road

I built a road. A short one, not more than five hundred feet long, but still.  I built it with our old smallish skidloader and the loader tractor and did so while the younger ones here were carrying on their work as usual, work like getting machines ready for harvest, scheduling pigs into the farrowing, doing the sales work, controlling the meats inventory and so on.  I pushed the topsoil to the side, got in twenty or so semi truck loads of fill gravel mixed with clay hauled out from various building projects in town and shaped it into a roadway as it came.  I am not looking forward to getting the bill for the hauling, with diesel at five dollars a gallon.  It took some time to shape the road with the undersized equipment.

The reason for the project is that our farmstead, our houses, barns and hog buildings are situated on a small rise surrounded by low ground.  It is this low ground where we needed the road.  Every spring and fall we have trouble getting heavy loads of our hog bedding pack manure through from the buildings out to the crop ground which needs it.  We are then stuck with going around the road to the fields a mile and more extra travel and with the added risk of upsetting the neighbors when on the way home from work they hit a small pile of what may have fallen off our manure equipment on our way to the fields.

The loads are heavy and so many because we use bedding on the hogs. They are more comfortable that way.  The manure is better, composting and becoming less toxic to the all important soil life than the liquid slurries that are the alternative.  The difference of just a few days extra to haul in spring before planting and in the fall before winter are critical.  We do not want to spread manure on top of snow, as the melt will give it a free ride into the streams and rivers. This road gives us relief from needing to spread the manure just in summer, when the crops cover most of the acres.

And the need for the road is an important marker for the growth of understanding with the group of people that are our customers.  Increasingly they understand that farming is complex, that it takes a lot of management and planning to carry it out successfully, safely and humanely, and are willing to pay a good price for the resulting product.  They know, as we do, that quality can come at a good reasonable price, but not a cut rate one.  We are grateful for that understanding.

Short

 When you are desperately short of moisture-here it is extending to three years-last night's offering of three quarters of an inch of rain is a real blessing.

Important work

 Surely, I thought when I awoke this morning, there is something important going on in the world today.  Seemingly surrounded by the sound of revving truck engines and related racket, I soon figured out that the dairy factory just north was cutting and stacking silage and that my farm was fortunate enough to be on the route between the field and the pile.

One thing that my seventy five years mostly spent here has taught me is that progress on the farm must always somehow entail hauling bigger amounts in bigger containers around in bigger circles.  It quite generally also involves an increase in noise.  "Sound and fury"

wonder

 Meaning to check the fence just before quitting time yesterday, I walked through the passage way to the north side of the grove.  When I stepped out from the last line of trees I suddenly found myself surrounded by butterflies.  I stood for a time enthralled, while butterflies circled my head and shoulders, occasionally perching on my sleeve for a bit.  

They were Monarchs, every one.  I think they are beginning to clump together for their long lifetime journey to Mexico.  One day very soon they will be gone.

I noticed dragonflies out over the hay field, in the middle distance, seemingly circling the millions of butterflies.  Dragonflies are predators, apex predators.  But somehow, I doubt they were threatening the butterflies, which seemed pretty much to ignore them.  I suppose the butterflies to be more threatened by birds.

That scene all along the northern edge of our grove, which I planted years ago, and which is a full quarter mile in length lifted my heart.  When I planted those trees, my head was full of profit margins and straight corn rows.  I thought I was planting a windbreak for us and the livestock.  

But today I am trying to grow aware as I grow old and I see other uses for trees, butterflies, hay fields and dragonflies.  One can rejoice in being alive at seventy five!

season change

The first hint of fall here on the prairie came in early August when the heat let up for a bit and the nights got cooler.  I could just about feel the ending of fast growth and the turn toward maturity in the crops and also, of course, the weeds.

Our pastures went dormant in July this year, due again to the heat and lack of moisture.  Now, with the beginning of what we can hope are the fall rains-we have gotten three plus inches in the last two weeks here-hope is rising that we will have good grazing into the fall.

