power lines

 The power coop did keep the lines up through the snow and high winds last week.  We have had some less than wonderful experiences with the power coops on our solar effort, because they over invested in coal and thus took away from their management much of the ability to make good decisions for the customers.

But the coops take a back seat to no one in utility service on maintenance and daily management.  Considering the huge distances they cover and amounts of assets they have exposed to all weather, they are without peer in service.  We could be stuck with Texas level carelessness and incompetence.  That we are not makes me grateful. 

Quieter day

 Wind is down today and the snow predicted is falling gently.  Probably not a good idea to get back to snow clearing just yet.  Temps are positive for the first time in days too.  Cattle are lying further apart now and not even grouping so close when they are standing.  They lie where they are rather than seeking out the windbreak.

I may have seen the pheasant Andrew saw with the pigs the other day, running across the pasture, so this one didn't die in the wind.  Drifting snow is dangerous for them because they tend to hunker down against the wind and sometimes can get drifted over deep enough not to be able to break through.  This can be seen in spring.  Pheasant carcasses sometimes line the inside slope of the windward side of the drainage ditches, where they are huddled against the wind. 

gray snow

 At 4:30 I started awake, looked at the diminishing light and went to the back to get all the clothes on.  Stopping by the shop on the way to the young calves at the west windbreak, I got the tractor started, set the throttle at just less than half and left it to idle, hoping to keep it warm enough so that it would start to power the alternator if the power lines came down overnight.  The phone gave an alarm about Willmar Municipal Utilities asking customers to reduce load until 10 pm.  It doesn't look so good.

Andy fell in beside me on his way to farrowing.

The calves were ok it looked like, backs all full of snow.  The main herd, south of the yard, was taking a run down the lane to get to their drinker.  I had no idea if it were open or not and knew very well that I couldn't do anything about it anyway, not if I planned to live to tell the story.  I may well have a cattle drinker to thaw in the morning, or the next day.  Meanwhile, the herd would have to eat snow.

Unlike this morning, that snow was becoming light gray and a bit gritty.  Soil was evidently blowing off somewhere.  I began to get angry, at myself as much as anyone else.  What must we farmers think, that it doesn't matter that some kid in the future will go without food because of the soil we let escape?

I shut the tractor down and came back to the house, brought the dog into her kennel in the garage.  LeeAnn had it all cozy wrapped in sleeping bags and quilts. I  fed and left her there.  We will hope for the best!

Wind

   Winds are up today from yesterday.  Visibility is down.  Cattle are yarding up in places where there is the best protection. The main obstacle with getting them from today through Saturday when the temps are supposed to break will be to keep them eating.  They won't go looking in this weather so it is getting the hay to them.  Digestion is critical for cattle in the cold for the body heat it creates, as well as the nutrition, of course.

The hogs should be alright in their beds, but they get reluctant to get up and get to the feeder in the cold.  The other major question is how many of the drinkers will freeze.  The question over all this is:  "Can the power Co-op keep the lines up and the electricity coming to the farm? 

cold

 Winds are coming up.  Temps are down.  The cloth masks LeeAnn made and distributed for Covid the first year because our rag tag health system couldn't provide them are now coming in handy to keep my old nose from freezing further in than it already has. 

First round today shows field diesel gelled in the barrel.  We didn't get winter fuel in there in time, or the supplier didn't get the soya diesel pulled out in time in the fall. Ditto with the one tractor that has two tanks where the soya tends to sit in the bottom tank bedeviling us all winter.  Skidloader lives in the barn, so that will be alright.

Cattle at their windbreaks are doing fine.  We feed by rolling out on the snow in winter.  May have to use the skidloader today for that.

Even the just weaned calves are doing all right.  Everything is burning through a lot of hay though.

Pigs are pretty comfortable in their deep straw beds even if the hoop sheds are fairly open.  So now to wait it out.  

We just have to avoid doing stupid stuff until Saturday when it begins to back off.  And hope the wind and snow doesn't take the power lines down.

first snow

 The first real snow of the season just happened last week.  Heavy snow on top of soil that is wet in places is becoming common each winter.  The difficulty is that in addition to the fact that major snow events here on the prairie seem not to have much of an endpoint in terms of further snow and blowing and drifting, when snow must be cleared from a earthen surface often as much gravel is cleared as snow especially at first.  This is especially noticeable when the clearing is done by pushing and stacking as we do, but it is also a problem for snow blower operation.  I have replaced more than a few shear pins and once the entire gearbox drive in snow blowing equipment due to this.

