GENE LOGSDON

The kind of society that thinks its okay to let dogs lick children on the lips is the same society that wants to tell farmers how to raise livestock. Granted that some farm practices are unnecessarily cruel to animals and need to be changed, the kind of mind that allows face-licking dogs should be humble enough to listen to what farmers have to say too about animal care. I have dehorned calves, docked lambs, castrated pigs, scraped maggots out of a sheep’s hide, punctured a hole in a bloated cow with a pocketknife to save its life, and watched my wife sew up animal wounds with darning needle and thread. I will be blistered for saying this, but I must stand by my experience. Animal pain and discomfort is not like what humans feel.

I don’t want to call chickweed the worst weed in the garden because I think it is trying to teach us a lesson about sustainable farming. But in its selected field of operation, the rich organic garden, chickweed is almost indestructible. Oh, you can blot it out with a thick layer of mulch for a whole year. But look out when the mulch decays away. The chickweed comes roaring back.

In the first part of “A Sanctuary of Trees,” I conjoined silviculture with my early years in a Catholic seminary studying for the priesthood. What I learned from the forests surrounding the several seminary locations I attended influenced me more than what I was hearing in the classroom. What I learned in both places led me eventually to choose the forest and leave the seminary... In our present traditional society, becoming a priest is a “call from God.” Becoming a forest-loving farmer instead should be a “call from God” too, and that is what I hope traditional religion will in the future readily recognize.

One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home... With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

Here are two stalks of asparagus growing just a foot apart. Both are of the same thickness and height. After an early morning temperature of 28 degrees F, one stalk is frozen and one is not. I have seen this happen many times. Anyone know why? This spring, when temperatures went from ridiculously high levels much of winter and early spring, and then plunged on some nights in late March and early April as much as fifty degrees in 24 hours into the twenties, fruit farmers are at their wits’ end. Early warm weather usually means lots of killing frost later on.

Today, April 11, 2012, the weather forecasters are calling for widespread freezing tonight and possibly sleet and snow here in northern Ohio. A month ago, when it should have been snowing, the temperature was around 80 and garden fools actually did some planting, even corn. In a neighbor’s garden the peas are up. They are yellow this morning because the temperature recently was below freezing three nights in a row. So while liberals had a grand time tee-heeing conservatives in March about being in denial over global warming, today the conservatives can tee-hee right back and the liberals have to eat crow or maybe snow.

Every year in the brown, sere days before the great greening in spring, I begin to have doubts. Will the flowers come again? Will the birds return? Will the trees leaf out? With all the despair and calamity rife in the world, the ancient fear that the end is near is as believable as ever.

I’ve learned more about the economies of small scale food production from watching chickens than from any library or university. The hens reveal a world almost foreign to our human experience. Ever since farming became a capitalistic enterprise, husbandry has been organized around the idea of making money, not making food. When the farmer is freed from the yoke of money-making, wonderful alternatives become possible in food production.

I am convinced that the seething cauldron of human thought boils up in the ethereal atmosphere of ideas, a process made more substantive now by electronic communication gone wild, and that more seemingly creative people have taller antennae jutting out from behind their ears to pick up on the latest notions and theories floating around in the great brain hovering over us.

In our local coffee shops, farmers gather every morning to trade stories. The topic sometimes gets around to scars and then the bull really starts flying. I love to listen, unnoticed, from a far off table.