El Nino

 Are we seeing the end of El Nino here at the end of March?  Temps have retreated to a somewhat more expectable level and now we have eight or nine inches of snow on the ground.  Maybe the alliance between climate change and the Nino pattern is over for the time being.  

So, on with mud season.  It looks as if we will need to focus now on getting the machines ready to plant the crop and patch the pastures and hay fields.  The corn markets have so far fallen out of bed as to make us question once again the wisdom of even planting the crop.  

But our major possible alternative, grazing, is problematic too.  It is impossible for us to project any real possibility of profit with calves and stocker animals at the price being paid today.  Contract grazing seems the only way to go so it is going to be time to start looking for someone with more animals to graze than they have grass.  Of course that means we must accurately estimate the amount of grass we will have.

No one ever said any of this would be easy. 

spooky

 March is often the snowiest stormiest season we have.  So far this year, somewhat like the winter we just had, March is quiet, warm and dry.  Anyone who has anything to do with growing plants and/or animals is spooked.  This is nowhere near normal and it feels as if we should stop pretending it is.  

For farmers, job one is coping with the season's weather. After we have done our best with that, after we have modified the seed order, or put in changes in the cropping pattern to respond to the warming, drying soil and hot daytime temps we are all afraid we are going to see again we will have to figure out how to cope.

Farmers, especially those operating livestock and diversified farms do not have the option to "work remotely" or cut back hours or do any of the things that people sometimes are able to do to cope with bad weather or disease.  Farmers cannot sit in the house, turn the air conditioning up and farm from there!  Much as the thought leaders we are so plagued with would argue for some or another "easy way out" there really isn't any.  We, like our plants and our animals will simply have to go through it.

Cropping patterns and livestock breeding schedules are what they are for a reason, or for a variety of reasons.  They cannot, and certainly should not, be changed at the drop of a hat.  Yet the weather and the climate are changing and we have to take up the work of deciding how and under what circumstances we will change.  

There is this.  The very fact that we must suffer through whatever the universe has planned or whatever adversity we have brought on ourselves means that we will be paying attention.  And if we cannot look away and entertain ourselves elsewhere, so to speak, we should therefore be encouraged with the fact that we will be focused in a way that no remote and detached investor ever is.  We have, as the saying goes, "skin in the game".  Do we ever, and the thought is terrifying in view of what we are told is probably coming.  

We have long operated this farm under the idea that "closest to nature is best"  and "get mother nature on your side.  She works for a minimum wage" and so forth.  Nature is changing of course, due at least to the warming temperatures.  But nature is still more constant, and more reliable than say, politics.  Or the market economy.  Nature can teach us things worth knowing.  It is doubtful that politics or economics can, with the kind of upheaval we are likely moving into.      

mud season

 Mud season is something that goes with living off the pavement.  Ask anyone who has taken up the responsibility of keeping a house reasonably clean and habitable what mud season means and you will find out.  It is an unending battle.

But this year is different.  It looks now, at this point in February, as if mud season will be what winter should have been this year.  We are still seeing temps that stay in the freezing zone at night, but peak above the thirty two degree frost point every or nearly every day.  Additionally of course the sun is stronger every day now and even when it is cloudy the surface of the earth thaws.  We have had mud since we shut down the pasture water system for the winter in early December and the cattle began walking to the heated drinker on the yard each day.  They carry a coat of mud on their legs that seems permanent.

I hear El Nino getting blamed for it, in combination with ongoing global warming.  This seems logical.  The underlying truth of the situation of course is that El Nino is a regular pattern we know.  Warming means that we are leaving behind an environment we understand and moving into one we do not.

We can guess a few things about what we are moving into.  Frost, or lack of it, changes the soil at least in terms of our working with it.  As the winter season shrinks compaction of the soil will get worse.  Tillage mistakes are more likely to be permanent.  

New weeds and pests will show up.  Already I have noticed that certain pasture grasses will grow here that were formerly too southern to survive this far north.  Disease will worsen and there will be regular surprises.  This will be as true among us humans as it is with our livestock.

It is best to view the earth as constantly changing instead of being in a steady state.  We will have to learn how to do that.  It will be useful to realize that this has always been so, that what makes it so apparent now is that today's change is something our human activities have brought about.  Permanence is essentially an illusion.  It will be useful for those of us in charge of land use to keep in mind the strong likelihood that most of the change we have seen in farming over the last century has been in the wrong direction and to learn to ask why this might be so.

winter

Most of us make brave noises about how we like the warmer weather and are enjoying it.  But those of us who live close to the weather and close to the cycles of the earth have a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  There is a deep unease.  We have caused a problem we may not be able to solve, we fear.  What if the corn crop next year, for reasons we can't suss out right now, fails the way the pastures have failed the past two seasons?

 It is a strange start to winter.  We have had the occasional freezing temperature but for most of the fall and early winter we are above freezing most of the daylight hours.  Not especially unusual for November, but well out of the ordinary for January.  El Nino gets mentioned.  We are reminded every day by the internet and radio chatter that climate change is now upon us.  It is a worry.  

