The Rural Voice, 1992-11, Page 47Book reviews
Getting the farm
message across
One of the concerns of farmers is
how to get more information about
what farming is really like across to
urban readers. Don Mitchell in
Growing UpCountry and his other
books and his columns in Boston
Magazine has gotten across a lot of
the grit of running a farm ... perhaps
more than many urban people would
like to know.
Mitchell is one of those back -to -
the -Landers of the late 1960s and
early 1970s who actually stuck to the
land. In 1973 he and his wife Cheryl
bought a rundown Vermont farm and
started farming sheep. Growing
UpCountry, subtitled Raising a
Family & Flock in a Rural Place is a
series of 25 essays on their life there,
including the birth and growth of
their two children. Few of the stories
will start a stampede of city people
wanting to take up farming, at least
not sheep farming.
Although raised in Chicago and
Philadelphia, Mitchell has become a
true countryman, even winning the
Vermont Master Lamb Producers title
in 1984. He makes fun of his own
efforts to be an "efficient" farmer,
such as when he wanted to sell
advanced breeding stock and even
offered to show his computerized
records of each lamb to show which
would be the best genetics for weight
gain, having triplets and quadruplets
and so on but none of the experienced
breeders even wanted to look at them.
He finally sold two lambs to a couple
and their children who were just
getting into breeding. They chose the
prettiest lambs, lambs the records
said had inferior genetics. Years later
the couple were famous for their
sheep that produced outstanding
offspring and plenty of triplets and
quads.
There's also the time he
experimented with steroids to bring
his entire flock into labour in as short
a time as possible ... then got sick
with a fever and left his harried wife
to deliver all the lambs.
The Vermont countryside sounds
much like western Ontario's, isolated
Don and Cheryl Mitchell, daughter
Anais and son Ethan and other
members of their Vermont flock.
from the hectic life of the major
urban areas nearby but still close
enough to feel the vibrations.
Mitchell touches on topics that are on
the mind of most farmers here too. In
one story on marketing sheep, for
instance, he notes "The 'farm gate'
price of lamb is set quite far from my
farm gate — in places like Texas,
Colorado and New Zealand and
there's little that any one shepherd
can do to fetch a penny more than the
going market price, on any given
day."
He gives farm tours, then
encounters the youth club of the
local humane society who arrive at
the farm looking for evidence of
cruelty to the animals. When they
discover he docks the tails of the
lambs, not even using an anaesthetic,
they go away with their prejudices
confirmed.
But the book is also filled with
warm, sometimes funny, stories of
raising a family in the country.
There's the case of the local school
where teachers staged a "rural
isolation drill" where in case of being
stuck in the school in a blizzard, the
kids were supposed to go outside and
organize themselves in such a way
their bodies would spell "HELP" for
passing airplanes. The exercise
turned out to be a joke by the
teachers trying to get kids to work
together.
There's the familiar farm story of
a father teaching his son to drive the
tractor, with near tragic results. There
are the simple worries of children
exploring what can be a dangerous
world. There's the story of the kids
driving a harder and harder bargain to
complete work in cleaning manure
out of a barn and the story that will
strike a note with many parents of the
father who becomes a forgetful tooth
fairy to an increasingly disillusioned
six-year-old.
Then there's the common rural
problem of dealing with mailbox -
baseball players, and persistent ones
at that, who come back for weeks.
Growing UpCountry is not a brand
new book (we confess it has been
sitting on a shelf awaiting review for
some months) but it's an accurate
snapshot of rural life, whether in
Vermont or Ontario.
Growing UpCountry, Raising a
Family & Flock in a Rural Place by
Don Mitchell. Camden House
Publishing, Paperback. $14.95.
HAUGHHOLM
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John Deere tractors from
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NOVEMBER 1992 43