2/09
Recently, Lyman Orton asked a group of Vermont students if they could envision their world without the familiar scenes and smells of dairy farms. Then he posed the question to us AOA artists and it occurred to me that my time in a Azuero Peninsula of Panama allowed me to describe an alternate vision.Hybrid solutions to life’s challenges intrigue me and I find they’re particularly interesting in rural societies because subsistence living requires constant attention to low budget and practical innovations.
The Azuero is cattle country . Life is conducted on horseback. There are more horses than cars or trucks and more cows than people. It feels like a land completely at home in the last century – except for cell phones and Internet. So I was totally thrilled and intrigued by their approach to dairy farming. There are no barns – no need - no smell of manure, and no milking parlors. The cows are milked in the field where they’re found each morning and evening. The ‘free range milk’ is collected in the standard milk cans, tied them one or two at a time to the farmer’s saddle and ridden out to the nearest main road where he makes a cell phone call for collection. (Since both cell phones and Internet are critical to the rural economy, there are NO debates about the unsightliness of communications towers within the communities)
He leaves the cans on the road and returns to his chores. The cans are emptied and returned to their spot on the side of the road for later collection by the farmer.The two questions I have – and my Spanish wasn’t good enough to get answers - were:
Why didn’t the milk turn to butter as it was jostled and churned on the ride out to the road?
And, what was involved in cleaning the cans after several hours in the 90 degree heat?
Life continues to be a mystery.
