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Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life
If you've lived in B.C. for more than a couple of years and you're not a vegetarian, chances are you have fond memories of Salt Spring Island lamb.
You may be wondering why they are only memories. The end of viable commercial sheep production on Salt Spring is but one of many sad and infuriating lessons in Brian Brett's award-winning Trauma Farm, an immensely satisfying meditation on farm life. [The title is derived from the name of his farm.]
It's a vigorous meditation, if there can be such a thing. Brett's confident prose, by turns earthy and lyrical, jaunts through the history of farming from the ancient domestication of the chicken to the twin juggernauts of bureaucratic over-regulation (bye-bye Salt Spring lamb) and corporate agribusiness (hello battery hens).
The book is subtitled A Rebel History of Rural Life, although it's hard to say just what Brett is rebelling against. Or maybe what he isn't rebelling against. Contrarian, curmudgeonly and often hilarious, he invites us to join him on a one-day tour of the farm that spans nearly two decades.
The conceit of an 18-year day is just that, a narrative fig leaf in place of plot. Which is good. It frees Brett to let fly with observations and opinions on a gallimaufry of topics in a corresponding panoply of forms- polemical rants, a smidgen of poetry, elegiac essays, and vignettes as short and sharp as a Post-It note. (Note to would-be authors: This is why you keep a journal.)
But everything leads back to the farm. Again and again he points to the promiscuous profusion and interconnectedness of plant and animal life on the farm (and the planet)-and to the consequences of our estrangement from that vitality.
Brett's anger and frustration at the conversion of food production from hands-on vocation to soulless factory output is palpable.
The unrelenting assembly lines force the workers to clean and gut up to a steer a minute . . . It often leads to accidental piercing of the stomach and the spraying of shit and intestines and their bacteria all over the meat. By the time we see that steer it's washed and wrapped in plastic. The bacteria aren't necessarily eliminated. Then we eat it.
The author claims not to be sentimental or anthropomorphic about animals. Fortunately this is utter nonsense, as he makes a convincing case for the intelligence and individuality of horses, dogs, pigs and even chickens. But he can also be clinical or barnyard blunt. Sometimes he is all three at once:
At Trauma Farm our fastidious horse, LaBarisha, politely craps in the same general area each day, providing manure. The sheep waste hay, pulling it recklessly from the racks in their sheds and shitting on it. This provides another excellent compost.
Into the first of a couple of chapters on chickens (entitled, alas, "Fowl Play";) Brett shoehorns a history of the bird's domestication, the rise and fall of its gene pool, an appreciation of its barnyard society, another condemnation of modern megafarms, and reflections from Sappho and Kenneth Rexroth on the perfection of the egg.
Then he describes in detail how he slaughters chickens. "That was extreme,"; gasps a college student who witnesses this procedure, and so it is. Elsewhere the killing of a pig, and the reaction of its sibling, sears the mind in two or three stark sentences.
A comical description of an osprey nagged by its mate into snagging a goldfish from the pond's farm is followed immediately by a description of the bird holding his catch like an ice cream cone, chewing the face of the still-wriggling fish.
But it's not all gore and guts. There's the crow that teases the dog and the mouse so fearless Brett can't bear to kill it. There are Zen-like reflections on chopping wood and weeding. ("If you have a goal in a garden, you're doomed.";) There are Rabelaisian accounts of casual breakfasts and extravagant feasts.
There are misadventures such as the time his tractor ran out of gas as he was using it to "fluff up"; a fire, and Brett and his wife Sharon had to push the machine out of the flames.
There are the local characters and the politics of the community fair. For some reason Brett and his friends get big yuks watching every member of a work crew bang his head on the same projecting beam.
For all I know Brett may be an incompetent farmer-he cheerfully admits his estate is a money-loser-but gawd, he sure knows a lot about crops and livestock and how they have been cultivated and bred around the world.
As he rambles purposefully around Trauma Farm on this 18-year day, extraneous facts drop from his discourse like crumbs from a ploughman's lunch. Did you know that Edward Jenner's experiments in inoculation, while successful against smallpox, probably spread other diseases including tuberculosis, which killed most of his family? Or that "salaam,"; Arabic for peace, evolved from a word for negotiations over salt?
These little nuggets are as addictive as beer nuts, but Brett's editors might have reined in his didactic streak a little. Was it really necessary to explain that sashimi is sliced raw tuna?
If Trauma Farm held none of this information, or if all of it were wrong, it would still be worth reading just for Brett's poetic turn of phrase. "As summer drives its hot fingers into the earth . . . the sky was a propane-fire blue . . . the pale armour of a crayfish haunting the stones in the creek bed;"; every chapter has a dusting of these gems.
True to his love for the heedless, wanton nature of nature, Brett resists the temptation to tie up his treatise with a tidy moral.
"Absurdity has lived with the planet since the first cell divided,"; he asserts. While he is nothing if not spiritual, he sees no personal god in "the gore, the parasites, the gorgeous birthings, those green leaves after a rain, the rusty nail in the foot, a nasturtium blossom close up, and the babies born headless while a tidal wave approaches.";
The only symmetry he offers is that at the end of this elongated day, as at the beginning, he pads naked into the woods.
978-1-55365-474-2
Shane McCune is non-agricultural, non-trendy, former Province columnist who writes from Comox.
