The “National Capitol Region” is not conducive to, shall we say, serene living. My family jokes, “You don’t need to hang in the left lane, please slow down; don’t drive like you’re from Northern Virginia.” Sometimes I just can’t help it.
For a time we enjoyed a slower, more peaceful, rural pace of life, our pax agricultura. From 2006 to 2011, we lived in West Central Missouri–it was the era of three young sons, our Kraft Mac and Cheese and chicken nuggets phase of child-rearing.
Homeschooling moms tend to ride at the leading edge of cultural and societal waves, and several in Ella’s merry band of young mother’s introduced us to new food possibilities, the wonders of Nourishing Traditions and direct, farm-sourced food. Pretty soon we were grinding our own grain, baking our own bread, churning our own ice cream, sprouting things. One of Ella’s piano students, Grace, even paid for her lessons with fresh eggs gathered in the family’s chicken coop. (For more about Grace, see Chapter 12, Dryland Lament.) Yes, this all took effort–it’s not as easy as popping a pre-made dinner into the oven, but the rewards far exceeded the costs.
Amish and Mennonite communities in the area played (and still play) a significant role in Missouri’s local food economy. By word of mouth we came to know the Fischer family, a devoted “New Order” Amish Family who ran their local farm business by word of mouth. After Ella’s friend Lauren gave them our name, Joshua Fischer called us from a pay phone, “Every spring I’ll send out a list of what we’re raising for that season: whole chickens, beef, pork, turkey, duck…all available to order. Just fill out the form and return it to us in the mail, and we’ll follow up with a letter giving you the day to come to our farm and pick it up.” And that was that. Without fail, the day we showed up, parking our bright red minivan next to the Fischer’s dark grey buggy, everything we had ordered was perfectly prepped, ready, and beautiful. Mr. Fischer beamed and proudly described how his daughters had cleaned three-hundred chickens the night before to be ready for today’s deliveries. All three-hundred sat ready in plastic coolers, pristinely wrapped in plastic and resting on ice they had picked up in town yesterday. We transferred our twenty-five birds to our own coolers, then gathered additional pickles, jams, pickled beets, and fresh-baked bread. We couldn’t resist departing the Fischer farm without extra farm goods from their shelves.
Our milk supplier was a Mennonite family, the Yoders–every few weeks, we drove to their farm to buy fresh whole milk in big, glass two-gallon jars. To this day, our sons recall the wonders of home-churned raw milk ice cream. As with the Fischers, we couldn’t leave their farm without other offerings: strawberries, broccoli, corn-on-the-cob, beets. Ella’s review of their beets … “The best beets I’ve ever eaten. I didn’t know a root vegetable could bring tears to your eyes.”
In those years I had only a superficial understanding of the differences between (and among) the Amish and Mennonite communities. Both dressed plainly, with solid colors and broad rimmed hats or bonnets. I was vaguely aware that both stemmed from the Anabaptist movement in Europe during the Reformation, but I was not focused on the theological spectrum on which these groups exist–a discussion for another venue. At the time, I simply observed that the Mennonite Yoders had electricity, tractors and cars.
In fact, one of the external differences became evident the moment we drove onto either farm. On the Yoder farm, the smell of diesel and motor oil joined the olfactory mix. At the Fischer’s Amish farm, the most prominent smells were that of horses and manure. There are some advantages to having your tractor make its own fertilizer as you work.
The dozen or so beautifully restored tractors lining the county road gave evidence of the Yoder’s successful tractor sales and sales side-business (or maybe it was their primary?) “Can we go take a look at your tractors?”
“Sure, Josiah’s down working on an old Case that we bought last week. I’ll meet you down there and check on how it’s going.”
After walking the line and fueling my Tractor Disease, I asked the older Yoder, “How long does it take you to rebuild one of these?”
“Oh, it just depends. If it’s in pretty decent shape, we can just overhaul the engine, new paint job, and new tires, and it’s almost as good as new, in some ways better. Some of the older, more beat-up tractors we buy need a lot more actual restoration, those are cheap to buy though, so it all pretty much evens out in the end. I’ve got my boys pretty well trained on rebuilding engines, so it mostly comes down to the cost of our labor.”
Rural scenes such as these continually play themselves out in my mind. The Amish and Mennonites are a small percentage of the total, but all across the nation, countless dreamers diligently seek to build (or rebuild) a small farm movement. How can we work our way back to the source?