European farmers have responded to muddy conditions by getting their working areas much more compact and paving them.  Looks like a good idea.  Won't be cheap.  

On the plus side the 30 acres of Kernza I helped Andy to plant last summer is now covered with a protective blanket of pretty dense snow, ensuring survival.  Hope the wind stays down a little bit so it lasts for awhile.

End of Season

 There is a flurry of work to be done beginning each fall with the end of field work, either because it is done or because the ground is too frozen to work with.  This will go on until it becomes too cold to work effectively outside.  At least this is true of livestock farms.  For us this year the main focus is on the hog facilities.  Hogs are hard on buildings.  Constant repair is the order of the day to restore what the hogs have worn out and also what damage the feeding and cleaning equipment has done.

Top of the list this year was to replace an underground electric wire that was shorting to ground, making it necessary to turn the circuit off and giving us a constant battle in February and March of last year to keep water available to two of our finishing hoop sheds.  We were able to tie new wire to the damaged underground at the electric box outside the hoop and pull it through.

The hoop ends also need rebuilding, because the posts that support the big open doorway there have rotted off.  We like the hoops for the way in which they offer some protection for the animals and their bedding while not cutting off so much of the air, breeze and sun from the outside.  These posts are part of that structure.  It is difficult to buy a good 5 inch by 6 inch post from the lumberyard anymore because too much of it is cut from dead fall trees.  They rot pretty fast.  We will replace these with 2" by 6" planks cut from dismantled railway bridges by a sawmill in Iowa.  These we will laminate into replacement posts.  They are well worth the price which is half of lumberyard new and well worth the trip to Iowa to get them.

And there are the tractors to winterize and the building heat to see to.  The hope this year, like every year, is to get the important things done in time for the celebrations we so much need every year.     

Winter Bedding for Pigs

 One of the projects to get ready for winter.  ---On this gray November day grandson Andrew and grandpa Jim are raking, baling and collecting cornstalk bales for the pigs' winter bedding. 

nutrients

     Numbers can be useful. Christine Jones, soil scientist, provides these about the recent reductions in nutritional quality of foods.  She compares levels from 1940 with those found in 1991.  27 vegetables show these declines:

copper declined by 76% over that time.

calcium is down 46%

Iron is down 27%

Magnesium down 24%

Potassium is down 16%

In the meats, similar levels are found:

Copper down 24%

Calcium is down 41%

Iron is down 54%

Magnesium is down 10%

Potassium down 16%

Phosphorus down 28%

These are figures from Australia.  Figures here may differ somewhat.  I think the principle concern remains.  Jones does not believe this is primarily a factor of depletion by overuse, however.  She pins the problem on lack of soil life, which is a direct result of our farming practices.  Soil life working with root systems are critical for nutrient uptake. 

This is one more problem we can do something about if we pay attention.

Management

 Any farmer who copes with a northern climate with its short growing season faces a choice.  Get more for the crops that can be grown.  Get the government to pay you what the markets won't provide for these crops.  Or, try to get more out of the season.  I am not opposed to any of these choices, but the last one of them often seems to be the alternative most available.  

For our farm which feeds hay to the cattle on pasture in the non growing season, an opportunity presents itself.  Or perhaps it is just making lemonade out of a lemon, as I heard a farm boy from the plains of Texas tell when he described the mixing of cattle and sheep on the same pasture not as "combination grazing" but rather, "just what we had to do to make a living".  Because where we feed the hay is regularly tromped into oblivion, shortening the grazing there to just a cleanup of whatever grows late in the season, this year we finally woke up enough to get some seed out there instead of just taking what the farm and climate offered.

So we seeded oats and an improved variety of rape in early September.  Oats will grow anywhere at any time and is generally pretty palatable and rape is thought to have a two month growth window before being ready to graze.  Additionally, this variety of rape is reputed to withstand temps down to ten degrees before quitting for the season.  This does not make up for seeding it about a month late, but we can observe, see what we get and adjust accordingly for next year.

