A new year at Madroño Ranch: bison harvests, chicken tractors, hog schools, and more

Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.

First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and....)

Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?

Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small casitas we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” Melissa Gaskill and E. Dan Klepper will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.

Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.

Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)

Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true chickenista, following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s Boggy Creek Farm. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)

Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official Madroño Ranch Facebook page. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come.

Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (still—it’s hard!)
Martin: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Stubbing the giant’s toe: thoughts on Midwestern agribusiness

Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans.

And did I mention corn?

We drove last week from Austin to Gambier, Ohio, to deliver our youngest to college, and then back to Austin. (Empty nest. Delight. Depression.) That this trip was my maiden voyage into the American Midwest was just one of many notable firsts. At about the time we crossed the line from Kentucky to Ohio, it began: fields of corn and soybeans on either side of the road stretching to the horizon, interrupted only occasionally by copses of oaks or by farm houses and barns or by grain storage units. We started to joke about it by the time we got to Gambier, smack in the middle of Ohio. After installing our daughter in her new dorm room, we turned our noses west and drove from Gambier to Clarksville, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, in one endless, relentless, repetitive, mind- and butt-numbing 600-mile day. The joking stopped at about mile 100.

The landscape wasn’t unpleasant by any means: the apparently unlimited fecundity of the earth was impressive, as was the system that ordered such abundance. The scope of it! And we didn’t even make it into Iowa or Nebraska! No wonder the people behind this astonishing productivity are proud of it.

But there’s another way to see that landscape, and those afflicted with the double vision I wrote about in an earlier post might see the abundance as a tumor, or at least a spreading rash. The economic, cultural, and environmental damage imposed by the efficiencies of agribusiness have been well documented, most popularly by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, along with films like Food, Inc. and Fresh. The idea that inexpensive food can be grown only through the use of annuals and monocultures, efficiencies of scale, and heavy pesticide use has been seriously challenged by farmers like Joel Salatin and Will Allen. Along with the steady depletion of topsoil, the off-farm effects of conventional agriculture are also well documented, from depletion of local biodiversity to the rapidly growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

After spending the night in Clarksville, we drove through another scene of apparent abundance en route to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Arkansas, of course, is the home of Tyson Foods, which began as a chicken wholesaler in 1935. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I love chickens for reasons that aren’t entirely rational. Last year, we moved our chickens at Madroño from the nasty old chicken coop to the Chicken Palace and added substantially to their numbers. The Chicken Palace, built by Robert Selement, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, could probably withstand a nuclear attack and has already foiled a whole lot of skunks, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and owls.

One of the great pleasures of a Madroño morning is to let the ladies (one of whom is named Fred, for reasons not entirely clear to us) out of the Palace and into the adjoining pasture and then to throw them the previous night’s vegetable scraps. From the moment they see me coming down the hill, they begin an almost-intelligible running commentary that steadily increases in volume and intensity. (“Can you believe she wears boots with her nightgown?” “God, I hope there’s no fennel in that scrap bowl.” “Hasn’t she ever opened a gate before? What’s taking her so long?”) Anticipation is so focused that by the time I open the door to the yard, and then the gate from the yard to the pasture, there’s a charge in the air that surely rivals the first seconds of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. No, really. Those chickens are moving. And I’m laughing. And very happy to gather (and sell) their marigold-yolked eggs. (For the reflections of a true chickenista, be sure to check out the highly readable blog posts of Carol Ann Sayle, who owns and operates Austin’s wonderful Boggy Creek Farm along with her husband Larry Butler. Carol Ann’s chicken blogs are worthy of a BBC comedy of manners with period costumes.)

Given my tender feelings toward our chickens, seeing a Tyson truck rolling down an Arkansas highway carrying its cargo of tightly packed chicken cages made me tense. When we got to Eureka Springs, with its funky old boutiques and gingerbread houses, we found a restaurant that served local produce and whose waitress told us that she was a “universal soul.” I relaxed a little, enough to start chatting with the friendly couple sitting next to us. As it turned out, the husband was a Tyson chicken farmer. The 16-year-old boy he had hired for the summer was worthless, he said, but the 14-year-old was great. He didn’t have an attitude yet, and never complained about the hours he had to spend each day picking up dead chickens.

I got tense again.

How can something that seems so clearly wrong to one person seem perfectly acceptable to another? How can I have arrived at my advanced age and still be surprised that this is so? Even though we all technically speak the same language—the Midwestern corn and soybean farmers, the Arkansas chicken farmer, and I—there seems to be an unbridgeable perceptual gulf between us.

When I’m feeling this kind of tension, I become almost ridiculously grateful for things like the National Geographic website, which describes the work of young scientists with big ideas that “show a potential for future breakthroughs.” Among the chosen for 2010—and they are a fascinating group—is an agroecologist named Jerry Glover who works for The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His field of study, so to speak, is perennial grains, wheat in particular. Unlike annual crops, which need to be replanted every year, drain nutrients from the soil, and allow erosion when they die, perennial crops can be “harvested year after year and maintain excellent soil quality.” Glover doesn’t preach (at least not on the National Geographic website), and he doesn’t point fingers at conventional farmers and say: Bad, bad, bad. He points to the evidence in the soils he works with, which speaks for itself—and in the same dialect as the farmers whose practices I find so confounding.

Seeing the scope of those Midwestern cornfields is sobering. Thinking about the money, time, and corporate muscle they represent is daunting. Reading about the salmonella outbreak in factory farm-produced eggs is appalling. When you buy from your local farmers and humane producers, you’re allying yourself with an entity so tiny it barely stubs the giant’s toe when it gets kicked aside. But that tiny stumbling block gathers a little more heft with each kick. To mix my images, watching this process is like watching a big pot of water boil: just when you think your stove is busted or your water’s dead, you start seeing those tiny bubbles appear and get perceptibly more emphatic—especially when then are young scientists like Jerry Glover working next to the giant and turning up the heat. And if those of us who eat keep asking for it, the giant will eventually be able to put sweet organic (or at least less devastating) corn into the pot and feed the less-eroded world with it. Sounds like a fairy tale, I know, but maybe it’s more of a parable—a story with an unexpected and revelatory twist at the end. Whatever it is, just think of the possible chicken commentary on giants in the kitchen. I’ll bet their footwear choices are even more entertaining than mine.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Martin: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation