The chickens are pooping all over the front porch again, and my wife is a very special woman.

Almost every week, at some point or another, Carolyn says how happy she is to live at Rancho Cappuccino, surrounded by the wildlife and the livestock, steeping in nature’s own exotic brew of life, death, struggle and ecstasy.

Sounds great, you may say, but the chickens are pooping all over the porch. The geese are pooping all over the lawn. The manure in the sheep pen is two feet deep right now and  the pasture where the cattle are grazing, well, it’s a cow pasture. Talk about your exotic brews.

The cow is a virtuosic defecator. They poop more, larger, wetter, deeper, noisier and more often than anyone else on the farm.

But all God’s children leave their mark.

The chickens leave theirs on the front porch.

My wife’s friends are revolted. Who can blame them?

But my wife is a very special woman.

We’ve tried solutions to the chicken problem. We tried fake snakes. The chickens ignored them, then killed a real snake and left it there, next to the fake snakes on the porch, to express their disdain I guess. This really happened. No kidding.

Then we created a barrier of silk flowers in little buckets. The chickens steer clear. Guests have to step over them.

Of course the chickens still do their business all over the sidewalk and the drive way and the lawn.

I’m acutely conscious that there are very few roommates who would put up with this, and almost all of them are men. If you think I’m being a sexist,  you have an invitation to come help me clean the sheep pen. Then we can talk about my prejudices.

I figure if Carolyn decided to divorce me, I could either move to town or be single for life. I try to think of some other attractive woman who would be willing to join me at the Rancho. I can’t. Even some of the best sports I know can’t hide the little grimaces that say, “How can they live like this? How can she live like this?”

So here’s to Carolyn, with all my gratitude. I’ll make sure I take my boots off every time I come inside. Promise. Unless I forget.

It was a small mistake, really, born of wishful thinking. On the farm, small mistakes often have fatal consequences.

In past years, I’ve always penned our new mothers up overnight with their guard-donkeys when the does and ewes are having their babies. Baby goats and sheep are very vulnerable, especially during their first 24 hours. Compared with human babies, the goats and sheep are precocious — they stand up within a few minutes of birth, walk within half an hour and run the next day.

But a sheep that can’t run is known to coyotes as “food.”

When the birthing began three weeks ago, I didn’t shut the pen the first couple of nights. The grass is green and growing and the moms were out feeding at first light every day. If I penned them up they would have to wait for me to let them out on the fresh grass. I might not be there at first light. My insomnia might go into remission.

The second night of lambing we had five lambs on the ground. The next morning there were four.

Worse, in a way, was the loss of another of the pen’s residents. For three weeks a mother goose had been incubating her clutch of eggs on top of a big bale of hay inside the sheep pen. She hissed at us as we walked through. Her husband stood guard just outside the pen every day, then disappeared at night to his own quarters somewhere.

That morning she was gone and I found bloody eggshells along a path that led from the haystack to a wet mat of her feathers in the pasture.

And it was all my fault.

I must admit that I took some solace from the thought of a warm pile of coyote pups asleep in their den with full bellies under the bank of the creek, half a mile away across the pastures.

But the next night I pushed the sheep, the goats and the guard-donkeys into the pen and locked the gate.

Photo by Bryan Welch

BRYAN WELCH

The turkey hen found a pile of chicken eggs had been laid on the floor of the coop in a corner under a ledge. She decided they were hers.

This was about two months ago. I closed off the room where she sat so the other birds wouldn’t bother her. Other than that, I left her alone. Three weeks later she hatched six baby chickens.

If a turkey can be said to have an expression, hers was proud.

Since then she’s raised her little brood flawlessly. The pullets are spooky and mischievous. They seem to enjoy their mom’s stature. They spend a lot of time climbing around on her back. Sometimes all six of them.

Then last week, as though she felt envious, the other turkey hen assembled her own pile of eggs and started setting.

When hens — turkeys, chickens or any other birds as far as I know — get “broody,” they go into a kind of trance. They lose interest in everything other than eggs. The second turkey hen actually assembled her eggs on the metal grate of the perch, surrounded by the rest of the flock. I thought when she failed to get up and go outside in the morning with the rest of the birds she must be injured. I picked her up.  Voila! Eggs. So I moved her in with the other hen.

The pullets consider the new hen a second, equally enjoyable Jungle Gym. From the first day, they were climbing all over her. Now the first hen has taken an interest in the eggs. She has moved in next to her co-parent and they are mutually incubating and sharing parenting duties.

