The news of the late-night robbery hurts, and I don’t even depend on those tomato and bean plants to pay my bills.
“Went down this morning to find a dastardly deer had entered the greenhouse through the side flap and had a delightful feast of my bean and tomato leaves,” Gwynn’s e-mail says.
“Oh. My. God,” I write back. I take it personally, having helped weed and mulch those beds with dusty straw.
Working a half-day a week on Stonecrop Farm in Giles County, Va., has pretty much destroyed any romantic illusions I might have had about the lives of people who grow food. But the meaning of this loss was different from my other “ah ha” moments.
It’s different from realizing how much pure muscle power and emotional stamina it takes to work all day in the summer sun and worry at night about the crushing drought that’s draining the stream that keeps the crops and the chickens alive.
It’s different from realizing how much courage it takes to face a black snake wrapped around one of your pullets with only a shovel and a water hose.
It’s different even from the realization that many farmers go without health insurance, simply taking their chances that the tractor won’t one day turn over or some other injury or illness won’t strike.
But a deer, like a locust infestation or a drought, is something larger, something far outside the farmer’s control. And the loss is so simple, yet so absolute and therefore shocking. The hours of work seeding, transplanting, mulching and watering those greenhouse crops is wasted, and with it some of the fall’s precious profit has gone into the deer’s belly.
I think to myself that we can only hope Bert, Gwynn’s husband and co-farmer, will find that deer in the woods, and the family will feast on it this winter. What a sweet-tasting stew that would be, subtly flavored by tomato and snap bean.
But on the phone later, Gwynn’s processed it, she’s moved on. They didn’t really have an assured market for those plantings anyway, she says. The lettuces and brassicas are still OK. And the poor deer, well, it must have been desperate to come in through the greenhouse like that, given the strong smell of humans and Walter the dog, all of which normally keeps them at bay. The drought — which may turn out to be the worst on record — is hurting them, too, she says.
I remember another organic vegetable farmer, Martin Miles of Lee County, who told me once: “An old farmer is dumb. You can knock him down, but then he comes right back up.”
Stonecrop Farm, Giles County, Va.
U.D. drought condition monitor http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
Tags: deer damage, drought, Giles County, Stonecrop farm, Virginia
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