Published in Graze

 

Covid-19 is deadly for my age cohort. It can be even more severe than the 300,000 deaths attributed to it as of mid-December would suggest, given what some of the survivors have been dealing with in terms of long-term debilitation.

Knowing this and more about our situation, I decided to retreat. This was to be grandson Andrew’s first shot at being in charge of the farming. He didn’t need me looking over his shoulder, and I needed to be out of the house doing something useful.

I really did. Ask my wife.

So I told the family that had offered us their 120-acre farm for grazing that I would spend the season getting ready for cows in 2021. I could be outside, away from others, doing the kind of work I understood and pushing toward an important goal, which was making sure that land coming out of CRP would not go to row cropping. I could also, and did, work at old man’s speed — maybe six hours a day, five days a week.

I have written before about the shocking effects of row crop agriculture on this kind of land, a gravel subsoil covered with a thin layer of loam. One corner of the property has a six-foot drop between the grass and the adjacent cornfield that grabs my attention every time I drive past it.

The trackhoe brought in last year by the landowners had blazed an area 800 feet long and 50 feet wide for the fence through trees adjacent to the slough east of the property. The slough is a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waterfowl production area, and that adjoining land also includes about 70 acres of upland. This strikes me as an opportunity for the future, as Fish and Wildlife is one of the easier government agencies to get along with for occasional grazing, as they perhaps understand land health better than the USDA.

This is no small matter. Few truly understand land health, and I very much doubt that even us graziers have it all squared away. But we do have a strong clue in that we understand some of the effects of grazing on the root systems of perennial plants through improvements in both water and the carbon cycles.

I spent several hours explaining to a reporter and the landowner why grazing animals were needed after all those years in grass, showing them the short brome standing on the hilltops and higher ground compared to the much taller and lusher stands of it near the bottoms, as well as the five-foot tall reed canarygrass and cattail in the lowest ground.

I said the cattle would restart the biological system and begin the process of rebuilding the root systems on these hilltop plants, and that those much more extensive roots would keep more of the water where it landed, keeping some of the moisture out of the bottoms and encouraging better plant growth on the high ground. We should, I told them, be able to reduce runoff.

So to work. I spent the first week cutting five strands of barbed wire loose from a mile of steel posts, perhaps 250 to 300 of them spaced no more than 20 feet apart. They were all driven by hand, no doubt, and I immediately respected the farmer who built the fence. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t lazy.

I started to roll up the brittle old wire. Some of it broke in my hands as I tried to start each roll. Surprisingly most of the bottom strand came loose of the sod, although here and there I had to cut and leave it.

Several weeks later, after half a dozen pairs of gloves, several ripped shirts and assorted cuts, I was ready to hire a tree puller for the skidloader, and made a one day job of pulling the posts. The pile of wire rolls and old posts on the yard would have buried a Farmall M. It is yet to be hauled to the salvage place.

Next, I needed to spend several weeks cutting small trees here and there and dragging them out of the way of the perimeter fence with the utility tractor. I was beginning to notice a distinct shortage of some of the wildlife I am accustomed to. Snakes I saw, and sometimes mice. I stumbled over more than one pocket gopher pile.

I heard crows and saw hawks circling down by the slough, but not so much over the grass. Most startling was the complete lack of songbirds.

The grassland seemed dead. No bobolinks or dickcissels. Meadowlarks, either western or eastern, were not heard. No killdeer’s song, nor savannah sparrows that I could detect. I do wonder what this grassland will sound like after a year or two of grazing.

The last step ahead of the coming of the crew to do the perimeter fence was to mow a strip around the entire farm. This I accomplished with a brush mower on the skidloader. The fence crew showed up the next day, and spent three days constructing an excellent, four-strand fence around the 120 acres, including five bends to dodge around the sloughs on the east side.

The landlady immediately started to get compliments on the property from her relatives who live all around the area. I think she was a little startled at the size of the check she had to write, though.

I questioned the hammering I had been hearing all summer, and it finally dawned on me that it was not hammers, but rather guns on the firing range at the lake. I had once again lived out of my own world, and into the next one.

Hammering on nearby farmyards around home was part of the sound of my youth, but no more. The places around me now are empty most days except for the several occupied by old people who mostly stay in their houses.

But it was also around this time that the neighbors started to show up in pickups and four-wheelers to talk. The retired cousin of the owner walked across the road to visit.

Two fellows nearby who work in town called me, wondering about hunting and if they could help with the cattle. This was a considerable relief, as I had worried a great deal about cattle 25 miles from home, even placid stock cows behind a good fence. Apparently I had a team if I wanted it.

This was neighboring the way I remembered it, long disappeared from my home farm surrounded by crops. I wonder, “Why the difference?” Most of these people were not farmers, either. Crops were planted and harvested around there, too.

Perimeter done, I went on to cross-fencing, using lighter wire in a single strand. The 109 pastured acres were split into seven roughly equal paddocks.

I paid careful attention not to get the fence in the way of someone wanting to break-graze these big paddocks in the future. Large paddocks for a herd of nurse cows reduce trips to move cattle, but they will not optimize grass or beef production.

Creeks are a novel experience for me. This one enters the farm from the east, crosses the entire thing and then doubles back, following a diagonal path to exit the south boundary. The first run of the creek coming out of the slough on the Fish and Wildlife land is wide and soggy. I fenced it out, both sides to the crossing that is about a third of the way across the farm.

Then, preserving the crossing, I ran fence along the north side of the creek to the road on the other side of the farm. This enables me to limit cow access to the creek to just two paddocks, which I hope will lead to good control of cattle behavior.

Next season we bring the cow herd, possibly calving them there, and then will install what we need for watering. I am beginning to feel the satisfaction that goes with building something useful, which is a blessing in these rancorous, Covid-stricken times.

finding cows

 Yesterday we opened the gate and let the cow/calf pairs to the cornstalks in the back as well as the soybean stubble and the standing hay.  If this year is typical, they will get "lost" out there and not come home for three or four days-possible with snow on the ground.  Because I am unsure of the effect of the patches of standing soybeans on the cattle, there because we harvested late in tough conditions, it will be my pleasure(and a bit of worry) to walk out there in the snow flurries predicted for today and have a first hand look.

tractor

 Our loader tractor, one of our chore tools, sits stationary today.  When the storm blew up on the 23rd we took it out twice to help stranded motorists.  The tractor made perhaps fifteen miles on the road in the snowfall and driving wind.  When I went to start it yesterday, it showed air restriction and upon exploration I found the primary air filter nearly completely blocked with ice and the final filter looking dirty and brown.  One cab door was frozen tight and the inside of the cab looked like someone had shaken out a vacuum cleaner bag in there.  We hope the tractor got shut down in time after the storm; we must wait until Saturday to get new air filters for it and try it out.  

