Working the land
Isle Madame family keeps farm going
Minus 23 degrees and Sarah Nettleton is whistling atop an island in the Strait of Canso.
Two short whistles and Ruby, a hundred yards away, is on the move.
The sheep, suddenly alert, bunch together as the border collie passes behind them.
The flock flows surprisingly fast over Rockloaf Farm’s tumbling pasture.
Then a two-tone whistle and Ruby turns to come back around clockwise, tightening them up.
A long flat to high note resembling a bosun’s call and Ruby crouches, walking into and pushing the animals toward Nettleton.
“Barring the milk cow and the dogs, generally I am not sentimental about my animals,” said Nettleton. “The sheep don’t get named, the cows don’t get named, because they serve a purpose here to produce for us.”
This 80 hectares of acid soil on Isle Madame has grown accustomed to being worked by strong women.
Down at the house, the youngest of Sarah’s four sons is following detailed instructions from his grandmother on how much firewood to bring in.
In 1959, a year after arriving from the United Kingdom, Martha and her veterinary husband, Brian, started the Truro Livestock Auction. They saw it as a way to break farmers free from processor-dictated pricing.
A few years later Martha and Brian escaped from a tedious veterinary association meeting in Kentville. With a babysitter already booked for their six children, they drove and drove and ended up on a dirt road between Arichat and Petit de Grat, buying a farm.
“When you have land you have a responsibility to look after it, use it,” said Martha on Thursday.
They put hooves on the ground.
And along with their children watched lambs come bleating in
to the world each April, grow fat as the pastures turned green and
they sharpened their knives in the fall.
“Day after day after day you see the whole cycle of life,” said Sarah, one of Martha and Brian’s two children, who chose farming as an adult.
“Death is part of that cycle we see on a regular basis. My boys
have faced death in animals and I think that will make them better prepared for when they face death in people.”
In 1988 Martha and Brian were home from a six-year stint managing a provincial livestock station for an NGO in Papua, New Guinea, when he died in a car crash. Martha buried her husband, flew back to Papua New Guinea for another year to wrap up their work there, and then returned to Nova Scotia.
At 60 years old she taught herself the jobs that once fell to Brian — learning to kill and butcher the sheep.
“There weren’t any Youtube videos to learn from back then,” said Martha, 83.
When Sarah and her husband Paul MacLean moved home with their four children and a desire to take over the reins at Rockloaf Farm, Martha taught her daughter the knife-work required to turn life into food: how to split the sheep’s carcass down the backbone and pare from it shoulders, hind legs, loin chops, rib chops and shanks.
It’s a craft that has served Sarah well.
With the nearest processing plants in Pictou and Sydney, it’s a time-consuming and expensive proposition to have animals killed and butchered. There’s one three-hour return trip to drop the animals off and
another to pick up the meat.
Government regulations require meat sold at markets or stores to be killed and butchered at these inspected facilities. But the Pictou County business stopped doing custom cutting a year ago.
And the one in Sydney is too far away and inconvenient to justify the trips.
So Sarah kills and butchers what she can sell to her Richmond County customers as farmgate sales — which are still allowed —and sends surplus live animals to auction in Truro.
“Even on Isle Madame there are easier ways to make a living,” said Sarah.
She estimates she’d need 200 sheep to make a living, but she’d also need expensive infrastructure like a big truck and trailer, haying equipment and huge amounts of lime to sweeten Rockloaf’s sour soil.
Even then there would be too much uncertainty.
So Paul works full time as a teacher and she substitutes.
“My kids all have had the chance to learn the responsibility that comes with living in a community, even if it’s a small family-sized community,” said Sarah. “It’s not just all about ‘me,’ there’s a sense of responsibility for the community in which you live.”
So the farm isn’t about making a living so much as it is about what it demands from each generation: the animals must be fed and the children must be taught.
Asked if either of her sturdy boys would carry the farm after her, Sarah, as always, was frank.
“It’s too early to tell. We’ll see.”