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.