Flee to the Fields, part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else)

 This is the third in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

Part 2: The case for subsistence farming

"Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance." ~ Harold Robbins

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Like this one is, my last post was also a reflection on the above quotation from Robbins' essay. But my focus last time was mainly on how our varied enterprises here on the farm (goat herd, hogs, turkeys, garlic, produce, etc.) all complement each other. The livestock provide the manure that enriches the fields, and the unsaleable produce and all of the other superabundance of the fields in turn feeds the stock. Ultimately we ourselves eat from the substance of our stock and whatever else our land yields, and we sell the surplus to meet the cash expenses of our family and our farm. We are, in short, subsistence farmers as Robbins describes the term.

This time I want to focus in greater depth on how growing the greatest practicable variety of crops as Robbins suggests is of benefit to the land and, therefore, to everything that depends on it (all the way up to the farmer, the land's caretaker, and even those who depend on the work of the farmer to eat). In other words, you.

You don't plant the same things in the same place year after year. This, really, is something that most all backyard gardeners know, and that, if they ignore, they eventually learn the hard way. I had somebody send me some pictures of their garlic awhile back. They were at a loss as to why most of their bulbs came out of the ground withered and rotted away to nothing. Were they planting it in too low spot in their garden? The answer was, no. They assured me that they always planted the garlic in that spot. And that was the problem in a nutshell: planting garlic in that spot year after year had led to a buildup of tiny eriophyid mites that fed on the the bulbs. Below the ground the mites leave the bulbs susceptible to rot. In storage, they cause the cloves desiccate, transforming them into wrappers-full of moldy dust. 

Of course, these mites occur naturally, and there should be no illusions that they can be avoided altogether without intense chemical application. So the goal for the gardener who doesn't want to poison his ground -- and the food that he puts on his table -- should be to plant garlic in at least a three-year rotation with other crops so that the mites are never able to congregate in large numbers in a particular location.

What is true of plants in the allium genus is also true of brassicas, cucurbits, nightshades, legumes, and all of the other plant families. Each family attracts its own distinct pests, and each draws on the soil differently. Plant heavy-feeders like cabbage or brussels in the same spot year after year, and you'll deplete your soil of nitrogen. Plant beans, peas, or a clover cover crop after brassicas, and you'll rebuild the nitrogen of your soil. Again, every successful backyard gardener is at least vaguely aware of these indisputable truths.

And yet, I've had an older farmer point out a field and remark to me that it has been planted "corn on corn" for more than twenty years. While he acknowledged that it "not a great practice," he shrugged his shoulders. It's what everybody does these days, he said. So long as you apply the right chemicals and the right pesticides at the right times, you are more than likely to have a yield. In the event of a crop failure, no worries: government subsidies will carry you over financially till next year. In this older farmer's words, "Corn pays."

While corn may pay, nobody -- not even a farmer who has embraced monoculture farming practices -- argues that it's good for the soil. Constantly drawing the same set of nutrients from the soil requires an annual artificial "re-balancing." First these injected nutrients are never truly incorporated into the soil by its organic components because they're so quickly drawn up again. Then the bacteria and fungi in the organic component of the soil are starved and begin to die off, leading to the cascading effect of less and less nutrient and mineral absorption and more and more run-off in the form of macronutrients (think of well water polluted by high phosphorus levels), pesticides (consider the rising incidence of glyphosate-caused cancer), and even the soil itself (basic erosion and farmland loss since dead soil doesn't absorb and hold water as readily as living soil does).

The answer for large-scale, corn-centric farmers is to plant soybeans as a "nitrogen fixer." Which is certainly better than continuous corn-on-corn planting. The irony of soybeans, however, is the same irony that has dogged corn for years: we simply don't need it all. So for corn, we farmers lobby the government to subsidize ethanol to make it financially worthwhile to keep growing corn. We invent ways to put more of it into our foodstuff. While sugar from beets or cane is much easier for us to digest, we instead put corn through a chemical process to make high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener linked to inflammation and, potentially, cancer. We do this not because it's more economical considered in itself, but because it's more economical when government subsidies are factored in. Again, corn pays.

But corn only pays when soy is planted too. So we need to find ways to utilize the glut of soy as well. Seventy-percent of it is fed to animals despite the fact that it causes inflammation in the digestive tracts of pigs and, together with corn, is not a proper feed source at all for forage-loving ruminants like cows. Ever wonder why cows produce so much methane? They'd produce a whole lot less if they were fed a more easily digestible diet! And this doesn't even get into the way that soy has found its way into human consumption (I'm thinking soy milk, despite the fact that the regular consumption of soy is likely linked to hormonal issues for women).

