Farming in the shade

The fields have finally dried off enough to start working the soil. We have a hay field planted, have been working and reworking a field that had a cover crop of rye that just doesn't want to die, and we planted one field to corn. Here's our faithful Massey Ferguson 180 (circa 1970s) pulling the four row corn planter. Very few farmers use equipment this small anymore. But we are a small farm, and this is the right size equipment for the acreage we work with. The Farmer lifts up the planter at the ends of the rows as he turns around. At both ends of the field, we plant headlands. Headlands are a few rows that run perpendicular to the body of the main field. We want to plant the whole field, but when cultivating and harvesting, we need room to turn around. So we plant the headlands crossways, knowing we will lose a bit of that corn to being ridden over. In the fall, the corn on the headlands is harvested first, giving us room to turn the combine around at the ends of th

We live fairly near alpaca farmers, and they are kind enough to let us bring our llamas to their alpaca shearing day. We need to borrow a trailer (despite the amount of animals on the farm, we still don't own our own livestock trailer), and load them up. Here's a shot of what they look like before their haircut, pedicure, and tooth check. Note: this is a full-service shearing day! Not just a trim for these ladies...  Here they are after their visit to the alpaca farm: They are ready for summer now! We have llamas because they help protect the sheep while they are out on pasture. They are naturally very curious, and can be a bit aggressive towards dogs and other canine types that would tend to want to hurt the sheep. In other news, we've been too busy working to blog. It's funny how when your hands are busy with fences or animals or tractor steering wheels, you forget to take photos. And when you come in at dusk, all you want is a large glass of water

A few weeks ago we made a quick trip to the wool mill in Frankemuth, Michigan. Zeilingers has been our go-to choice for wool processing for several years. We were picking up comforter batts, but poked our heads into the yarn making part of the mill. They just happened to have our wool on the machines.  This stage is called pencil roving. The wool has already been washed, and the next stage is spinning the pencil roving into yarn. The pencil roving is very fragile. It's easy to pull it apart, and yank it right off the machines. I am always amazed that such huge machines can be set to work so gently with such a fragile product. Gary is demonstrating the fragility here. After spinning, this wool will be sent upstairs at the mill to be machine knit into socks for us to sell at our markets.

The winter was exceptionally cold. Too cold to do anything more than what was absolutely necessary on our workshop renovation project. Stud walls, plumbing, electrical and heating progressed very slowly. Six boys worked in the woodshop every Wednesday evening on their kayaks, and it was a struggle to get the temperature to a life-sustaining level each week. We hosted our  shearing day  in early March, and told people we were "under construction".  But now that we have (slightly) nicer weather and a larger workforce, things have begun to happen again. Insulation. Does it matter that it doesn't match? This is a part of the ground floor, which will house our farm store.  The bean storage room... And heading upstairs... Half of the upstairs will be housing for farm help. No need to insulate most interior walls. The other half of upstairs will be the everything else room. Weaving, dyeing, wool storage--the possibilities are exciting! Here are tw

Last week it finally stopped raining long enough for us to load the beans and haul them across the state to be sold. We raised 14 varieties of dry beans last year. We sell our beans at farmers markets, in local shops, and to restaurants. In West Michigan, our beans are available in the following retail establishments: Grassfields Farm in Coopersville, Michigan Pantry and Nature's Market in Holland, and Fernwood 1891 in Fennville. We plant about an acre of each variety. This year we are basically sold out of four of our 14 varieties already. But we plant extra (10 acres) of one variety and could never hope to sell out in our local markets. Black Turtle is the official name of the black bean that is so common that its name has been shortened just to "black bean". It is a wonderful bean, and we sell the extra to an organic bean processor on the other side of the state. These totes are full of black beans and are ready for the long haul. It was an uneventful trip--o

Since we put the sheep out to pasture about a week ago, we've moved them four times. Our rotational grazing guru is going to be away for the summer, and so I will have to be the sheep mover. I got a lesson a couple of days ago. Around the whole big pasture is a permanent perimeter fence. We subdivide the large pasture into many smaller pastures by putting up temporary fence. First, we made a dent in the pasture by driving a straight-ish line from one permanent fence to another. This dent is where we set up the temporary fence. We laid each of the fence sections out on the ground. It took four sections of fence and a gate to reach across the pasture to subdivide it. After laying each section out, we stuck the poles of the fence in the ground. The temporary fence was very easy to set up because the ground was so soft. After all the sections were set up, we electrified it. Can't have the little buggers getting out. And then we opened the fence between the ol

Last summer we bought a used mower deck. The kind that you can mount on the back of the tractor, and make some serious time as you are mowing down the leftovers in a pasture that has just been vacated by animals. It's a good practice, but one that has been hard for us with just a small brush hog .  Well, as with most equipment that we (can afford to) buy, it was Well-Used. Very broken in. Like more rust than steel, if you know what I mean. The bones of the piece are still good. But the rest of it needed a lot of work.  Elbow grease (and small machine, bearing and sheet metal shops) to the rescue. We are stimulating our local economy in small doses. The parts are ordered and the rusty bits have been scraped off. We are getting close.

When I blogged yesterday about what to do with the dwindling feed problem, I didn't tell you that we'd already made a plan and carried it out. I wanted to see what others would have decided, though I realize I didn't give all the information. Things I left out included lack of money and the fact that we are still lambing. The first year we had sheep we had the ewes giving birth out in the pasture, and it Did Not Go Well. Since that time we've chosen to lamb inside, where conditions are much more controlled. Anyway, this past weekend it was apparent that we had a dire situation on our hands. Denial of the situation was not working; something needed to be done, and it needed to be done right then. But of course we had these cows in the way. So the first order of business was to sort the calves from their mothers, and remove the bull from the group. Enter the sorting chute we recently purchased (which probably has something to do with our cash flow problem). We spen

Last spring is still haunting us. Last spring was a wet, flooded, soggy mess . Because of the extra moisture, our corn was planted late, and we were not able to harvest any of it last fall. No corn at all. We don't feed much corn, reserving it for that little extra protein that is needed by the ewes right at lambing time. We feed a little to our Holstein beef steers over the winter, as Holsteins just will not grow on hay alone. Unfortunately, we ran out of what little 2012 corn was left before this year's lambing season started. We've been hoping that our hay (typically very high quality) would carry the ewes through until they could be turned out to pasture. There are two problems with this hopefulness. The first dates back to the spring floods I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The same flooding caused the first-cutting hay crop to be harvested late. It was very coarse and not all that palatable. Coarse hay tends to be wasted more by the animals. They pick