I am not a gentleman farmer.
I am a farmer.
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| Yesterday: Digging holes for re-plants |
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| Planting |
There is a joke I tell: A guy won $50 million in a lottery. A reporter asked him what he was going to do with his winnings. With great enthusiasm he answered, "I am going to farm until it's all gone."
I have been growing cantaloupes and watermelons nearly every year since I was about 11 years old. The farm is property my great-grandfather bought in 1883. There is no glamour in melons or melon-growing. There aren't any "melon snobs," in the way that there are wine connoisseurs. Wine connoisseurs talk about wine and find value in buying expensive wines of supposed superbly fine quality. Until I began growing grapes, I dismissed such people as "wine snobs" and likely poseurs -- people who pretended to know wines and the subtle flavor-notes of great vintages, grown on east-facing slopes with just-so terracing, trellising, irrigation, and soils. Now that I am growing grapes on my own unique soil -- ground up pumice rock -- I hope wine connoisseurs will find something special about the terroir.
Until I began growing grapes, I told a semi-joke at the expense of purchasers of expensive wine. I said those connoisseurs paid top dollar to satisfy their exquisitely refined taste, but would also eat underripe, flavorless melons that I would cull, taste, and spit out in the field.
When I was a candidate for county commissioner in 1980, a prominent Republican, an orchardist, asked me a "gotcha" question: "How many Mexicans have you got?" He meant it in the way a plantation owner in the ante bellum south might have asked a social inferior how many slaves he owned.
I answered, "I am the only Mexican." He knew what that meant. I did all the work. It made me a nobody.
I meet some definitions of gentleman farmer. I am a landowner and I have outside income, thank goodness, that allows me to own a farm that usually loses money. But my notion of "gentleman farmers" are people who arrange for others to do all their farm labor. They farm while staying comfortable and well dressed. That isn't me. I get dirty. I get hot and sweaty. I move pipes. I spray herbicide. I hoe weeds. I do stoop labor tying vines to the second wire on the trellis. On days like yesterday, when it was 92 degrees, and today when it will be 95, I will be out there early, before 7 a.m. I will quit at 1 p.m. There is no shade in a field of young grape plants.
There is "gentleman farmer" status in the celebrity world from owning a vineyard. Trump owns one. Hollywood celebrities and hedge fund billionaires own them. They can put their name on a wine label.
There is another way to own a vineyard. The working-farmer way. That's me. There isn't any status or "romance" in it. It's hard work but there are compensations. It puts me into a time machine. It triggers good memories of my father, Robert Sage, a farm boy who grew up on that land, went to war, met and married my mother, returned to the farm, finished college, became a school principal, and spent summers working alongside his sons on the property his father and grandfather farmed. He would approve of how I am taking care of it.
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| Robert Sage, about 1928 |
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| Robert Sage, late 1960s |
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11 comments:
It's supposed to be 101F tomorrow here in Virginia. And it's only June. What will July and August look like? Or feel like? I escaped from Florida on Wednesday to avoid the heat. Surprise! It followed me. That makes me wonder about what the world will look like for my grandkids ages, 1,4, and 6 in the future. Will this kind of heat be normal? How will they cope? Will the heat we are experiencing now be considered "the good old days" as their world gets even hotter? I worry for them, like all grandparents do. But this is serious stuff and there's no sign of it changing. Every year we set new records. What if it gets too hot to grow vegetables? Or the cows can't handle the heat and die in the fields? High temperatures will affect everything, from the food chain to the grid.
The Artic ice is melting. That's fresh water going into the Atlantic Ocean. If too much is released, that will interrupt the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water north. If that happens, we will get global cooling. One causes the other. It's like Earth giving us the finger.
Good job on keeping the farm going and doing all that labor. Be careful of working in that heat as when we age we don’t tolerate heat as we did when younger. Doing all that labor is like your personal gym.
Speaking of wine connoisseurs, last year a two-dollar bottle of cheap Belgian supermarket wine was re-labeled and entered in a prestigious wine competition in France. It won gold. I am not making this up: https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2023/05/belgian-wine-wins-gold-in-france
Peter C. – One way to avoid the effects of climate change is become a Republican and pretend it’s a hoax. What, me worry?
I'm reminded of the old TV commercial for a product I can't recall,but the punchline, accentuated by thunder and lightning was "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature". I submit it's not only not nice it's arrogant and foolish to ignore Nature, on the only planet we've got. And the Climate Deniers, the pillagers of the rain forests and all there ilk need to recognize that this Planet, Mother Earth, does not need human kind, but humanity definitely needs the Earth.
RE: all this...
1. I'm currently at 75ft above sea level here in central Florida, and about 20 ft above the limestone bedrock. That means that a long time ago, there was a lot of sea ocean covering the land area here.
2. Evolution is the result of living creatures surviving climate change (and geologic change). Remember what Darwin and Wallace discussed.
3. As for that wine... Not too long ago, Eric Asimov had a wine column in the WSJ, where he discussed fine wines and pricing. When asked by a novice what was the difference between a $25 bottle, and one that cost $100, he replied, $75 and marketing.
We have a neighborhood wine club here in my neighborhood, and it's been going on for a few years. We do blind tastings, and limit our purchases to $20 or less. We choose themes, types, and regions to give everyone the chance to taste, compare, and score. We've probably met about 15 times over the past 4 years with 6-8 couples.
I'm proud to say that my wife and I have been fortunate to have 4 of our wines chosen as the "best" of the evening. Happy to say all those winners were priced under $10. We have also purchased wines up to the $20 limit.
On other occasions, we've visited many wineries and attended many tastings over the years. For us, that $75 or $150 bottle of Opus One did have to be tried just once for the experience. Yes, Asimov was correct with his answer.
There is one advantage of marketing AND climate change...there are now many, many more places that are making fine wines. My wife and I will never be able to try all of them, but we will certainly try, especially those areas that are newer.
You are a farmer and a gentleman.
Peter, can we at least chip in to buy you a nice sun hat from Sunday Afternoons?
Anthropogenic climate change is a fact. That's the scientific consensus but it’s contrary to Republican orthodoxy, so it’s important for them to deny the facts and pretend there’s nothing we can do about it – as they do with gun violence.
Re: Anthropogenic climate change is a fact
Mike, who was responsible for all that climate change before humans (and dinosaur farts)?
I'll be the first to admit that everything we do affects our environment, but mankind is not totally responsible for climate change.
Correlation is not the same as causation. And we're not quite sure what humankind's contribution is the sole cause of climate change. Perhaps we're slowing things down rather than speeding things up.
Don't equate pollution to climate change. Geologic and astronomic events seem to have a much larger impact than human activity.
I'm the other Mike, ex-OR, now-FLA.
"And we're not quite sure what humankind's contribution is the sole cause of climate change."
Climate scientists are quite sure, but what does NASA know?
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/
CO2's rate in the atmosphere has been constant for thousands of years. Then came the Industrial Revolution in the 1850's. Since then, it's been rising every year. I submit there's a correlation.
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