The point is that monoculture "big ag" causes problems at each stage. The mania for corn-soy on a mega-scale leaves us with a glut of product that we don't need at huge expense both to the taxpayers' pocketbooks and health, and certainly to the land itself as well. 

I believe that the solution is the small landholder -- in other words, the subsistence farmer -- who produces what he and his stock need, and who sells from his surplus. As a small landholder, the subsistence farmer grows small amounts of the widest variety of crops in a true rotation. His rotation is not the corn-soybean nitrogen quick-fix and repeat, all the while applying a full range of ever stronger pesticides to keep the ever-present fungi, aphids, and borers at bay. The subsistence farmer can practice a true rotation because of the wide variety of things that he grows in small amounts.

In our own case, we've focused on the allium family (garlic), the cucurbits (zucchini, winter squash), and the brassicas (brussels, cabbage), mixed with a few cover crops (clover to recover nitrogen, mustard to prepare the soil for garlic). Since the brassicas take so much less space than the cucurbits, we're able to add to the mix a small field of wheat for our own use and another small field of corn to fatten our stock. We have a dozen acres in hay as well, and with that we meet all the dietary needs of our small ruminants. Admittedly, we're still a work in progress since we do have to purchase some additional grain for the hogs in the winter and for the turkeys that we raise in through the summer and fall. But we're working toward a rotation that will care of all of our needs -- both human and animal.

And we sell from our surplus, as Robbins says the subsistence farmer should. And my strongly held opinion is that the surplus that we sell from basically matches up, proportionally, to the sorts of things that the outside world needs. Whereas the big row-crop farmer give the world a glut of practically indigestible corn and soy, the subsistence farmer sells the wide array of vegetables, small grains, and pastured meats that the consumer really needs.

What else would we need that the subsistence farmer can't provide? Are we worried that without big-ag we wouldn't be able to feed the world? I have an argument from Flee to the Fields -- for another future post, for sure -- that if all the big farms were eliminated, and if they were replaced by a third of the acreage of small landholdings, we'd be living in a land flowing with milk, honey, and a whole lot of other things preferable to corn, soy, and their ilk. We'd be healthier for it too, as would our animals, and even the land itself.

Flee to the Fields, part 2: The case for subsistence farming

This is the second in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

"The Catholic Land Movement proposes Subsistence Farming as the first remedy. This does not mean, as its enemies assume, that the farmer lives on his farm as on a desert island, and sells nothing. Rates and Taxes alone would make this impracticable. Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance. For the farmer, on the whole, sells wholesale and buys retail. On the economic side alone, any practical diminution of this kind of traffic cannot fail to be a net gain to him." ~ HAROLD ROBBINS

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Reflection

I have a hard time explaining to people exactly what type of farmers we are. It is true that I work part-time from home. Even if farming brought in all of our income needs, I'd still be teaching.  I love teaching for Mother of Divine Grace, the online program directed at Catholic homeschoolers that my own boys are enrolled in. Yet we're hardly homesteaders or mere "hobby" farmers either, as more than half of our income last year derived from our working of the land. So we're not hobbyists, and despite the fact that we're Wisconsinites who milk goats twice a day, and despite the fact that the goats take up a lot of our daily attention here on the farm, I wouldn't dare say that we're dairy farmers either.

Perhaps the strongest case is that we are produce farmers. Last year we made nearly $14,000 off of garlic after expenses. We also grow enough winter squash, brussels, and cabbage to market these crops wholesale through a produce cooperative. But if we're produce farmers, we're awfully distracted produce farmers. We're distracted by the attention we pay to a growing herd of meat goats. We cut and baled nearly two thousand small squares of grassy-alfalfa hay last summer. We process and sell turkeys direct-to-consumer every Thanksgiving. We recently had a few sows farrow, and we have two steers that we're bottle feeding. 

I want to tell people that we're subsistence farmers because, really, that's the most accurate description. But I'm taken aback at how alien the concept is to many folks, even -- and perhaps especially -- the folks involved in agriculture. The concept of subsistence farming conjures up African farmers raising small plots of maize in desert conditions and living on the edge of starvation. Or it brings to mind people who enjoy living off of the land, but who earn the money to pay the bills by employment off of their homestead. Well, I can assure you that we're not starving. And as already noted, more than half of our income derives from our land.

