he points out, there’s a huge difference between a farm kid and a kid raised on a farm. If you get a choice, always, always hire the farm kid. That’s the one with the work ethic.  

 

With Kayaking with Lambs, what you walk into is a world animated by the values of family, faith, neighborliness, caring for the land, and respect. These aren’t the values of contemporary culture; they are the values the culture has forgotten and for which we’re already paying a tremendous price.

 

There is a structural emphasis upon the sacredness of the life Miller is describing. The book is organized by eight of the monastic offices of the day, combining Vigil and Matins under Matins. Without ever becoming overtly religious, that organization tells you much about the thought animating each entry in the book. There is a time to be watchful, to pray, to work (and work hard), to rest, to celebrate, to mourn, and to cherish. This is a sacred business to be about.

 

Miller doesn’t romanticize farm life; it’s extremely hard, physically, emotionally, and mentally taxing labor. But it’s the life he’s chosen, the life he lives, and the life he obviously enjoys. Even with the freezing nights when you find your arm inside a ewe struggling to give birth. 

 

Since 1999, Miller and his partner Cindy operate Winged Elm Farm in eastern Tennessee, supplying pork, ham, mutton, and beef to customers in Knoxville and Chattanooga. And he updates his blog weekly (I subscribe to it, so I had some idea of what this first book of his would be like). 

 

Kayaking with Lambs is already one of my top five favorite books of the year. It’s written with humility and self-understanding, and with a deep love of the land and the work that’s organized upon it. It’s also written with a strong sense of dry wit; I found myself often smiling and occasionally laughing out loud as I read it.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The people who ruined the internet – Amanda Chicago Lewis at The Verge.

 

John Thomas Smith’s Rural Cottages – Spitalfields Life.

 

A Blank Page – poem by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

 

Employers are fed up with college ‘waste,’ opt for skilled blue-collar workers instead – Taylor Penley at Fox News Business.

Poetic Voices: Jessica Gigot and the Land

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one half of the adult population worked on a farm in 1870. By 1900, it was a third, and then a fifth by 1950. In 2020, less than two percent of adults worked on a farm. As we moved from farms and small towns to cities and suburbs, we’ve experienced phenomenal gains in productivity and creativity. We’ve also severed ourselves from understanding and knowing the land. 

Poet Jessica Gigot originally trained as a biologist. When she was in her 20s, she experienced a kind of call for understanding the land. Inspired by the local food movement, she spent several years as a farm intern in the Pacific Northwest. She eventually earned an advanced degree in horticulture. As her 2021 memoir A Little Bit of Land makes clear, Gigot wanted to understand farming, but she also wanted to know why people farmed. What was it that kept so many generations of farmers on the land and attracted so many newcomers?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

How the Cultural Revolution Played Society Against Itself – Tania Branigan at Literary Hub. 

 

Autumn Summons – poem by Talbot Hook at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Ocean of Coins – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Tolkien’s Literary Output: Fundamentally Religious and Catholic? – Holly Ordway at The Imaginative Conservative.

The Poetry of Farming: "Water at the Roots" by Philip Britts

Philip Britts (1917-1949) was an Englishman who joined the Cotswold Bruderhof community. The Bruderhof was (and is) a faith community who live together and share all land and possessions. They are also pacifists. Consider the plight of Britts, who is living and farming in rural England when World War II begins. Some members of the community are German; the Bruderhof started in Germany. The British government and local authorities weren’t terribly impressed by both pacifists and Germans living in rural England when Britain was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany. The British could accept the pacifists, but not the Germans.

Philip Britts

The community was given a choice – the Germans had to be interned or leave, or the entire community had to emigrate. The Cotswold Bruderhof choose emigration, and eventually settled in Paraguay, the only country which would accept all of them. It wasn’t an easy life; farmland had to be tilled, crops planted and harvested, locusts fought, strange diseases encountered (one would eventually kill Britts when he was 31).

Britts kept a journal, wrote essays, and also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Thanksgiving Post Featured at Jennifer's Place

Jennifer Dukes-Lee has featured my Thanksgiving post from last year as a report at her blog, Getting Down with Jesus. Take a look -- and remember to be thankful to farmers every day, not just Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving: Of Such Is Greatness

My first thought is of roads.

Quiet roads. Roads busy with traffic only in the spring and fall, when planters and combines and tractors are being moved from shed or barn to field, from farm to neighbor’s farm. At other times, empty roads, a little busier on Sundays when families head to church or on weekdays when the school buses are picking up children, but quiet roads nonetheless.

The roads meander between fields of corn and soybeans, wheat and sorghum, dairy farms and a few orchards here and there. Roads connecting farms and towns, neighbors and friends, work and rest. Pickup trucks carrying seed and supplies travel these roads, as do trucks hauling corn and beans from the harvest.

