Hayman Road Farm

Local Energy

2011-11-12T17:46:00.000-08:00

Whenever we wanted to cook something before, the local coal fired powerplant threw a few extra nuggets on the fire for us.   Out their stack came a few more wisps of mercury to end up in the next fish we eat.  A few more pounds of CO2 wafted in to the atmosphere to keep the polar icecaps melting and the subtropical deserts moving northward into the US. Or perhaps the Palisades nuclear power plant threw another fuel rod into the reactor for us, and vented a little extra radioactive tritium like they did a few weeks back. (that's how they do their part to encourage mutations and foster evolution)   Our son's chance for a viable future dimmed, just a little.

We haven't reached cooking perfection, but we're a little closer now.   The 1918 Kalamazoo ("A Kalamazoo, direct to you!") woodstove we rebuilt last winter is now installed and in regular use, with our electric stove soon to go on the craigslist free ads, or perhaps to the local metal recycling bin.

Our kitchen is now a little warmer in the winter (let's not think about summer temps just yet). We're also trying to catch up on some hastily prepared cookstove wood, which must be shorter and of lesser diameter than the wood for our regular heating stove. The stuff we're burning now is a little green yet, as we still haven't quite worked up enough of a reserve. We're also using corn husks from our field to light most of the fires.

Impressions so far?    Woodstove cooking tends towards the "medium" heat range.   You really have to work to get something hot. But, on the plus side, things do tend to taste better when cooked at lower temperatures for longer times.  It takes a little more lead time, particularly if I've been negligent in cutting some dry kindling out of scrap wood from the barn. Starting the fire with green kindling is possible, but takes a few applications of paper or corn husks. We've been using it for about 6 weeks, so it's starting to feel normal now.   I usually get a fire going first thing in the morning.

Eventually I plan to plumb a water heater into the stove, which has a water jacket on one side of the firebox (essentially a hollow cast iron box for water to circulate through).   That'll give us another way to wean ourselves ever so slightly from the grid. It also happens that our electric dryer was haphazardly wired through the old electric stove outlet, so getting rid of the electric stove gave us an excuse to stop using the dryer.   It wouldn't take me more than an hour to rewire it, but the default path for now is to leave it be.   We used it very rarely anyway, and find that the clothesline and wood drying rack both work great.

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Fall is about over now. The leaves are off the trees, which now shriek when the wind blows like it's doing this evening. I miss the colors, but they'll be back again next year. Just had our first snow this week, which lasted less than a day. Snow is beautiful too, especially outside at night under a full moon.

The Tell-Tale Calf

2011-08-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

There was just no good way to do it, so I'd been putting it off. Maintaining one herd on pasture is difficult enough, and I never really designed our farm to maintain separate herds. We have four calves, aged 3 to 13 months, and they were all actively nursing as a result. 9 weeks is the standard weaning age. On the plus side, everyone is fat and happy, but on the downside... we were averaging just over a gallon of milk per cow each day. Some of that is the fact that we're feeding only grass (that's about a 40% drop compared to the usual grain diet), part of it is the fact that we milk once a day (about a 20% drop) as well. But the four biggest problems with our production were merrily bouncing and jiggling around the pasture betweeen frothy mouthfuls of milk.

Even though we sequestered the calves at night, we weren't getting half of our cows' production. Some of the cows were better than others, but a few of them would hold back their milk. Their teats would go dry while the udder was still bulgingly full. Hmmmmmm...

With our ever-growing herdshare requirements, something had to give, so one morning I shooed the cows back out of the barn after milking and moved the calves to a newly fenced off part of our yard. The mooing ensued. Momma cows were angry. Kids were angry. I just felt like a jerk.

The bellowing followed me back into the house when I sat down for my other job (the one that actually makes money). Despite the heat, I had to close the windows. The bellowing came through the walls -- a constant reminder of my cruel and abusive actions. It really didn't stop until about the third day. I'm sure the neighbors loved it even more than I did.

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The new combine worked beautifully on our oats, which we forked from the hay wagon into the combine, essentially just using it as a threshing unit. We discovered, however, that the hull-less oats have small hairs around the seed which the fan on the combine sprays all over. Think itchy fiberglass-dust. Even after putting everything through the wash, we could all tell when we put on the same clothes we were wearing on threshing day.

