Even the first lamb had needed help, but delivering the second one required the expertise of someone with much more shepherding experience than me. Instead, on the coldest night we’ve ever had before or since (23˚F below zero), it was my responsibility to help get this lamb born, and the only lamb I had ever seen born was barely an hour old. If you know anything about lambing, you’ll immediately recognize the problem, because it shouldn’t be an hour between twin lambs.
Up at the house, my wife, Mary, was drying off and warming up the chilly first lamb while talking on the phone with the vet. She returned to the barn and relayed his advice: push the head back in, find the second front leg and bring both of them forward. The ewe was exhausted at trying to get a lamb out whose shoulders were all bunched up because only one leg was forward – what the maneuver would do is get the lamb into the streamlined form akin to someone diving into water, arms stretched out in front. Somehow I accomplished the rearrangement, though it took precious minutes, and I was fearing as much for the ewe’s life as for the lamb’s. That’s why I was willing to pull as hard as I did, knowing that it was going to be more my pulling than her pushing that was going to do the trick.
The little black lamb lay on the straw, covered in amniotic membrane and not moving a muscle. I assumed that the trauma of birth, of which I’d been such a part, had killed it. In case it still had a chance, I cleared the membrane from around its mouth and nose. When a couple of seconds later, that lamb sucked in some air and shook its head, I sucked in some air myself and shook my head in disbelief. A minute later, it was on its feet, struggling to find the udder.
How did two novice shepherds find themselves in that situation? After buying some land and building a house on it nearly 20 years ago, we were eager to try to coax some sort of living from the land. Having read the 1935 classic Five Acres and Independence, we set out to develop a life for ourselves in the country. Our 25 acres seemed like a kingdom.
We were drawn to livestock because we had a beautiful two-acre meadow in front of the house that we wanted to keep open, since it was that combination of open land and forestland that had brought us back to New England. Sheep were the logical choice, because they’d be easier to handle than cattle. We’d sell wool and meat and have a steady supply of sheep manure for the garden, which would produce a surplus of vegetables we could sell at farmers markets, and we would be connected to the land in a way that we had both been longing for.
We fenced the field in sections, bought a small flock of Corriedale ewes, built a barn, and went about the business of becoming shepherds. Mary learned everything there is to know about wool, took up spinning, and sold fleece to other handspinners. Lambs were sold for meat and occasionally for a better price as breeding stock. After salting the skins, we had them tanned and sold them or gave them as gifts. We were welcomed into what turned out to be a wonderful community of sheep farmers.
Difficult deliveries aside, working with the animals provided great pleasure. We worked to improve our flock, our land, and the financial picture, but no matter what we did, we could never turn even a small profit. Despite the strength of our commitment, I concluded that it was never going to be anything more than a hobby. And I further concluded that if I were given a choice of hobby, it wouldn’t be raising sheep. So, after a decade of flinging around hay bales, mucking out the barn each spring, and learning more than I ever hoped to about sheep obstetrics, we gave up that particular dream.
Along the way, land adjacent to ours had become available at a price we thought reasonable, so our acreage grew to 100 acres, nearly all of it forest. We were forestland owners almost as if by accident, because it had been land that we were buying, not specifically forestland. Since then, I’ve met so many other accidental forestland owners. Whether they inherited or bought a piece of land, chances are it was forest because nearly 75 percent of the land in the Northeast (New England and New York) is forested.
But if you were to go by calendars and images in travel sections, you would think that New England was still predominantly the home of the family farm. Who doesn’t love that image? More so even than a white church on the village green, the singular icon of New England is the image of a red barn, white farmhouse, and black-and-white cows grazing in green meadows.
It’s been more than a century since farming was the predominant land use, because starting even before the Civil War, farmers abandoned the Northeast as flatter farmland opened up in the Midwest. All that’s left of most of those white farmhouses and red barns are cellar holes and barn ramps hidden in the woods. The green meadows have grown up to green forests.
