Turkeys and trees
Almost once a week I drive to the airport in Charlottesville and I am writing this at the airport in Charlotte, waiting for my next flight to Dayton, Ohio, where I have a farm consultation tomorrow. The airport is exactly 55 minutes from our home, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, from the Shenandoah Valley to the Piedmont in Virginia. Interstate 64 leads to Charlottesville and offers spectacular views below as it passes the peak of Afton Mountain.
During this 30-minute highway trip, I was passed by three tractor-trailers carrying turkeys to poultry processing plants in Harrisonburg, heading west while I was going east. Thanksgiving is approaching, and since we processed our own turkeys over the past few weeks, I noticed how dirty those turkeys were.
Ours are gleaming white, literally snow-white. They look like they’ve been washed with shampoo and are impeccably clean. The turkeys in those trucks share the same genes as the ones we raise – they are broad-breasted white turkeys, resembling Nascar race cars – but the way they are produced is appalling. Living their entire lives without access to fresh air and sunlight, crammed into huge buildings, breathing their own waste, unable to escape to clean ground, and never experiencing the joy of hunting for crickets or grasshoppers, their feathers are coated with droppings. The feathers looked a dull yellowish-brown.
What a terrible affront to environmental responsibility to take such a magnificent bird as the turkey and never let it achieve its turkiness. If you’ve ever had the privilege of seeing a flock of happy turkeys in a pasture, you know what I’m talking about. Their vibrant eyes and bright red heads bobbing on their snow-white feathers as they run around, looking like prehistoric creatures, from blades of grass to grasshoppers, cheerfully chirping and clucking. A turkey, as I’ve been told, has about 31 vocal options compared to 16 for a chicken.
Instead of feeling joy for Thanksgiving, I felt an embarrassing sadness that American agriculture has fallen so low, and American buyers are so indifferent to the expressive beauty of a live turkey in its natural habitat.
These reflections made me once again take note of the tangled mess of trees along the highway and on the median. In Europe, one of the most striking features of highway shoulders is the carefully trimmed and maintained trees along public transport areas, whether they are rail lines or highways. I think the wealth of our country has made us take our resources for granted.
These transport shoulders could be greatly improved by planting good trees instead of junk ones. The dead, bent, sick, and overly dense biomass could be shredded into chips and used as fertilizer through composting. We could even plant fruit trees along miles of public roads. In Italy, every cloverleaf highway is full of vegetable gardens. People sometimes camp there on weekends and tend to their vegetables. I have no idea how they allocate it, who gets what, but it creates a rich and beautiful landscape wherever you look.
We Americans simply do not care. During Thanksgiving, I encourage all of us to reflect on how fortunate we are to have a good climate, abundant water resources, and rich natural resources. Do we appreciate it enough to take care of it? To work on it? To get calluses on our hands from instinctive care and participation in the wealth given to us by God?
Or are we so busy with football games, checking TikTok, and following Taylor Swift that the pitiful turkeys and the tangle of useless trees never enter our consciousness? After writing the book "SALAD BAR BEEF," readers told me, "You ruined our Sunday afternoons spent driving on country roads because now at every turn we see overgrazing and erosion. What we once saw as beautiful, we now see as destructive."
I can’t imagine a greater compliment to a preacher concerned with management. Opening eyes and new awareness is the beginning of cultural change.
What do you notice about the threats and opportunities related to management in the place where you live and work? Do you care?