In today's industrial agriculture world, too many farms identify with noxious odors and a place of death.  Syringes and chemicals are the instruments of choice, spreading toxins throughout the ecology.

             If that is your impression--and I can see why it would be--I invite you out to Polyface.  We're heavy into haymaking right now with the break in the weather.  While others decry the sudden heat wave, we're dancing because that's exactly what we need to get in the hay.

             Hay is simply solar dried grass, and you want it hot, dry, and a bit breezy preferably with low humidity to suck the moisture out of the grass and dehydrate it as quickly as possible.  All of us have memorable odors.  It might be the smell of grandma's kitchen.  It might be the smell of Grandma.  Or special cookies she baked.  Perhaps the smell of a freshly decorated Christmas tree.

 `            For me, the quintessential favorite odor of my life is the smell of new hay.  Old hay has a certain musty odor, but fresh hay is a totally different thing.  It's the smell of winter nutrition, the assurance that we can make it through another winter.  It's also the busiest time of year because making it well happens in a narrow window of time.  A couple of weeks can make all the difference in maturity and quality.

             Burying your face in freshly stacked hay yields an intoxicating blend of odors, all of which are deeply satisfying.  Putting by for the winter and trying to work with the weather, the grass maturity, equipment function; it's a dizzying time of work and getting ahead.

             With the wonderful smell of drying hay wafting across the farm, this morning I put up a cross fence for today's cow move alongside the river.  When I got near the bank, a big deer jumped up and trotted off a few yards.  I looked where she'd been and there, curled up on a little sandbar at the edge of the water, were two tiny little fawns.  Folks, that's farm magic.

             She'd obviously had a set of twins in the last couple of days.  The fawns never moved, lying motionless as if to say:  "If I don't move, I know he won't see me."  Their mother stood anxiously a few yards away, eyeing me like only a protective mother can.  I hooked on my fence handle and quickly retreated across the field, leaving the three-some to their day of sunning by the river and whatever adventures lay in store.  And knowing that their protected riparian wildlife corridor was protected from the cows with electric fence.

             Between immersion in new hay smells and wildlife brith along the river, I'm struck by the magic of a wildlife-friendly and odor-friendly farm.  I've always said that good farming should be aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic.  Indeed.

             What's your favorite nostalgic smell?