Life on a farm is filled with rebirth. Every egg I gather and strawberry I pick reminds me of this. It is also filled with death. I am not so naive to think it isn't a big part of what we do as farmers and producers. I have readied myself. I am not queasy about eating something I have named, or despondent burying a beloved pet. I know it comes with the territory. I just thought I would be better at it.

I have thought a lot about how I would like to handle the deaths on my farm. I have an ideal farmer/shepherd character in my mind, the one I aspire to be. She is ever watchful, vigilant and full of deep respect for the animals in her charge. She does not coddle, she allows her animals to be the animals they are. Joel Salatin urges us to allow "pigs to experience the pigness" of their lives. My ideal farmer/shepherd keeps track of their health, adds, when necessary, the vetting or supplements they might lack and manages her land and the health of the soil, watching the big picture, the whole within wholes. When things go wrong, and their lives are ready for the end, she is wise and caring and helps them through, stress free and gently.

That is the ideal. Here is what really happens.

After finally figuring out how many yellow barn cats actually lived here, I named them all, 5 total, 2 females Stubby and Squeak and 3 toms, Grizzle, Moon Man, and Van Gogh. One cold morning, I found the oldest Tom, Van Gogh ( because he had only one ear), in the pasture just outside the barn. Wet, stiff and laying haphazardly in the mud. I looked upward and noticed another pane of glass had fallen out of the north side of the barn on the second floor. I had an odd feeling he had been driven out of the second story in some wild, semi suicidal, final leap and ended it all, instead of quietly going off to die of old age.I didn't really know him. I had only seen flashes of him, slipping up into Eds workshop or sliding behind the horse shed into the woods.He was old had no teeth and was mangy. So I scooped him up into a shovel and flung him into the woods.That night I felt awful why hadn't I at least buried him? He probably served the farm well, keeping it clean of mice and rats. I owed him more.

Death #1 I gave myself a D-.

Next test.Murray McMurray Hatcheries sent us 13 Chickens, 5 Buff Cochin hens, 5 Buff Laced Polish hens, 2 Buff laced Polish roosters and a free one who turned out to be White Langshan rooster. Within the year, we realized for a nice laying flock you do not need three roosters. I fact, you don't even need one rooster. Roosters are a pain in the ass. Yes, they are beautiful.

But this is what happens with roosters. They crow in the morning and then they continue to crow all day long. What starts off as being quaint and bucolic quickly becomes a constant din, a testosterone fueled cacophony that drives you to throw objects at defenseless animals hell-bent on dominating you and proving to hens, whose only interest is devouring every moving object they can scratch out of the ground, that they are worthy of fertilizing their developing eggs. The hens pay them no attention, so they turn on you. They chase you down and jump at you with terrible talonned thumbs on their shanks and leave horrible bruises on the back of your calves. On our farm, they are beautiful, useless beasts, because the cruel joke is that you still get eggs, whether they are fertilized or not. You just won't get more chickens, which we just didn't need right now. Something had to happen. The first ones to go were the worst offenders. The Polish boys, Animal and Gonzo.It was time to introduce to them the circle of life. Time for my next test.

To be continued ....next post

Circle of life lessons