Christmas

 The Aussie greets me at the gate this morning on my way to plug the loader tractor in.  Cattle need to eat on Christmas Day too.  The dog is a terminal morning animal, overjoyed with me and the new day.  I wonder once again how many dark and dismal days she has saved me from, just by being there to change my attitude. 

Difficult hope

Example of a column published monthly in Graze newspaper.  Go to Graze@grazeonline to order.

Timothy Snyder says that we need to join others, some of whom we do not agree with or even particularly like, in worthwhile work. Snyder, as it happens, is a full professor of history at Yale and as such is part of the elite. He may in fact be thought of as something of a leader in that exalted group due to the fact that he regularly gets turned to for an explanation of why our government, but more to the point, our entire society no longer seems to work. He also holds against the narrowing of “the news” to a few national outlets at the expense of the robust local news we still had just a few decades ago. I would add that far too much of this “national news” is in fact thinly disguised opinion, and that it, especially the electronic versions of it, are much the cause of our screaming at each other and being at each other’s throats.

But we know this: What Snyder is urging upon us is an activity and approach still common in rural America. We have here in our small communities volunteer fire departments and ambulance crews as well as first responders who try to keep people from dying until the ambulance gets there. We also sponsor as a regular thing various kinds of dinners and other sorts of celebrations aimed at getting together what money there is available for the help of a family in trouble due to health issues, usually, but other pressing matters as well.

This should probably be viewed as the tail end or leftover of the life that went before. It is a shadow, or reflection of the attitude and practice that once described our entire lives, including the economic part, here in rural America. The farming of my boyhood a half century ago here on this farm seemed to me at the time to be simply reality. It was the way farming was and was done. Today it is gone, a shadow of the past.

My own father, a man who held himself to a reasonable standard of decent behavior, would and did work at silo filling, baling, and manure hauling with a man he knew to be a thief. He did so because they were neighbors and he needed to. But it is important to point out that he knew them and by that fact had some control of the situation. But his own thinking often enough was to leave the rural approach behind rather than improve it.

My own best friend through my school years grew up on a farm that took a different approach. His father used tractors, but was leery of them. The team of horses stood in the barn in the winters, as a kind of honor for the work they had done. They were still used in the oat harvest, done by a thresting ring. My family thought their farm was “a little slow”.

We are who we are. Consider the words of my late friend Dennis, the dairy scientist who figured out how to bulldog the University into building a dairy grazing program at its station at Morris, just north of me, as he addressed the gaggle of twenty somethings visiting my farm who were finding it difficult to understand how we related to our neighbors, most of whom must take a dim view of our practices. Dennis said that if I had livestock out on the road or my barn on fire, the neighbors will all show up to offer what help they could. This did not mean, he said, that they would show up at my funeral. A farm boy himself, he understood the rural mind.

It will not do to overstate the case here. Many of us involved in one or another of these volunteer activities find ourselves looking around trying to see who might take up the work when we lay it down. It is impossible not to see that as the economy which runs the country whittles down our numbers we will get to a time when we cannot do for ourselves even in these necessary things. We are all, I am afraid, rural people who have managed to live out of our time. But the clock is quite obviously running for urban America too and indeed, the world as a whole as well. What is true for us here in rural America is true in large part for the country as a whole. We are in the grip of savage financial forces. So it is necessary for us to look carefully to see what we might salvage from our former lives and particularly what we might build anew out of the destroyed parts of our rural communities that lie scattered everywhere.

First is to acknowledge how insidious and destructive our modern tendencies are. The baneful influence of the modern state and economy are undeniable but it is important that we see that this destructiveness works through us, in addition to being imposed upon us. My own father, who worked with his neighborhood as he needed to, was the first in the community to own a combine. It was a cobbled together sorrowful affair, more trouble than it was worth, but it did free him from the threshing ring. It freed me as well from what is now a fond memory for my boyhood best friend. It took me some time to see that this move toward agricultural progress was also a move toward the decay of the rural community. Each time I drive to town I see the barn, now abandoned, that housed the team which that farmer used in the 1950’s to help my friend’s father in the oat harvest.

