winter

Most of us make brave noises about how we like the warmer weather and are enjoying it.  But those of us who live close to the weather and close to the cycles of the earth have a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  There is a deep unease.  We have caused a problem we may not be able to solve, we fear.  What if the corn crop next year, for reasons we can't suss out right now, fails the way the pastures have failed the past two seasons?

 It is a strange start to winter.  We have had the occasional freezing temperature but for most of the fall and early winter we are above freezing most of the daylight hours.  Not especially unusual for November, but well out of the ordinary for January.  El Nino gets mentioned.  We are reminded every day by the internet and radio chatter that climate change is now upon us.  It is a worry.  

We depend so upon winter being winter.  We need the soil to freeze to help us erase compaction mistakes from the season and to improve soil drainage for next year.  We need it to clear and cleanse the air we breathe.  It seems now as if I have an ongoing head cold because allergies and sore throats as well as froggy voice come so often, seemingly each episode on top of the last.  Irises are reported up along some of our building foundations.

The best farming advice I can notice tells us to spread our risks, to prepare for a wet season as well as a dry one, to look for both hotter and colder temps than usual, to expect more disease in the livestock while we hope for less.  Diversity is our best hedge against an unknown and unknowable future. Planning to make a bonanza yield is out. Staving off disaster by hedging our bets is the thing. 

We should remember that this posture, spreading our bets and not going whole hog for anything, is what farming was formerly good at, before crop insurance and this whole attitude of living via the internet in some kind of eternal present. We need to be people for whom the next tough time is as real as the last one, for whom preparation is everything, who know to not bet the farm on anything but ourselves, that we have to trust people beginning with trusting ourselves.

And we need to reach out for our neighbor's hand to proceed into the future together.  We better hope that hand is still there.

   

generations

 It is a rare blessing indeed to be able to work across the generations.  Over twenty five years ago, our son and daughter-in-law and their three children joined us on the farm.  We saw the need of a marketing arm for our products to collect more of the income we were being denied in the conventional markets, so we started a meat sales company, which today markets our pork, beef and eggs.  Our farming children were intimately involved with this new venture, and in fact provided much of the drive for it.  

As that generation saw the opportunity in marketing, one of their children, my grandson, has demonstrated a real interest in helping the farm succeed on its own merits.  His brother and sister are deeply involved in agriculture too, one on the supply side and the other with quality control in meats processing for one of our processors.

This is important to me.  I see around me numerous examples of people my age whose only possibility of continuing connection with farming is in renting their land out, driving someone's truck at harvest, and watching the changes in agriculture, most of which do not benefit them.  I am grateful not to be one of that number.

This year, as I built the road mentioned earlier that I thought we needed, I could pretty easily keep up with what was going on with the combining, corn stalk baling and tillage.  The machines are familiar from my farming, so is the routine.  The startling part is my not being first hand involved with it.

We can aim our children where we think they ought to go.  But at a certain age, we need to let go, stand back and hope for the best.  Hard to do but so necessary.  

If I can pass on one piece of advice to the younger ones, it would be to take the past, what you remember, what has been told to you, what has been passed down as tradition, or "how we always did it" with a goodly grain of salt.  Things are changing fast.  Change is beginning to look like an avalanche.  If you are to survive, you will need to be light on your feet.

Remember that much of the change coming is the result of what farming in the past has done and what it has not done.  It is yours not to resent the change, but not to wholeheartedly sign on either.  Your own judgment is going to need to be your closest friend and advisor. What the crowd is doing is apt to be short sighted and sometimes just wrong.  

You will need to do better than we have done in terms of caring for land, people and community and to do so in the midst of turmoil that only the very oldest among us has any experience with.    

Good luck!  You do the most important-and least recognized-work in the world. 

road

I built a road. A short one, not more than five hundred feet long, but still.  I built it with our old smallish skidloader and the loader tractor and did so while the younger ones here were carrying on their work as usual, work like getting machines ready for harvest, scheduling pigs into the farrowing, doing the sales work, controlling the meats inventory and so on.  I pushed the topsoil to the side, got in twenty or so semi truck loads of fill gravel mixed with clay hauled out from various building projects in town and shaped it into a roadway as it came.  I am not looking forward to getting the bill for the hauling, with diesel at five dollars a gallon.  It took some time to shape the road with the undersized equipment.

