Fall

 Here in western Minnesota, we are at that time when digging in the earth is going to need to stop for several months simply because the earth will be too hard.  There are a host of other things set to happen, all of which signal the end of the something, and also the beginning of something else.  There is no other season like it on the farm in terms of the imperative of getting some things done and the reality of needing the accept the human limits we all live with.  

Many of the things I have thought would be done by now are not and will not be.  I will live in next year country in some important ways.  But it is critical to remember that this is illusion, that our crackerjack communication system regularly confronts us with impossibility, from the celebrity who can change his/her circumstance in life with what seems a mere wave of the hand, to cyberspace superhumans who can accomplish wonders by just thinking about them.

Those of us willingly(and sometimes not so willingly) stuck in reality know that there are things to be seen to, and that if we ourselves do not take it up it is we who will suffer the lack.  Are the potatoes dug up and stored?  Is the house ready for winter?  Are the winter livestock quarters usable?  Will the water freeze?  Is the soil properly covered and protected for the winter?

In reality though, it is all of us who suffer the lack of quality living, as our common life deteriorates and our government falls apart.  Our wise ones have tried to tell us these things for generations.

In the Great Digest Confucius says, in a fragment of a longer thought:  ". . .wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families, wanting order in the home they first disciplined themselves. . ."

As the chaos grows around us we need to continue to pay strict attention to getting the critical things done that we can do.  The order we so badly need in our government today grows from the order we focus on establishing in our own lives, beginning with ourselves.  Work carefully!  Be well.  Enjoy your Thanksgiving!  

gratitude for everyday joys

 It was one of those events I tend to go to because I think I should.  At the high school, we paid twenty dollars each for a seat in the auditorium so that we could listen to three women in goofy costumes display some of the sillier aspects of being a Lutheran in a small town.  So I thought.  Little did I know what was coming.  When life calls for teachers, they will come.  These came with a wake up call!

The twenty dollar gate charge went to community education in the three towns represented by the school, which charity represented a plausible reason for my being there.  We watched the three cavort their way through various skits and situations they had cobbled together out of their own lives.  Included was a mild-very mild-roast of three "volunteers" from the audience the women had gotten up on the stage.  We pretty much all knew them and they knew us.  Good sports all.

But there is this, I told myself.  How many of the miserable politicians we have plagued ourselves with have ever laughed at themselves?  How many of that crew of miscreants have ever knowingly exposed themselves to public ridicule?  Or heaven forbid, taken it in good humor?

More to the point though, the evening featured normally dour old German farmers and grandmothers somewhat enthusiastically following along with a made up group exercise and dance routine rather than sitting in their seats furtively looking for someone else in the group that they knew making a fool of themselves.  They actually followed along and tried to keep up with the rapidly increasing pace. This, of course,was completely out of character for us.

Perhaps most unusual of all, the three women on stage closed the program by exhorting us to continue to get together, to sing together and laugh at each other, and ourselves.  And you know, a generation or two ago we would not need to have been told that.  We expected to do that and we did it naturally.

But since, our farming and other ways of making a living in rural America have increasingly gotten in the way of such simple joy.  We compete, we do not commune.  Consequently our friendships have gotten fewer and considerably more shallow.  Joy suffers.  Human life suffers.

One of the saving graces in our lives, here at Pastures A Plenty, is that our group of customers is filling in, serving some of the purpose we so badly need in our lives together, providing us with friendship and support and ongoing commitment as our traditional rural life fragments and gets more problematic.  And our customers are all across the spectrum politically as we have been able to learn in the process of dealing with them.  Some of us would not deal with some others of us if it were not for our common belief in and commitment to the idea of good food and how that eaters knowing farmers and farmers the buyers of our foods is a very much stronger and more long lasting bond than we ever thought it would be.  

We evidently needed three outgoing women doing a show of silly jokes and pranks to remind us of that.  And for that, I am grateful.

Farm Aid

 At the end of this most difficult and trying production year on the farm, when everything we tried ended being disappointing came a welcome surprise.  We were asked to participate as a farm and family in the 40th edition of Farm Aid, the ongoing concert series started by Willie Nelson and others in response to the financial hardship of the mid eighties.  It was to be in Minnesota at the stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota.  Additional to all the chances to represent our farm and family and what we were trying to do, I was to have a chance to meet Sarah Smarsh, that blaze of clear thinking and passionate writing out of rural Kansas.