When we think of what ties countries together, we think of information networks, interstate highways, airline schedules, train tracks. And yet, these roads that have names like “A” and “D” or FM 27 are our geographic arteries and blood vessels. Without them, and the work they support, all the rest wouldn’t matter. Silicon Valley exists because your average farmer In Iowa or Ontario produces enough food each year to feed 150 people. People like me and my family.

This fall, I spent a few days at Laity Lodge in Texas with a group of writers who are part of the staff for The High Calling. One of them lives off one of those roads in Iowa. The other lives off one of those roads in Ontario. They’re both writers, mothers and farm wives. And neither of them would bristle at being called a farm wife because they and their families know exactly what that means.

Jennifer Dukes-Lee and her husband Scott farm in Iowa. Jennifer was the political correspondent for the Des Moines Register before she and Scott moved to his family’s farm to take his dad’s place. I could tell you all kinds of things about the Lee family – I’ve been following Jennifer’s blog for more than year – but you should visit her there first. And you will learn a lot about farming, and family, and values, and faith, and what’s important in this life.

About a year ago, Jennifer was writing with a catch in her throat; I could sense it and feel it with every blog post. It was Scott’s first harvest to manage on his own, and it was one of the most difficult harvests in recent memory. Planting had been late because of wet weather; and harvest was equally late. Scott was often in the fields at midnight and later, and he finished and shut the barn door on his equipment just as the snow started. A lot of farmers weren’t so fortunate, and were harvesting in the snow. But I could read the tension in what Jennifer was writing and see it in the photographs she posted.

Ann Voskamp and her husband David farm in Ontario. At Ann’s blog, you can learn about family, and faith, and tradition, and values, and the beauty of day-to-day living. Both Voskamps come from farming families, and family is an idea that will surface again and again in her writings.

This spring, the time had come for her oldest son to climb up into the cab and learn how to till and plant fields. She captured his nervousness exactly, because it mirrored her own. And one picture told the story: her father-in-law, her son’s grandfather, sitting in the cab with her son, his hand on the young man’s shoulder, her husband holding on to the side as he listened. Teaching, passing on knowledge, the embracing of a tradition.

All of what happens on that farm in Iowa, and all of what happens on that farm in Ontario, is the stuff of what makes countries like the United States and Canada great and prosperous nations, even when economic times are bad.

And all of that greatness comes flowing down those roads, eventually finding its way to each of us.

My thanks to Jennifer and Scott, and my thanks to Ann and David.


Photograph: In the Country by Bobby Mikul, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Farmer in Northwest Iowa

He’s one of three million Americans.

This particular one lives and works in northwest Iowa. He does what his father did before him – he farms the land, to grow food, provide for the family, and be a vital part of the community where he grew up. Farming is what he knows and what he believes in.

He fights the weather, as much as anyone can fight it. He certainly talks about it a lot, because the weather matters. A lot. A wet spring means he’s planting late. Not enough rain in the summer threatens his crop. A wet fall means he’s harvesting late, and he hopes it’s not too late because the rain could turn to snow. If it’s been as wet a fall as this year has seen, when most Americans are sitting down with family and friends for Thanksgiving, there’s a good chance he’s going to be in that combine, trying to finish the harvest. And giving thanks he has some dry days to do it.

So people like the rest of us can eat.

Some harvest nights, he’s got the headlights on the combine, and he’s out there, working. No one except his wife knows, because he can’t quite slip into bed quietly enough not to wake her at 3 a.m. to get a couple of hours of desperately needed sleep. She hears him; she knows what he does for their family. She doesn’t say anything; she puts her hand on his shoulder so he’ll know. And he does.

He doesn’t talk about it, either. He just does it.

He’s heard what some say. You don’t take care of the land. You’re industrial agriculture. Flyover country. All the demeaning and patronizing words that come when people learn farming from whomever the latest college guru happens to be.

He shrugs. He has work to do.

He’s a businessman because he has to be. He has to track commodity prices. Seed and fuel prices. Fertilizer. Utilities. Loan rates, assuming credit’s available. Land values. And he’s learned how to use technology. GPS. The net. Mobile computing. Because some things he has to find out like now, while he's on the tractor or in the combine or he's stopped at the feed supply and he hears something he has to check on.

He’s smart, because farming takes brains, and an intellect, and common sense, and experience, and ongoing education from the state university and the extension agent and the seed dealer and anyone else who has knowledge to impart. He listens and ponders. That’s on top of his degree in agriculture or business or marketing. And, yes, he reads the farm publications but that’s the Wall Street Journal and Business Week that he’s reading at breakfast. And he's reading them online.

He worries, too, about a lot of things. If the children will farm after him. If commodity prices will stay high enough to turn a profit. About the cost of his inputs. About whether he should make an offer on that land that became available across the road. And the weather.

He’s a man of faith. He has to have faith to be in farming. Faith in God. Faith in something besides himself. Because he knows it takes more than himself to be successful. Like when his father-in-law spends a week with him to help with the harvest. When his brothers share equipment. And when he does the same thing for them.

So this Thanksgiving, give thanks for him. And the three million men and women just like him.