Questions remain.  Will the rape/ oats provide a satisfactory ration for the cattle or will it need to be supplemented?  How to follow it up and get back to perennial pasture?  Will the rape succeed on our low and poorly drained pastures?  I formerly used rape in producing hogs, and it worked very well, but that planting was on higher and sloping ground.    

It would be helpful in terms of establishing a perennial pasture next spring if the cattle could take the crop pretty much down to the surface without pugging the soil, but that depends entirely on the fall season.  If they did leave it relatively smooth, we might have a shot at no tilling the new pasture into the area fairly early in the season.  Minimizing machine use is always a goal here at Pastures A Plenty.  I did use the disc and then the drag to prepare for seeding.  I am not sure that seeding it early would have changed the need for that.  

Perennials are better for the land than annuals.  That being true, we have wanted not to interfere with the pastures at all once they are seeded down.  So this attempt is on the order of an experiment.  If we are to evolve into a better farming, we must make it up as we go along. 

Kernza

 Kernza is an exciting new grass from the Land Institute in Kansas via the University of Minnesota's Forever Green program.  It was developed from  intermediate wheatgrass into a kind of perennial wheat, which can be harvested for grain as well as used for grazing. That it is a perennial means that, unlike standard wheat, it does not need to be planted every year, saving the tillage necessary, and of course, the seed cost.  It should be a goal for all of agriculture to have living roots in the soil year around as much as possible for soil stability and health.  This can be a large step in that direction.

But of course, this is new and there are issues.  The University is putting considerable work into building markets and there are bakers and brewers in the Twin Cities that are beginning to incorporate Kernza and Kernza flour into their products.  The taste and baking characteristics are somewhat different from wheat so it will take time.

For us here on the farm, the grain would add to the cash income from crops while the forage will be useful for grazing the beef herd as well.  We don't know as much as we will about how this may fit together, or how long a Kernza seeding will persist.  But the annual crops currently in use in western Minnesota and on our farm are corn and soybeans, both of which require fall and spring tillage, especially in an organic system.  This early spring work on our wet clay soil, especially if it has not been tilled in the fall,  is difficult to do well, resulting all too often in compaction both shallow and deep and the consequent difficulty with getting the crop to thrive.  The very system opens the soil to severe wind erosion in winter and early spring but alternatives are not easy.  

It was our desire to get away from this bind, this tilling of wet soil to achieve high production, that first brought cattle into our farming, with the perennial forage needed that could be seeded in summer or fall and maintained for several years offering us a way out of a cycle of damage.  Kernza, we hope, will offer us some of the same advantages.   

reseeding

 I just finished seeding about eight acres in the pasture that was standing in ragweed.  I used a bushel of oats with six lb of a good forage rape from Barenbrug.  We had winter fed hay there in 2021 and expected to see a return to good grass this year.  But this is often enough not the case on our farm.  I don't want to back off of pasture feeding due to the wonderful efficiencies-no manure to haul, minimize tractor use in winter, and so forth. But it is becoming apparent that it is very easy to damage a poorly drained highly clay soil such as ours with heavy traffic even in winter.  There really is no such thing as standard one size fits all grazing advice.

It may be good for us to regard that winter feeding area as an opportunity to produce a good annual crop of forage, followed by a return to perennials the following spring.  This would involve some heavy tillage, which is not great, but it may be just the thing for this problem.  Of course, a good annual crop of forage assumes that it is going to be planted well before the end of August.

Rain

 We did get rain about a week ago now.  Four and one-half inches at home here and three and a half on the Eagle Lake pastures.  Virtually nothing ran off.  The situation was not good before the rain and we will see how much good comes of it for this year.  It does bring up an interesting comparison though, which consists of impressions only as the inch and seven tenths the pastures got in June that the home farm didn't plus the stark differences in soil and slope make it impossible to reach much in the way of a logical conclusion.

Obviously, every thing is green now.  We had to restart the lawnmower.  The pastures are slow to fire up though, clearly demonstrating the usefulness of schemes to leave a certain level of grass behind at each move.  The grass finds it slow and hard to begin booming again from a start of not much more than an inch or two.  Poor management here.  We resisted destocking the entire summer hoping for rain, and consequently grazed too hard. 

