The Feed Store

A freezer and pantry full of meat, a season without having to buy any beef: for this a deer died.

Animal agriculture, we hear over and over, is horrific for the environment and horrific for the livestock involved. Yet most of us can’t or won’t change our ways. There may be a general sense that beef is horrible, but there is a literal sense that steak is delicious.

In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.

Mayweed is a persistent gift that teaches me how to thrive in unlikely places.

When cut into chunks, tossed with salt and some brown sugar, and then roasted all afternoon in a very low oven, perhaps with a bit of sauce for the last bit, pork belly becomes a gateway to the real.

Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.

I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility.

How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man?

Our trees are unlikely to make a measurable difference in global carbon dioxide levels, and they will not do anything to hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but according to Wendell Berry, these facts have nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not our decision to plant trees is, as Kerstin declared, good.

Thinking about ecology from a national perspective, my house with standard R-19 walls and R40 roof, standard windows, and so on, is a “problem.” From a local perspective, though, there’s a solution that’s far simpler than the ones proposed by national standards for green building: Get up from my library chair and throw another log in the wood stove.