impressions of life

 Our partially empty upstairs space has grown to be a record of sorts.  There is the bookcase full of agriculture titles, mostly about small and alternative farming.  And the stairs coming up are lined with pictures of kids growing up, both of us are there as are all our children.  One former bedroom is a display of junior high and high school art, here a girl on a swing, there a small girl leans over to kiss a small boy. A melange of horses.  There is the farm building scene and the panorama of a combine in a field unloading into a truck.  Dreams of small girls and a small boy.  

On the other wall is a photo shot by a friend superimposed with a poem of Wendell Berry, singing about death and birth and regeneration.  The photo is of a barbed wire fence making it over a small hill near a tree, which I had admired in the photographer's studio a few years ago.  What I didn't know then and have since begun to understand is that I am attracted to fences, because in some way they are a sign of human determination to stay.  I will need to explore this further.

ice

 Yesterday I broke up ice in the three pasture water tanks south of the driveway with a sledge hammer.  The north tanks had been shut down a month earlier.  The ice was six inches thick, unusual for this early.  I had turned the water off about a week earlier and needed to get the tanks empty enough so that the winter's ice and snow didn't damage the water valve.  The cows go on the cornstalks today, the market herd is on the pasture eating good hay and I guess they are all as ready for winter as can be.  I would as soon do without, but my opinion in the matter is without consequence.

Early winter

 Last month's early snow-seven inches-never melted completely as October snows usually do.  Five more inches fell in early November.  We were able to get the corn harvested.  As farmers generally do, we hadn't waited for our own cornstalks to bale for bedding, but had gotten access to bedding on a neighbor's field.  Farming here on the northern plains in a time of shifting climate often requires the farmer to put things out of order in an attempt to get something-anything-done.  

We didn't get the last cutting on the hay that was planned for rotating to corn.  Neither did we get the manure spread there or the tillage done.  Those jobs join the unharvested soybeans, which now stand in snow and if not harvested until spring will lose most of the yield.  

Time for plan B.  We will put the cowherd on the unbaled corn stalks to harvest much of their own feed between now and spring when we will again attempt to bale the stalks for bedding to be used in summer.  We may need to stall the organic rotation for a year as it is difficult to till hay ground in spring for corn planting without use of crop chemicals.  And we will, as always, hope for the best.  

While we watch the corn in the bin as it dries, we are getting the livestock drinkers and the buildings ready for wintertime use.  We have shut the pasture water system down nearly a month early. The cattle are healthy and fast growing, while we have a real population explosion among the pigs and the laying hens.  For this and for our farm and our health in this time of Covid we are most grateful.

early snow

 Seven inches of snow in mid October is unusual.  So is the week long cold spell that keeps it with us.  Most farms here are just started with corn harvest, while most of the sugar beet and soybean harvest is done.  And our farm, as a small organic operation finds it difficult to own a combine and so must wait until those that own the machines are done with their own harvest.  Consequently all our corn and soybeans are standing in snow at this point.  Then, of course all the conventional grain must be cleaned out of the combine and trucks to make sure we meet organic standards before we start.  

The corn we will be able to get sooner or later, the soybeans are a bit more iffy.  This is the new world of climate change.

Corn stalks or stover are important for us since we depend upon a great deal of bedding materials for our hog business which operates entirely on bedding.  Our carryover from last year is gone.  So it is a race now between improving weather allowing us to harvest the corn and bale up the stalks and the need to buy bedding.

The cattle part of the operation is still grazing pastures, though the amount of feed there is reduced by this last rotation.  We keep them moving, feeding some hay in the pastures and then expecting them to root through the snow to find the available grass.  They look good.  The hogs too are happy and healthy. And efforts are being made to expand the chicken population here since the eggs from chickens that are allowed to roam are popular and sell well.  These are things to be very happy about since the livestock are the core of our farm. 

contact

 We have lost contact with the soil and that is the fundamental reason for our deteriorating world.  We started a few centuries ago with digging sticks.  Simple tools, the hoe and shovel and spade were devised from this start.