I did, and it was far too short, of course, and an experience I will not soon forget.  I write too, as you can see and I am rural, and like she, I am sick of being misrepresented as a cute comical character who knows nothing and lives in the past.  We hit it off even though she is a generation or two younger than I (most people are anymore!)

The day was a press event and then an extended three hour marathon of press interviews after which  I and a friend descended into a deafening rock concert going on a few floors below.  I was ushered to the farmer's lounge and there spent some time talking to several young people who were excited about their efforts to connect farmers with customers.  Unbeknownst to me, wife LeeAnn was getting a little annoyed with her inability to connect with me after what she understood was to be just a half hour with the press-I had turned my phone off.  She got through and sent a grandson-we had much family and several good friends with us that day-to find me and fetch me down to the seats below.  

The music was good, but the sound level intense.  I am not much of a concert guy but this impressed me more than once.  Old rockers with a message, names like Neil Young, Dave Matthews, John Mellenkamp as well as Willie Nelson of course and Margo Price-not so old-singing with a point, songs that I liked.  I had Young's driving chorus "We've got crime in the White House" playing in my head for the next several days.

Son Josh and daughterinlaw Cindy had gotten seats on the main floor where the seats we had purchased were and found us in the farmer's lounge to say that Greg Gunthorp, with whom I had shared a podium thirty years earlier in Indiana talking about pastured hog production, was seated close to them and wanted to talk to me.  I spent an hour on the main floor of the concert trying to talk to him and lost my voice for the next several days.

I am really not much of a concert guy but this was exceptional and I keep replaying the experience in my mind.  It is so at least in part because it is rare for a farmer to find himself (or herself-three of the four presenters at the press event were women farmers)held up for admiration.  I will carry the boost with me for when times are tough, as they pretty certainly will be.

 

 

State Fair time

 This is typically a time to look back on the season and feel some satisfaction over the parts of the farming effort that went well.  This year for us, our livestock enterprises, the drivers of our meat supply business, are the one thing that didn't fail us.  Other than livestock, the season has been a slow motion disaster, start to finish.

We received the full year's total precipitation in the three months between May 15 and August 15 which is most of the growing season here.  It calculates to two inches of rain per week average for those 13 weeks.   Plants will not grow well in that kind of moisture overload.  I have written before about the yellow stunted corn, the small grain still unharvested two months after it was time, about the hay crops abandoned in the field and so forth.

Going back at it after this kind of summer feels left handed, so to speak, with my apologies to those who really are left handed(right handed for you, I guess)  We go to work in the midst of all the undone work from the summer, trying to figure out how to get the necessary things done so that we can help get another season underway next year.  

We must clear the hay bales from the failed second cutting so that we can make a third crop on the hay.  We have to decide if it is worth trying to swath and combine what is left of the rye or if it would be better to run the disc over it and help it seed another green plowdown crop going into fall.  We will need to decide if we should run the Kernza planting another year, or till it and rotate away to another crop. And we know with some certainty that our corn, such as it is, will not be going into the bin without artificial drying, a capacity we gave up some years ago.  So now what?

We will see what crop insurance will have to offer.  Crop insurance has not been as usable for this livestock dependent farm as we might have hoped. 

We are not alone.  Everywhere, and all too often, climate is destroying human effort these days.  And the thing to notice is that the humans involved in climate disasters very rarely talk of giving up.  We take heart from that.  We will press on.  

Rain

 Our farm had 10.6 inches of rain in the 18 days beginning June 11th.  As is usual in these very wet times, we lost about ten acres of pasture and another ten to twenty acres of growing crops as one of our main drainage systems ran backwards, letting in to our farm the water that had been dumped into the drainage upstream. 

The timing of the rain was tough as well coming just in time to stop cultivating, the most critical weed control activity for our organic cropping system.  Rain grows grass, of course, which usually means the pastures shine in a wet time.  But the amount of rain in this short time made even the pasture soils soft and susceptible to compaction damage.  We will suffer the results of this overload of moisture for some years to come, in reduced productivity and weedy conditions in both the cropping and pasture parts of the farm.