We must ask if rural community and technology are always incompatible. It is important to be honest here. I would not like to give up high impedance fence chargers, portable fencing, livestock trailers, modern hay handling equipment, somewhat less dangerous tractors, etc. I am also alarmed and dismayed by the situation I see in the community. If I walk around the outside of my farmstead I will see approximately eight farm sites, all but one of which was the center of a working farm when my wife and I started here in the 1970’s. Today none of them are. That is drastic change in a few decades. Others have followed as witness the consolidated schools, some struggling to survive and the plague of dollar stores near empty downtowns. If many others in the nation have suffered with that kind of change we have all the explanation necessary for the volatile politics we are drowning in.

So I couldn’t cooperate with my neighbors anyway, because I have none that are farming. Additionally, I knew everyone of those eight families in the seventies. Now I know at most three.

I am convinced that the question about technology and community is an important one. It is about the well being of our neighbor as our religions instruct us. And it is one that those of us who control farm businesses should wrestle with. But it is difficult. I have not made much progress with it in my own thinking. Neither have our national public intellectuals from the sound of it.

Somewhat easier to consider is the possible good effects of farm driven vertical expansion. I think this is because it moves us back toward other people. I have argued before for the economic goodness of local production, processing and sales of local products, in my case hogs, eggs, beef. I will not rehearse that here because now I want to advance the idea that we need to find useful work with other people for our own-and their-mental, emotional and social well being. We need to do things together and this need goes well beyond recreation, as important as that can be. It also goes beyond profit taking to some sense of prosperity, a word that points beyond our own financial well being to that of others. The new thing now, for me, is that the troubles we are in as a nation point out very clearly that this is true of all of us, urban people as well as rural. It is said that misery loves company. But so does hope!

bale site

 The farm's central yard and barns looks like a bale site.  The 67 soybean straw bales and 279 cornstalk bales, finished just now with being hauled in from the fields, joined with the 300 plus hay bales from our work all summer to make things look like a hay sale.  But there is no sale here, but merely the collecting up of some of the farm's residue and produce temporarily.  The hay bales will support the cattle through the winter as they get eaten on the pastures, while the bean straw and cornstalk bales will bed the hogs for the year, after which these and the manure they have soaked up will return to the crop fields to boost and enhance the soil enabling next year's yields.

It is our attempt to follow the cycle:  growth, harvest, decay, then regeneration forming the basis once again for growth.  Farming is right only when it attempts to honor this natural cycle.  Absent that it becomes just one more extractive industry. 

freeze

 I worked several weeks in the summer of 2019 to get the supply lines from the pasture underground water system to the watering tanks sufficiently covered with gravel and soil that we could maintain a grazing rotation well after Thanksgiving.  So far it has not panned out, since we have had for the last two seasons a serious and lengthy cold snap in most of November.  Last year I broke through six inches of surface ice in one cattle tank before I gave it up for the year.  This year, because of the dry conditions, the grass gave out before the water froze.

We will see what next year brings.  For now, we do winter cattle feeding along with the other getting ready for winter things, like getting bedding bales home, getting the livestock buildings in winter order, putting away tools and so forth.  The farmer proposes, God(in the form of weather) disposes.  So it goes.

Jim

land

 "Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do.  They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides.  But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." Aldo Leopold

thistles

 I have long thought that patches of Canada thistle are there because the soil, probably compacted, needs their tap roots.  Now I hear Klaas Martins say that there seems to be a built-in control in the process.  Evidently the symbiosis between root and soil life requires that the tap root growth be in anaerobic conditions.  So that is why after persisting and thickening several seasons, the thistle patch fades and disappears.  Those roots have worked themselves out of a job as they made the compacted layers of the soil more permeable and thus more aerobic.

It is easier to observe this in a pasture than under crop conditions with the continuous tillage and/or chemical interventions.

Southernization

 It is becoming harder to ignore the evidence that the Midwest, the nation's farm belt, is becoming more southern in its economy and assumptions about its population.  Like the plantation south before the Civil War, the usable assets are concentrating in ever fewer hands.  If the current farm size here in Chippewa county, reaching toward three thousand acres per farming operation does not give sufficient evidence, what about the collectivization of livestock agriculture into huge concentrated confinement operations; five thousand sows in one building, ten thousand milking cows per site on a half dozen sites within a few miles of this farm?

