Farming in the shade

While waiting for soybeans to unload the other day, I had a discussion with our dairy farmer friend. He had a satisfied look on his face when he commented on the current price of beans. "Almost makes you want to get more into crop farming," he said. We talked about the price of milk. Right now it's pretty good, though there have been times when I imagine he's had a hard time breaking even. He told me about how Michigan will be banning BST (a hormone additive) in January. "I never used it," he said, "but a lotta guys do. When they stop using it, their production will go down. And less milk means higher prices." Then he grinned. You need to know that this man is not rich by any stretch of the imagination. You can see through his Ford pickup's fenders. His wife has worked for as far back as I can remember. I don't mind the idea of higher milk prices quite so much if it means hard working farmers like him will have a little to put away. Then th...

Today The Farmer and J. went to pick pumpkins from a nearby farmer's field. The pumpkin season has peaked (does anyone want to buy a pumpkin after Halloween?) and those left out in the field will just be plowed under and wasted. So he allows us to come and pick as many as we want. What do we want with all these pumpkins? We feed them to the sheep. Some of the sheep seem to like them better than others. But there seems to be something about pumpkin seeds that naturally gets rid of any little critters in their digestive tracts. S. would encourage me to use the proper biological name: parasites. Yes, sheep on pasture tend to get worms over the summer, depending on how quickly we move them from pasture to pasture. So we feed pumpkins in the fall to help with this problem before we take them into the barn for the winter. Feeding pumpkins is fun. You have to throw them up in the air as high as you can, so that they smash open nicely. Otherwise it's hard for the sheep to break them op...

Habakkuk 2:20 The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.

The Farmer is mighty creative. He gets it from his mom, whose creativity expresses itself mostly through the use of fabric. And he gets it from his dad, with whom he worked as a mason tender beginning at age 12. He gets it from years of working with my dad on the farm. He gets it from studying in the school of farming on a shoestring. "Make do or do without" seems to be an unwritten rule around here. Many times he has figured out how to fix something that's unfixable, or rig something to function almost as well as another thing that would cost hundreds of dollars more. And just because he's never done it before is not a good reason not to try something new. Yesterday, while my dad was combining J.'s soybeans, The Farmer was busy raking hay. Yes, hay in the end of October. We had such a great stand of alfalfa hay that he couldn't bear not to cut it and do SOMETHING with it. So he asked around, and learned that he could turn this wonderful stand of alfalfa into ...

We are now working on harvesting the soybeans of a neighboring farmer. The first photo is of the soybeans falling out of the gravity flow wagon into the receiving pit at the base of the grain leg. There is an auger underneath that brings the grain up into the grain leg (or elevator). This is a photo of the grain leg (with a distributor and a catwalk at the top)--I shot this one looking straight up. You can see the stabilizing wires and the enclosed ladder for climbing. The beans or corn then are brought to the top of the grain leg and routed to the correct bin. Hmmmm...forgot to take a photo of the bin. We are storing the neighbor's beans for him, so that he can sell them when he wants to. While he was waiting for the beans to unload, the neighbor (J.) decided to take a look around from the catwalk (68 feet up in the air). The Farmer said later that he'd wished he'd known J. was going up there--he would have sent a grease gun up with him to lubricate all the fittings up the...

We've had a lot of rain these past few weeks. Even so, yesterday we finished the last of the harvesting. Corn and beans are all off! So today, the guys planted a small 4-acre field with rye seed. Rye is a grain that is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer; it is not killed by the frost, like oats. Several other fields will be planted (at a thinner rate) with rye seed as well. We will till the ryegrass into the ground in the spring to provide nitrogen and organic matter for the soil. A cover crop like this also helps to keep the weeds down. The first photo is of the field being tilled with a Massey Ferguson tractor and a field cultivator: This photo is of the field being planted using a different Massey Ferguson tractor and a grain drill:

Sigh. I'm not a country music fan. We haven't had it on in the house as the kids were growing up. So why are they racing to the stereo each night at about 8 p.m. and tuning in to the local country music station and turning it up LOUD? One song, in particular, which keeps winning the 8:00 evening "top song" slot on the local station. International Harvester, by Craig Morgan I'm the son of a third generation farmer I've been married 10 years to the farmer's daughter I'm a God fearing hardworking combine driver Hogging up the road on my p-p-p-p- plower Chug-a-lug-a- lugin 5 miles an hour On my International Harvester. The songwriter talks about how the slowness of the combine travelling down the road irritates those who have "people to see, places to go." You can google it if you'd like to hear it or read the rest of the lyrics, but I don't really want to get in trouble with the copyright police by posting it all here. I do think it...

