Narrative continued

Got a night's sleep last night.  Leisurely breakfast and then fed the calves.  I needed to chase up a half dozen reluctant ones but I don't think it is sickness.  I am thinking they just didn't want to give up the warm bedding they were lying on. 

High of zero today I guess.  Wind is down some.  Checked the waterers and both the cattle drinkers are all right.  Saw one hog drinker skimmed over with ice.  Have to recheck later.

Market herd found its way back to the feeding site on the pasture so I won't have to use a tractor to break trail for them. 

Picked eggs and watered chickens. 

Skyped with Carye and Kris for an hour. 

After the noon meal, started and warmed up the tractor, then switched to the material bucket and went to work on the drive way.  Took about three hours to break through and then clean up some of the leftovers.  Banks are four to five feet high on both sides of driveway now.  The least breeze will drift it shut again.  We will get a lot of use out of the snow pushing equipment around here between now and spring.  We were nearly three days not getting down the driveway.  Fortunately we are always well stocked with food and the heat stayed on!

It was a mistake to line the solar panels up along the south of the driveway and while we lucked out the first two years, this year we pay for it.  After this we will need a line of bales or something about 25 feet into the pasture to catch some of the snow before it gets to the panels.  Live and learn (and live with it)

We have not started on the yard and livestock areas other than to break through a trial to walk on.  But the garbage truck is due to show up, we might have customers and hogs need to be loaded and hauled Wednesday.  Tomorrow we will  hit it with tractor and skidloader both.  Might get it acceptable in a day.  Otherwise we will finish on Tuesday.

Thursday morning we leave for the Grassworks conference.  Really looking forward to it!

Need to feed the cows yet before dark.  Below zero again tonight and only zero again tomorrow. 

Cattle huddled around hay bale.  The upper part of our driveway covered in large snowdrifts. 

Narrative

Thursday
Storm coming.  Wind from Southeast, then switching to North West.   A foot or more snow.  Hauled five straw bales to a line along extreme SE corner of the calves' pen to provide a windbreak.

Truck came home from the Twin Cities run.  Made it ahead of weather late in the evening.

Friday
Wind is blowing at six in the morning.  Snow starts mid morning.  Wind picks up.  Maybe 30mph  Temperature rising toward mid twenties.  By after noon the driveway is drifted across.  Andy says he is going to leave the frozen drinker in the one sow pen, as it is covered by snow.  Drifts across the yard at about one foot.  Driveway deeper than that.  Tore calves' hay bale apart to give them all access to the last of it and perhaps a little bedding dry enough for them to lay on.  Spread a bale of hay for the cows.  Checked hens for eggs to keep them from freezing.  Heard that the wind was to switch to North West at about midnight and then stay down for a bit before picking up. 

Market cattle came up from their hay to shelter from the wind behind the sow's hoop.

Plugged tractor in and turned the switch on timer to send current through all day and night.  Checked the gas level for heat in the hog houses.  Don't know how we would get a supply truck on the yard if we needed to.  Thankfully, we have plenty.

Made it until nine before the warm house air put me to sleep.

Saturday
Up at four.  My ears tell me I am too late.  The wind is already up.  Grabbed some coffee and went to start the tractor.  Used it to haul a fresh bale to the calves.  Was able to dodge the drifts alright, but switched to the snow bucket and spent until five thirty pounding a hole in the drift west of the hoops so the cattle could get to the lane south of the yard out of the wind and be out of the way as I got bedding and a second bale to the calves.  Was able to get them to move after I trained the tractor lights on the hole through the snow where they would have to go.  Wind began to howl.  In for breakfast.

Hauled a hay bale to the market animals in the lane and pushed it to unroll it.  They look a lot like yaks standing on the north pole out there.  Hauled a bale of stalks to the cows for feed and bedding and needed to tear it apart mostly by hand.  It was made wet-we had little choice about that-and pretty much frozen in a lump.  In to warm up.

Back out.  Andy has found another frozen drinker in one of the finishing hoops and I get a pail of hot water to get it thawed before noon.  I am beginning to learn to minimize house time because it puts me immediately to sleep.

Drifts on the driveway are now nearly four feet deep.  I estimate it will take about five hours steady work with the tractor to clear it and then it won't stay clear.  Spring will be necessary there.  Made a mental note to get a snow fence/row of bales south of the solar panels to keep this from happening again.  Wind notches up speed once again.  40-50 mph?  It is starting to drive the snow through the grove. 

Now we go to the sow hoops as it is feeding day.  We will see what extra attention is needed there and are certain it will use up the afternoon.  The buried drinker will need to be dug out and thawed.  I will get back to this writing in a day or two.

in the mirror

Farmer suicide is on an uptrend. Some would call it a spike. I would not because I fear it is not done going up. There are reasons for this. An erratic and foolish President who gets a kick out of playing with agriculture markets would be one, also a chicken magnate as Secretary of Agriculture who thinks there really is no room for any on the farms who are not huge businesses.

Climate change tends to make knee jerk reactions out of carefully laid cropping plans. Government responses to both climate and political meddling are hugely expensive and pretty much ineffective.

