Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This was written in the 1990s, when we were farming in Cape Breton.

Visitors who know next to nothing about it seem fascinated by the economics of our minuscule farming operation, and the impression they give is that their questions are driven by ambivalent impulses: on the one hand, they want to prove to themselves that our life, reminiscent of back-to-the-landers of the 60s and 70s, is so financially unsound as to sink it below their horizons of possibility; on the other hand, they wish us well and want to think that we can turn a dollar at even our most outlandish activities.

I would not scoff at economics - every life must be judged, at some point, by the principles of cost accounting - but such an inquiry often seems barren to me, as a path that leads into a thicket of misunderstanding, often with comic aspects. Now and then, however, I learn something, and that redeems much.

Thus, this conversation yesterday morning: Turning to glance at the clock on top of the Hoosier kitchen cabinet, I announced "six minutes," gave the churn handle a last turn, and lifted the lid to peer in at the chunks of yellow butter dropping from the wooden paddles into the thick buttermilk. Jo Ann, busy packing curds into a cheese mold, murmured an approving "Mmm." The visitor sitting at the massive table that stretches down the middle of our kitchen looked thoughtfully at the clock. I pulled the cork at the bottom of the churn and the buttermilk streamed into gallon jars.

"Is there much call for that?" the visitor asked, nodding at the jars as I put them at the end of the table.

I shrugged. "Some. Drunks, mostly."

"Drunks?"

"They drink it before a bat on the theory that it coats the stomach, and afterwards as a hangover cure."

"I never heard of that," he said wonderingly.

I said:

Nor I, til we moved to Cape Breton. It isn't as common as it used to be. I knew a guy used to run one of those little stores in Sydney they call a "dairy," and he told me that 30 years ago there was tremendous demand for the stuff after a weekend. There was a big crock of it on the counter, thing with a spigot, and he said Monday mornings it was all he could do to keep that crock filled.

The buttermilk disposed of, I washed the butter by pouring cold water into the churn, turning the handle a dozen times, and draining the whey-like liquid into a bucket for the pig and turkeys. When the liquid was virtually clear after three washings, I scooped the golden masses of butter out onto a wide breadboard placed over the sink. Now I worked the last vestiges of buttermilk out, pressing the butter back and forth with a broad spoon I carved out of red oak for this very purpose when we lived in Vermont. In a few minutes the butter, a smooth solid mass in the middle of the board, was weighed - five and a quarter pounds - and set on the table. Now Jo Ann took over, first to work salt into it and then to print it, forming one-pound blocks in a mold and wrapping them in butter paper.

During this time the visitor had been a silent, but obviously preoccupied observer. Now he spoke up. "So the actual churning time for the two batches of butter was 13 minutes, seven for one and six for the other."

"Yes," I said, wondering where the conversation was headed, but already having a pretty good guess. I removed the handle and paddles from the churn and washed it with scalding water.

"How long does it take from beginning to end, all of it?" he asked, waving his hand at the counter, heaped high with breakfast dishes, the milk pails, and all the jars, pots, and implements needful to make two batches of butter and a six-pound Farmer's Cheese.

"Oh, an hour and a half, maybe three quarters, from the time I set up the churn and take the cream out of the refrigerator until the last dish is done."

He did some mental arithmetic and then he announced with some satisfaction that I was earning between 20 and 23 dollars making butter. I went out to the porch and turned the churn upside down in the sun, debating with myself whether I should cooperate and let the fatuity stand, or throw some more data into the mix. "Well," I said, reentering the kitchen with a frown of concentration, "You also have to figure in milking time, say another 10 or 15 minutes for every couple of gallons of milk"

"Oh" he said, "Of course," but then he had to know how much of the milk was cream. I left him to his calculations while I began the dishes. The gallon jars were washed and dried before he had his figures adjusted. That's when I introduced haying time. . . . His air of purposeful concern gradually faded. He looked blank for a moment. Then he frowned, shook his head, threw up his hands, and declared that we probably weren't making a cent on the butter.

