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.