Bringing It to the Table (20 page)

And so Mr. Besuden began his life as a farmer with the odds against him. But his predicament became his education and, finally, his triumph. “I was lucky,” he told Grant Cannon of
The Farm Quarterly
in 1951. “I found that I had some talent for doing the things I
had
to do. I
had
to improve the farm or starve to death; and I
had
to go into the sheep business because sheep were the only animals that could have lived off the farm.”

Now seventy-six years old and not in the best of health, Mr. Besuden has not owned a sheep for several years, but he speaks of them with exact remembrance and exacting intelligence; he is one of the best talkers I have had the luck to listen to. How did he get started with sheep? “I was told they’d eat weeds and briars,” he says, looking sideways through pipesmoke to see if I get the connection, for the connection between sheep and land is the critical one for him. The history of his sheep and the history of his farm are one history, and it is his own.

Having only talent and necessity—and unusual energy and determination—Mr. Besuden set about the restoration of his ravaged fields. There was no Soil Conservation Service then, but a young man in his predicament was bound to get plenty of advice. To check erosion he first tried building rock dams across the gullies. That wasn’t satisfactory; the dams did catch some dirt, but then the fields were marred by half-buried rock walls that interfered with work. He tried huge windrows of weeds and brush to the same purpose, but that was not satisfactory either.

Some of the worst gullies he eventually had to fill with a bulldozer. But his main erosion-stopping tool turned out, strangely enough, to be the plow, the tool that in the wrong hands had nearly ruined the farm, in the right hands healed it. Starting at the edge of a gulley he would run a backfurrow up one side and down the other, continuing to plow until he had completed a sizable land. And then he would start at the gulley again, turning the furrows inward as before. He repeated this process until what had been a ditch had become a saucer, so that the runoff, rather than concentrating its force in an abrasive torrent, would be shallowly dispersed over as wide an area as possible. This, as he knew, had been the method of the renters to prepare the gullied land for yet another crop of corn. For them, it had been a temporary remedy; he made it a permanent one.

Nowadays Kentucky fescue 31 would be the grass to sow on such places, but fescue was not available then. Mr. Besuden used small grains, timothy, sweet clover, Korean lespedeza. He used mulches, and he did not overlook the usefulness of what he knew for certain would grow on his land—weeds: “Briars are a good thing for a little hollow.” In places he planted thickets of black locust—a native leguminous tree that would serve four purposes: hold the land, encourage grass to grow, provide shade for livestock, and produce posts. But his highest praise is given to the sweet clover which he calls “the best land builder I’ve ever run into. It’ll open up clay, and throw a lot of nitrogen into the ground.” The grass would come then, and the real healing would start.

Once the land was in grass, his policy generally was to leave it in grass. Only the best-laying, least vulnerable land was broken for tobacco, the region’s major money crop then as now. Even today, I noticed, he sees that his fields are plowed very conservatively. The plowlands are small and carefully placed, leaving out thin places and waterways.

The basic work of restoration continued for twenty-three years. By 1950 the scars were grassed over, and the land was supporting one of
the great Southdown flocks of the time. But it was not healed. What was there is gone, and Henry Besuden knows that it will be a long time building back. “’Tain’t in good shape, yet,” he told an interviewer in 1978.

And so if Mr. Besuden built a reputation as one of the best of livestock showmen, the focus of his interest was nevertheless not the show ring but the farm. It would be true, it seems, to say that he became a master sheepman and shepherd as one of the ways of becoming a master farmer. For this reason, his standards of quality were never frivolous or freakish, as show-ring standards have sometimes been accused of being, but insistently practical. He never forgot that the purpose of a sheep is to produce a living for the farmer and to put good meat on the table: “When they asked me, ‘What do you consider a perfect lamb?’ I said, ‘One a farmer can make money on!’ The foundation has to be the commercial flock.” And he wrote in praise of the Southdown ram that “he paid his rent.”

But it was perhaps even more characteristic of him to write in 1945 that “one very important thing is that sheep are land builders,” and to plead for their continued inclusion in farm livestock programs. He had seen the handwriting on the wall: the new emphasis on row cropping and “production” which in the years after World War II would radically alter the balance of crops and animals on farms, and which, as he feared, would help to destroy the sheep business in his own state. (In 1947, Mr. Besuden’s county of Clark had twenty-four breeding flocks of Southdowns, and 30,000 head of grade ewes. That is more than remain now in the whole state of Kentucky.) What he called for instead—and events are rapidly proving him right—was “a long-time program of land building” by which he meant a way of farming based on grass and forage crops, which would build up and maintain reserves of fertility. And in that kind of farming, he was prepared to insist, because he knew, sheep would have an important place.

“I think,” he wrote in his series of columns, “Sheep Sense,” published in
The Sheepman
in 1945 and 1946, “the fertilizing effect of sheep on the farm has never received the attention it deserves. As one who has had to farm poor land where the least amount of fertilizer shows up plainly, I have noticed that on land often thought too poor for cattle the sheep do well and in time benefit the crops and grass to such an extent that other stock can then be carried. I have seldom seen sheep bed down for the night on anything but high land, and their droppings are evenly scattered on the pasture while grazing, so that no vegetation is killed.”

What he wanted was “a way of farming compatible with nature”; this was the constant theme of his work, and he followed it faithfully, both in his pleasure in the lives and events of nature and in his practical solutions to the problems of farming and soil husbandry. He was never too busy to appreciate, and to praise, the spiritual by-products, as he called them, of farm life. Nor was he too busy to attend to the smallest needs of his land. At one time, for example, he built “two small houses on skids,” each of which would hold twenty-five bales of hay. These could be pulled to places where the soil was thin, where the hay would be fed out, and then moved on to other such places. (In the spring they could be used to raise chickens.)

