Making the Grade

Reason a trillion why I hate maths

In case you were wondering, it's pretty fucking challenging to be a Jainist dairy farmer. 

Just. 

Saying.
My relationship with living creatures has always been pretty warm and friendly, though there was definitely a panoply of critters that I either kept a respectful distance from or was outright terrified by (see: spiders, centipedes, furry spiders, cockroaches all sizes, tarantulas and other spider types). Living in the city bred an adversarial sort of dynamic with animals -- rats, roaches and pigeons formed the trifecta in the Us vs. Them war between the worlds. (Though honestly I never minded rats unless they startled me or were viewed inside a dining establishment I was posted up inside of, and I genuinely like pigeons as friends.) 

But since moving here, my affection for members of the animal kingdom, including my former foes the spidz, has grown into something approaching maniacal benevolence, much to the chagrin of my boss, who silently curses me every time I announce the total number of slugs I've set free onto the lawn, having retrieved them from the dew-speckled grain pans. I suffer a true moral conundrum when swatting the tenacious remaining mosquitoes feverishly suctioning the life blood from my sweaty upper arms, my personal quagmire deepened with the knowledge that the bloodsuckers are female and as a feminist I feel I should support their right to guzzle my vein juice. I've even taken to relocating wayward spiders who might otherwise meet certain death inside the sudsy confines of the milk house. 

Someone call the loony bin.

As soon as the days begin to shorten and the summer starts to wane, goat farmers begin to plan their breeding season strategy. Some combination of my incipient cluelessness and the general opacity of proceedings at Lazy Lady shielded me from the particularities of this process. But now that I'm a little more keyed in -- and unafraid to ask -- I know that as breeding season approaches, Michael is making his decisions regarding which girls to keep and which to cull. (It stands to reason that we would not bother breeding any girls we aren't planning to keep.) While I wasn't at Twig for the first round of culls last fall, I arrived for the last -- we sent three girls off to slaughter, and while I had yet to form strong attachments to them or fully understand what went into making these decisions, it weighed on me heavily.

There is a fine-tuned algorithm for determining whether or not a goat is pulling her weight in the barn. It's called ERPA, which stands for estimated relative producing ability, and it basically plots out whether a doe is producing enough milk to cover the cost of keeping her. Sort of like a goat version of the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball, as I understand it. The girls are ranked either positively or negatively based upon this formula and given grades, and that, in combination with their propensity for high or low somatic cell counts, their milk components, their body condition and disposition, and probably some other things I'm forgetting, determine their status in the herd and therefore who gets to remain and who goes byebye. Because Michael kept 10 doelings from our most productive girls this spring, there are effectively 10 slots that need to be freed up by the girls who aren't earning their keep. 

Guess who's on the bottom of the heap? I will give you a hint:

A+ in Face-having

I have made it clear to anyone who will listen that my love for this aloof be-waddled diva knows no bounds, to the extent that I created a motherfucking instagram account for her, secretly hopeful that if she achieved some level of internet notoriety she'd be spared. But alas, the world does not work that way. 

That being said, my boss is a reasonable sort of fellow and as I've made it clear to him that I'd like to do everything in my power to save Gar (and her other low producing affiliates who include, as I understand it, Tara, Ellen, Chandler, Tabitha, Abbey and a few others), he is allowing me to try and find forever homes for these lovely ladies. Thus commences my mad dash to place the girls who might otherwise be sent off to the slaughterhouse in loving barns/yards/etc. (Obvi if you are reading this and have a lead on someone who might want to buy some darling does, holler atcha girl.) 

I fully appreciate, in a removed, cerebral way, that this regular culling is part and parcel of dairying. It's what you sign up for when you enter into this line of work. But I have not yet accepted it, and may not. This stance is not popular and I'm not altogether proud of it (I was told by a colleague that I wasn't a "real farmer" if I wasn't resolved about the inevitability of this practice, which made me want to smack the self-satisfied bitch who expressed the sentiment. This is a person who, ironically, makes cheese but has never kept animals). It is what it is, and as long as I continue this line of work, I will do what I can to minimize what I consider to be the premature deaths of otherwise healthy and valuable animals. Call me a fucking fool if you want, I give negative shits. 

