Bringing It to the Table by Wendell Berry

care. We give selenium injections to ewes and lambs and use a prudent amount of medication for parasites. We give no inoculations except for tetanus to the newborn lambs, and we have never trimmed a hoof.
    Until recently, and even now with ewes, our practice has been to buy bargains, animals that for one reason or another fell below the standards of the show ring. But I don’t believe that our flock would have developed to our standards and requirements any faster if we had bought the
champions out of the best shows every year. Some of the qualities we were after simply are not visible to show ring judges.
    I am not trying to argue that there is no good in livestock shows. The show ring is a useful tool; it is obviously instructive when good breeders bring good animals together for comparison. I am saying only that the show ring alone cannot establish and maintain adequate standards for livestock breeders. You could not develop locally adapted strains if your only standards came from the show ring or from breed societies.
    The point is that, especially now when grain-feeding and confinement-feeding are so common, no American breeder should expect any breed to be locally adapted. Breeders should recognize that from the standpoint of local adaptation and cheap production, every purchase of a breeding animal is a gamble. A newly purchased ewe or buck may improve the performance of your flock on your farm or it may not. Good breeders will know, or they will soon find out, that theirs is not the only judgment that is involved. While the breeder is judging, the breeder’s farm also is judging, enforcing its demands, and making selections. And this is as it should be. The judgment of the farm serves the breed, helping to preserve its genetic diversity.
    Because of the necessity of purchasing sires from time to time, the continuity of the locally adapted flock must reside in the female lineages. Studying and preserving the most long-lived, thrifty, and productive ewe families are paramount. But this need not be laborious, for your farm will be selecting along with you. You pick the individuals that look good. This always implies that they have done well; and sooner or later you will know the look of “your kind,” the kind that is apt to do well on your place.Your farm, however, will pick the ones that last. Even if you do not select at all, or if you select wrongly, a ewe that is not fitted to your farm will not contribute as many breeding animals to your flock as will a ewe that is fitted to your farm.

    It is generally acknowledged that a shepherd should know what he or she is doing. It is not so generally understood that the flock should know what it is doing—that is, how to live, thrive, and reproduce successfully on its home farm. But this knowledge, bred into the flock, is critical; it means meat from grass, at the lowest cost.
     
    NOTE
    1 We did so the next year, and have continued to do so, except in times of deep or crusted snow. We winter our ewes on a hillside that is ungrazed from early August until about Christmas.

Energy in Agriculture
    (1979)

    I HAVE JUST BEEN rereading Donald Hall’s lovely memoir, String Too Short to Be Saved . It is about the summers of his boyhood that the author spent on his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. There are many good things in this book, but one of the best is its description of the life and economy of an old-time New England small farm.
    The farm of Kate and Wesley Wells, as their grandson knew it, was already a relic. It was what would now be called a “marginal farm” in mountainous country, in an agricultural community that had been dying since the Civil War. The farm produced food for the household and made a cash income from a small hand-milked herd of Holsteins and a flock of sheep. It furnished trees for firewood and maple syrup. The Wellses sent their daughters to school by the sale of timber from a woodlot. The farm and