Farming in the shade

The $450 operators manual we recently purchased for the combine that we’ve owned for 8 years has paid off already. We were able to find the problem and get the grain head hydraulics to work again. The first of the small grains are in the bin. This year we are harvesting four small grains--einkorn (an old variety of wheat), oats, barley, and rye. Much of the field drowned out in the Monsoon of Fall 2018 or the Monsoon of Spring 2019. But it looks like we will be able to harvest some of each of what we planted, and we're grateful for that.  For more on our combine woes through the years, search “combine”. It’ll make you feel better about your life, I promise. 

The problem du jour is nothing new. If you can’t afford new farm equipment (and really, who can?!), you buy what you can afford. And fix it when it breaks. Some of it is pretty specialized equipment which is only used once or twice a year. We try to maintain and care for the equipment after each use and before we fire it up for the next go-around. But we do have a saying for this part of farming: “Stuff only breaks when you use it.” Equipment can look good, start well, and run smoothly, but when it’s time to actually do the work, some little thing will go wrong. Right now it’s the wiring on relay switches in the combine. Right at wheat harvest, of course. With oats and rye waiting their turn. Yes, we have had our share of problems with this combine. The former owner used it hard, and it shows. Some have asked us why we don’t just buy a different combine. The answer is near the top of this post—go ahead, scroll up. I’ll wait. YouTube is good, provided the person making the video actu...

We have recently been encouraged by the kindness of good friends and total strangers, both. Thank you, all, for your comments, shares, good wishes, and prayers. We wrote about our struggles with the wet weather in part because we feel we have a relationship with many of you. We consider you friends, and friends need to let each other know what is going on. We also shared because we know that many of you aren’t familiar with the risks of farming. Each year we take our blood, sweat and tears, as well as most of our remaining money, and we bury it in the ground. We hope and pray that everything works out so that we get all that money we buried back. And we also hope that the blood, sweat and tears fertilize it and make it yield an increase. That increase or harvest is what we convert to money over the winter and the next summer while the next set of crops grow. This money is what we use to pay the bills, fix things, take a small salary, and save a little to bury in the gr...

Well, folks, we have zero acres of corn and dry beans planted so far this year. And no hay cut for the winter feed for our cattle and sheep.  We still have a chance on the hay, but every day that passes means the quality goes down. We still have a chance at the dry beans. But there is the little detail of standing water in the fields. The window for planting corn has closed. So there will be no corn crop this year. We have had crop failures and catastrophes before. Usually one thing at a time, though. We are trying to stay hopeful while still thinking about what Plan B looks like. God is faithful.

We grow Wapsie Valley corn, an open-pollinated variety that dates (at least) back to the mid-1800s and has its roots in Iowa. We have found it to be much higher in protein than the hybrids we used to grow, and this is the corn that we have ground for our corn meal and grits/polenta.  Typically, we harvest the corn with our combine. This past fall, we had what amounted to a monsoon.  Eventually the ground became so saturated that we couldn't use the combine anymore. So we harvested the remainder of the corn the old-fashioned way. A gentle public service announcement: Please do not tell a farmer that his food costs too much. Either buy it, or don't buy it. You probably have no idea what has gone into the production of that food... Save Save

I've taken a long hiatus from blogging, and so I'll do my best to catch up, without making you feel like you're drinking from a firehose. Speaking of firehoses (and by extension, water)... After a long dry spell during the summer, the weather changed. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights. At least it seemed that way. Here's a photo that shows the results: We were able to harvest the field of beans that was planted on sandy soil. These beans were harvested before the bulk of the rains came.  Unfortunately, the field that was heavier clay soil we were not able to harvest. If you dig under the snow, you'll probably find frozen, sprouted beans. Ten varieties of beans.  Needless to say, we are not all that happy about this. It has changed our farmers market display, to be sure! The beans are a big part of our annual income. These things happen, but maybe you can understand a bit more why I haven't been eager to blog. After all, if you don't ...

We need to make another hard decision. It seems like farming is full of guessing and second-guessing. And here we are at another crossroads where the "right answer" (if there is one) is not clear. The interesting weather we experienced over the summer meant that the beans we planted on the clay field did not germinate well, and/or were choked out by weeds that could handle the concrete-like clay soil better than the beans. We have a field of weeds with a few beans scattered through them. Black Calypso, Black Turtle, Black Valentine, Hutterite Soup, Jacob's Cattle, Jacob's Cattle Gold, Marrow, Pinto, October, and Tiger Eye. Many of our (and our customer's) favorites. The combine cannot handle the grassy weeds. In fact, it is on the edge of breaking again. We know there are hardly any beans out there. The choices we have are clear: try the combine and suffer the consequences of it breaking right before we need it to harvest corn and potentially losing that...

