NOTES FROM ACADEME: THE SUSTAINABLE UNIVERSITY
Seven a.m. and fog stills the valley enfolding Warren Wilson College. Cattle stand like statues in the damp gray mist, a pasture vanishing beyond them, and trees beside the river are vague silhouettes that the wiper blades can neither resolve nor remove. The only spot of color is a giant pumpkin growing outside Warren Wilson’s farm office, where the door is open and John Pilson, the farm manager, is listing chores on a whiteboard, the marker’s cap clenched between his pursed lips: “Field-day planning. Hay shed. Fall-break sign-up. Truck prep. Meat.”
It’s a busy time of year on the liberal-arts college’s 275-acre farm, with the corn ready for the combine and pigs and steers due for a trip to the butcher before the fall meat sale. “I’m a three-ball juggler with five balls in the air,” grins Mr. Pilson, putting the cap back on the marker. Besides overseeing the 27 students who tend the herds and crops, “I’m supposed to be a welder, a vet, a carpenter, and a mechanic, and I’m supposed to understand soil science,” he says.
Trailed by Buddy, his dog, Mr. Pilson heads out a back door — this morning he is doing the milking, too. The farm’s lone dairy cow, Katie, gets milked by hand twice a day, mostly by students. When Mr. Pilson takes a turn, he and Katie listen to Morning Edition and he makes himself a cowaccino, a straight-from-the-udder beverage that he claims to have invented: “Take your black coffee out in the morning and squirt in milk hard till it foams out over the top.” The results are delicious. “I don’t think I was anybody till I had a beverage I could take credit for,” Mr. Pilson deadpans from the milking stool.
Until Mr. Pilson came to Warren Wilson, 10 years ago, the college’s farm was “a very conventional operation,” he says. “I took over for a guy who was here 40 years, and his dad was here before him.” The college hired Mr. Pilson in part because he was interested in sustainable agriculture. He gave up using growth hormones in the herds and adopted a system of crop rotation to replace most fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Students grow corn in a field one year and barley or oats the next — corn, barley, and oats all feed the pigs — and then for two years the field is used for hay for the cattle. The hay leaves behind enough nitrogen to support the next year’s corn crop. Land too hilly to plow is used for grazing cattle. He and the students, he adds, are “big into trying to be humane to the animals.”
Shortly after NPR’s 8 a.m. newscast, Mr. Pilson turns Katie out to pasture and carries a pail of fresh milk inside. The milk cannot be sold because it is not pasteurized, so it is given away on a first-come, first-served basis, mostly to students. The farm crew’s morning shift straggles in for the 8 a.m. meeting, filling a rude assortment of chairs and sporting a mix of Carhartt overalls and counterculture T-shirts. Mr. Pilson says “only about one student a year” goes on to a career in farming, but even so “more kids want to get on the farm crew than we can take.” The farm, he says, “is perceived as glory work,” even though it requires “a whole lotta weed whackin’ ” and much shoveling of what Mr. Pilson only rarely calls manure. Warren Wilson requires all of its 850 students to work 15 hours a week at campus jobs, but those who get on the farm crew regularly volunteer to work extra hours for no extra pay.
Mr. Pilson likes to say that his job consists of teaching hippies to break farm equipment, but farm-crew members attest that he and Chase Hubbard, the assistant farm manager, are good instructors who brainstorm with them when problems arise. This morning Mr. Pilson will send some of the farm crew to continue the big granary-renovation project and will tell Dan Hughes, a junior majoring in political science and history, to begin a “weevil jihad” by the barley-storage bin, exhorting him to “Deliver us from the weevil.” Later Mr. Hughes, working around an 11 a.m. psychology class, will change the oil in the farm’s John Deere tractor.
Meanwhile, Amanda Williams is fielding phone calls about the fall meat sale, which she oversees. This year the farm will have about 100 hogs and 33 steers butchered to sell retail, in addition to selling about 300 young pigs to other farmers. Pork is sold twice a year for $4 a pound and the beef every autumn for $4.75 a pound. “We sell out,” says Ms. Williams, a junior psychology major who plays on the women’s soccer team. “Our customers want grass-fed and -finished meat that doesn’t have all the hormones and antibiotics. It really is good meat, really good.” So good, in fact, that the college’s food service can’t afford it, although animals that are culled from the herds — cows and sows that aren’t bearing strong, healthy offspring, for instance — become ground beef or breakfast sausage for the dining hall.