The snowstorm was a learning experience for some of us, for us older ones, more like deja-vu all over again.  We humans persist in thinking we have it under control until nature shows us we don't.

snow

 A covering of brown snow this morning, the product of four inches of snow, high winds and too much fall tillage. 

Winter storm

 It was deceptively mild this morning, but a step outside of the protection of the grove was a step into an increasing northwest wind carrying a real bite.  I had gotten both cattle groups fed yesterday with enough hay to carry them at least through today, so I worked at picking up stray bits of twine, bale net and so forth knowing that otherwise we would encounter them with the skid and loader pushing snow tomorrow.  Then I helped Andy with a last minute clean and rebed on two of the sow groups.  By the time we headed in for the noon meal it became evident we probably would need to stay there for awhile.  When I finished eating I could only just make out the solar panels across the driveway in the blowing snow.  

After a lifetime on this farm and the last four plus decades operating it, it still amazes me how much I discover needing to be done just ahead of a major snow storm.

We will have a white Christmas, I guess, after all.  The white will be tinged with brown and black edges from too much exposed soil blown loose. Will we have eyes to see?

cattle

 Today I must complete the temporary fence required to get the cow/calf pairs to the rest of the corn stalks and the bean stubble as well as the hay that is slated to be tilled and turned to annual crops next spring.  Due to the lateness of our season we decided that we would try to finish building our bedding inventory in the corn stalks in spring, which gives the cows the winter's time to finish their work.  The standing hay alone should feed the herd for several weeks.  Once again the perimeter fence earns its cost back.  It is expensive indeed to feed brood cows exclusively out of the hay stocks.

First step is to remove the line I put up in October.  Those fiberglass rod posts are frozen in and I have found it easy enough to pull them if I first use the drive cap and hammer to get them started down through the frost.  A few of them will need to be hammered in to complete the new fence, and then it is just reeling out the wire-poly flex-and hooking the runs up to the hot perimeter. 

I do not know precisely why it is that the land that is under a cropping scheme benefits so from cattle on it at the end of the season.  Unlike the situation in the pasture, where soil benefits are so easy to see-improved water holding capacity, mellowness, increased tilth-it is more difficult to suss out after the cropping season.  But it seems to be real.  Our soils, which are heavily clay, somewhat waterlogged and more easily compactable show benefits from cattle foraging in all those areas.  It takes a bit thinking and imagination to know where to look, but when you have been at it as long as I have, it is very real.

community

 We lost someone from our community recently, someone important to me and others.  As is by now typical with us, we lose more than we gain, we have a shortage of people coming up to fill the shoes of those leaving. My earliest memories of him are from when I was twelve.  He was perhaps eighteen, had gotten done with high school, had a job bagging groceries, a decent car of his own and was spending his spare time chasing around after girls.  I admired that.

He moved to employment with our local petroleum and fertilizer supply co-op, soon worked his way up to manager and spent thirty plus years in that capacity, managing a crew of twenty five and more seasonally.  He was the one I needed to approach when I wanted to get our meat products into the convenience store that was part of the operation.  He was reluctant at first, wanting to do it but not quite sure our licensing was legal(it was).  He worried about it and it took nearly a year for him to get to the place where he wanted to chance it.  This was now ten years ago, perhaps and we have done well there.  

I have thought much about this lately, in these times of upset in food supply and worries about pandemic.  That convenience store was (and is) well stocked with "food" from who knows where.  The shelves are restocked by a truck that just shows up regularly.  But our products, produced on our own farm, and processed locally only showed up on the shelves after an extended period of worry on the manager's part and serious conversation between us including whatever guarantees I could make.  He and I had grown up in the same community, had spent at that time perhaps fifty years working near each other, had done much business together which taught us that we could trust each other, and yet he worried.

This is what our food system does to us. We are all tempted to give too much credit to the food supply illusion that surrounds us, letting it take precedence over our own hard won knowledge of the people around us, only to see that system fall apart at the first pandemic.

impressions of life

 Our partially empty upstairs space has grown to be a record of sorts.  There is the bookcase full of agriculture titles, mostly about small and alternative farming.  And the stairs coming up are lined with pictures of kids growing up, both of us are there as are all our children.  One former bedroom is a display of junior high and high school art, here a girl on a swing, there a small girl leans over to kiss a small boy. A melange of horses.  There is the farm building scene and the panorama of a combine in a field unloading into a truck.  Dreams of small girls and a small boy.  

On the other wall is a photo shot by a friend superimposed with a poem of Wendell Berry, singing about death and birth and regeneration.  The photo is of a barbed wire fence making it over a small hill near a tree, which I had admired in the photographer's studio a few years ago.  What I didn't know then and have since begun to understand is that I am attracted to fences, because in some way they are a sign of human determination to stay.  I will need to explore this further.

ice

 Yesterday I broke up ice in the three pasture water tanks south of the driveway with a sledge hammer.  The north tanks had been shut down a month earlier.  The ice was six inches thick, unusual for this early.  I had turned the water off about a week earlier and needed to get the tanks empty enough so that the winter's ice and snow didn't damage the water valve.  The cows go on the cornstalks today, the market herd is on the pasture eating good hay and I guess they are all as ready for winter as can be.  I would as soon do without, but my opinion in the matter is without consequence.

Early winter

 Last month's early snow-seven inches-never melted completely as October snows usually do.  Five more inches fell in early November.  We were able to get the corn harvested.  As farmers generally do, we hadn't waited for our own cornstalks to bale for bedding, but had gotten access to bedding on a neighbor's field.  Farming here on the northern plains in a time of shifting climate often requires the farmer to put things out of order in an attempt to get something-anything-done.  

We didn't get the last cutting on the hay that was planned for rotating to corn.  Neither did we get the manure spread there or the tillage done.  Those jobs join the unharvested soybeans, which now stand in snow and if not harvested until spring will lose most of the yield.  

Time for plan B.  We will put the cowherd on the unbaled corn stalks to harvest much of their own feed between now and spring when we will again attempt to bale the stalks for bedding to be used in summer.  We may need to stall the organic rotation for a year as it is difficult to till hay ground in spring for corn planting without use of crop chemicals.  And we will, as always, hope for the best.  

While we watch the corn in the bin as it dries, we are getting the livestock drinkers and the buildings ready for wintertime use.  We have shut the pasture water system down nearly a month early. The cattle are healthy and fast growing, while we have a real population explosion among the pigs and the laying hens.  For this and for our farm and our health in this time of Covid we are most grateful.

early snow

 Seven inches of snow in mid October is unusual.  So is the week long cold spell that keeps it with us.  Most farms here are just started with corn harvest, while most of the sugar beet and soybean harvest is done.  And our farm, as a small organic operation finds it difficult to own a combine and so must wait until those that own the machines are done with their own harvest.  Consequently all our corn and soybeans are standing in snow at this point.  Then, of course all the conventional grain must be cleaned out of the combine and trucks to make sure we meet organic standards before we start.  

The corn we will be able to get sooner or later, the soybeans are a bit more iffy.  This is the new world of climate change.

Corn stalks or stover are important for us since we depend upon a great deal of bedding materials for our hog business which operates entirely on bedding.  Our carryover from last year is gone.  So it is a race now between improving weather allowing us to harvest the corn and bale up the stalks and the need to buy bedding.

The cattle part of the operation is still grazing pastures, though the amount of feed there is reduced by this last rotation.  We keep them moving, feeding some hay in the pastures and then expecting them to root through the snow to find the available grass.  They look good.  The hogs too are happy and healthy. And efforts are being made to expand the chicken population here since the eggs from chickens that are allowed to roam are popular and sell well.  These are things to be very happy about since the livestock are the core of our farm. 

contact

 We have lost contact with the soil and that is the fundamental reason for our deteriorating world.  We started a few centuries ago with digging sticks.  Simple tools, the hoe and shovel and spade were devised from this start.

At some point we figured out how to use animal power.  The first "plow" behind an ox was essentially a large digging stick. Then iron was formed into plowshares and other cultivating tools which were drawn behind teams of animals, the farmer walking behind or in front of the creatures.  Gradually seeders and cultivators and hay mowers were devised, all drawn behind teams of animals and former human tasks began to be mechanized.  

Eventually someone put seats on many of these machines and farmers no longer walked as much.  The bond between soil and the human foot was stretched.  

Early tractors began to replace the animal teams.  Instead of feeling the soil underfoot the farmer felt mechanical vibrations up his spine as he rode the machine.  Additionally the noise of the machines separated him from hearing the wild things that had always surrounded him.  And the machines were now fed from the petroleum industry and not the farm.

From here for a while the machines changed by getting bigger and more powerful.  And now we have guidance systems.  Tillage marks in the fields are now in straighter lines than any human eye and hand on the steering wheel can accomplish.  

The next step, already underway, is to take the farmer out of the picture entirely, to make him obsolete.

And there are several principles here that we should study.  One is that the move in agriculture toward mechanization is in essence a move from the female toward the male. Women operated the digging sticks.  Few women have yet figured out how to make themselves obsolete.

Another is that the art has gone out of farming while the science of plants and animals has concentrated in the laboratories, which devise solutions that are administered through the corporate structure that rules us.  

Third crop

     Sustainable and biodynamic farming discussions have centered for years upon the idea of improving farm practice by addition of a "third crop"  in view of the deleterious effect of a full season monoculture on soil health and biological diversity.  Small grains such as oats, barley and wheat have filled this role in the past, but now there is not a good enough price for the kind of wheat we can grow in the northern corn belt and the other two grains are pretty closely associated with livestock, a disappearing feature of midwestern farming.

    So the demand for a third crop (which generally means another full season crop with cash value in the market that I can plant and harvest with existing equipment) continues.  It is wrong headed.  The need is not for another full season crop.  It is rather for a different approach to farming entirely.  The need is to integrate some version of grass and grazing animals into the cropping rotation.  To do that we need the animals, or at the least, access to the animals.  And to accomplish that we will need to maintain, nurture and respect the ability to handle animals, and especially in a more extensive production system.  It could be thought of as a knack for getting animals to do what we want rather than making them do what we want.  But in fact this ability is nearly gone from us farming people.  

    Great change is happening in the meats industry.  Some of it is ominous as in the various attempts at meat replacement and the development of "meat in a vat" produced by microbes.  And it is impossible to morally justify the current situation where people are required to work during a pandemic with virtually no protections.  Especially egregious is the move to exempt the huge meats companies from wrongful death lawsuits.  This situation is indefensible morally.

    Additionally, we know that grazing animals can help cycle carbon back from the air into the soil and that the soil health encouraged by and built from this cycling is critical to stopping soil erosion, excess water runoff and soil degradation.  We know we need to vastly increase the proportion of perennial plants(as opposed to annuals) in our farming schemes, again to help stabilize the climate.  

    Our challenge is how to do all this in a way that is humane to people as well as animals and is properly respectful both of human and wild communities and careful of the health of the land with which we are entrusted.  It should go without saying that mainstream agriculture is headed in the wrong direction.

light

 The light is different now than it was in high summer.  The sun's angle is lower and shadows abound even at mid day.  But the light is fuller, somehow, rounder and more promising than in the full glare of July.  Harvest is on us now, with more to do and less daylight to do it in.  The sense of urgency grows.

The cattle graze pastures higher in both cellulose and carbohydrates now.  Each year the early grass, so lush and soft, hardens as the summer waxes and wanes, and then in fall, the surprise once again that the fall grass is better feed, the cattle gain faster and are more satisfied.  I spend some time each day watching them, envying a bit their effortless ability to harvest continuously throughout the year rather than stacking the whole job up to be done in October.  

We are happy and grateful this autumn for the excellent corn and soybean crops we have to harvest and for the abundant health of the animals.  Our joy is tempered by knowledge of the losses suffered by others and the genuinely hard life of so many.  We know our turn will come.

For a farmer, the fear of the next hard time is always as real as the memory of the last one.  But we are, none of us, promised anything beyond the moment.  Wisdom teaches us to live in and with that knowledge.  And so we can often find joy in what is immediately at hand. 

