I went to the Farm!

I saw goats and pigs and roosters and turkeys and cows and dogs. Good lord, I want a goat.

This adventure was the brainchild of my cousin. He saw Food Inc. over the week and wanted to price the alternative. Our plan was to visit White Egret, Boggy Creek, and Springdale farms. The latter two are produce farms that are only a short bike ride from my house. White Egret is a livestock ranch, and so by virtue of necessity, is out in Webberville. Coincidentally this is just a few miles down the street from my house.

Where I work, there are goats. They belong to 4-H Austin. Where I work, people often talk of finding a happy place to suppress the urge to flip out. My place is making fog clouds on a window watching goats stand on top of stuff.

There wasn't much question of where to go first, especially considering that I'd never heard of this place. The drive to Webberville was short, probably about 10 minutes from my house, and easy--down MLK past the toll road and the water tower in Webberville that, because of the angle that it faces the road, reads "Austin's Colon." Driving out there is strange because of how quickly the city turns into farm land. Neighborhoods break away to scrub and abandoned strip malls, and these quickly break away to scrag trees and open rolling pasture land. This probably isn't a permanent condition, so go see it now.

White Egret farm is right off the main road about a quarter of a mile past the only gas station out there. There is a sign, but I still missed it because I was going too fast. Once in I faced the perils of gravel roads, mud, and the unlikeliness of a Honda Civic interacting with either. Unstuck, I made it around the final curve in the road and I was greeted by the songs of all of the animals on the farm. It was loud. Loud through my windows, through the sound of soft jazz that is my soundtrack on adventures. And when I pulled up I got a quizzical look from a woman with a quart of Borden in her hand who told me to park anywhere if I wanted.

We went over to the woman and told her our mission and she replied that she didn't sell any produce. Then, fumbling for the right words, we tried again and explained that by produce we meant that we wanted to pet her goats and maybe eat some of their cheese. That seemed to click with her. Because it turns out that White Egret isn't a farm, but a goat dairy, out preaching the good word of the healthful benefits of drinking unpasteruized goat's milk. Ok. I think goats are hella cute. The woman told us we could look around and that she would be back with a catalogue.

The goats live under a large pavilion, open at both ends with a walkway up the middle and pens on either side of this. The pens seemed to function only to keep the straw in place, because the goats came in and out of these at their leisure. And by leisure I mean that one goat with little horns on his head would sprint by and shortly after about 20 other goats would chase after him, bleating. Then they would all get outside and stand on top of things.

Scattered up and down the hall way were these big white fluffy things. After I was finished petting the goats, these fluffs stirred and came to get theirs. I was actually kind of terrified by this, because the big fluffy things turned out to be Great Pyrenees. Heads the size of bowling balls, paws larger than my outstretched hand. And they had to bend their heads down to rub it on my thigh. So of course I obliged. And as I did, more showed up, loafed up from under piles of hay, coming and going to get a scratch, so that I was constantly surrounded by three or four dogs. It was hard to distinguish one from the other, the way their loafing and fluffing morphed into one another, but I was sure that I counted no less than ten of them under the pavilion.

This whole time around us we were surrounded by noise. I couldn't believe how many animals there were. And they were all making noise. Roosters flew in and out of everything around us, and then fell clumsily in the middle of their shows of bravado. Cats mewed from the coziest corners of the pens and far off in the distance in the hog wash came the noise of unabashed hedonism. That would be, the pigs. Or hogs. Big, huge black things.

On the way out to look at the pigs we ran into the woman we had seen earlier. She handed us an order form and explained how things worked. We didn't actually have to go out to the farm to pick stuff up because they delivered. There is no limit to how much you have to buy, and only a four dollar delivery fee. All you have to do is place the order and leave an ice chest outside of your door and they bring the goods on ice.

After this we introduced ourselves. The woman's name was Lee, or Leigh. She is a small woman with glasses and a careful, observant look to her face. She has a serious manner that betrays business ownership and animal husbandry, and a sophisticated vocabulary that places her somewhere outside of the manure and mud and grey leafless trees of this farm outside of Austin. On her finger is a large opal, which I clued as a tale-tale sign of an adolescence in the 60's.