By 9:30 the fog has burned off. Edwin Self, a senior environmental-studies major who is the farm’s cattle chief, climbs into a battered SUV to check his charges — the 33 steers being finished in a pasture rich with alfalfa, clover, and matua grass, and the main herd of 60-some brood cows and yearlings, lazing on a hillside. The herd has a mix of breeds. “We try to put genetics in that are going to fill our grass-fed needs,” says Mr. Self, noting that shorter, stockier animals gain weight more easily.
In the spring, calving keeps a five-member cattle crew busy, but in the fall Mr. Self works alone, mostly fixing fences and moving the steers from one part of their pasture to another. Like other farm-crew students, he can recall bad moments — such as when cows broke through a fence and were discovered disporting themselves in the river — but he says he routinely works about 10 extra hours a week that he doesn’t bother listing on his timecards. “I take pride in this farm,” says Mr. Self, “ ‘cause it’s a well-working farm.”
Mr. Self’s counterpart on the pig crew, Anna Chollet, says she too works — and worries — overtime. “I like to come down and watch the piglets being born, or I’ll be in my room and I’ll think, Oh, we need to move Pearl,” says Ms. Chollet, a senior biochemistry major. What she worries about most, she says, is moving animals from the group of younger brood sows to the group of older ones, because sows establish a hierarchy and enforce it brutally. “We had a sow get her leg broken — they beat her up,” says Ms. Chollet, who now tries to transfer two or three animals at a time to diffuse tension.
“The old pig boss and I, we talk about being too involved in the pigs’ lives,” she says, naming sows as she passes them. “That’s Madeline — I named her after my grandmother — and this is Saint Katy the Virgin, after the Steinbeck story.” As pig boss, Ms. Chollet tracks the sows’ 21-day heat cycles and decides when they should be bred by one of the two boars — Niels Boar and Norman Boarlaug. The pigs, too, are a mix of breeds. “We try to mix the good meat quality of the darker breeds with good mothering qualities” found in the pinker pigs, she says.
The pig crew works from 7 to 9 each morning. The students move 450-pound sows by walking each animal between two three-foot-square panels of wood that block her view of anything other than what’s directly in front of her. A pig likes to know where she’s going and will head to what she can see, Ms. Chollet says. Not so the cattle — moving them is another matter altogether. In the afternoon, Mr. Pilson and Mr. Self round up nine farm-crew members to lead the 60-plus brood cows and yearlings along more than a mile of road separating one college field from another.
“Come, booooossss!” the students shout, calling the cattle down to the gate and then lining up across the road in front of them. Having sent some crew members out to stop traffic, Mr. Self marches ahead of students who are walking backward, arms spread wide to prevent the animals from picking up too much speed. The herd makes it past two curves and an intersection in good order, but then several animals break for an unguarded lane, chased by shouting students. The rest of the herd takes advantage of the distraction to pick up the pace, passing a line of drivers startled by the sudden rush of ruminants. By the time Mr. Self swings the gate closed behind the last cow, many farm-crew members have had a healthy afternoon run.
“We’re just tiny in the big picture,” Mr. Pilson says, driving back to the office in his pickup with Buddy crowding him on the seat. “We’re a tiny little farm.” Even so, he is as proud of it as his students are. “I’m expecting really good yields” in corn, he says — 150 bushels an acre, not bad for a farm that avoids commercial pesticides and fertilizers. As for cattle, he says: “We start the spring with about 100,000 pounds of live weight — cows, calves, and yearlings — and we finish in the fall, eight or nine months later, with 150,000 pounds. That’s 50,000 pounds of cattle coming out of the grass.” Buddy puts a paw up on his leg. “At the end of the day I often do a victory lap, survey the program,” says Mr. Pilson. “Maybe shut a gate that somebody left open.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 53, Issue 9, Page A56
