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Summer is here, the days are hot, and I’m outside laying sheep wire on our farm on the hill with my father. Fencing, that ancient act, is nothing new to us, but at the time of the coronavirus it has become something strange and novel. As we work, we must keep our distance from each other as strangers.
The construction of this fence has come to symbolize our new life.
Our latex gloves are snug and firm as we secure the wire to the fence posts. Our 100 sheep have been cheeky in their attacks on the sweet grass of the front fields in recent times and have traversed the old cable. The wire of the sheep will give them manners, we joke.
Eight weeks have passed since the country began to close, and although many things in the world have changed, the ancient practice of agriculture continues. We, the people of the earth, have found ourselves challenged and defended.
Near
Working from home: John’s wife Vivian
My world, the world of the Birchview farm in rural Co Longford, is a new land. Our lives have been reduced, but they have also been expanded. In this new slow lane, we now see the place of what always was: our natural generosity.
We listen to the tractor radio while working the cable; There have been more deaths today. Although each one is a hit, we must continue. The work of the farm does not stop, even in the shadow of death. Birds are singing louder now, or maybe it’s because we have newly discovered ears for the sounds of nature. Gone is the cacophony of cars and trucks, of tractors and motorcycles. Instead, we have found the noisy nature of the world once again.
We stretch the sheep wire with the tractor and listen to the tension in the metal as it becomes tight and strong. I work on one end and my father on the other as we drive our staples into the fencing posts. The echoes of our heartbeats echo through the earth.
“This will hold up the bastards,” my father yells.
The brambles are thick and strong in places and I carry them with the cover knife. Today they will not stop our progress, and soon the wire wall is taking shape.
My mind has calmed down at work now and I think it could be a few years, if our work goes well, until we are in this place again. What changes will have taken place then, what deaths or tragedies, what achievements and joys? They say that a river is never the same every time you return to it; so also with a field.
In this time of great illness, we do not know what the earth holds for us. But we are ready
At lunchtime, while we wither in the sun, we take a break and have lunch. In this we are also separate. He eats pork and I eat beef; We have packed different lunches in different houses. We can’t even share a bottle of water like we would have in the days leading up to the outbreak.
We don’t curse life, because it could be worse. We could be stuck in an apartment with no outdoor space. That, I know, would be a death of a new kind for my father.
The coronavirus has become a master, albeit cruel, one who has shown us that everything was always here, everything we needed to live was on this earth.
The land I live on is known as the central region. Here in central Ireland, we are like the navel of this ancient place. Beneath my feet is layer after layer of limestone laid in the coal period, millions of years ago. They are said to be the remains of ancient life. Limestone is known for its permeability: water flows through it, creating strange shapes as it does.
Sometimes when I am standing in this land of ours, I think the water flowing through the stone has not only shaped the rock but us. That in this central region, in this intermediate place, we find life and death, heaven and hell, nature and destruction, and that penetration has made us the people we are.
I have had time to reflect on all of this in the past few weeks, we all have. Unable to travel, we have all become experts in our native lands. Like the urban dwellers who have come to know the idiosyncrasies of their gardens, I have also come to know the curves and folds of the fields as the people of yesteryear did.
Covid-19 has altered our daily lives as farmers. As the son of farming parents, it has meant a change in the way we operate our farm. We do not work together, except in exceptional cases. The tasks have been divided. Now I take care of the sheep while my father tends to the cows.
My mother, the heart of our farm, has had to close her Montessori school and returned to agriculture full time. She has bought calves to raise, some rare breed cattle, and is bottle feeding two sick lambs who would have died in the fields if she had not intervened.
On a visit to the farm while keeping our distances one night, she told me that this new world was like the one she had grown up in. People never moved away, their lives focused on their farm, and a trip to the city only happened once. one month. In many ways we have returned to the reality of this life.
I live in the mountainous Longford region in the shadow of Cairn Hill, the highest point in the central region. My wife Vivian, who lived in Dublin for part of the week, now works from home doing her advertising work through her Zoom computer and meetings.
While the coronavirus has taken a lot out of so many, it has given us something we haven’t had in over a year: a life together. It is no longer necessary to be in Dublin. Upon learning that his working life could be carried out from the dining room table in our kitchen, he has come to love our life in the country. In the afternoons after work, I take her to see the sheep. Vivian, who was raised as a city girl in Sydney, has come to know about farming life. She points to the lambs that are thriving, others that need help, and comments when the grass is growing and if we need to think about moving the cattle.
Ramadan lambs
Gone are the great social days of trips to the shopping center or, with the arrival of summer, the celebrations of agricultural shows. With the temporary closure of many of the fast food chains and declining exports, the demand for Irish meat decreased and, with it, the price of a beast.
We sold the last of our one-year-old cattle just before the market went down. My father told me that we were lucky to get rid of the animals and have the money in our account.
For me, that trip was the completion of a kind of trip. Calves from my own cows Granta and Houghton were sold, named after the publishers of The Cow Book. With the money, I hope to buy another cow, but that is no longer easy. I look at the Done Deal pages in the afternoons after work to see if there is a cow nearby and if the farmer would hand it over. Even in the movement of animals, we must be careful with the virus. Animals are still traded, yes, but it’s a much more careful matter.
The sheep in my charge are a different matter. Lamb is operating well at the moment. We are lucky that every year Muslim friends come around Ramadan to buy lambs for the least well off in their community. Helping the less fortunate is a central tenet of Islam. This week, our friends came again looking for fit lambs to put under the halal butcher knife.
We had only three lambs fit for sale, but we were glad to supply them to our brothers.
Our neighbors, our great friends in agriculture, have become figures for us. We do not know what happens on their worlds or on their lands.
The spirit of the meitheal has had to change. You can do favors, but they must be done in different ways: an animal that drops into a house, a friendly conversation on the phone, but we must keep separate. In doing so, we miss the old ways of doing things.
When summer comes and hay and silage are made, we don’t know what help we will have. My young cousin Jack, now a strong young man in his teens, has helped us with hay production in recent years, but if the restrictions are not removed, we will not have his hands or his strong back.
With the formation of a new government on the horizon, farmers are concerned that there will be a reduction in the size of the national herd. My father, who has always been distant in his work, expected this.
“They will pay us to farm like our parents did,” he says. “Less will be more.” The reeds, the ditches, the curlew: they will be our new crops, they will change the way we think about our world. Cattle will be bought and sold, yes; the lambs will go to the butcher, but the quality of their lives will be better and, hopefully, their prices will be higher.
The pandemic has taught us many things, that life moved too fast, that our endless ride of relentless growth was pushing the world too far. For me, the outbreak was a collapse, but this collapse can become a breakthrough.
Agriculture can change, we can adapt, we can focus on our land and our animals and find a new way of being. We still have to face the meat factories and the supermarket giants, but this change has already begun; People are already growing their own food, killing an animal for the freezer, thinking again to the rhythm of the seasons.
Advancement is the awakening of a people to an unstoppable idea; A new way of life. There are many things from the old world that we can do without. That world no longer exists. That is the path that brought us to this place, this unemployment.
Covid-19 is a disheartened teacher, but if we listen to him he will teach us how to appreciate life again as a result of everything that once was. Power is in our hands again to change the system perhaps for the first time in a generation.
Let’s not go back to what it was, let’s eliminate the endless hours of travel, the pollution of unnecessary industry, the culture of waste.
Let us find new lives at the time of the great illness and on this basis build our foundation for a new world.
John Connell is the author of ‘The Cow Book: A Life Story on a Family Farm’
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