When you talk to older folks, subsistence farming is only a generation or two back in time. The idea had been that you lived off of your land, and you sold things from the farm to pay for the items that you didn't produce for yourself -- new shoes, perhaps, or household luxuries, or the occasional new farm implement . This was the most common form of farming well into the 20th century. Then here in Wisconsin, dairying became a specialty. In other places, it became a cash crop like wheat, cotton, or corn. At some point it became easier simply to focus on the cash crop and to buy everything else ready-made.

And what is wrong with a total focus on a cash crop? Absolutely nothing in a good year, I suppose. But what happens in the year when your cash crop fails? If you are a subsistence farmer, then you don't buy household luxuries or new farm implements that year. You put away vegetables from the garden and butcher a hog. You stack wood in the shed, light a fire, and stay warm and well fed all winter as you plan and pray for a better year next year. If you're not a subsistence farmer, you'd better hope that the government intervenes with a highly subsidized crop insurance program. Seriously, American taxpayers, are you aware that you are paying farmers to focus on their cash crops? Why is that? Why are we paying farmers to produce so much corn that we are depleting our soil and inventing strange new uses for it? 

It's not subsistence farming that's strange, it's the other way around that is strange. Why in the world would a farmer concentrate on a single crop? If I were encouraged to do that, it'd be produce since produce is our major "cash" money maker here on the farm. The first few years I had to purchase fertilizer simply because there was no other option. Also the first year, I had the tough experience of learning that a great deal of produce is deemed unfit for the market due to the most annoying, tiniest of defects. In short, I had additional costs with respect to inputs, and I had product that was unsaleable. I was losing money on both ends of the equation. 

Add in livestock, however, as we gradually have, and loss becomes gain on both ends. After making up a $2,000 investment into an old manure spreader, our growing goat herd began to provide ample fertility for the produce acreage. Outside fertility runs about $700, and for that price you get pelletized chicken manure that can only be used for so many years before you risk the build-up of micronutrients like calcium. In three years we've already made up that investment, and the goats are still there producing more free fertility for the produce operation than ever. On dairies they call manure "liquid gold." For goats it's a little different-- a little dryer and easier to work with -- but just as valuable (and not as unbalanced by excessively high nitrogen).

Add some feeder pigs too, as we also have, and the loss of unsaleable produce becomes the gain on the other end. Last year we sold nearly a thousand pounds of zucchini to our wholesaler, for example. But for every saleable zucchini that is under seven and one half inches and perfectly cylindrical, there's another one that curves slightly or comes in too large or too fat. This past December we processed five feeder pigs that were fed on zucchini through June, July and August; that feasted on winter squash through September and October; and that were finished on brussels stems and leaves and fattening homegrown corn all the way through to their processing date.

It's so hard to account for all the benefits of subsistence farming on the balance sheet. For example, Rosemary objected the other day when I was grumbling about the cost of the goat herd. I pointed out that we'd be $5,000 richer if I sold the hay that the goats are burning through this winter rather than retaining it. I pointed out that we made only a few thousand dollars off of goat sales last spring, and that the herd only produced the equivalent of $700 worth of manure. But then Rosemary reminded me that we processed a number of cull goats and pressure canned their meat to keep our own hungry brood well fed. And depending on the time of year we get half a gallon to two gallons of milk per day. Consider the price of all the milk that the boys go through, and all the cheese that we've made and enjoyed, and Rosemary makes a convincing case that the goats actually turn a small profit. Add to this the fact that the size of the herd -- and therefore the real value of stock on the farm -- continues to increase without any cash inputs (apart from $350 spent on a buck with new bloodlines a year and a half ago).

The point is, subsistence farming doesn't necessarily look good on paper. But I can assure you, we're eating really well, and we stay warm through the winter. We have enough cash to pay the bills, even when things are a little tighter when one of our several cash crops fails, as our squash did the year before last. Which has me thinking that I should also write about Robbins' point in the quote above about growing the greatest practicable variety of crops. But maybe I'll save that for the next post!

Flee to the Fields, part 1: Why farming is not a business

 For years I've been vaguely aware of the Catholic Land Movement that was initiated in England in the interbellum period between the two great world wars. Its promotors included G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, writers whom I've admired for years. Their project, in short, was to foster a return to the land. They saw the rise of industrialism in England -- the self-styled "workshop of the world" -- as being inherently inimical to basic human thriving. Man has "an affinity for reality," one of Land Movement's promotors argued. "The elements of life -- the cleansing earth, the seasons, the contact with primary things -- are necessary to sanity."

The highly idealistic Land Movement sought to train Catholic men in the agricultural arts and settle them on small plots of land, both to farm and to raise their families in small, closely knit, faith-centered communities. Then World War II intervened: the world changed dramatically, many of the most prominent promotors died, and, sadly, the budding movement died out.