We are busy wringing the "expense" out of farming, or as the late Paul Gruchow, interpreter of his own rural upbringing, once pointed out in plain language, we are taking the human trash out of agriculture.  Like the south with its slave labor, we have supplied ourselves with underpaid and too often terrorized brown skinned folks to do the hard work milking the cows, caring for the hogs, slaughtering the animals that we once took some pride in doing ourselves.  And like the slave economy of the south, we have generated massive inequality in our midst and begun to welcome in the class sorting this inequality permits and encourages. Also like the south we have permitted and encouraged the development of a class of people we think of as "white trash", folks who for one reason or another have not been able to move toward opportunity and who see no great reason for hope here. 

It is difficult for me to believe that the countryside I left for the University of Minnesota in 1966 has anything at all in common with what I see around me now. It feels as if this change over just one human lifetime, is a story not told and not heard, and for all of its killing of dreams and unrequited desire for stability and community is but one small generator of the huge anger and resentment that has taken our political life by storm.

Berry

 I pulled Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound" off the shelf for another read.  Published in 1989 before Berry became our American prophet of healing, it is his meditation upon his own role, as a rural white person in the border south, in racism.  The phrase, "the hidden wound" refers to the wound we whites have given ourselves in the course of our centuries long treatment and mistreatment of the negroes in our midst.  It is, he argues, a mirror image of the wound we have inflicted upon them.

I have been bothered, as an upper midwestern farm kid and now an aging Minnesota farmer over how this applies to me.  While negroes have been scarce in my experience, I grew to adulthood among Mexicans and Americans descended from Mexicans laboring in the sugar beet fields.  Right now, down the road in the nearby dairy factories, brown skinned people milk the cows we milked formerly.  Little is heard about the harsh impact upon rural communities, mostly white, of this collectivization of agriculture.  Nothing at all is said about the effect on the people working there thousands of miles away from home.

The working of slave or underpaid and abused labor helps us separate ourselves from the strict expectations and difficult life of actually working the land, and in so doing hinders our understanding of it, putting beyond reach our availing ourselves of its blessings.  This is the wound.

Berry wants to understand his wound as completely as he can in the hopes that understanding as much as possible of it may help it to heal.  

There is another wound.  This has to do with ownership of the land.  Native wisdom tells us we cannot ever own land.  We have yet to take that in and meditate upon its meaning in our lives and for our future. 

Maintenance

 While the crops farmers surrounding us are working long hours for a few days to get harvest done our work with crops and livestock is pretty much unremitting.  October is the time when the demands of harvest add to the necessity of getting winter feed lined up, buildings and livestock equipment repaired and things generally buttoned up so that we can get our work done this winter.

What this shows is a general human tendency that when there is more work than time to do it, routine maintenance gets left.  We prove to ourselves every year that someone to fix, repair and build is an important asset on this farm, because every October we see too much of the planned repair and renovation undone. This will make our winter tasks harder and less satisfying to do.

Farm income must cover the support of the farm's staff.  

natural wisdom

"I turned them ahead as usual toward the end of the day", said the farmer/field day host.  "They walked ahead, took a mouthful of the new grass and turned around to beller their complaints at me."

Then he told us that when he checked them the next morning they were all peacefully and happily grazing.  He went on to say he thought that the violent weather including hail and wind predicted for the night before had caused the plants to draw the sugars and liquid carbon, the good stuff, down into the roots where it would be protected, and that the sugars and nutrients had arisen to the foliage in the morning.

What are we to do about this kind of information, we who consider ourselves rational?  Do plants know to protect themselves?  Or more accurately, do they protect the nutrition for the animals that graze them?  Rationality has coached us to think of plants and animals as similar to, but maybe a small step better than machines.  Does this really describe the world?

I have seen cows with their noses pointed straight into the air so that another cow might groom their throats with that rough tongue in long strokes, bottom to top.  And horses standing in pairs, scratching each other's rumps with their teeth.  This doesn't bear much evidence of the old "nature red in tooth and claw" individualist thinking.

Just before the Covid locked us up, I was listening to a soil scientist presenting his findings about a long studied apple orchard planted on a south facing slope.  The bottom of the slope was a wet area and the top somewhat more droughty.  The scientist explained how he had devised a series of experiments and observations to prove or disprove his casual observation that the trees in the orchard were providing for each other through general association with the web of soil life where they stood and with which they were intimately involved.  He thought he saw strong indication that the trees on the bottom of the slope were sharing the water where they stood with their mates on the drier upslope through the web of life in the soil. 

