June

    June is crunch month.  Most farmers would say this. But it is particularly accurate about farms that are diverse.  And it is even more so when the diverse farm has gone to organic production. We have three livestock species on our farm, and use corn plus a hay seeding consisting of two or three grass species and four or five legumes.  Plus a new seeding of Kernza which management we are trying to learn as we go.  And then of course there are the weeds, too plentiful to count.  All of this diversity, we now know, is just what the soil needs to be healthy.

    Hay and corn conflict with each other. The corn, if planted in April which we hope for, may make it from six or eight inches on June 1st to four plus feet on June 30th, thus putting whatever weeds are in the crop out of reach of the cultivator because the corn is too tall to cultivate.  The hay, meanwhile, generally needs cutting in the first week of June and then raking and baling.  All of these operations on the corn and hay are best done in afternoons when the dew is gone.

    And yet, hay and corn are tightly linked with each other.  And especially is this so on an organic farm.  It is the hay with its legume component that builds nitrogen fertility into the soil.  Hay is going to be necessary to get the cattle through the winter.  Corn is pig and chicken feed.  The very best seed bed in which to plant the corn is tilled hay ground.  The generous root structure that has developed under that grass/alfalfa/clover combination not only offers the best chance at fixing atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, but the root decomposition the next spring at corn planting time offers a seed bed par excellence.  Nothing else comes close.  This hay ground tends to be a bit drier than other acres, thus allowing some of the corn planting to happen earlier.   

The fact that the hay crop has for several years prior been cut and baled several times each year means that annual weeds have mostly sprouted and been killed. The perennials, such as thistles, have had their root strength considerably diminished due to the frequent cutting. 

    Hay and corn go together.  The smart farmer is going to figure out how to get all that work done in one month.  Perhaps the best approach is to custom hire some of it.  Or maybe livestock work can be scheduled away from June as much as possible. For the diverse farmer, getting out of hay and corn production is not optional.  It is the very core of what makes a diverse and organic farm work.

mRNA vaccines

 I am seeing stories  that seem to identify mRNA vaccines as "gene therapy".  Does anyone know what this is about? To my mind there seems to be some distance between vaccination, which builds an immune response to a threat, and therapy, which would seem to apply some version of treatment toward the gene itself.  What is the story here?  Is this an attempt to sort the mRNA approach to vaccine development from the methods used formerly to cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine involved, or even ascribe nefarious motives to any who use messenger RNA in vaccine development? 

This is becoming an issue in our meats business.

Adjusting a pasture attitude

 I have always leaned toward a grazing practice based upon the idea of using animals to harvest what nature wants to grow on soil I pretty much take for granted.  Lately I am seeing some holes in the usefulness of  that attitude.

For one thing, the soil can never be taken for granted.  It must be cared for in use and that truth is as real for a farmer who harvests by grazing as it is for one who is reliant on tractors and tillage.  Cows in wet times can compact the soil.  Careless grazing opens too much of it to the wind and water.  Care with haying must be taken not to transport too many nutrients away.

Attitudes must exhibit some flexibility.

So now we have about 25 or 30 acres needing attention due either to our drainage installation in the wettest area of the pasture a year ago or our practice of winter feeding of hay on pasture.  There is too much bare soil out there and a certain amount of leftover hay mixed with manure in about six paddocks.  Plans are to reseed two of these pads to a hay and grazing mix of perennial forage plants and use the other four to grow a single season grazing crop which will finish early enough for us to reseed pastures then, hopefully without much in the way of tillage.  

Plans are to use Japanese Millet for hay or grazing in three of the four pads that will grow an annual crop with the other one planted to an oats/rape mixture which should be ready for grazing a bit sooner than the millet.

There is another damaged paddock of about four acres adjacent to these which we will leave to its own devices, to see if there really has been any benefit to all this running about with tractors and tools causing extra use of fuel.  I am cheering for the left alone paddock to prove to me that a pasture managed correctly can fix itself!    

old dog

 My dog Lily, or as I call her along with every other dog I have ever had, "dog", is getting old.  When I am tied up working in the shop, which is usually not my first choice, she comes with and chooses a comfortable place-not too far from the heater, and out of range of the sparks thrown by the acetylene torch, angle grinder and arc welder, and lies there watching me work.  Tomorrow she may bounce along with me as I walk the pastures and fields looking for first signs of spring life and figuring out how long until the soil will bear the weight of the cattle.  Today she     rests.  She chose a soft pile of floor sweepings to rest on today.