At some point we figured out how to use animal power.  The first "plow" behind an ox was essentially a large digging stick. Then iron was formed into plowshares and other cultivating tools which were drawn behind teams of animals, the farmer walking behind or in front of the creatures.  Gradually seeders and cultivators and hay mowers were devised, all drawn behind teams of animals and former human tasks began to be mechanized.  

Eventually someone put seats on many of these machines and farmers no longer walked as much.  The bond between soil and the human foot was stretched.  

Early tractors began to replace the animal teams.  Instead of feeling the soil underfoot the farmer felt mechanical vibrations up his spine as he rode the machine.  Additionally the noise of the machines separated him from hearing the wild things that had always surrounded him.  And the machines were now fed from the petroleum industry and not the farm.

From here for a while the machines changed by getting bigger and more powerful.  And now we have guidance systems.  Tillage marks in the fields are now in straighter lines than any human eye and hand on the steering wheel can accomplish.  

The next step, already underway, is to take the farmer out of the picture entirely, to make him obsolete.

And there are several principles here that we should study.  One is that the move in agriculture toward mechanization is in essence a move from the female toward the male. Women operated the digging sticks.  Few women have yet figured out how to make themselves obsolete.

Another is that the art has gone out of farming while the science of plants and animals has concentrated in the laboratories, which devise solutions that are administered through the corporate structure that rules us.  

Third crop

     Sustainable and biodynamic farming discussions have centered for years upon the idea of improving farm practice by addition of a "third crop"  in view of the deleterious effect of a full season monoculture on soil health and biological diversity.  Small grains such as oats, barley and wheat have filled this role in the past, but now there is not a good enough price for the kind of wheat we can grow in the northern corn belt and the other two grains are pretty closely associated with livestock, a disappearing feature of midwestern farming.

    So the demand for a third crop (which generally means another full season crop with cash value in the market that I can plant and harvest with existing equipment) continues.  It is wrong headed.  The need is not for another full season crop.  It is rather for a different approach to farming entirely.  The need is to integrate some version of grass and grazing animals into the cropping rotation.  To do that we need the animals, or at the least, access to the animals.  And to accomplish that we will need to maintain, nurture and respect the ability to handle animals, and especially in a more extensive production system.  It could be thought of as a knack for getting animals to do what we want rather than making them do what we want.  But in fact this ability is nearly gone from us farming people.  

    Great change is happening in the meats industry.  Some of it is ominous as in the various attempts at meat replacement and the development of "meat in a vat" produced by microbes.  And it is impossible to morally justify the current situation where people are required to work during a pandemic with virtually no protections.  Especially egregious is the move to exempt the huge meats companies from wrongful death lawsuits.  This situation is indefensible morally.

    Additionally, we know that grazing animals can help cycle carbon back from the air into the soil and that the soil health encouraged by and built from this cycling is critical to stopping soil erosion, excess water runoff and soil degradation.  We know we need to vastly increase the proportion of perennial plants(as opposed to annuals) in our farming schemes, again to help stabilize the climate.  

    Our challenge is how to do all this in a way that is humane to people as well as animals and is properly respectful both of human and wild communities and careful of the health of the land with which we are entrusted.  It should go without saying that mainstream agriculture is headed in the wrong direction.

light

 The light is different now than it was in high summer.  The sun's angle is lower and shadows abound even at mid day.  But the light is fuller, somehow, rounder and more promising than in the full glare of July.  Harvest is on us now, with more to do and less daylight to do it in.  The sense of urgency grows.

The cattle graze pastures higher in both cellulose and carbohydrates now.  Each year the early grass, so lush and soft, hardens as the summer waxes and wanes, and then in fall, the surprise once again that the fall grass is better feed, the cattle gain faster and are more satisfied.  I spend some time each day watching them, envying a bit their effortless ability to harvest continuously throughout the year rather than stacking the whole job up to be done in October.  

We are happy and grateful this autumn for the excellent corn and soybean crops we have to harvest and for the abundant health of the animals.  Our joy is tempered by knowledge of the losses suffered by others and the genuinely hard life of so many.  We know our turn will come.

For a farmer, the fear of the next hard time is always as real as the memory of the last one.  But we are, none of us, promised anything beyond the moment.  Wisdom teaches us to live in and with that knowledge.  And so we can often find joy in what is immediately at hand.