But perhaps the most central reason is who we are as farmers and how we think. We tend to hold ourselves responsible for everything. Every bad thing that happens on our farms is our responsibility, we think. We are to blame. And the truth is that this delusion has spread throughout the economy. Our tendancy to blame ourselves is the very best and sweetest success of those who already have most of the money and use it to control the economy, the technology and the government.

Farmers do have some control. But that fact is hedged about with truly insurmountable odds on all sides. We can decide to plant corn, but will not succeed if we must wait til a week into June to get to the field. We can decide to rely on our understanding of livestock animals to earn our living but cannot succeed if the market fences us out because of small size, for instance, or difficult milk pick up, or if Silicon Valley decides to create and peddle an end run around the very idea of animal based protein. We can study and pay attention to soil health, but will have little impact if our primary attention must be to the job that provides us money the farm doesn’t and health care for our family.

Anger is a very appropriate emotion in our circumstance. Properly harnessed by a shrewd perception as to where blame actually lies for our predicament it can be hugely useful. But never if it is largely focused upon the person we see in the mirror.

Leo Tolstoy knew this and wrote about it more than a hundred years ago: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible. . .except by getting off his back.”

The rich are every bit as greedy as they were a century ago, plus today they are cheeky enough to put it out that they, and only they, have the solutions to our problems.

friends and adversaries

One of the things we learned when we began selling our meats directly to customers and stores is that it is not possible to get them on the shelf everywhere.  Consequently we began to be reluctant to patronize restaurants, for example, where we couldn't get our products into their kitchens.  If we stick strictly to this, we eliminate about ninety percent of restaurants.  All of the major chains, of course.  And in fact, we have gone a considerable distance in this direction without being too doctrinaire about it.  It means we spend a good deal more money when we do eat out, and do not eat out very often. 

This strikes me as close to the argument as to how citizenship must extend well beyond elections.  First key is to spend less.  This makes us less beholden to the mass economy.  We do not have to work to replace a dollar we have not spent.  Second, then, is to spend with friends.  This means we must learn the difference between friends and adversaries and support our friends.  We can learn a lot about how we should act by watching how these major companies behave.  If one of them is causing mayhem for people, there is no reason to support that with our dollars.

We once sat at a table with friends in our business, a family that produced and bottled milk for sale in the city.  We had organized our farm organization's meal for the evening, using local products as much as possible and another fellow at the table remarked as to how he could buy milk at the local gas station/convenience store for much less than the price our friends were selling it.  Our friend simply responded "It's not the same product"

It is not.  Our friend's milk was made on grass, with no drugs, and with careful attention to the cow genetics that can cause milk intolerance issues for certain people.  The milk the other fellow was buying was sold in a gas station convenience store owned by the Koch brothers, they who had caused political upheaval in Wisconsin.   The milk source was unknown. 

Doing business with our friends when possible is one of those things we will have to get right.  It really is simply citizenship.  We make the kind of world we want to live in. 

fox and chickens

Sonny Perdue, Secretary of Agriculture and chicken magnate, has allowed the pork slaughter industry to begin taking over pork inspections from the federal inspection services.  This is one more indication that our government and civil society have gone off the rails.  This is not a new idea; it has been talked about for several decades now and pilot programs have been run.  The impetus here with industry is to speed up the slaughter.

Since our pork sales business started in 2000, we have depended upon the quality of the product and the predisposition of some people to support farms like ours and related businesses.  We still do.  But it has become necessary to state certain facts that we never formerly thought we had to, in view of the crippled state of our government.  To wit:

1) Animal welfare is a central concern for us, an ongoing and important effort.  Animal welfare on the farm is central.  Transportation of the animals and slaughter are other important aspects.  We make a constant effort in all these facets of pork production and supply.  Our animals are slaughtered under state inspection, and the inspector has no qualms about stopping slaughter or throwing out substandard product.  Sonny Perdue has no intention of cancelling this inspection and we would not agree if he did.

2) We use processing businesses that pay the kind of wage that employees can live on and that provide safe and clean working conditions.

3) And we expect the kind of return in our business that allows us to be adequately compensated for our work on the farm and in the business.

These three statements could serve as a guideline for a conscientous buyer of pork in making purchases.  None of these are honored by the mainstream meat industry, from farm through retail.


 

And again

Six tenths an inch last night.  Put together with the totals for the last eight or nine days, that would be six inches.  And we are not the hardest hit.  Today's broadcast news weather cutie (male this time) expects Houston to hit eighteen inches. 
Amazing how these television millionaires can prattle on about astonishing weather events without ever dropping the word "climate" into the monologue.  Their billionaire corporate overlords don't want climate talked about.  It makes them uncomfortable.  Ostriches.
Here, with the rains of the last week in mid September, we are headed for another fall of mud, the farm full of places the tractors can't go, and increasingly, even the cattle. Third straight year now and as I said yesterday, in hindsight it is pretty clear that the trend since I started ridge til in the early nineties through to today is toward wetter.  That is why the difficulty with small grain seedings and the increasing impossibility of putting the cattle on the crop acres. 
Another healthy dose of rain headed our way on Friday night.