Point being, sooner than I'd like I will be having to bid adieu to my most beloved ruminant pal, and THEN what will I have to live for? I ASK YOU! WHAT?

I woke two days ago and all of a sudden it was fall. As soon as the calendar hit September, the whole world got that sort of golden light and the mornings started getting colder and I began to slowly count to ten as I found myself stuck behind school bus after school bus in an effort to connect with my higher self and not be aTourettes-addled rage beast with death lasers for eyes.

September 1st marks exactly two fucking years since I first started this weird-ass odyssey. The whole week leading up to it, I kept getting those awesome/awful Facebook Time Hop shits, which essentially documented all that I was doing in the days leading up to my big move and the wonder and strangeness of my new surroundings once I'd arrived here in VT (see: the VAG and Endless Chanterelles). 

A few months or even weeks ago, I was still by and large deep in the throes of the self-doubt and existential anxiety that has characterized, let's be honest, most of my tenure in the Green Mountain State. But it occurs to me as I reach this little anniversary that two years seems to be the magic number. I recall first moving to New York just out of college and almost immediately plotting my escape plan, overwhelmed by the noise and the crowdedness and the seeming impossibility of finding a job despite what I thought were pretty deece credentials and all the gorgeous women who made me feel like a hopeless, hapless clown child who would never ever get a date. Well, as luck would have it, those escape plans, flimsy as they were -- "I know! I'll apply to one - ONE -  J school, and for good measure make it the most competitive one in the country!" -- did not materialize but two years on I found myself ensconced in the apartment that I would remain in for the rest of my time in New York, in a neighborhood that was still, at the time, sort of affordable and fun, in a job that gave me a steady paycheck and a 401K and access to even more fun, and doing my damnedest to approximate the trappings of all those gorgeous girls, albeit in gear from Target and H&M. In other words, I'd settled in. 

I don't know that I'm totally settled in here -- my actual home still feels a bit temporary and I'm reticent to do so much as buy a bed frame because with my luck the second I commit to any large or cumbersome piece of furniture I will move and have something annoying as fuck to deal with. But I think at the very least I'm beginning to "get" dairy farming. Especially now, as I round the corner to a year at Twig Farm, things begin to cycle back. I've started feeding out the golden, bittersweet apple drops to the girls during milking, going down the line and asking each one, "Apple?" like a stewardess offering up warm washcloths on a Transatlantic flight. And even more than last year, I can draw corollaries and make connections and start to put pieces together. And it feels familiar, and it feels good.

It's all made my ponderings regarding my future here in Vermont and in dairying a bit muddled. I'm finally FINALLY beginning to feel the satisfaction of understanding, and even, dare I say it, a low level of competency. But whether or not that's enough for me to commit to another year on the farm when I'm unsure of how it's propelling me towards my desired life (whatever that is) is another thing entirely. 

Last weekend I got to visit one of my all time favorite boos, Bianca Miraglia, maker of the excellent Uncouth Vermouth, who recently decamped to a farmhouse in Saugerties to begin growing her own botanicals and whatnot for her stellar libations, and was super charmed and dazzled by the community of young, connected foodmakers and growers and entrepreneurs who have made their homes in the Hudson Valley. All arguments of gentrification (or whatever the rural version of that is) aside, I feel deeply the appeal of a set-up like that -- one where you have the nature and the means of production at your disposal and also a closer connection to the city. From the outside, it looks like the best of both fucking worlds, but what do I know? 

I have at least four months left on my lease in Vermont and whether to renew or not is currently on the table. The longer I stay, the harder it is to imagine leaving, and the more I improve at my job, the more invested I am in staying the course and learning more. But I also know that I'm not getting any younger, and there are still a lot of things I want to do before I set down roots. Not to mention this work is HARD on the body, and there's a part of me that would like a happy medium between the totally immersive, hardcore every day physicality and the more interior, reflective life (and the lazy lounge life if I'm being totally honest). 

It's all a big goddamned ? and the Mysterions type of situation up here. (Google it.) For now I'm trying to keep my options open and enjoy the last luminous rays of sun at the end of my days on the farm, cozied up to my ungulate friends for as long as they're around. Color me Zen as fuck.