Follow Your Nose
There was an eye-watering stench - think a combination of rancid chicken manure and death - besieging the nearby city of Fort Smith this month. The source was reportedly an agricultural waste lagoon remediation project. The smell has been haunting the area for weeks, even making it north on the wind to Cedarville, though it was less potent here. The smell has been so remarkably persistent and awful that I am certain it will be added to the list of natural disasters people speak of for decades: "Remember the tornado of '96? The drought of '12? And don't forget The Stink of '19!"
There are a lot of CAFO-style poultry producers in this region. Windset Ranch used to be one of them back in the day. I know a lot of these farmers, and have heard them joke that the smell of manure "smells like money!" as a way to remind themselves - and their non-farming neighbors - that manure is an unavoidable by-product of their livelihood. So just get over it, right? If you want to eat meat you have to put up with the nose-hair-curling stench, right?
Yes and no. It is true that farming can be smelly. When we shovel out the litter from the chicken coop the ammonia can be overpowering. Raymond the billy goat has an impressive cologne shall we say, that if you get it on your hands or clothes will stay with you all day. Outside isolated tasks like these, though, our farm smells like fresh grass, hay, sawdust, soil, sweat, animal aliveness, and sometimes diesel (one of those not-good-but-good smells). In other words, most of the time it smells amazing. We farm at a scale that it only smells bad for short periods of time in limited areas, and smells like beauty the rest of the time. We, and farms like ours, don't stink out an entire river valley for weeks at a time.
Some of the best advice my mother has given me is to follow your nose. It's a deceptively simple instruction, containing within it the wise guidance to trust your intuition and go where it guides you. To trust in your senses. I think it is good advice for farming, too. If we farmers follow our noses, we will create a world covered with farms that are appropriately scaled to our human communities and to our particular ecosystems - farms that do not sacrifice beauty for productivity, but rather are productive because they are beautiful. Farms that smell like sweet clover and living soil after a steady rain.
There are a lot of CAFO-style poultry producers in this region. Windset Ranch used to be one of them back in the day. I know a lot of these farmers, and have heard them joke that the smell of manure "smells like money!" as a way to remind themselves - and their non-farming neighbors - that manure is an unavoidable by-product of their livelihood. So just get over it, right? If you want to eat meat you have to put up with the nose-hair-curling stench, right?
Yes and no. It is true that farming can be smelly. When we shovel out the litter from the chicken coop the ammonia can be overpowering. Raymond the billy goat has an impressive cologne shall we say, that if you get it on your hands or clothes will stay with you all day. Outside isolated tasks like these, though, our farm smells like fresh grass, hay, sawdust, soil, sweat, animal aliveness, and sometimes diesel (one of those not-good-but-good smells). In other words, most of the time it smells amazing. We farm at a scale that it only smells bad for short periods of time in limited areas, and smells like beauty the rest of the time. We, and farms like ours, don't stink out an entire river valley for weeks at a time.Some of the best advice my mother has given me is to follow your nose. It's a deceptively simple instruction, containing within it the wise guidance to trust your intuition and go where it guides you. To trust in your senses. I think it is good advice for farming, too. If we farmers follow our noses, we will create a world covered with farms that are appropriately scaled to our human communities and to our particular ecosystems - farms that do not sacrifice beauty for productivity, but rather are productive because they are beautiful. Farms that smell like sweet clover and living soil after a steady rain.
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