But in the mind of the public, the pastoral image will always trump the one conjured up by forestry. In the world of public relations, it’s impossible for a logger with a skidder and a chainsaw to compete with cows and tractors. Most people can drive by a 20-acre cornfield skinned to stubble every year and see it as a vantage point offering lovely views of woods, barns, and streams. But if a half-acre is cleared for a log landing, it’s enough to evoke horror.
Yet, that landing and all that it represents has more to do with the continuation of the rural landscape than agriculture does. Why? Because the number of people who own forestland and the number of acres they own is many orders of magnitude larger than their farming counterparts. The forest that you see out the car window is more than likely owned by an individual or a family – not the government or a timber company. Across New England and New York, there are 451,000 people who own at least 10 acres of forestland. This mosaic of owners forms a big picture of a forest totaling more than 50 million acres that at least in the rural regions is still relatively intact. In addition to these forestland owners, there are many thousands of people who participate in the forest economy – the loggers, truckers, foresters, and all those who make a living turning wood into paper, lumber, furniture, and electricity.
And not only is all that activity good for the rural economy and the communities that depend on it, it is absolutely crucial for the long-term ecological health of the region. The single issue that you can find nearly universal agreement on – even among people who are usually on opposite sides of a shouting match – is that one of the most serious problems facing the rural Northeast today is the parcelization of the land. As forestland gets subdivided, and begins to be criss-crossed by roads and powerlines, and pockmarked with housing lots, the ecological benefits it provides to society are diminished. A forest thus compromised is less effective at filtering and storing water, less able to clean up the air, and less hospitable to many of the wildlife species that make this region so biologically diverse.
But if the thousands of people who make up the landowning mosaic can hold onto that land and not subdivide it, those functions continue. Some people are blessed with sufficient wealth that they can own land without it being productive. But many people are not in that boat. For them, the land needs to be a source of some revenue to justify holding onto it.
As our family farm morphed into our family forest, our initial supposition that we could make the land pay proved not to be so naïve after all. Over the years, we’ve had five timber sales, and nearly all of the land has now seen some harvesting. Income from the sales has paid the property taxes on the land (yes, we’re enrolled in the state’s current use program, which reduces tax on productive land) and has left us on average with $6.70 per acre per year. A pittance, you might say, but not if you consider that we’re not doing anything besides entrusting the land to a forester and a logger whose work fills us with confidence we’re doing the right thing. The source of most of that income has been the poorer-quality trees, leaving the better ones to grow in size and value, because our strategy is to increase the value of the timber over the long haul.
The beauty of owning forestland is that trees grow on their own. On average, you can expect your forest to grow half a cord per acre per year. Forest management is simply making decisions about which trees will put on that growth.
I am a relatively active owner, having found how much I enjoy puttering in my woods. I fell poorly formed trees, removing them for firewood if they’re near a road; if not, I leave them to return nutrients to the soil and provide food and shelter for a system of animals that inhabit the forest floor. I free wild apple trees from competition and prune the best-looking white pines.
This work is fun, but it’s more than a hobby, it’s an investment. It doesn’t provide income today, but it will enhance value tomorrow. This process is happening on thousands of family forests across the region.
Today’s farmers, including those operating on a scale that dwarfs what we attempted, continue to be working against a frightening equation: high costs of everything they need – feed, equipment, fuel, and land, let alone health insurance – and low prices for their products, due largely to subsidized competition from huge farms outside the region.
Still, people continue to find ways to farm because it’s in their blood. Many are diversifying and finding ways to not rely solely on the milk check. They’re making cheese or yogurt, raising beef or other meat, and some are growing vegetables for subscribers in a model called community supported agriculture, or CSA for short. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that the demands of scale are pushing agriculture in a decidedly industrial direction. I applaud the farmers who are fending off all the challenges that come their way, and I am grateful for what they do.
I hope that policymakers understand the incredible benefit to society of being able to buy nutritious food grown on local farms. But I also hope that they don’t lose sight of the far-reaching benefits of keeping this forest mosaic from shattering into a million pieces.