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December 19, 2023 Food + Drink » Food + Drink Features
Published December 19, 2023 at 2:52 p.m. | Updated December 21, 2023 at 11:42 a.m.
Lucas Farrell's work takes two main forms: written and caramel. He oscillates between those mediums, following the rhythms of the year on Big Picture Farm in Townshend, which he owns and operates with his wife, artist Louisa Conrad.
Poetry and caramels aren't so different, suggested Farrell, 42, in an email. "They share a process of boiling down their material (milk or language) in an attempt to distill, sculpt or otherwise express the fundamental components of life — in small but sweet and wondrous form!" And, in Farrell's case, both involve goats.
Big Picture Farm's caramels are certainly wondrous. Made from the milk of Conrad and Farrell's free-range 50-goat herd, the creamy, gooey treats come in flavors such as sea salt-vanilla, chai, maple cream, raspberry-rhubarb, cocoa-latte and cider-honey. The couple sell more than a million per year of the delicate, decadent, individually wrapped pieces.
Farrell won the inaugural Sundog Poetry Book Award in 2020 for the blue-collar sun. While that collection takes inspiration from his life on Big Picture Farm, as Seven Days reviewer Benjamin Aleshire wrote in 2021, "the book has concerns besides ruminations on ruminants."
Over the past couple of years, however, Farrell has been writing more and more about the animals in both poetry and prose. He and Conrad are entering their 13th year on the farm; some of the goats and guard dogs they started out with have passed away.
"I have these pieces I think of as elegies, or meditations, on these animals that we've lived with that have become so interwoven in the fabric of our lives," Farrell said in a recent phone interview.
The elegies are still finding their form as a collection, he said. But seeing his essays come together with photographs from Conrad's growing archive "illustrates how important these creatures are, at least to us."
Early December is the farm's busiest time of year, when the couple fill holiday orders to ship around the country. Farrell took a break from wrapping caramels to speak with Seven Days about those beloved animals, when he writes and how the spheres of his life overlap.
What does December look like on the farm?
This time of year, I'm just trying to get through the list each day. We're down at the shop — which is a mile and a half down the road from the farm — wrapping caramels using this Willy Wonka machine that we have and helping fill orders.
It's been seven-day-a-week caramel production for many weeks now, and that's always how it is. It's very cyclical. We're all hands on deck there, and then things shift. In the spring, when kidding happens, it hits 100 percent in the other direction.
The animals are transitioning a bit before us into chill winter mode. There's a buck in with the herd right now, so I'm observing, keeping an eye on who's been bred. We always stop milking right before Christmas and take a few months off as the goats are pregnant.
When in that cycle do you find time to write?
Most of my writing happens in the winter, January through March. I have more periods of time where I can really hash things out and work on longer pieces. Then, in the spring, summer and fall, I do a lot of what I call "glimpses" — a little journaling, jottings that pile up.
How does that schedule influence your poetry?
I think of the farm as art. I think of our caramel as art. They're things that we're actively making, along with my writing or Louisa's photographs or drawings. They bleed into one another and inform one another.
Structurally, logistically, there are different spheres of our farm. We have the animals — the grazing, the milking, the barn. That's a sphere. Then there's the sphere of shipping, order fulfillment, customer service and packaging. Louisa and I are wandering in between spheres all the time. We have a small team, four employees. They're also wandering between spheres at different times of year.
The art of that is just that it's our life.
All that variety must tickle your brain in a cool way. When you get a chance to sit and write, where do you do it?
A lot of it is bedside. [Laughing] I was actually just thinking about this, because I'm writing about Josie — a Maremma, a livestock guard dog. She was 10 when she passed this summer. She and Elvis, who's 12, they're out with their goats all the time, right? Twenty-four-seven, they're outside, and they bark. They bark all night to keep the coyotes away. That's their job. Josie especially, because she was the smaller of the two but had a louder bark.
When we first got them as puppies 10 years ago, that obviously was disruptive to our sleep. Very quickly, it became this comfort. There was this profound silence when she passed that has really disrupted the way we sleep and the way we were able to dream.
I fix a lot of problems on our farm. Most of them are easy to fix, but some are harder. I don't know if you can relate, but like back in school, if you're working on a puzzle, you can work on it at night when you're sleeping, in dream mode. Removed from the distraction and flow of everyday life, you can focus. Josie allowed us to dream in that way.
That's a long way of saying that most of my writing happens at night.
Your published work takes a variety of forms. How do you describe all the ways you put pen to paper?
One of the big things I do, in terms of writing, is grant writing — the writing of keeping our business going. In the early days, I was writing a business plan to convince the bank to lend to us. I love all the different forms of writing.
The content, audience and subject matter dictate the form. I never really know what it's going to come out as. Sometimes I'm writing prose, and that ends up wanting to be a poem, or vice versa. It's freeing. And it can also be a little unhinging.
The notion of writing poetry — particularly starting to write poetry — seems terrifying.
I think it's less terrifying when you're younger. I think everything is a little less terrifying when you're younger.
How did you get started?
I was in an academic setting [at Middlebury College, then the University of Montana's graduate program in poetry], surrounded by amazing thinkers, writers and professors, people working in that direction. There's a lot of luxury there to explore whatever subject strikes your fancy the most.
Language has always had a big impact on me. It helps and informs my understanding of my experience in the world. When you're reading a poem, it kind of stops you in your tracks and helps you — helps me — reprocess my own experience. It changes the synapses of my thinking.
And sometimes it's just playful, this sort of delight and joy in reading as an escape from work.
I find delight and joy in your caramels as a break from work. [Laughing.] I often stash them in my coat pockets and find them later, like little gifts to myself.
That happens to me, too.
Do you snack on them a lot?
I do a lot of tasting in the mornings, generally. It's sort of a daily taste while I'm wrapping. There's always this one piece at the end of a run that stays in the wrapping machine, unwrapped. So when I go to clean, there's one little piece there. I get to taste that one.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.
into the field before that one
& again through the one
I still see you there
tethering its vastness to the moment
at the edge of it,
at the stars, their pulsing
makes of loss a field
The original print version of this article was headlined "The Poetry of Caramel | Lucas Farrell of Big Picture Farm on writing, confections and beloved animals"
Tags: Food + Drink Features, Reading Issue, Big Picture Farm, caramel
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