The reason for the project is that our farmstead, our houses, barns and hog buildings are situated on a small rise surrounded by low ground.  It is this low ground where we needed the road.  Every spring and fall we have trouble getting heavy loads of our hog bedding pack manure through from the buildings out to the crop ground which needs it.  We are then stuck with going around the road to the fields a mile and more extra travel and with the added risk of upsetting the neighbors when on the way home from work they hit a small pile of what may have fallen off our manure equipment on our way to the fields.

The loads are heavy and so many because we use bedding on the hogs. They are more comfortable that way.  The manure is better, composting and becoming less toxic to the all important soil life than the liquid slurries that are the alternative.  The difference of just a few days extra to haul in spring before planting and in the fall before winter are critical.  We do not want to spread manure on top of snow, as the melt will give it a free ride into the streams and rivers. This road gives us relief from needing to spread the manure just in summer, when the crops cover most of the acres.

And the need for the road is an important marker for the growth of understanding with the group of people that are our customers.  Increasingly they understand that farming is complex, that it takes a lot of management and planning to carry it out successfully, safely and humanely, and are willing to pay a good price for the resulting product.  They know, as we do, that quality can come at a good reasonable price, but not a cut rate one.  We are grateful for that understanding.

Short

 When you are desperately short of moisture-here it is extending to three years-last night's offering of three quarters of an inch of rain is a real blessing.

Important work

 Surely, I thought when I awoke this morning, there is something important going on in the world today.  Seemingly surrounded by the sound of revving truck engines and related racket, I soon figured out that the dairy factory just north was cutting and stacking silage and that my farm was fortunate enough to be on the route between the field and the pile.

One thing that my seventy five years mostly spent here has taught me is that progress on the farm must always somehow entail hauling bigger amounts in bigger containers around in bigger circles.  It quite generally also involves an increase in noise.  "Sound and fury"

wonder

 Meaning to check the fence just before quitting time yesterday, I walked through the passage way to the north side of the grove.  When I stepped out from the last line of trees I suddenly found myself surrounded by butterflies.  I stood for a time enthralled, while butterflies circled my head and shoulders, occasionally perching on my sleeve for a bit.  

They were Monarchs, every one.  I think they are beginning to clump together for their long lifetime journey to Mexico.  One day very soon they will be gone.

I noticed dragonflies out over the hay field, in the middle distance, seemingly circling the millions of butterflies.  Dragonflies are predators, apex predators.  But somehow, I doubt they were threatening the butterflies, which seemed pretty much to ignore them.  I suppose the butterflies to be more threatened by birds.

That scene all along the northern edge of our grove, which I planted years ago, and which is a full quarter mile in length lifted my heart.  When I planted those trees, my head was full of profit margins and straight corn rows.  I thought I was planting a windbreak for us and the livestock.  

But today I am trying to grow aware as I grow old and I see other uses for trees, butterflies, hay fields and dragonflies.  One can rejoice in being alive at seventy five!

season change

The first hint of fall here on the prairie came in early August when the heat let up for a bit and the nights got cooler.  I could just about feel the ending of fast growth and the turn toward maturity in the crops and also, of course, the weeds.

Our pastures went dormant in July this year, due again to the heat and lack of moisture.  Now, with the beginning of what we can hope are the fall rains-we have gotten three plus inches in the last two weeks here-hope is rising that we will have good grazing into the fall.

The temperatures are coming back up again which will help the corn mature.  But the lengthening nighttime hours that August brings should moderate this hottest of all summers. 

I am reminded of conversations I had with a grazier some years ago who was beginning to be discouraged by the way in which his cool season grasses too often hardened off in summer while his neighbor's corn maintained its lush green color through the heat. We can learn from this perhaps.  In a sense this is the difference between our cool season pasture grasses and the warm season annual corn.

We tell ourselves European stories.  And it is Americans who bred up corn, while it is Europeans that provided our pasture grasses, such as brome, orchardgrass, fescue and so forth.  The Americans in question are, of course, natives and that is why that particular agronomic history has never been developed.  We have always had extreme difficulty admitting that the native population knew anything, or could do anything useful.  If we will pay attention to American stories, we will find that the natives bred up corn centuries ago, particularly in Central and some of South America as well as the southwestern corner of the USA.  The European pasture grasses are out of context, while corn is in its ancestral home.

Grasses are warm season, such as corn, sudan grass, sorghum, big and little Bluestem and Indian grass, or they are cool season, such as orchard and brome, meaning they grow best in the cooler parts of the growing season. We have a continental climate here in the upper Midwest with extremes of heat in summer and cold in winter and that is why the pasture grasses harden off and become dormant in summer while the warm season grasses such as corn, are just hitting their stride.