Joshua Rockwood came to Cambridge today to see me at the Round House Cafe, he invited Ken Norman, a farrier who also supported him during his hard and frightening struggle with the secret informers of the animal rights movement who nearly destroyed his farm last year. I was glad to see Joshua, I miss him, he is a cherished friend.
(I am going to be speaking at West Wind Acres Farm on June 18, at the Open House Scheduled there.)
Joshua survived that hard struggle last year, won it handily and completely. The charges against him were false and unjust, he should never have been arrested on those 13 counts of animal neglect and cruelty. Farmers often tell me that struggles with the animals rights movement are never really over, the justice system seems to be an annoyance for them, as is truth and rationality. Many people have told Joshua to expect to be harassed and monitored for years, if not forever.
There was a surreal moment for me, when Scott Carrino, the owner of the cafe came over to stand with Joshua and Ken Norman. All three men have used crowdsourcing projects to help them when they were in need. Ken needed help when he had double-knee surgery more than a year ago, Joshua raised more than $70,000 in legal fees and farm support to keep his farm going through his ordeal, and Scott is raising money on gofundme to buy his cafe.
Three very worthy people, in very worthy causes, supported by good and worthy people from everywhere.
Joshua is doing well, his business, nearly destroyed when his face was posted all over television as an animal abuser, is picking up again, he is pleased to fact court hearings and jail, although people still drive by his farm with cameras every know and then hoping to catch him and his animals in some sort of difficulty, so they can call the police. Joshua does not dare make a mistake. And he makes very few.
It is not the way free people are supposed to live, in perpetual fear of secret informers and the police, but that is the way many farmers live in America.
In America, we value lawns and neatness over the people who give us food to eat. Whenever I mention bringing a calf to our farm this summer, people instantly e-mail me, demanding to know if the calf will be separated from its mother, which many consider abuse.
Very few understand that if the cow stays with its mother, the mother cannot produce her fresh milk for sale, the farmer will starve to death, and children will not have milk to drink that is not produced by artificial hormones. This, is seems, is the new idea of what it means to be humane. They worry about the calf, never the farmer.
Joshua lives in a town that is being heavily developed, the remaining farms and farmers are under siege from new residents who hate the smell of manure, are traumatized by the sight of chickens running in the road, and value their lawns much more highly than the lives of the farmers who produce their food and their farms.
When his pigs get out – very few farmers on this earth can afford the maximum security fences that can guarantee that no pig or chicken or sheep or cow will ever get off the farm and onto a road – there is hysteria and outrage.
This is not true in rural America. Animals are all around us, so are farmers.
When chickens go into the road around here, people either run them over, slow down, or avoid them. They do not call the police. It is considered life, not a crime.
When animals break out of fences, as they often do in rain or high winds or when the grass is rich on the other side, my neighbors do not call the police to complain, they come to the door and offer to help bring them back inside the farm. When horses lie down to nap in a sunny pasture, or cows stand out in the snow, we do not call the ASPCA and demand an investigation, we smile at the beauty and simplicity of the sight.
And if Joshua lived around me, and his dogs sat out with the sheep in the cold or his water tanks froze, we would come to his farm and ask if we could help him get through the winter. We would not have him arrested and try to ruin his life and livelihood and traumatize his family. That, I think, is community.
When several of Joshua’s pigs cross the road and tore up a few chunk’s of a neighbors lawn, she called the police and tried to organize a neighborhood effort to sue him to protect their lawns and perhaps close down his farm. She never called Joshua or tried to speak with him. By the time the sheriff arrived a few hours later, the minor lawn damage was repaired, the pigs were back in their pens, the officers went home.
Joshua went to speak with her, and told her he would be happy to repair any damage his pigs caused if they ever got out again. She could sue if she wanted, he said, but he would never give up his farm. She dropped the idea of a suit. She was fine, she said, as long as her lawns were protected.
Almost any farmer will tell you that people demand good and cheap produce and meat, and shriek when food prices go up, but expect it to be a kind of immaculate agricultural conception – no smells, escaped animals, noises in the night, broken fences, frozen water tanks, animals with dirt on their coats.
I am immensely grateful to the men and women who do the hard work of farming. Their lives are never easy or predictable, it is a powerful calling for them.
Unlike many of my ancestors, I have never had to go to bed on an empty stomach, never had to worry about where my daughter’s next meal would come from. Farmers work awfully hard to make that so. Their farms are dirty, crowded, overrun with the junk they can’t afford to toss out or hope to use again.
Real farms are not pretty, they are not spotless, some of the smells can stop you cold.
If their pigs chew up up my lawn once in awhile, it’s fine by me.
We have lost touch with farms and food and the natural world, we often make the farmer’s life pure Hell, paving our roads with good intentions and passing all kinds of laws and regulations that make their lives harder and less profitable so that urban people can feel good about themselves.
It is easy to say there are too many farmers, if you are not one. Or that farmers are too dirty, cruel, smelly and chaotic to exist with perfectly manicured lawns. We are perhaps the first country in the history of the earth to fill our stores and markets for centuries with good, cheap and plentiful food while countless millions of people have starved all over the world.
Today, with thousands of farm families losing their farms every year, and most of the public far removed from the real lives of farmers, we may one day soon rediscover that farms are more precious than lawns if we want our families and children to eat. But we may have to learn the lesson the hard way, as farm after farm falls into the glutinous hands of giant corporations, many of whom are crueler to animals than Joshua Rockwood would or could ever be.
I was happy to see Joshua, he is doing well. Despite his horrible year, his business is growing again, he is selling pork, poultry and beef, he has a lot of new customer for his popular and healthy meats, and he is now a tough warrior in the deepening struggles of the small farmer to survive in the corporate nation, where we take our food so much for granted.
He has exciting plans to expand his farming work, he is a strong and honest man, if anyone can do it, he can.
Joshua is not afraid, he seems resigned to the fact that there will always be police in his life now, the secret informers will always slither by with their long lenses, there will always be people happy to call the sheriff rather than talk to him, people who will always love lawns more than farmers, some neighbors have no idea of what it means to be a neighbor, and there will always be people who so emotionalize the lives of animals that they have stripped the farmers of much of their own humanity and dignity.
Perhaps what we need is to emotionalize the farmers, to call them our furbabies, see them as piteous and abused, to build them no-kill farms that can never go under, re-home them when disaster strikes, and worry about whether they can be kept with their mothers for life. What a gift to Mother Earth that would be.