Though this is still a small-scale operation, it's much bigger than most anything we've done before. "Real" farmers use massive propane or natural gas grain dryers to get their grain down to a suitable moisture content for storage. In our case, I had to cycle it through the oven in small batches, which took nearly a week. Not sure how they did it before the advent of grain dryers. Corn is easy -- just put it in the corn crib while it's still on the ear, but with oats.....? Maybe leaving it in the shocks a while longer was the trick.

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Earlier in my life, I joked about writing a "cookbook" which would contain only meals that could be prepared and consumed in under 5 minutes. I didn't see a whole lot of point in spending time on anything related to food. Food was fuel, and who would want their life to revolve around gas stations?

Now every day of my life is devoted to food in one way or another. This is exactly what our ancestors have done for centuries, though most of us born in the 20th century have been lead to believe that it's below our dignity to grow or process our own food in the age of machinery and cheap labor from illegal immigrants. I think that this is what people should be doing instead of looking in vain for some sort of fulfillment from watching TV, or having a "hobby". I think we're all programmed to focus on food, whether we realize it or not. I think it's why fishing and hunting are so popular. While I was growing up, my stepmother would use up her vacation time by picking berries. At the time I thought she was wasting her precious vacation. Now I think she's on to something.

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Our khaki-campbell duck, quack-quack, went broody this summer and stayed with a clutch of eggs for several weeks until she finally hatched two of them. Rachel summoned us all to the barnyard when she took both of them down to the puddle for their first swim, which was really neat to see. Peeper (the ducks' father) was swimming in the puddle as well, and immediately ran over to the chicks and tried to kill both of them as we watched in horror. He suceeded with one before we could intervene, but we managed to save the second. Animals don't always see the world as we do, I suppose.

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I've felt a bit frustrated as of late with my own inability to ditch my pickup truck for good. I know full well that we're teetering on the edge of human extinction if we haven't already committed ourselves to it. I also know that most of the gasoline I'm burning here in Michigan is probably coming from tar-sands, making it *extremely* carbon intensive and damaging -- much more so than the gasoline from conventional oil that was running my car just a few short years ago. Reading articles like this makes me all the more determined to do something, but then I start to think about trying to haul lumber home, or feed, or fencing, or....

The truth is that 99.9% of my ancestors had none of these "needs" that I claim to have. I really shouldn't have them either, but I doubt that I could live like my ancestors in the society that we've built for ourselves. There's no doubt about it -- our lives in most countries are fully dependent on fossil fuels in hundreds of different ways. Choosing the low carbon option at this point -- as we should -- will mean the death of *billions* of people on this planet. The other option -- and the one which we look to be following -- will mean the death of all 7 billion of us along with most other life on the planet. We don't have good choices at this late stage in the game.

Next time you're wondering why no politician is capable of doing anything substantial to combat global warming, just ask yourself how long you think they would live if they actually did do something substantial, such as phasing out all fossil fuel use over the next year or two. They'd be hanging from a light pole in a matter of minutes, I suspect. This sort of change has to come from the grass roots, or it will never come at all.

The Learning Curve

2011-07-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

Our first and second cuttings of hay are all safely in the barn now. Both cuttings were made with a clear 5 day forecast which changed to include rain a day after the hay was down. In both cases we just managed to squeak through and avoid the thunderstorms that make up most of our rain at this time of year. Perhaps it's a good lesson in humility for me, as there's really nothing you can do if your hay gets rained on. On the other hand, it has lead to a serious case of OCD as I fight the urge to check the latest radar animations every few minutes.

The first cutting was 100% horse powered. The second cutting was about 50% in the barn when the hay loader suffered a mechanical problem that I wasn't sure I would be able to fix, so we opted to finish with the assistance of our great neighbors, Stan and Sharon, and their baler. When the equipment you use hasn't been manufactured for 70 years, you can't just run down to the local tractor supply and find replacement parts.

The new 1951 Allis Chalmers "All-Crop" 60 combine -- yet another Craigslist find

I'm still learning a lot about growing small grains. The oats we planted earlier this year did well, but the weeds grew worse and worse as harvest time approached. I ended up purchasing an All-Crop combine, and learned that weeds will make combine harvesting difficult, due to their high water content making a mush in the threshing cylinder.

In Gene Logsdon's excellent Small Scale Grain Raising book, he suggests cutting the oats and windrowing them (as with hay) before harvesting, which allows the oats to ripen while drying out the weeds. I cut and windrowed the oats along with our second cutting of hay last week, so they're ready to be picked up by the hay loader now for manually feeding through the combine. Guess I'll see how that goes.