Democracy

Political democracy must rest upon economic democracy or it is soon reduced to mere forms, which is currently the case with us.  Elite money trumps whatever anyone besides the elite thinks.

This is most evident to any who have lived, as I have, through the destruction of a dispersed agriculture.  The landscape here, consisting of mostly 200 to 300 acre farms in my youth, is now collected into several six and seven thousand acre empires and the situation of the working people and rural communities becomes much more precarious now than it was in the regular former hard times on the farm.  One of these huge establishments has up a sign advertising for "harvest drivers".  It doesn't trouble itself as to how these drivers are to keep body and soul together for the other forty weeks of the year.  Nowhere in our politics or economy is there any sign of elites troubling themselves over the situation of working people.   

It was Malcolm X rather than Martin Luther King who brought this thinking out during the sixties.  It was his insistence on the need for a dispersed wealth to support the black reach for civil rights, plus his failure to guarantee "non-violence" that struck so many whites as dangerous and radical.  It is why Martin is lionized today as an American saint and Malcolm is a historical figure.  Wall Street thought Martin was "safe" where Malcolm was not.  This is, however, a misreading of Martin, as we will find out.

Political democracy cannot be sustained on anything but economic democracy.  If we wish decent treatment for black people, or if we wish to honor the voice of working people, thus reducing support for the Trumps of the world, we must do it by making it possible for people-all people-to build a bit of wealth thus achieving the stability of life, family and community so necessary to a decent life on earth.

care

Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, ponders what it might mean for this generation to “work the garden and serve it, to observe and thus preserve it.” This matter is critical for our survival on earth. Now we have the productionists in control. Quantity rules. The matter of land care/food production is drastically simplified. The agriculturalists are outside looking in.

It would seem we have more pressing matters. The coronavirus decimates our elderly and infirm, as well as our working population. The police too often carelessly use and even murder our black fellow citizens. Our attention is, as always scattered among a multitude of urgencies. We have not yet considered the possibility that this might be one big question.

Greed brought black Africans in chains to our shores because southern planters could not make enough money by actually hiring the poor whites they were surrounded by. Land hunger wrenched black people violently from their homes and enslaved them.

Of course land hunger must have land. The land was taken violently from the native population, which was corralled up and starved on a tiny portion of what they once were at home on.

Human populations push relentlessly into wild areas. Agriculture is often the point of the spear. Viruses then jump from wild populations across specie lines and infect us with one pandemic after another.

This was brought to a head by my sudden realization that the farming business I had found so pleasing-livestock on the land-depends upon people poorer than I taking large risks with their own health to work in slaughterhouses, while our government structure does nothing to protect them, rather choosing to protect their employers from lawsuits over poor labor practices.

What would be the endlessly ramifying results if we began to see ourselves as keepers of the garden rather than as entrepreneurs? Can we push greed down and bring care and a sense of belonging up? Do we have a choice?

raspberries

We have reached that point in every summer where the raspberries begin to bear fruit.  The crops are started, the cultivations done as well as can be, the cattle are in their second grazing rotation, the first crop of hay made and I am daily grazing through the raspberry patch picking through the hollyhock blooms to find the best and juiciest of the lot.  I happen to be the only one in the house that likes raspberries.  For one small reason and for a brief time, life is good!

birdsong

There seems to be a pair of western meadowlarks in the east part of the pasture.  I see them on the electric wire overhead or on a pasture fence post singing their beautiful flute like eleven or twelve note song.  It ascends for two notes followed by a third note almost swallowed or expressed on a drawn breath, and then descending for another six or seven notes.  It is an absolutely distinctive prairie sound that has been so long absent here.  It was simply the song of my youth sixty years ago surrounding me as I tramped these fields seeing, hearing and tasting the world.

Now they are back, a coda to my life and, I hope, a blessing to my grandchildren. They are a present sign that some of the farming things we are doing now, emphasizing perennial plants and producing animals on the land as much as possible, are moves in the right direction.

jobs

It takes no great mental effort to see that the powerful people and institutions are using the coronavirus shelter in place time to dispense with as many of the "jobs" as they can.  Many sheltering people will have no job to return to.  So what better reason to start thinking about the meaning of work?

Anyone lucky as I have been to have spent my working life managing and working a small farm has a head start here.  Much as the economics profession and the corporate elite would like to have us think that work is about money and nothing else.  Farmers, at least diversified smaller ones, know better.

I have been fortunate to happen on two women thinkers recently that helped me open to this subject.  Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, writes in her examination of the circumstances surrounding the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus that traditional cultures thought that "the active form of wisdom is good work"  This thought certainly occupied the hearts and minds of the farming men who taught me and the women who taught and fed me sixty five years ago.  Though they would never have questioned it, in just five or six short decades since, this understanding of work has nearly vanished from us, in favor of the modern notion that work is something you do the least of in return for the most money.

Davis continues:  "Wisdom does not consist solely in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise."  She continues:  "The modern failure to honor physical work that is skilled. . .has resulted in the devaluation and humiliation of countless workers."

Susanne Langer, twentieth century philosopher, picks up the theme, observing that a great threat to mental security is the modern mode of working.  She says that". . .the nearest and surest source of mental satisfaction has dried up. . .Technical progress is putting Man's freedom of mind in jeopardy." 

The money is not the issue.  The tech industry could be made to write each of us a monthly check and it wouldn't be a financial burden to them-they are that rich.  But no one can give us the meaning back.  For that we will have to create among ourselves an entire new society and economy.  We must create our own meaning.  Elites cannot provide meaning, only control. 

summer

In summer when my shadow grows to about my height it is time to walk out to the pastures and the fields.  The cattle are uncomfortable this first hot day and the hogs as well.  We got the cattle to shade and the hog sprinkler started and now it is the end of the day; time to walk out and let the sweat dry in the fitful breeze to see what has become of the world as we got through the time from noon til now. 

I can see what weeds are coming in the corn, judge how the grass regrows after we made a too early start in the north pasture and try to figure if the bulls can stay where they are for another two or three days.  It is also a time to quiet the mind, begin some plans for tomorrow and look forward to a night's rest.  For me, it is also a time to ruminate on how unusual the work I have been blessed with really is in the modern world and to contemplate how little the world can tolerate the draining of meaning from work and what it has done to all of us.

meanings

In a world where people are managed in corporations by HR (human resource) departments, it should not surprise that the Trump administration has referred to people as "Human Capital Stock"  And we should note that the word "resource" when applied to mineable metals, wood products and fertile soil, is generally, contrary to what the prefix "re" should mean, in reference to things that are used up in the effort to make other things; for instance, soil to make food, or people to make corporate  profit.

