Now and then elated

Comes a day in March when you feel the sun on your face, and there is some real heat in it, and you know for sure that winter is winding down – even if we have to ride out a couple more blasts of icy weather. That’s a good feeling.

We’re still a long way from apple blossom time (in the Annapolis Valley or anywhere else nearby), but in this issue of Rural Delivery we are anticipating those sweet fragrances and flavours – berries as well as tree fruit. These are risky crops, and producers are motivated to gain some control over prices, through direct marketing or value-added processing.

Apples are sometimes called “the king of fruit,” for their prolificacy and their versatility. The apple is also symbolically potent, appearing frequently in mythology and literature (though biblical scholars believe the forbidden fruit referred to in Genesis could have been grapes, or pomegranate, or quince).

In the modern era, the poet of the apple was Robert Frost, who actually had some credibility as an orchardist. Famously, he wrote about a cow that abandoned her pasture to gorge on windfallen fruit, and about the mental and physical fatigue that followed apple picking, back when the job involved climbing on a ladder. (Incidentally, does anyone know where you can buy traditional apple ladders – the kind made from two halves of a spruce pole, tapering and joined at the top?)

Less famously, and about half a century later, Frost published “In A Glass of Cider,” which is about imagining oneself as “a mite of sediment,” riding a bubble upwards and then sinking again to the bottom of the glass. It’s not very subtle – in fact, it sounds like a scrap of verse someone might have written on a paper napkin after knocking back a couple pints – but I love the last two lines: “I’d catch another bubble if I waited. / The thing was to get now and then elated.”

That seems like a useful perspective on life’s ups and downs. It’s also a strong endorsement for cider – a beverage that was the original raison d’être for apple production in this part of the world, and is now making a remarkable comeback after languishing in obscurity for a century or so.

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We got some good feedback on our January-February cover shot of a frosty steer munching hay at Meadow Green Farm in Antigonish County. Then we got one heck of a good snowstorm, so I decided to check in with Nick MacInnis to see how he and his cattle fared. In that area there were reports that more than 80 centimetres fell on the first weekend of February, before the blizzard finally blew itself out. Not as bad as Sydney – which got about 150 centimetres, causing Cape Breton Regional Municipality to declare a local state of emergency – but enough to cause significant inconvenience to farmers and everyone else.

“It was a tough one,” says Nick. “Until the storm, I was still rotating the herd around the pastures and rolling out hay each day, but now there’s too much snow for them. They don’t like walking in it. It’s up to their chests.”

These are fairly stout cattle – Red Poll and Hereford crosses, which do well under grass-fed management. They’re accustomed to being outdoors in all kinds of weather, and thus did not suffer any distress from the storm itself. “They never go in a barn,” says Nick. “I have windbreaks, and a couple sections of spruce forest they have access to, and one of those spots has a spring that runs all year round.”

This small operation relies on purchased hay – which may run contrary to traditional notions of farm self-sufficiency, but it’s part of Nick’s strategy for minimizing overhead. “I see a lot of guys who are getting stressed out because they’re so financially squeezed, and they can’t figure out why I’m buying hay, because they think it’s such a waste of money,” he says.

In addition to avoiding the considerable equipment and fuel costs, not to mention the frequent aggravations of making hay, Nick is able to focus on pasturing, which is his top priority. From spring to fall, he moves the cattle every day, adjusting his rotation plan according to weather and forage growth, always trying to eke out the maximum amount of nutrition from every acre. “I’ve noticed a lot of beef producers who are making hay, they’re sacrificing their grazing management,” he says, “or their hay production is really at the expense of proper grazing management.”

Like the cattle, the hay is kept in the great outdoors – not wrapped, just resting on six-inch logs, to keep it off the ground. “It works really well.” says Nick. “I tarped it one year, and that was a big mistake – it rotted.”

This recent snowstorm buried his hay, so Nick had to use some bales he keeps in the barn as a backup supply. “That’s what it’s there for,” he says. “It’s been in there for three years, untouched.”

Meadow Green Farm sells cuts of beef at the Antigonish Farmers’ Market, and also takes orders for sides and quarters. In addition to raising his own cattle, Nick does some custom grazing for other farmers. “They just pay a flat rate per day per cow-calf pair,” he says. “If I were raising yearling steers, and the producer was interested in doing it on a per-pound basis, I could do that.”

This is more than just an extra revenue stream. “If you’re managing your grazing correctly, in theory, the more animals you can be managing, the greater impact you can have,” says Nick. “For the growing season for grass, I’m bringing in additional livestock, so I’m able to put high impact on small areas for short periods of time. There’s an advantage to that.”

Another way this farm deviates from strict self-sufficiency is its partial reliance on leasing land – a 40-acre piece from one neighbour, and a 75-acre piece from another. These are people who value agriculture, but who, for one reason or another, were not making use of their fields. “We’ve come to kind of a non-financial agreement,” says Nick. “They get a side of pork and a Christmas turkey every year. That’s the deal, and it seems to work out well. I’ve signed five-year agreements with them…. I would have liked longer, but that’s where they were comfortable.”

This business model is drawn partly from a book called No Risk Ranching (Green Park Press, 2002), by Missouri farmer Greg Judy – who was himself inspired by Allan Nation, the late grazing guru who famously wrote: “Your sole purpose should be not to own the land, but to make a living from the land.” Judy’s 2008 sequel, titled Comeback Farms, delves deeper into pasture management as a means of restoring degraded agricultural lands and soils.

“He kind of built his operation around other people’s property, using other people’s cattle,” says Nick. “He has a fairly substantial YouTube channel. He has over 100,000 subscribers. He’s pretty influential in the regenerative agriculture space, at least for cattle and sheep.”

To facilitate livestock watering in his multiple paddocks, Nick plans to build a few more ponds on the farm. He had hoped to do so last summer, tapping into federal-provincial funding assistance through the Resilient Agricultural Landscape Program – but conditions were so wet, traversing the fields with heavy equipment would have made a mess. He intends to try again this year. “It’s the best investment you can make,” he says, “on a grazing operation.”

Looking at agriculture more broadly, Nick believes there is a great deal of potential to boost food sovereignty in Nova Scotia – especially if new entrants to the industry are willing to consider alternative approaches.

“Besides beef farming, there are still lots of opportunities for other kinds of farming – to find abandoned or under-utilized farmland, or other areas that have grown over that used to be farmland. The sky’s the limit, for people wanting to get into farming with that direct-to-customer model, where you’re lower-production,” he says.

“I run into a lot of people who would love to farm, or they have a small operation, and they’re trying to get loans to buy property. They would probably be much better off financially if they expanded first through leasing land. If interest rates remain elevated, it’ll become more fashionable, perhaps.”

Sounds like a reasonable prediction, don’t you think? We might soon be hearing more about the leasing and swapping of land – not just for economic reasons, but for the sake of soil health and pest management. There could even be a shift in how we define farms and farmers. The objective of the enterprise is to produce food, and various approaches are workable – as long as producers get the remuneration and the personal satisfaction they deserve. DL