Yeah -- I know. Combines aren't exactly in line with my low carbon goals. The problem is that there don't seem to be any good low-carbon methods of threshing any significant volume of grain. The Amish in this area typically use a grain binder, and then take the shocks of grain to an old fashioned stationary threshing machine powered by a tractor. Not a bad solution, but I figure if I'm going to use gasoline for one part of the process, I might as well use it for the whole process. Stationary threshing machines are huge (and all very old), and I'd need another barn just to store it along with the grain binder I would need. I can justify this one on the fact that we purchase grain for our chickens and hogs anyway, and this should be somewhat less carbon intensive due to the fact that I'm doing most of the fieldwork with horses. When the gasoline dries up, I'll be in almost as bad of shape as anyone else, but at least I still have my grain cradle and a bathtub to thresh in!

Our corn was a bit of a challenge this year. Equipment problems delayed the planting, and the local crow and turkey population quickly discovered that each young sprout had a tasty kernel attached to it -- a problem I haven't had with my last two plantings. I ended up re-planting the corn very late (June 5th), and put up a scarecrow. I'm not sure if the scarecrow did any good or not, but the end of the field where I placed it does seem a little less sparse than the other end now. The corn is up about 7', but still has a way go go, with no tassels yet.

Our garden buckwheat patch (with white flowers)

The small patches of buckwheat we planted at either end of the garden are producing lots of seed now, but the plants are so green and lush that I can't imagine how we'll be able to dry them for threshing. Many of them lodged as well, so might be difficult to harvest.

I think this is the first truly miserable stretch of weather I've experienced since moving to Michigan 3 years ago. Temps have been in the 90's with heat indexes in the low 100's. I'm sweating even before I make it to the barn in the mornings, and am very much looking forward to fall now! Putting up hay in this kind of weather isn't particularly fun either. Bam-Bam (our merino ram) wants to get into the cool and bug-free barn so much that he started ramming the doors. This behavior was bolstered by some initial success before I finally got around to reinforcing them.

Our batch of Freedom Ranger chickens (a meat variety) went exceptionally well this year, with *zero* mortality (except for butchering day -- where we had 100% mortality). We took them to 11 weeks again this year, which makes for quite large birds. We've started another batch of cornish cross birds, which will be our first experience with this breed. Thus far we've lost a half dozen, though that may be a result of the awful heat we're now experiencing. On the plus side, they haven't needed a heat lamp. They'll be going out into the pasture pen here in about a week, so hopefully the mortality is all behind us now.

I’ve been looking ever since we arrived in Michigan. I figured that somewhere on our plowed fields I was sure to find an arrowhead eventually, but no such luck. I finally found one, while hoeing in our garden. It’s a 1” triangle point, a little lopsided but clearly handmade. I see it as a memento, from the last people to live here without trashing the place. They lasted 10,000 years before we gave them smallpox and shot them. We're looking as if we'll have the place trashed in 200 short years. But hey, look what we can do!

Speaking of arrowheads, I've noticed an ever growing contingent of people who have arrived at the same conclusion that I have, that we need to return to a non industrial society. Our problems arent simply that we produce too much carbon, or that we overfish the oceans, or that we like to raze the rainforest to grow chemically intensive soybeans for our factory farms. Our problem is that we are an industrial society which is relentlessly spending our environmental capital in a million different ways. We're driving the oceans to complete extinction with acidification. We're the primary culprit in the massive extinction event which is now underway before our eyes, and which will likely include ourselves within the next century, unless we manage to alter course.

This is the same idea now embodied in the movie "END:CIV", and in the writings of Derrick Jensen among others. It sounds ludicrous to many of the boomer generation, who seem to be almost universally convinced that the cornucopia of technology will solve all problems, but many of the folks in my generation or younger are seeing this as self evident. It's an idea worth exploring, if for no other reason than the fact that our society's current course is clearly suicidal.

Around the Farm

2011-05-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

After work this evening, a storm started to brew outside. To my dismay, it managed to wrap itself around us and leave us with almost no rain whatsoever, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, and snapped a few photos. Everything is so lush and green right now, and it looked dramatic against the dark sky with all the trees whipping around in the wind. Here's our new hand pump, looking out over the barnyard pond (aka Peeper the Duck's romantic puddle o' lovin) and the pastures.

