There’s a confession I need to make. At this very moment I have 150 close-up, black and white pictures of bull testicles in my library. I know how this sounds. It doesn’t sound good. How did my life come to this? The same way undercover vice cops become addicts after smoking freebase to fit in, I suppose. I am addicted to farming.
To be honest, I’ve always been an obsessive. As a child I owned every Audubon Society Field Guide for every type of creature that walked, swam or flew. In high school it was all guitars and competitive shooting. When I was 22 I wanted to learn how to work on cars so I bought a 1971 VW bus, and a month later the engine was out on a floor jack, tools were everywhere and I was covered in grease. And art school was an exercise in serial obsessions, spending thousands of dollars of money I didn’t have on exotic materials to make paintings I knew wouldn’t sell.
But unlike most of my obsessions, food was an accident. It happened to me. I never suspected that when I took the first job I could get—washing dishes and making pizzas—that my life was about to take a serious left turn. Once you’ve worked in food and liked it, it’s pretty hard to get a job doing anything else. So I forged ahead, and learned to cut 200 lb. wheels of Emmentaler. I became a wine buyer. I opened stores, drizzled aged balsamic vinegar on strawberries, and stumbled around faraway neighborhoods for skewers of cubed lamb fat. I was in. I gave up my delusional desires to write the great American novel or be an important painter and just went with it. Then came the knives. Then came the books, the carbon steel pans, the Alembic still, natural wines and of course: meat.
Meat wasn’t an accident; it was an ambush. While working at a group of restaurants, I was pulled into a conversation between the chef and the owners that ended with: “Do you want to be the butcher?” Even though I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about meat or butchering, I was bored and, more importantly, available. I said yes, and two years later I had my own butcher shop.
Meat would be the end of it, I thought, the final stop in a lifetime of promiscuous obsessing. After all, I had opened a business so I couldn’t just flitter off, following my muse to some new and fascinating niche. I had built my home. I had dug in. I was done. For the rest of my life I was going to be a butcher. But meat is a pretty tough business, and to get exactly what you want at the right price, you have to buy direct from farmers. Easy enough, I thought: Just find a good farm.
And farming, it turns out, isn’t an exact science. Everything from feed to breed affects the quality of the meat: Cattle born early in the year are better than those born in the fall. Too much nitrogen-rich clover or alfalfa before slaughter, and a whole beef carcass can be ruined by scatole, a microbial metabolite that makes the meat smell and taste like...scat. So it’s not as easy as “finding a good farm,” because the complexities of what a good farm does just grow and grow the more you learn about them. Suddenly, you realize that you don’t know all the details, but that every detail matters, and THAT is how you end up with pictures of bull testicles in your library, my friends.
Still, I thought the farming thing might be a phase. My wife hoped it was a phase. We both figured that I’d shake it off and settle back into butchery, maybe with a thing on the side with opening restaurants or something to keep the wandering mind occupied.
Then we actually did open a restaurant with some friends, a place for great burgers and hot dogs. I was hopeful as we worked in the space, scraping decades of grease off the concrete floors, scrubbing gunk from the old metal fixtures. I was completely absorbed, at peace even, as I was snaking mouse dropping-caked drains. A few weeks later, exhausted but exhilarated, I found myself planted in a deck chair, staring at the sea in front of our newly-opened place, and there it was. The thought. All the triumph and sea air couldn’t keep it at bay: “Wouldn’t it be so much cooler if we raised the animals for the burgers and dogs?”
So now: a cascade of books, PDFs and YouTube videos on soil microbes, breeding, glandular function, trace mineral nutrition, multi-species stacking. Monthly trips to choose our beef on the hoof. A subscription to Acres USA begets one to the Stockman Grass Farmer, which leads to local farming newsletters from Lancaster County, the Hudson Valley, Maine and Virginia. Soon, I’m emailing the author of an obscure cattle book in Australia, trying to get a copy sent to the U.S. and calling fuzzy landlines in rural Montana for herd books.
So who knows where this is going to go? I’m worried, and I’m sure my wife isn’t happy about this either. Ever since I’ve put the wheels in motion to apply for a grant to establish a breeding, research and teaching farm, I think it’s time for me to finally face facts: I have a farming problem and it is not going away. I talk culling and breeding with owners and help castrate bull calves with the farm managers. A sustainable agriculture conference here, a field day there, a few books off Amazon and, next thing you know, I’m the guy people avoid at parties: The guy just waiting for an opportunity to pin them down and talk about the amazing potential of Holistic Managed Grazing. The guy who’s really excited about portable electric fencing. The guy who really, really wants to tell you about testicles.
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