climate

It seems as if we are headed into another fall season very much like '09. Since midsummer this year, we have had rain in the forecast pretty much every week and a large proportion of the rains turn out to be heavy. Last fall was so wet that we pulled the cattle off the permanent pastures in October to keep them from being destroyed, and unusual problem with permanent pastures and those tough root systems.
We have straw laying in windrows that should have been baled in early August, a first crop of hay on the new seeding that was cut the first week of August and we cannot get to the point where either is dry enough to bale. We have turned each swath three or four times to keep it from rotting and smothering the new grass coming beneath.

It is this kind of thing that brings climate change to mind. This weather is unusual even in our forty years of experience. It is difficult to see what a farm might look like as it modifies itself to cope with this kind of weather. One thing that appears to be true is that, muddy pastures or not, perennial agriculture does better in adverse weather than annual cropping. I am pleased to see that attention is finally being paid to the Land Institute's work on developing perennial grain crops by the more conventional academic institutions.

Most of them, most of the time of course, are burying their head in the sand after the fashion of our own University of Minnesota, which just cancelled the showing of a well researched documentary about the Minnesota river on the grounds that it was too critical of annual cropping and conventional agriculture. Pivot point for the deed was a vice president of public relations who is married to a board member of the Minnesota Agri-Growth council and whose law firm serves as a lobbying mouth piece for conventional agriculture at the legislature.

Ever the same, ever the same.