On the left is our plot of naked oats, on the right is our hay/dandelion field, nearly tall enough to cut already.

Another spring delight -- one of the many dogwoods scattered around our woods. Henry took great pleasure in telling grandma (who loves dogwoods) that I cut one of these down to make a mallet.

The barnyard, looking back towards the house. The oaks are just breaking bud. The horses are lamenting the fact that I just locked them up to keep them from getting too fat.

Our ladies enjoying the nice tall grass. All the grazing books talk about letting the grass reach a certain height, and then pulling the animals off once the height has been reduced x number of inches. Our cows haven't read these books though, and often ignore the tall grass while concentrating on the short grass. If I had endless free time, I should be mowing the pastures after they're grazed, but that hasn't happened yet this year.

I thought that this year I would finally be able to keep the grass from getting too tall and going to seed. Should be easier now that we have a total of eight cows and calves, along with 3 horses and 8 sheep grazing. Well.... the reality is that the grass jumps by about a foot in height over the course of a week, and much of it is heading out already.

On a jaunt through the woods at this time of year we find Jack-in-the-Pulpit growing near one of the marshes on our property. Neat looking flower!

A terrestrial crayfish burrow. My grandparents had these living in their front lawn in southern Illinois, miles from any significant body of water. I would take a piece of bacon on a string and lower it down the hole until I felt the crawdad take hold and try to pull it. Then ever so slowly, pull it back up in a match of tug-o-war. I got them up high enough to see, but never high enough to catch before they let go. If I had more time I'd love to try that again.

We took a day earlier this month to check out a stream near our house. Had a beautiful walk through the woods to reach the creek. Found some musclewood -- a strange tree that has bark looking like muscles on a skinned animal, and a box turtle with red eyes. The creek meanders through a large meadow ringed by tamarack (which turn a beautiful yellow in the fall before losing their needles), where we saw no people whatsoever. Henry and I each caught a nice brown trout, though his managed to snap the line just as he was being landed.

Just before I caught my fish, a 3' northern water snake came floating down the creek, writhing around in the water and landing in the muddy bank right at my feet. He couldn't see me because the bullhead catfish he'd just caught had its mouth over his nose and eyes. He eventually managed to get it off and swallow it before continuing back into the creek.

Back in February while we were boiling maple syrup, I took advantage of the time between attending to the sap and fire by making a ladder to go between the basement and loft of the barn, using only wood from the farm, all mortise & tenon with wedges holding each rung. Much more aesthetic than the aluminum ladder it replaced, and it doesn't clang and scare the animals anymore when I throw a straw bale down from the loft.

Henry with the pile of wood he split himself. He worked on this for over an hour on his own initiative.   Quite impressive for a kindergartener!   Next year I'll save him a couple more cords to split.

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I keep hearing phrases these days such as "when the economy gets better", or "when gas prices come back down".   I wince a little every time I hear things like this. People are holding on to investments, or waiting for the job market to improve, or making new business investments that I think are doomed to failure. I'm not always right about everything, but I'm pretty sure that the economy will not be getting any better over the long term. Ever. I also think that's a good thing, so perhaps my own desires are clouding my judgement?    Let me explain...

The economy was we know it today is the economy of an industrial society. The lifeblood of industry is energy. The more energy we use, the wealthier we become.   Consider the fact that a ditch-digger from a century ago had a shovel to work with.   That same ditch digger today probably has a backhoe or an excavator, and can easily do the work of 20 people with shovels.   The productivity of this one person is dramatically enhanced.   The same is true of all sorts of industry. Over the course of the 20th century, home sizes more than doubled or tripled in many cases.   We have so much material wealth that it means nothing to us.   A screwdriver that was once the prized posession of a father from 100 years ago can be purchased for pennies today.   A box of nails was at one time worthy of bequeathing to your relatives in a will, for instance. People were poor, and we're all going to become poor again.

We're going to return to historical norms of wealth because our energy supplies are running out.   Nonsense you say?   Consider the fact that Mexico, our #3 oil supplier of a few years ago, is projected to have no more oil for export within 3 years. The oil fields of the north sea are in similar decline, as are the fields in Saudi Arabia and much of the middle east, to say nothing of US oil fields (we peaked 40 years ago).

