"No doubt, passing motorists along the distant dirt road must have imagined something else---that the grim reaper had come to Enosburg Falls."

I once found enlightenment in a Manhattan deli, on a plate of chicken, several years ago. That revelation led to my rediscovery of real food. With this discovery, I changed my body and my mind by shedding over 160 pounds and thirty years of food industry propaganda.

We should all be so lucky as to experience such a singular moment of clarity when the answers to our most opaque questions become suddenly transparent. To my surprise, I experienced a second moment of enlightenment recently on a small farm that is as far away from Manhattan conceptually as it is in miles.

After rediscovering just how valuable real food was, I was compelled to follow the trail from the retail end of the food chain to the production end, somewhere far distant from the asphalt-choked world of my suburban life. I arrived at this farm in Northern Vermont with the vague goal of reconnecting with food at the source. My more concrete objective included learning more about the care and maintenance of a cow as I had begun to entertain the idea of keeping a family cow for myself.

There was another reason, one that I could hardly admit to myself, but it lurked there in the grey light of my thoughts, indistinct in shape and feature, but at the same time as visceral as my every breath. When I dared give form to the thought it was this: I wanted to know if I was made of the right stuff that enables one to live the challenging life of a farmer?

As painful as it was to acknowledge this primal need to test myself, a need that perhaps dates back to our Paleolithic origins, I had to know nevertheless. Was I man enough to put in a hard days work on a farm, as my grandparents had done or had I evolved into that most recent variant of the species of man: from Homo sapien to Homo sofa-man? Borne and bred of the city, could I hack a full day of farm labor or would I collapse with the vapors at the mere hint of hard work, perishing of consumption like some petticoat and lace heroine in a nineteenth century novel?

Down on the farm
Rural Vermont is a visual feast of picture perfect farmland and verdant forests against a luxuriant backdrop of blue-green mountains and a cerulean sky. Rustic barns dot the landscape for miles amid rolling hills and gushing streams. As lovely as this postcard existence is, it evaporates every morning at 4:00am when the hard truth of another long day washes my dreams away like a cold bucket of reality.

The slack-string grunt of green frogs plays like a chorus of ill-tuned banjos in the cold morning air. Dawn struggles up over the horizon and the morning birds chatter away. The first order of business is milking, which on some days, means slogging a good portion of a mile through boot-sucking mud out to the pasture where the cows lie in unhurried repose. To my initial delight and later consternation, I discovered that cows have personalities as distinct as any person. It takes the empathy of a social worker and the patience of priest to arouse them from their morning reverie and march them to the barn.

The herd consists mostly of Devons, a beautiful breed of cow with a deep ruby-colored hide that can glisten like fine silk when the light touches it just right. Barrel chested with stout legs, a well-formed Devon is a triple treasure. Traditionally used for both meat and milk, these powerful beasts were once employed as draft animals and could pull a plow as well as any ox. The herd also included a few mixed breeds such as a Devon/Jersey mix and a at least one Dutch Belt/Holstein.

I quickly learn that life evolves around the animals and not just the cows either. There were pigs and chickens to be attended to as well. It was only after their needs had been met that I was free to return to my little room for breakfast. I came to see that this was the true role of the caretaker. The modern industrial farming model views livestock as a commodity, no different from crude oil, natural gas or copper. This didn't seem right since a living creature is far more complex than an inert metal like copper. Ultimately, the quality of the end product (milk, meat or eggs) is affected by how well an animal is cared for. It makes business sense to me that a farmer who understands this, earns the right to charge a premium price for his goods and as a consumer, I am glad to pay that price.

At 4:00 in the afternoon, the ritual trek to the pasture to bring in the milking herd repeats itself. In between, there are two more herds to tend to. They are located on different paddocks around the farm. Multiple gardens with every manner of vegetable, flower and herb grow in different plots on the farm. A recent excess of rain has ensured lots of weeding will be necessary. This mix of crops and animals makes this farm much more like the traditional farms that were once common across America.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan draws a distinction between traditional farms with a mix of animals and crops and the modern farm that monocrops corn and/or soy. Two key differences separate these two types of farms. The first is that the farms of old relied on solar energy, soil, grass and water for their existence. A good farm manager, with the right balance of animals and crops, could maintain a symbiotic self-contained system able to support and feed the soil, the animals and the people.

Contrast that today with a farm that has removed some of the key components of the traditional farm such as crop variety, rotational grazing and developing a symbiotic balance between plant, animal and soil resources. Such a farm must rely more heavily on external inputs like grain and chemicals, which must be imported from elsewhere. This is a fossil-fuels based farm which makes for another ironic difference: that if all a farm like this produces is corn and soy, the farm family cannot even feed itself with what they produce.

Chores chores and more chores
At one point, I was assigned the task of scything a field of rye grass that was on the verge of going to seed. The grass stood about five feet high and covered a little less than a quarter of an acre. The late morning sun pounding down on me made for an unusually warm day. This promised to be a difficult job, and yet, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There's something sublimely empowering about swinging a three-foot long curved blade of edged steel. Watching that grass fall in my wake, as sweat poured from my body like a garden sprinkler, I was alternately Genghis Khan, Hannibal and Shakka, Zulu warrior, an irresistible force, a juggernaut. No doubt, passing motorists along the distant dirt road must have imagined something else---that the grim reaper had come to Enosburg Falls.