"Renew", "restore", "rebuild", "replenish"  are all uses of the same prefix that indicate taking some kind of care.  But with "resource" the meaning seems to fall away and I wonder if that does not indicate either a carelessness in language or a deliberate destruction of meaning in pursuit of what we want.
There is more of the advertising lingo here than of careful precise speech.

What if we began to refer to fertile living soil as part of Creation-or creation if religion makes us squeamish.  Soil then becomes a made thing, made by God.  It also takes on the meaning of "gift".  And it involves us in using that which we did not make, with the sense of gratitude and responsibility that entails.

We must somehow become responsible for our impacts upon that which we did not make, certainly including people.  If we have sufficiently ruined the meaning of "resource" it may help to use other words, other language, to remind ourselves of our responsibilities in the world. 


 

work

Good work is usually a combination of the physical and the mental.  It is, in any case, infused with wisdom.  It is wisdom that can orient work toward where it seems the universe is going, toward what we think the Creation needs.  And it is wisdom applied through work by which we humans are best able to approach the spiritual.

So then, my project of pulling up old barbed wire-a full mile of it, all of it five strand usually with the bottom one or two wires buried in the sod-has so far cost numerous scratches on my forearms, two tick bites and shredded beyond use one pair of leather gloves and the sleeves of two work shirts.  I am half done.

This is what is generally thought to be hard labor.  And it is hard and nasty.  And so far, it is done alone, which is a bad way to live a human life.  But it is not hopeless.  I work in the breeze and sunshine, surrounded by birdsong.  The wire is brittle with age and rust.  Most of my rolls are a collection of short broken pieces.  I learn a respect for the capacity of hard work shown by the long ago farmer who installed all this, before he gave it up and entered it into CRP

This is hard labor done for a reason.  This place badly needs grazing animals.  And grazing animals must be protected from barbed wire.  Around me I can see in the grass the swales created by tillage on too steep, highly erodible land.  The cropping system required as a prerequisite to CRP entry sent far too much soil down the creek, beautiful though it is today as it meanders through the grass.

I see where the wire was cut to let the tractor into one after another of the crop fields.  He had a better idea in the first place.  But he was supported in that by neither the agriculture industry or the government.  What is the future for us, a people that find it too hard, or beneath them to think of the care of our land?

University of Chicago economics

The Chicago school of economics, featuring thinkers like Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Hayek, students like Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, to name a few and populisers like Thomas Friedmann have pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of agricultural thought and practice with their monomaniacal focus upon profits.  Witness  Perdue the Secretary of Agriculture echoing Earl Butz once again on how the "big get bigger and the small go out."

And the people clump up in the cities looking for real employment and finding mostly "gigs" while the soil life disappears and the soil itself goes to the Gulf of Mexico.  We will not change any of this until we once again honor the profession of "agriculturalist", that rare person who attaches him/her self to place, who tries to understand this particular soil, this climate and these particular people, who understands that farming calls for physical and mental and emotional work and is among the highest callings for mankind.

"Farming" that focuses exclusively upon profit is not farming at all, but rather the grand old American tradition of enrichment by taking the gifts of Creation and turning them into money, broken people, and junk.  Just like the rest of our economy.

coronavirus

It seems evident that the corona virus likes to spread in slaughterhouses, as these have been the primary vectors for the pandemic here in the Midwest. The racist says that the susceptibility of brown skinned people to the virus is proof they are in some basic way different from us. There is another explanation though, one based in fact rather than prejudice. To see it we have to ask why it is that brown skinned people are slaughtering the hogs.

To know where we are, we must understand where we were. And in 1973 I was working at the University of Minnesota’s Veterinary Hospital where I was responsible for supervising veterinary students in their part time work at the University. I struck up a friendship with one of these and soon understood that this was his first experience working during the school term. He was a senior at the time, soon to graduate.

The usual route to a veterinary license at the University of Minnesota is by taking a four year course of study in animal science. Some are able to gain entry to the veterinary program after two years in animal science, more are allowed in after three years, and some spend the entire four years of the animal science program before they are admitted. Some never are. It is a pretty tough program. I cannot recall whether my friend got in after two, three or all four years. He was a pretty bright fellow, that I remember.

He told me one day that his entire time at University, through whatever number of years in animal science and then the four pretty intense years at Vet Med itself was sponsored by checks written by his father. As a condition he was allowed to work only during summers, not during the school term. Then he was expected to study. His father relented and relaxed the rule for his last few months at the program. His father was a slaughterhouse worker who often worked the evening shift because it paid ten cents an hour more. My friend loved and deeply admired his father. From today’s viewpoint this seems a fantasy. I cannot feature a slaughterhouse worker sponsoring his child at University today.

As always, there are steps between then and now. Powerful people in industry were told in the early eighties that labor laws and rules would no longer be enforced. Soon after, local P 9 of the meat cutters union struck and were locked out by Hormel for about two years, in my memory. My friend’s father’s union. The workers eventually came back, some of them at least, for wages not much more than half of what they had formerly. Smaller slaughter facilities through out the Midwest followed suit. Increasingly immigrants and foreign nationals did the work.

Other changes followed, made possible by the lack of a strong union voice. Line speeds were steadily increased. Both bathroom breaks and speaking to others on the crew were disallowed in some facilities. Workers were crowded. Repetitive motion injuries skyrocketed.

Then, with the libertarian philosophy increasingly dominant in government, the job of meats inspection began to be passed from the government to the large meat companies. Today, if you want to be sure you are getting inspected meat, you really should buy as directly from the farmer as possible. Small plants must still be inspected, either by the USDA or the state’s “Equal To” system.

There are some questions we should ask before we jump to any conclusions about immigrants and foreign nationals. Where did the money go that was “saved” by underpaying workers? Is any of it still in mid America helping our families and communities or is it all on Wall Street? How bad are conditions in the home country that migration to employment in an American meat plant as they currently run looks like a good idea? And importantly now in this time of pandemic, can sickness be blamed on racial difference or is it rather a consequence of bad, stressful, and crowded working conditions and immune systems weakened by stress and high blood pressure related to coping with public hatred, bad housing and bad food? A quick tour of any grocery store will show that, in our country, cheap food is almost always bad food. Weak immune systems open the door for the virus.

