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  • The Scent of the Field
  • Andrew Berns (bio)

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Feedlot by Sue Coe. Copyright 1991 Sue Coe. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Sue Coe / graphicwitness.org

After breakfast one morning last March, I walked into a cavernous, high-roofed barn in eastern Washington State and watched a stillborn calf get flayed. It lay on a butcher block stained with blood. The calf’s tongue extruded beyond its teeth; its eyes stared ahead; and its neck declined toward its chest at an unnatural angle, as if in sacrificial supplication. Ranchers skillfully sliced and sawed their way through this animal. Their charge was to excise a perfectly intact hide.

Only a few days before, at an identical hour, I sat down to a very different postprandial labor: grading midterm examination essays. I teach history at the University of South Carolina, and my students had written about the eighteenth-century Jewish philosopher and savant Moses Mendelssohn, and assessed his vision of Judaism’s future. When Mendelssohn arrived in Berlin from his childhood home in Dessau at age fourteen, he entered the city through a gate reserved for Jews and cattle. Premodern Jews knew where their meat came from; their descendants often do not. That knowledge meant that they led lives in consonance with natural processes. It also made the stories of the Bible and classical Jewish literature, which took place in a preindustrial world, easier for early modern scholars like Mendelssohn to understand. As I observed the flaying of a calf, I realized how lucky I was to visit the inland Northwest during calving season: I sensed my time there would help me understand the world in which Mendelssohn lived, as well as a much more distant Jewish past. A German Jewish philosopher of the eighteenth century, the biblical patriarchs, and American ranchers in 2015 are divided by many things, but they are united by an intimate knowledge of food production.

Life on the Farm

My sister is married to the son of a cattle rancher whose property is near Spokane, Washington. Well aware of my attraction to the countryside, she urged me to spend spring break with her and her family. Sensing an antidote for my sedentary life as a professor, I leapt at the chance. The Belsby ranch sprawls over 9,000 acres in Washington. Besides sprouting hay, alfalfa, a bit of winter wheat, and the odd cluster of apple, cherry, and plum trees, the ranch gives the Belsbys their living through its animals—some 700 head of cattle and two endearingly out-of-place geriatric water buffalo, old gifts from a rancher friend. Inside the house itself, calving paraphernalia was everywhere: sacks of milk powder slumped on the floor; syringes and vials of probiotics cluttered every surface; drying esophageal tubes hung from the backs of chairs; and rinsed bottles, recently separated from their plastic areolae, dripped into the sink and onto counters. Outside the house, vistas are expansive, and the openness of the landscape invites gales of wind and a nourishing sun that bestows its blessings all day. The men and women who work there are hearty and hale; the cows content; and the dogs, with huge bales of bound hay to leap over, livestock to bark at, and bubbling springs to quench their thirst, are in their own terrestrial paradise.

On my first afternoon I cruised around in an all-terrain vehicle with a seasonal worker: an eighteen-year-old Brigham Young University–Idaho student named Kelsey. Kelsey and I journeyed through muddy flats up and down precipitous hills to reach water holes guarded by clusters of willow trees, where heifers sometimes retreated to give birth in peace. One of our jobs was to find newborn calves, mark them by piercing their ears with plastic tags, and, in cases of postpartum constipation, inject them with laxatives, all the while fending off solicitous mothers irked at the approach of humans bearing syringes. Another responsibility was to lead cows from pen to pen, which meant wrestling and shoving them. Expectant moms are kept in a heifer pen until they give birth to their calves. Subsequently, mother and calf must be led, sometimes across...

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