Pigs on pasture

 Just after the fourth of July now we look forward to hosting a tour group of employees of one of our stores in the Twin Cities next week.  A main attraction will be the two groups of feeding pigs we have started in the pasture.  We are pleased with the results so far and look forward to showing them and talking to the group about pig production.

The first group is on last year's winter cattle feeding area and part of the reason for that is the hope that the hogs will tear apart the left over uneaten hay helping it to move from waste to manure to soil fertility.  They are doing well at that and the hope is that we will see widespread green grass throughout the area because of it as the next growing season swings into gear.

A wonderful and partly expected side benefit of this kind of housing/production is the excellent health of the hogs.  They are half grown to market weight now and losses have been minimal.  Growth seems to be fast as well.  They have coped well with the periodic heat this summer, thanks in part to the sprinkling and mud making we have caused.  Movement is key here to keep them from making the holes too big to cope with in subsequent seasons.  It has so far not been an issue.

The second group Andrew moved out is smaller and also has been started on a regular steamed rolled oats factor in the ration.  This is Andrew's nod to the old guy advice he is getting and it seems to be working.  So far no losses and the pigs steadily improve in appearance.

The old guy in question is none other than me.  I am pretty fixed in the opinion that hogs need a regular small inclusion of oats in the ration when they are little and that the sow herd should be maintained  on a ration at least twenty five percent oats by weight.  This is how we-meaning I-used to do it and it seems to me to maintain healthy pigs and sows.   Minnesota farms formerly produced oats as a major thing.  That of course was when we used horses and mules for tractive power.  But not feeding a team is no excuse for not growing oats on a hog farm.  Farmers talk constantly about a third crop for the rotation.  Perhaps growing the oats instead of buying it from Canada is a partial solution.

Getting the pigs out of the pasture and to market is the next hurdle and I will keep you posted on how that goes.  We are optimistic. 

pastures

 The good health of the group of feeding pigs we put to pasture in mid April is little short of astounding.  Much of pig disease is respiratory, which we knew of course since we have a history of producing pigs in pasture.  Therefore, pretty generally the pigs do better if they live in the sunshine and fresh air.  Any kind of confinement, even the loose hoop house production we use can have its issues.  The hoop houses are better than all alternatives but pasture, and necessary when pigs need to be supplied twelve months per year.

Now there are problems of course.  But they are all logistics issues.  Pigs need shelter, so we put a large hut out there, to which we can add several smaller ones as the pigs grow.  They need extra shade, which is provided by pulling a hay rack out there.  Self feeders must have lids that can be fastened down tight, because some of our rains come complete with high winds.  We installed several taps into the cattle watering system that runs through the entire pasture so that water can be automatic.

Currently we are transporting feed to the pastures using some of the four wheel drive equipment we have on hand anyway.  In future we will need to provide approach roads from various angles to assure that we can usually get the feed truck out there which will simplify matters considerably.

It is a pleasure to see our system work better since we decided to take half a loaf, so to speak, and use the pastures when weather permits.  There is a sense in which we have bent our operations to quit fighting nature, and doing that on the farm wherever and whenever possible always makes the operation go better.  Nature can be a stern taskmaster, but also a good and dependable friend.  We need to keep learning that! 

Pigs on pasture

 Andrew decided this year to try again to use the pastures in the hog production, even though we need production all year around and it is too cold for pigs in pasture in winter this far north.  The thinking is that several of the six groups of piglets farrowed each year could be fed in pasture, thus freeing up the usual feeding areas for a significant period to allow the level of disease microbes to decrease and thus making health easier to maintain year around. 

We moved them to pasture in the paddock where the cattle had been fed in winter about mid April.  In the three weeks since moving out, the pigs have dug into the feed supplied and really begun to shine with health.  As of now, they are confined to their shelter plus a generous area of the grass with electrified poultry wire.  This is more to keep predators out which we fear might be a problem when the pigs are small.  In a few more weeks, we will construct a single wire giving them several acres to run in.  Pigs grow fast.  We hope for the coyotes to stay away from somewhat larger pigs.  They always did with the sows.