But the Land Movement's founding documents endure in a book entitled Flee to the Fields, which Rosemary purchased for me last month as a Christmas present. Having started reading the book just yesterday, I'm only two essays into the slim volume. But I'm so taken by the ideas expressed therein that I'm inspired to restart the old Garlic and Sapphires blog. My intention here is to write a series of posts on particularly pivotal insights that I've come across in my reading. In each entry I'll lay out in the insight in context, and then I'll reflect on it in light of my own farming experience. Perhaps I'll be enthusiastic enough to write daily; perhaps life will distract me, and I'll slow down. 

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The problem of simple versus compound interest

The first essay in Flee to the Fields was composed by Herbert Shove, who was a British naval commander in both world wars as well as a self-taught economic theorist. Among many other insights, Shove notes that modern capitalism thrives off of compound interest. The idea is that profit is calculated from ever-increasing principal balance. With burgeoning enterprises, this makes sense because such businesses have the potential to be ever larger; they are held in check only by the market forces of supply and demand. If there is a demand for flat-screen televisions, then a maker of flat-screen televisions can chart an upward trajectory in production, consistently showing a profit that compounds as the business grows in size. While one may certainly question whether such a trajectory can continue indefinitely, even in industry, that would be a matter for another essay.

What works (at least temporarily) in industry, Shove argues, does not work in agriculture. A farm may briefly take on the trappings of compounding profits by improving its efficiency to squeeze more out of a flock, a herd, or a parcel of land. But eventually the interest stops compounding because nothing more can be squeezed out of what is available without adulterating the quality of whatever is produced. The principal is what the principal is: so many cows produce so many hundredweight of milk per year; so many acres yield so many bushels of wheat per season. There are limits to what the land can produce or the size that an operation can be. Interest in farming is simple, Shrove writes, not compound, because the principal remains constant.

When agriculture is run like an industry and has industrial profits demanded of it, it's quickly run into the ground. Whereas industry turns a profit by "reducing the time cycle of manufacture," agriculture is bound by a "rigid seasonal time factor." Also, both industry and agriculture reduce their wage bill by turning to mechanization. But whereas industry pays for that mechanization by expansion and by diversification into an near endless array of manufactured goods, expansion in agriculture can only go so far because a nation only needs so much milk, so much wheat, and so much corn and soy. 

And thus capitalistic agriculture-as-industry rapidly becomes a dead-end. "The seasonal 'simple interest' return from land must, as the speeding-up process continues, lag ever further behind the cyclic 'compound interest' return from trade or manufacture."

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Reflection

Shove's argument spoke to me because I see the market pressure on farmers all around me here in Wisconsin, the home of a dying dairying culture. It seems that dairy-turned-industry is in the last throes of the dead-end that Shove predicted for industrial agriculture more generally. Farmers were encouraged for years to turn a profit by expansion; for years they looked very much like a burgeoning industry, and they expanded and mechanized accordingly. Now the market is glutted, the milk price has tanked, and farmers are saddled with the debt from facilities they can no longer afford and with more milk than they can sell, at least at a price that off-sets their debt. Ironically the only way out that many farmers are able to see is to produce even more milk. 

The expansion approach may work for a few mega-dairies in the short term. But how long will it be worth it as the profit margin narrows even more? What are independent mega-dairies to do now that Walmart and other major retailers operate their own milk facilities because their loss is less than the commission they'd have to pay to independently owned dairies? Expansion, it seems, is no answer at all in the long run: ultimately mega-dairy agriculture will be swallowed whole by the commerce industry. We know this because it's already happened with poultry farming, and this is exactly the pattern that retailers are following with dairy. Most all of poultry sold in the States is raised under exploitive, non-negotiable contracts with companies like Tyson delivering the birds and the feed and the farmer (contract employee, rather) taking on all of the risk. This is the bleak future for dairy too.

I don't pretend to know the path forward for my fellow farmers who are invested in dairy or poultry. In fact, I don't know what the path forward is for any farmers of any stripe, given that the general presumption is that farming is an industry and therefore must expand in size and scope in order to turn an ever increasing profit. I remember being asked about cashflow by the FSA farming representative last year while applying for a loan for our small, second tractor for our farm. Apparently it was a red flag that so little cash was "flowing" through our farming operation. It was explained to me that, ideally, I'd sign up to grow significantly more produce next year in order to raise the cash flow. It mattered not in the least that it would require me to hire an employee or to further mechanize, or possibly both. Apparently the important thing was that I become larger and therefore have more "profit potential."