[BCBW 2010]
You may be wondering why they are only memories. The end of viable commercial sheep production on Salt Spring is but one of many sad and infuriating lessons in Brian Brett's award-winning Trauma Farm, an immensely satisfying meditation on farm life. [The title is derived from the name of his farm.]
It's a vigorous meditation, if there can be such a thing. Brett's confident prose, by turns earthy and lyrical, jaunts through the history of farming from the ancient domestication of the chicken to the twin juggernauts of bureaucratic over-regulation (bye-bye Salt Spring lamb) and corporate agribusiness (hello battery hens).
The book is subtitled A Rebel History of Rural Life, although it's hard to say just what Brett is rebelling against. Or maybe what he isn't rebelling against. Contrarian, curmudgeonly and often hilarious, he invites us to join him on a one-day tour of the farm that spans nearly two decades.
The conceit of an 18-year day is just that, a narrative fig leaf in place of plot. Which is good. It frees Brett to let fly with observations and opinions on a gallimaufry of topics in a corresponding panoply of forms- polemical rants, a smidgen of poetry, elegiac essays, and vignettes as short and sharp as a Post-It note. (Note to would-be authors: This is why you keep a journal.)
But everything leads back to the farm. Again and again he points to the promiscuous profusion and interconnectedness of plant and animal life on the farm (and the planet)-and to the consequences of our estrangement from that vitality.
Brett's anger and frustration at the conversion of food production from hands-on vocation to soulless factory output is palpable.
The unrelenting assembly lines force the workers to clean and gut up to a steer a minute . . . It often leads to accidental piercing of the stomach and the spraying of shit and intestines and their bacteria all over the meat. By the time we see that steer it's washed and wrapped in plastic. The bacteria aren't necessarily eliminated. Then we eat it.
The author claims not to be sentimental or anthropomorphic about animals. Fortunately this is utter nonsense, as he makes a convincing case for the intelligence and individuality of horses, dogs, pigs and even chickens. But he can also be clinical or barnyard blunt. Sometimes he is all three at once:
At Trauma Farm our fastidious horse, LaBarisha, politely craps in the same general area each day, providing manure. The sheep waste hay, pulling it recklessly from the racks in their sheds and shitting on it. This provides another excellent compost.
Into the first of a couple of chapters on chickens (entitled, alas, "Fowl Play";) Brett shoehorns a history of the bird's domestication, the rise and fall of its gene pool, an appreciation of its barnyard society, another condemnation of modern megafarms, and reflections from Sappho and Kenneth Rexroth on the perfection of the egg.
Then he describes in detail how he slaughters chickens. "That was extreme,"; gasps a college student who witnesses this procedure, and so it is. Elsewhere the killing of a pig, and the reaction of its sibling, sears the mind in two or three stark sentences.
A comical description of an osprey nagged by its mate into snagging a goldfish from the pond's farm is followed immediately by a description of the bird holding his catch like an ice cream cone, chewing the face of the still-wriggling fish.
But it's not all gore and guts. There's the crow that teases the dog and the mouse so fearless Brett can't bear to kill it. There are Zen-like reflections on chopping wood and weeding. ("If you have a goal in a garden, you're doomed.";) There are Rabelaisian accounts of casual breakfasts and extravagant feasts.
There are misadventures such as the time his tractor ran out of gas as he was using it to "fluff up"; a fire, and Brett and his wife Sharon had to push the machine out of the flames.
There are the local characters and the politics of the community fair. For some reason Brett and his friends get big yuks watching every member of a work crew bang his head on the same projecting beam.
For all I know Brett may be an incompetent farmer-he cheerfully admits his estate is a money-loser-but gawd, he sure knows a lot about crops and livestock and how they have been cultivated and bred around the world.
As he rambles purposefully around Trauma Farm on this 18-year day, extraneous facts drop from his discourse like crumbs from a ploughman's lunch. Did you know that Edward Jenner's experiments in inoculation, while successful against smallpox, probably spread other diseases including tuberculosis, which killed most of his family? Or that "salaam,"; Arabic for peace, evolved from a word for negotiations over salt?
These little nuggets are as addictive as beer nuts, but Brett's editors might have reined in his didactic streak a little. Was it really necessary to explain that sashimi is sliced raw tuna?
If Trauma Farm held none of this information, or if all of it were wrong, it would still be worth reading just for Brett's poetic turn of phrase. "As summer drives its hot fingers into the earth . . . the sky was a propane-fire blue . . . the pale armour of a crayfish haunting the stones in the creek bed;"; every chapter has a dusting of these gems.
True to his love for the heedless, wanton nature of nature, Brett resists the temptation to tie up his treatise with a tidy moral.
"Absurdity has lived with the planet since the first cell divided,"; he asserts. While he is nothing if not spiritual, he sees no personal god in "the gore, the parasites, the gorgeous birthings, those green leaves after a rain, the rusty nail in the foot, a nasturtium blossom close up, and the babies born headless while a tidal wave approaches.";
The only symmetry he offers is that at the end of this elongated day, as at the beginning, he pads naked into the woods.
978-1-55365-474-2
Shane McCune is non-agricultural, non-trendy, former Province columnist who writes from Comox.
[BCBW 2010]
Submitted on February 10, 2010 in By David.
