Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

One of the Anasazi Triumvirate: Feeding Artistic Cultures In My Region For 7,000 Years

It is a miracle to me every year (OK, both years, so far) that agriculture works. That it’s in fact preferable in many ways to what’s usually thought of as hunter gathering. Actually I feel like what I do on the Funky Butte Ranch is hunter gathering, only at home with my loved ones. Call it sedentary agriculture if you will, but I’m anything but sedentary. I just don’t have to spear antelope on my afternoon runs. I mean, I throw a few seeds in some goat poop, irrigate it with a super-efficient Israeli drip irrigation system, hope for no late hail, and all of a sudden there are sprouts — in the case of this photo, Anasazi beans sprouted from a discovered ancient strain. This year the corn, tomatoes, onions and peppers are also looking great. (Though it was touch and go as of a week ago — for a couple of days there, I wasn’t sure Natalie would give milk, then that she would give LOTS of milk, and why weren’t the peas sprouting? I mean, c’mon, third graders can sprout peas in “science” class– Gregor Mendel, that type of thing.) As I mention in Farewell, my Subaru, recent DNA testing shows that this diet kept some of my Anasazi predecessors on this land living well into their 30s, so obviously it’s a diet I want to emulate. They say that your blood type can tell you if you’re genetically a meat-eating wanderer or a Tigris/Euphrates-derived, grain eating farmer. Growing up in the suburbs, I was a third type — Dominoes Pizza-orderer. Now I think I’m getting a bit closer to what my genes are asking me to eat and drink.

My tomato goal this year is simple – even with constant, hours-long, meditative grazing all summer and fall, I want us to be so overwhelmed with orange-liciousness that we have to can perhaps 100 pasta meals’ worth of them for the winter. And we seem to be on our way – the drip system is working like a charm. My sweetheart bought me some planters so a couple of our now hundreds of tomatoes can be transported inside for winter fruit when it gets cold. She came home with the planters, asked me if I wanted them down in the garden, and I said, “let’s just give them some time and a rinse to wash China out of them.” Ah, Globalization in the midst of local living.

Meanwhile, the orchard is progressing. I’m in bliss over the apple blossoms that emerged this week. Growing up, I never understood why we had one plum tree. If it didn’t produce, why not get it a friend? Isn’t the goal of a plum tree plums? Seemed easy enough. Two decades later, you can see why it fills me with such joy to have flowering plum AND apple trees this year…and we just planted them from grafted, organic saplings a year ago. Long live drip irrigation. Especially timer-drip irrigation that frees me to do things like milk goats and not overly worry about watering. Except when there are leaks. Or squirrel-tooth assaults. But that’s not more then thrice a week.

Ah, water in the desert, It becomes valuable like wine. My sweetheart, myself, and our dogs Sadie, River and Mack ended the day yesterday outside the chicken coop with an exuberant, if clumsy and toothy sunset rendition of the Hebrew Mayim dance, which is basically a single concept, single step appreciation of the liquid elixir of life

Next Dispatch, I’ll wax with full-belly satiation on the amazing milk productivity of Natalie the Molasses-addicted Wonder Goat. Meanwhile, I still very much consider myself to be a novice at all of these agricultural endeavors, though I’m losing my remote control muscle memory in favor of goat milking muscle memory, more and more of my protein is coming from the Funky Butte Ranch, and I’m starting to see the world, from cloud to soil, with Farmer’s Eyes.

And I’ll end this Dispatch with an advertising mock-up for the Funky Butte Ranch (I don’t think we’re marketing anything except happiness, and that’s free). It was made by young Simona Bach of El Paso, Texas, upon her family’s visit to the FBR last week. I think she captured the Butte’s visuals with particular vividness and accuracy, especially in the late day, low angle sun.

Oh, one other note: many of you have asked about seeing my recent Tonight Show appearance. Click here to watch the segment in all its Rhinestone Cowboy glory:

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