We do our pig feeding in shelters with a large quantity of straw for them to play in.  It is a good system, the best we can devise for year around use.  But nothing beats pasture when it can be available.  I get a lift every day from watching them play.  We hope this summertime practice works out.

years ago

How things have changed in the sixty years since I left this farm for college! Our former American middle class is on its way out.  A few predator types at the top of the economy have decided to corner all of the world's wealth.  Every one else is on a slow slide to the bottom.  So much so that my farm organization, Farmers Union, decided to feature a former ranch kid who told and sang about his issues with bipolar disorder, especially the extreme depression part of it, at the National Convention.  He has had a real struggle with trying to stabilize himself to the point he could live a decent life.  It was a heartfelt and wonderful session.  It touched me.  Part of the reason though, was that I thought that his fight against depression individually applied as well to the generalized depression we Americans fight on a daily basis.

He ended with some of Roger Miller's long ago hit: "King of the Road".  I thought 40 years ago that this was just a fun and bouncy hit song.  This time it was different.  I heard the pain under the bouncy lyrics:"  . . .trailers for sale or rent. . .rooms to let, fifty cents. . .I smoke old stogies I have found, short and not too big around, I'm a man of means, by no means King of the Road. . .third box car midnight train. . ."

But this won't do.  People living like this need a hand up.  And that means someone to give them that hand.  That means us.  We must take back what has been taken from us, so that we can.  We must live now as if helping and looking out for others is the most important thing we do, because it is. 

Farming

 It is not easy to be happy about agriculture today.  For my neighbors, their soybean market has been given away by rancid domestic politics.  They await something of a gift from the government, something they really do not want, but can hardly turn down, given the circumstance.  Farm debt is up.  Fuel prices are skyrocketing due to Israel's and our war against Iran.  Fertilizer prices will soon head for the moon due to shipping difficulties in the Strait of Hormuz.  

Our state has been attacked by the authoritarians.  Minneapolis fought hard and valiantly against ICE, trying to protect terrified inhabitants using no weapons, but the damage caused there, as well as in the rural areas will cost the state millions over the coming years.

Last year like 2024 was very wet for the first part of the summer, and then dry.  In 2024 we lost our corn crop, most of the year"s pig feed, that had to be replaced out of the checkbook.  This year we lost the winter rye feed grain crop.  Much of the farm was flooded for much of the summer.  The fence chargers would not hold the cattle.

 And the worst result of all this is that it has become a battle to maintain a sense of caring for the community.  This we cannot do without.  This we must have.  We cannot let government be the cause of estrangement between us and our neighbors.

 Our truck will once again make its regular deliveries.  We will continue to work on our "farm to school" project.  We will continue sales from our farm shop and to rural outlets we have worked to put together.  We will continue.  Despair is not an option.

We know that many others are affected as are we.  We know it is going to be difficult for some to pay the slightly higher cost of some of our products.  We understand this and hold no grievance about it.

Farmers understand that there are times when it is critical to keep moving and to try to make things come out even against tall odds.  Farmers often face an uphill battle, with weather and bad markets.  But farms, especially livestock farms, teach that quitting is not an option.  The sun will rise tomorrow and the animals will need feed and our care and attention.

The best way, maybe the only way, through a disaster is to keep going, keep putting one foot ahead of the other.  

We appreciate all of you, our customers.  If you must back away for a time we understand that.  Know that you will always be welcomed back.

Take care

Our best to you:      Jim, LeeAnn, Josh and Cindy and all our families. 

ICE

 We are keenly aware that our customers are a wide variety of people representing a wide variety of thinking.  We expect no one to take a side in the current troubles in Minneapolis as a precondition of accessing our meats. But we do think that there is room for everyone to regret and try to ease the pain of those who are affected by government actions against the Twin Cities and indeed Minnesota as a whole.  Our rural area has been impacted as well.  As a farm and company we will continue to deliver as best we can, including by driving our truck into the Twin Cities as scheduled.  We neither expect nor seek trouble. We simply want to honor the commitments we have made.

