stress

Stress levels are zooming here on the farm.  It is not just Trump's fumbling approach to fixing trade deals with China and others that badly need fixing, an approach that loads the sacrifice all on farming and rural America.  It is also the big unadmitted elephant in the room: climate change.

People say that too much rain is preferable to drought.  For at least some of the farms and farmers, that is wrong.  We have had three or four years of not only excessive rain, but an excessive number of rainy days and it leads me to consider my own history here.  In our forty two years now of farming this place we had a significant loss to drought one time-1988.  We have had perhaps twenty years of reduced yields and lost crops to excessive moisture in that time.  Each of these losses is smaller, but cumulatively they add up to much more than the single drought loss.

We are at the 19th of May at this writing.  This is the closing opportunity for planting corn.  We have no corn planted.  Small grains are a waste of time now.  Better to try for a short term one cut annual hay crop and then seed a winter grain for next year.  Soybeans are difficult on our farm.  We are running out of hay due to the lousy hay crops last year.  So the cattle are on the pastures-timely by the calendar, way too early by field conditions.  The grass doesn't grow because it is too cold, the excess rain pools in the hoof prints of the cows, tonight it will freeze while the new calves lie on the wet ground.

Not only have we not planted corn, we have not been able to haul manure out.  The manure is necessary for the corn crop.  Our hog facilities are full to the rafters, so to speak.  If we get enough drying weather to clean them and apply the manure, it will be at the expense of the corn we should be planting.  The manure is beginning to be a health issue. 

And to add insult to injury, the USDA is absolutely clueless about what is going on.  Rather than trying to point farming in a useful direction, to get practices on the land that help sequester carbon and thus somewhat modify the out of control water cycle with its excess precipitation, the agency seems to exist mostly to pass out aid to farmers unnecessarily hurt by the incompetence of government, both at the agency and in the White House and Capitol.