Today is a guest post from Cheryl at the Crooked Tree Farm. Her and her husband were the first people I interviewed on the blog so long ago. I have a random post from her today that really illustrates how many of us feel and how we are perceived as the crazy ones in America today. -James
March 21st, 2013. 11am on the dot, and still a huge line at Subway. It was my son’s 4th birthday, and trying to keep him from ricocheting off the walls like a pinball with a buzz cut was a job on its own. I was 6 months pregnant, had spent most of the previous night out in our barn and my eyelids felt like sandpaper.
“Excuse me, miss?” It took a second to come out of the fog and figure out that the lady behind me was trying to get my attention. I turned to respond, hoping if didn’t look half as cracked-out as I felt.
“Um, just to let you know, there’s blood all over your coat…?” She gestured with a hesitant finger while I looked. Sure enough, she was right.
“Oh, thanks for telling me. Yeah, that’s just goat blood.” In my haste and exhaustion I’d forgotten to change my coat. Explained the crazy looks I’d gotten while walking through Tractor Supply, at least. I smiled politely and started to turn my attention back to the ongoing battle to remain conscious but the look on the woman’s face stopped me.
“We raise goats,” I explained. “Dairy goats.” She was wide-eyed and looked so disgusted it was almost funny. Her face was frozen in recoil, her arms pulled back defensively like my pink Carhartt jacket was tainted with monkey pox.
“We had a birth this morning.” I went on, hoping to put her back at ease and make the rest of our time together in that goddamn line a little less painful. She kept staring at me. I sighed, turned around anyway and went back to fighting the impending coma. My son was chattering happily to everyone nearby about his birthday, how he was getting a whole sandwich to himself and that his presents were wrapped in Ninja Turtles paper.
“You raise goats for the fair?” One of the employees asked. The county youth fair is a pretty big deal out here. Lots of local kids raise a few chickens, a goat, pig or calf for the show ring and then the auction every August.
“No, we have a milking herd.” Not tired, not tired at all. So much energy, both eyes open. Not tired…
“For what?”
I blinked. “For milk.”
“So you drink it?!” The employee eyed me suspiciously. Half the people in the store were now staring at me.
“Yes.” That wasn’t entirely true. Our first goat to actually have milk had only given birth four days earlier, and her adorable little fuzzball baby was currently consuming all of her milk. But that was the purpose of our herd, the goal of raising goats in the first place. More babies were due to arrive soon and we would have plenty of milk once they had finished with it.
The stares continued. The woman behind me still looked disgusted, also thoroughly weirded-out and confused. The whole place was quiet.
“You know they have milk at the grocery store, right?” Some random person chimed in. That elicited a laugh from everyone, including me. The conversation ended. I ordered our family’s pile of sandwiches, collected the birthday boy and drove home with my bloody coat open to the cold.
We get comments from random people pretty much all the time. We have 6 kids and drive a 12-seater ‘church van.’ We have facial piercings and a lot of tattoos. Our oldest child is taller than I am and often mistaken for my sister. We stick out, and we’re used to it, but that was a whole new kind of crazy. That woman who pointed out the blood on my coat was more comfortable with the possibility of having just met the local devil worshippers than the idea of meeting a young family who didn’t want to buy milk at the grocery store anymore.
Right now we have 5 goats in milk and a herd that averages about 20. We’re growing a decent sized garden and started planting fruit bushes and vines this spring. We can, we freeze, we dehydrate. We’re working on figuring out soap and cheesemaking. We hunt and forage. We barter, we buy in bulk from local farms and make things from scratch as often as we can. We reuse, repurpose and wear things out. It’s exhausting and time-consuming (like REALLY time-consuming) but it’s worth it, and if that makes us weird to random people at Subway then hell, guilty as charged.
We’re only a few generations removed from when everyone farmed in order to survive, yet a lot of kids growing up today have no idea that beef comes from cows and their most commonly consumed vegetable is the potato (in the form of the almighty French fry.) so many people have no idea how their food ends up in its cute styrofoam trays and plastic clamshell boxes and they really don’t care, as long as it’s waiting for them at the store whenever they need it. The world is changing so fast and things are becoming so uncertain. How smart is it to depend entirely on an extremely screwed-up system for our most basic needs?
We chose to homestead because we wanted to break that lemming-like cycle of dependence on the corporate food producers that can’t even be bothered to tell us what’s actually in the crap they’re selling us. We wanted to know that if the proverbial shit ever hit the proverbial fan we wouldn’t be in dire straits trying to feed our family.
We want our children to grow up practicing the skills they would need to survive in the case of a catastrophic event. This planet is floating tits-up in a quagmire of its own excrement, and although our generation may never see anything crazy happen it’s almost certain the next generation will.
We want as much of our money to go to small businesses and local merchants as possible, instead of lining the pockets of the corrupt corporate bastards who are using us as a human science experiment and destroying the future of agriculture in the name of profit.
We want to opt out of the rat race, the culture of never ending consumption and the helplessness and apathy that are so readily accepted in society today.
We want our children to grow up holding the power to their survival in their own hands, knowing that they posess the knowledge and the skills as well as the spirit they need to carry them through any situation they might encounter in their lives.
We also like to pee outside. We like having a big pile of scrap wood to sort through and build shit on a whim. We love the quiet, hearing the occasional train instead of the constant drone of traffic. We love our ‘free range’ kids who can climb trees like monkeys, are most comfortable barefoot and carry in handfuls of wild garlic and morels like they’ve just found buried treasure.
More than anything, we just want to live on our own terms. Investing in our future instead of the neighborhood gossip, teaching our children to want more out of life than designer sunglasses and complacency. Stewards of the planet instead of its destroyers, symbiotic instead of parasitic. And the jelly from the grocery store just tastes like shit.
Cheryl Holloway Crooked Tree Farmstead Mini dairy goats, cruelty-free eggs Fresh produce and home canning
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