A farm's life cycles

The magnolias have burst into bloom. The lush soil in the giant community gardens is tilled and ready for planting.

In the pig-pen, a giant red sow lies on her side, suckling a half-dozen piglets. Said piglets - wrinkly, elbow deep in shiny black mud - are feeding with clumsy gusto, their heads bobbing joyously.

Nearby, eight sated cousins lie side-by-side like fat red piano keys, their little chests rising and falling as they snooze in the sun.

Up a hill, pretty-faced white kids lounge, watching the passing humans. Two long-lashed brown calves rush to a fence, hoping the humans are bearing full baby bottles.

Not this time. Black Karakul lambs mill about, crowding their mothers at the feeding trough. A couple of the ladies are still pregnant. They don't look too happy about it.

There is so much cute here you feel woozy from it.

The farm, 19 acres owned by the town of Lincoln and run mostly by volunteers, is a little gem. Put a couple bucks in the box by one of the barns and you can hang out all day. It's a sweet, frowsy place, left to the town by Dorothy Codman, of the Boston brahmin family.

Codman offers programs where kids can learn about agriculture, and adults can make felt and learn how to keep backyard chickens. There are sheep-shearing festivals and harvest fairs and barn dances, too.

But the real beauty of this place is less formal than that. Codman isn't a petting zoo or a giant pastoral diorama. It's a real, working farm.

Farmers and volunteer workers here are happy to show you around, but they're also busy feeding the animals and mucking out barns. They birth legions of babies in the spring, and harvest 16,000 bales of hay in the summer.

Groups of middle school children come by in the afternoons to help feed the animals and clean the troughs. A few weeks ago, some happened to be around to see a calf born.

On a recent Sunday, a dark-haired nine 9-year-old named Max was invited to collect eggs from the chicken coops. He gently nudged each protesting chicken off its hay, and carefully placed the eggs into a big basket.

"They're warm!" he told his father, delighted.

The farm looks and runs and smells like it might have 200 years ago, except that these days, the Fitchburg train slides by now and again. It's home to rare heritage breeds, like those red Tamworth pigs, and Devon cows, and some spectacularly hued chickens. The animals get grass and hay and other kinds of real food. Cows roam the meadows, or laze under trees.

Herman the water buffalo lives among them. He looks like a big bale of hay till he lifts his head. He's pretty happy on the farm. Why wouldn't he be? He's the only member of the herd who will never go to the slaughterhouse.

That's the part of the farm's cycle you try to put out of your mind when you're eating the heavenly bacon and beef for sale in the store alongside the impossibly golden-yoked eggs.

It's not easy, because you can pet many of the animals, and get a very close look at some of the others.

On a recent visit, a toddler of my acquaintance was quite taken with the turkeys, puffed up for mating season, emitting loud gobbles and other oddly pneumatic noises.

He was in heaven. He doesn't yet know that Codman Farm is rare and quaint, an historical artifact in a world of battery hens, feed-lots, antibiotics, and factory farms.

I wish he didn't have to find out.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is abraham@globe.com.