I met Carol Gulley while walking on a treadmill in cardiac rehab, she leaned over and told me that my swiss steer Elvis, an animal I unwisely acquired at the first Bedlam Farm, had come from her farm. We became instant friends, and Maria and I were eager to get over to her farm and meet her husband Ed and the goat Sadie, and the cow Sweetpea that she was always talking about. Carol is a pretty shy and quiet person until you mention one of her animals, and then she lights up. Turns out her husband Ed is the same way.

They are one of those couples that complete one another, that define connection and love and loyalty in marriage. They represent something that has become important to me in recent years, as a writer and as a human being: they live in the real world, the real world of life, of animals. They are open and honest and direct. They represent a precious and vanishing way of life, as a culture we are forgetting what a life of independence and individuality is like, what it takes, how important it is to support it.

Farmers are beset these days, encircled. The farmer and author Wendell Berry writes that we have forgotten what people are for, the economists and politicians have decided that the small family farm is no longer efficient or feasible in the new global economy, small farmers are beset by government bureaucrats, unfair and outdated regulations, arrogant and unknowing people who claim to speak for the rights of animals, and they have been abandoned by the rest of us, most of whom are happy to stuff their shopping carts with food without knowing or caring where it comes from.

We get what we deserve, and we will all be the worse for it when these farms finally disappear and give way to the factory farms who represent nothing but mass production and profit. Carol and Ed Gully birthed most of their cows, and know every one by name. They work brutally hard, beyond the imagination of both of us. A few months after her open heart surgery, Carol was on her tractor helping Ed harvest the corn sileage for their cows.

I have a rule at my farm that people eat until the animals do, and Ed and Carol have lived that way for years. I was reminded yet again that people who work with animals are especially blessed, and so are their animals, who have great care, purpose and need in their partnership with people, in the joys and travails of life. Carol and Ed Gulley do not need a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals, they have that already.

This is what people are for, we owe them more than this, we forget it at our peril.