 Again, do we credit this?  This fellow was not some crazy hermit, but a University trained scientist. For myself, I plan to keep these things in mind as I explore.  And while I am little qualified to pass judgement on the reality of this, I do find myself wondering about a situation in which an apple tree may send water uphill to help a thirsty compatriot but a modern nation such as ours cannot pass a law that provides health care for all and some basic help for families.  What really can we and should we learn from the plants and animals we so casually manipulate?

fear

     I have been grazing several dozen cow/calf pairs at some distance from the home farm this year.  I spent last year taking up miles of old rusted barbed wire and the steel posts it was hanging on so that a good perimeter fence could be built.  I began to notice hammering in the distance occasionally which reminded me of my youth on this farm.  But I soon worked out that what I was hearing now was shooting at the nearby gun range.

    What I hear now when I am with the cows is gunfire.  Someone thinks it worthwhile to spend money on the gun(s) and ammo and then endless hours shooting away at a target placed in front of a sand hill.  Why? Fear is the simplest and I think most accurate explanation.

    In contrast the hammering I heard in my youth a half century ago really was hammering.  It was also industry.  Someone was fixing buildings or fence or building new.  

    It is important, I think, to point out that "industry" in description of those sounds at that time bears little resemblance to what we have learned to think of as "industry" today.  Those people were not industrious little worker bees busy doing something or other to create the profit margin for some corporation.  Instead those were people, usually families, creating the means and the likelihood of their own survival, and they hoped, prosperity at their own homes and farms.

    That official and academic agriculture decided soon after WWII that those lives were worthless, that money could devise ways to do it better and cheaper and that those people were better used and more useful if driven off their property and on to an assembly line is one of the true tragedies of our history.  It takes its place with the theft of land from the natives and the enslavement of Africans as major moves to take possession of the earth and its wealth by the very few.  And these things created the dangerous and despairing and hopeless environment in which we survive today.

    We are a long time gone in the wrong direction.

  

heat

 We are faced with another wave of heat.  Seven day forecast shows no relief.  The fact we are in an increasing drought situation means that the crops will suffer severe damage.  Right now the concern is with the cattle-how to get them safely through the heat and what to feed the rest of the summer if the grass continues not to grow.

We have been rationing pastures every move-each day-for a month or more now.  Later today, I will construct a temporary walk back lane so we can move them under trees on the main yard each afternoon and drive them back out to graze in the evenings and overnight.  We do have a decent second hay cutting, thanks to several timely inches of rain over the last month or so.  That will be needed to get through the winter.  Soon we will have to make some decisions about culling down to get through whatever time we will cope with this.  It is hard since our herd is only as big as it needs to be to service our beef customers, so it will impact that as well.

Thankfully the cow calf/pairs are grazing the new pastures twenty five miles away, a place well situated with trees and very much understocked this first season.  They should come through alright. 

drought

 It is impossible any longer to ignore the fact that our American west is drying and burning up.  The drought has reached our farm in western Minnesota, where it is said we are several inches short on rainfall.  This is an underestimate, I am sure, that fails to take into consideration the extreme heat and low humidity this spring and summer that have succeeded in sucking out what little moisture exists in the soil.  

The crops do not grow.  The weeds do, of course.  It is difficult to impossible to operate a diversified organic row crop farm this year.  We teeter on the edge of disaster.

Anti trust

 Interesting isn't it, how for most of a century anti trust law goes unenforced, basically tearing apart diversified agriculture in the farm country and dispossessing God only knows how many farm families until there are only four huge conglomerates, mostly not American, supplying all our meats and no diversified farms left, but the Supreme Court and the entire regulatory presence of the government can finally rouse themselves to action when it is a college kid wanting to play a kid's game who thinks he ought to get more than room, board and tuition free for doing so.

Hard snow

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 to hit 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 have gone 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 prairie grass, the sound 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, or imposed from above, or bought and paid for.

1988

 Anyone of a certain age is beginning to see the similarities between this year and the drought year of 1988.

rain

 

Seven tenths inch in the gauge as I write this on Thursday, May 27.  The rain started in the night and is predicted to continue for the day today and into the night.  It will start those seeds lying in dry soil, soak up some of the surface dryness and help the soil into a better condition for the next hot dry wind we seem to be getting so much of this year.