It is our fervent hope that the current stress and suffering be over for all our friends and neighbors.  Take care, all of you.  As will we here at Pastures A Plenty. 

glacier

 This year we find out again about the wonders of livestock work on the glacier like ice mother nature has provided us.  We have had since the first snowfall the regular alternation of snow fall and freezing days and thawing days that rapidly turns snow cover into ice.

And how to do the chores?  Add on spikes, of course!  Staying in the house, as the weather man cautions, is not an option.  Avoiding a spell in the hospital in traction from a fall becomes very desirable.  The animals need attention and immediately, or very soon, that need becomes job one.

You see, when you take on livestock farming, if you have the older understanding of the farmer's role, you have assumed a calling.  It is not dissimilar to having a child.  When you do this, in either example, some things become non optional.  Like a child that needs the care it needs, no matter what, the livestock make that kind of demand.  You have made a deal with the world or with your understanding of it.  The use of the livestock for food to sustain our lives requires an absolute adherence to the care and feeding of that livestock. There should be nothing careless or offhanded about that.

This understanding is older.  And it is one of the things that modern farming with its illusions that animals are merely some kind of machine for our use and satisfaction has left in the past.

Like so many of the things we have left in the past, there is a cost.  Carelessness in this will cost us too much of our humanity.  Eating carefully assumes that we take responsibility for careful husbandry of the lives we mean to take for food. 

Fall

 Here in western Minnesota, we are at that time when digging in the earth is going to need to stop for several months simply because the earth will be too hard.  There are a host of other things set to happen, all of which signal the end of the something, and also the beginning of something else.  There is no other season like it on the farm in terms of the imperative of getting some things done and the reality of needing the accept the human limits we all live with.  

Many of the things I have thought would be done by now are not and will not be.  I will live in next year country in some important ways.  But it is critical to remember that this is illusion, that our crackerjack communication system regularly confronts us with impossibility, from the celebrity who can change his/her circumstance in life with what seems a mere wave of the hand, to cyberspace superhumans who can accomplish wonders by just thinking about them.

Those of us willingly(and sometimes not so willingly) stuck in reality know that there are things to be seen to, and that if we ourselves do not take it up it is we who will suffer the lack.  Are the potatoes dug up and stored?  Is the house ready for winter?  Are the winter livestock quarters usable?  Will the water freeze?  Is the soil properly covered and protected for the winter?

In reality though, it is all of us who suffer the lack of quality living, as our common life deteriorates and our government falls apart.  Our wise ones have tried to tell us these things for generations.

In the Great Digest Confucius says, in a fragment of a longer thought:  ". . .wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families, wanting order in the home they first disciplined themselves. . ."

As the chaos grows around us we need to continue to pay strict attention to getting the critical things done that we can do.  The order we so badly need in our government today grows from the order we focus on establishing in our own lives, beginning with ourselves.  Work carefully!  Be well.  Enjoy your Thanksgiving!  

gratitude for everyday joys

 It was one of those events I tend to go to because I think I should.  At the high school, we paid twenty dollars each for a seat in the auditorium so that we could listen to three women in goofy costumes display some of the sillier aspects of being a Lutheran in a small town.  So I thought.  Little did I know what was coming.  When life calls for teachers, they will come.  These came with a wake up call!

The twenty dollar gate charge went to community education in the three towns represented by the school, which charity represented a plausible reason for my being there.  We watched the three cavort their way through various skits and situations they had cobbled together out of their own lives.  Included was a mild-very mild-roast of three "volunteers" from the audience the women had gotten up on the stage.  We pretty much all knew them and they knew us.  Good sports all.

But there is this, I told myself.  How many of the miserable politicians we have plagued ourselves with have ever laughed at themselves?  How many of that crew of miscreants have ever knowingly exposed themselves to public ridicule?  Or heaven forbid, taken it in good humor?

