For many, agricultural life brings to mind weekend trips to farmers markets, sprawling fields, brightly colored produce and flavorful crops. Well, it’s not always so picturesque. There’s nothing bucolic about bugs, bleach and baling. Here is a look at some local farmers' least favorite chores.
Illustration by Iain Duffus
Making Hay
Beads of sweat trickle down Clay Trainum’s lined but lively 56-year-old face, his T-shirt drenched after a long day’s work.
Small, pesky pieces of hay stick to his body like, as he describes it, “sprinkles on a doughnut.” The owner of Autumn Olive Farms, Trainum has just finished baling hay on his 50-acre property, something he does an average of five times during the summer.
Why, on a sweltering 98-degree Virginia summer day, would he bale 30 acres of oat hay?
Well, Trainum has 1,000 pigs ranging from full-grown Berkshires to young piglets — and every single one eats hay.
“I only make hay when it’s god-awful hot, “says Trainum, who explains that it’s best to bale hay when it’s dry and warm. Each hay-making session yields anywhere from 400 to 1,200 bales and takes roughly four to five days to complete.
Trainum lifts the 50- to 75-pound bales onto a conveyor to be stored safely 25 feet up in his barn — an intense, dry, suffocating heat trap. “You’re hoping for lots of straw for bedding, yet it exponentially increases your misery factor when baling,” he says.
Illustration by Iain Duffus
Dark and Wormy
While some farm jobs put you in the crossfire between heat and hay, others bring you out at night.
It’s midnight, pitch black, and David Hunsaker and Barbara Hollingsworth are heading to their field and greenhouse at Village Garden, armed and ready with black lights in hand, straight Ghostbusters style. The duo is stealthily on the hunt for a pesky intruder: tomato hornworms. “They are the bane of our existence,” Hunsaker says.
Growing up to 5 inches in length and resembling a chubby, neon-green finger, the tomato hornworm looks deceptively endearing and is detrimental to plants. The pesky caterpillars begin their feast at a tomato plant’s green leaves, where they are well-camouflaged. Eventually, and voraciously, they work their way to the fruit itself.
Hunsaker and Hollingsworth spend hours scanning their plants, looking for the illuminated crop-killers that glow under the black lights.
“Usually I find a couple worms on a plant, but one worm can do a lot,” says Hollingsworth. “We have to check for them quick.”
Illustration by Iain Duffus
Policing for Mold
Steve Haas, a 56-year-old mushroom man whose first memories involve fungi and foothills in Lynchburg, battles his own crop killers, though these are invisible without a microscope. Haas forages his 65-acre property daily for wild mushrooms — his favorite — but he also grows lion’s mane, oyster, shiitake, maitake and portobello mushrooms in wooden boxes on oak sawdust beds inside an 800-square-foot room.
“The worst part of my job is the opposite of dirty,” says Haas, who decks himself out in rubber boots, a face mask and clothes he doesn’t mind losing to splashes of bleach while he cleans his mushroom-growing facility four to five times a week.
Haas is protecting his prized possessions against green mold, which, ironically, is a species of fungi. Once present, the spores can hijack his carefully cultivated environment in no time. Haas delicately takes the box apart, employing a power washer and a plastic brush to get in every nook and cranny.
“It’s a delicate balance,” he says, “but if you keep it super clean, you can stay ahead of the game.”