Sometimes she hurts and takes the day off.  So do I.  We understand each other.

She is master of appreciating the explosive flight of the started pheasant.  She cocks her head, better to listen to the increasingly rare sound of the meadowlark.  She pretends, on our walks, to dig up the pocket gophers which have been busy making tunnels.  Sometimes, when she thinks she knows where I am headed, she will lie down in the field and wait for my return.

She is not much of a stock dog, even though she is a shepherd by breeding (Aussie).   She tends to hold her ground as cattle approach to examine her until they are close and then she turns to run, through a gate if I have been dumb enough to leave it down, the whole herd following her.

I love shepherds for their perceptiveness-they know who they belong to-focus and loyalty.  It sobers me to realize that some shepherd dog someday is going to mope and mourn my disappearance from her life.

Lily is in the world and of the world in a way that I like other humans, have trouble  being.  She simply lives out the time allotted to her, fully present at all times.  She does not do art.

Humans do art. It is how we are comfortable in the world that confronts us. Farmers do art, especially diversified small ones.  In this idea I have no great group of fellow travelers for the art I do will never hang in a museum.  But I insist on it.  If no one else, I can count on my dog to agree, if not understand.

Today I mend two posts that the hogs have bent and rusted off.  Though years of experience, I have figured out how to do this spending a minimum of money and in a manner that will not cause someone soon to need to do it over again.  No course of study teaches this very necessary art.

This morning I studied seed catalogs choosing seeds to plant in the bare drowned out places in the pasture and also where the sward was torn up to install drainage a year ago.  I need to consider longevity. palatability, winter hardiness and cost.  In addition, I decided to plant permanent pasture in half of it only, seeding annual grazing in the other half.  This spreads the cost-perennial seeds are expensive-and may  make it possible to get around a difficult season if that is what we get.

When the season opens I will start grazing the herd and the decisions come daily:  How hard to graze, when to move, when to stock more heavily or destock, what the weather will do, can I get more acres to graze for late summer, how far into the fall can I graze and how do I make that happen.  These are decisions that are made daily and cannot be found in a book or from a consultant.  They are based on experience gained by observation, by hearing and smelling and then trying to put the big, impossible to fully understand picture together.  They must be based on judgement-what I know about this farm, and what I can  make happen. 

There are a multitude of similar choices that cropping entails too, but I have pretty much passed that part of the farming on to the next generation.  I hope they will learn too, and that farms are art forms.  They will not get any support in that idea.  I have not.

Part of this is due to the extreme prejudice in our country against anything small or made by work. 

 I wish them well.  They will need to learn from their dogs.

Winter

 Winter-I assume it is finally over now with tonight's temps to be down to 25 degrees-pushed on for most of April this year.  A warmup is projected from here. As the pile of hay shrinks the manure stacks up and composts in the hog houses.  Since we handle manure as a solid, and always mixed with bedding, it is much easier to store safely and minimize the nitrogen losses to the environment even in the case of a long spring.  But there gets to be a lot of it this time of year.  

There is always this aspect of a tightly wound clock in spring, where the manure stacks up, the buildings fill with feeding animals, the cattle get sick of hay and start lining up at the fence to watch the grass grow.  It will be a relief when we can open the gates, hook up the manure spreader and do our part to start the crop year.  This year we have cornstalks leftover from last fall that will need to be chopped and baled for bedding and moved off before we can plant as well. 

It has been hard on the wild things.  Pheasants lined both sides of the roads searching for the least bit to eat as the snow cover lasted for a full five months.  We traveled to the west border of the state for a celebration of music several weeks ago and must have seen close to a hundred deer, some of which were pretty skinny stripping the bark from whatever trees they could find. 

For our kind of diversified farm, it seems there is too much work when the snow finally retreats and the frost comes out of the soil.  Besides the livestock work there is the manure to haul and spread ahead of corn planting.  The planters and grain drills must be ready to use, though we are beginning to consider that spring small grains may not be the best choice for our low and somewhat wet farm.  We generally plant those crops too late-in May-because the soil is not ready to bear the weight of equipment in April.  