The last of the spring's calves are being born, most recently in the rain this morning, so a little bedding will need to be spread for their comfort.  A little extra work, but they are hardy healthy little buggers and will be just fine.  When I checked this morning, several were playing, running full tilt from one end of the pasture to the other, tails in the air like flags.  They have very good tree protection and will be fine.  We are grateful for the rain.

drifts

 Again yesterday we were faced with the bad effects of tillage here on the prairie.  The winds blew strongly out of the southeast and then southwest as they have nearly every day for the last month.  The air was gloomy and gritty with blowing dirt.  Few fields have enough growing plants to stop this-only hay fields and pastures.  Driving home in the evening from the CRP acreage I am developing as pasture I could see soil blowing off the fields belonging to the same farmer who provided the soil drifts along our fence and far into our hay field in February.  Check the post from Feb 26.

Andy told me that he had waded through soil as deep as his bootlaces there.  So have I.  And it is not just one of us farmers.  It is all of us.  With our hay fields and pastures we have about half our acres protected from this, but the half we put to annual crops is exposed.  We in agriculture have not devised a solution to this tillage problem other than a massive annual chemical dump to facilitate no-till(and all too often, tillage farming as well).  This is a dire situation ranking right up there with growing inequality.  Blowing soil is climate deterioration made real.  It is not just about polar bears.

The Universities have been little help here.  And the Silicon Valley hotshots think the solution to everything is to create fake meat from-you guessed it-these same annual crops.

We pray for rain to save the production year.  Then, of course, the wind erosion will pause for a bit and water erosion can take center stage.  We need real change!

Flags

Dandelions serve as yellow warning flags in the spring pasture.  Where they are especially plentiful and thick the sward has been recently abused.  Dandelions are opportunists, shedding many seeds and colonizing every bare spot.  These may be around watering places where animals spend enough time to wear the sod thin or out.  But if they are spread somewhat across a paddock overgrazing is indicated.  This can happen when animals are left too long before being moved, thus constantly grazing too short, or it can be, as is nearly always the case with me, that I have come back too soon.  Adequate rest is a most important principle and often the cause of a poor stand.  Tilling and reseeding will not help.  The only cure is the changing of the farmer's mind, leading to more careful following of a grazing plan.

Anticipation

 There is on a farm like ours a sense of waiting, of anticipation in the spring.  We wait for the soil to warm and dry, for the grass to start to boom, the annual plants to begin to sprout.  Gardens are partially planted, seed ordered, machines prepared, the farrowing house ready for the spring litters.  Chickens begin to roam the yard in search of whatever tastes good in an egg.  As the temperatures jack up and down and all things hold their breath and hope for the new season, we occupy ourselves with making the animals more comfortable, bringing them out of their winter confinement and toward the sun.  We begin to haul the winter pile of manure to the crop ground that needs it, preparing it for the seed.

The cattle sense the time better than we.  They begin to hate their hay, instead gazing wistfully across the fence to the grass in the next paddock over, which begins to intensify in greenness as it readies itself for the coming spring growth surge.  Soon there will be not enough hours in the day for us to do the work. 

life

 Spring stirs.  Small flocks of geese return overhead. The honeybees show up at a feed tank, hoping for an early fix of something to start their work.  Soon the pair of bald eagles will be seen, stopping for a bit on their way back to their nest at the river. And overhead the murmuration of blackbirds, that aerial display of hundreds of thousands of the birds flying together as if they are one airborne being, flexing its muscles.  The flock seems to communicate among themselves as if along its own nerve endings.

And the spring smell!  It is evidence of the Earth organizing itself for another cycle of life, soon to burst out all over.  The steam from the warming soil mixes with the early chlorophyll from the surging grass, making a heady scent indeed.  It is what feeds us, body and soul.  And even here, in our Midwest, one of the most fertile places on the planet, we subscribe to what the poet knows, that our earth is often more beautiful than useful.

Widen the lens

           from Graze 

This is on all of us, from those with some control of land who ignore their impacts on soil; to those nonfarm people who can’t be bothered to think about their food beyond that it be cheap; to those, like me, who are pleased to think we are going in the right direction, but probably haven’t pushed hard enough and have been too willing to rest on our laurels.

