Moving soil

 Sorry about the interference from the idling pickup.  We are trying to show the blowing soil in the background-15-20 mph wind today with gusts to 30.  Pretty moderate for a late winter prairie wind.  I scrape up wet soil from the top of the snowbank.  The soil is about a half inch deep and I don't have to scrape far to get as much as I want in the hand.  Also note the bank of soil covered snow piled up on the fence.  It is four strand high tensile and in places the weight has pulled the bottom two wires down.

The fields in the background are full season crop of sugar on one side, and dry bean production on the other.  This is what "clean tillage" does.  I can also say with some certainty that if all the soil around was held in place by living roots as it was when we whites showed up here, there not only would be no soil on the fence, but much less snow as well.  The snow would be held where it landed, benefiting that soil and the life it sponsors.

Notice that the field I am walking in is a hay field.  No more than twenty percent of the hay plants, grasses and legumes, that I know to be there are showing through the drifted soil.  This continues in places more than a hundred feet into the hay field.

Nation

 The late Allen Nation wrote approximately this thought in his Stockman Grass Farmer paper some years ago:  

"It is in the nature of grass to stay in one place.  And it is in the nature of cows to move around.  But we have fastened the cow into confinement and are spending much time and money making the grass move to the cow".

When all costs are accounted for-economic, human, damage to the earth-and we finally learn to ask about net progress, the huge confinement dairy factories that surround me will have to answer to Nation's simple truth.

Processing

Critical to our goal of producing food for people rather than commodities for industry is the presence of a healthy small meat processing sector.  This has been allowed to decay, from the buildings in use that are somewhat obsolete to the all important people factor.  The work is physically demanding and the returns are small enough not to entice new generations in.  The flood of available hogs that swamped small meat processing, this due to major industry coronavirus shutdowns showed the weakness in the system.

We at Pastures A Plenty work on our own processing agreements as well as joining with others to push the state into providing some help to get the sector back on its feet.  This may well require the same level of interest and investment as the string of stadiums built and the massive help extended to the airlines.  It is every bit as important.

Additionally, major meat industry must be held by the federal government to decent behavior, as regards their underpaid and terrorized mostly immigrant work force and their poor treatment of both the animals they slaughter and the farmer-producers of those animals.

cattle

 It is twenty below zero as I write this and I can see from where I sit the cattle at their hay rings in the south pasture.  A dozen or so lie on the leftovers from a prior feeding.  They are chewing their cuds and several columns of steam rise from their breath and body heat.  We feed cattle in the pastures on a slow rotation through perhaps three paddocks in the course of a winter and we do this deliberately in an attempt to mimic nature, which always operates in a circle.  Our agriculture pretty much denies this reality, insisting instead on a straight line picture: inputs in equals growth equals slaughter/harvest equals money and waste.  And then we buy more inputs to start over.  

With grassfed cattle production it is more apparent that the proper model is rather: birth/seed then growth then harvest/death then decay, then regeneration and then back to birth and seed sprouting.  The glitch in our cattle feeding scheme is that the winter hay mostly does not come from the pasture, but from hay fields that are part of the organic cropping rotation.  

This cycle is a bit harder to see with pig production or annual cropping.  But it is still the overall pattern and we forget it perhaps at our peril.  It also provides place of honor to perennial plants over annual ones.

grass

 Once again the days lengthen toward my birthday in mid February.  That point marks two months into the new season, and the time when it becomes obvious to me that the sun is once again winning the annual battle with dark.

The other thing I watch for is grass.  Often as early as February I can see little spears of grass showing a hopeful green in the pastures where we feed the market cattle.  Often these will be poking up through the snow, a real symbol of bravery in a hostile world!

These pastures have been in perennial grasses and legumes now for twenty five years.  But what passes for a house lawn here has grown pretty much undisturbed for nearly seventy years, in my knowledge, maybe longer.  In the lawn I do not see this early poking up of new life.  The lawn is mowed, while the pasture is grazed.  Is it the cattle?

I need to explore the hay fields, which are two or three year rotations, to find out if early grass shows there.  But whatever, it is evident that no corn or soybeans or other annuals are currently greening up anywhere in Minnesota.  The early greening of perennials has to do with the carbon cycle and thus is critical to our efforts to get some of the carbon back out of the air and into the soil where it belongs.  We have much to learn.  

snow

 A new layer of snow covers the earth this morning and the gentle breeze from the southeast is not disturbing it.  Temps are to climb several degrees by noon and then fall toward zero in the evening and overnight hours.  I can see cattle in the pasture around their hay rings from where I sit and they aren't yet greatly disturbed. 

When the wind switches to the northwest later today the pigs will show discomfort, particularly the sows.  We do not have adequate shelter for them from winter winds and to achieve that will require extensive renovations to the two hoops that house them.  30-60 head of sows in a standard hoop is not enough animal body heat under any circumstances and the lower the temp and higher the wind, the worse it is.

In addition, we need perhaps fifty percent more space for our market hogs.  And our bedding pile shrinks rapidly and we wonder how much of it we will have to buy to get through til spring when we can bale more from the stalks the cow herd now forages.  We use an incredible amount of bedding, perhaps 400 big cornstalk bales per year.  It is difficult to get them made and that amount of soiled bedding to haul out and apply to the cropping acres is a major materials moving task.

This is simply too much work for a small hog operation.  The view among our customers is favorable toward the idea of bedding the hogs, and we prefer to produce that way as well, but we will need to get better at it. 

post

 Today the replacement for the broken post at the feeding stalls needs to be finished and a call should be placed to the hoops company to make sure they have indeed sent the rollup door that blew off the west end of the sow hoop in the first strong winter blast.  This constant need for attention to repair, added to the list of "tools" needing to be built is typical of small livestock farms.  Big operations tend to use turnkey systems that call for complete regular replacement upon breakdown; smaller farms such as ours cannot afford that approach. 

The need is always for someone on the farm who knows the history of the buildings and the land, who can somewhat feel what will go haywire next and has a good practical understanding of how to make a good repair.  The broken post needing replacement is critical, it holds three gates which are used to control the traffic of five hundred lb sows to and from the feeding area.  It was rusted completely off at the base, thus the decision to build it new.  Getting it right involves lining the base bolt holes up properly with the existing stainless steel studs, getting the post absolutely straight on its base and getting all the gate mounts the right size and in the right place.  A real challenge, in other words!