麻豆传媒AV

Not using pesticides, the Walking J Farm in Arizona, 20 miles from the Mexican border, near Amado, was certified organic and an inspector came through to pass the farm and submit the required papers.

The garden included certified organic vegetables like kale, turnips, Napa cabbage, mizuna, arugula, spinach and mustard greens. The majority of the garden vegetables were planted in rows outside - all seeds are hand-planted - with row covers to be placed when the night temperatures threatened freezing, at around 40 F, the number garden manager Mark decided was the cut-off point for covering.

A small portion of the vegetables, plus fresh potted seeds to be later transplanted outside after germinating in a germination chamber, were kept in a hoop house. The germinated seeds were put in potting soil and kept under cover every night during the first few cold months of January and February where the temperature was not controlled.

The difference between a hoop house and a regular greenhouse, although they look exactly the same, is that a hoop house is not climate controlled like a greenhouse. The plants inside the hoop house were watered at least twice a day to restrict wilting from the day's heat. We, the interns, would move to the garden to weed, plant and harvest, depending on whether the day was close to a market or not.

On market days, grass-fed beef, pork and organic vegetables were taken to Tucson to be sold on Thursdays and Sundays. Saturdays the farm was open to sales between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., for visitors travelling along the Arivaca Road.

Before garden work, chores began in the morning at 6:30 a.m. and in the evening around 4 p.m., and consisted of rounds on a quad attached to a trailer with a large watering tank mounted on it. Rounds were assigned to one intern a week, while the rest of the chores were taken up by the farm manager and whichever intern decided to pitch in.

Cows needed to be milked, along with a goat. Turkeys were fed, along with horses and a herd of cows. The intern in charge of chores that week was responsible for loading up the trailer with seven buckets full of feed for pigs and chickens. They were also in charge, in the evening, of picking up eggs that roosting pasture raised chickens had laid.

The farm consisted of a family, Jim and Tina, with two small children, a farm manager, Gabriel from Sacramento, and a garden manager, Mark from Chicago. There were four interns when I arrived; two left and another two arrived during my stay.

The interns consisted of people, in their early to late 20s from places like Colorado, Ohio, Kentucky, California, Idaho, Vermont and Illinois. Regular internships were three months. Interns, except for managers, lived in a small room packed with bunk beds, had another room as their kitchen, with a stove and a fridge, and were given a weekly stipend of $50, on top of a dozen eggs a week per intern, milk and all the vegetables they could want.

If there was at least one important thing I learned on the farm, more important than anything else, it's that you never grab a milking cow by her horns - unless you want to get stabbed.

It was a morning when no one else was around and I was by myself, in the first week, in charge of rounds. I was putting buckets of feed onto the trailer.

A milking cow named AP had found her way out of the corral and into the milking area, but did not go to her regular stall. Instead she found herself with her face inside one of the buckets of feed. She was threatening to tip it off the trailer with her munching.

Not knowing what to do, I began to yell and swat at her but to no avail and, in one uneducated attempt to pull her head from the feed bucket, I made the mistake of grabbing her by the horns. Big mistake.

She reared up in a large arc, came around like a haymaker uppercut and jammed me in the guts with her horn, glancing off my impressive beer belly, which I sucked in like a champ. My shirt ripped open and I had a bruise on my belly for days. I later found out that maybe I might not have been so lucky and there was potential of literally being impaled. Possibly.

Maybe for some, life is all about taking the bull by the horns but, when it comes to sage advice, you have to take it literally. I tried to take a milk cow by the horns and all I got in return was the annoyance of having to buy another shirt. I think I'll show that American cow who's boss by taking some of my American money and putting it back into the Canadian economy, by buying a new T-shirt back home in the Battlefords and eating plenty of hamburgers in the near future.