MOSES

We spent Thursday through Friday at the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Conference. Seeing long time friends is always wonderful. It is a fact that we who do things a little differently in agriculture are so scattered and sparse that it takes a regional conference like this to relax and feel among friends. And the large numbers of young people with their children and babies is heartening. The mood among us older ones at least was pensive. Many face retirement without really knowing how best to proceed. All too many have no one to help into the business following us. And current political events point to a real wrong turn taken by our politicos, and perhaps all of us, beginning decades ago. How did it get so terribly wrong? We have work to do, no matter our age. The first question is about order and priorities. What needs to come first? It is my hope that as we work to pull us and our country back from rage, hatred and fear and to heal those corrosive attitudes we can also see some of what needs to be restored in order for us all to live a satisfactory and conserving life here on earth, and to take on that work. We have reached a critical point in our country and the world. Let none of us shirk the task.

thaw

One thing that upsets the feeding plan to outwinter-feed on pasture-the cattle is a thaw. We have had several this odd winter already and the cattle generate an amazing amount of mud. They punch holes in the sod, destroying the pastures, and fouling the feed. It is becoming apparent that we must always have a plan B. Now typically we feed the cow herd on the cropping acres. We couldn't this year because of the wet late summer and fall. This meant we weren't able to get all our cornstalk bales-bedding-hauled in. Cattle out there would wreck the bales, so we gave it up and kept them on the pastures. Now they need to come off, to the lots I suppose, much as I hate it. The Sustainable Farming Association has made available several videos of Alberta, Canada farmers winter feeding their cattle and I am fascinated by the idea of placing the bales in October and then bale grazing by means of an advancing hot wire for the winter. But this winter shows me that at least part of that layout must be on the cropping acres for use during the warm times. The mess can be more easily corrected if you are just planting corn anyhow.

soil health

The fourth annual soil health conference sponsored by the Sustainable Farming Association runs this week in Fergus Falls. I can't go and am really missing it. We have had someone, generally me, there each year as this is critical stuff. Attention to soil health, to the multitude of microscopic critters and plants that should be in the soil, is key to so much. Those critters grow plants which cover the soil and provide food for animals and us. Soil critters stabilize the soil, keeping it from washing and blowing away. And they sequester carbon, something all of us need to understand as we try to stabilize our climate that we have been burning so much carbon into. Sequestering happens as organic matter in the soil is built, and building that requires living roots in the soil at all times of year. It requires regular cover crops featuring a variety of species and it is likely to mean more farming with perennial plants instead of annual. These things would be revolutionary in agriculture and the pity is that so few know about them.

winter work

This year we needed to keep the cattle on the permanent pastures rather than sending them back to the cropping acres for winter feeding.  So there they are, munching on hay while being "watched" by our newly installed array of solar panels.  Meanwhile winter was kicking up with snow and wind last week while we needed to wean the pigs, move their mothers back to the gestation area and install the next group of pregnant animals in the farrowing pens.  "The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer!"  But as always, we are grateful to have important work to do. 
Jim

winter

The long fall ended with a storm on November 18th that bowed the bushes over under the snow weight and sent the farm into power outage from noon until ten the next day.  Somehow, on this kind of farm, we are never quite ready for the end of season even though we know we are pushing it.  Always there are two or three things that really should be done first and so it goes.  So the storm interrupted Josh and Cindy's first wintertime convention in the Twin Cities, making them late as they pushed to keep animals reasonably warm and watered by use of the stand by generator.

So we have a few things yet to do.  Today the cattle went into winter lots and the hay feeding rings until we can get the last of the bedding bales home next week, allowing them access to what they can find of the crop residues.  Meanwhile pigs are being weaned today and moved out from farrowing so that can be cleaned for the next batch of sows.  Tomorrow we must turn off the pasture water at the curb stops.  And, we get to throw the switch turning on the array of solar panels, at long last.  We eagerly look forward to it!

Around here, you could often be tired, but never bored!  We wish you all a Merry Christmas and much good time with family and friends!

solar

Our new solar panels are up. They stand along the farm’s driveway oriented south at the edge of the pastures. The process to the present point with the project has been long and convoluted so it is good to see them standing there. We started thinking about solar four or five years ago because we were not comfortable with the way the freezers we use in our business had driven our electric bills up. This was because of the cost in dollars, but also the apparent contradiction in goals. We claim in our meats sales that our animals are raised differently, that the kind of farming that produces them, heavy on pastures and hay while minimizing the use of row crops makes possible the kind of long rotations in land use that are kind to the environment, saving on fertilizers and crop chemicals and enabling us to avoid use of GMO’s. Our crops are indeed certified organic, which is a contrast to our heavy use of electricity to run freezers for our meat sales.

