This is typically a time to look back on the season and feel some satisfaction over the parts of the farming effort that went well. This year for us, our livestock enterprises, the drivers of our meat supply business, are the one thing that didn't fail us. Other than livestock, the season has been a slow motion disaster, start to finish.
We received the full year's total precipitation in the three months between May 15 and August 15 which is most of the growing season here. It calculates to two inches of rain per week average for those 13 weeks. Plants will not grow well in that kind of moisture overload. I have written before about the yellow stunted corn, the small grain still unharvested two months after it was time, about the hay crops abandoned in the field and so forth.
Going back at it after this kind of summer feels left handed, so to speak, with my apologies to those who really are left handed(right handed for you, I guess) We go to work in the midst of all the undone work from the summer, trying to figure out how to get the necessary things done so that we can help get another season underway next year.
We must clear the hay bales from the failed second cutting so that we can make a third crop on the hay. We have to decide if it is worth trying to swath and combine what is left of the rye or if it would be better to run the disc over it and help it seed another green plowdown crop going into fall. We will need to decide if we should run the Kernza planting another year, or till it and rotate away to another crop. And we know with some certainty that our corn, such as it is, will not be going into the bin without artificial drying, a capacity we gave up some years ago. So now what?
We will see what crop insurance will have to offer. Crop insurance has not been as usable for this livestock dependent farm as we might have hoped.
We are not alone. Everywhere, and all too often, climate is destroying human effort these days. And the thing to notice is that the humans involved in climate disasters very rarely talk of giving up. We take heart from that. We will press on.
