The End of Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

had plowed through one of our fences and was harassing the neighbors’ milk cows.
    Still, my father kept at it, building up the herd until at last we had more than thirty head of cattle, odd hybrids of Holsteins, white-faced Herefords, and Black Angus. In a way, my father was a man who was ahead of his time. Nowadays, of course, grass-fed, range-raised beef is the meat of choice for enlightened, environmentally sensitive, and compassionate foodies, and with good reason. It is far less cruel than raising the beasts in cramped, filthy corporate feedlots, where they’re shot full of drugs and chemicals. But back then, few people gave much thought to such concerns, focusing instead on the plentiful, uniformly flavorful, and reliably tender meat that corporate farming provided.
    My father was one of the few who resisted the technocorporate approach to farming. Apart from his unreasoning hatred of woodchucks, he was really a softhearted guy who objected to the fundamental cruelty of factory farming. He couldn’t stand the thought of animals suffering in cattle concentration camps. What’s more, after spending years working for the pharmaceutical industry, he had come to be skeptical of what he saw as its excesses, and as a result he was none too keen on feeding his food drugs, either.
    To him, free-range beef farming was the only way to go. Unfortunately, my father had made more than a few flawed assumptions in sketching out his grand vision for the farm. The first was that he believed that if he simply gave his herd a reasonably open range, providing them with hay only when it was necessary, the cows would reward him by fattening themselves up and turning themselves into succulent steaks and burgers. Modern farmers who raise grass-fed beef now understand that their herds, like any other crop, have to be rotated, that their pastures must be rested and fertilized and replenished, that their cows should be introduced to fresh pastures a few acres at a time and, before that pasture is played out, moved to the next.
    My father took a far more laissez-faire approach, letting his herdwander wherever it pleased whenever it pleased. The result was that the pastures were quickly ravaged, and once they were, the herd would scramble up and down the steep, rocky inclines to the next patch of grass. All that exercise made them healthy and happy—every cow in the herd was buff enough to have won a spot on the Soviet Union’s Olympic shot put team. But as a commodity, they were next to useless. It’s fat that gives meat its tenderness and its flavor, and there wasn’t an ounce of it on those animals.
    As a result, whenever we’d cart a few off to auction, the buyers would poke them a few times with their cane, shake their heads gloomily, and offer as little as possible for the creatures, figuring that they could grind them into hamburger or, in a pinch, use them for dog food.
    For our part, we had a few slaughtered for ourselves, and our nightly meals tended to be silent affairs, with the four of us chewing, and chewing, and chewing, until the tasteless meat could be forced down our esophagi with only minor danger of choking. A culinary buddy system developed. It became standard practice in our house never to eat meat alone, just in case.
    Still, my old man kept at it, and he pressed me into service. In the fall, I’d string barbed wire around the pastures and the hay fields, but only when he forced me to. I’d cut and stack hay in the summer—that was far more fun, because we had worked out an agreement with the neighbors to share the work and the hay, so it became a social event. We’d work from just after dawn until milking time at dusk, feverishly tossing thousands of 25-pound bales of fresh-cut timothy and alfalfa to each other in a kind of hay bale bucket brigade, stacking them in a crisscross pattern until we had built a wall forty feet high in the haymow in the barn. On Sundays we didn’t put in hay; that was the day of rest.