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.