Wind

   Winds are up today from yesterday.  Visibility is down.  Cattle are yarding up in places where there is the best protection. The main obstacle with getting them from today through Saturday when the temps are supposed to break will be to keep them eating.  They won't go looking in this weather so it is getting the hay to them.  Digestion is critical for cattle in the cold for the body heat it creates, as well as the nutrition, of course.

The hogs should be alright in their beds, but they get reluctant to get up and get to the feeder in the cold.  The other major question is how many of the drinkers will freeze.  The question over all this is:  "Can the power Co-op keep the lines up and the electricity coming to the farm? 

cold

 Winds are coming up.  Temps are down.  The cloth masks LeeAnn made and distributed for Covid the first year because our rag tag health system couldn't provide them are now coming in handy to keep my old nose from freezing further in than it already has. 

First round today shows field diesel gelled in the barrel.  We didn't get winter fuel in there in time, or the supplier didn't get the soya diesel pulled out in time in the fall. Ditto with the one tractor that has two tanks where the soya tends to sit in the bottom tank bedeviling us all winter.  Skidloader lives in the barn, so that will be alright.

Cattle at their windbreaks are doing fine.  We feed by rolling out on the snow in winter.  May have to use the skidloader today for that.

Even the just weaned calves are doing all right.  Everything is burning through a lot of hay though.

Pigs are pretty comfortable in their deep straw beds even if the hoop sheds are fairly open.  So now to wait it out.  

We just have to avoid doing stupid stuff until Saturday when it begins to back off.  And hope the wind and snow doesn't take the power lines down.

first snow

 The first real snow of the season just happened last week.  Heavy snow on top of soil that is wet in places is becoming common each winter.  The difficulty is that in addition to the fact that major snow events here on the prairie seem not to have much of an endpoint in terms of further snow and blowing and drifting, when snow must be cleared from a earthen surface often as much gravel is cleared as snow especially at first.  This is especially noticeable when the clearing is done by pushing and stacking as we do, but it is also a problem for snow blower operation.  I have replaced more than a few shear pins and once the entire gearbox drive in snow blowing equipment due to this.

European farmers have responded to muddy conditions by getting their working areas much more compact and paving them.  Looks like a good idea.  Won't be cheap.  

On the plus side the 30 acres of Kernza I helped Andy to plant last summer is now covered with a protective blanket of pretty dense snow, ensuring survival.  Hope the wind stays down a little bit so it lasts for awhile.

End of Season

 There is a flurry of work to be done beginning each fall with the end of field work, either because it is done or because the ground is too frozen to work with.  This will go on until it becomes too cold to work effectively outside.  At least this is true of livestock farms.  For us this year the main focus is on the hog facilities.  Hogs are hard on buildings.  Constant repair is the order of the day to restore what the hogs have worn out and also what damage the feeding and cleaning equipment has done.

Top of the list this year was to replace an underground electric wire that was shorting to ground, making it necessary to turn the circuit off and giving us a constant battle in February and March of last year to keep water available to two of our finishing hoop sheds.  We were able to tie new wire to the damaged underground at the electric box outside the hoop and pull it through.

The hoop ends also need rebuilding, because the posts that support the big open doorway there have rotted off.  We like the hoops for the way in which they offer some protection for the animals and their bedding while not cutting off so much of the air, breeze and sun from the outside.  These posts are part of that structure.  It is difficult to buy a good 5 inch by 6 inch post from the lumberyard anymore because too much of it is cut from dead fall trees.  They rot pretty fast.  We will replace these with 2" by 6" planks cut from dismantled railway bridges by a sawmill in Iowa.  These we will laminate into replacement posts.  They are well worth the price which is half of lumberyard new and well worth the trip to Iowa to get them.

And there are the tractors to winterize and the building heat to see to.  The hope this year, like every year, is to get the important things done in time for the celebrations we so much need every year.     

Winter Bedding for Pigs

 One of the projects to get ready for winter.  ---On this gray November day grandson Andrew and grandpa Jim are raking, baling and collecting cornstalk bales for the pigs' winter bedding. 

nutrients

     Numbers can be useful. Christine Jones, soil scientist, provides these about the recent reductions in nutritional quality of foods.  She compares levels from 1940 with those found in 1991.  27 vegetables show these declines:

copper declined by 76% over that time.

calcium is down 46%

Iron is down 27%

Magnesium down 24%

Potassium is down 16%

In the meats, similar levels are found:

Copper down 24%

Calcium is down 41%

Iron is down 54%

Magnesium is down 10%

Potassium down 16%

Phosphorus down 28%

These are figures from Australia.  Figures here may differ somewhat.  I think the principle concern remains.  Jones does not believe this is primarily a factor of depletion by overuse, however.  She pins the problem on lack of soil life, which is a direct result of our farming practices.  Soil life working with root systems are critical for nutrient uptake. 

This is one more problem we can do something about if we pay attention.

Management

 Any farmer who copes with a northern climate with its short growing season faces a choice.  Get more for the crops that can be grown.  Get the government to pay you what the markets won't provide for these crops.  Or, try to get more out of the season.  I am not opposed to any of these choices, but the last one of them often seems to be the alternative most available.  

For our farm which feeds hay to the cattle on pasture in the non growing season, an opportunity presents itself.  Or perhaps it is just making lemonade out of a lemon, as I heard a farm boy from the plains of Texas tell when he described the mixing of cattle and sheep on the same pasture not as "combination grazing" but rather, "just what we had to do to make a living".  Because where we feed the hay is regularly tromped into oblivion, shortening the grazing there to just a cleanup of whatever grows late in the season, this year we finally woke up enough to get some seed out there instead of just taking what the farm and climate offered.

So we seeded oats and an improved variety of rape in early September.  Oats will grow anywhere at any time and is generally pretty palatable and rape is thought to have a two month growth window before being ready to graze.  Additionally, this variety of rape is reputed to withstand temps down to ten degrees before quitting for the season.  This does not make up for seeding it about a month late, but we can observe, see what we get and adjust accordingly for next year.

Questions remain.  Will the rape/ oats provide a satisfactory ration for the cattle or will it need to be supplemented?  How to follow it up and get back to perennial pasture?  Will the rape succeed on our low and poorly drained pastures?  I formerly used rape in producing hogs, and it worked very well, but that planting was on higher and sloping ground.    

It would be helpful in terms of establishing a perennial pasture next spring if the cattle could take the crop pretty much down to the surface without pugging the soil, but that depends entirely on the fall season.  If they did leave it relatively smooth, we might have a shot at no tilling the new pasture into the area fairly early in the season.  Minimizing machine use is always a goal here at Pastures A Plenty.  I did use the disc and then the drag to prepare for seeding.  I am not sure that seeding it early would have changed the need for that.  

Perennials are better for the land than annuals.  That being true, we have wanted not to interfere with the pastures at all once they are seeded down.  So this attempt is on the order of an experiment.  If we are to evolve into a better farming, we must make it up as we go along.