rain

 About a week ago we got an inch and six tenths of rain. This is not enough to break the drought but I am taking it as a hopeful sign. Since the rains cut off abruptly in early summer after spoiling any chance we had of getting the corn planted, it has been a roller coaster of planning and worry.

There is one aspect of it we shouldn't forget.  Our soil is very miserly when it comes to giving up moisture.  This is one of the soil characteristics that drove us around the bend this spring when it was continuously too wet to plant, but it is also a blessing when the weather turns hot and dry.

It was late by the time we could think of getting a tractor, let alone tillage, through the wet soil where we had planned corn.  It was mid July, and we had weeds two and three feet tall on the acres we had planned for corn.  Looking at the situation, it seemed we would be better off not tilling and planting a cover crop in part because we were thinking about trying to plant a winter annual on at least some of the acres.  But no farmer can sleep at night surrounded by fields of weeds about to go to seed.  We needed to do something.

We chopped the weeds down in late July.  We got the old stalk chopper out there, hoping it would hold together when challenged by the extra load offered by the green weeds.  We thought that the chopper made more sense because it was cheaper and closer to the junkyard than the hay mower.  It came through for us so we ended up with fields of cut off annual weeds poking through a rough mulch of chopped lambsquarter and pigweed and foxtail grass.  

As it turned out, this operation held the weeds in check and covered the soil completely protecting it from the heat of late summer.  And when we did disc in fall to prepare for planting the rye, we could see the advantages of what we did.  Instead of powder dry soil six inches deep, which is what would have been the result of complete tillage to control the weed growth we had a decent level of moisture throughout, enough to start the rye we planted.

There is another aspect of this, something of which I had not a clue until I started studying various aspects of soil health a decade ago.  A good complete cover of living plants or even residue will keep the soil from heating to temperatures well over 125 degrees, which is more than hot enough to destroy much of the soil life.  When you allow soil to be overheated like that you can plan on a delay in getting a healthy soil life back.  And soil life is critical to growth and production!  Life long learning, I guess.

hybrid rye

This year we did not get the corn planted in anything like a timely fashion, so we took the crop insurance option of prevented planting.  What this meant is that land would be available for planting a winter annual in August thru September.  We purchased hybrid rye seed for thirty acres and got it seeded just after the fifteenth of September.  It was seeded into what was by that time, very dry soil.  It seemed iffy indeed, especially given the cost of the seed.  Andy wrestled with the suggested planting depth of 3/4 inch and the knowledge that the soil was dry at that level.  He seeded a bit deeper than that.  Setting depth is tricky with our old grain drill, but a few days into October we were pleased to see the rye standing in narrow rows across the first part of the field.

Hybrid rye may be important to our farm.  It is a high yielder, consistently doing over 100 bu/acre with much less in fertilizer and weed control expense compared to corn.  It feeds as well as corn, while offering the animals a better range of protein and fiber.  

Importantly for us, it is planted in late summer, which means that including it in the rotation opens an opportunity for manure spreading and tripping up the weed production cycle by interrupting weed control with summer tillage or mowing, something that is just not available with full season crops such as corn.

Moving heavy equipment such as tillage or big manure spreaders across the land in summer minimizes the risk of soil compaction.  And increasing the diversity of crops grown is always a plus for soil health, as the life in the soil thrives on variety.

We will tell you more about rye as we find it out.  We feel pretty good about our successful year with Kernza, good enough to take on another challenge!

Kernza

 Grandson Andrew, the farmer around here, got his experimental crop of Kernza harvested early this week and is now baling the straw for use in the farrowing house.  

Kernza is a perennial wheat bred from intermediate wheatgrass, which is used as a pasture grass on the northern high plains.  And it looks as if the straw has a pretty heavy waxy coat over the somewhat green stem.  We think it is dry enough though and the hard stem and its waxy coat should break down nicely in the bedding chopper that we use with the sows and litters.

