trust the spirit
after a confusing legal battle between this website, usweekly, and people mag over who has first rights to pictures of oprah’s newborns, i’m happy to announce that the first photographs of our newborns will be released tomorrow.
one of the most amazing things about my apprenticeship has been its serendipitous timing. my interest in moving to georgia and learning to farm occurred within days of full moon farms physically relocating, and as far as infrastructure is concerned, restarting from scratch. seeing a farm develop from the ground up will be an invaluable experience when i start my own farm down the road.
this is a cartoon on the dangers of factory farming put out in two thousand three by sustainable table, the same group behind the eat well guide. although this cartoon is old news, being featured on farm 255’s farm dirt back in the winter of oh six (hello archives), and since being trasnlated into dozens of languages around the world, i somehow managed to miss it until last night.
i hope you enjoy it as much as i did.
I'm High On Cooking | in Environment, Farm, Food, Health, Restaurants, VIDEOS, livestock, sustainability 
after three months of intense and private rehearsals, pork chop hill’s elite synchronized swine quintet, the pot-bellied flops, held a dance recital on the main stage wallow. communities of wild hogs choreographing elaborate dance routines for mating orgies have been recorded since early human cave drawings, straight through to journals on the american homesteading frontier. the existence of these communities of synchronized swine dramatically predates the origins of the now olympic level sport by over seven thousand years. it is of no coincidence that the sport’s official selection as a summer olympic sport in the mid eighties came at the exact moment as the hog industry’s still famous pork: the other white meat campaign.
dirt farmer—old, sweaty, dirt farmer,
crawling in those thick weeds,
seven years of that pulling,
each year they spread seed.
from there in the garden, manicuring colored rails,
order, form, and predictability superficially veils
the dirt farmer’s truth, that the work that he does pales
when compared, to nature’s own, hidden detail.
above, in, and under the dirt on his face,
the earth churns and toils at it’s own frantic pace.
if he stopped for some time, ordering this chaos, that he temporarily maintains,
the whole farm would be swallowed, turned back into forest, with a few season’s rain.
his work in the garden, he learned over time,
not from thick books, but from trying to find
how far to push nature without crossing the line.
how much to take, while remaining benign.
his knowings unwhole, some facts but a guess,
each season’s follies, he’ll try to digest
another tiny hint of what’s hidden beneath,
as the true magic and work happens below his two feet.
the most surprising thing about slaughtering a hundred chickens is how enjoyable the process can be. you’ve never seen a happier bunch of people—mostly eager volunteers—surrounded by buckets of blood, feathers, heads, and guts. like a well oiled machine of all human cogs, we grab, crate, slit, drain, scald, pluck, behead, delimb, eviscerate, wash, check and chill in smooth unison. like any impressive group effort—like a perfectly timed band, or spain over the dutch—the true magic comes when all start flowing as one.