The Ultimate Guide to Starting Your Own Farm This Spring
I’ve spent the last couple of days visiting a farm as part of my fieldwork for this article. The war in Iran is threatening the global economy, and maybe that’s the excuse you needed to finally do something truly enjoyable: start your own farm and tell inflation — and rubbery supermarket chicken — to go to hell. Take notes.
The essential feature of any farm is the smell. The one thing all farms in the world have in common is that they stink. What distinguishes them from a landfill is that the living creatures are generally larger, recognizable, and don’t have multiple heads. You can’t buy bad smells anywhere, but they’re easy enough to produce: just get yourself some animals — skunks, alive; fish, dead — and scatter them around your yard on a hot day.
When choosing your animals, think about what kind of meat or eggs — male mammals excluded — you’d like to see on your plate.
Cows
Cows are the one thing that can turn your ramshackle chicken coop into a proper farm. An animal of that size, domesticated, inspires admiration in visitors and earns the respect of neighbors.
Cows are extraordinary creatures and understand human language remarkably well. If you let a cow loose in a field and tell it “Eat!” it will immediately begin eating. If you don’t tell it, it will eat anyway. Their discipline is exquisite.
Moving a well-fed cow is no easy task, which has made them extremely lazy. As a result, their main occupation is lying in the sun with their udders on display. If you want to be a proper farmer, it’s important to learn the correct livestock terminology. You don’t call them “boobs.”
Dogs
Farm dogs should be kept to a minimum. I recommend one — and a thoroughly ill-tempered one at that. Its job is to nip at the cows’ tails and terrorize the chickens into moving around the farm so you don’t have to get up and whack them with a stick. Train the dog properly and let it handle everything.
Sheep
Sheep are rather impertinent. When they’re not sheared, they ruin the pastoral landscape, and those little white blobs on green grass quickly become the corniest image imaginable outside the city. Which is precisely why we shear them.
Communicating with sheep is extremely difficult because their entire alphabet consists of two letters: “b” and “a.” They only ever use them in one direction — “baa.” You will never hear a sheep cry “aaabbb!” unless you’ve left an open bottle of whiskey within reach. Over time, however, they’ve developed the remarkable ability to stretch that final vowel indefinitely, adjusting the length of their bleating according to their needs.
Quick guide to interpreting sheep:
Baa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Baaaaaa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Chickens
Chickens chatter like parrots, make a mess of everything, and strut around with a defiant air. The good thing about them is that they lay eggs. And from those eggs come more chickens. It’s quite extraordinary. They could keep this up indefinitely. I suspect they have a plan to take over the world.
Pigs
Pigs provide the essential smell that keeps your farm from smelling merely like cows, sheep, or chickens. Once you raise pigs, everything smells like pigs. They also function as an excellent human repellent. Unfortunately, they have the opposite effect on insects.
Donkeys
Donkeys are loyal and good-natured. They’re a great help with farm work, and their stubbornness and perseverance are well known. Besides, they don’t smell too bad — especially compared to pigs. Donkeys have only one real danger: they bite. A very foolish friend of mine once had a finger bitten clean off by a donkey. It was, strictly speaking, an act of cannibalism.
Daily life on a farm is as entertaining as it is exhausting. From morning till night, there’s always something to do. And if there isn’t, it’s the perfect moment to start chopping firewood for winter. There is always wood to chop. Here are some of the key activities to round out your day:
Getting an Egg
If you have chickens, this is fairly straightforward. Walk into the coop, grab a hen, and climb onto a stack of crates so all the others can see you. Draw your sword, cut off her head, and declare: “This one didn’t lay any eggs! The rest of you have 24 hours!”
By the next day, the coop will be overflowing with eggs.
Chickens are very clever. To check whether the eggs are really yours or whether one of them placed a bulk order at the supermarket, take an egg and crush it underfoot in front of them. If one of them starts crying, the eggs are yours. If they all laugh, you’ve been had.
Milking a Cow
Too unpleasant. Try persuading the calves to do it for you.
Killing a Pig
I don’t think there’s a more unpleasant experience in life than killing a pig. In the countryside, it’s done in a way that is both cruel and distressing — for the pig and for those present. A gentleman would never do such a thing.
To slaughter a pig with proper civility and elegance, paint a target around its tail, release it into the yard, dust off your old Winchester ’73, drink half a bottle of vodka, and put on a The Rolling Stones record at full blast. The rest will take care of itself
Going to the City
After 48 hours on a farm, you’ll be desperate to get back to the city, put on clean clothes, and breathe some carbon dioxide. Then you’ll spend hours stuck in traffic because of some damn anti-war march about Iran, watch the whole parade of idiots go by, and decide to head straight back to the farm as soon as possible — to surround yourself with pigs, who smell just as bad but at least don’t support the ayatollahs.
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