The devil is in the marketing of course.  As always, for any new crop the markets are thin and easily saturated.  The grain is used as a wheat substitute in bread, but more in making other baked goods, such as waffles, pastries and the like.  Beer is being brewed with it.  

The farmer group has organized a co-operative to help with market development, including aggregation.  It is a work in progress.

Kernza is a perennial, albeit a short term one, lasting three to five or six years.  Andrew knew what the benefits for the soil health are when a perennial is planted instead of the annual, with its need for annual tillage and often a months long open season where the soil is exposed to the elements, allowing the carbon to be oxidized out of it.  Grazing teaches the value of a good perennial plant.

Good farmers try to push toward what they know the soil needs.  It is a risk, always a compromise with the ongoing need to make a profit.  Farmers that do this kind of experimenting deserve credit for it.  Few really know what the risk to the farm of failure is.  But the farmer does, and sometimes goes ahead anyhow.  

A nice agronomic side feature is that the Kernza is aggressive.  It has a complex and large root system, which is wonderful for the critters that live in the soil.  But it helps the Kernza out compete most other plants, once it is established. It pretty much drives out the weeds in the second and third year.  This alone makes it useful in an organic rotation.

We are in the business now.  Time will tell if it works out or not. 

grazing event

 I went to a pasture walk last night about fifty miles distant from here.  It is a real blessing to look at an agriculture that is very different from that surrounding me and this farm, and to talk to some of those practicing it. It is a trial when every conversation I can have with neighbors must start with a serious tutorial on what drives my kind of farming.  They really have no idea that it is possible to think of farming apart from corn production.

coping with weather

We do not have a growing corn crop at this point.  Due to the ongoing "rain every fourth day" spring and early summer, we couldn't plant corn until it was far too late.  We will have to depend on crop insurance and the livestock operations to carry us for the year.  But there is the new problem of how to handle the land that would have been in corn.

We couldn't get timely seeding of a cover crop done on the acres involved for the same reason we couldn't plant the corn.  And we had an explosion of weeds on the land.  Organic farms such as ours do not simply remain bare for any length of time when not planted with a crop.  Nature steps in.  In our case, nature provided annual grasses, mustard, pig weed, lambsquarters, thistles, cockleburs and a few other hard to identify plants in place of the missing corn. 

We held fast to the idea of seeding oats as a cover crop until about mid July.  When we could finally access the field, we figured out that the weeds were providing the complex roots in the soil needed to foster health of the land. and gave up the idea of seeding oats.  The stand was chopped down to control the setting of noxious seeds.  Of course, some of the weeds slipped past the chopper and accelerated their drive to produce seed. 

It was obvious most of the problem plants were annuals.  Knowing this, and that there was an ample supply of weed seed in the soil again, we disced the field twice in early August.  This should start any new seed to growing.  And the time between mid August and hard freeze, when annual plants stop growth, should be four to six weeks.  Most annual weedy plants will not set seed in that time.

This is typical farmer "making it up as we go" planning.  We try to think clearly, act and then hope for the best.    

pile up

 There is a pile up in front of and in the shop building where we do our fixing and simple building.  This is what happens often when you attempt to farm with tractors and equipment that is not, shall we say, "showroom fresh".  Especially is it true of the part of farming that involves lots of equipment use. 

Even though we took a 'prevented planting' option in the crop insurance thus cancelling the entire corn production season we still have the problem of weed control on those acres, still muddy from spring, as well as the need to establish a cover crop beyond noxious weeds.  And we have a considerable number of acres in hay, as well as a semi perennial planting of Kernza to deal with.

So the pile in the bottleneck grows.  The older tractor we have pulling the big baler overheated badly in the extreme heat last week while baling the nurse crop of oats off the new hay seeding.  It is parked in the doorway, baler still attached while Andy reluctantly hired a neighbor to bale the ninety or so acres being threatened by rain.  It has the hood pulled off and the water supply jacket disassembled to the thermostat under my mistaken impression that the thermostat was the problem.  So it is back to the drawing board on that job, while we wait for the gasket set my exploration destroyed.  