The temperatures are coming back up again which will help the corn mature.  But the lengthening nighttime hours that August brings should moderate this hottest of all summers. 

I am reminded of conversations I had with a grazier some years ago who was beginning to be discouraged by the way in which his cool season grasses too often hardened off in summer while his neighbor's corn maintained its lush green color through the heat. We can learn from this perhaps.  In a sense this is the difference between our cool season pasture grasses and the warm season annual corn.

We tell ourselves European stories.  And it is Americans who bred up corn, while it is Europeans that provided our pasture grasses, such as brome, orchardgrass, fescue and so forth.  The Americans in question are, of course, natives and that is why that particular agronomic history has never been developed.  We have always had extreme difficulty admitting that the native population knew anything, or could do anything useful.  If we will pay attention to American stories, we will find that the natives bred up corn centuries ago, particularly in Central and some of South America as well as the southwestern corner of the USA.  The European pasture grasses are out of context, while corn is in its ancestral home.

Grasses are warm season, such as corn, sudan grass, sorghum, big and little Bluestem and Indian grass, or they are cool season, such as orchard and brome, meaning they grow best in the cooler parts of the growing season. We have a continental climate here in the upper Midwest with extremes of heat in summer and cold in winter and that is why the pasture grasses harden off and become dormant in summer while the warm season grasses such as corn, are just hitting their stride.

Heat update

Today is the third day of challenging heat.  Tomorrow promises somewhat cooler temps and we will need to see what the humidity will be.  Yesterday was butcher day and Andrew needed to get the hogs to the butcher in Belgrade.  There are risks in moving hogs in this weather. Most livestock trailers do not cool as well as they should, and even if they do, any air moving is very hot, mid nineties yesterday.  Andy generally has a good supply of ice frozen for these kinds of situations.  The hogs will play with the ice chunks, which helps them to cool down around the head and neck.  We also wet them down as regularly as needed, both in their hoop living quarters and in the livestock trailer.  Hogs do not sweat and wet skin is helpful for them to survive extreme temps.  Andy moved the delivery into the morning.

The cattle were grazed out in the sun on Tuesday in the regular pastures.  On Wednesday, I held them on the yard in their lot and fed them hay.  I put a bale in late last night and spent two hours early this morning finishing the fence around the grazing in the hay field that Andy had topped the day before to reduce the risk of alfalfa bloat.  By eight o'clock I had the charge in the fence up to 2000 around the thirty acres.  Not really enough, I thought but it will have to do.  Due to the rain on Tuesday and the high humidity, the grass stays really wet, pulling the charge down in the fence.  

I let them out into the new grazing at about 8:30 this morning and they grazed out there, staying close to the shade available north of the farmstead grove.  When I checked them after the noon, they had found their way back to their customary trees to pass the heat of the day.  Things are going to be easier after that first trip out and back in!

We are due for some R and R now tomorrow.  We better not let the pile of work here bully us out of a bit of easy time after the three day emergency we have just farmed through!

Heat

 The heat predicted for some time lands on us starting today.  Temps of 95 plus are expected plus a rising humidity.  We have been busy with preparations.  Today we move the bales off the nearby hayfield and set up fence along the adjacent corn field.  The cattle will be able to shade up on the yard in the north pen under the shade of trees planted just twenty years ago, and then spend the evening, overnight and early morning grazing the stubble plus ten acres of poor stand we have left them.  This should last a week or a bit more, and we hope for a weather change by then. 

For the hogs, Andrew has been spreading fresh bedding in all the hoops.  When manure is stored under foot it composts, creating heat.  This is an attribute of hoop hog production.  To counter this, we must spread fresh bedding regularly so that the pigs are not lying in manure and soiled bedding, which is hot.  

Additionally, we are able several times a day to wet the concrete area where the feeders stand so that the animals can stay wet.  

Heat causes work here as surely as cold does in winter.