The next stop was a non-production farm in Medoc, Gironde. Non-production farms didn’t sell produce to customers, so these farms tended to be smaller and less formal. I pulled in at the train station on a Sunday afternoon and was collected by my co-host, Claire. The drive to the property passed through fields, small homesteads and vineyards – this was Bordeaux country. Despite the association with world-famous wine, the area didn’t look wealthy. The farm itself was the crumbling remains of several stone barns that had previously belonged to a vineyard. The vineyard still operated next door but was, apparently, not doing so well. At the bottom of the driveway, a caravan was parked with a canopy attached to the side and a large tent nearby. I would later discover that this was inhabited by a very useful man, named Gaston, and his family. A tribe of goats roamed around inside an electric fence, with chickens scattered in between scratching at the soil. An enormous long haired mountain dog named Otto basked in the sun on a patch of hay. The house a was a curious one-storey wooden fortress, where I met my other host, Greg, who was busy disposing of a dead rat.
The first work day was an intensive bout of moving bales of straw into an outdoor shelter, after which I was tasked with my own project; installing solar panels (les panneaux solaires). This involved several steps, the first of which was to mount eight panels on a south facing roof. A set of metal brackets had to be arranged in four adjacent lines and drilled into the sheet metal. After the brackets were secured, Greg and I hauled the panels up a ladder and put them in place one by one. Solar panels can be thought of as batteries with a positive and a negative terminal. With all the panels side by side on the roof it was possible to connect the panels in series (positive to negative in a long chain) leaving a single positive and negative terminal exposed. With all the panels in place, around four hundred volts were measurable between the two outputs. The next step was to build a place to house the batteries (les batteries) which would store the excess charge from the panels, and the inverter (l’onduleur) – a control box that acted as the brains of the system. Following standards and best practices was not encouraged at the farm, so Greg asked for the system to be housed in a wooden cabinet in an open barn where it would be sheltered from rain but not much else. Following the mantra “it’s not my farm”, I built a makeshift cabinet and attached it to a wall with some hefty screws. Batteries, inverter and panels in place, the next job was to connect everything thing to mains and power it up. Not remotely qualified as an electrician, it was necessary to get some help. This is where Gaston became invaluable.
Gaston was a close friend of Greg and Claire, and a very cool character. Tattooed and bearded, he didn’t speak a word of English, and communicated mostly in swear words. Having taught himself about household electrical systems, he would lend a hand to Greg whenever an electrical issue needed solving on the farm. In return he lived rent-free in the caravan with his family whilst they found a more permanent place of residence. Between the two of us, we worked out the best arrangement of the junction box, which needed rewiring to facilitate the new system. In France, all properties have a junction box, same as the UK, but there is also a separate box with a switch (le disjoncteur generale) that disconnects the property from mains. Disconnecting this meant we could operate with reasonable safety, assuming no-one decided to switch it back on without telling us. It also turned out that, in France, a ground connection was not provided by the utility company and it was up to the property owner to install their own by burying a metal stake in the ground. This was a little unnerving as the ground connection was needed to draw the electrical current to earth in the event of a fault. Without a correctly installed connection, the current might flow through a person instead. Looking at the junction box, it was very clear that an electrician had not been involved in the original installation, so there was no guarantee that the ground connection was any good.
Suffice to say, we survived the installation and eventually had the panels, mains and the batteries connected to the inverter. During the afternoon, the display showed that a steady stream of solar power was being delivered to the farm.
There was one problem with the setup. At precisely four minutes past ten every day the power to Claire’s portion of the property, yet another converted caravan, would cut. This appeared to be because of the transition to cheap rate electricity (heures creuses) which happened at approximately ten pm every day. Looking at the inverters display, we could see the mains voltage momentarily drop, which would then be followed by the power cut. The inverter would also briefly cut power to the rest of the property for a couple of seconds, presumably as a precaution against damage. We narrowed the problem down to Claire’s kitchen; it seemed there was a faulty appliance or possibly a more fundamental problem with the wiring. With no obvious cause visible, we made do with switching off the power supply to the sockets until they were needed and agreed that it was probably worthwhile getting a qualified electrician to take a look.