“It’s good to have Nature working for you,” he says. “She works for a minimum wage.” But in reading his “Sheep Sense” columns, one realizes that he not only did not separate the spiritual from the practical, but insisted that they cannot be separated: “This thing of soil conservation involves more than laying out a few terraces and diversion ditches and sowing to grass and legumes, it also involves the heart of the man managing the land. If he loves his soil he will save it.” Once, he says, he thought of numbering his fields, but decided against it—“That didn’t seem fair to them”—for each has its own character and potential.

As a rule, he would have 400 head of ewes in two flocks—a flock of registered Southdowns and a flock of “Western” commercial ewes. After lambing, he would be running something in the neighborhood of 1,000
head. To handle so many sheep on a diversified farm required a great deal of care, and Mr. Besuden’s system of management, worked out with thorough understanding and attention to detail, is worth the interest and reflection of any raiser of livestock.

It was a system intended, first of all, to get the maximum use of forage. This rested on what he understands to be a sound principle of livestock farming and soil conservation, but it was forced upon him by the poor quality of his land. He had to keep row cropping to a minimum, and if that meant buying grain, then he would buy it. But he did not buy much. He usually fed, he told me, one pound of corn per ewe per day for sixty days. But in “Sheep Sense” for December 1945, he wrote: “One-half pound grain with three pounds legume hay should do the job, starting with the hay and adding the grain later.” He creep-fed his early lambs, but took them off grain as soon as pasture was available. In “Sheep Sense,” March 1946, he stated flatly that “creep-feeding after good grass arrives does not pay.”

Grain, then, he considered not a diet, but a supplement, almost an emergency ration, to ensure health and growth in the flock during the time when he had no pasture. It must be remembered that he was talking about a kind of sheep bred to make efficient use of pasture and hay, and that the market then favored that kind. In the decades following World War II, cheap energy and cheap grain allowed interest to shift to the larger breeds of sheep and larger slaughter lambs that must be grain-fed. But now with the cost of energy rising, pushing up the cost of grain, and the human consumption of grain rising with the increase of population, Henry Besuden’s sentence of a generation ago resounds with good sense: “Due to the shortage of grain throughout the world, the sheep farmer needs to study the possibilities of grass fattening.”

Those, anyhow, were the possibilities that
he
was studying. And the management of pasture, the management of sheep
on
pasture, was his art.

In the fall he would select certain pastures close to the barn to be used for late grazing. This is what is now called “stockpiling”—which, he points out, is only a new word for old common sense. It was sometimes possible, in favorable years, to keep the ewes on grass all through December, feeding “very little hay” and “a small amount of grain.” Sometimes he sowed rye early to provide late fall pasture and so extend the grazing season.

His ewes were bred to lamb in January and February. He fed good clover or alfalfa hay, and from about the middle of January to about the middle of March he gave the ewes their sixty daily rations of grain. In mid-March the grain-feeding ended, and ewes and lambs went out on early pasture of rye which had been sown as a cover crop on the last year’s tobacco patches. “A sack of Balboa rye sown in the early fall,” he wrote, “is worth several sacks of feed fed in the spring and is much cheaper.” From the rye they went to the clover fields where tobacco had grown two years before. From the clover they were moved onto the grass pastures. The market lambs were sold straight off the pastures, at eighty to eighty-five pounds, starting the first of May.

After fescue became available, Mr. Besuden made extensive use of it in his pastures. But he feels that this grass, though an excellent land conserver, is not nutritious or palatable enough to make the best sheep pasture, and so he took pains to diversify his fescue stands with timothy and legumes. His favorite pasture legume is Korean lespedeza, though he joins in the fairly common complaint that it is less vigorous and productive now than it used to be. He has also used red clover, alsike, ladino, and birdsfoot trefoil. He says that he had trouble getting his ewes with lamb in the first heat when they were bred on clover pastures, but that he never had this trouble on lespedeza.

His pastures were regularly reseeded to legumes, usually in March, the sheep tramping in the seed, and he found this method of “renovation” to be as good as any. The pastures were clipped twice during the
growing season, sometimes oftener, to keep the growth vigorous and uniform.

The key to efficient management of sheep on pasture is paying attention, and it was important to Mr. Besuden that he should be on horseback among his sheep in the early mornings. The sheep would be out of the shade then, grazing, and he could study their condition and the condition of the field. He speaks of the “bloom” of a pasture, referring to a certain freshness of appearance made by new, tender growth sprigging up through the old. When that bloom is gone, he thinks, the sheep should be moved. The move from a stale pasture to a fresh one can lengthen the grazing time by as much as two hours a day. He believes also that lambs do best when the flock is not too large. That is because sheep tend to bunch together when grazing, the least vigorous lambs coming last and having to feed on grass mouthed over and rejected by the others. He saw to it that his pastures were amply provided with shade, and he knew that the shade needed to be well placed: “I think the best lamb-growing pastures I have are the ones where the shade is close to the water. I have seen times during July and August when sheep would not leave the shade and go to water if the shade and water happened to be at opposite ends of a large field.”

The crisis of the shepherd’s year, of course, is lambing time. That is the time that the year’s work stands or falls by. And because it usually takes place in cold weather, the success of lambing is almost as dependent on the shepherd’s facilities as on his knowledge. The lambing barn at Vinewood is an instructive embodiment of Mr. Besuden’s understanding of his work and his gift for order. He gives a good description of it himself in one of his columns: