I do not welcome the presence of slugs on the farm.  No doubt slugs play some vital role in the local ecology.  I just do not see what it is.  Unlike flies, for instance, which in their superabundant pestering way do their part to keep the planet free of excess rot while providing tasty snacks for amphibians and birds, slugs serve no obvious purpose.  I have never witnessed a slug engaged in useful work.  Nor have I seen anyone - not a bird or a toad or a bug - eating one.  Not even Ben, one of our farm workers, who ate a big worm when our other farm worker offered him $10 to do it.  But I really doubt he would have swallowed a slug for that price.  Slugs are not even attractive to any other sense.  Rats may do more damage - they will chew through fiberglass insulation, particle board, and a heavy plastic tub to get at winter squash - but they are also soft and capable of a certain sweetness, despite those unfortunate tails.  You never hear anyone looking at a slug say, "But he is kind of cute."

It is possible slugs exist solely to bedevil farmers in the late fall.  Just about every other pest, except deer, goes away when the nights get cold.  Flea beetles, which make organic production of anything in the crucifer family, such as broccoli or turnips or bok choi, a nightmare in the warmer months, vanish by mid-September.  Deer flies, which make having exposed flesh a nightmare in the warmer months, are long gone by the first frost.  But slugs really come into their own in autumn.  Something about chilly dew and short days appears to suit gastropods.  Perhaps, though, it is simply the bounty of crisp greens and storage crops or the last of the summer crops that appeals to them.  Certainly slugs have a hearty and adventurous appetite, noshing their way through an impressive array of vegetables.  Even deer, gorging themselves before the winter famine, won't try as many things as a slug.  I have never, for instance, seen any sign of a deer taking even the tiniest bit of daikon radish.  But a slug considers a daikon a feast.

To be honest, I would prefer it if my children, not slugs, had such eating habits, though I suppose I would not find it much less irritating were I to discover Sam and Will had nibbled on everything in the field.  Nonetheless, it is hard not to admire slugs a little.  These squishy, sticky, torpid blobs, with no feet or teeth, will climb three feet up a tomato vine and somehow digest a significant portion of a ripe tomato (and, mind you, only a ripe one; I wonder if Southern slugs eat green tomatoes).  Imagine an old man in a wheelchair taking out his dentures and scaling a 40-story building for a steak.

I would not call it will power - I hesitate to invest invertebrates with individual autonomy - but slugs possess remarkable instinctual determination.  But then all sorts of creatures do.  Our cat will sit still for a whole day waiting for a mouse to venture from some hiding place.  Each spring a huge old snapping turtle hauls herself out of the swamp across the road and lumbers at least half a mile across our field to the pond on the corner.  Year after year, the potato beetles track down our potato plots, and every fall ladybugs swarm into our house and pack themselves away in obscure crannies to await longer days.  And it is not just creatures.  Grasses and thistles regenerate from scraps of rhizome.  Lamb's quarters and crabgrass root themselves in any scrap of soil - on stone walls and concrete floors and pieces of equipment.  There are trees growing out of our trees.

It is all very inspiring, except that I spend a significant amount of my time trying to quell this enthusiasm for life.  If bugs and plants gave up more easily we would not have to weed the greenhouse every few weeks, or pick potato beetle larvae off the plants every season, or put out row covers over midseason crops before they even sprout to save them from the flea beetles, or bulldoze hedgerows to keep the vegetation under control, or check each ripe tomato to see if some hungry slug has started to digest it.

It is wonderful as a farmer to get in touch with nature, to walk through the fields on a cool autumn morning and admire the deep green of the rye and oat cover crops and watch the leopard frogs bound away from one's feet, to pause to observe the blue heron stalking fish along the edge of the pond and listen to the beating wings and reproving honks as skeins of geese pass low overhead, to stare at the fading colors of the hardwoods up on the hillside and stoop to pull a crisp, cold carrot from the dark earth.  But a lot of the time getting in touch with nature feels more like hand-to-hand combat than a hug - not that either is really possible with a limbless creature like a slug.