Fast growing grass in a rainy time also tends to short out the electric fence and as a result we had cattle out three times, twice on and once off of our farm.  We found out about this first with a call from a neighbor and immediately after a call from the cops.  Any farmer hates hearing this kind of message, but it is the very best kind of neighbor that calls us anyway.  And the cop is just doing his job.  We got them back but the impact remains.  We are checking all the animals at dark every night trying to find trouble before it starts.  Sleep is interrupted and my arms ache from swinging the machete trying to clear the big weeds back from the fence.

So does all this mean we will give up pasturing?  No, it does not.  Pasturing simply works better than crop farming.  What it does mean is that we will be even more insistent in our conversations with anyone who hears us about the reality of climate change and its impacts.  We cannot afford the luxury of being wishy washy about a problem that is staring us in the face.

And we don't have time to monkey with politicians who will not act on it, will even take us backward because they think they personally have a way out figured and can make much money on the ride down into whatever is coming. 

FarmAid

This summer, in the midst of the clatter and surplus of work, more work than can be done timely, we were contacted by FarmAid.  They wanted us to be part of a podcast they were putting together about where farmers and farms are going from here.  Their preferred subject was the idea of joining marketing of farm products to their production, all to the benefit of the farm family and community.

    We were happy to be part of it, of course, as we are happy anytime the ongoing bustle of urban America admits that we and the food we produce are critical to everyone's health and survival.  LeeAnn, I and grandson Andrew were first interviewed about the origins of Pastures farm, the start of grazing and straw based hog production, as well as the forming up of the marketing and the learning process taken on especially by LeeAnn and Josh and Cindy and the work and twists and turns it has taken to get it this far.  

        Then Josh and Cindy took the story to the next level talking about their work revitalizing rural processing businesses, the facilitating of the transfer of business to the next generation and the start that has been made here in Minnesota to train and educate the next generation of processing workers and more than a few, it is hoped, future owner operators.  Much Covid spending in our state went to this rural effort.  It is appreciated and we hope it bears fruit long term.

        A bit later the new food coop started up in New London was the subject. Started on a shoestring and operated by true believers in a new approach to food growing and provision, it promises to be a real blessing to our farm and business. New London lost its local grocery store some years ago and the new food effort may well benefit because of the hole left in the community by the departure.  Our marketing arm has been busy facilitating and helping with the start up.

       And, of course, our reward, besides the satisfaction of talking food and farming with someone who certainly seems to care how it all comes out, is that we could buy at a reduced price, FarmAid concert tickets for later this summer. For LeeAnn and I this will be our first big concert since Peter Paul and Mary at the auditorium on campus at the University of Minnesota in 1970.  

 

Smoke

 Smoke from the fires in Saskatchewan and Manitoba sent thick smoke south to us again this weekend. This is not normal weather.  Air quality index claims danger in exposure for older people and folks with heart and lung problems.  

The earth is on fire and we are the cause of it.  We will figure out how to live with it of course. We always do.  But the other question, the one about longer term results and tipping points and if the earth coming toward us in the near future is at all like the one we are adjusted to remains.

What we try for here at Pastures A Plenty in view of all this is to keep our production of crops and animals as close as possible to what might be happening here if we were not here.  We do not know what is coming.  But we can look back and see that the earth has produced growing green things and animals have reproduced as far back as we know.  This we need to take to heart and to learn.

We think it is a pretty good bet that all the certified smart people and all the corporate money will not be able to figure out a solution.  We only hope they don't make it too much worse than they already have.  And we hope they may give up their age old habit of thinking they know better and begin occasionally to listen to the people doing the work of the world.

We put our faith in the capacity of earth, given kindly use and care, to figure out how to heal itself.  We need to figure out how to feed ourselves and others without doing huge damage.  To do this, we must learn an attitude of listening, of careful attention to what the earth is telling us.

Humility is required.  Listening to the earth and the animals on it and in it does not come naturally to us humans.  But we will have to learn.  The earth will teach us.  So we carry on our work with the plants and animals and try to do so in a way that makes things better and not worse.