This makes me happy.  This fall was full of regular, abundant rain, which made harvesting difficult to impossible. Besides the weather difficulties, we dealt with regular break-downs with the combine. We would fire it up, begin to harvest, and it would immediately break. We would spend a week of nice weather fixing it, and just before we finished fixing it, it would rain like crazy. Then we would have to wait for the ground to dry up, and once it was dry, we'd try to harvest again, and the combine would break. Repeat, ad nauseum.  I could go on about how stinky this fall has been. I have tried to have a Habakkuk 3 mindset (though the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vine... yet I will trust...), but honestly, it's been hard.  But this--THIS. The combine is working, and has been for over an hour. The corn is dry, and the ground is only a little bit muddy. It looks like we might get a harvest after all. Thanks be to God!

There's nothing like spring on the farm. It's a love/hate relationship, to be sure. In this photo, The Farmer had just brought a bale of hay to the cattle--something he has done successfully and without incident, all winter long. This time was different, though. A couple of days of very warm (50s!) temperatures melted all the snow, and turned the solid ground into something much less than solid. Of course, it was just before we needed to go somewhere. He texted me, and asked me to meet him at the pasture gate--he was going to get the tractor, after removing the snowblower that was mounted on it. I don't think I've ever driven this tractor--it's the new Kubota--and, after a 15 second lesson and the application of some log chain, I was in charge of pulling the skidsteer out of the mud. Fortunately, I didn't muck it up too badly, though there were some tense seconds. Never a dull moment.

The past few weeks, The Farmer has been milking cows for another farmer each weekday morning. The dairy farmer is dealing with a bad back, and can't do it himself. There are at least three other guys helping out, too, covering nights and weekends. It's hard to think about the sole proprietor being laid up in any line of work, but dairy farming is one of the most relentless jobs out there. We feel for our friend, who planned to work five or so more years before retiring. Now what? He waits for the results of tests... The other day I read a New York Times op-ed piece titled "Don't Let Your Children Grow Up To Be Farmers," quite obviously a play on the country music song, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys." The author got my attention early in the article when he said: "The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn't making a living." And then he went on to share statistics...

Some of The Farmer's "spare time" (cue laughter track here) was spent working on the combine this summer. During rye harvest, the engine blew . It was a terminal diagnosis. So we looked around, finally found, and ordered a new engine. Let's see if you can tell which is the old and which is the new.  Any guesses? Does it help to see them together? The new engine was actually a tractor engine, just like what came out of the combine. Almost. Kinda. Mostly the same. Close, y'know? There were some modifications needed, of course. Because nothing is ever truly easy. Even when you spend a bunch of money on a new engine. The Farmer has mad wood skills. He is not a natural mechanic (though his brother is!). But after years of working along side my father on all kinds of farm equipment, he has acquired a working knowledge of how to fix things. And out of necessity he has tackled some pretty big jobs. We are grateful for a diesel mechanic friend wh...

The ditches are becoming clogged with willows. Every couple of years we really need to work on cutting them back. The Farmer has a saw blade that fits on the end of his weed whacker that helps with brush whacking. Perfect for the willow invasion.  Here's a  photo of the before: And an idea of what things look like after: There are piles of dead willows along many of the ditch banks on the farm. Our township has a summer burning ban, so these willows will be collected for a fall brush fire after the ban is lifted.

Last week we harvested our rye crop. Afterwards, The Farmer headed out to custom combine a couple of very small rye fields for nearby blueberry farmers. This is what the evening ended like: Now that's not a great picture, I'll admit. It was late and it was dark. So I'll explain it to you. The large tractor was towing the combine home. The combine engine blew while The Farmer was custom combining. We knew the engine wasn't good. But we decided to keep using it until it wouldn't go anymore. And that time has come. Three years ago our old combine gave up the ghost during harvest. We scraped together enough money to buy this one . And now it needs a new engine. I explained it this way to a friend--we can only afford to buy the combine equivalent of a 1979 Chevy Nova. Now, I'm not bashing the Nova (much). But when was the last time you saw one on the road? I didn't think so. We have a new engine being shipped to us. One that cost more than half of w...

A couple of weeks ago, we set up temporary fence to move the cattle to new pasture. It was a Saturday evening, and we'd finished a day of farmers markets and farm work by eating supper around a fire. Just one last thing to do, and we could clean up and fall into bed exhausted. Everyone else was gone, and so The Farmer and I slowly moved the cattle to new grass. Here's where things went south. The parading ladies caught the attention of Mo, the bull, who is in solitary confinement while the calves are being born. As we were slowly walking behind the cows, I looked over and noticed Mo had his head between a gate post and a building. And he was pushing. I left The Farmer and ran over to him, waved him away from the gate, and rejoined the parade. But he was not finished. He was NOT going to stay in solitary confinement any longer. And before we could say, "I'm tired and I dearly hope this doesn't go south!" he broke the gatepost and was free! I have re...

