Maintenance

 While the crops farmers surrounding us are working long hours for a few days to get harvest done our work with crops and livestock is pretty much unremitting.  October is the time when the demands of harvest add to the necessity of getting winter feed lined up, buildings and livestock equipment repaired and things generally buttoned up so that we can get our work done this winter.

What this shows is a general human tendency that when there is more work than time to do it, routine maintenance gets left.  We prove to ourselves every year that someone to fix, repair and build is an important asset on this farm, because every October we see too much of the planned repair and renovation undone. This will make our winter tasks harder and less satisfying to do.

Farm income must cover the support of the farm's staff.  

natural wisdom

"I turned them ahead as usual toward the end of the day", said the farmer/field day host.  "They walked ahead, took a mouthful of the new grass and turned around to beller their complaints at me."

Then he told us that when he checked them the next morning they were all peacefully and happily grazing.  He went on to say he thought that the violent weather including hail and wind predicted for the night before had caused the plants to draw the sugars and liquid carbon, the good stuff, down into the roots where it would be protected, and that the sugars and nutrients had arisen to the foliage in the morning.

What are we to do about this kind of information, we who consider ourselves rational?  Do plants know to protect themselves?  Or more accurately, do they protect the nutrition for the animals that graze them?  Rationality has coached us to think of plants and animals as similar to, but maybe a small step better than machines.  Does this really describe the world?

I have seen cows with their noses pointed straight into the air so that another cow might groom their throats with that rough tongue in long strokes, bottom to top.  And horses standing in pairs, scratching each other's rumps with their teeth.  This doesn't bear much evidence of the old "nature red in tooth and claw" individualist thinking.

Just before the Covid locked us up, I was listening to a soil scientist presenting his findings about a long studied apple orchard planted on a south facing slope.  The bottom of the slope was a wet area and the top somewhat more droughty.  The scientist explained how he had devised a series of experiments and observations to prove or disprove his casual observation that the trees in the orchard were providing for each other through general association with the web of soil life where they stood and with which they were intimately involved.  He thought he saw strong indication that the trees on the bottom of the slope were sharing the water where they stood with their mates on the drier upslope through the web of life in the soil. 

 Again, do we credit this?  This fellow was not some crazy hermit, but a University trained scientist. For myself, I plan to keep these things in mind as I explore.  And while I am little qualified to pass judgement on the reality of this, I do find myself wondering about a situation in which an apple tree may send water uphill to help a thirsty compatriot but a modern nation such as ours cannot pass a law that provides health care for all and some basic help for families.  What really can we and should we learn from the plants and animals we so casually manipulate?

fear

     I have been grazing several dozen cow/calf pairs at some distance from the home farm this year.  I spent last year taking up miles of old rusted barbed wire and the steel posts it was hanging on so that a good perimeter fence could be built.  I began to notice hammering in the distance occasionally which reminded me of my youth on this farm.  But I soon worked out that what I was hearing now was shooting at the nearby gun range.

    What I hear now when I am with the cows is gunfire.  Someone thinks it worthwhile to spend money on the gun(s) and ammo and then endless hours shooting away at a target placed in front of a sand hill.  Why? Fear is the simplest and I think most accurate explanation.

    In contrast the hammering I heard in my youth a half century ago really was hammering.  It was also industry.  Someone was fixing buildings or fence or building new.  

    It is important, I think, to point out that "industry" in description of those sounds at that time bears little resemblance to what we have learned to think of as "industry" today.  Those people were not industrious little worker bees busy doing something or other to create the profit margin for some corporation.  Instead those were people, usually families, creating the means and the likelihood of their own survival, and they hoped, prosperity at their own homes and farms.

    That official and academic agriculture decided soon after WWII that those lives were worthless, that money could devise ways to do it better and cheaper and that those people were better used and more useful if driven off their property and on to an assembly line is one of the true tragedies of our history.  It takes its place with the theft of land from the natives and the enslavement of Africans as major moves to take possession of the earth and its wealth by the very few.  And these things created the dangerous and despairing and hopeless environment in which we survive today.

    We are a long time gone in the wrong direction.

  

heat

 We are faced with another wave of heat.  Seven day forecast shows no relief.  The fact we are in an increasing drought situation means that the crops will suffer severe damage.  Right now the concern is with the cattle-how to get them safely through the heat and what to feed the rest of the summer if the grass continues not to grow.

We have been rationing pastures every move-each day-for a month or more now.  Later today, I will construct a temporary walk back lane so we can move them under trees on the main yard each afternoon and drive them back out to graze in the evenings and overnight.  We do have a decent second hay cutting, thanks to several timely inches of rain over the last month or so.  That will be needed to get through the winter.  Soon we will have to make some decisions about culling down to get through whatever time we will cope with this.  It is hard since our herd is only as big as it needs to be to service our beef customers, so it will impact that as well.

Thankfully the cow calf/pairs are grazing the new pastures twenty five miles away, a place well situated with trees and very much understocked this first season.  They should come through alright. 

drought

 It is impossible any longer to ignore the fact that our American west is drying and burning up.  The drought has reached our farm in western Minnesota, where it is said we are several inches short on rainfall.  This is an underestimate, I am sure, that fails to take into consideration the extreme heat and low humidity this spring and summer that have succeeded in sucking out what little moisture exists in the soil.  

The crops do not grow.  The weeds do, of course.  It is difficult to impossible to operate a diversified organic row crop farm this year.  We teeter on the edge of disaster.

Anti trust

 Interesting isn't it, how for most of a century anti trust law goes unenforced, basically tearing apart diversified agriculture in the farm country and dispossessing God only knows how many farm families until there are only four huge conglomerates, mostly not American, supplying all our meats and no diversified farms left, but the Supreme Court and the entire regulatory presence of the government can finally rouse themselves to action when it is a college kid wanting to play a kid's game who thinks he ought to get more than room, board and tuition free for doing so.

Hard snow

I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land.  And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets to hit the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and have gone on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot prairie grass, the sound our grandfathers heard in this place.

The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man, or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry.  They cannot be theorized, or imposed from above, or bought and paid for.