More to the point though, the evening featured normally dour old German farmers and grandmothers somewhat enthusiastically following along with a made up group exercise and dance routine rather than sitting in their seats furtively looking for someone else in the group that they knew making a fool of themselves.  They actually followed along and tried to keep up with the rapidly increasing pace. This, of course,was completely out of character for us.

Perhaps most unusual of all, the three women on stage closed the program by exhorting us to continue to get together, to sing together and laugh at each other, and ourselves.  And you know, a generation or two ago we would not need to have been told that.  We expected to do that and we did it naturally.

But since, our farming and other ways of making a living in rural America have increasingly gotten in the way of such simple joy.  We compete, we do not commune.  Consequently our friendships have gotten fewer and considerably more shallow.  Joy suffers.  Human life suffers.

One of the saving graces in our lives, here at Pastures A Plenty, is that our group of customers is filling in, serving some of the purpose we so badly need in our lives together, providing us with friendship and support and ongoing commitment as our traditional rural life fragments and gets more problematic.  And our customers are all across the spectrum politically as we have been able to learn in the process of dealing with them.  Some of us would not deal with some others of us if it were not for our common belief in and commitment to the idea of good food and how that eaters knowing farmers and farmers the buyers of our foods is a very much stronger and more long lasting bond than we ever thought it would be.  

We evidently needed three outgoing women doing a show of silly jokes and pranks to remind us of that.  And for that, I am grateful.

Farm Aid

 At the end of this most difficult and trying production year on the farm, when everything we tried ended being disappointing came a welcome surprise.  We were asked to participate as a farm and family in the 40th edition of Farm Aid, the ongoing concert series started by Willie Nelson and others in response to the financial hardship of the mid eighties.  It was to be in Minnesota at the stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota.  Additional to all the chances to represent our farm and family and what we were trying to do, I was to have a chance to meet Sarah Smarsh, that blaze of clear thinking and passionate writing out of rural Kansas.

I did, and it was far too short, of course, and an experience I will not soon forget.  I write too, as you can see and I am rural, and like she, I am sick of being misrepresented as a cute comical character who knows nothing and lives in the past.  We hit it off even though she is a generation or two younger than I (most people are anymore!)

The day was a press event and then an extended three hour marathon of press interviews after which  I and a friend descended into a deafening rock concert going on a few floors below.  I was ushered to the farmer's lounge and there spent some time talking to several young people who were excited about their efforts to connect farmers with customers.  Unbeknownst to me, wife LeeAnn was getting a little annoyed with her inability to connect with me after what she understood was to be just a half hour with the press-I had turned my phone off.  She got through and sent a grandson-we had much family and several good friends with us that day-to find me and fetch me down to the seats below.  

The music was good, but the sound level intense.  I am not much of a concert guy but this impressed me more than once.  Old rockers with a message, names like Neil Young, Dave Matthews, John Mellenkamp as well as Willie Nelson of course and Margo Price-not so old-singing with a point, songs that I liked.  I had Young's driving chorus "We've got crime in the White House" playing in my head for the next several days.

Son Josh and daughterinlaw Cindy had gotten seats on the main floor where the seats we had purchased were and found us in the farmer's lounge to say that Greg Gunthorp, with whom I had shared a podium thirty years earlier in Indiana talking about pastured hog production, was seated close to them and wanted to talk to me.  I spent an hour on the main floor of the concert trying to talk to him and lost my voice for the next several days.

I am really not much of a concert guy but this was exceptional and I keep replaying the experience in my mind.  It is so at least in part because it is rare for a farmer to find himself (or herself-three of the four presenters at the press event were women farmers)held up for admiration.  I will carry the boost with me for when times are tough, as they pretty certainly will be.

 

 

State Fair time

 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.  

Rain

 Our farm had 10.6 inches of rain in the 18 days beginning June 11th.  As is usual in these very wet times, we lost about ten acres of pasture and another ten to twenty acres of growing crops as one of our main drainage systems ran backwards, letting in to our farm the water that had been dumped into the drainage upstream. 

