#12 - Just farmin' around
The Travelling Farmers being farmers
After a long drive from Phoenix, it has been ten days since we started working in Kim and Darryl’s farm near Portland, and we have rarely felt as well as we do now! We learn every day from our guests who share their experience of seasoned farmers.
The week was first marked by the birth of more than twenty lambs. What a joy it is to discover every morning that two or four lambs were born!
Aren't they cute?
Kim and Darryl have taken time to teach us what to do with the lambs in the forty-eight hours after their birth. After having made a demonstration, we relayed them and have learned how to cut the umbilical cord and the tail to avoid infections, how to tag the lambs with big plastic colored earrings, and how to castrate them.
Taking care of the lambs
First, in order to facilitate the healing, we use a pair of scissors to cut the umbilical cord of lambs. This is the shortest step.
Then, we need to tag each lamb by putting an identification earring with a large clamp - this in order to ensure a good traceability of meat. Traceability is a word that we had heard before, but that we understand better now: if a batch of meat is defective, Kim and Darryl know from which animal it comes from and can exclude the mother from the herd of breeding sheep. And they can also connect the slaughter weight of each lamb to his mother, to identify the mothers that provide the biggest lambs, and therefore the more meat.
Then, using a resistant and tight elastic, we have to reduce the size of the tail of the animals, in order to avoid health problems.
Finally (and this is the most difficult action for us to practice!), it is time to castrate the males, so that all can live together peacefully under they are 18 months.
In short, this time of birth is not an easy one and we are happy to learn about what meat production implies concretely, since we consume it every day. At our next lamb chop on the barbecue, we will have a better idea of what we eat!
As we discover daily, raising animals is inseparable from a precise routine. Indeed, every morning and every night, 365 days a year, you have to feed the animals, check that they have water and straw, and that they are healthy. The animals do not stop eating on Sundays or during public holidays. Therefore, methodically, at 7:45am to 7h45pm we inspect and feed turkeys, ducks, chickens and sheep with Kim and Darryl.
This is an aspect of every farmer’s life that our journey can only glimpse. It is easy for us to share this daily routine for two weeks or a month, and only see the positive aspects of it: an outdoor life, a concrete work in contact with nature and animals, and the feeling of serving to something essential in seeking to feed people. But it takes 6 months, 1 year or longer to understand what it really means, be a farmer. Even someone positive and enjoying life like Daryll occasionally feels some nostalgia to follow this routine that never ends. Being a farmer also means to accept having a humdrum lifestyle and to put passion in sometimes monotonous and repetitive activities. In that sense, Daryll impresses us more than anyone that we’ve met since the beginning of this trip: in spite of normal moments of doubt, he always has a huge smile on his face when he goes out every morning in his garden, and quietly starts focusing on his daily tasks.
During the day, our job is basically to repair fences for sheep, to clean the stables, but also to take care of the greenhouse and vegetable garden. Helped by our experience in Uruguay, we planted vegetables: celery, artichokes and tomatoes, and flowers (calendulas).
Jules planting artichokes
The Travelling Farmers planting tomatoes
Darryl has heard a lot about the ecosystem of small farms that exist here. Within a radius of twenty miles, many families raise animals or grow fruits and vegetables in order to consume products as local as possible. For example, we went with Darryl get their weekly milk in another small farm five miles from home. The way it works is simple: one can send by email the amount of milk he needs and then comes whenever he wants in the farm and take in a large fridge the gallons of milk labeled to his name. The payment is made at the end of each month. This self-directed and free from surveillance system impressed us! And with only two cows, twenty families are supplied in milk without having to go through any intermediary.
Kim and Darryl actively participate to this community atmosphere by selling their lamb meat locally. Yesterday was the annual Lamb Fest in the where we are: in order to sell their lambs and chickens, Kim and Darryl invite all their friends for a day at home. It was a great opportunity for us to discuss with other farmers in the region.
Many of the people we met held a similar speech. After thirty years having a stressful professional life, a sense of absurdity invaded them and pushed them to withdraw into a state said to be quiet and restful: Oregon. Here, they all told us they felt calmer, more fulfilled. Two of them explained to us having long sought to increase their comfort, saving to be able to offer a more spacious car or a more efficient dishwasher, before realizing that this was not what made them happy.
It is very interesting for us to hear these various testimonies. These people have lived more than us and they seemed to warn us against some mistaken judgments on life that are made during one’s youth and turn out to be difficult to correct after. As we gradually approach the beginning of our working life, we try through this journey to question the values that were given to us in France, in order to discern in which ones we really believe.
In short, this week, we have the feeling of having lived the kind of life we were looking for, as we started this journey: working outdoors on a farm, and once completed our working day work, enjoying nature. Tristan has even spent his afternoons fishing small wild trouts in the river flowing below the farm and has experienced tremendous success.
Next Sunday we will be in Seattle for a few days, the first step of a long journey to Alaska.
We wish you a wonderful week
We’ll be back next Sunday!
Bonus picture:
One of the guys we've found working in the vegetable garden