Also noticeable is the difference between the impacts on heavy use areas between the two locations.  Here at home the area right around the drinker being used during the rainfall-which stretched over about two days-is crusted and compacted, surface pugged and very difficult to walk over.  At the east pastures, twenty five miles distant, it is difficult to see any particular impact at all in the paddock where the cattle were during the rain.  It did rain an inch more at home, but I think the major difference is that the soil here is very predominately clay and on the east location it is heavily sand.  

The damage to the soil surface of a heavy rain and cattle impact on a clay soil will have to be taken into account if we are to succeed in grazing these soils, which are so much more productive than the sand based soils on the glacial til that runs across the state, and on which our east pastures are located.  Sand holds up better under heavy use and rain, but clay produces much more if we can avoid compacting it. 

drought

 Climate change is expanding the western drought into western Minnesota.  The USDA climate hub reports for us rainfall at about 50% of average for the month of July.   This follows a moisture short period in June as well.  Additionally, our temperatures are running several degrees above average, humidity readings are on the low side and the winds are pretty constant.  These factors cause plants to use extra soil moisture to cool themselves, thus exacerbating the dry conditions, and adding to the problem.

Planning for a diversified livestock farm must take all this into account and a judgment must be made about whether this is a one or two year event, or an ongoing trend.  We are thinking this will be an ongoing reality for us.  So first, we will likely see a need for shade for the herd periodically, to which we never paid much attention.  Fortunately, we have the farmstead grove of trees which can be used and also two maturing field windbreaks which we can set up for cattle to be moved into on hot afternoons.

Additionally, we may need to work toward a different pasture sward.  Currently we have three or four cool season grasses and some clover for them to graze.  But cool season grasses do not do well in the heat, so we may need to work toward more alfalfa, chicory, plantain and so forth, all of which are tap rooted to some depth.  Intermediate wheat grass, used extensively west of here, is worth a thought too, as it develops a tremendous ball of roots, some of which extend quite a depth.

The pigs require a different approach.  Unlike cattle, pigs will cool themselves nicely if they have access to standing water or can get to a mist sprayer.  The only time this does not work as well is when the humidity is very high and even then, it helps quite a bit. They do need shade, but this is pretty available to them as the housing provides a good bit of it.

It might be helpful to change the pig feeding over to a timed event, rather than simply having feed available all the time.  An animal with a full stomach-especially a simple stomached beast like a pig suffers from a full stomach when the weather is hot.  It may be possible and certainly worth looking at, to devise ways to encourage them to do more of their eating overnight and in the early morning hours.  The technology to accomplish this is quite inexpensive and easy to adapt.

And in the future, we may need to adjust our cropping pattern.  Corn, our major hog feed, requires a great deal of precipitation to grow and may become more of a problem.

To get through the remainder of this season we must sort down the grazing herd, and sell some animals we did not want to market.  This must be done as a first move to get the cattle appetite in line with the available grass.  We hope it rains, and soon! 

We all do need to pressure those with agency to change our economy so that we stop putting so much carbon into the air.  Politicians, of course will never do anything unless their feet are held to the fire. 

lead

 Getting cattle into a forage based diet, including pastures, has tended to get me away from herding and chasing them.  They want to see what I am up to when I come and they come to investigate.  They hope I will open the gate leading to fresh grass.  This gets learned and soon I can lead them pretty much wherever I want them rather than driving them.  One of the perks of planned grazing.

heat

 The low humidity levels the last week or so took the edge off the extreme high temperatures. The pigs have come through the heat without damage and the cattle only needed to be run under the trees one day.  The soil life suffered.  Bare soil heats up toward 150 degrees F at the surface and the soil microbes begin to die.  These microbes serve as a pathway between the soil fertility and the plants, especially in an organic system. We can see the need to develop systems for growing our organic crops with the soil covered right from the start.  The pastures fare better in this way.

