You are always in time. On time. Out of time. On a farm. Always. Seasonal time. Geological time. Daytime and night time. Deep Time and no time. You are in the time of fertility and the time of harvest. Your year might be framed by frost time. Sow after the last harvest before the first time. Make hay while the sunshines time.
There is cheating time. Where you harvest suntime and store it for wintertime. As firewood, preserved fruits, jams, pickled vegetable, cured meats. Winter cheated of it’s prize by the hard work of harvest.
You are never far from past times. From the people who lived, worked, farmed and built before you. A hedgerow planted, an orchard in fruit, a wall whose stones are layed like the unsaid words of voices long gone. Care and love stowed in the stonework. Boundaries that have a truth to tell if you have the time to hear them. Roscommon, where we farm, and Northwest Ireland is crowded with the past. You are cheek by jowl with it. The forest behind our farm filled with the ruined houses of the barely remembered forty families who farmed there. There are quarry pits on the farm, their edges softened by generations of growth and green. A limekiln tumbled down into itself, hawthorns sprouting from its spoil. No one remembers it. As you shape land so, it, too shapes you. The marks you leave traced by it in you in turn. What will I leave that will shape those to come in turn. The past at your shoulder, under your spade.
You farm with future time pulling you onward like a gravity. To create a life for children. To create a life for things – for livestock, for wildlife, for the humming and buzzing and growing things that throng Hawthorn Hill Farm. To farm sustainably is to work the careful balance between the now and the future to come. Taking just enough to leave just enough so that tomorrow there will be more to take. We grow trees, have a no spray or chemical fertiliser farm, tolerate and encourage badgers, foxes, pine martens. We have woodland and wild flowers and dragon flies. Because to farm sustainably is to balance that present and that future. Often by taking lessons from the past.
What we are trying to do here on Hawthorn Hill Farm is simple. Raise good, affordable food, with care for the environment and for the animals we raise. We aim to be sustainable. For the environment. For our wildlife. For ourselves. For our customers. For our families. For our foxes. For our flowers. For our beetles and hawks and hoverflies.
Like Wendell Berry said. I stand for what I stand on. I stand on good, clean, healthy, chemical free, living soil on a healthy, biodiverse, sustainable farm. I stand for it too.