The fleeting chance we had to make a future on this land for ourselves and our progeny is fast disappearing. And though we may not have thought it, the same holds true for every human on Earth.

There have been warning bells — the Dust Bowl, for instance. More recently there was 1988, the dry year, when I witnessed some of the neighbors hiring payloaders to go into the road ditches bordering their fields to buck the drifting soil back onto their property.

They changed the locations of a few yards of drifted soil without changing their farming practices. Failure was evident from the beginning, and this spring my hometown, population 1,500, shows lawns nearly halfway in from the northwest corner completely covered with a fine layer of black dirt.

Talk of residue and its management has been going on as long as I have been aware. What is changing now is that we see that an entire question of soil quality requires study. Our former happy ignorance no longer suffices.

Managing residue armor on the soil is one of the five principles of soil health. The other principles lead us to think about why soil blows here now, even when it is not nearly as dry as it was in 1988 — things like reducing disturbance and keeping living roots in the soil, for instance.

Our soil here in the northern Corn Belt is deader now than it was in 1988. That is why it blows so easily. As I point out in the comments accompanying the video, the wind that day was perhaps 20 miles per hour, where in 1988 it seldom got that quiet.

The soil here today resembles a pile of inert mineral matter. Since that mineral matter is clay in nature, it consists of very fine particles that move easily. Under a kindlier use, where it is mixed with a goodly supply of carbon in various stages of change that eventually result in organic matter, it would be more apt to stay in place, even if left bare.

Part of the farming religion in my community has always been that if at all possible, every acre should be plowed every fall. My own father drilled this into my head.

The reasons are simple. Our soil is heavy and fertile, mostly poorly drained, inclined to be wet and slow to warm up in spring. Black soil showing under the sun speeds warmup. Under a scheme of growing only full-season crops such as corn, soybeans and sugar beets, slow-to-warm soil in spring is a recipe for poor yields.

I came to the realization in the 1990s that the only way to change things in a real way was to figure a way around the fall plowing imperative. That meant a different cropping scheme so that some of the springtime “first in the field” pressure was relieved.

We started with hay and pasture. Seeding down the wettest of our soils provided some relief from the spring rush, as did the hay.

We needed more livestock to use the hay in winter. We increased the sheep flock and then added dairy heifers on the grazing acres. We fed hay to the sow herd.

We seeded more pasture. The owner of the heifers wanted to go organic, so we spent four or five years in the early aughts transitioning the farm by means of the hay seeding and the pastures. Going organic really fattened up the price we could get for the corn.

We found we needed to rotate the hay seeding to control weeds in the organic crops, so the hay was put into a regular rotation. Each year we destroyed some acres and seeded new ones.

We started grazing the final hay cutting. We began seeding complex cover crops as part of the crop rotation, and grazing and haying them, too. This helped us rest the permanent pastures, which otherwise would have been a bit overstocked.

The hay rotation, plus the early final cutting of the cover crops, provided room for us to fall-seed new rye varieties that yield so much better than the older ones. We are working on including rye in the hog feed rations.

It is vital to note that while all of this was happening on the farm, we were learning to do our own marketing of the pork from our hog herd, bringing more of the resulting money home for the support of our families. This helped put the farm on to a firmer footing, and allowed us to think about what we were doing, rather than merely reacting to circumstance. It is good not to minmize this change. The marketing and extra burden on the hog business due to the need to supply hogs weekly on a schedule doubled the work load, at a minimum.

The dairy heifers are gone now, replaced by beef cows and their calves, which are grassfed and marketed by us.

We have accomplished our first goal, which was to destroy the fall plowing imperative. We no longer till anything in fall except the hay land that is going back to cropping use.

Since we have reduced the corn planting, the tilled (chisel and disc) hay ground, always drier than the rest of the farm, provides the early spring start that fall plowing did formerly. With the haying and hay/winter grain seeding, we have moved our heavy fieldwork commitments from early spring and late fall to early and midsummer.

It amuses me to think that we made some progress on the soil health principles pretty much by accident on our way to making a farm that would work without much fall tillage, and no plowing whatsoever. We now have one-third of our acreage in permanent pasture. Another third is in hay cropped and grazed on two- to three-year rotations, and a third is in grain and corn cropping.

