By Sheila Drain
Our discussion leader set a stack of Irish books on the coffee shop table and asked us to choose a title to read and later, to lead. I hastily chose the Farmer’s Son, purely on the merits of its cover. The dust jacket recommendation from Colm Toibin also helped to persuade me: “A vivid and sharply observed account of a way of life which is almost invisible,” Toibin quietly asserts.
And for me, growing up on a former (now suburbanized) dairy farm in rural Ohio, the cover of the book is familiar and comforting. Up until the early years of the Millenium, my rural neighbors and family stopped our cars to let the herd cross from the pasture to the barn daily at milking time. This practice is no longer observed there due to the high-speed travel on paved asphalt.
The farmland once featured similarly rolling pastures, but now sprouts large, quickly built homes favoring many triangular peaks as the standard architectural detail; manicured, dandelion-free lawns, and long, concrete driveways with accompanying sheds for the riding John Deere lawn mowers form the new aesthetic. The herd is long gone.
In high school, I regarded “my Holsteins” as the neighbors I loved the most, which explains why Connell’s cover speaks to me: its black and white cows stand serenely in the foreground, separated by the vanishing perspective of hedgerows and of the subtle filaments of wind turbines.
Connell’s cows co-exist with a traditional cottage or two dotting the green hills giving way to the shimmering sky and sea of the Atlantic. This cover, for me, represents a deeply appealing genetic memory of Ireland, unconsciously one my family attempted to recreate on the farm here in America.
Book Cover
We’ve all seen this iconic representation of Ireland often and in some way: on brochures, postcards, posters, greeting cards, or from a distance when travelling, too -although we are somewhat alien from this land by the slight remove of glass between us as our planes land, rental cars are hired, or motor coaches are engaged in Ireland. Can we imagine not seeing these images at all, perhaps in a future visit the Emerald Isle?
In a subtle, not polemical way, Connell asks this question of us (and he imagines the distinct possibility of this cataclysmic change) in 240 pages of a memoir of a son returning to a family farm in the Irish Midlands from his studies and internships in Australia and Canada.
From there he made documentaries, worked as a journalist, and fell in love, before returning home to help his father on the farm and to meditate upon his future in family farming. That is largely what the book is about—the future of the family farm.
This book is also partly a meditation on the sacred relationship between farmer and the land that sustains us, partly a history of the prominence of cattle in Indo-European culture and Greco-Roman myth for 10,000 years or more, and partly an account of a returning son’s depression brought on by isolation and strained family and romantic relationships. The story moves toward the recovery of hope and a renewed spirit for this thirty something writer and farmer, now a winner of a prestigious Granta prize.
This farmer’s son (in Ireland, the title is the Cow Book) honestly, simply, and with the clarity of a Seamus Heaney or a Patrick Kavanaugh, renders the harsh beauty of the life-bringing enterprise of animal husbandry. Connell’s work has recently been named Ireland’s bestselling non-fiction work as he takes readers down the backroads and into the barns of County Langford, where farm animals are far more numerous than residents.
Connell shows us the difficulty of cows and ewes in labor and his own skillful delivery of calves and lambs as he, a three am midwife of sorts, participates in the most traditional, nontechnical task of helping life come into the world. He unselfconsciously notes his own tradition of welcoming each young lamb after a successful labor with a kiss on the head for good luck.
The lambs are sure to need this luck in fending off the fierce Irish winds and rains of the birthing season in February through early April; disease, too, among the herd plus natural predators threaten the young lambs constantly. Connell describes throughout the cycle of hardship and sacrifice of both humans and animals who surrender their lives in this enterprise to sustain the lives of others.
Many consumers of protein products such as red meat suppress this reality that Connell lets us see vividly; we toss cellophane swaddled, Styrofoam encased steaks (with their additives and calories clearly labelled) into our grocery carts as casually as if they are protein bars. But Connell removes the abstraction of food production and consumption as we see what goes into the making of these animal products. He takes us into the labor room, the life of the barn, where his joy and suffering, along with that of the animals he cares for, mingle.
Not only is this a story of new life and of the fierce drive to survive nature’s harsh challenges, but this book also touches on the cave drawings of Lascaux, on bull fighting in Spain, and it reviews the cow’s importance to western culture over thousands of years. Again, factory farming, synthetic meat production, and cloning could end this deep and lasting relationship – indeed it has already taken hold in Ireland’s pig industry. Connell laments the miserable, crowded conditions of penned up and suffering sentient beings, rarely now visible in a pastoral landscape. But far from being a screed, this book remains a prayer of gratitude for the courageous spirit he helps us to see in animals and for those who farm the Irish land.
Connections to the Landscape
John Connell is a young writer with a refreshing lack of cynicism and a deep humility and spirituality. He is clear-eyed in reminding us at the book’s end that traditional Irish family farmers, who identify as organic and not corporate farmers, “raise cattle to die, but they live a life of peace and nature.
Our way of farming here in Ireland may be seen as a backward step, but it is a way in which the animal can live with dignity, and one in which the farmer has retaken the old and respectful role of custodian of the land and the environment for the next generation.” Connell covers the turf of these deep connections beautifully in The Farmer’s Son, and he makes this story indelibly visible.
*Sheila Drain is a retired teacher of British literature and English composition in northeastern Ohio.
I appreciate Sheila Drain’s book review of “The Farmer’s Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm” by John Connell. The book clearly resonates with her, reminding her of her own childhood growing up in rural Ohio surrounded by dairy farms. She brings this rural insight and perspective when describing the daily rhythm of Connell’s life on his family farm as he tends to the cattle and sheep throughout their life cycles. Sheila sensitively relates how Connell’s return to the family farm helped him regain his mental health and sense of purpose. Family-owned farms in Ireland are now under threat due to the aging farming population, lack of succession planning, climate change, and economic challenges. Connell ultimately decides to honor this way of life by turning to organic farming, a practice that helps protect the environment and provides livestock with a humane life. The Irish language is full of words that are poetic and rich with meaning. Many of these words reveal how connected our ancestors were to nature and the land. As I was reading this review, I thought of my own Irish ancestors who had been tenant farmers, so dependent on the land for sustenance. John Connell is a passionate and persuasive advocate for preserving a way of life that has been so integral to Ireland. Thanks to Sheila for sharing her well-written, perceptive reflections on Connell’s thoughtful and timely book.