My forearms ache so much, I can hardly write. I spent four hours yesterday spraying caked cow crap off every conceivable surface of a stable with a high-powered water blaster. I feel great.
Yesterday, it was my legs that were sore. We huffed up and down steep hills, raking row after row of hay down to where the tractor could ball up everything. Before that, I spent three hours with a weed whacker, mowing out dips and swamps that their giant push mower was unable to reach.
People in our harvest team are complaining about their backs. I feel fine, if not a tad sore. It wasn't the raking that was hard, it was moving the masses of grass with pitchforks into neat rows along the flats that really laid the hurt on. Still, everyone is smiling and having fun.
We've been playing farmers in Western Norway. This is our second year of doing it and hopefully not our last.
Michelle and I have wanted to live on a farm for nearly all of our relationship. It's one of the things that helped us bond. Now, we don't want to be farmers, I think those illusions died not long ago. By the time Michelle finishes school, I'll be 37 and it isn't wise for a middle-aged city guy with just a love for nature to suddenly become a farmer. Especially without any real knowledge of agriculture (reading Mike Pollan and Jim VanDerPol doesn't count. SIDE NOTE: If you want to read a great book about agriculture and the romance of living on a farm, please read Conversations with the Land by Jim VanDerPol, a collection of nature and political essays pertaining to life on an organic farm in Western Minnesota. Beautifully written. https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Land-Jim-VanDerPol/dp/098395030X SIDE NOTE FINISHED.) or a slew of kids to work for free (We're still reluctant about when to have the first). Yet, we still want a farm. They call it hobby farming, of course, and it's nothing novel or groundbreaking. We just want some chicken and bees, maybe a goat to make some nice chevre.
As a society, we've gotten so separated from this kind of life, when in the past, this was all there was. A hobby farm is actually missing the point. Sure, there is something therapeutic about hard work and raising up animals and plants, then eating them, but farming doesn't equal happiness as many millennials have romantically deduced. If this were true, the stereotype of the depressed farmer wouldn't exist. Sadly, there's little money in the life and tractor culture has made farming a lonely endeavor. Even Solveig and Dag Kenneth, our farmer friends we've been helping, would not be doing nearly as well had they not the help of their neighbors or Dag Kenneth's side income.
Things are different, though, out here in Western Norway. They don't have miles upon square miles of flat land to plow. Most crops can't thrive in the constant rain and rock slopes. But rain makes grass and wildflowers, clover, sweet gale, meadow sweet, and other goodies that show up incredibly in meat. So lamb and dairy cow are the primary agriculture out here, though some harvest berries, cherries, or other fruits. Farmers toss their animals onto the unmowable mountains and harvest grass from the rest of the land to feed them over the winter. This is nothing new for livestock farmers.
The difference is the climate and landscape. Tractors don't love hills, so much of the work must be done by hand. The bails can't be too wet either, so everything must be done on sunny or overcast days, which happen in little spurts, sometimes only a few the whole summer. So the community comes out, works 12 hour days (ours were only 9, since there were quite a few of us) helping themselves and each other to mow all they can before the rain returns. They call it the "slått" and when it's finished, they often finish with a wild party, drinking whiskey and beer while staring at the fields as they get sopped by rain under the shadow of the mountains.
It's beautiful to see cousins, siblings, neighbors, and friends all working together in a mad race to ensure there's enough food to winter the livestock. This is how humans work best, all as one, for a common, concrete goal. Even here, in one of the most developed countries in the world, people still live with these old-fashioned customs (albeit with tractors). And nothing feels better than looking out at the mountains towering above as if from a postcard, but this isn't a vacation (well for my wife and I, it is a bit). This is life for the bone-hard (beinhardt) farmers of West Norway. They're not all happy. It's not a perfect romance, an ideal picture of life's pinnacle, but you couldn't convince me otherwise while sharing that first beer with shaky, blistered hands after a long day of backbreaking labor, looking over the freshly mowed fields, knowing we did it all together, as people have done for thousands of years.
Yesterday, it was my legs that were sore. We huffed up and down steep hills, raking row after row of hay down to where the tractor could ball up everything. Before that, I spent three hours with a weed whacker, mowing out dips and swamps that their giant push mower was unable to reach.