The richer we get (some of us) the poorer we are (all of us)!

climate

I saw a story on the public last night about a place in Mississippi called Turkey Creek, a low area not more than three miles from the Gulf where black families have lived since they were freed in the 1860's  In the face of a stream of proposals out of the local development officials and the usual brood of developers for a traffic bypass and development of recreational facilities-hotels, golf courses, condos, etc-which would fill in the wetlands and vastly increase the flooding risk for the community, all of which got the protesting homeowners labeled "dumb bastards" by the mayor and "whiners" by Governor Barbour, the situation seemed hopeless.

Then they began to get conservation easements in place and "historical place" designations for some of the houses, all pushed and sponsored by relatively well off environmentalists and preservationists and their groups.  By the end of the story, the pressures had eased somewhat on the community, just in time, as it turned out, for the BP oil spill disaster.

But I wonder, for those of us battling to keep small farms and farmers viable, if there is not a lesson here.  We have put forward the human story of these farms and communities for several generations now, to no avail.  Now we have another "farm crisis" which will once again result in fewer farmers.  Perhaps we need to make our arguments based upon the need for a certain number of people on the land to facilitate the proper movement of carbon mostly back to the soil, where so much of it originated.  Will the very real threat from climate destruction motivate change where simple exposition of the local human misery caused by our current approach to agriculture has failed?  Maybe the deteriorating climate threatens the right people, the powerful people?

fence

Took down about one half mile of temporary fence this afternoon.  We had it up to protect the hay from winter foraging cows.  Took about an hour, spent in the sun walking and doing easy work.  I am lucky indeed!

Spring

Spring arrives!  Pastures show green from a distance now.  Cattle are sick of their winter feed and will begin leaning longingly on the fence. 

walk

Like a deer yarded up in the snowy river bottom chewing on the diminishing store of palatable twigs, I had become sufficiently disgusted with my winter’s restriction and wanted to get out on the prairie. Grabbing my walking stick, I headed for the fields beyond the yard full of hope that I might go some distance without the need of snowshoes on this warmer day in the middle of February. I was not disappointed for the snow was hard enough with the constant wind and the few warmer temperatures to bear my weight. I judged it to vary from eight inches to a foot and a half in depth, depending upon where the wind had left it. Nowhere did it fail to cover the land. This has not always been the case in my lifetime here, but it does seem to be an increasing trend lately.

Setting out for the back corner where I had set temporary fence around the new hay seeding to protect it as the cow herd foraged and rummaged through the corn stalks, I resolved to walk that fence if I could and see how much of it was held in the icy crust on top.

Polywire held in the grip of the icy crust cannot often be pulled loose without straining and breaking the wire. And if it is left til spring, the melt will bear it down getting it within the reach of the mice that have spent the winter under the snow feasting on the residue meant for the farm’s cows. And they will chew the wire apart at various intervals. But all of it hung in place between the posts.

I noticed the color of the snow. Most of it was quite white but those areas along the west and north boundaries of the farm, just down the prevailing north and west winds from the neighbor’s tillage were beginning to gray and some of the leeward edges of the snow drifts that were high enough to slow the wind showed delicate patterns traced in black. The same was true of the edges of the hay field we had tilled to prepare it for corn planting in the coming spring. The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) regards all soil in my part of the county as non highly erodible land (NHEL). The elements beg to differ, and if I am serious about farming responsibly I must hold myself to account for my role in it.

But it was in a sense, a walk over the wind made visible, for the snow lay in drifts on top of drifts, some of it fantastical in shape with irregular scoops underneath the forward edge of the original drift where the wind had managed to scour out some of the softer snow underneath the icy surface. Much of the snow surface was pockmarked with the effects of a short prior thaw, but this was overlaid with oblong drifts of newer whiter snow. The soil life and the new dormant hay plants seemed safe to me, not always the case here when snow is lighter and the winds are able to move it all to the protective tree groves and the winter livestock areas.

There is an earnest teenage Swedish girl traveling the earth these days using whatever mode of transport that is not a jet plane which she regards as unnecessarily wasteful of the earth’s gifts. She means to go wherever world leaders gather and lecture and harangue and shame them without mercy for their lack of attention to the deteriorating situation with the climate. I find myself cheering for her. Go Greta! But what I fear she is finding is that even though she has somehow slipped through the cracks in the wall that allows these masters of the universe types to determinedly ignore any who rise to challenge them, her words are not as effective as she must wish. And I think that is because these elites know very well that even if they were inclined to impose upon themselves the discipline to give up some of their advantages in favor of a better world for all people and a healthier earth, they are in reality powerless to effect this kind of change.

Top down management decisions cannot cure what ails the earth and its climate, though such people could resolve to try to get out of the way of those that can. And those that can are all of us, if we choose to. But there are major issues with us:

• How do we care for the earth if we are not at home on it? Because we as humans are limited creatures, our care is necessarily so. When I took my little wintertime walk, I was repeating what I had done many times over many seasons in my seventy odd years of life. I am familiar here. There is no such thing as being at home on all of earth. Globalization is a delusion. A home must be human sized, because we are. And that means there must be many of us to properly care for what we have been given.
• How can we try to help heal the earth? Are we not allowing technology increasingly to come between our life and other life on our farms? Don’t we each year have fewer people on the land? And do we not have the economy forcefully separating us from the work we ought to be doing?
• We have a long tradition, both political and religious, of despising that which is close and yearning after what is afar. Why do we understand Pluto better than the soil and its life under our feet?
• Do we have the nerve and resolve to get our wants under sufficient control that we do not destroy that which we did not make and which sustains us in order to fulfill our every whim?
• Lifelong care of something precious must be preceded by taking delight in it. But delight is far too much an oddity in the world we have built around us. If we knew how to delight, that world would not be what it is.

I was not always the man who just took a walk in the snow. The idea of walking slowly in the cold, of noticing the wind scallops in the snow, of musing over the difference between what is and what was would not have given me pause twenty years ago. But the time in farming here and coping with agribusiness as it appears in our country have made me sober up and think that I must have missed a lot of sign posts on the way to where I am now.

And so I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land. And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets hitting the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and gone on on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot tall prairie grass, the sound that our grandfathers heard in this place.

