TL;DR

We harvested beets, kale and carrots today, then prepared seed garlic. I also assisted a clean out of two month old chicken bedding to prepare the coop for the next round of meat birds.

In the morning, we broke apart garlic heads for cloves as seed for next year’s crop. I love the smell of garlic, even if I’m not eating it, even if it’s triggering my arthritic pains to work with. Like harvesting basil and biting into crispy fresh carrots, the sensory on the farm can be very close to addictive.

However, and this is a big ‘however’, considering the pig and chicken shit smells that my nose feels from my fingers to my toes after what we just did, I’m thinking that Tom Hanks must have also mucked out some stalls to arrive at his favorite curse word, ‘horseshit’ (as shared on Inside the Actor’s Studio and also lauded by Seth Green, another favorite of mine). I grew up mucking out horse stables, so the smell of hay and alfalfa is lovely for me, ammonia aside. At least for today my favorite curse word is ‘chickenshit’…and I will gladly explain why forthwith.

‘Meat Seedlings’

After working around animals raised on a farm as future food for only one season and not involved in the worst parts of the job, there are many similarities to tending and harvesting vegetal crops. You have to water them, observe how they’re maturing, feed them appropriate to their needs, and harvest them at the right time. This leads to my internal dialog referring to them as ‘meat seedlings’, despite a pejorative and frankly utilitarian tone. I do this for my own sanity and not trivially as a reminder that, while vegetable seedlings have less in common biologically with their farming overlords than various other creatures you’d commonly find around a farm, they’re still tasked to people who raise both for human consumption.

If you don’t like this fact, stop eating poultry or pork or beef. Call it like that, by its food name and not its animal names like chicken, pig, or cow. An “all cow pattie” doesn’t sound the same as the marketing slogans of your average American burger joint, now does it? “Pulled pig” sounds painful but no BBQ restaurant would be caught without a menu option of the like, despite all the rest of their items being lesser steeped in carnal destructive tendencies.

Still, the fact is that I still eat all kinds of meat, despite smelling of and caring for animals in service of all kinds of dark human cravings. Maybe some day, I’ll become a veg-o-terrarian, but I don’t think so. Some things are deeper ingrained than even I can change. And don’t feel bad that you do either, unless you work on a farm with those co-habitants and can’t stomach the idea of smelling like their shit and then eating their flesh within the same day.

Humane Farming and Meat Raising

I’ve thought a lot about what it means that Jamie the farm operator chooses to raise meat on this farm. He’s one of the most patient and kind individuals I’ve ever met, extremely humble and hard working, and I can’t have intentionally stumbled upon a better example of what small farming should be. If only there were more people around here to do the hard work of producing food for others then maybe the cost of meat wouldn’t be so scoffed at by pedestrian consumers.

The thing is, you have to be consigned to the fact that people eat meat. Following that, you have to also be pragmatic about the fact that people crave meat and will eat based on their (perceived) placement on a Maslow hierarchy of needs. When they can afford Japanese yakitori, they will pay so much money for it. When some friends of mine want a homestyle soup dumpling but don’t eat pork, they’ll find a way to make shrimp and/or vegetables work instead. So after only a year of working on this farm, I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone you know isn’t raising meat humanely, then either you’re shooting and cleaning it yourself or you’re buying generic hormone and antibiotic-laden meat from the supermarket, despite the false labeling and marketing that goes on there.

So that’s what we do on this farm, we raise cage-free fully-organic chickens and pigs, and we do it with love and care. It’s a messy business, not insanely profitable, but ethical and humane. It’s a lot of hard work, as the following long-format video shows in visual form (but not smell, thankfully for viewers).

Farm ‘Operator’ or ‘Orchestrator’?

For many months now, I thought I had identified the right terminology for differentiating farm land ownership, functional administration, and key staff roles by using the term ‘farm operator’ to describe the person who is responsible for the prioritization of day-to-day operations of the farm. But there’s so much to what Jamie does every moment of ever day on this farm, how the decisions between owner and ‘operator’ and other staff are made in concert with each other that I think a more appropriate term might be ‘orchestrator’.

An orchestrator plans and crafts what should happen, not what will for sure. They create the boundaries and conditions for everything that happens to be as close to optimal as possible. There is an audience, in this farm’s case it is a CSA membership, farmer’s market goers, partner institutions, and soon the general public through the general store in Essex. Jamie orchestrates a cacophony of activities, fixes, natural elements, corresponding adjustments, and communications to make the whole thing work out well. People rave about the farm fresh eggs but most will probably never know how much chickenshit a farm orchestrator deals with to get them to market…and that’s okay too.

AI Summary from Field Notes

Tomorrow is my ‘tech day’ of the week and I have a huge backlog, but the things I’m most looking forward to closing out on in my homelab are:

1. Solidify my distributed tracing setup infrastructure
2. Adding deeper tracing across service boundaries
3. Adding graceful fail mechanisms to the trace-producing clients

Today’s summary stands as is…I have enough to do above and around the house and still don’t have a viable agentic prototype completed to change anything up.

Summary