The irony seemed lost on the FSA representative that our little farm had made more money for our family that year than many other, far larger farms that had much more "cash flow." We had no employees to pay and (until that second tractor loan came through) no debts to service. We made plenty of money. It's just that our static enterprise was producing simple interest; it was not compounding. 

My resolve then -- now confirmed and strengthened by my reading of Shove's essay -- is that I need to avoid the industrial treadmill in my farming enterprise. Farming for me, ideally, will bring in the "simple interest" of a living income. We do have some growing yet to do as we learn fully to utilize our beautiful plot of land. Indeed, the income will grow together with my growing gaggle of boys; then it'll slowly ebb as they age out and move on to whatever God has in store for them. I have no pretensions to "growing a business." I'll stick to growing squash, brussels, garlic, and cabbage for those few folks who appreciate good food enough to pay what it's worth.

Some thoughts on the salvation of miscarried babies

I've been teaching a high school-level sacraments class for a few years now. I've always had the policy of taking students' tough questions, and invariably, when we're discussing the necessity of baptism (As Jesus says in John 3:5, "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven."), students ask about babies who've died in utero. Given that Rosemary has had six miscarriages over the course of our marriage, it's something that we've thought and prayed about a lot. As friends have reached out and comforted Rosemary, we've been amazed at how many women have suffered miscarriages. So it doesn't surprise me that students ask. Likely it's something that many of them have experienced in their families, too.

So, what of these babies? Can we hope that they're in God's loving embrace? If so, how de we square that with the Church's perennial teaching in the necessity of baptism for salvation?

In class, there are a few things that I try to emphasize:

• First, baptism is absolutely necessary. Jesus was explicit, and it is the perennial teaching of the Church. Like with other hard teachings-- the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, the indissolubility of Holy Matrimony-- the Church cannot but be faithful to Christ's words.
• Second, however, I believe in a merciful God, whose very nature is love. Therefore, I'm at peace about my own six children who've died before birth. I entrust them to His providential care.
• Third, while we may not know precisely what God has in mind for these children because Christ didn't tell us, we are permitted to hope that there is a way to salvation for them.

The reason that I feel confident stating the third point in class is because it's explicitly endorsed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1261 (my emphasis):

"As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: 'Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,' allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism."

This is enough to bring peace to many students' minds. Yet the reason that some of my more traditionally-minded students struggle with it is because they've been taught that unbaptized children are deprived of the Beatific Vision, and that they reside in a "Limbo of the Children."

Isn't this what the Church teaches? they ask.

Actually, the Church has never explicitly had a doctrine of limbo. In fact, during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, the International Theological Commission published a document clarifying that this is the case and going so far as to state that limbo "has no clear foundation in revelation, even though it has long been used in traditional theological teaching."

As the ITC document reviews, St. Augustine was one of the first to wrestle seriously with the question of what happens to children who die without the benefit of baptism, in light of Christ's hard words about its necessity. Augustine's response was that due to original sin these children would be condemned to hell, though they would receive only the "mildest condemnation" since they had committed no personal sin of their own.

Hard words from Augustine, but what is their context? It had to do with the fact that the heretic Pelagius, to whom Augustine was responding, had been teaching that babies who died without baptism would be saved. Augustine tended strongly in the other direction because he was rejecting the Pelagian teaching. Interestingly, although many other theologians adopted Augustine's extreme wording, the subsequent Council of Carthage, in condemning Pelagius and affirming the necessity of baptism, did not go so far as explicitly to say that unbaptized children would receive any sort of punishment, even mild punishment. Subsequently, the ITC document traces how this led to theologians speculating, more mildly than Augustine did, of a "Limbo of Children," whose only "punishment" was their being deprived of the Beatific Vision.

What is clear is that there are two extremes positions, both of which are illegitimate:

• First, stating that unbaptized children are condemned to hell. St. Augustine may have stated it, but the Church has never taught it. 
• Second, stating that unbaptized children are saved. The heretic Pelagius may have stated it, and many erroneously seem to think that the Church now teaches it, but the Church has never taught that either.

Within those two extremes, however, we find on legitimate footing both the theory of limbo and the hope that God has a way, albeit unknown to us, for unbaptized children to be saved. The ITC document states that the issue of children dying without the benefit of baptism has taken on new "pastoral urgency," and that this has led to a new examination of the issue. Both the ITC document and the CCC privilege the legitimate position that we can hope that God has a way for unbaptized children to be saved. That's why I privilege this position when my students press me on the issue in class.