The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry. They cannot be theorized and imposed from above or bought and paid for.

carbon

Thinking through some of what I saw on my walk yesterday leads directly to the difference between annual and perennial plants. If the legumes I saw in their greenery on March 12^th are photosynthesizing, and they must be, and if the grasses surrounding them were green perhaps a month longer last fall, say until November 15^th after the first hard frost which pushed the legumes into dormancy on about October 15^th, then there are things we can say. One is that annual plants live between whenever they can be planted in spring, generally about May 15^th here until the first hard frost, when they really do die. The goal of an annual plant is not to live on itself but to produce seeds which will start growth in the future.

It is also important to point out that the perennial planting I saw was in both cases diverse. More than one species was present. In the case of the pasture it may have been fifteen or twenty. Even the hay field was seeded with two legumes and three grasses.

Perennial swards photosynthesize for three months longer than do the annuals. This is important. It is not just the perennial, but the diversity of perennials that outperforms the annuals. And they do, harvesting sunlight for eight months per year instead of five, a sixty percent improvement.

What is happening here might be called the carbon pathway. It is how the cycle of life works. Sugars and carbohydrates are manufactured from CO2 and the sun and sent via the plant into the roots and thence partially to the soil life, which in turn helps the plant to access minerals in the soil and grow. Researchers often call this product “liquid carbon” and its movement is critical to plant growth. When plants “sequester” carbon they are helping clean our excess carbon out of the atmosphere and installing it in the soil, where a certain amount of it originated due to agriculture’s traditional over reliance upon the plow.

March

The day could not have been more typically March as I angled across the pasture, climbed the fence and headed for the hay field where the water was standing.  A strong cold wind blew, clouds mostly covered the sky with just a few peeks of sun.  And once again I was cheered by the scene under my feet.  In both the pastures and the hay field, green was showing.  Those clover and, in the hay field, alfalfa plants were a bright intense green nestled as they were in beds of just greening grass with water puddles and leftover snow drifts scattered about.
Unless we go to look, we don't see this.  From the edge the fields still look winter dead.  They are not.  And I wonder if they really are in winter, at least when it comes to perennial plants.
There are differences.  You are apt to get mud on your feet in the hay, where you will not most areas in the pasture.  This is because the roots in the pasture are very much more developed; consequently you are walking on plant material left over from last year.  There is little in the way of bare ground.  This is usually not true in the hay seeding, where the roots, though perennial, have typically not had as many seasons to develop.
What always startles me about this is that the first parts of the pasture sward to go dormant in the fall, after the first hard frost, are also the first plants to show a vibrant green in the spring.  Legumes evidently operate in a somewhat different season than the grasses that are just now losing their dusty green aspect and clothing themselves in spring green. 

free market

John Ikerd, professor emeritus in agriculture economics at Missouri has this to say:
"People brag about the free market.  But we have central planning here.  It's just not by government.  It's by corporations."

climate

It is doubtful that conventional agriculture can or will move fast enough in response to climate deterioration.  Certainly this can be said of other elements of the economy also, and for similar reasons.  Farmers have a great deal invested in the continuation of business as usual.  Expensive lines of machines suited to one kind of farming only will weigh heavily on farmer response.
This being the case, we should perhaps question the wisdom of the continuous buttressing of farming as usual, from government sponsored crop and income insurance to the targeting of government payments and University research into livestock concentration and annual crops.  It is the younger farmers, few that they are, those kept out by these economic and social cushions for established farmers, that are apt to see their way to the kind of change necessary.  A farmer with forty years experience and a machine investment in the millions will go over the cliff before considering any kind of perennial production, taking much and many with him. 

water cycle

Carbon movement and the water cycle move in tandem one with the other.  The extra humidity we have been experiencing is a direct result of an impaired water cycle.  There is too much water (humidity) in the air and it acts as a greenhouse gas, making our climate situation worse.  But the humidity is high at least in part because our soil holds much less water than it should.  This is because of our shrinking level of organic matter.  Since soil OM is about fifty eight percent carbon on average, we can say that if our carbon movement was more favorable-that is, away from the air and toward the soil-our water cycle would be improved because more of it would be held in the soil; estimates are that every one percent increase in soil organic matter means that 20000 more gallons per each acre can be held in the soil.

It is within our ability to improve the level of soil organic matter.  We must reduce tillage, keep the soil covered (armor on the land),keep roots in the soil year around-preferably perennial roots, and do what we can to get livestock back on the land, particularly the ruminants-cattle and sheep.  This allows plants to sequester carbon and thus increase the level of organic matter.  Climate change is serious, but we are not helpless.

Christine Jones

The best national health policy is good agricultural policy. This is as true for us in the US as it is for Australia, where Jones is located.  Her work is much about the impacts of modern agriculture and climate upon the nutrient density of our foods.  Go to "Amazing Carbon.com" for a look at her research and writing.

soil

We livestock farmers have a story to tell and no one but us will tell it. That story centers on the soil and the impact upon it of what we do. Livestock manures and the inclusion of ruminant animals on the land are the key.

From Christine Jones, Australian soil scientist: “An increase of around 5% in global photosynthetic capacity and/or photosynthetic rate would be sufficient to counter the CO2 flux from the burning of fossil fuels, provided the extra carbon was sequestered in soil in a stable form. This is do-able. On average, global cropland is bare for around half of every year (11). If you can see the soil it is losing carbon – and nitrogen!!”

It is important to point out that while the fake meat and milk crowd lunges full speed ahead for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, their cover story is that they are helping the climate by getting rid of those nasty cows. But it is precisely those nasty cows and a few more of their livestock companions that are so necessary to build the soil life that will enable us, given proper farming practice, to sequester carbon and to do so deeply enough to keep it there. The problem is not the cow. The problem is us.

I realize that I am preaching to the choir here, that it is unlikely any vegan will read any of it. But my point is that we must believe in and be proud of what we do and be willing to talk about it. We have a fight on our hands and need to be prepared. Consider this: It is possible in the Midwest to plow up a grazed pasture in order to seed oats there of a certain variety, the yield of which can be sold to a company that makes a product called Oatley to be sold as a milk substitute. So a managed pasture could be sacrificed to provide a substitute for the real milk that could have been produced there while the soil sequestered some of the atmospheric carbon we do not need, thus improving the fertility of the soil itself. If this makes sense to you there is a career waiting in television broadcast news. But this is what passes for thinking with us Americans. And this is what we must fight against.

