old dog

 My dog Lily, or as I call her along with every other dog I have ever had, "dog", is getting old.  When I am tied up working in the shop, which is usually not my first choice, she comes with and chooses a comfortable place-not too far from the heater, and out of range of the sparks thrown by the acetylene torch, angle grinder and arc welder, and lies there watching me work.  Tomorrow she may bounce along with me as I walk the pastures and fields looking for first signs of spring life and figuring out how long until the soil will bear the weight of the cattle.  Today she     rests.  She chose a soft pile of floor sweepings to rest on today.

Sometimes she hurts and takes the day off.  So do I.  We understand each other.

She is master of appreciating the explosive flight of the started pheasant.  She cocks her head, better to listen to the increasingly rare sound of the meadowlark.  She pretends, on our walks, to dig up the pocket gophers which have been busy making tunnels.  Sometimes, when she thinks she knows where I am headed, she will lie down in the field and wait for my return.

She is not much of a stock dog, even though she is a shepherd by breeding (Aussie).   She tends to hold her ground as cattle approach to examine her until they are close and then she turns to run, through a gate if I have been dumb enough to leave it down, the whole herd following her.

I love shepherds for their perceptiveness-they know who they belong to-focus and loyalty.  It sobers me to realize that some shepherd dog someday is going to mope and mourn my disappearance from her life.

Lily is in the world and of the world in a way that I like other humans, have trouble  being.  She simply lives out the time allotted to her, fully present at all times.  She does not do art.

Humans do art. It is how we are comfortable in the world that confronts us. Farmers do art, especially diversified small ones.  In this idea I have no great group of fellow travelers for the art I do will never hang in a museum.  But I insist on it.  If no one else, I can count on my dog to agree, if not understand.

Today I mend two posts that the hogs have bent and rusted off.  Though years of experience, I have figured out how to do this spending a minimum of money and in a manner that will not cause someone soon to need to do it over again.  No course of study teaches this very necessary art.

This morning I studied seed catalogs choosing seeds to plant in the bare drowned out places in the pasture and also where the sward was torn up to install drainage a year ago.  I need to consider longevity. palatability, winter hardiness and cost.  In addition, I decided to plant permanent pasture in half of it only, seeding annual grazing in the other half.  This spreads the cost-perennial seeds are expensive-and may  make it possible to get around a difficult season if that is what we get.

When the season opens I will start grazing the herd and the decisions come daily:  How hard to graze, when to move, when to stock more heavily or destock, what the weather will do, can I get more acres to graze for late summer, how far into the fall can I graze and how do I make that happen.  These are decisions that are made daily and cannot be found in a book or from a consultant.  They are based on experience gained by observation, by hearing and smelling and then trying to put the big, impossible to fully understand picture together.  They must be based on judgement-what I know about this farm, and what I can  make happen. 

There are a multitude of similar choices that cropping entails too, but I have pretty much passed that part of the farming on to the next generation.  I hope they will learn too, and that farms are art forms.  They will not get any support in that idea.  I have not.

Part of this is due to the extreme prejudice in our country against anything small or made by work. 

 I wish them well.  They will need to learn from their dogs.

Winter

 Winter-I assume it is finally over now with tonight's temps to be down to 25 degrees-pushed on for most of April this year.  A warmup is projected from here. As the pile of hay shrinks the manure stacks up and composts in the hog houses.  Since we handle manure as a solid, and always mixed with bedding, it is much easier to store safely and minimize the nitrogen losses to the environment even in the case of a long spring.  But there gets to be a lot of it this time of year.  

There is always this aspect of a tightly wound clock in spring, where the manure stacks up, the buildings fill with feeding animals, the cattle get sick of hay and start lining up at the fence to watch the grass grow.  It will be a relief when we can open the gates, hook up the manure spreader and do our part to start the crop year.  This year we have cornstalks leftover from last fall that will need to be chopped and baled for bedding and moved off before we can plant as well. 

It has been hard on the wild things.  Pheasants lined both sides of the roads searching for the least bit to eat as the snow cover lasted for a full five months.  We traveled to the west border of the state for a celebration of music several weeks ago and must have seen close to a hundred deer, some of which were pretty skinny stripping the bark from whatever trees they could find. 

For our kind of diversified farm, it seems there is too much work when the snow finally retreats and the frost comes out of the soil.  Besides the livestock work there is the manure to haul and spread ahead of corn planting.  The planters and grain drills must be ready to use, though we are beginning to consider that spring small grains may not be the best choice for our low and somewhat wet farm.  We generally plant those crops too late-in May-because the soil is not ready to bear the weight of equipment in April.  

We are thinking a better choice may be winter grain crops such as rye, wheat or triticale which are planted in late summer or early fall.  This would necessitate a change in rotation but would open up a wonderful slot in mid to late summer for applying manure when the soils are best able to stand up under the heavy equipment.  Manure is not like fertilizer.  Soils can be fortified with manure and the good effects will carry on for several years.  There is no inherent need to spread manure right ahead of the planting.  

The cattle are necessary for this kind of farm operation because they can use a short season complex cover seeding done in May for grazing in July or hay in August, thus opening the field for manure and/or seed at a time of year where it seems that time is available to do it.

These are critical matters in trying to run a successful small farm.  A clay soil, when worked or even just driven over before it is sufficiently dry will form lumps pretty nearly rock hard when it dries.  Such an area is essentially out of service for the year until the freeze and thaw of winter can rescue the damage.  It is an expensive and discouraging loss.  If you are going to have a different kind of farm, be it organic or biodynamic or diversified, it seems to me necessary to farm differently.  This business of nothing but two full season crops just will not do.

There is very much to do and to decide this season.  For the next month or so we are going to be busier than we really want to be.  Yet it is exciting.  Even for an old guy, farming never fails to perk up the spirit.  Working hard to be in synch with the season just seems right!

Jim