We depend so upon winter being winter.  We need the soil to freeze to help us erase compaction mistakes from the season and to improve soil drainage for next year.  We need it to clear and cleanse the air we breathe.  It seems now as if I have an ongoing head cold because allergies and sore throats as well as froggy voice come so often, seemingly each episode on top of the last.  Irises are reported up along some of our building foundations.

The best farming advice I can notice tells us to spread our risks, to prepare for a wet season as well as a dry one, to look for both hotter and colder temps than usual, to expect more disease in the livestock while we hope for less.  Diversity is our best hedge against an unknown and unknowable future. Planning to make a bonanza yield is out. Staving off disaster by hedging our bets is the thing. 

We should remember that this posture, spreading our bets and not going whole hog for anything, is what farming was formerly good at, before crop insurance and this whole attitude of living via the internet in some kind of eternal present. We need to be people for whom the next tough time is as real as the last one, for whom preparation is everything, who know to not bet the farm on anything but ourselves, that we have to trust people beginning with trusting ourselves.

And we need to reach out for our neighbor's hand to proceed into the future together.  We better hope that hand is still there.

   

generations

 It is a rare blessing indeed to be able to work across the generations.  Over twenty five years ago, our son and daughter-in-law and their three children joined us on the farm.  We saw the need of a marketing arm for our products to collect more of the income we were being denied in the conventional markets, so we started a meat sales company, which today markets our pork, beef and eggs.  Our farming children were intimately involved with this new venture, and in fact provided much of the drive for it.  

As that generation saw the opportunity in marketing, one of their children, my grandson, has demonstrated a real interest in helping the farm succeed on its own merits.  His brother and sister are deeply involved in agriculture too, one on the supply side and the other with quality control in meats processing for one of our processors.

This is important to me.  I see around me numerous examples of people my age whose only possibility of continuing connection with farming is in renting their land out, driving someone's truck at harvest, and watching the changes in agriculture, most of which do not benefit them.  I am grateful not to be one of that number.

This year, as I built the road mentioned earlier that I thought we needed, I could pretty easily keep up with what was going on with the combining, corn stalk baling and tillage.  The machines are familiar from my farming, so is the routine.  The startling part is my not being first hand involved with it.

We can aim our children where we think they ought to go.  But at a certain age, we need to let go, stand back and hope for the best.  Hard to do but so necessary.  

If I can pass on one piece of advice to the younger ones, it would be to take the past, what you remember, what has been told to you, what has been passed down as tradition, or "how we always did it" with a goodly grain of salt.  Things are changing fast.  Change is beginning to look like an avalanche.  If you are to survive, you will need to be light on your feet.

Remember that much of the change coming is the result of what farming in the past has done and what it has not done.  It is yours not to resent the change, but not to wholeheartedly sign on either.  Your own judgment is going to need to be your closest friend and advisor. What the crowd is doing is apt to be short sighted and sometimes just wrong.  

You will need to do better than we have done in terms of caring for land, people and community and to do so in the midst of turmoil that only the very oldest among us has any experience with.    

Good luck!  You do the most important-and least recognized-work in the world. 

road

I built a road. A short one, not more than five hundred feet long, but still.  I built it with our old smallish skidloader and the loader tractor and did so while the younger ones here were carrying on their work as usual, work like getting machines ready for harvest, scheduling pigs into the farrowing, doing the sales work, controlling the meats inventory and so on.  I pushed the topsoil to the side, got in twenty or so semi truck loads of fill gravel mixed with clay hauled out from various building projects in town and shaped it into a roadway as it came.  I am not looking forward to getting the bill for the hauling, with diesel at five dollars a gallon.  It took some time to shape the road with the undersized equipment.

The reason for the project is that our farmstead, our houses, barns and hog buildings are situated on a small rise surrounded by low ground.  It is this low ground where we needed the road.  Every spring and fall we have trouble getting heavy loads of our hog bedding pack manure through from the buildings out to the crop ground which needs it.  We are then stuck with going around the road to the fields a mile and more extra travel and with the added risk of upsetting the neighbors when on the way home from work they hit a small pile of what may have fallen off our manure equipment on our way to the fields.

The loads are heavy and so many because we use bedding on the hogs. They are more comfortable that way.  The manure is better, composting and becoming less toxic to the all important soil life than the liquid slurries that are the alternative.  The difference of just a few days extra to haul in spring before planting and in the fall before winter are critical.  We do not want to spread manure on top of snow, as the melt will give it a free ride into the streams and rivers. This road gives us relief from needing to spread the manure just in summer, when the crops cover most of the acres.

And the need for the road is an important marker for the growth of understanding with the group of people that are our customers.  Increasingly they understand that farming is complex, that it takes a lot of management and planning to carry it out successfully, safely and humanely, and are willing to pay a good price for the resulting product.  They know, as we do, that quality can come at a good reasonable price, but not a cut rate one.  We are grateful for that understanding.

Short

 When you are desperately short of moisture-here it is extending to three years-last night's offering of three quarters of an inch of rain is a real blessing.