Meanwhile we have the old swather sitting to the side waiting to have the sickle pulled out and refurbished.  Jury is out as to if the rest of the old machine will hold together to cut the Kernza crop, long as it is on straw.  Also our field pickup developed a series of bubbles on one of the front tires meaning that it is unsafe at any speed.  Finding a decent used tire for a sixteen inch rim is difficult to say the least in this age of seventeen through twenty inch wheels.  We use that old truck to help with moving the newly baled hay to storage.

I pulled the sickle out of the swather yesterday and moved the machine out of the way.  Time to get hold of the hammers, punches, and right angle grinders to make that sickle usable.  Today we will start to reassemble the front of the baler tractor after having done what we can to flush the radiator fins of the fine dust built up in there.

But it is hard to escape the feeling that we hold our breath waiting for the next pile up to begin.

rainy

The seven day forecast from NOAA that I look at has shown significant rain for the last three months, often enough two of those rain events in the same seven days.

I can remember another year, probably in the early nineteen nineties, that was wet like this. It was pretty much before we moved into trying to market our production personally.  We have never gone whole hog for chemical weed control on this farm and I remember trying to cultivate the first time in the first week of July. The only weed control applied to this point that year was a band of granular grass herbicide over the corn row.  It was not fun.  Things on the farm have changed considerably since then, with the move into pasturing livestock and a revised crop rotation.  The organic certification accomplished in the early aughts and maintained ever since is a change in outlook and philosophy that has a major impact on everything.  This year we took the crop insurance offer of prevented planting and brought the corn seed back to the dealer.

Rain that won't stop is a challenge and a game changer. We will have to locate and speak for corn for the hogs.  We face trying not to allow noxious weeds to set seed in fields too muddy to till and the temptation to break the organic certification and spray.  We need to establish a cover crop in those same muddy fields.  Corn stalks will not be available for our hog bedding from our own fields.

But a good farm always tries to provide margins.  We have thirty acres of the new crop Kernza ripening for harvest.  The yield from that will make excellent hog feed.  And the straw left from that harvest, together with the extra corn stalks baled last fall, will get us through in terms of bedding.  The hay production, both from the established hay fields and clippings of pasture overgrowth are much in surplus.  Andy has gotten the sow herd on a continuous full feed of good hay from our own stockpile.  And due to the lack of a growing crop on the corn acres, we now have the chance to spread the manure in summer rather than first thing in the spring when the soil is wet and easily compacted.  Maybe we can trying seeding a winter grain crop such as rye, wheat or triticale.   

So we provide a part of our own insurance against adversity, which farms should always do, but are in fact too often failing to accomplish today.

chickens

 From where I sit writing I can look out the window and watch about 300 broiler chickens searching through the grass for anything good to eat.  We raised broilers formerly for some years, but quit because we had to haul them too far for processing.  We couldn't spare labor enough to do it ourselves, so we began buying farm raised chickens to sell in our meats business.

What has changed is that we now have local processing available again and so we refurbished the old equipment in April and bought in the chicks.  This is an opportunity we created for ourselves, without withholding any credit from the people who have started the processing here.  This is so because since the pandemic, our family, including Josh and Cindy as well as LeeAnn and I have been active in urging development of processing here and throughout the state using both state and federal funds set up to help rural communities through the worst effects of the pandemic.  

So we spent endless hours on zoom and in person meetings, lobbying the legislature and making personal contacts with people likely to succeed at a processing business.  We, of course, have a vested interest in the success of the new processing businesses.  We very much appreciate the nerve and courage it takes to start a new venture in these trying times.  And we think that you, our customers, need to be aware of what is happening too.

