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.