We have not yet succeeded in getting a cover crop established in standing corn, or figured our way around heavy tillage to destroy a hay seeding in our organic rotation.

We have increased the presence of living roots in our soil, which is armored or covered most of the time. We have much reduced our tillage disturbance, and have increased our crop diversity. And livestock are active across the entire farm.

We have come far, but have far to go. The gold standard is a food product produced exclusively from ruminant animals on permanent perennial pastures. We are not there, and I can’t see far enough into the future to know anything about pork produced on perennial plants.

The real difficulty with change in agriculture is that the social/economic system has worked for years, if not centuries, to send innovators and imagination into the cities. Each year, farmers become more conservative and more cautious.

Meanwhile, the government/industry/education complex drives full speed ahead to make the situation worse. Hogs have been collectivized and housed under huge roofs. Now dairy is in the same place. Nitrous oxide pours skyward from all of it.

A modern plantation agriculture crowds out our farming communities, communities that once supported and surrounded us. They steadily diminish, dwindling with every farmland sale and every new confinement shed, Poultry disappeared from farms years ago, now to reappear as small farm flocks to serve the people fed up with watery store eggs. For now, independent farmers are left with beef, plus those chickens and sheep in a country that doesn’t want to eat lamb.

How do we foster livestock on the land, what with 80 or 90 percent of the livestock tied up in corporate confinement? How do we achieve diversity in the root systems of plants when the elevator price boards, which listed as many as six or eight grains when I was a boy, now generally sport no more than two?

It has been a difficult road for us. But honestly, also a pretty satisfying one.

How many other farmers would, or could, do this is open to question. Some — a few — have.

But some of the real questions that hover over this are:

When are the rest of the American people going to step up and help bring to fruition that clean countryside and clean food so many say they want?

When is the federal checkbook going to quit sponsoring soil erosion?

When are ag economists going to grasp the idea that they need to think a new thought?

And how will we attract the kind of creative and thinking people we so much need to stay here, or come back here to involve themselves with an agriculture that seems driven by a death wish?

#first published in the April 2021 issue of Graze. Check out grazeonline for subscription info.

Moving soil

 Sorry about the interference from the idling pickup.  We are trying to show the blowing soil in the background-15-20 mph wind today with gusts to 30.  Pretty moderate for a late winter prairie wind.  I scrape up wet soil from the top of the snowbank.  The soil is about a half inch deep and I don't have to scrape far to get as much as I want in the hand.  Also note the bank of soil covered snow piled up on the fence.  It is four strand high tensile and in places the weight has pulled the bottom two wires down.

The fields in the background are full season crop of sugar on one side, and dry bean production on the other.  This is what "clean tillage" does.  I can also say with some certainty that if all the soil around was held in place by living roots as it was when we whites showed up here, there not only would be no soil on the fence, but much less snow as well.  The snow would be held where it landed, benefiting that soil and the life it sponsors.

Notice that the field I am walking in is a hay field.  No more than twenty percent of the hay plants, grasses and legumes, that I know to be there are showing through the drifted soil.  This continues in places more than a hundred feet into the hay field.

Nation

 The late Allen Nation wrote approximately this thought in his Stockman Grass Farmer paper some years ago:  

"It is in the nature of grass to stay in one place.  And it is in the nature of cows to move around.  But we have fastened the cow into confinement and are spending much time and money making the grass move to the cow".

When all costs are accounted for-economic, human, damage to the earth-and we finally learn to ask about net progress, the huge confinement dairy factories that surround me will have to answer to Nation's simple truth.

Processing

Critical to our goal of producing food for people rather than commodities for industry is the presence of a healthy small meat processing sector.  This has been allowed to decay, from the buildings in use that are somewhat obsolete to the all important people factor.  The work is physically demanding and the returns are small enough not to entice new generations in.  The flood of available hogs that swamped small meat processing, this due to major industry coronavirus shutdowns showed the weakness in the system.

We at Pastures A Plenty work on our own processing agreements as well as joining with others to push the state into providing some help to get the sector back on its feet.  This may well require the same level of interest and investment as the string of stadiums built and the massive help extended to the airlines.  It is every bit as important.