Yes, we're finding new sources of oil all the time, but it's just not making up for the amount of oil production we're losing every year. We've been burning more than we find each year for over 30 years now. Canada, now our #1 supplier of oil, will simply be unable to meet our demand despite being having reserves "larger than Saudi Arabia", for the simple reason that they don't have enough water to process the tar sands at a rate which would meet our demand.   The kerogen in their sand isn't even really oil, but is rather the precursor to oil that would need to be cooked within the earth's crust to make oil.   They cook it with natural gas coming from wells which have dramatically decreasing EROEI's.

That says nothing of the horrible environmental impact of strip mining areas the size of whole states and creating rivers of processing effluent.   Nothing could be worse than tar sand oil from an environmental perspective.   It's probably the dumbest thing humans have ever done.  We're like the alcoholic that has been reduced to drinking listerine and is now eyeing a jug of kerosene. As Dick Cheney liked to say, "The American way of life is not negotiable". At least not until we end up in the gutter or the morgue, apparently.

As goes the oil, so will go our industrial economy, and so will go our retirement investments, our industry, and our jobs. Despite increasing demand, oil production has not increased since 2005 (or 2008, depending on what you count as "oil").   As the Shell geologist M. King. Hubbert predicted in the 1950's, we've hit the peak and are headed downhill.

Why is this a good thing?   I think it's good because the industrial economy is killing us. It doesn't take a genius to see what carbon emissions are doing to the ocean that feeds us and provides our oxygen. Nor should it take a genius to see that most of our coastal cities will be inundated as the polar icecaps melt.   It shouldn't take a genius to see that the complete loss of our arctic ice-cap (likely to happen this decade) will dramatically change weather patterns (this is already happening). Peak oil is our best chance at averting human extinction, because it's quite clear that we like our cars and electricity too much to give them up voluntarily.
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While I'm in doomer (or is it optimist?) mode, let's explain the concept of overshoot, and why I think this century will finish with somewhere between 0 and 1 billion humans regardless of how we play our hand.   Before we discovered the wonders of oil, the planet was more or less at capacity in terms of humans, and our population was roughly a billion people depending on the year you pick. Like a sugar packet being poured into a vat of yeast, oil has become our food, and we've responded just as the yeast would.  We have 10 calories of oil used to create 1 calorie of our food nowadays. So it's safe to say that 6 of our 7 billion people are now here because of the oil we're consuming. As the oil disappears, so will most of us.

Only it's not that simple.   In most biological systems, when a massive influx of food results in such a dramatic increase in population, there is a loss of base carrying capacity.   We read about this in the news on a daily basis, whether that's dying coral reefs, depleting topsoil, overfished oceans, Fukushima, or BP's little oopsie in the gulf. Oil is the crumbling crutch that supports 6 billion people.  When it breaks, our population will most likely drop below the original level of 1 billion as a result of this degredation in our planet's carrying capacity.
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Another pet peeve of mine these days.   People seem to think that the electricity we've grown to like over the last few decades is now a "need" rather than a want.   My local utility likes to talk about meeting our energy "needs" in their monthly newsletter. What amazes me is that people were able to survive before electricity ran our lives. The fact is that our "need" for electricity is little more than a want, and it's also suicidal.   We need to stop presenting ourselves with the false choice of "alternative energy" vs. nukes or coal plants.   None of the above is the only answer which might avert human extinction.

This is much like the question of how we'll "feed the world" that Monsanto likes to present. If we feed the world, we all know what happens, because it's been happening for centuries.   We make more babies, and thus have more to feed. There is no end to it, until we reach the point of feeding so many people that they destroy the planet with the byproducts of their existence. Feeding the world is suicide, but we won't voluntarily stop doing it.   The decline energy supplies will do it for us, however.   Famine won't stay cooped up in Asia and Africa much longer.

Working for Fun

2011-04-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

I suspect most of my old climbing and skiing buddies back in Washington think I've lost a few marbles after trading my former life of sailing, skiing, and climbing for a new life of manure, teats, weeds, and hay.  I certainly wasn't going to waste my life watching TV and mowing the lawn like so many people I knew, and running a farm seemed just a shade more tolerable than mowing a lawn for the rest of my life. I would've never wanted to tie myself down with daily milking chores.  Every spare dollar and minute I had was devoted to play.