How do I make sense of it, theologically? I militate against the notion that God would create immortal human souls, endowed with the powers of the intellect and will, that is, the ability to choose the Good, only to deny them the opportunity of ever making that choice and enjoying perpetually God's own presence. Augustine's own most famous phrase, from the beginning of the Confessions, is that our souls are restless until they rest in God. Honestly, my thought has always been that this would be a cruel irony indeed, something utterly alien to God's own nature.

Let me go out on a limb for a moment, more so than I would in a high school religion class (since it's merely my opinion). Already in the time of Augustine, two substitutes to the baptism of water had been carved out-- baptism of blood (that of martyrs who died in Christ's name) and baptism of desire (the baptism of those who desired baptism explicitly or implicitly but hadn't yet been able to avail themselves of the sacrament). My own theological instinct places the hope that we are permitted to have that unbaptized babies are saved under the category of an implicit baptism of desire.

Like other virtuous pagans and Old Testament figures who would have chosen Christ if only He had been proclaimed to them, so too, these babies, had they lived long enough to choose Christ, could also have done so. I imagine them as immortal souls standing before the Judgement Seat of the Lord, making the same choice that we all do in choosing baptism, or that the virtuous pagans did when Christ harrowed hell.  Do we know that they would have chosen Christ? Certainly not, hence Pelagius' error. But could they have? Can we hope that they would have? It's clear that the answer is 'yes.'

Breaking news: Ascension date miscalculation blamed on Common Core math

By GSM News Staff

Vatican City, May 30, 2019 - A five-year old using an old fashioned abacus earlier today discovered what appears to be a discrepancy of three days in the Catholic Church's calculation of the commemoration of Our Lord's Ascension into Heaven.

The Ascension of Our Lord
Juan Rodriguez Juarez, 1720

"I was moving the abacus beads one at a time," the precocious, unnamed math scholar explained. "I started on April 21st, this year's date for Easter. Then I counted, 'one, two, three, four...' on the calendar. When I got to 40, my finger was resting on May 30th."

This left the young math scholar troubled and confused. "I read in my parish's bulletin that we will be celebrating the Ascension on Sunday, June 2nd," he explained. "But that would be 43 days after Christ's Resurrection, not 40."

Yet according to the first chapter of Acts, Christ "presented himself alive to [his followers] by many proofs after he suffered, appearing to them during forty days..." Then he "was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight."

Thus, since the young scholar's concern seemed justified, GSM News reached out by telephone to the Vatican for clarification.

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, picked up the phone. After the discrepancy was explained to him, there was a long pause, and the beads of an abacus could be heard clicking in the background.

Finally, the flustered priest could be heard picking up the receiver. "Theology is not mathematics," he said in an irritated tone. "2+2 in theology can equal five. Similarly, 43 is the new 40."

GSM News also reached out to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where an official confirmed suspicions that Common Core math had been incorrectly deployed in calculating the date of the Ascension. "We threw out our abacus to comply with the new math standards," he admitted. "Ultimately we just had to guess."

Yet the USCCB official became defensive at the suggestion that faithfulness to Scripture necessitated transferring the date of the Ascension to its correct date, Thursday, May 30th. 

"Folks are so busy during the week surfing the internet and shuttling their kids to soccer games they can't possibly be expected to make it to church for something so minimally important as commemorating the Ascension of their Lord and Savior into Heaven," the bureaucrat said. "I think that having the Ascension on Sunday will help people to celebrate it with more festivity,"

However, the same precocious child who originally noted the date discrepancy for the Ascension also expressed skepticism at the official's claim that people could celebrate the Ascension with more festivity on Sunday. 

"That seems to violate the Pauli exclusion principle," the five-year-old explained. "Two identical things can't occupy the same space at the same time and in the same manner. So if Sunday is already occupied by the festivity of the Seventh Sunday of Easter, how can you possibly expect to add the festivity of the Ascension to an already festive day? It seems that one would have to displace the other."

Reached again for comment, Father Spadaro sounded exasperated. "I'm telling you, if mathematics doesn't apply to theology, then surely physics doesn't either."

The USCCB bureaucrat was equally frustrated. "I have no idea what the Pauli exclusion principal is," he admitted. "I decided to take underwater basketweaving instead of physics in college."  

A homesteading manifesto

We have twelve taps in the maple trees around the house right now. Plastic tubes run from the taps into large glass bottles wedged securely with pieces of wood against the tree trunks. With the sun shining and the temperature hovering in the low-to-mid 40s, the sap runs intermittently. The past few weeks I've been boiling down the sap, the result so far being nine quarts of rich, amber-dark syrup. And we're probably not done yet, since the temperature dipped into the upper teens a few nights ago, probably "reseting" the trees for one last "run."