The original thought was to participate in our state’s net metering law under which our power cooperative would buy the power produced by the panels and sell us back all the power needed for the freezers including whenever the panels were not producing-nighttime-or producing at a reduced rate in the winter. We were to be able to buy the power at our regular rate and sell our power back to the coop at nearly the same retail rate. However, before we could get the panels up, the legislature here changed the net metering law at the request of the coops, which didn’t think they should be required to provide what is essentially stand by electricity at a rate that allowed them little or nothing in the way of income to cover maintenance costs on their transformers, lines and poles. Now, the state decided, the power suppliers would have latitude in the amount of power they would buy back, what they would pay for it and a standard monthly service charge as well. The only requirement is that these charges and policies be “reasonable”. As you can imagine, this resulted in an immediate pile up of complaints to the state’s Public Utility Commission, which had been appointed referee. This happened in 2014, when we had been awarded the USDA grant to cover part of the cost, but had not yet signed the contract with the builder. We put the project in neutral and spent a year studying our options and rethinking the entire idea.

We knew from the beginning that one of the things we wanted to consider was taking that entire system off line. After all, the freezers draw the most power during the daytime in the summer, when temperatures are the highest and panels produce the most. We knew from experience during several day and day and a half long weather caused power blackouts that the freezers, which we keep at about ten degrees below zero, will hold the cold for overnight without more than a three or four degree rise in temperature. And though our local power coop is well managed and does a good job of maintaining and improving its infrastructure, it does depend upon western coal as its fuel and low interest loans from the government to keep its balance sheet healthy. And the infrastructure that surrounds both us and the power coop, the national electrical grid, is being allowed to run down, resembling nothing so much as a diversified farm where the farmer, nearing retirement, has no heirs and sees no use in putting money into something he will not live to use, and so does not bother to fix the barn roof. Why a country with a large and productive economy should act that way is a puzzle I have not been able to figure out, but there it is.

After long and intense negotiations with the power coop, and long careful study of what the new approach would do to our projected payback time on the panels-increase it from eight years to eleven basically, given the best the coop would offer-we cautiously went ahead. We reasoned that we had the Public Utility Commission to fall back on, reluctant as we were to involve a government referee in a dispute with a coop run essentially, by friends and neighbors. We will see. We hope for the best.

Why didn’t we just take the plunge to offline? Because the daily inventory in the freezers generally exceeds five thousand dollars at any given time, and because we are far from figuring out the details of the standby. Time to do that and gain experience with the actual production of the panels was why we wanted to go the net metering route in the first place.

There are questions about this. How much will the panels produce? What about the equipment required to make sure that the freezers are not allowed to run when the panels are not producing enough to avoid low voltage to the motors? What else beside night will cause the panels to produce at a greatly reduced rate? What will be the effect of a series of cloudy days in summer? And then, how good are battery standbys, or would we be better served with a simple diesel standby generator?

These questions are some of the host of issues that will come up as we consider producing the power we need in other ways than coal and in a more decentralized fashion. It seems evident here that decentralization is crucial, given the long term inability of the US government to deal with simple infrastructure improvements and maintenance. But what is also evident is that farms, and especially diversified ones, are in a unique position to start taking up some of these problems and learning how to use some of the new tools to solve long standing issues. And it may be just my opinion, but I think rural power coops could benefit here as well, thinking about ways to form closer and more beneficial relationships with their own customers/owners. Here in the Midwest for instance, the power coops are thinking about large solar installations to produce their own solar energy and thus achieve better control over when they need to buy natural gas produced power to supplement the solar. Good and ongoing communication with their own customers with solar installations could result in similar control of the power supply for the coops plus providing opportunity for hundreds of farms like ours to produce additional income while controlling our own costs.

Farms are full of opportunities. The major problem with alternative energy in any form is what to do with the slack power production times. Farms, because they are under such close and personal management, might be able to take the lead in distributing the load, matching it more closely with available power at any given time. Suppose, for instance, that we install solar panels to supply the power needed to pump the water from our central water well. We use a lot of water, as does any livestock farm. We could oversize the capacity of the solar installation enough that we could rely on it to produce in twelve hours the power needed for twenty four. Then, if we routed the water from the well into a water tower, such as all small towns use, we could provide livestock and household water when the sun is not shining. With just a little ingenuity, we should be able to attach a small turbine that would use the falling water-from the tower-to generate a certain amount of power for another use, ventilating a barn, for instance, or heating a piglet nursery. Essentially what this system would do would be to save the power generated from the sun to use at night, while also encouraging thought about reducing load for night times.

This solar effort promises to be an adventure! One step at a time.

humidity

The humidity and number of rainy days here at Pastures during August demands to be noticed.  My lifetime on this farm has seen a variety of weather, but until now, nothing like the weather in August just past.  Generally August has been hot with relatively low humidities and crops and hayfields going a bit short of moisture.  By Labor Day we are welcoming the lengthening nights for the relief they provide against the daily heat.

We have certainly not had the worst of the rain, as many areas close to us report instances of ten and twelve inches at a time, and consequent floods as the rivers and creeks are overloaded.  Still, the humid weather in late summer here is unnerving and the constantly extended expectation that more is on the way alerts us that something different is up.  Whatever we make of it, we need to pay attention.

Jim