It’s the sort of situation that makes the farmer think, “Whatever.”

You’ll read here and there these days that industrial agriculture is more environmentally friendly than organic agriculture or traditional, diverse farming practices.

The writer is, almost without exception, someone who makes a living, directly or indirectly, from industrial agriculture. That doesn’t change the fact that they are, in their reasoning, perfectly correct. Industrial agriculture pollutes in ways organic and traditional growers do not, but its efficiency also creates environmental benefits.

As humanity’s population grows and we sprawl across the planet’s empty spaces, the efficiency of our food production becomes more and more important. As much as I believe in organics and grass-feeding, I don’t believe that I can produce 100 calories of soybeans or a pound of hamburger in a smaller space than the industrial farmer. I need more room, and generally more time, to do what I do.

If I have a hungry world to feed and I feel a sense of urgency, then it’s time to cultivate, irrigate and spray. It’s time for genetic engineering, herbicides and artificial fertilizers. That’s the way to produce the maximum amount of food using the minimum time and space.

I’m not talking about sustainability. I’m talking about efficiency.

Our toughest philosophical problem these days is what I call the Austerity Conundrum. A lot of people believe in human dominion and unfettered expansion. That leads us to a world in which we will, eventually, have minimal resources available to each person. We can’t expand production forever, so if we continue expanding demand we end up stretching our resources thin. It’s a grim certainty.

Unfortunately, many of our conservation efforts lead us to more or less the same conclusion.  When conservationists suggest that everyone should ride bicycles and that no human being should use more than five squares of toilet paper per session, they are tacitly endorsing the goal of maximum human efficiency, a goal that willfully averts the gaze from the underlying issue of population growth.

This is not to discredit the power and beauty of the conservation movement. Conservation ignites the human imagination. An aesthetic of simplicity is inherently a part of the spiritual practice of frugality and generosity. What we, as individuals, do not consume will be consumed by other living things. And the planet will benefit from our stewardship.

But our logic is flawed if we believe efficiency will solve our puzzles.

The only sustainable human future is a stable human future – a future in which both our population and our consumption are stabilized. While we focus on efficiency we ignore more compelling issues.

Our first child, Caitlin, was born in 1985. That’s when my universe completely changed. Parenthood was, for me, like a highly efficient contractor who came in, gutted my house, replaced all the furnishings and renovated it down to every detail. In a couple of hours. He also moved the house — to another planet.

I didn’t particularly want a child, until the first one arrived. Then, suddenly, the baby was the center of my world.

I grew up with babies in my house. I had a little brother. Later, my mom took in day-care infants. I was no stranger to parental chores. I understood the plumbing. I could warm formula, wipe away the spit-up and change the diaper. I knew about babies but I didn’t understand some people’s compulsion to have them. My wife, for example. She wanted babies. There was not, as I recall, any discussion of my opinion on the matter.

My blasé familiarity with babies, as a group, evaporated with the arrival of my own daughter. This was not just a baby. This was my baby, a totally different thing.

When Caitlin was born, I was supposed to call the extended family with the announcement. It was a tough job for me because I kept bursting into tears. Then I had to reassure everyone that the baby was fine. I was just so happy!

Two years later Noah was born and it was the same thing all over again for me, the blubbering dad.

I’ve been thinking about this because Carolyn and I just got back from our first spring break without the kids. It was nice to get away. We saw some terrific stuff. But it wasn’t the same without the kids.

Before I had children, I felt I had engineered a secure little world for myself. I lived in a nice place. I had a few nice hobbies. My work was interesting. I could avoid, for the most part, the parts of our world I found unpleasant. I could ignore people whose lives were not as privileged as mine. I could ignore any problem that wouldn’t reach global proportions for, say, the next 70 years or so. I could insulate my little corner of the universe.

Then, suddenly, I was connected to every part of the world, both present and future.

This was, for me, the big wake-up call. Our children — all the children we love, not only our own — connect us to the future. The world is no longer bounded by our awareness. The future is of immediate concern. Not just the future our children will experience, but the future their children will experience, and so on, and so on.

It gets personal all of a sudden.

We can dwell on the profound consequences of our actions, but this exquisite connection to all that is outside ourselves has its immediate satisfactions, also. Spring break was fun, but I only had my own fun to enjoy. Before, when the offspring went along, I enjoyed their fun as well as my own.  This year, without them, I felt a loss.

So I salute the impulse (I didn’t feel) to have babies. I salute the passion that drives us to breach our small, insulated worlds and connect with the future.

And next year I’m going to try to take the offspring along.