Claire had a hobby of making goats cheese (chévre), and she showed me the basic process from end to end during my stay. The goats were milked by hand, five goats providing one small buckets-worth of milk. Kefir was then added and the solution was left at room temperature for a couple more hours. By the afternoon, the milk had separated into thick curds and thin liquid (petit lait). The liquid was given to the cats and the curds were put into moulds with holes to allow for drainage. After sitting at room temperature overnight, the curds were more solid and ready to either be eaten directly as a dessert item Claire called a ‘faiselle’ or salted and left to sit for another night to form goats cheese. The longer it was left at room temperature, the stronger and denser the cheese became.
Dinners on the farm were always cooked by Greg, who had previously worked as a chef in his own restaurant. The restaurant had operated out of a converted school bus which was still parked on the property. It had been shut down some years before, by court order, and Greg was cryptic about the exact reason for this, proclaiming that, “en France, people are not free to live as zey want”. He always cooked on an open fire despite being endlessly pestered by the chickens and several cats who lived on the property. One cat in particular, a blind and slightly cross-eyed tabby, was incessant in his pursuit of food and would regularly be launched across the driveway by Greg for sampling the evening meal. Initially sympathetic, I felt considerably less friendly towards the cat after discovering him eating the remains of a chick outside my cabin.
The farm was unique in that several cockerels (des coqs) co-habited alongside the hens. In general, farms had a single cockerel housed separately from the hens until required for breeding. This ensured that the eggs produced by the hens remained chick-free for human consumption. At the farm however, five or six mature males would strut around the farm, competitively calling out for attention throughout the day. They tended to get along fine, but occasionally a less dominant male would attempt to mate with a hen. Inevitably, a larger or better-plumed male would run over to chase away the youngster and then have his own way with the female. At one point I saw a male mount a hen, only to be chased off by a larger cockerel, who was in turn chased off by another one.
Perhaps to give the hens a break, Greg and Claire had decided that two of the cockerels were due for slaughter and Greg suggested that, if I was interested, he could show me how it was done. There are many different ways to slaughter poultry, but the method used on the farm attempted to be as ethical as possible. It was a little disconcerting, therefore, to see Greg pick up a hammer. The process was as follows (note that this is a fairly graphic account; skip to the next paragraph if you are squeamish). After being captured, the cockerel was hung upside-down from a branch. We then sought to stun him before slitting his throat, the idea being that doing this whilst the cockerel was fully conscious would inflict too much pain, even if done quickly. To stun him, the cockerel was held by the neck and given a hard blow across the back of the skull with the hammer. To be sure the it was actually stunned, several blows were necessary. In the case of the second cockerel, it was still flapping its wings instinctively after four hits. To finish the job, a small but very sharp knife was inserted point first into the side of the neck behind the main artery. Sliding the knife forward quickly was sufficient to open the neck and allow the blood to drain out. The cockerels didn’t die instantly. To my horror, one of them continued flapping after having its throat cut, blood spraying in all directions. After a couple of seconds however, it fell still and drooped towards the ground, eyes closed and tongue lolling.
Killing cockerels was not a fun experience, but as a meat eater I think it was an important one. We plucked the feathers from the carcasses and removed the parts we couldn’t eat, which went to the cats, Otto, and the pigs. Greg then roasted them on the fire before making a rich tomato and aubergine stew sprinkled with sesame seeds. Dinner is a late affair in rural France, with meals often being ready after nine pm, so Gaston and his family joined us around the fire beforehand to enjoy an evening drink (apéro). At four minutes passed ten, the meal was finished and we were eating some homemade goats cheese when lights switched off, signalling time to clear up the plates.