We cut and baled the first crop of hay last week, and also began the tillage and cultivation of the corn.  The oats look nice.  We will keep you posted on what happens with that field as we get into the summer.  We hope for rain.

f

warming

 It is easy and tempting to think that a warm spell in May compensates for the cold April we experienced.  But warm days warm the air, not the primarily the earth, which responds more like any body of water, taking time to warm in spring.  This is critical for farming.  The lilacs that will probably not be in full bloom by Memorial Day as they generally are, the corn seeds that will not grow vigorously and the grass that stands still rather than booming in response to the seventy degree days are exhibiting the same stress.  The earth is not yet warm enough.  It will be the rest of the season, including the time available before first frost in the fall that will now determine the success or failure of the season.

climate

 For two months we have repeated the same weather pattern, all of it at temps ten to fifteen degrees below average.  We will have a warmer day, then the wind switches to south and picks up.  Temps drop for two days, then we will get a little rain or usually snow.  Then it warms enough to melt the snow and the pattern repeats, all within about a week.  We have been windy, even for us on the prairie for most of the winter.  Difficult to think about planting anything.  The pastures do not even green up.

This is El Nino, or it is climate change, or perhaps both.  In any case, we now pretty much know, seeing the disasters that some others face, that climate change may well appear as a cooling, high winds, drought, floods and etc.  Our climate system is distressed and disrupted.  We need to start admitting that so we can deal with it.  Farms have a lot to do in response and real opportunity to make some positive change.  

calving

 We are going to the north side with the cows.  Yesterday I turned the water on there and got water in one of the two tanks.  The other, along with the entire south side is still frozen.  Frost is not gone yet, I suppose because the soil is quite dry, enabling the frost to go deep.  This spring requires a lot of patience. We'll find out how long the sod holds up there under the impact.  Depends on the weather.  It is likely that we will need to provide some kind of windbreak to protect from the north and east, if the weather forecast is to be believed.

calf

 First calf today, born in the mud of the lot.  I swung a gate over and was able to get cow and calf into the grove, an area we graze occasionally on hot afternoons.  There are some areas of sod there.  We will see how it holds up when the other twenty four head of cows join them.  Hope for spring!  Sooner the better now.

Farming

 Farming can be understood largely in terms of finance.  Looked at this way, a farmer would want to start somehow-almost always by inheritance-with title to a certain amount of land.  This could then, by timely and careful investment, grow over a lifetime by using the equity in already held land to finance purchase of more land.  This works as long as the primary drivers of land value stay in place.  That is, there must be an underlying and ongoing pressure on price.  If land drops in value, this would not be a disaster as long as the assumption is made that price will fluctuate but the long term trend is up.  And efforts have been made, mainly through the establishment of a comprehensive crop insurance, to take the risk out of this approach, both the risk of bad weather and poor crop prices.  

This will hold until and unless we come to a time of major upset in the world, where constantly increasing land values are no sure thing.  

This neglects the land, treating it as commodity.  An alternative vision would put the care and improvement of soil health and the care of other species on a par with simple farm production.  The benefits of the improvement in the carbon cycle that can result from good land care, the increased water holding capacity of the soil due to restrictions on tillage and careful farming practice accrue to all, and not just the farmer's individual bank account.  Good farming, by this standard, leads to a better quality of life for all.  This farming is the polar opposite of the first example.  

It is very much a secondary tendency today.  If we want it to succeed for the benefit of all our lives, for the care of our own grandchildren through care of the earth, it will have to be supported by all.  This is a vision well beyond simple capitalism.  It is, however, necessary if we are to survive on earth.   

from Graze April 2022

 

The Russian attack on Ukraine serves as a shocking reminder of how things have changed since the hopeful years after the fall of the wall in Berlin in 1989. Then, and throughout the nineteen-nineties our farm hosted what seemed to be a steady stream of visitors from Europe especially including eastern Europe. It seemed to me at the time that a bunch of organizations had gotten the idea that communications among farmers worldwide was something they wanted to foster. We had, in addition to perhaps three different groups of Swedes and a delegation from Japan a group from Latvia which gifted us with a small wallhanging made of stones and dust of amber from the Baltic sea, pasted by hand to a scrap of wall paper in the shape of a sea scape and framed. It seemed at the time to be a thing made because anything purchased would be difficult to afford. That alone makes it precious. That amber display still hangs in a place of honor in our house.

And of course, the Hungarian. He sticks out in my mind because he was not part of a group and his visit was difficult to say the least, and unforgettable. He came with a driver/interpreter and we walked through our pastures, took a quick look at the crops and a tour of the barns and then stood on the yard and talked for what must have been three hours. He was just a bit shorter than I and powerfully made. Our visitor and I both knew and loved farming. I knew not a word of Hungarian. He knew no English. Our interpreter, an earnest young woman, knew both English and Hungarian, but nothing at all about farming. This slowed us up as much as the language barrier to say the truth.