Sir Albert Howard said it well: “The health of soil, plant, animal and . . . human is one and indivisible.”

thaw

Our recent two day thaw shrank the snow piles significantly.  It also reduced and hardened the snow remaining on the pastures. Once again, they remain snow covered while the neighbor's black plowed fields are showing through.

This is the reason why things in this area are done as they are.  That black soil, increasingly exposed to the sun as the winter wanes, will warm faster than anything with cover on, including pastures.  With the pastures though, the soil life on and surrounding the root systems pushes in the other direction making those perennials productive much sooner than any annual plant, and even ahead of winter annuals.

This is a powerful argument in favor of the plow here on the wet prairie and one which any who want a different direction must take seriously.  For us, after we transitioned to organic and reduced the proportion of acres in corn and deleted soybeans entirely, it means an extensive inclusion of hay in the rotation.  Then the tilled hay ground can be planted timely to corn which will usually produce a good yield.  But this requires a revamping of the entire farm.
The corn acreage must be reduced, as noted.  But livestock must be kept or we would be dependent upon the hay market, often enough thin and poor.  Since livestock are kept, there is a wide variety of crop plants available to be grown on the non corn and non hay acres, because the livestock are always there as the market. 

Also, with livestock available, some of the harvest of some of these unusual crops can be done directly, with the cattle, for instance.  And these crops-small grains and forages-need not be planted first thing in the spring and do not need primary tillage to establish.  These changes, instituted over a lifetime of farming and not finished yet have made our farm more resilient, which is a considerable asset in troubled and trying times with the climate and the economy.

Black soil with nothing growing is bleeding carbon-worsening our climate problem-and nitrogen, an expensive crop input.  Thinking our way away from these practices is vital, though not easy.

Narrative continued

Got a night's sleep last night.  Leisurely breakfast and then fed the calves.  I needed to chase up a half dozen reluctant ones but I don't think it is sickness.  I am thinking they just didn't want to give up the warm bedding they were lying on. 

High of zero today I guess.  Wind is down some.  Checked the waterers and both the cattle drinkers are all right.  Saw one hog drinker skimmed over with ice.  Have to recheck later.

Market herd found its way back to the feeding site on the pasture so I won't have to use a tractor to break trail for them. 

Picked eggs and watered chickens. 

Skyped with Carye and Kris for an hour. 

After the noon meal, started and warmed up the tractor, then switched to the material bucket and went to work on the drive way.  Took about three hours to break through and then clean up some of the leftovers.  Banks are four to five feet high on both sides of driveway now.  The least breeze will drift it shut again.  We will get a lot of use out of the snow pushing equipment around here between now and spring.  We were nearly three days not getting down the driveway.  Fortunately we are always well stocked with food and the heat stayed on!

It was a mistake to line the solar panels up along the south of the driveway and while we lucked out the first two years, this year we pay for it.  After this we will need a line of bales or something about 25 feet into the pasture to catch some of the snow before it gets to the panels.  Live and learn (and live with it)

We have not started on the yard and livestock areas other than to break through a trial to walk on.  But the garbage truck is due to show up, we might have customers and hogs need to be loaded and hauled Wednesday.  Tomorrow we will  hit it with tractor and skidloader both.  Might get it acceptable in a day.  Otherwise we will finish on Tuesday.

Thursday morning we leave for the Grassworks conference.  Really looking forward to it!

Need to feed the cows yet before dark.  Below zero again tonight and only zero again tomorrow. 

Cattle huddled around hay bale.  The upper part of our driveway covered in large snowdrifts. 

Narrative

Thursday
Storm coming.  Wind from Southeast, then switching to North West.   A foot or more snow.  Hauled five straw bales to a line along extreme SE corner of the calves' pen to provide a windbreak.

Truck came home from the Twin Cities run.  Made it ahead of weather late in the evening.

Friday
Wind is blowing at six in the morning.  Snow starts mid morning.  Wind picks up.  Maybe 30mph  Temperature rising toward mid twenties.  By after noon the driveway is drifted across.  Andy says he is going to leave the frozen drinker in the one sow pen, as it is covered by snow.  Drifts across the yard at about one foot.  Driveway deeper than that.  Tore calves' hay bale apart to give them all access to the last of it and perhaps a little bedding dry enough for them to lay on.  Spread a bale of hay for the cows.  Checked hens for eggs to keep them from freezing.  Heard that the wind was to switch to North West at about midnight and then stay down for a bit before picking up. 

Market cattle came up from their hay to shelter from the wind behind the sow's hoop.

Plugged tractor in and turned the switch on timer to send current through all day and night.  Checked the gas level for heat in the hog houses.  Don't know how we would get a supply truck on the yard if we needed to.  Thankfully, we have plenty.

Made it until nine before the warm house air put me to sleep.

Saturday
Up at four.  My ears tell me I am too late.  The wind is already up.  Grabbed some coffee and went to start the tractor.  Used it to haul a fresh bale to the calves.  Was able to dodge the drifts alright, but switched to the snow bucket and spent until five thirty pounding a hole in the drift west of the hoops so the cattle could get to the lane south of the yard out of the wind and be out of the way as I got bedding and a second bale to the calves.  Was able to get them to move after I trained the tractor lights on the hole through the snow where they would have to go.  Wind began to howl.  In for breakfast.

Hauled a hay bale to the market animals in the lane and pushed it to unroll it.  They look a lot like yaks standing on the north pole out there.  Hauled a bale of stalks to the cows for feed and bedding and needed to tear it apart mostly by hand.  It was made wet-we had little choice about that-and pretty much frozen in a lump.  In to warm up.

Back out.  Andy has found another frozen drinker in one of the finishing hoops and I get a pail of hot water to get it thawed before noon.  I am beginning to learn to minimize house time because it puts me immediately to sleep.

Drifts on the driveway are now nearly four feet deep.  I estimate it will take about five hours steady work with the tractor to clear it and then it won't stay clear.  Spring will be necessary there.  Made a mental note to get a snow fence/row of bales south of the solar panels to keep this from happening again.  Wind notches up speed once again.  40-50 mph?  It is starting to drive the snow through the grove. 

Now we go to the sow hoops as it is feeding day.  We will see what extra attention is needed there and are certain it will use up the afternoon.  The buried drinker will need to be dug out and thawed.  I will get back to this writing in a day or two.