Why I Farm

Image Gallery Beano, Buster and Bryan. NATHAN HAM

Twenty-five years ago I was an enthusiastic hiker and backpacker. A skier and a climber. I probably spent 45 days a year in the outdoors and slept outside five or six nights a year. I lived in a city, and I tried to get into the nearby mountains every chance I had, but it wasn’t much.

These days, I watch the sun come up several times a week. I know what’s blooming and which birds are coming through. I know how it feels to be outside on the worst night of the year watching coyotes try to open the door of the henhouse. Now that I am a farmer, I see much more of nature than I did when I was outdoors purely for recreation. For me, the difference between hiking and farming is the difference between listening to music and playing music. As a hiker, I enjoy the dramatic rhythms and splashy vistas of the mountains. As a farmer, I am part of the dense, varied, vigorous symphony of the prairie.

Raising our Own Meat

I write this during the most bittersweet of our seasons: late fall or early winter, depending on the day and the weather. It’s the time of year when we kill the animals­ — the cattle, sheep and goats — that we raise for meat for ourselves and our friends.

Just a few months ago they were the spirits of spring, filling the pastures with the joyful, bouncing exuberance of new life. In a few weeks their meat will be in my freezers, and my friends’, on our tables and in our bodies.

People often ask, “How can you eat your own animals?” Sometimes it’s a sincere question, meant to explore the emotions associated with raising your own meat. But often it’s more of an accusation, as in: “How can you be so callous?” So in response I might ask, “How can you be so cruel as to eat animals without knowing them? Without knowing how they lived? Without making sure they were treated kindly and with respect?”

My father, both my grandfathers and all my great-grandparents were grass farmers. It’s quite likely that every generation of my family since prehistoric times has followed a herd of grazing animals — either wild or domesticated — through its lifetime and down its nomadic path across the ages. We have always lived in direct contact and in a kind of kinship with the animals that provide our food. I believe it’s a “natural” relationship in the deepest and most profound sense of that word.