In my experience, five or six gallons of propane are needed to boil down enough sap for three-to-four quarts of syrup. That's roughly $20-25 per gallon of syrup, which isn't bad considering that high quality maple syrup retails in the grocery store for $20 per pint. Yet when you consider that we frequently use maple syrup in place of sugar, which is dirt-cheap at the grocery store, the financial benefit evaporates more rapidly than the excess liquid evaporates from my kettle of boiling sap.

So why bother? Why bother raising our own meat and cultivating our own garden produce, as we do? Why spend all those hours starting seeds and weeding plants; all the evenings during the summer and fall canning, pickling, and preserving? We produce our own milk, turning it into kefir, and cheese; we process our own pigs, rendering their fat for our own lard and and brining and smoking their bellies for our own bacon. I make my own wines and ciders, fermenting apples, pumpkins, rhubarb, grapes, currents, raspberries, even dandelions. All of this comes at great cost-- I mean literally, since these activities take a great deal of my time, and time is money. I could be working more hours. If I devoted my time and energy to it, I could be making far, far more money than I do. It would be so much more efficient, and likely cost effective as well, simply to buy things.

***

It's a funny thing, because modern society promises to free us from the supposed slavery of making our own food, building and repairing our own house, etc. All these things are available at the grocery store, over the internet, or at the hands of an expert who would be happy to do it for us. It's more efficient that way. But more efficient for whom? Certainly not for the individual, if it only frees a person from work so that he can do other work. It seems to me that it's efficiency simply for the sake of efficiency, or, worse, efficiency for the sake of industry moguls whose wealth is in the billions-- which is why I am speaking of efficiency-worship. The irony is that we've traded the tether of meeting of our own basic needs for the tether of making the money that we need to pay for our basic needs.

To be clear, this is a complicated matter. For many folks, careers are vocational, not merely a means to the end of making money. Freed from menial tasks to some degree, many people have the time to pursue careers of importance to the community broadly speaking. I'm thinking of lawyers devoted to the pursuit of justice, teachers to helping students to learn, doctors to healthcare, etc., etc. This sort of specialization is only possible when folks are freed from the obligation to spend long hours cultivating food, and mending clothes. The rewards that follow from deep immersion in an area of specialty are likewise great. Humanly speaking, we desire not only to know, but to know deeply.

Yet again, I'm suspicious that what is good has been made into a god, because, humanly speaking, we also desire to know broadly. But why bother knowing broadly when there are experts to handle pretty much anything, and when we're often tired out from whatever specialized task we've been trained to perform on the weekdays? What results, therefore, is a sort of infantilization, a sort of communal forgetting of the sort of basic knowledge that it was once taken for granted that a person would possess-- knowing how to feed oneself, how to cloth oneself, how to shelter oneself. It instead leaves a person at the mercy of the "experts," and it hardly seems like freedom to me.

***

I'm convinced that our modern society has us worshipping its god, efficiency. Think about it: Our modern highways permit us to commute longer distances, and our technological advances lead to more things rolling off assembly lines more quickly than ever before. Yet we work as many hours as our parents did. And if our paychecks are at all larger, the extra money evaporates with the purchase of the supposed time-savers that make it possible to work those long hours-- the washing machine and dryer; the dishwasher and microwave; the packaged, pre-processed food; the clothing that is replaced rather than repaired; the smart phone that keeps us tethered to the job 24/7.

And so, the cycle repeats itself, and life passes us by while we're busy raising the money to live. Maybe we get a weekend here and there, and maybe retirement, too, if our health holds out. Yet a sure sign of our societal slavery is that fully four-fifths of the American workforce is living paycheck-to-paycheck. Like gerbils running on our wheels, we work more and more. We make more money, yet the things we need to pay others to do for us because we're too busy working to do them ourselves is endless. We pay somebody to grow our food because we're too busy to weed a garden. A person's yard may be full of maple trees, but he's too constrained by work obligations to tap them and boil the sap. Somebody else will have to grow his food, cure his bacon, change the oil in his car, repair his leaky roof...

As for me, homesteading, and all the work that it entails, most of which is wholly unnecessary in this day-and-age, is a conscious non serviam. I will not participate in efficiency-worship. I will not serve that god.

America's Dairyland, no more

La Crosse County's Dairy Breakfast has been cancelled this year. Apparently nobody stepped forward to host the annual breakfast, which would ordinarily draw thousands of people out into the countryside to eat breakfast and tour a working dairy farm. The dairy breakfast's FB cancellation announcement is a muffled cry for help:

"We have lost a large number of dairy farms in the past few years, and especially in the last year alone. Those that remain are busy putting their efforts into getting through each week-- one day at a time." 

