early snow

 Seven inches of snow in mid October is unusual.  So is the week long cold spell that keeps it with us.  Most farms here are just started with corn harvest, while most of the sugar beet and soybean harvest is done.  And our farm, as a small organic operation finds it difficult to own a combine and so must wait until those that own the machines are done with their own harvest.  Consequently all our corn and soybeans are standing in snow at this point.  Then, of course all the conventional grain must be cleaned out of the combine and trucks to make sure we meet organic standards before we start.  

The corn we will be able to get sooner or later, the soybeans are a bit more iffy.  This is the new world of climate change.

Corn stalks or stover are important for us since we depend upon a great deal of bedding materials for our hog business which operates entirely on bedding.  Our carryover from last year is gone.  So it is a race now between improving weather allowing us to harvest the corn and bale up the stalks and the need to buy bedding.

The cattle part of the operation is still grazing pastures, though the amount of feed there is reduced by this last rotation.  We keep them moving, feeding some hay in the pastures and then expecting them to root through the snow to find the available grass.  They look good.  The hogs too are happy and healthy. And efforts are being made to expand the chicken population here since the eggs from chickens that are allowed to roam are popular and sell well.  These are things to be very happy about since the livestock are the core of our farm. 

contact

 We have lost contact with the soil and that is the fundamental reason for our deteriorating world.  We started a few centuries ago with digging sticks.  Simple tools, the hoe and shovel and spade were devised from this start.

At some point we figured out how to use animal power.  The first "plow" behind an ox was essentially a large digging stick. Then iron was formed into plowshares and other cultivating tools which were drawn behind teams of animals, the farmer walking behind or in front of the creatures.  Gradually seeders and cultivators and hay mowers were devised, all drawn behind teams of animals and former human tasks began to be mechanized.  

Eventually someone put seats on many of these machines and farmers no longer walked as much.  The bond between soil and the human foot was stretched.  

Early tractors began to replace the animal teams.  Instead of feeling the soil underfoot the farmer felt mechanical vibrations up his spine as he rode the machine.  Additionally the noise of the machines separated him from hearing the wild things that had always surrounded him.  And the machines were now fed from the petroleum industry and not the farm.

From here for a while the machines changed by getting bigger and more powerful.  And now we have guidance systems.  Tillage marks in the fields are now in straighter lines than any human eye and hand on the steering wheel can accomplish.  

The next step, already underway, is to take the farmer out of the picture entirely, to make him obsolete.

And there are several principles here that we should study.  One is that the move in agriculture toward mechanization is in essence a move from the female toward the male. Women operated the digging sticks.  Few women have yet figured out how to make themselves obsolete.

Another is that the art has gone out of farming while the science of plants and animals has concentrated in the laboratories, which devise solutions that are administered through the corporate structure that rules us.  

Third crop

     Sustainable and biodynamic farming discussions have centered for years upon the idea of improving farm practice by addition of a "third crop"  in view of the deleterious effect of a full season monoculture on soil health and biological diversity.  Small grains such as oats, barley and wheat have filled this role in the past, but now there is not a good enough price for the kind of wheat we can grow in the northern corn belt and the other two grains are pretty closely associated with livestock, a disappearing feature of midwestern farming.

    So the demand for a third crop (which generally means another full season crop with cash value in the market that I can plant and harvest with existing equipment) continues.  It is wrong headed.  The need is not for another full season crop.  It is rather for a different approach to farming entirely.  The need is to integrate some version of grass and grazing animals into the cropping rotation.  To do that we need the animals, or at the least, access to the animals.  And to accomplish that we will need to maintain, nurture and respect the ability to handle animals, and especially in a more extensive production system.  It could be thought of as a knack for getting animals to do what we want rather than making them do what we want.  But in fact this ability is nearly gone from us farming people.  

    Great change is happening in the meats industry.  Some of it is ominous as in the various attempts at meat replacement and the development of "meat in a vat" produced by microbes.  And it is impossible to morally justify the current situation where people are required to work during a pandemic with virtually no protections.  Especially egregious is the move to exempt the huge meats companies from wrongful death lawsuits.  This situation is indefensible morally.

    Additionally, we know that grazing animals can help cycle carbon back from the air into the soil and that the soil health encouraged by and built from this cycling is critical to stopping soil erosion, excess water runoff and soil degradation.  We know we need to vastly increase the proportion of perennial plants(as opposed to annuals) in our farming schemes, again to help stabilize the climate.  