"Umhmm," I said noncommitally.

Done with her cheese, Jo Ann came over to dry dishes, and we worked quietly for a few minutes until I came to the big stainless steel pots which must have reminded the visitor of the butter - I had heated the cream in one of the them - because he suddenly said, gesturing at the pots, "Why? Why do you bother if you're losing money on it?"

So he was determined to go the distance, was he? Up to this point I had been kidding around, hoping I wouldn't have to go into the subject seriously; I hate having to justify our life. There was a time 40 years ago when I liked nothing better, but I was young and feisty then.

"Before I answer that," I said,

. . . I should explain that we don't lose money on butter. The economics of our dairy operations are a little intricate, and some things are more profitable than others, but nothing is a loss. For example, the same gallon of cream that makes two pounds of butter - seven dollars - I can sell for 20 dollars. Cream is our most profitable dairy product, butter our least, but even if I had a market for all our cream I'd still make butter. Why? Pride. We're one of the last farms still making butter, and you can't buy the equal of ours anywhere. And it brings a lot of customers in here who buy other stuff.

Maybe that would satisfy him; maybe I could leave it at that.

But now Jo Ann took the conversation in a new and more interesting direction.

Oh, there's much more to it than butter and cream and prices! From the milk we make cheese, and curds - what city people call cottage cheese - and we drink the milk and use it in cooking, and we make all kinds of things - pancakes, and muffins and biscuits and doughnuts - with buttermilk. We feed milk or milky waste to cats and a dog, as well as pigs and turkeys and chickens - then there's the manure - where would be without it? There are nine raised garden beds, that's nearly 2,000 square feet, and they're all filled to a depth of eight or 10 inches with the summer manure that's been piled and left to rot for a year. Then the other plantings, gardens and fruit trees and bushes and shrubs, are manured every year, and the fields and pastures are manured on a regular rotation, too. The enriched land grows the forage, not just to produce milk but also meat, and it also feeds the horses that do all the work. . . . Why, there's cow in everything we do!

The visitor nodded, but it was without the conviction her impressive speech should have elicited. I suppose he accepted what she said in a theoretical way - he didn't disbelieve her - but he could not feel the full force of her argument; the things she spoke of were static entities in his eyes: a garden, a field, trees, while to her they were a process: different forms of the farm's energy in development.

Whether or not I could have successfully introduced this insight into the conversation was moot because that was when the party broke up and the visitor went his way, thinking what thoughts of our domestic economy I dared not imagine. As I went my own way about the farm, doing my work, however, I pondered the idea. Jo Ann's forceful speech was not news to me, of course; the centrality of cattle in our farm economy I have known since we bought our first cow in 1962, but the abstraction of that fact - the flow of energy through different forms - I had not consciously thought much about.

I was reminded of a wonderful booklet I have, The Cow: The Mother of Prosperity, published in 1921 by International Harvester Company, a thorough, practical guide to keeping cows. It is more than that, though - it's bovine boosterism epitomized by declarations like this:

We need cows, good cows, well cared for cows, wherever folks live and fields are farmed and grasses grow.

That's fine with me, although I have no illusions that the folks will respond; today's agricultural situation is a far cry from what it was in 1921. For one thing, fewer cows produce much more milk, and for another, the herds are very much larger, so the regime at a modern farm - how the cows are handled, what's done with the milk, the way manure is kept and used, and so on - must necessarily be radically different from what goes on at the Gardner Farm. Nevertheless, I think we - modern farmers with large herds and lots of sophisticated machinery, as well as the reactionary Gardners - would agree with this statement by W. E. Hoard, the founder of the magazine Hoard's Dairyman:

The cow is the foster mother of the human race - from the day of the ancient Hindoo to this time have the thoughts of men turned to this kindly and beneficent creature as one of the chief sustaining forces of human life. *