We will eat better because of these new businesses and our communities will benefit.

spring

 I would have long since succumbed to the retirement idea and quit if not for grazing.  Traditional crops farming is simply too discouraging.  Increasingly the community does without the expense spending or the income from the crops farms as they are today.  The farms are simply too big and spread out to have any good effect on the home town or its businesses.  

Grazing, on the other hand, is more year around.  The cattle that are grazing in summer have also to be fed in winter.  Grazing lays out considerably less cash for expense but at least its income is more available to be spent locally.  And this is especially true of the farms which try to sell their products locally.

And then there is weather.  Right now we celebrate the inch and half of rain we got last night and can already see the effect on the color and lushness of the grass.  More is expected early next week.  We badly need it, having been short on moisture for going on four seasons now.  The crop fields, mostly not planted, are just muddy.

It is not just that.  We started the cattle to grazing about a week ago.  Even though the temperature is a bit low to encourage vigorous grass growth, there is some forage out there to get.  The animals signaled their appreciation for the new situation by kicking up heels and racing about the new paddock with tails straight up in the air.  It is impossible for a farmer not to be moved by that expression of joy.

Grazing has its issues, true.  We do not have first rate forage plants to use because forage is always an afterthought to corn when it comes to research.  But the season is longer at both ends, considerably so if the farmer has planned the stocking rate right.  The work is more pleasant-who can argue with walking on grass to observe the animals?  The expense, thus the worry, is a great deal less.

 It seems to me that a well managed farm in the northern corn belt here needs to include annual crops such as corn plus grazing animals.  The soil and the land need that kind of practice.  The animals need to be managed in that way.  And perhaps most of all, farmers need that regular respite from machine logic. It restores the soul.

El Nino

 Are we seeing the end of El Nino here at the end of March?  Temps have retreated to a somewhat more expectable level and now we have eight or nine inches of snow on the ground.  Maybe the alliance between climate change and the Nino pattern is over for the time being.  

So, on with mud season.  It looks as if we will need to focus now on getting the machines ready to plant the crop and patch the pastures and hay fields.  The corn markets have so far fallen out of bed as to make us question once again the wisdom of even planting the crop.  

But our major possible alternative, grazing, is problematic too.  It is impossible for us to project any real possibility of profit with calves and stocker animals at the price being paid today.  Contract grazing seems the only way to go so it is going to be time to start looking for someone with more animals to graze than they have grass.  Of course that means we must accurately estimate the amount of grass we will have.

No one ever said any of this would be easy. 

spooky

 March is often the snowiest stormiest season we have.  So far this year, somewhat like the winter we just had, March is quiet, warm and dry.  Anyone who has anything to do with growing plants and/or animals is spooked.  This is nowhere near normal and it feels as if we should stop pretending it is.  

For farmers, job one is coping with the season's weather. After we have done our best with that, after we have modified the seed order, or put in changes in the cropping pattern to respond to the warming, drying soil and hot daytime temps we are all afraid we are going to see again we will have to figure out how to cope.

Farmers, especially those operating livestock and diversified farms do not have the option to "work remotely" or cut back hours or do any of the things that people sometimes are able to do to cope with bad weather or disease.  Farmers cannot sit in the house, turn the air conditioning up and farm from there!  Much as the thought leaders we are so plagued with would argue for some or another "easy way out" there really isn't any.  We, like our plants and our animals will simply have to go through it.

Cropping patterns and livestock breeding schedules are what they are for a reason, or for a variety of reasons.  They cannot, and certainly should not, be changed at the drop of a hat.  Yet the weather and the climate are changing and we have to take up the work of deciding how and under what circumstances we will change.  

There is this.  The very fact that we must suffer through whatever the universe has planned or whatever adversity we have brought on ourselves means that we will be paying attention.  And if we cannot look away and entertain ourselves elsewhere, so to speak, we should therefore be encouraged with the fact that we will be focused in a way that no remote and detached investor ever is.  We have, as the saying goes, "skin in the game".  Do we ever, and the thought is terrifying in view of what we are told is probably coming.  

We have long operated this farm under the idea that "closest to nature is best"  and "get mother nature on your side.  She works for a minimum wage" and so forth.  Nature is changing of course, due at least to the warming temperatures.  But nature is still more constant, and more reliable than say, politics.  Or the market economy.  Nature can teach us things worth knowing.  It is doubtful that politics or economics can, with the kind of upheaval we are likely moving into.      

mud season

 Mud season is something that goes with living off the pavement.  Ask anyone who has taken up the responsibility of keeping a house reasonably clean and habitable what mud season means and you will find out.  It is an unending battle.

But this year is different.  It looks now, at this point in February, as if mud season will be what winter should have been this year.  We are still seeing temps that stay in the freezing zone at night, but peak above the thirty two degree frost point every or nearly every day.  Additionally of course the sun is stronger every day now and even when it is cloudy the surface of the earth thaws.  We have had mud since we shut down the pasture water system for the winter in early December and the cattle began walking to the heated drinker on the yard each day.  They carry a coat of mud on their legs that seems permanent.

I hear El Nino getting blamed for it, in combination with ongoing global warming.  This seems logical.  The underlying truth of the situation of course is that El Nino is a regular pattern we know.  Warming means that we are leaving behind an environment we understand and moving into one we do not.

We can guess a few things about what we are moving into.  Frost, or lack of it, changes the soil at least in terms of our working with it.  As the winter season shrinks compaction of the soil will get worse.  Tillage mistakes are more likely to be permanent.  

New weeds and pests will show up.  Already I have noticed that certain pasture grasses will grow here that were formerly too southern to survive this far north.  Disease will worsen and there will be regular surprises.  This will be as true among us humans as it is with our livestock.

It is best to view the earth as constantly changing instead of being in a steady state.  We will have to learn how to do that.  It will be useful to realize that this has always been so, that what makes it so apparent now is that today's change is something our human activities have brought about.  Permanence is essentially an illusion.  It will be useful for those of us in charge of land use to keep in mind the strong likelihood that most of the change we have seen in farming over the last century has been in the wrong direction and to learn to ask why this might be so.

winter

Most of us make brave noises about how we like the warmer weather and are enjoying it.  But those of us who live close to the weather and close to the cycles of the earth have a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  There is a deep unease.  We have caused a problem we may not be able to solve, we fear.  What if the corn crop next year, for reasons we can't suss out right now, fails the way the pastures have failed the past two seasons?

 It is a strange start to winter.  We have had the occasional freezing temperature but for most of the fall and early winter we are above freezing most of the daylight hours.  Not especially unusual for November, but well out of the ordinary for January.  El Nino gets mentioned.  We are reminded every day by the internet and radio chatter that climate change is now upon us.  It is a worry.  

We depend so upon winter being winter.  We need the soil to freeze to help us erase compaction mistakes from the season and to improve soil drainage for next year.  We need it to clear and cleanse the air we breathe.  It seems now as if I have an ongoing head cold because allergies and sore throats as well as froggy voice come so often, seemingly each episode on top of the last.  Irises are reported up along some of our building foundations.

The best farming advice I can notice tells us to spread our risks, to prepare for a wet season as well as a dry one, to look for both hotter and colder temps than usual, to expect more disease in the livestock while we hope for less.  Diversity is our best hedge against an unknown and unknowable future. Planning to make a bonanza yield is out. Staving off disaster by hedging our bets is the thing. 

We should remember that this posture, spreading our bets and not going whole hog for anything, is what farming was formerly good at, before crop insurance and this whole attitude of living via the internet in some kind of eternal present. We need to be people for whom the next tough time is as real as the last one, for whom preparation is everything, who know to not bet the farm on anything but ourselves, that we have to trust people beginning with trusting ourselves.

And we need to reach out for our neighbor's hand to proceed into the future together.  We better hope that hand is still there.