He started by telling us about the breakup of Soviet style farms and agriculture in Hungary and a few of the particulars about how he and his family got access to a few hectares of land. By the time he-and she-had reached this point I understood that I was talking to someone as passionate about agriculture as I was. This was nineteen-ninety-five and I was just beginning to move into grazing. We had pigs in the pasture for farrowing and several hundred ewe/lamb units that we were grazing. But the major business of the farm then was pig production.

This seemed to excite my visitor most. He liked to talk about pigs and his references to crops such as barley and rye were interspersed with statements more about garden things, cabbage, turnips and so forth. By this time he was pretty wound up and had moved to within three feet or so of me and was yelling Hungarian at me in an effort to make me understand what he was excited about. I give the interpreter credit here as we were moving into a situation that would have flustered a lesser woman. But she gamely held on, through one of us or the other impatiently informing her what a gilt was and what farrowing meant, and the finer points of castration.

The Hungarian reduced himself to simple declarative sentences: “Suppose I have a pig” the interpreter informed me. “So I feed the pig what I think it needs. My grandfather is some help with that.” Next, she said (remember it is the interpreter speaking to me, the Hungarian fellow right now is someone who is pretty worked up with his failure to communicate and appears to mostly be a boiling kettle of overwrought feelings) “as the pig grows, I have to decide what the best weight to market it may be.” “Because”, she informs me, the public changes. “Now they want this, then they want that. . .” “Or there may be no market at all when the pig is ready” she says. “Then I have to think what to do about the pig and how I will do without the money I thought I would get for it.”

It was then that something of the total picture of this man’s life began to dawn on me. He and the others of his nation were building an economy and a life from the ground up, one painstaking piece after another. In an instant I realized how much the mental and emotional furniture given to me almost accidentally by my parents and the people surrounding me as I grew up had become the very tools I thought with. And that not all others had the same set of tools as a birthright.

And it was also then that the visitor seemed to calm somewhat and return to his senses. Thinking about it since, I realize that something of what was happening in my head, the very enormity of the effort required by him and others must have shown on my face to the visitor, something he didn’t need to rely on the interpreter for. There was a connection. As an American farmer, the circumstance where there really is no market was temporarily beyond my comprehension. I grew in understanding that day. And that knowledge has stood me in good stead as we took the farm on an increasing tangent from standard operation and into the kind of world we hoped was coming.

Now of course, thinking about what our market is and how much we can sell is second nature to us. No more ‘building the production and someone will want it’ for us. This was really the start of my experience of what it must be like when a totalitarian system falls apart and everyone must somehow figure out how to cope on his/her own. And I am filled with admiration for the Hungarian.

Well, we eventually wound down and I accompanied the guests over to their car. By this time the Hungarian farmer was brimming with good cheer and what I took to be gratitude for the experience. Most of what was said and done in those few minutes didn’t require an interpreter, going in either direction. The woman doing the translating folded herself behind the steering wheel looking totally exhausted from her hours of making each of us understandable to the other. I thanked her and asked if she thought she was up to the hundred plus mile drive back to the city. She assured me she was. She undoubtedly looked forward to speaking only Hungarian for awhile.

This world is different from what it was in nineteen-ninety-five. And just as I think there is more than one nation to blame for the atrocity being visited upon the people of Ukraine I think that it is imperative we look beyond the immediate and obvious conclusion that it was the communists that tore apart peasant agriculture in Hungary and the rest of east Europe creating misery in the process. It was of course, but it is not communism that carries on that destructive work today.

When I was in high school, we were taught in geography class that the two most fertile and richest places on earth were the American midwest and the Ukraine. Politcal and economic analysis today will show that the midwest is among the poorest areas of the US, while Ukraine is thought to be the poorest country in Europe. Try to get your mind around the gigantic modern screwup that allows residents of the most highly fertile places on earth to be increasingly impoverished in terms of average income of the residents and also their sense of agency and hope for the future. How does a civilization bungle things that badly? It takes an economist.