    Our challenge is how to do all this in a way that is humane to people as well as animals and is properly respectful both of human and wild communities and careful of the health of the land with which we are entrusted.  It should go without saying that mainstream agriculture is headed in the wrong direction.

light

 The light is different now than it was in high summer.  The sun's angle is lower and shadows abound even at mid day.  But the light is fuller, somehow, rounder and more promising than in the full glare of July.  Harvest is on us now, with more to do and less daylight to do it in.  The sense of urgency grows.

The cattle graze pastures higher in both cellulose and carbohydrates now.  Each year the early grass, so lush and soft, hardens as the summer waxes and wanes, and then in fall, the surprise once again that the fall grass is better feed, the cattle gain faster and are more satisfied.  I spend some time each day watching them, envying a bit their effortless ability to harvest continuously throughout the year rather than stacking the whole job up to be done in October.  

We are happy and grateful this autumn for the excellent corn and soybean crops we have to harvest and for the abundant health of the animals.  Our joy is tempered by knowledge of the losses suffered by others and the genuinely hard life of so many.  We know our turn will come.

For a farmer, the fear of the next hard time is always as real as the memory of the last one.  But we are, none of us, promised anything beyond the moment.  Wisdom teaches us to live in and with that knowledge.  And so we can often find joy in what is immediately at hand. 

Democracy

Political democracy must rest upon economic democracy or it is soon reduced to mere forms, which is currently the case with us.  Elite money trumps whatever anyone besides the elite thinks.

This is most evident to any who have lived, as I have, through the destruction of a dispersed agriculture.  The landscape here, consisting of mostly 200 to 300 acre farms in my youth, is now collected into several six and seven thousand acre empires and the situation of the working people and rural communities becomes much more precarious now than it was in the regular former hard times on the farm.  One of these huge establishments has up a sign advertising for "harvest drivers".  It doesn't trouble itself as to how these drivers are to keep body and soul together for the other forty weeks of the year.  Nowhere in our politics or economy is there any sign of elites troubling themselves over the situation of working people.   

It was Malcolm X rather than Martin Luther King who brought this thinking out during the sixties.  It was his insistence on the need for a dispersed wealth to support the black reach for civil rights, plus his failure to guarantee "non-violence" that struck so many whites as dangerous and radical.  It is why Martin is lionized today as an American saint and Malcolm is a historical figure.  Wall Street thought Martin was "safe" where Malcolm was not.  This is, however, a misreading of Martin, as we will find out.

Political democracy cannot be sustained on anything but economic democracy.  If we wish decent treatment for black people, or if we wish to honor the voice of working people, thus reducing support for the Trumps of the world, we must do it by making it possible for people-all people-to build a bit of wealth thus achieving the stability of life, family and community so necessary to a decent life on earth.

care

Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, ponders what it might mean for this generation to “work the garden and serve it, to observe and thus preserve it.” This matter is critical for our survival on earth. Now we have the productionists in control. Quantity rules. The matter of land care/food production is drastically simplified. The agriculturalists are outside looking in.

It would seem we have more pressing matters. The coronavirus decimates our elderly and infirm, as well as our working population. The police too often carelessly use and even murder our black fellow citizens. Our attention is, as always scattered among a multitude of urgencies. We have not yet considered the possibility that this might be one big question.

Greed brought black Africans in chains to our shores because southern planters could not make enough money by actually hiring the poor whites they were surrounded by. Land hunger wrenched black people violently from their homes and enslaved them.

Of course land hunger must have land. The land was taken violently from the native population, which was corralled up and starved on a tiny portion of what they once were at home on.

Human populations push relentlessly into wild areas. Agriculture is often the point of the spear. Viruses then jump from wild populations across specie lines and infect us with one pandemic after another.

This was brought to a head by my sudden realization that the farming business I had found so pleasing-livestock on the land-depends upon people poorer than I taking large risks with their own health to work in slaughterhouses, while our government structure does nothing to protect them, rather choosing to protect their employers from lawsuits over poor labor practices.

What would be the endlessly ramifying results if we began to see ourselves as keepers of the garden rather than as entrepreneurs? Can we push greed down and bring care and a sense of belonging up? Do we have a choice?

raspberries

We have reached that point in every summer where the raspberries begin to bear fruit.  The crops are started, the cultivations done as well as can be, the cattle are in their second grazing rotation, the first crop of hay made and I am daily grazing through the raspberry patch picking through the hollyhock blooms to find the best and juiciest of the lot.  I happen to be the only one in the house that likes raspberries.  For one small reason and for a brief time, life is good!