August Fairs

August is fair month.  The grandchildren have been involved in county fairs.  Some of the younger ones had projects at the Brown County Fair in New Ulm and the older grandkids, here on the farm, were at the Kandiyohi County Fair.  Everyone worked hard on their projects and won several blue ribbons.  Granddaughter, Kirsten, won a 4-H state fair trip with her Ewe Lamb and will be there the first weekend.  The last weekend grandchildren, Jake, Andrew and Kirsten will go for the FFA State Fair Shows with their hogs and sheep.    Sunday, August 24th  at 11 am  Pastures A Plenty will be participating in the MN Cooks Event in Carousel Park near the grandstand.  This event has been going for over 10 years and from 9 am to 4pm every hour on the hour MN chefs and farmers will be on stage demonstrating and talking about local foods.    Hope to see you at the MN State Fair! 

cool

The cool nighttime temperatures for the last week or so, and predicted for another week are going to be a problem for the corn crop.  We can expect wet grain, I think, and perhaps a slightly reduced yield.  This shows the wisdom of diversifying a northern (or any) farm, making sure that the income streams in from a goodly variety of sources.  Nature runs her economy this way, using a great variety of plants and animals.  Diversity offers safety.

Jim

hysteria

Comes the word now from our professional governmental nannies that fist bumps, in the style of the somewhat younger (than me) set are a safer greeting than the old fashioned handshake.  I suppose this is because the palm carries more e-coli than the knuckle skin.  Somehow, it doesn't occur to these types that slowing down our homeless human drifting around across the globe, carrying with us our microbes as well as other fauna and flora would do more to arrest our drift toward serial epidemic hysteria than any amount of worry about which method of human greeting carries with it more risk.

And a butcher block came up yesterday in our endless conversation among ourselves here at Pastures.  I remembered one from my childhood sixty years ago that I greatly admired just for the amount of human effort that had been expended over it.  I claimed that it was sufficiently dished on the top from years of wear due to an endless series of knives cutting meat that it would hold without spilling a drinking glass of water.  Now, of course, such a tool is not allowed in any food production area due to the porousness of the wood.  Somehow, we do not worry about the integrity of the private inspectors hired by the chicken killing companies to substitute for the public inspectors they claim to no longer need.  Wood, in the service of cutting meat is suspect, but companies hiring their own inspectors is not.  Progress, I guess.

Jim 

Eliot

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place we started and know it for the first time."

T. S. Eliot is not in any sense an agricultural or rural writer, but this sentence of his has always seemed an apt description of a farming life.  We live our lives, we who love farming, as a kind of continuous experiment with new procedures, new products, new machines, only to discover as we age that we forgot to start by asking our farm what it could produce well, without reduction to itself or to us.  With age may come the patience to listen to what the land wants to do.  A long, busy, mistake filled life finally comes to the chance for wisdom, if we can but recognize it. 

Jim

farm politics

Democrat Collin Peterson sends out a request for support, saying that he has been able to represent Minnesota's seventh district as a Democrat even though it voted Romney in the last Presidential election.  While the risk of one more know nothing right winger in the Congress is a serious matter, and must be considered, we must also take a close look at what we are buying in the Peterson brand.  Representative Peterson has been more than supportive of farm law as it is, indeed, he is one of its major architects, even in the Republican House.  And it is this law, tilting the table toward the "winners" as it does, that empties out the countryside, cheapens the jobs that are left, that plants corn and soybeans on sidehills too steep for an annual crop, collects our livestock into fewer and fewer large farms, partly by insuring that grain stays cheap and market opportunities for agricultural products slim to none.  To add insult to injury it casually and carelessly cuts food stamps when people increasingly do without decent food.

Someone needs to give Representative Peterson a tour across Minnesota in this extremely wet year and point out to him that those fields that are sending the soil to the river are planted in annual row crops instead of permanent pastures and hayfields.  Where is the value of a farm policy that shuts down small and medium dairies in central and southeast Minnesota so that it can put six thousand cows on a rotating milking platform just six miles north of me?  This election will once again be between bad and worse.  Discouraging for a believer in democracy. 

Jim

mosquito

Mosquitoes are bad now, one of the results of our month of rain.  Now we check the weather forecast not just for evidence of rain or severe weather, but also for sun and wind; certain jobs, anything in the pastures for instance, are difficult to impossible without sun to fry the little critters to death, and wind to blow them off.  Their presence gives religious belief a trial.  Since we say that we believe God considers His creation to be good, we must deal with the idea that God loves the mosquito too, even though we may not think much of it. A real philosophical conundrum.

Jim

clear voice

We in the country do not speak with a clear voice.  Too many of us are willing to fall into line behind the version of reality put forth by the large agribusiness companies and the commodity groups such as corn growers and pork producers that shill for them.  It should, for example, be a no brainer that the politicians claiming to represent us would get for us a goodly share of the money from the "environmental and arts" amendment to the state's constitution that passed a few years ago.  Especially is this so because rural lives, lived at the very source of the problem, have much more to do with improving conditions than urban ones. 

Consider, for example, Arne Carlson's stated goal of making the Minnesota River swimmable and fishable in ten years, a truly magnificent goal with a deadline now long passed.  Urban folks might enjoy a clean river but rural folks have to make it so. While we, or at least some of us, can choose to leave the plow in the shed, and begin to explore what livings might be made with permanent stands of grass and legumes, urban folks can what?  Sort their trash and pick up after their own picnics?  We can do that too, and should.  So why should the urban areas continue to get the lion's share of amendment spending?

The negative role of the University and its lobby shop is perverse.  This is especially so in view of the fact that it is an institution supposedly committed to the education and improvement of the farming and working classes of people.  As an alumnus, I am deeply ashamed.

Jim