Russia is no longer communist. It is instead a dictatorship run by fabulously rich oligarchs who were allowed to(encouraged to?) steal the assets of the people of Russia when communism fell apart. They are further advanced than our American version of oligarchs, but they are all headed in the same direction. And they are coached and encouraged by the international set of economics gurus who have been elevated by too many of us as all purpose prophets and soothsayers. So the same economists-ag economists for instance-who have had so much to do with producing justifications for the tearing apart of rural lives and communities in our country are hard at work in Russia and east Europe as well.

I can be wrong. I often enough am. But this is what I see when I look beneath the news headlines. It is no longer democracy against communism. Now it is oligarchs against the rest of us.

Snow/rain

 For those who live on pavement, a wet snow and a steady rain have the same effect.  They both mean wet sidewalks for a day or two and streams running toward the storm drains.  A diversified farmer understand it differently.  In spring, both the snow and the rain create mud, but mud after a rain results in a much faster drydown.  The rain creates the opportunity for the soil to start firming up.  Snow has the opposite effect, keeping everything soft and seeming to prolong the frost-thaw forever.  This makes all the difference, not just in getting into the fields for spring planting, but well before that in keeping livestock relatively dry and healthy and in being able to get manure hauled out without having to put it on top of snow, which no good farmer wants to do.

So while the temperatures beckon us to come, experience counsels caution.  Patience must be the practice.  Too early on the soil creates damage that will last the year. 

glacier

 We are past my birthday in mid February now and can see hope for spring's warmup.  Days are longer, light returns, but winter hangs on like a sour sullen old man.  Our livestock working area has become a glacier, winter's regular snowfalls melting under the increasingly powerful sun, then refreezing at night into a sloping treacherous surface.  Out of storage come the pull on spikes so necessary to staying upright.   

It is snow season with ten plus inches expected this week and steady high winds.  We will have to remind ourselves that the ice is down there.  But soon the winter will slowly leave our south sloping yard exposed to thaw and firming up.

Meanwhile the lilacs at our back door show swelling buds, telling me that the time to prune might have been two or three weeks ago.  Green shows under snow in the pastures.  We hurry to keep up with Nature's steady pace. 

Unit train

 I turned right in town and drove to the west past the unit train loading outfit. As I drove I fell to thinking about this place, what it is and what it was.  Sixty years ago, I knew it simply as "the elevator".  It bought and sold six or seven kinds of grain, sold feeds and feed premixes as well as seeds and provided coal for home heating.  Instead of today's constant line of semi tractors and grain trailers there were mostly farm tractors pulling farm wagons, sometimes hitched in pairs.  Some of the more up and coming farmers drove products in on single axle trucks.  A feed delivery truck ran constantly between the elevator's feed mill and surrounding farms. When grain left the community it did so by boxcar, perhaps several being loaded at a time.

Today there is no feed mill and no feed delivery truck.  The elevator sells no coal, no seed, no fertilizer.  It sells grain by the unit train, fifty two cars or 104 cars-all hopper bottom-at a time.  That is all it does.  There is no loading platform and no gaggle of teenage boys sitting on it smoking cigarettes and watching the town after hours. 

We were richer then and didn't know it.

roller coaster

 Winter here is typical so far.  The seven day outlook I check every morning pretty generally shows either one or two "down to below zero trends" each time.  We have not had any severe sub zero nights(twenty-five below or colder) but it does become a challenge to keep bedding up to standard and water free of freezeup.  

I have found that we need to go back to strings on the hay bales, or enough of them to get us through Dec-Feb.  This is so that the bales, which sit outside here no matter what, can be placed out on the pastures in rows of five or six in late October setting up for the cattle to graze through the winter.  They can be set on their round sides so that the strings may be cut and pulled off in two or three handsful and yet the hay would have some protection from late rains.  Taking strings off can be done ahead in about a half day's time.  This will not work with netwrap unless I  go with a tractor and loader to tip them over after removing the nets, which I would rather not do.

What I also would rather not do is to start a tractor three to six days out of each week to carry snow and ice covered bales out there and then pull the nets off complete with a load of ice and hay.  This has to be simpler.  There simply is not enough return even to grassfed beef to pay for that kind of tractor wear and senseless labor.  