People in our harvest team are complaining about their backs. I feel fine, if not a tad sore. It wasn't the raking that was hard, it was moving the masses of grass with pitchforks into neat rows along the flats that really laid the hurt on. Still, everyone is smiling and having fun.
We've been playing farmers in Western Norway. This is our second year of doing it and hopefully not our last.
Michelle and I have wanted to live on a farm for nearly all of our relationship. It's one of the things that helped us bond. Now, we don't want to be farmers, I think those illusions died not long ago. By the time Michelle finishes school, I'll be 37 and it isn't wise for a middle-aged city guy with just a love for nature to suddenly become a farmer. Especially without any real knowledge of agriculture (reading Mike Pollan and Jim VanDerPol doesn't count. SIDE NOTE: If you want to read a great book about agriculture and the romance of living on a farm, please read Conversations with the Land by Jim VanDerPol, a collection of nature and political essays pertaining to life on an organic farm in Western Minnesota. Beautifully written. https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Land-Jim-VanDerPol/dp/098395030X SIDE NOTE FINISHED.) or a slew of kids to work for free (We're still reluctant about when to have the first). Yet, we still want a farm. They call it hobby farming, of course, and it's nothing novel or groundbreaking. We just want some chicken and bees, maybe a goat to make some nice chevre.
As a society, we've gotten so separated from this kind of life, when in the past, this was all there was. A hobby farm is actually missing the point. Sure, there is something therapeutic about hard work and raising up animals and plants, then eating them, but farming doesn't equal happiness as many millennials have romantically deduced. If this were true, the stereotype of the depressed farmer wouldn't exist. Sadly, there's little money in the life and tractor culture has made farming a lonely endeavor. Even Solveig and Dag Kenneth, our farmer friends we've been helping, would not be doing nearly as well had they not the help of their neighbors or Dag Kenneth's side income.
Things are different, though, out here in Western Norway. They don't have miles upon square miles of flat land to plow. Most crops can't thrive in the constant rain and rock slopes. But rain makes grass and wildflowers, clover, sweet gale, meadow sweet, and other goodies that show up incredibly in meat. So lamb and dairy cow are the primary agriculture out here, though some harvest berries, cherries, or other fruits. Farmers toss their animals onto the unmowable mountains and harvest grass from the rest of the land to feed them over the winter. This is nothing new for livestock farmers.
The difference is the climate and landscape. Tractors don't love hills, so much of the work must be done by hand. The bails can't be too wet either, so everything must be done on sunny or overcast days, which happen in little spurts, sometimes only a few the whole summer. So the community comes out, works 12 hour days (ours were only 9, since there were quite a few of us) helping themselves and each other to mow all they can before the rain returns. They call it the "slått" and when it's finished, they often finish with a wild party, drinking whiskey and beer while staring at the fields as they get sopped by rain under the shadow of the mountains.
It's beautiful to see cousins, siblings, neighbors, and friends all working together in a mad race to ensure there's enough food to winter the livestock. This is how humans work best, all as one, for a common, concrete goal. Even here, in one of the most developed countries in the world, people still live with these old-fashioned customs (albeit with tractors). And nothing feels better than looking out at the mountains towering above as if from a postcard, but this isn't a vacation (well for my wife and I, it is a bit). This is life for the bone-hard (beinhardt) farmers of West Norway. They're not all happy. It's not a perfect romance, an ideal picture of life's pinnacle, but you couldn't convince me otherwise while sharing that first beer with shaky, blistered hands after a long day of backbreaking labor, looking over the freshly mowed fields, knowing we did it all together, as people have done for thousands of years.
2 comments:
Thank you for this Aaron. You paint a beautiful word picture of a countryside that I have seen and loved. You are on to something about the need for common working together in nature. We have lost that here and are the poorer for it. We will need to find it back or reinvent it. Isolating ourselves with only a screen for company is a death sentence for humanity. And thank you for the kind words about my writing.
Jim Van Der Pol
I enjoyed reading your adventures about Norwegian farming. This is the land of my maternal ancestry. We visited Norway twice. A beautiful place!
LeeAnn VanDerPol
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