It seems like every year I do a post on dying. Life is easy to share with you. New lambs, new corn plants, spring--it's all good! But you cannot have life without both ends--birth and death. And while I am usually pretty jazzed at the end of life of a corn field (harvest is a pretty exciting time), I am less excited about the death of an animal. Yesterday we found one of our barn cats had been hit, but was still alive. While we made plans to put her out of her misery, she dragged herself off somewhere to die alone. The past week I've been struggling with a lamb with a broken leg. He was too old to teach to drink from a bottle, even though I tried. For a while, we wondered if his mother was still caring for him. But we found his body yesterday when we moved the sheep to a new pasture. This little lady's mother developed mastitis. It went septic, and by the time we realized the severity and decided to treat her with antibiotics (thereby making her no longer organic), ...

The first time I heard about the process of "tubing" a lamb, or feeding via a tube, I was slightly horrified. It sounded so barbaric. But watching a weak lamb slowly die is not all that much fun, either.  So, "tubing" a lamb has become one of our strategies for lamb survival--a tool in our toolbox, if you will. It is important that the lamb is not cold--you can tell by feeling the ears. If the lamb is cold, you must warm it up before tubing it.  The three things needed are a chunky syringe, a flexible tube, and some lamb milk replacer (or mama's milk, if you can get it). You'll see in the photos below that the milk is in a standard baby's bottle. The bottle in this case is simply something to hold the milk in.  The Farmer likes to warm the tube in hot water to make it flexible. The thin end of the tube is inserted carefully into the esophagus. The wider end of the tube is attached to the bottom of the syringe. The warm milk is poured ...

A few weeks ago we started hearing the well pump run more than usual. We kept our eyes open, but started to suspect an underground leak. The trouble with underground leaks is that they have to get bad enough before you can find them. Given what we've recently heard about the aquifer that provides us with water, we felt badly that our underground lines were wasting water. Apparently people in our area will soon be out of fresh well water, despite the fact that we are surrounded by fresh water: the Great Lakes! Something about the aquifer not recharging at a fast enough rate. Supply is less than demand. And there are two types of culprit in this situation: the farmer who irrigates his crops endlessly (sorry, but it's true), and the homeowners that decide to build new homes out in the country. But I digress. Eventually we found a tell-tale sign. And, on a lovely cold winter afternoon, The Farmer and his crew started digging. Just finding mud isn't enough. Sometimes...

How quickly our day's plans changed. And yet, it could have been so much worse. The Farmer went out to do chores this morning, and immediately noticed the plume of black smoke from the vicinity of the compost facility. He ran. What he found was the beginning of this. He quickly surmised that a skid steer (a.k.a. bobcat) on fire with fuel in it was more than he could handle on his own. He ran back up to the house, while dialing 911. He called to me that the skid steer was on fire, and he was going to "get the truck". He is a part-time, on-call firefighter, and the station is a mile from our farm. Good odds. Yet look at how close that skid steer was to the edge of the barn. In the meantime, I alerted my dad about the fire by phone. He was able to move the tractor out of the barn, just in case the fire spread. I alerted my in-laws by banging on their door and yelling FIRE! I grabbed one of the house fire extinguishers, and asked them to bring more. The fire exti...

The clouds this morning were interesting enough to snap a picture of. Apologies for the lack of quality of the picture--it was quite early, and still rather dark.  We are receiving regular rains, now, which is so much better than too wet or too dry. The beans are coming along nicely, but we had to till under the vast majority of our single corn field. This spring's relentless rains didn't allow us to adequately prepare the field for planting. The weeds took over, and some of the corn didn't even take root due to the extreme wetness. So instead of 3 fields of corn, we have 1/5th of a field. Corn is a cash crop for us, as we feed very little to our animals. So things might be a little tighter for us next year, when there is no corn to sell. Farming is an exercise in trusting God. We have never had a perfect year. Good years? Yes. But they are sprinkled in among the not-so-good years. There are no guarantees in farming, or in life. I guess the trusting that comes w...

Last summer we were crying for rain. And now this. This is a nearby field, not ours, truthfully, but ours look about the same. We've had an average of 1/2" of rain each day in April. Well over three of those inches fell today, on top of already saturated soils. I would show you what happens in my basement when the soil is completely saturated and the ditches and fields are full of water. But I have nothing to complain about when I compare the little streams that trickle across the cement floor of my basement to the moats completely encompassing houses that I've seen on the TV screen. Sandbags are available at the local fire station for those who are trying to keep rivers and streams from coming in. Trusty sump pump, keep working tonight while I try to sleep, please. And have mercy, Lord, on those who are losing so much.