Country Snobbery

Over the years of making the transition from urban to rural living, I have experienced the death of a stereotype, sadly.  It's the image I had of "country folk," being 100 percent comprised of simple, honest, optimistic people, living their lives close to the land and embracing their choices while respecting the choices of others.  

Oh, that does happen sometimes, but its by no means something you can generalize about. But the following idioms are, I believe, present in almost every rural place you can find across our great nation.

(This is because, just like city life, there are hierarchies and cliques residing in the country.)

It goes something like this:

Large agricultural businesses often scoff at small farms, claiming they are either hobby farms or "communes run by hippies." (Are there even still people out there calling themselves hippies anymore, by the way?)

Small agricultural holdings, on the other hand, scoff at people choosing to be "yuppies" living "city life."  Although there are always a lot of platitudes about how they totally respect other people's choices, their disdain seeps through their conversation, their writings, and their attitudes when they run into these urban folk.  It's like they just can't quite believe people still choose to live and work in the city, and they treat those people like exotic zoo animals they don't quite understand. (Note:  This is always worse if they themselves actually chose to leave city life at some point for rural living.  Then the mock respect/curiosity/feigned ignorance gets plastered on so thick you could scrape it off with a knife).

People with no land are not immune to this either:  People with no land at all, who shop at the local farmer's market sometimes scoff at the ignorant fools in the grocery store, buying mass produced crap by the cart-load...never mind the fact that it's all they may be able to afford.

The carnivores, who believe eating meat is practically a Biblical mandate talk about vegetarians the way white people used to talk about blacks and commies in the 1950's.....they're all simpletons who just don't get the natural and correct order of things.

Horse people are in their own world and there are cliques within cliques within cliques, drama, gossip and grand plot twists.  Your horse clique is usually you and a couple of other couples who know how to keep horses. Your equine vet and farrier are in this clique too, although they are probably not aware of it.  Everyone else with horses are dangerous idiots, all other vets are incompetent, and all other farriers do nothing but cause horses to founder and develop cracked hooves. 

All that being said, you may ask why anyone would want to embrace rural life with all this mock elitism going on.  Well, it's worth it because, at a certain age and maturity level, you see these opinions for the prejudices they are -- held only by some (unfortunately) very vocal minorities -- and just live your life, not worrying what other people think.

You survived high school.  You can probably survive the country.

Horsing Around With Your Topsoil

One of the things I have noticed about the area we live in is the number of horse properties around us.  It seems like at least half the homeowners in this neighborhood use their acreage for equines -- with most folks pasturing their horses 365 days a year, or close to it.  

I like horses, and used to own one myself, before we moved here.  But that was back when we lived in the suburbs and I boarded my horse with some friends who lived in the country.  

Even there, I couldn't help but notice the place where the horses spent most of their time (which happened to be the riding arena at that establishment) was completely devoid of green growth of any kind.  That's because horses, more than almost any other farm animal, are hard on the land.  This was illustrated to me recently, when we got a flyer from our community services district reminding homeowners to place wattles (kind of like long sandbags filled with tightly-packed straw) at the bottom of their hills, where the exposed and loose dirt could be expected to run into the road when it rained.  

Keep the wrong size animal on the wrong amount of acreage, and, if it's a hillside, you can pretty much say goodbye to your hill, one gully-washer at a time.

We have a healthy crop of ground cover on our hillside right now, and no grazing animals, and therefore have no problems with erosion at this time. Wattles are unnecessary.  Our topsoil and native grasses seem to hold our downslope pasture together nicely. But when we do get some livestock, we will need to use a rotational grazing method much of the year and be really, really judicious in adding four-legged critters to our farm, because topsoil is black gold and I'm not going to lose ours.

And while I'd like to own horses, donkeys, goats, sheep, llamas, and pigs, unfortunately we don't have enough room to graze that many animals and keep our soil in one place when winter rains and summer winds come.  To keep that many animals we'd probably need at least 20 acres or more. 

So I'm guessing maybe one donkey or a couple of goats would be manageable for us, because the menagerie I often dream about having would strip every living piece of plant material off our hillside and eventually, even strip the very dirt from it.

Guess even paradise comes with some limitations.