Additionally, major meat industry must be held by the federal government to decent behavior, as regards their underpaid and terrorized mostly immigrant work force and their poor treatment of both the animals they slaughter and the farmer-producers of those animals.

cattle

 It is twenty below zero as I write this and I can see from where I sit the cattle at their hay rings in the south pasture.  A dozen or so lie on the leftovers from a prior feeding.  They are chewing their cuds and several columns of steam rise from their breath and body heat.  We feed cattle in the pastures on a slow rotation through perhaps three paddocks in the course of a winter and we do this deliberately in an attempt to mimic nature, which always operates in a circle.  Our agriculture pretty much denies this reality, insisting instead on a straight line picture: inputs in equals growth equals slaughter/harvest equals money and waste.  And then we buy more inputs to start over.  

With grassfed cattle production it is more apparent that the proper model is rather: birth/seed then growth then harvest/death then decay, then regeneration and then back to birth and seed sprouting.  The glitch in our cattle feeding scheme is that the winter hay mostly does not come from the pasture, but from hay fields that are part of the organic cropping rotation.  

This cycle is a bit harder to see with pig production or annual cropping.  But it is still the overall pattern and we forget it perhaps at our peril.  It also provides place of honor to perennial plants over annual ones.

grass

 Once again the days lengthen toward my birthday in mid February.  That point marks two months into the new season, and the time when it becomes obvious to me that the sun is once again winning the annual battle with dark.

The other thing I watch for is grass.  Often as early as February I can see little spears of grass showing a hopeful green in the pastures where we feed the market cattle.  Often these will be poking up through the snow, a real symbol of bravery in a hostile world!

These pastures have been in perennial grasses and legumes now for twenty five years.  But what passes for a house lawn here has grown pretty much undisturbed for nearly seventy years, in my knowledge, maybe longer.  In the lawn I do not see this early poking up of new life.  The lawn is mowed, while the pasture is grazed.  Is it the cattle?

I need to explore the hay fields, which are two or three year rotations, to find out if early grass shows there.  But whatever, it is evident that no corn or soybeans or other annuals are currently greening up anywhere in Minnesota.  The early greening of perennials has to do with the carbon cycle and thus is critical to our efforts to get some of the carbon back out of the air and into the soil where it belongs.  We have much to learn.  

snow

 A new layer of snow covers the earth this morning and the gentle breeze from the southeast is not disturbing it.  Temps are to climb several degrees by noon and then fall toward zero in the evening and overnight hours.  I can see cattle in the pasture around their hay rings from where I sit and they aren't yet greatly disturbed. 

When the wind switches to the northwest later today the pigs will show discomfort, particularly the sows.  We do not have adequate shelter for them from winter winds and to achieve that will require extensive renovations to the two hoops that house them.  30-60 head of sows in a standard hoop is not enough animal body heat under any circumstances and the lower the temp and higher the wind, the worse it is.

In addition, we need perhaps fifty percent more space for our market hogs.  And our bedding pile shrinks rapidly and we wonder how much of it we will have to buy to get through til spring when we can bale more from the stalks the cow herd now forages.  We use an incredible amount of bedding, perhaps 400 big cornstalk bales per year.  It is difficult to get them made and that amount of soiled bedding to haul out and apply to the cropping acres is a major materials moving task.

This is simply too much work for a small hog operation.  The view among our customers is favorable toward the idea of bedding the hogs, and we prefer to produce that way as well, but we will need to get better at it. 

post

 Today the replacement for the broken post at the feeding stalls needs to be finished and a call should be placed to the hoops company to make sure they have indeed sent the rollup door that blew off the west end of the sow hoop in the first strong winter blast.  This constant need for attention to repair, added to the list of "tools" needing to be built is typical of small livestock farms.  Big operations tend to use turnkey systems that call for complete regular replacement upon breakdown; smaller farms such as ours cannot afford that approach. 

The need is always for someone on the farm who knows the history of the buildings and the land, who can somewhat feel what will go haywire next and has a good practical understanding of how to make a good repair.  The broken post needing replacement is critical, it holds three gates which are used to control the traffic of five hundred lb sows to and from the feeding area.  It was rusted completely off at the base, thus the decision to build it new.  Getting it right involves lining the base bolt holes up properly with the existing stainless steel studs, getting the post absolutely straight on its base and getting all the gate mounts the right size and in the right place.  A real challenge, in other words!