blow off

Visibility is reduced to about a half mile on this 22nd day of December.  The winds have picked up and made short order of blowing the snow from the neighbors' moldboard plowed cornstalks.  Other than our own place, we live in a black world again.  Our 32 acres of plowing has not blown off.  I think this may be for two reasons;  first that it is discing and then chisel plowing shallow with sweeps rather than the moldboard plow.  It is a hayfield we want to bring back for row crops; this is the only place in our rotation where we do fall tillage, about ten percent of our acres.  So that then is the other reason, the size of the field is small enough to prevent the wind from getting a very good go at it.  Maybe there is a third reason, the fact that the exposed soil is laced with grass and alfalfa and clover roots, all of which are perennial, unlike corn, and none of which were dead when the tillage was done. 

We need to rotate corn in and out of our rotation for the hog business.  There seems no other way than tillage to kill the established hay in an organic system.  I don't like tillage.  I don't think it does the soil any good.  Further, undisturbed perennial sod sequesters carbon, which we desperately need to do, thanks to everybody's irresponsible over use of petroleum.  You might notice that this service, provided free to the rest of us by any responsible grazing agriculture never gets talked about when agriculture's environmental sins are being listed.   

geese

Several large skeins of geese over head this very cold week, including one very complicated one flying high that featured about four or five smaller V formations organized into one ragged gigantic one.  All the geese are headed southeast, a pretty good indication they are migrating, even at this late date.  They remind me of my farming life.  I very rarely get done with "getting ready for winter" much before New Year's.  As my neighbor used to say, back when crop farming was done by spending hours at it rather than by overwhelming it with high priced machinery:  "If you are done much before Thanksgiving, you don't have enough to do."

Sows

The sows are more comfortable in this first cold blast of winter than they were last year.  It looks to have been a good idea to move the drinkers outside of the hoops, thus subtracting that much of the reason for wet bedding.  We also stacked corn stalk bales just north and west of the hoops, so that they rarely get the full force of the wind.  We are working to improve our windbreak to the west, but growing trees takes time. 

Of course having the water outside of the bedded area means we must figure out a way for the animals to come and go, always the problem with this kind of a set up in the north.  But we must have outside access for them anyhow, because we plan to feed large wet (silage) bales free choice and this must be done outside rather than in the bedding, which is how we fed the small bales. 

ideas

We have a too small idea of God and a too large idea of money.

black

Few realize anymore that Black Friday was formerly the name for the Christian day of suffering and sorrow now called "Good" Friday.  It now means that certain "people" (corporations) will make it into the "black" in their accounts on this shopping day.  Several dozen people who pretty much never make it into the black by cleaning and otherwise staffing the stores owned by those corporations sat down in the middle of Snelling and University yesterday to call attention to their troubles at the risk of being hit by those in a hurry to get there.  I wonder about us.

What if we had used the political breathing room provided by the defeat of the marriage restriction and voter restriction amendments several years ago to not only balance the state's budget going forward, but also to push the state's minimum wage up to twelve or even fifteen dollars, thus guaranteeing those who work enough wages to keep body and soul together.  Where would big retail have fled to?  Might making common cause with these folks sitting on University and Snelling have helped us all by reducing the state's quotient of misery thus improving the quality of life for all?  And would not higher wages throughout the lower economic levels have helped keep the state out of future budget difficulties due to decreased demand for social helping programs?  Instead we have continued in our well worn rut of responding to whatever interest group has been hurt last, or has been able to make the most fuss.  Why?  Is it because the one taboo subject we have left is the matter of economic class?

Meanwhile, the pressing matters of elementary human dignity at work, the impoverishment of most of the earth's people in America as elsewhere, a shrinking natural resource base, a deteriorating natural environment, rising levels of violence and violent rhetoric and growing corporate control of our lives are left to fester.  What is wrong with us?

farm haiku

The black cat sits as sentinel over two frozen hog carcasses, stacked one on the other.  The rays from the winter sun begin to warm both cat and cat food. 

harvesting the leftovers

One of the many advantages, both economic and environmental, of our kind of diversified farm is that we can let the cattle forage in the cornstalks after corn harvest, and then when they have gotten their fill after several weeks, we can bale and bring the leftovers to the farm to be used as hog bedding in the feeding hoops and for the sows all winter.  And then the stalks help with getting the manure back out to the land in the spring.  This way of bringing fertility to the cropping acres not only returns the phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium in the hog's manure, all of which are valuable nutrients, but it is the next best thing to a grazing system in that there are microbes cycling through the animal digestive system that appear to be quite necessary for the health of the land.  So there is a real sense in which we harvest our corn crop three times. 

Jim