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.