The timing of the rain was tough as well coming just in time to stop cultivating, the most critical weed control activity for our organic cropping system.  Rain grows grass, of course, which usually means the pastures shine in a wet time.  But the amount of rain in this short time made even the pasture soils soft and susceptible to compaction damage.  We will suffer the results of this overload of moisture for some years to come, in reduced productivity and weedy conditions in both the cropping and pasture parts of the farm.

Fast growing grass in a rainy time also tends to short out the electric fence and as a result we had cattle out three times, twice on and once off of our farm.  We found out about this first with a call from a neighbor and immediately after a call from the cops.  Any farmer hates hearing this kind of message, but it is the very best kind of neighbor that calls us anyway.  And the cop is just doing his job.  We got them back but the impact remains.  We are checking all the animals at dark every night trying to find trouble before it starts.  Sleep is interrupted and my arms ache from swinging the machete trying to clear the big weeds back from the fence.

So does all this mean we will give up pasturing?  No, it does not.  Pasturing simply works better than crop farming.  What it does mean is that we will be even more insistent in our conversations with anyone who hears us about the reality of climate change and its impacts.  We cannot afford the luxury of being wishy washy about a problem that is staring us in the face.

And we don't have time to monkey with politicians who will not act on it, will even take us backward because they think they personally have a way out figured and can make much money on the ride down into whatever is coming. 

FarmAid

This summer, in the midst of the clatter and surplus of work, more work than can be done timely, we were contacted by FarmAid.  They wanted us to be part of a podcast they were putting together about where farmers and farms are going from here.  Their preferred subject was the idea of joining marketing of farm products to their production, all to the benefit of the farm family and community.

    We were happy to be part of it, of course, as we are happy anytime the ongoing bustle of urban America admits that we and the food we produce are critical to everyone's health and survival.  LeeAnn, I and grandson Andrew were first interviewed about the origins of Pastures farm, the start of grazing and straw based hog production, as well as the forming up of the marketing and the learning process taken on especially by LeeAnn and Josh and Cindy and the work and twists and turns it has taken to get it this far.  

        Then Josh and Cindy took the story to the next level talking about their work revitalizing rural processing businesses, the facilitating of the transfer of business to the next generation and the start that has been made here in Minnesota to train and educate the next generation of processing workers and more than a few, it is hoped, future owner operators.  Much Covid spending in our state went to this rural effort.  It is appreciated and we hope it bears fruit long term.

        A bit later the new food coop started up in New London was the subject. Started on a shoestring and operated by true believers in a new approach to food growing and provision, it promises to be a real blessing to our farm and business. New London lost its local grocery store some years ago and the new food effort may well benefit because of the hole left in the community by the departure.  Our marketing arm has been busy facilitating and helping with the start up.

       And, of course, our reward, besides the satisfaction of talking food and farming with someone who certainly seems to care how it all comes out, is that we could buy at a reduced price, FarmAid concert tickets for later this summer. For LeeAnn and I this will be our first big concert since Peter Paul and Mary at the auditorium on campus at the University of Minnesota in 1970.  

 

Smoke

 Smoke from the fires in Saskatchewan and Manitoba sent thick smoke south to us again this weekend. This is not normal weather.  Air quality index claims danger in exposure for older people and folks with heart and lung problems.  

The earth is on fire and we are the cause of it.  We will figure out how to live with it of course. We always do.  But the other question, the one about longer term results and tipping points and if the earth coming toward us in the near future is at all like the one we are adjusted to remains.

What we try for here at Pastures A Plenty in view of all this is to keep our production of crops and animals as close as possible to what might be happening here if we were not here.  We do not know what is coming.  But we can look back and see that the earth has produced growing green things and animals have reproduced as far back as we know.  This we need to take to heart and to learn.

We think it is a pretty good bet that all the certified smart people and all the corporate money will not be able to figure out a solution.  We only hope they don't make it too much worse than they already have.  And we hope they may give up their age old habit of thinking they know better and begin occasionally to listen to the people doing the work of the world.

