TURKEYS AND TREES
I drive to the Charlottesville airport almost once a week and am writing this in Charlotte airport while waiting for my next leg to Dayton, Ohio to do a farm consult tomorrow.
The airport is exactly 55 minutes away from our house, across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the Shenandoah Valley and into Virginia's Piedmont. Interstate 64 is the path to Charlottesville and offers spectacular views below as you crest Afton Mountain.
During that 30-minute interstate commute, three tractor trailers carrying turkeys to poultry processing plants in Harrisonburg passed me going west as I traveled east. With Thanksgiving coming up and having processed our own turkeys over the last few weeks, I noted how filthy looking these turkeys were
Ours are brilliant white; literally snow-white. They look shampooed and spotlessly clean. The turkeys on these trucks are the same genetics as the ones we raise--broad breasted Nascar race car high octane whites--but their production is abhorrent. Living their whole lives without benefit of fresh air or sunshine and packed in massive houses on their own toilet breathing fecal dust, unable to ever escape to clean ground and never allowed the joy of chasing down a cricket or grasshopper, their plumage becomes infused with fecal dust. The feathers looked dull yellowish-brown.
What a terrible blight on stewardship to take a magnificent bird like the turkey and never let it achieve its turkeyness. If you've ever had the privilege of seeing a flock of happy turkeys on pasture, you know what I'm talking about. Their vibrant eyes and brilliant red heads bobble on top of snow white plumage as they scamper, prehistoric-looking, from grass blades to grasshoppers, joyfully chirping and clucking. A turkey, I'm told, has some 31 vocal options compared to a chicken's 16.
Rather than feeling Thanksgiving gladness, I felt embarrassed sadness that American agriculture has stooped this low and that American buyers are this nonchalant about the expressive beauty of a vibrant turkey in a natural habitat.
These musings led me to notice, for the umpteenth time, the tangled mess of trees along the highway and in the median. In Europe, one of the most striking highway edge characteristics is carefully pruned and manicured trees along public transport areas, whether they be rail lines or highways. Our country's wealth, I think, has made us unappreciative of resources.
These transport edges could be improved exponentially to grow good trees instead of junk trees. We could chip the dead, bent, diseased and overly dense biomass for chips to use for fertilizer via composting. We could even grow orchard trees along miles of public roads. In Italy, every highway clover-leaf is full of vegetable gardens. People sometimes overnight there on weekends and tend their veggies. I have no idea how they allocate who gets what, but it makes an abundant and beautiful landscape everywhere you look.
We Americans just don't care. During this Thanksgiving season, I challenge all of us to ponder how blessed we are with good climate, abundant water, and abundant resources. Do we appreciate it enough to caretake it? To work in it? To get callouses on our hands from visceral stewardship and participation in God-given wealth?
Or are we so busy getting to our soccer games, checking our TikTok feed, and keeping up with Taylor Swift that the bypassing deplorable turkeys and the jumble of junky trees never enters our consciousness? After writing SALAD BAR BEEF, I had readers tell me "you ruined our Sunday afternoon country road drives because now we see overgrazing and erosion around every turn. What we thought was beautiful we now see as destructive."
I can't imagine a higher compliment to a stewardship preacher. Opening eyes and newfound awareness are the beginning of cultural change.
What do you notice about stewardship threats and opportunities where you live and commute? Do you care?
