A Cow for Farmer Willy

by Heather Blackie of Pembroke, ME

Willy comes along the path from the barn. He’s holding a long black tangle of hair. It is incongruent – this mess of hair belongs on something. It is not a scalp, of course it’s not a scalp, but it makes you think scalp.

Fiona’s tail, he says. He looks shattered. She caught it in a tree and pulled, pulled hard enough to yank it right off. Highland Cattle tend to be docile but there are exceptions to everything. Fiona is, without question, the most skittish. Perhaps there was an incident, or it’s her nature, or this is something she learned from her mother as she teaches flight to her daughter, Henna. Confinement or restraint – add another ounce of pressure when she’s already got all she can handle and she might explode. In a pen made of panel gates, secured to each other, secured to the ground, she angles her horns beneath the lowest bar and lifts the whole arrangement into the air with her head. She squeaks out underneath, bending bars, scraping her back just a little, freeing others who might be willing to choose the same route and making a ferocious racket. Her back has a knob on it which would suggest this has happened before, as in before she became Willy’s.

The tail, he says, was hardly even caught. If she’d just waited a minute. He looks like he’s about to cry. Knowing Fiona helps you know why it could happen to Fiona. Her tail was the price of a good scratch. The tree would not let go.

Willy has wanted cows ever since he lost his farm in a divorce. The wife didn’t keep their farm either. It was sold to square things up. His half of the sale went to bills; her half went into her pocket. She took the truck, the dog, the firewood and the perennials. He loaded some tools into the rusted Peugeot and drove away from the empty greenhouses, the empty house, the empty barn and the empty fields that had grown heifers, hay and vegetables for fifteen years. He looked for something to staunch the pain. He rented a cabin from a man who had too many houses and turned his back on farming. Carpentry took up his days and kept something in his bank account, but there were no cows.

Farming had him pretty hard though. He couldn’t just stop being what he was. He started spending weekends cleaning the barn at a friend’s dairy. He built compost piles because he was an architect of compost piles. They were beautiful. And he got to be around cows.

Carpentry and farming enterprises for other people filled twenty years, and he made a lot of compost. The last half of that span he lived in a little house perched on a ledge between redwood forests and rolling hills blanketed in grass that rippled down one side of the valley and up the other. Empty fields. Fields with fences where one neighbor had a few goats and another neighbor had a few horses, but vacant grassland was everywhere and the forest was tiptoeing into the fields the way it does when no one is managing the edges, managing the grass or trying to mimic the patterns of grazing animals that had been integral to the landscape for thousands of years.

Willy tended to see things in the reverse of most others. Where many people saw bucolic green fields free of cows, he saw fields that cows could improve. He saw grass turning to milk. He saw a mobile milker that gave a farmer, maybe him, a place to milk and bottle leading to fresh local milk. He saw the wisdom of good practice pulling in carbon and helping the soil hold water, which would lead to fire resilience. The fields were a million shades of green until the dry season when greens crispened to brown and gold. What people failed to see was that the fields would change without animals. He could put to use something that wasn’t being used and make it better, which was the same way he got into compost: he had this habit of going to the loading dock of a foodstore first – to check out the disposition of the scraps, to find out where they went. Maybe that’s changed now, but back then, the only other interest in food scraps were the haulers who were paid by the pound. They didn’t really care where they ended up but they didn’t like someone picking up what they regarded as theirs. Plus, in many places, there were regulations tightly tethered to food scraps. The store owners liked the idea of a beneficial product made from what they were throwing away so they changed things up and went with the compost-maker. It was a bitter pill for the haulers.

On the way to his compost site, Willy passed the dry dusty fields of a western dairy. Guernseys nibbled bits of grass they could reach under the fence. He had to stop to look. Joe stepped outside with a wrinkled smile and a deep welcoming voice. He was old and crooked. His fingers were red and swollen, stayed curled as if he was holding something, as if he’d milked cows all his life, which he had. He loved cows every bit as much as Willy did. Joe told him he was coming to the end and selling his herd. He wasn’t getting any younger, and the price of milk had dropped through the floor, which wasn’t the first time. How could you keep going?

Joe and Willy became friends and Willy saw a way to keep Joe attached to cows by buying a few of his last Guernseys and moving them to the empty fields near his house. Cows were the easy part; they were right here and Joe and Willy spoke farmer to farmer. The people who owned the fields would surely embrace it.

Willy bought three. Not a lot, but a good start. Joe milked the cows and cared for them as Willy made payments. They shared the milk, and Joe was glad his barn had a few cows in it. Willy sent his proposal to the neighbors. The response from all of them varied only by what they emphasized as their first reason. For some it was liability. For another, a preference for a cow-less landscape. For someone else, the worry that she might not see the cow-pie before she stepped in it and wouldn’t that be a tragedy. The no’s were unanimous and overwhelming, thank you very much for asking and good luck. But the response did fit the neighborhood – an apparent lack of awareness about grass, the struggles of small farmers, a bit of NIMBY, and a disconnect between people who needed to work to make a living and those who didn’t. The valley was populated by those who’d already made a fortune, were retired, or farmed without needing to make a living farming. And anyway, there had been no signs in front of fields saying for rent. Joe bought the cows back from Willy.

Twenty-five years later, Willy has his own forty acre farm in Maine. Ten Highlands eat hay, twigs and occasionally alfalfa cubes through the winter and graze the grass when there’s good grass to be had. He only lets them out when the ground is firm enough to hold them so they don’t punch through to the clay and turn the pastures into swiss cheese. He’s unwavering on this. He cannot afford to lose the pastures he’s converting from poverty grass to diverse forage, building soil health and stability along the way. The animals, Icelandic sheep included, are like game pieces on an ever changing board. It couldn’t be done without them. What they contribute in manure, saliva, grass management, weed suppression, and the microbial populations on their feet can’t be bought in a bag, nor can the haphazard pattern of shallow footprints that catch seeds and rainwater be replicated by a machine.

Willy hasn’t lost the sensibility he had in the West, that he’d had before he started his first farm – that of seeing what wasn’t being used, and what could be made better with nature and some work. His farm comprises pasture and forest and it’s surrounded by more of the same. Many fields have been reclaimed by the advance of forest, while others are managed by the roaring blades of mowers and brush hogs. The operators of the machines make decisions based on grass height and soil saturation – they don’t want to get stuck. They are mostly oblivious to the types of forage they knock down and the ecosystems that crash with it. Mice, rabbits and fawns are the obvious victims, but birds, monarchs, spiders, snakes, bees, amphibians, and so many others go down too. Cows could be another way. Perhaps people would be interested in custom grazing. Mowing could happen, operators could still make a living, but it would take place when the ecosystem was less vulnerable. In the meantime, there could be cows. Or sheep. And they didn’t have to be Willy’s. Just bringing back the health of the land, restoring fertility, reducing emissions – it made sense.

Late last fall, the cows finished grazing a 35-acre field. The owner had said yes. Hay had been cut for as long as the man could remember, and every year, sometimes twice a year, the hay was taken away and nothing was given back to the field. The cows evened things out – filling their bellies, yes, but in tune with the field and its inhabitants, adding fertility as they moved onto another slice when Willy moved the fence.

Willy built a two-strand polywire enclosure that funneled into a smaller pen of metal panels. The panels were anchored to trees. Luring the cows into the pen would be as gentle and patient as it had to be. That was the plan. They’d been in a trailer only twice – once to bring them to the field, and once to bring them home from the man who gave Willy the cows in the first place. The owner of the cows had to move to the city, and the buyer of his farm decided at the last minute he preferred it cow-less. There were five then – two new calves, two cows, one heifer – Fiona. It took two weeks and a few sacks of grain to teach them the trailer wasn’t a bad thing. Fiona remained skeptical. And now, waiting to return home, there are seven. Fiona has a new red calf, Rusty.

The cattle hauler backed up to the pen and stepped out, carrying his cattle cane. He had cows of his own and he came with his own ideas. The clanging of the trailer and the bang of the door shattered the quiet, rattled the cows. They moved away instead of near, never mind the grain. The trick, or one of them, was to help the cows make the right choice, let them. You had to think like a cow, or try to. Attempts to force them when they weren’t ready would sabotage the whole effort. Two stepped on. Then a third. Then that one spooked and backed off which spooked the other two, and then, like trying to keep water from rushing downhill, there was a frenzy of movement, the swing of a cane, a bloody nose, a slamming door, three caught, and Fiona, farthest from the trailer, charged the wire and took off with a merry band of three others behind her. The trailer left, deposited the three at home and returned, hovering nearby while Willy coaxed the rebels in slow and gentle. Three, including Rusty, loaded, but it was still too much for Fiona. She ran off again, and Willy built a fence around her, hooked it to a battery, and left her for the night.

He was done with the cattle hauler, and while he was a good friend, he decided he’d figure things out from here. He had a small open trailer that was low to the ground, something that might be used to haul a lawn mower. He built a pen on the trailer and loaded Rusty into the pen. It was a Sunday morning, quiet, no traffic. This time, Willy opened the fence and let Fiona go. He climbed into the truck and rolled slowly down the road. Fiona trotted along at the back, her brisket and udder swaying, clouds of steam billowing around Rusty as he watched his mother follow him all the way home.

The vet, upon hearing Fiona will allow Willy close enough to see but not close enough to treat the broken stump, says she’ll either get well or she’ll get sick enough to let him treat it. For now, she seems to care less. Willy pinned the tail to the barn door. It’s a beautiful thing. Were it a pony tail on a teenager, it would be the envy of everyone, it’s that beautiful. Now Fiona’s the girl with the bob – perky but to a cow, useless. Perhaps he will dry and cure the tail so he can tie it to her stump, to see how that might work to swish away flies.

And another thing went away: the man who owns the field changed his mind about having cows there next year. Not that anything was amiss. Quite the contrary – he was thrilled with the company of cows, the beauty and fertility they brought to the field, and he said his kids loved to feed them when they visited. He decided he’d just go back to the taking, giving the fields back to the haying outfit. They could do it in a day or two, over and out, while the grazing went on at the pace of a cow eating, at the speed of a farmer moving them across the checkerboard of a field to the rhythms of the grass.