Christmas

It was my pleasure and privilege this morning after Christmas to step out into the unspoiled snow blanket covering the yard.  Only the overexcited dog skittering ahead marred the scene.  My feet soon found the ruts left there by tractor use in the overly warm December and I slowed down into old man gear, afraid of a broken leg or nose or worse.  It wasn't always like this.  I used to tell my wife that I made my living by bouncing up off the ground after falling.  She reminds me that this is beginning not to be an option, which I of course do not want to hear.

It is also true that back when I could bounce I did not properly appreciate all that the natural world constantly laid at my feet.  Then I would have been full of the need to get the snow bucket on the tractor, and push it all into piles, after which the livestock would mostly need bedding,  providing me with a long day's work.  This is all still true, but I have come to the time when I can put things in their proper order.  First awe and wonder and the awakening of the inner child.  Then work. 

Jim
 

ready for winter

Four inches of snow on the ground this December 1st and more on the way.  Time to finish buttoning up for winter.  Andy brought twelve big straw bales up and stacked them to close up the ends of the finishing hoops against the northwest wind.  Jacob and I moved the boars out to dirt and rebedded the sows.  We hope for a little mild weather yet so we can clean and rebed before putting the big gates on the west end.  Josh cleaned the outside drinker area near the old pole shed before it froze us out until spring.  Now to enjoy the new snow for what it is.  And it is beautiful indeed where it hangs in the lilac bushes reflecting LeeAnn's early Christmas lights.  There is something wonderful about clean white snow under a full moon in early winter. 

Jim

soil

I talked to a conventional farmer recently and he told me of spreading the residue from the Fibrominn electrical generating plant as a soil amendment.  His goal, beside the trace elements and a bit of phosphorus in the product, had to do with getting the cornstalks to rot, thus making the soybean year to follow easier.  This appears to be a matter of concern, though it is never an issue for us.  Our local co-op has started in the liquid 28% N business and this is the reason for it.  Fall application is thought to accelerate the decay of the corn stover.  We bale most of our corn residue for bedding and let the cow herd at the remainder.  Also, of course, we do not use the bt hybrids, or other forms of bioengineering in the corn seed we plant.

Lime from the sugar plant is also coming into favor.  The thinking is that it helps against compaction in the field ends where the end rows are planted over all the tractor end turns.  Again, we don't see an issue, probably because our rotation is nearly fifty percent hay(alfalfa-clover-grass)  This spring I walked the entire farm with a penetrometer and could not find serious compaction anywhere.  We formerly had a problem.  It is the changes that have brought about the improvements in our soil.   

Our farm is alkaline, with severe 'alkali' rims consisting of limey salty soil.  We have trouble with growing beans, or would have if we were interested in doing so.  It seems merely logical that this kind of farm needs fertility provided by acid livestock manures and not salty commercial fertilizer products.  It also needs the kind of farmer that does not think exclusively in terms of tractors. 

Rain

Today is the first day of several rainy ones if the weather reports are to be believed, and it is welcome indeed.  When we shut the pasture water system down for the season late last week, there was no water in any of the risers except at the leak.  This is unusual as the water table in the pasture is nearly always high, rarely more than three feet down. 

And while the earth is being replenished a certain rooster pheasant is acting pretty cocky about escaping the gun.  He struts back and forth across the path I walk with the dog out to check the cattle each day, ducking behind a clump of grass every time he thinks I am noticing him. 

We have much reason to feel gratitude.  We need also to feel empathy and sorrow for all those thousands who wander on earth, driven out from their homes with no clean water or decent food to eat.  We are certainly wealthy in every way that counts.

Jim

Ready

The last cornstalk bales came in yesterday and we are to the point of putting fence around the bale storage area we have in the fields and then letting the cows, calves and young stock out there for a final go at the crop residues and cover crop regrowth (mainly Italian ryegrass, rape/turnip and clover)  They will trail back to the yard for drinks so it is also time to shut down the pasture water system, always nice to get done before winter does it for us.  Last week we finished the new sow partition fence and all groups are on heated drinkers there, or will be when  we find the short in the system.

After the final gleaning is done, perhaps soon after Thanksgiving, we will sort the young stock and put them on the permanent pasture for a slow winter rotation while they feed on the sorghum sudan silage bales, maintaining, we hope, a good growth over the winter.  The cows will be maintained on ordinary hay on the crop fields.  We need more late fall and winter grazing crops to take us all the way to Christmas.  Hay is expensive to grow and bale.  But it is pleasing to see the growing cattle business fit in so well with the hogs and crops, especially since diversity in agriculture is so off trend.   

open

The long open fall makes it easy to get the farm work done but it is also seductive.  Who would not rather go for long walks under Cottonwood and Ash and Box Elder scuffing his feet through the piles of fallen leaves, listening to the south wind chuckling contentedly in the increasingly bare branches and then out onto the dormant pastures, mature grasses crunching underfoot while the breeze stirs the seedheads?  Geese fly over in the vain search this year for open water and a rooster pheasant explodes into flight from nearly under your feet, rusty scream trailing behind him like a piece of broken machinery.  You could stay here awhile!

Then the thoughts intrude.  There are pigs still on an unheated drinker.  Plus the unfound short in another drinker heater.  The sow shelters have not been closed up for winter.  All the windbreak stalk bales are not in place.  Hog weaning and then breeding is coming shortly.  The bull needs to go to the fall calving herd and the market animals need sorting from the cow herd here so that the cows can be made to scrape the crop fields for provisions.

Work is always there, but all humans, including farmers, need dreamtime.  A balance must be found.   

losing

I had hoped that one good result of Lyndon Johnson's losing the south for the Democrats for at least a generation, to put it in his own terms, would be that the stranglehold the south held over farm policy would let up.  The disappearance of the "Dixiecrats" and the lessening political influence of the huge rice and cotton farming empires (think plantations) they represented should have allowed enough room for the building of a farm policy that would benefit ordinary rural citizens more by bolstering rural communities and keeping farm ownership as spread across the population as feasible.  It hasn't happened.

Instead, the southernization of our American politics seems to have beaten electoral change to the punch and we now have northern "Democrats" such as my congressman, who see to it that most of the dollars flow to the hugest few farms by means of crop insurance payments and that even the smaller stream that comes directly from the government is restricted only by declared income.  One must have one million dollars in declared income before any restriction is placed upon receipt of government help.  It is difficult for me to imagine, given our Swiss cheese of a tax structure, anyone crafty enough to amass a huge farming empire being stupid enough to declare one million dollars in income to the IRS. 

There have always been alternatives.  A very simple one would have been to support the first few bushels or bales of whatever the dominant crop is and nothing after that.  That simple approach would have gotten the government out of the business of building huge crop empires, it would have kept the wealth somewhat spread out, and it would result in land priced reasonably enough that a young person who is not a member of a farming empire family could think about buying or renting enough land to give farming a try.  That is manifestly not what we did and we ought to ask ourselves and our political representatives why we did not.  That question is the beginning of a political education.