I have already found that I need to be careful of getting into March with this because of the chance of mud.  But through the hardest of winter, the easiest thing to do is to walk out there every week or five days to reel up a length of fence and put up another and move the bale rings.  And I hear some do not even use bale rings for this setup.  Once again, time for change.

repaired drinker

 Our newly repaired drinker was frozen over this morning at -7 degrees. When I fed the cattle at about ten, I broke through the ice with my heel.  Suspect the valve may be frozen as well.  But when I checked at two, the cattle had reopened the trough and were drinking. I could hear the water running so the valve must have been open.  A step, but -7 is not as cold as it is apt to get.  We aren't to February yet.

capped

 We managed to get the offending drinker pulled off, the line from underground sufficiently dried up to cap it and got the system covered with a heat lamp on it, which we hope will hold until the warmer weather next week eases the replacement of the unit.  Thirty degrees at the start just after noon yesterday and 17 degrees with an increasing northwest wind when we finished at four.  Timing was critical.  Now we can run the system twenty four hours a day instead of off and on to minimize the leaking.  The two cattle groups share one substitute drinker for a few days.  Sometimes a thing goes right!

below zero

 It got to -18 last night, a good deal short of the predicted -26.  But the damage has been done.  We are running the water on the main system on two hours, then off, then on another two hours.  This is to water the two cattle groups in turn at a single side of a small hog drinker.  Beside that small drinker two other hog drinkers are served by that line.  This is not good for the drinkers, which are liable to freeze with no water in them.  It is also not good for the cattle as a hog drinker is slow, inducing them to suck in too much air as they drink.  The reason for this is that one of our cattle drinkers failed about a week ago, freezing solid and bursting the valve beneath the drinker so that the tunnel underground filled with water and froze over.  We are trying to thaw the top with a heat lamp so that we can replace the valve, or at least stopper the line until spring.  We need something warmer than -18 to do this.  We shut the other cattle drinker down because of bad design.  It freezes at zero and takes about two hours of wet hands and clothes to bring it back to life.  Not worth it.  There will be replacements going on when the weather moderates.

But first we have to get that far.  Warmer weather is predicted for Saturday, but then two very cold nights before we get to what looks like a warmer time next week.  We hope everything holds together that long.  We are fighting exhaustion here. 

snow

 The wind driven snow today is beginning to show a shade of light brown.  It puts me in mind of those inch and one half high soil drifts I found last spring on the packer wheels, blown in from the neighbor's "clean" tillage.  And it shows the truth of the insight that the more valuable(pricier) the land becomes, the harder it is abused.   

winter

It begins to look like a tough winter.  We haven't yet made it to twenty below.  Later this week, perhaps.  But as I look at the diminished visibility today I am reminded that we had a significant wind and cold event late last week, are having one now and another is starting to show in the day seven of my seven day NOAA forecast.  Regular enough to be tough. This winter is one to try to live through

attention

 Covid forces/encourages more attention to immediate surroundings.  This is in reality an important blessing hidden inside the curse.  Because I am not moving around so much as I did, my life has slowed to the extent that I notice what I did not formerly.  I have become more aware of the honking of geese overhead in the fall, added to the rasping cackle of the pheasant protesting being driven out of his shrinking cornfield.  As I turned the holiday lights in the house on this morning, I found myself listening for the call of the mourning dove, so much the sound of spring and oncoming summer here. Peterson's guide locates us at the northern extent of that bird's range, so I suppose we may be able to count on that sound for a few years as climate changes everything around us.

The sun is two weeks stronger now than it was at solstice.  I cheer for it, as the holiday lights are but a poor substitute.

below zero

 Eighteen below this morning, down from sixteen below yesterday at this time.  The winds are calm, though, which makes a considerable difference.  Hay consumption is way up.  The cattle seem healthy though.  We have the cowherd on the waste product from the pretzel factory in town and free choice cornstalk bales.  We haven't yet tried the market herd on the waste.  

This stuff is supposed to be high in protein.  We need to get a feed analysis on it so we can make informed choices about feeding it.  The sow herd, which has been on it some time, shows evidence of fairly high salt content judging by the amount of excess urine.  That would be pretty much expectable from a snack food I guess.

One drinker out of the seven is giving us freezeup problems this cold snap.  Not fun.  Could be worse. High of 24 expected for tomorrow.