We put our faith in the capacity of earth, given kindly use and care, to figure out how to heal itself.  We need to figure out how to feed ourselves and others without doing huge damage.  To do this, we must learn an attitude of listening, of careful attention to what the earth is telling us.

Humility is required.  Listening to the earth and the animals on it and in it does not come naturally to us humans.  But we will have to learn.  The earth will teach us.  So we carry on our work with the plants and animals and try to do so in a way that makes things better and not worse.

twin cities liberal

 But isn't he a Twin Cities liberal? This question from a newspaper reporter who went on to mention her time in a bar hearing liberals painted with every abomination and ill known to man.  This prompted me to reply that indeed he is but that didn't make him a bad person.

This response gained me a certain notoriety, I guess, but to me it was merely a reflection of my lived reality.  The occasion was a meeting in western Minnesota featuring Attorney General Keith Ellison about efforts he is making to hold machinery companies to account for their efforts to withhold vital technical information from independent repair shops.

This is "liberal" I suppose, in that it reflects the typically liberal desire for a level playing field for all.  But it also speaks to the need for openness in the marketplace which is, or certainly should be, essential to a conservative view. 

Increasingly, we allow our political hatreds to drive our commonsense underground and this is very detrimental to our lives together.  Grandson Andrew, who farms, was there to tell about the difficulties we were having with a tractor, trying to get it repaired and keep it running.  This is something nearly every farmer has experience with and it matters not at all who he voted for in the election.  We should be able to say that and act accordingly.

And indeed, this is detrimental.  If we must ask who our neighbors voted for before we will agree to stand together on a matter that impacts all of us, then we have truly left behind the rural life that I came back to in the late seventies.  That rural life meant that if my barn was burning neighbors would show up offering what help they could without ever considering who I voted for.  

If we have already left, or ever will leave that attitude behind in favor of making sure my political bunch drives out your political bunch, we will have given up most of what was good and right about our lives together.

That would be a tragedy!

vaccinate

 Did I miss something?  My seventy plus years spent mostly on this farm dealing with livestock has resulted for me in a healthy respect for vaccines.  It has gotten to the point with our overproduction of pigs in the upper Midwest, that I do not know if it is possible to produce pigs at any scale here without vaccines.

So why do we have our Secretary in charge of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, a known vaccine opponent who also is a Kennedy, now say, after a lifetime of denial of vaccine usefulness, that he will make measles vaccines available in view of the situation in Texas, but will do nothing to require them.  Why?  This runs contrary to virtually everything I have been taught, in large measure by veterinarians

Vaccine effectiveness relies mostly upon uptake.  The more casual the use of vaccines in a situation, the less well they will work.  I think I am right here.  Anyone who wishes to argue against that belief can start discussion by making a comment below.

I think the real controversy about vaccines is due to the ascendancy of libertarian thought and action.  Due to the success of this philosophy over the last half century, we have difficulty doing anything that helps the neighborhood or community, even if it would benefit us as well.  Our minds just no longer work that way.  We think that for us to succeed others must fail, as Gore Vidal said.    

gloom

 It is easy to feel under the weather this holiday season.  The country continues at war with itself and we have just finished another holiday where we have to worry about politics as a flashpoint around the dinner table.  This morning the weather is warming and foggy, weird for the days between Christmas and New Year's.  

But closer to home, the steer that was acting about to break with pneumonia turned the corner and made a recovery on its own, without intervention.  Given the pessimistic outlook in ag circles for any prosperity on the farm, our decision twenty years ago to try to go as directly as possible to the buyers and eaters of the food looks pretty good.  And on New Year's day we gather with extended family including several very recent additions to celebrate the fact that we have each other and to miss those not there.  Functioning families like ours and others are the very basis of a good country, if the nation ever gets bright enough to realize it and value those families that are still going.  

Change is constant, and that includes the weather, and importantly people, who it is easy to believe never change.  But they do, and mostly the reason for the change, when it comes, has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with love.

Take care of yours.  And be grateful for them.

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.