I looked back at my fallen enemy and thought that I was done with that field, but that was not to be. The scything was necessary to clear the grass so that we could put down a crop of cabbage. About two weeks later, I returned to the field with a planting crew. When ranking farm chores by the amount of sweat produced and energy expended, row-cropping knows no equal. We were putting down starter plants rather than seeds, so we needed deeper holes. The soil was hard and just inches below the surface, full of rocks. I felt like a miner. In all, we planted a half-acre of cabbages, about 1500, over the course of three days. We did so under an unforgiving sun that alternated with freakish thunderstorms that in one case, killed a calf on another farm not far distant.

As the 13 - 14 hour days turned into weeks and the weeks into the first month, my strength of mind increased while my body alternated between farm-hardened invincibility and geriatric feebleness. The former transformation was due in equal parts to the hard work and a diet of sumptuous nourishing foods. Pasture raised beef, eggs and cultured milk, home made cheeses, yogurt and butter, home grown kim-chi, sauerkraut, lamb and succulent pork, lively lettuce, potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic, honey and herbs---all nurtured from the rich composted soil on this wonderful farm, fueled by the synergy of sun, soil, microbes and people.

Even though I'm worn thin at the end of the day, I nevertheless feel energized. Why? In my old life as a software developer, such a feeling was rare. Imprisoned in a cell of grey walls and tortured in endless meetings polluted with politics and punctuated with meaningless buzzwords, I felt unfulfilled at the end of each day. It was as if some kind of parasite was feeding on my soul, withering it with each turn of the hour. It took a few weeks for me to realize that this new feeling of accomplishment that I was experiencing was something that has largely gone extinct in the corporate world: job satisfaction.

As the weeks progressed, I found that my skill at animal husbandry was improving. I became an expert at getting Cathy, the recalcitrant cow, to keep up with the rest of the herd. I learned enough about the herd's social interactions to anticipate their behavior and get clear of a slashing horn when an inferior and a superior cow found themselves crowded too closely in a tight spot. I developed an immunity to the whip-like sting of a cow's tail at milking time and grew fond of the warmth and life that radiates from their massive bodies. I knew how to keep my balance in the pig paddock when they set upon me at the site and smell of the milk pail in my hands. I learned how to steal eggs from the reluctant chickens while keeping a wary eye on the rooster who stalked my every move.

I learned to identify the whoop, whoop sound of the Common Snipe as its tail feathers beat the air in a kamikaze dive. I knew the machine-gun tock, tock, tock of the Pileated Woodpecker and the comical mating dance of the Bobolink. I inhaled the intoxicating aroma of lemon balm, ate wild strawberries and black currants and tasted the hint of sweet licorice in anise. I learned to identify the deadly false hellebore, a plant that if consumed, could draw one down into unconsciousness forever. And each night, under the intoxicating drug of exhaustion, I was lulled asleep by the sounds of nightfall beneath a brilliant sky alive with the blue fire of the milky way.

Along with milking cows, chasing pigs, gathering eggs, digging ditches, driving tractors, stacking wood, herding steer, dodging bulls, feeding mosquitoes, swatting flies, ducking lightening, swamp stomping, fence walking, log chucking, hay raking, weed pulling, crop planting, manure shoveling and blister busting... I've come away from this experience with a deeper and more profound sense of mission than ever before, but I've also learned that this wonderful life lies perilously close to extinction.

Even on this lonely outpost a few miles shy of the Canadian border, the long arm of a misguided state and federal bureaucracy seeks to extinguish the small farm. Here as in other states, an oppressive regulatory system prevents farmers from realizing their full economic potential. Rather than encourage fair trade for the family farm, the Vermont department of Agriculture seems hell-bent on preventing it at all costs. Contradictory state and federal regulations leave some farmers mired in red tape like a tractor stuck in a muddy field.

Many farmers are forced to play the game of trying to emulate industrial farming practices while their future prospects sink deeper and deeper into red ink. Even when a grass roots effort brings success, as it did when Rural Vermont, a small but committed farm advocacy group, rallied farmers and consumers to support the Farmer Protection Act, the heavy hand of big business intervenes. Governor Jim Douglas vetoed the bill amid protests that he had sided with corporate interests against Vermont farmers. As if that wasn't enough, plummeting milk prices are taking a toll and an unusually wet summer has kept some farmers from getting their hay in. It could be a difficult winter for some. Others may not make it.

Despite the challenges modern farmers face today, they still have the potential for the best kind of life---one where hard work and independence can still pay a rich reward. Is there a family cow in my future? Perhaps, but if that future is to become a reality, I and many others who care about real food will have to work inside and outside the political process to insure the we continue to have a choice for how we chose to live and the animals we choose to keep.