About time

 

The Government’s Bad Diet Advice

America’s dietary guidelines have long been based on weak science.

www.nytimes.com

 

winter

Winter on a diversified livestock farm is really its own occupation.  This is the time when the animals you decided to work with become your dependents and you must put in the extra time and especially effort that it takes to get them through each night and each weather system that blows through from two days of strong north winds and falling temperatures to several days of strong south winds and slowly, very slowly rising temperatures.  And then a week later, here it comes again.  Bedding is a constant for the hogs, the cattle begin to use feed as fuel and each day a different door must be closed, or partly opened for ventilation, hay must be placed south or north of the windbreak and the tractor must start to push the snow, carry the hay or bedding.

From this perspective spring is retirement and we really look forward to it!

Jim

power

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting-Milan Kundera

education

Good judgment comes from experience.  Experience comes from bad judgment. 

consistent?

I notice our new representative Tim Miller signed on enthusiastically with the local school district (MACCRAY) in its battle with Governor Mark Dayton over Dayton's desire to see it return to a five day week.  Local control is always best, said the representative.  I agree, mostly, even to the extent of supporting local control for schools which operate mostly by spending state money.  But it would be difficult, if not impossible for one who believes in local control for schools to speak against it when it comes to counties and townships who merely desire the same authority to zone and regulate that every municipality in the state assumes it already has.  Such an effort is gaining steam at the legislature this year.  Big Ag, as usual, wants no government interference with anything except when it benefits their attempts to roll over what others want. 

We will see how Miller votes.  There are a few of us yet that have not succumbed to the national state of political Alzheimers;  that think and notice and remember well enough to require a certain basic consistency in our representation.  We will no doubt be revisiting this issue here in a few weeks.

Jim    

conferences

The alternative agriculture conferences this year are very much about cover crops.  The practice of using a cover crop after or with the main crop and then harvesting, grazing it or letting it go back to the soil is understood to promote soil health, making it less susceptible to erosion, compaction, weediness and so forth.  Many of the cover crops farmers are planting are complex mixtures of grasses, grains, legumes, beans, including both warm season and cool season plants.  The beneficial aspects of the cover crops in addition to the reduced primary tillage and exposure to sun and wind for the soil appears to center around the maintenance of living roots in the ground, even in winter.  Perennial plants overwinter, of course, and those roots continue to live, benefiting the soil life twelve months every year, as opposed to annual cropping, done extensively in conventional agriculture, which leaves the soil microbes to starve during the non growing season.  It is, if you think about it, how nature "farms".

Jim    

respiration

Today I went to hear a report on the results of a cover crop demonstration grant the farm was a part of.  For the first time ever in my four decades of farming I saw soil test results reported out partly in terms of the respiration measured coming from the sample of soil.  This, of course, is an attempt to assess the microbial activity in the soil, with the understanding that the more the soil teems with life, the more fertile it will be, the less it will compact and erode and the easier it will be to work with.  In the larger sense, it is an attempt to apply wisdom as well as science and experience to the farming of the land.  There is hope for us yet!

Jim