We are thinking a better choice may be winter grain crops such as rye, wheat or triticale which are planted in late summer or early fall.  This would necessitate a change in rotation but would open up a wonderful slot in mid to late summer for applying manure when the soils are best able to stand up under the heavy equipment.  Manure is not like fertilizer.  Soils can be fortified with manure and the good effects will carry on for several years.  There is no inherent need to spread manure right ahead of the planting.  

The cattle are necessary for this kind of farm operation because they can use a short season complex cover seeding done in May for grazing in July or hay in August, thus opening the field for manure and/or seed at a time of year where it seems that time is available to do it.

These are critical matters in trying to run a successful small farm.  A clay soil, when worked or even just driven over before it is sufficiently dry will form lumps pretty nearly rock hard when it dries.  Such an area is essentially out of service for the year until the freeze and thaw of winter can rescue the damage.  It is an expensive and discouraging loss.  If you are going to have a different kind of farm, be it organic or biodynamic or diversified, it seems to me necessary to farm differently.  This business of nothing but two full season crops just will not do.

There is very much to do and to decide this season.  For the next month or so we are going to be busier than we really want to be.  Yet it is exciting.  Even for an old guy, farming never fails to perk up the spirit.  Working hard to be in synch with the season just seems right!

Jim

Harassment

 Someone made the statement not long ago that we have passed the point of winter and that it is now harassment.   I was amused and sick enough of winter and so started to pass the thought around.  But today I realized that some of life really is being harassed.  This constant snow cover, looking as if it will now extend all the way to April is kind of a death warrant for some of the wildlife.  I woke to the fact that I have seen pheasants, for example, near the roads and right up to the buildings on our farm since January.  They are looking for seeds to eat and if their luck doesn't improve, they will soon die.  On our farm grain and feed spillage as well as stockpiled manure is a regular occurrence, so that might partly explain why I see so many.  

In demonstration of the thought that it is an ill wind that blows no one some good, I can say that we put seed out last fall that we are optimistic will succeed in sprouting a crop of Kernza.  And I have seen no sign of the soil drifts, often several inches deep on the snow that are usually evident.

Eagle

 The bald eagle was perched high in the cottonwood tree that towers over the dugout where the fill for the hoghouse was bladed out at the northwest corner of the grove.  He watched me, head turning slowly, as I came past with the tractor headed to the bale site where I would load up two bales to feed the cattle in the pasture as I did every day.

We have had a two week stopover from a pair of bald eagles each of the past ten years, usually in March, when the retreating snow cover reveals a number of carcasses of wild things and the occasional casualty from farm operations.  They seem to be on the way somewhere, possibly the river bottom some thirty miles south of here, though I have never seen them take off in that direction.  Their behavior while here reveals their essential nature as buzzards.  At least while I have observed, they do not hunt while there is something available that is already dead.  I can't say I even know what a hunting bald eagle looks like.  I am, on the other hand, surrounded by hunting red tail hawks all season long.

But this eagle was alone.  I did take the time to look for the mate.  I pushed in the clutch and sat for awhile, scanning the grove carefully for sign of another perching bird of prey, but came up empty.

I have taken to paying much more careful attention to any change I see in the wild things surrounding me.  These changes might include different species growing in the grove and odd ends of fields that generally get left alone.  I have brought to mind that I regularly seed fescue with pasture and hay mixes, an idea my Dad would have scoffed at, knowing as he did that it would not succeed this far north.  I have brought to my own notice the fact that I have fewer grassland birds and songbirds of any kind than he did. I have begun to assume that mostly because of our own behavior, we are in the midst of massive change-deterioration might be a better word-and we are not going to like where it brings us out.  One eagle where there have been two is an alarm bell.

I wonder what else has changed or is changing that I have not yet noticed.

It is an ironic truth that I and a few others are becoming more acutely aware of the world around us, our plant and animal companions on our farms, just as they are fading because of the threat our way of living has put them under.  

Perhaps I will see the eagle and his mate today.  If I do not, and if the mate continues in its absence, I will have to question why it has happened.  Obviously, animals die.  But just as obviously it is not always because of age.  If it is instead that change is making it impossible for them to live here, I will need to question myself, us all, and how we are living and farming.  We cannot succeed on earth by pushing other species out.