Farming was, for her, "a hereditary problem." Her grandfathers on both sides had been farmers in Iowa, but her own father had wanted nothing to do with "anything that could turn four legs up and die." She had received a degree in Biology and then after doing some biological consulting for farms had began her own farm in 1978 in Illinois. In '91 she packed up the whole operation and moved to Austin.

I asked her if a background in biology meant that she had a different approach, more scientific, to farming. But she told me no, that it was much more intuitive than that. She could walk through a farm and look around and tell you everything about the farm, and even to the point that she could do it over the phone. She does read scientific papers, but knowing the entire proper functioning of a farm must be something organic that you feel right and wrong, and then proceed diagnostically, because an organized scientific readout would trail on into inanity.

Then she told us about the farm as it is now now. There are about 400 goats. Many of which were pregnant. She pointed those out for us to see. If we were lucky, she said, we might even get to see one give birth today. This never happened. I don't know if we were lucky or not. At one point in our conversation she politely told us to excuse her, and she ran off into a clump of goats who were not standing on top of things. Returning, she told us that she had only seen an optical illusion, that she thought she had seen a leg sticking out of the back of the goat. I don't know anything about animals, because for a second I was wondering what they must be putting in the goat's milk that enabled her to see legs sticking out of goats, and how that might be kind of cool, until I realized that expectation as much as anything can control your expectations.

All of her animals exceed organic certification, because they eat in a pasture, but she is not certified as so. Achieving organic certification for grazing animals involves a process of certifying the pasture land that can take several years, and from what I understand many ranches forgo this measure.

Then Lee showed us the pigs, and explained that if a pig is not properly contained (in this case behind a triple row of electric wire) it will route out any water lines on the property and make a new wallow for itself. As if to concur with this, the biggest, ugliest of the hogs bellowed out a squeal and began to harass a smaller, more demure pig that seemed to be going through some issues at the moment. She's in heat, Lee said, and this big one, that's the male, he's trying to mount her.

On the way out to show us the turkeys, Lee turned to the state of modern farming. What she owns would be considered a medium sized integrated farm. Larger than a hobby farm, but significantly smaller than the corporate farms where most of the food I eat comes from. Integrated means that the animals eat together, live together, and sustain each other--a simple construct that attempts to mimic the success of an ecosystem. When they go out to pasture all of the animals go out together. But, Lee told us, this farm is a dying breed. Especially with summers like the last. During drought weather plants retain high concentrations of nitrates from the soil, which in turn acts like a toxin to the animals that eat it. Watering is expensive, and even with that, her goats were still dry. That means no milk, on a dairy farm.

But it was a rainy day when I was there and goat babies usually come during christmas time. They make all of the cheeses on site, and in fact vertically integrate everything on site, and were planning on having completely replenished stocks of everything in four weeks.

The turkeys were a large cluster of white around two very large red turkeys. They were two types. Lee pointed to the cluster and explained that they bunched like that because they were hungry. The gate opened and a slow flood of turkeys engulfed our feet. They shit with excitement and covered our ankles. Lee was unfazed, and I tried to hold my breath without showing it. The red ones were antique turkeys, an interesting flavor; the white, double breasted turkeys. They are capable getting 50% of their food through foraging, and this also improves the flavor, as well as sustaining the other animals. Tomorrow, Lee told us, the people from the TV show Friday Night Lights were coming to film a scene with these turkeys. Lee asked us if we were from UT, and we told her no. Lots of people from the schools come out here, she said. Then she asked us the time and told us we could look around as long as we wanted, but that she had to leave. It was dump day, one of the least glamorous days on the farm.

Before she left I asked her where the goats grazed and she pointed to some 400 acres beyond the trees. "The dogs work at night," she said, "I don't really understand it. They laze around all day and then work at night, two or three at a time, but goats won't go out in the rain. They don't like mud."