Solus Sto

Hope everyone is having a great 2012. As I am steering into the new year I keep coming home to find a certain beer in my fridge. The beer is the eponymous Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale, and I am officially nominating it my fave of the season over the perennial favorite, Anchor Steam’s Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Ale.

Lagunitas won out not because it was best in style. Let me make that clear. I think Anchor’s approach was more in line with a seasonal release, but Lagunitas Sucks is just an outstanding beer, bar none. That being said, I have noticed a distinction in interpretation; some folks think it’s an IPA (or even double) and others just call it an American Strong Ale. I like the latter distinction. It’s certainly hoppy, but the malty backbone is not drowned out and the bitterness of those hops is kept in check.

I admit that I also like the backstory of this beer, or at least what Lagunitas has told everyone on the packaging and online. They are a working brewery, they have things lined up in production just-so, and making the typical seasonal Brown Shugga just wasn’t in the cards. That’s where they tripped into opportunity. By not making a big, malty mess of a holiday beer (which I LOVE, btw) they were able to go another way and make something a little unexpected but altogether great.

For the record, I still have both this and the Anchor in my fridge. The difference being that Lagunitas is more generally approachable. And I guess that’s the last winning bit of it. This beer is not so distinct as to make it a “special occasion” beer. I can drink this beer and not be reminded with each sip that “hey, it’s the holidays!” Instead, I can just sip a good beer.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas/New Year season. Or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Festivus. Whatever you celebrate, I hope it went well. This year, as a  full time agriculturalist, I celebrated, but probably not to the degree as most non-farm involved folks.

For instance, on New Year’s Day I imagine more than one of you was nursing a hang over from a little too much celebratory champagne. On some level, even though I did not have a hangover, I was somewhat envious of you. That’s because for life on the farm, an arbitrarily placed holiday that marks another revolution around the sun means very little. Put it another way: cows don’t care. And neither do the chickens or the swine. So New Year’s Eve saw me celebrating (doing the countdown, all that) in Menlo Park with friends, and then promptly motoring up 280 back to Marin county in order to be at work the next morning. So when you were waking up to 2012, I was already out there in the field tending to my animals.

Of course, I had to explain to friends why I couldn’t be on-board with the NYE antics full-board. Many of them were surprised to hear about having to work on New Year’s Day. Because farming pulls me into fields far from the grip of “civilization” I sometimes forget how far removed most Americans are from their food,  and the larger food system. Agriculture exists in a separate sphere from most of the modern world’s trappings. While we use tractors and science and other things like that, the pacing is different. Plants and animals don’t subscribe to the 40-hour work week; they don’t take the weekends off. Unless you’re managing a free-range herd of bison (which are wild creatures) you’ve got to feed, water, and manage the health of your creatures day-in and day-out.

While on some level I feel this isolates or separates me from the majority of Americans uninvolved with agriculture, I’m also a little intrigued by it. There’s something to being in tune with a larger natural system that’s not governed by people. At least, that’s how I like to think of it. In my conception, farming is not a battle to be won; rather, it’s a partnership between me, the animals, the soil, the water, and everything else. So, here’s to 2012 and forging deeper partnerships with the natural world.

Friday was a wet day down on the farm. The forecast called for rain, and brother did we get it. It didn’t come in one torrential downpour, but rather, was spread throughout the day. Little spits here and there, with intermittent deluges. Overcast, but not that cold.

The day began pretty normally, watering and feeding the birds. Because of the rain we opted to drag some of the feeders indoors so the animals weren’t having to stand outside to eat. This made feeding the animals a little more difficult because we had to feed around them, but it worked out in the end, and I think they appreciated dry food in the comfort of their houses.

Because we have tightened up our operations in the past few weeks, we now have more time to devote to other tasks around the farm. The pigs have come down to the barn, along with their piglets. We spent the latter half of the morning preparing these new quarters with hay and wood chips. There was some last-minute roofing work that had to be done, but all in all we got the job done to satisfaction.

Working with pigs is interesting, because as adolescents they are nimble and fast, and quite cute. As they get older they become a little more ornery and not so cute. Moving the little pigs is more or less an issue of move the mother, and they’ll follow. They know where their meal ticket is cashed. The sows are similar in that you move the babies, they squeal, and mom usually comes along instinctively. There are, however, always exceptions. Animals have personalities, just as much as people, and working with them puts me in a position to appreciate that fact. We had to move some of the free-range pigs over (nearer to the barn, but still on pasture), which necessitated taking down and repositioning the electric fences that keep them confined. In the course of dismantling the fences the pigs got wise (they are very smart creatures) and made a break for fresh lands.

As any good cowboy will tell you, you can’t let your animals get away. While cowboys would say that to you while chasing down cattle on horseback, I had the Northern California Tara Firma version: on the back of a 4-wheeler, chasing swine! In the rain! It was friggin’ awesome. The animals generally respond pretty well to basic herding tactics, and by working as a team two of us got the pigs turned around and back to the new patch. It was dirty work, a little vexing at times, but SO. MUCH. FUN!!!!