Also known as Johnny Cake at our house. Simple, basic recipe: 1 cup flour 1 cup corn meal 1/4 cup sugar 2 tsp. baking powder 1/2 tsp. salt 1 cup milk 1/4 cup vegetable oil 1 egg, beaten Combine all just until mixed together. Pour into greased square pan and bake about 25 minutes at 400 degrees F. What mades it extra good today was that the corn was picked yesterday and freshly ground just before lunch.

When I chose the name for this blog, it was partly a play on the name of our farm--Shady Side Farm. It was also partly a statement on the decline of farming in America--that somehow a cloud has passed over the sun, and we work on while worrying what is to come. I just finished reading a novel by Wendell Berry. In his Jayber Crow , he traces the lifetime of a small town barber in Kentucky. In the excerpt I've included here, the barber speaks of the state of farming in his small town probably somewhere around the 1970s. I found much that spoke to me: And the farmers, some of them at least, were worrying. They knew that farming was in decline, losing diversity, losing self-sufficiency, losing production capacity. A sort of communal self-confidence, which must always have existed, had begun to die away. You could hear it in the talk. Elton Penn, say, would come in on a Saturday night for a haircut, and then another good farmer, Nathan Coulter maybe or Luther Swain, would come in, and t...

I was recovering from a total hysterectomy. My family took very good care of me, and I've recovered nicely. No long-term effects, other than perhaps a bit of extra padding around the middle of me. Not sure whether to blame that on the hysterectomy or the baked goods that are ALWAYS in the cookie cupboard. I am SO GLAD that I had the surgery, though, as it relieved a lot of symptoms I was struggling with. And it was very nice to find out it wasn't cancer. Just before my surgery, we took a week plus vacation to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. What a fabulous time we had, despite the fact that the kids wanted to hike miles upon miles each day and I COULD. NOT. KEEP. UP. (They will tell you I whined a lot.) These were some of my favorite photos of the trip. If you ever get the chance to visit da U.P., do it!

The heat has finally ended; we had record high temps the past three days. Now that it actually feels like fall, the guys headed out to combine a sample of the corn. They found the moisture level to their liking. It tested at about 21% moisture, which means we'll still have to dry it a bit to get it to the desired 15% level. So, it has begun. Much of our former cropland is now pasture, so the pressure to get all the corn off before the rain/snow hits is not as great as it used to be. After a summer with very little rain, we were surprised to find the first field yielding at about 100 bushels. We KNOW that there will be some fields that are pitiful, but this first decent yield was encouraging to us.

We are rather inept at marketing. Given that, and the fact that polls are fun, would you help us name our new color yarn? The color IRL (in real life) is a bit less vivid than the photo looks. More muted. This was naturally dyed using berries from a weed that grows in the edges of our fields and ditchbanks. We think it might be called pokeberry weed, but no one has done the homework yet. We used alum as the mordant and precooked the berries with a little sugar and cornstarch. They looked good enough to make into a pie. Perhaps I should have put that as an option--Pokeberry Pie. Vote away. The poll is located in the sidebar on the right side of the screen. Please comment under this post if you have better ideas. And thanks!

Late last summer we bought and installed a corn burning furnace. It's an outdoor-type that heats water which is piped into the house in a closed loop. Blow some air across the heated water pipes and you've got your heat. It was a dismal failure. It burned corn, all right--lots of corn. And it kept our house warm. But most of the heat blew right out of the chimney. Waste, waste, waste! What a shame. What an expensive shame. No help from the company (contact me before buying one of these babies, and I'll tell you which company to avoid). As good midwesterners, we try to make the best of a bad situation. Especially when money's involved. So, today's project was to move the outdoor corn burner into the workshop. We'll capture the wasted heat that floated away last winter and heat my new weaving studio with it. And perhaps The Farmer's woodshop, too. The photo is of The Farmer digging up last summer's hard work. The pipe (with heated water inside) will be ins...