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THE PASTURE'S ALWAYS GREENER
"I could do this all day,* says Scott
Anderson. It's not yet noon on an unseason
ably cool May Saturday, and the school teacher
from Loganville has alt but sweated through
his navy blue t-shirt. Anderson's perspiration
proves that even cooler spring mornings in
Georgia can still scorch, especially when, like
Anderson, you're lugging pine brush slash
across a Walton County pasture—for fun.
Anderson and his wife, Stephanie, are
part of 'Farmer for a Oay," a monthly event
organized by Athens Locally Grown, an online
farmers market with a Broad Street brick-and-
mortar pickup point, that connects farm-fresh
produce customers to the souls and soils that
grow their food, and offers a taste of the farm
life for city types.
The first stop on the summer-long tour is
Darby Farms, a 35-acre sustainable pasture
poultry operation near Good Hope run by
Daniel Dover, an enthusiastic young breeder
who turned to chickens after an early career in
computers.
Five-thousand broilers will soon arrive
at Darby Farms. To meet their pecking and
clucking needs, Dover must quickly reclaim
a stretch of fallow pasture covered in China
Berry trees, pines and shrubs. Dover has
already felled the trees with a chainsaw, and
now he needs help stacking the trunks and
limbs into bum piles—which is where the
Andersons come in.
Once the pasture is cleared, Dover will
slowly walk his flocks down the grassland; the
birds will graze, grow fat, and eventually end
up on some of these volunteers' plates.
White Scott evidently revels in these out
door chores, Stephanie, unaware that she'd be
working today, feels underdressed and unpre
pared. Both wish they'd capped off the previ
ous night with one fewer beer.
People have an idealized notion of what
farm life, even on a small one, entails, says
tour coordinator Marc Tissenbaum. "Farmer
for a Day" pulls back the topsoil and exposes
just a speck of a work week that can reach 70
hours, kindling a "healthier respect" for the
amount of labor needed to grow food.
Most Athens Locally Grown farmers operate
on an extremely small scale; throwing a crop
of volunteers at a mound of work that may
have taken days to accomplish with tittle or
no staff is a boon to these mini agri-firms.
Clearly prepared for a morning of pasture
tromping and tree bark cuts, Sara Issenberg
wears a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses and
comfortable clothing. Watching her fel
low fill-in farmers drag tree branches into
piles, Issenberg, who works in marketing,
can't imagine how Dover could pull this off
alone. She imagines this wouldn't appeal to
everyone.
“There's something to be said for putting
in the labor; you don't associate hauling sticks
into a pile with getting your food," Issenberg
reflects. "At least, I don't."
After two hours in the fields, everyone
treks back toward the Darby farmhouse for
lunch and a chance to make
that all-important farmer-
consumer connection. "You
should ve been here last
week when the China Berry
trees were in bloom," Dover
says, pointing up to the
still-flowering branches try
ing to shade the luncheon.
The workers have spent the
morning dragging the tree's
limbs across the pastures,
and now its cream and
purple blossoms parachute
onto their paper plates.
Dover explains that as the
China Berry ages, it becomes
a "real tough wood."
"Your chain saw didn't
seem to think so," says Bill
Burnell, who runs Burnell
Farms, an Athens Locally
Grown producer, with his wife, Tammy. The
Burnells are here to "pick Dover's head" as the
couple expand production from their Cornish
X-rocks and Rainbow layers. Using her cell
phone as a voice recorder, Tammy tapes Dover
detailing his sustainable poultry methods.
Dover employs what he calls a "stacking
technique' in rejuvenating the pasture. As he
walks the first clutch of birds down the pas
ture enclosed in bottomless pens, the chick
ens graze down the grass and leave a trail of
microbe-filled manure. Over the next 20 days,
the sun eradicates any harmful bacteria. The
leftover nutrients heal the soil* Dover then
repeats the process with the next batch of
fowl
Dover won't use chemicals or drugs on his
birds. His mobile pens show he doesn't con
fine them more than necessary, and for these
reasons, Dover says, his birds are disease-free.