Wisconsin's license plate reads America's Dairyland. Yet nearly 20 percent of the state's dairy farms ceased operations in the last five years. Last year, a whopping 10 percent of those that remained did the same. There are now fewer than 8,000 dairy farms remaining, down from-- if you can believe it-- 100,000 operational dairy farms in the state of Wisconsin in 1960. Why? Because dairy farmers-- conventional farmers, at least-- are presently earning only three quarters of what it costs them to produce their milk. They haven't made enough to cover costs for five straight years now.

When I hear of the dairy breakfast being cancelled, when I see FB pictures of farmers loading their cows into auctioneers' trailers, when I read the poignant articles like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal's from a few months back-- I can't help but detect a pervasive sense of helplessness. In the back of my mind is an interview with a land-grant university ag professor in the dairy farming episode of Neflix's series Rotten. He says something to the effect that the dairy industry is changing, and that farmers will just have to adapt.

It's more of an observation of fact than a prediction, at least for the conventional industry. It's not the dairy industry that's dying. Despite an overall decline in dairy consumption, dairy is still an $88 billion industry here in Wisconsin. It's just that the milk is being produced on fewer, and far larger, farms. The farms that are making it are doing so by getting big. The economy of scale permits them to negotiate better prices on everything from feed to veterinary medicine. Again, it's not so much the dairy farming is dying as it is that dairying is dying as a way of life for a significant number of Wisconsinites. Again, the professor's comment is mainly a statement of fact. Dairy farmers will adapt, at least those few who survive.

***

On the other side of town from us, the Plain-folk, as the Amish call themselves, have small, carefully tended garden plots and greenhouses. Many sell furniture, as well as maple syrup and fresh produce in season. Their signs always say, "No Sunday sales." Their children walk the side of the road barefoot, and there are so, so many buggies, especially on days when the Amish gather for worship, or the evenings when the young couples are courting.

Travel a little further down the road, however, and suddenly the idyllic, pastoral farms of the Plain-folk give way to a massive manure pit and several sprawling, industrial structures with massively-scaled fans constantly circulating the air. It's one of the largest mega-dairies in the region, the dairy supplier to a regional chain of filling stations. A few thousand cows spend their lives confined to these buildings, where they are milked in an 80-cow rotary parlor three times per day. A cow steps onto the platform every 7.8 seconds; 400 cows step on and off that platform every hour.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not contrasting the idyllic little farms of the Plain-folk with the local mega-dairy in order to condemn anybody. It's just such a glaring example of our changing countryside that it haunts me every time I pass by. To emphasize, the family that runs this mega-dairy is in at least their third generation farming the land. They're pillars in the local community. They've succeeded in a changing industry, and they're poised to survive. So I'm not trying to demonize them in any way.

Yet if dairies like theirs are the future (and again, the future is already largely here, since most milk nationwide is already produced in larger-to-mega sized dairies), the question becomes: What exactly are we sacrificing?

***

As far as the answer is concerned, I have lots of thoughts running through my head. There is a thoroughly depressing must-read piece over at The American Conservative focused mainly on Iowa's pork industry, which is now entirely industrialized. The result in Iowa has been the utter decimation of rural communities-- ghost towns, closed high schools, massive increases in rural poverty, crime, and drug addiction. Yet there's more, too. There's the economic divide between the urban and the rural, between the parts of the country that matter politically and the parts that are referred to derisively as "fly-over country." There are the massive-scale recalls, the inhumane treatment of animals, the pollution that results from stockpiling of manure, the total lack of understanding on the part of most folks of what food is and where it comes from, etc., etc.

There are so many reasons why we should want more farmers and smaller farms. It's not just about preserving a way of life for a small percentage of the population or "saving the family farm." Rather, more farmers means that rural communities are not drained by urban flight, and that everybody, whether they're farming or not, is closer to their food. I am firmly convinced the industrialization of farming is the source of many, many woes.

***

By the way, since the dairy farming is already so scaled up, the answer to stabilizing the number of Wisconsin dairy farms is not so simple as drinking more milk. Something drastic needs to change in the way milk is priced that will give preferential treatment to smaller farmers. There have been many proposals in recent years that have failed to gain traction. But the proposal of the NFO featured in this Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel article seems simple enough that it could be rallied around. It calls for a two-tiered system that would add $4 to the pay price per hundredweight of milk, up to one million pounds per month. That would give farms with up to 300 cows a competitive edge matching the competitive edge that mega-farms get due to the economy of scale.

More will follow on these matters, of course, in future posts.