In honor of Labor Day, and of our collective goat love.

Goat Song is the story of a year in the life of a couple who abandoned their one-bedroom apartment in New York City to live on seventy-five acres in Vermont and raise Nubian goats. In poetic, reverent detail, Brad Kessler explores our ancient relationship to the land and our gradual alienation from the animals that feed us. His fascinating account traces his journey of choosing the goats and learning how to breed, milk, and care for them. As Kessler begins to live the life of a herder, he encounters the pastoral roots of so many aspects of Western culture—how our diet, our alphabet, our religions, poetry, and economy all grew out of a pastoralist setting, a life lived among hoofed animals.

From page 129, courtesy of Scribner.

“When I sink into the rhythm of these days all this labor (the milking and cleaning and mucking and feeding kids) is pleasant, even in this heat. The end result is palpable: Milk. It’s difficult labor but it’s my labor and the best kind there is – that which directly feeds us. Gandhi believed that everyone there is – the banker, shopkeeper, poet – should spend at least a small part of his or her day producing the food they eat or the clothes they wear. “Bread labor,” he and Tolstoy called it. In India, Gandhi urged everyone to spin their own homespun, that it would liberate both the country and the individual from oppression. He wrote: ‘If the poet spun half an hour daily his poetry would gain in richness.’

These mornings I tend to believe in Gandhi’s prescription; that one’s own bread labor – labor that is not for hire, that doesn’t turn into a commodity but feeds you – can enrich one’s life and lead to a kind of liberation.

Maybe it’s just the routine, the same objects in the same place (the wipes, the teat dip, the feed bucket, the scoop). The smallest change upsets the balance; and the repetition builds a kind of faith (milk stand, hoof trimmers, hay knife, stool). Rote is the nature of prayer. Incantation is repetition. Saying and doing the same thing over and over until entranced. Ritualizing the same physical motion with your body as Yogis do. My movements here on this milk stand are a kind of davening, a morning prayer with goat.

‘All natural and necessary work is easy,’ wrote Gandhi. ‘Only it requires constant practice to become perfect, and it needs plodding. Ability to plod is Swaraj. It is yoga.’ “

Steve Parker, Lunenberg, MA

I grow vegetables on 35-acres in Lunenberg, MA. My farm – Parker Farm – has been operating for 19 years and, if it doesn’t kill me, I’m planning to farm this land for many years to come.

Hello all!
Well, today is Stephen Jr’s first day of kindergarten, and I am scrambling to figure out how I can break away from the CSA harvest for 20 minutes, so that I may see him get on the bus for his first day. A few weeks ago his starting school “hit” me, and I was feeling a bit blue about it – the whole ‘where have the years gone’-type thing. So I decide that I when I pick him up at day care so we can make our nightly CSA drop off, I am going to spoil him a little bit, so that – at least for a few more minutes – he can be my little boy once again, and I can let him know how special he is to me.

So I stop at the store, pick him up a chocolate milk and a treat and a little toy that had caught his eye a few days before, and proceed to pick him up and begin our journey into Somerville. He eats his snack, drinks his milk, then plays with his toy for a few minutes as I heap worship upon him, and I start to feel reassured that he will always, in some form, be my little fella. Then, as we get on the highway, he turns to me and says: “Daddy, when you get really old and die, do I still have to be a farmer?”

As Rodney Dangerfield would say, “I don’t get no respect”.
Well, I wish I had more time to write, but I have got to start harvest for tonight, and that pretty much sums up my life right now-next time, Steve.

More about Steve: “Common Ground: The Farmer and the Musician“. Parker Farm’s Facebook page is here.

The Better World Challenge and The Buckminster Fuller Challenge are both design and concept competitions for big-brained people like you. Inspiring, at the very least.

A Better World by Design is pleased to unveil the first ever Better World Challenge! Open to students and student-led organizations from around the globe, this competition aims to inspire young innovators from multidisciplinary backgrounds to solve a tangible problem facing many modern cities: food deserts.

What is a food desert? Quite simply, it is a geographic area with limited access to fresh, nutritious, or locally-sourced food. Obstacles to the elimination of food deserts include, but are not limited to: availability, price, proximity of sources, transportation and preservation of goods, poor environment for local farming, and lack of awareness or education.

Submissions are due by 11:59 PM on September 15th, 2010.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. It attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.

» Applications are now being accepted: How to Enter
» Deadline is Monday, October 4, 2010 at 5pm, Eastern Standard Time

Previous years’ winners of the Buckminster Fuller Prize and runners-up include:

BK Farmyard’s Yard Farming project

Operation Hope – Permanent water and food security for Africa’s impoverished millions.

Watergy Greenhouse

For more about Buckminster Fuller and The Challenge, check out this post.

You’ve got the ideas, let’s spread ‘em around!