I built a road. A short one, not more than five hundred feet long, but still. I built it with our old smallish skidloader and the loader tractor and did so while the younger ones here were carrying on their work as usual, work like getting machines ready for harvest, scheduling pigs into the farrowing, doing the sales work, controlling the meats inventory and so on. I pushed the topsoil to the side, got in twenty or so semi truck loads of fill gravel mixed with clay hauled out from various building projects in town and shaped it into a roadway as it came. I am not looking forward to getting the bill for the hauling, with diesel at five dollars a gallon. It took some time to shape the road with the undersized equipment.
The reason for the project is that our farmstead, our houses, barns and hog buildings are situated on a small rise surrounded by low ground. It is this low ground where we needed the road. Every spring and fall we have trouble getting heavy loads of our hog bedding pack manure through from the buildings out to the crop ground which needs it. We are then stuck with going around the road to the fields a mile and more extra travel and with the added risk of upsetting the neighbors when on the way home from work they hit a small pile of what may have fallen off our manure equipment on our way to the fields.
The loads are heavy and so many because we use bedding on the hogs. They are more comfortable that way. The manure is better, composting and becoming less toxic to the all important soil life than the liquid slurries that are the alternative. The difference of just a few days extra to haul in spring before planting and in the fall before winter are critical. We do not want to spread manure on top of snow, as the melt will give it a free ride into the streams and rivers. This road gives us relief from needing to spread the manure just in summer, when the crops cover most of the acres.
And the need for the road is an important marker for the growth of understanding with the group of people that are our customers. Increasingly they understand that farming is complex, that it takes a lot of management and planning to carry it out successfully, safely and humanely, and are willing to pay a good price for the resulting product. They know, as we do, that quality can come at a good reasonable price, but not a cut rate one. We are grateful for that understanding.
