Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark recounts the final stage of his embrace of farming. Picture this: a gray-haired lawyer in overalls on a soggy raw early March day, crawling at full speed for the third or fourth time into a steamy metal pig shelter and lunging forward, splaying out flat in the mud, but managing to grasp the back feet of a recalcitrant 200 pound pig. He triumphantly screams “I’ve got him, help me,” and pulls the pig back far enough out of the hut for his partner to help rope its back legs, wrap the rope around a bar in the back of a waiting trailer, and heave and hoe and winch this last pig foot by foot to its destination. That lawyer was me, my partner a Ph.D. In situations like this, we liken our amateur efforts to Laurel and Hardy. When the trailer door was finally barred shut, I gasped for air and accustomed my bruised and filthy self to standing upright again. I met the kind, crinkly eyes of one of my favorite local characters, George Atkinson. George is a Livingston dairy farmer who has “retired” to, among other things, transporting large animals in his “Critter Carrier,” often from farm to slaughter house. He was positively chortling. “Mark, if your clients could only see you now.” This happened several years back, when it was time for our first mixed litter of Ossabaw pigs to go to market. It was before Peter figured out how to configure our fencing into a loading chute, and before we realized how much easier and less traumatic it would be to coax the pigs into the truck with a pail of apples. It was before it dawned on me that it was not the hallmark of a farmer to be caked head to foot in mud and poop; that, indeed, the farmers who knew what they were doing seemed always to have impeccably clean jeans and even clean boots.
While George was so amused, I was reveling in the elemental rush of it all. If my mother or grandmother, who had shrugged off as light eccentricity my passion for vegetable gardening, had been alive to witness my disheveled state, they would have shaken their heads in dismay. It had come to this, after all the sacrifices the family had made so my good education could assure me a high-status desk job. At Passover, we celebrate the realization of a new freedom in every generation, but if I were to tell them that this was a step toward liberation for me, they would have been convinced of my descent into abject goyishe madness. And how do I explain this late-in-life engagement with livestock raising? As with gardening, it wasn’t my idea. It was at Peter’s urging that we initially acquired turkeys and sheep and chickens and almost every other species we’ve accrued. And as I had done with Peter’s gardening years before, I watched the animals from a safe distance. I perceived our first four sheep as living lawn ornaments, and disappointing ones at that. It seems they spent the first several months depressed at being shipped away from their old home, lying about on the front lawn like woolly blobs. I was happy to stay away from them, and they from me. It had never occurred to me that I might actually have to touch one at some point. When I began to realize that having animals meant having to handle them sometimes, the thought frankly terrified me. If a chicken got where it wasn’t supposed to be, I chased it ineffectually. I would get the bird cornered only to have it flap its wings wildly, making me shrink back, at which point, I would inevitably call for Peter to help. While I continued my ineffectual efforts, Peter actually caught them.
It should come as no surprise that eventually a chicken got out when nobody else was around. I swallowed hard, caught it by doing what I had seen Peter do, and it was like a Temple Grandin moment: a gate had opened. I had acquired a new skill, which made me very proud, but much more to the point, my reluctance to touch was shattered. Then, when the ewes started lambing and we needed to move them to better shelter (the barn not yet having been reconstructed), I learned to handle them as well. Overcoming my fears of handling these strange creatures was a necessary, but not sufficient step to a sustained interest in caring for them. What followed was far more important. Once I began to interact with them, I gradually came to know them as creatures with something in common with me. I saw evidence of their individual variations in behavior, emotions, characters, and relationships. This shook my world view. Admitting that they had consciousness and were part of our world forced me also to recognize that we are part of theirs. At a very late point in life, I came to see that we are more animal than we care to admit, our exaltation of morality and philosophy notwithstanding.
Of course, one can’t know fully what’s going on in any other creature’s mind, human or animal. But it pleases me greatly to observe our menagerie in what I perceive to be a state of contentment, what I’d call an animal contentment. Throw a basket of weeds to the chickens and you will hear a low murmur of clucks that draws other chickens from all over the yard, each getting busy picking through the weeds for what most appeals to them. Fill the mangers with hay on a winter morning and you can sit in the barn’s south-facing suntrap and listen to the industrious sound of 40 sheep quietly munching while the younger lambs play around them. These are moments of contentment. It resembles human contentment, but seems to differ in its innocent, unreserved quality, apparently unpolluted by suspicions of motive, anxieties about the future, or the other reservations that prevent humans from knowing pure joy. I’m the sort who never forgets that upsides always come with downsides. For me, the ability to not only witness but also induce such unmitigated contentment makes livestock care particularly compelling. It’s not a chore, it’s a pleasure. —Mark Scherzer