"I'm not saying I don't have my problems,"
he says, then points to the sky. "But the best
sanitizer in the world is right up there. It's
UV—a thermonuclear weapon."
So far, predators have posed little threat
to Dover's chickens. Since he has "let the
wild thrive" and provided acres of untouched
brush for rodents and bugs to root around in,
the foxes and hawks leave his domesticated
animals alone. Nonetheless, he's retrained his
white-haired Anatolian Shepherd, Luke, to
treat the chickens as his charges, and not his
prey.
Dover recently caught a raccoon nearby,
and "we can find his skin just over yonder"
in the bushes. It's a regrettable but necessary
part of what he does, he says. A volunteer
leans in to ease the farmer's guilt; "It's part of
raising something tasty."
Beyond the blue sky and cirrus clouds,
there's not much overhead to speak of here.
Dover started Darby Farms with a personal
$2000 loan that's already been paid back;
the house and its 35 acres are leased; the
structural bits, including a converted cotton
wagon in which he houses layer hens, came
about througd bartering and traded tabor.
After finishing off sandwiches, bananas and
bowls of Dover's red bean and chick pea salad,
Dover leads a tour of the farm that follows the
stages of a chick's life on Darby Farms. From
the ramshackle shed-tumed-breeder coop, to
the rusty Japanese truck bed feed container,
to the homemade plucker that de-feathers
four birds in 20 seconds, Dover has built a
cobbled-together but carefully considered
and humane operation that's efficient cost
saving, sustainable and, in essence, an exten
sion of his personality: "I could pick up and
move all this stuff with ease—it's flexible, its
malleable; the only thing that limits you is
imagination."
Earlier that morning, a few volunteers
propped themselves up on the tailgate of
Dover's lime green work truck, resting as the
farmer laid out his philosophy of the nature of
work. He didn't notice the caterpillar, whose
abdominal segments were just as neon as the
vehicle, climbing the chin strap of his outback
hat.
People complain about not working; about
sitting behind a desk all day, Dover says.
"They're starting to see [physical] work as
vital, to see work as fun. And this is exciting
work."
But before throngs of bank tellers, misty-
eyed over the thought of a pre-Dust Bowl
agricultural worker's paradise, spear their
keyboards with their fountain pens, squeeze
against revolving door wings and burst head
long back to the land, take Dover's advice; Do
not discount the value of your work.
Just as massing brush into burnable piles
is an essential task for a pasture poultry
farmer, there's a sure neces
sity to compiling mounds of
data into searchable spread
sheets. While the completion
of this work may not carry
the tangible omega of a
dozen eggs or the romanti
cized end-of-the-day ache
of strained biceps, it does
mean that budgets are bal
anced, paychecks are filled
out or, to use another exam
ple of office-based toil, local
music rags are published.
'Obviously, everybody
works and makes a living,'
Tissenbaum interjects. But
meaningful work is lacking
in many people's lives, he
says. Beyond a paycheck,
there isn't much correlation
between work and life.
Not that everybody wants to or is capable
of performing this type of labor, Dover adds.
But if your work isn't meaningful, 'there's a
void, and you don't know what it is until you
fill it"
Andre Gallant
Don't let the swat scam you: "Farmer for a Day” isn’t
ail toil and trouble. Most of the work is on the tighter
side: mulching, weeding, moving compost. When the
tour comes to Burnell Farms in September, owner
Tammy Bumelt wants the volunteers to bring their
fishing poles: "Will weed a tittle. Wb*H fish a little."
But spots on the tours are limited. Sign up tor one on
the Athens Locally Grown website (www.athens locai-
fygrown.net} or email farmefforadayOgmatl.com
To view a "soundsiide" companion to this article
containing additional images and interviews, go to
http7/www.youtube.comAvatch?v=bfhWyh6oi II.
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Darnel Dover handles the hazardous work white "Fanners for a Day” haul brush at Darby Farms
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