Sustainability as a way of life: visit to Larksong Farm, Ohio

Sustainability in the production of food is the basic level. Without that human life is not sustainable. I visited an Amish organic farm in Ohio about a month ago to learn about practicing sustainable agriculture. Since my childhood I had been aware of Amish, but had never really thought about their “quaint ways” as a template for sustainable livelihoods for the twenty-first century. Amish are nothing if not a model for resilience, for adaptability, for living in place. My trip to Larksong Farm was explicitly organized as a fieldtrip to learn about sustainable agriculture, part of the 2011 Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology held this year in Columbus Ohio. The bus drove for an hour or more through little winding roads among small rounded hills and valleys. We began to see the signature black Amish carriages pulled by elegant black horses pulled up at corner stores and even gas stations (where the horses were being watered), triangular “slow” signs on the back of the buggy. We pulled into the drive of a modest farmstead where David Kline waited for us, stocky and good-natured bearded figure in his overalls and work shirt. We stood next to a large whitewashed barn with numerous cliff swallow nests under its eaves, a small log cabin with a lovely garden and a [largely disused] purple martin house on a post. [The birds comprise an important organic pest control system]. The farm, David told us, is 120 acres, seventy of it under cultivation by horse. His son in law was harrowing the hilly fields with a team of 12 Belgian horses- a skilled task. The farm is an organic dairy farm, selling its milk through the producer group “Organic Valley”, which has stricter standards for organic than any certification agency. The dairy herd is Jersey cows, and the pasture, hay and oats they are fed is produced on the farm itself. Oats and oat straw serve for the horses as well. Corn is also produced and fed to the livestock, and there is a vegetable garden for the family’s domestic use, along with several large fruit trees. David expounded on the effects that employing horses to work the land and for transportation has on the local landscape, as well as on the pace of life. In that part of Ohio, small towns thrive, because families need services available at distances practical to access by horse and buggy. The farm size and cultivated lands are also dictated by what is practical to work with a team of horses. As David commented, the horses dictate the pace of life; they need a midday break to eat and drink and so does the farmer. They don’t have lights to work into the night, so the farmer too rests in the evening. The remaining acreage at Larksong farm is woodlot, including what David describes as virgin white oak forest. The oak beams in the capacious barn were cut from the farm itself, and the oldest were dated by dendrochronology to the 1830’s. Another product of the woodlot is morrel mushrooms which fruit in early May; if he hadn’t had to meet with his visitors, David would have taken a walk in the woodlot to look for mushrooms. The manure from horses and cattle is spread to fertilize the land, and David asserted that mixing the manure with the carbon source of straw greatly reduced the potential for water pollution and enhanced the quality of the composted manure for fertilizer (that’s the way I used to manure my garden when I lived in Northern British Columbia, with chicken and rabbit manure mixed with straw and alfalfa hay).
While we stood talking, David’s son in law returned from harrowing and began to unhitch the team of 12 powerful and well-trained Belgians. They were hitched in four sets of three. Each trio stood patiently until its turn to be led to the barn for their food. David mused that horse harnesses used to be made from the hide of 4 year old bulls, which were thick and tough enough to withstand the stresses of pulling harrow or plow. Now modern commercial beef and leather production does not produce adequate natural leather for harness, and a synthetic product must be used….but there are risks; in the event of a tangle, the traces will not break, complicating freeing horses or people entangled in harness lines.

The dance of modern necessity, self-sufficiency, and the dictates of religious faith require creative problem solving, thought, and conscience. I noticed a small windmill pumping water, and a solar panel on an outbuilding. Perhaps more controversially, there was a small tractor, used not to work the land, but for its power take-out, which helped to move hay bales into the loft. A generator was used for brief periods to pump the milk into the storage container twice a day - and to charge cordless electric drills- though the house and buildings had no electricity, and the entire farm is “off-grid”.

We went into the comfortable farm building for the midday meal, prepared by David’s wife, his daughter, and a granddaughter visiting from New York state to help another daughter with her new baby and during her recovery from the birth. The front room had a big plate steel wood heater, reminiscent of a Canadian ‘Mamma Bear” Fisher stove though the make was different. When I lived on the land we too heated with such a stove in our front room. Natural gas run lamps, very much like the propane lamps I and friends had used “in the bush” for night-time illumination in cabins and little hand built houses lent a further air of familiarity to the scene. (The natural gas, David explained, came from a pipeline that ran down the road by the farm, and came from the local region). The water came from a well outside the kitchen door, where a hand pump provided potable water, though I think the running water in the bathroom might have come from the windmill driven pumped water; I didn’t ask.

The long table and benches accommodated our group and David, and we ate a lovely meal produced almost entirely on the farm itself: Yukon Gold potatoes and sour cream, salad, biscuits and butter, meat loaf with tomato sauce (the beef and the oatmeal both were produced on the farm), fruit crumble and “real” ice cream. The ice cream and the coffee and sugar were the only items I noted which definitely were NOT from the farm itself. Some sweetener was from the farm too: the large silver maple in front of the house yields abundant maple syrup.

Although the Amish community does not continue formal schooling beyond the eighth grade, clearly the family was well read and well informed; without television, people read in the evenings. And evidently write as well: our host David Kline is the author of several published books, most recently “Letters from Larksong Farm” published by Wooster Press (a local Ohio publisher) in 2010. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the farm, its birds and animals, and the rhythms of life in eastern Ohio as I read David’s words.

In disturbing contrast, last week my partner and I were reading a feature article in the June issue of Scientific America about producing meat by tissue culture (p. 64 “Inside the Meat Lab” by Jeffrey Bartholet). Although conventional feedlot livestock culture is environmentally destructive, and turns animal flesh into an arguably unhealthy commodity, severing relations between people and what they eat, I can’t see that a high tech synthetic food will be less environmentally problematic, and potential for unforeseen health consequences are evident to me. More problematic I think is the artificiality of severing human kind from the web of life, of the plants and animals that sustain us on the earth, and of the social relations of food production and consumption. I would rather eat meatloaf and potatoes at Larksong Farm.