Something changed for me. Maybe it was just getting older. Terrifying Rachel on one especially stormy sailing trip made it tough to take the sailboat (which doubled as our house) out for a weekend. The arrival of our son Henry added a new hurdle to any trip to the mountains (Are the diapers packed?   Sippy cup? Oh wait -- it's his nap time now!).  Then there were my nagging doubts that driving 100+ miles to get to the mountains and back wasn't exactly a model of environmental responsibility, particularly in light of new knowledge about ocean acidification and the acceleration of climate change.  Playing on the weekends also seemed to lack a sense of purpose that became increasingly important for me.  Added up together, the reasons began to make my usual "fun" a little less so.

Around 2004, a friend loaned me a couple of books by Richard Heinberg (The Party's Over and Power Down). At the time I had pretty much written off any concerns over peak oil.   I was smugly confident in the fact that alternative energy sources would be found, just as my economics classes suggested they would. Heinberg's books did a good job of shooting down that idea, and made me think that I might want to alter course in preparation for what was coming.

Another event played a role as well.   My son started bringing home the "disease of the week" from daycare. A chronic sinus infection set in, and I made repeated trips to the doctor for an antibiotic which would resolve my constant fever and fatigue. I had a CT scan of my sinuses to see if there was anything requiring surgery. The CT scan came back with notes of a "possible meningioma", which didn't exactly brighten my mood. After 9 months I finally found an antibiotic that worked, and a year later I went in for an MRI to settle the question of the brain tumor, which didn't exist after all. In the elapsed time, I decided that it might be a good idea to take my health a little more seriously, and that meant taking my diet seriously.   I discovered the Weston A. Price foundation, which dramatically changed my views on good food vs. bad food.

So did I in fact trade a life of fun and adventure for a life of monotony and drudgery? Not at all! Well... not most of the time anyway.   The many animals on our farm ensure that there's never a dull moment, and continuously amaze me with their intelligence and affection. Every day I'm learning something new and interesting about them. It turns out that even the "drudgery" of forking manure isn't that bad either.   Just this evening, our border collie pup decided to try and catch every cowpie I flung on the manure heap, which turned it into a game for both of us and an unwelcome bath for her.

Working with horses has been a real learning experience, and taking Bobby out in the buggy is a blast as well. On our last trip this week, we were flagged down by an Amish man who was working on a house nearby.   He was surprised to see a buggy so far away from the usual Amish haunts, and perhaps even more surprised to see that the driver wasn't Amish. When I explained that the buggy was one of my ideas for dealing with energy scarcity, he agreed that it was a good idea, and lamented the fact that many of the Amish are just as dependent upon fossil fuels now as are their "English" counterparts ("English" is the Amish term for all of us non-Amish).
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So what's new on the farm these days?

We've put up a greenhouse alongside the garden, which we're really looking forward to using.   That should extend our growing season by a couple months at the very least, and allow us to produce salad greens year-round now.   It's nothing huge (16x28'), just a hoop house, but should meet our needs for now.

The well we put in last year is all ready for the hand pump, which should be installed here in about a week. Considering that we typically go through 100 gallons a day for the animals alone, I don't think we'll shut our electric pump down anytime soon, but it will be nice to have a manual option, particularly when the grid goes down in a couple years due to the upcoming solar storms, at which point it will likely stay down.

Okay, okay -- chances are that such a storm wouldn't affect the whole US, but it's a possibility. I wouldn't need electric lights when the grid goes down, 'cause the nearby Palisades and Cook power stations will keep the night sky glowing with their meltdowns.   As this nuclear engineer notes, nukes don't do well without a functional electric grid. Each nuclear power plant is a bold statement that there will never be another war, terrorism incident, natural disaster, or dumb mistake.   Maybe us humans deserve the fate we've created.   Back to the farm...

The garden is all ready to go; peas are planted, and potatoes will likely go in tomorrow.   We just planted a half acre of "hull-less" oats, which will be our first experiment with small grains. My only harvesting equipment is a grain cradle for now.   Chances are we'll be hand-tying the sheaves and threshing with flails. I keep thinking that an old pull-behind combine like an Allis Chalmers All-Crop would be nice though...

Field corn will be going in here in a couple weeks.   This year I've decided to try Reid's yellow dent instead of the Henry Moore (both open-pollinated varieties), for the sole reason that it will fit the seed plates on my planter better. It's either that or find a new planter, because my 100 year old Deere & Mansur planter is too old and obscure to find new seed plates for. Otherwise, I think we'd continue planting the Henry Moore.

While plowing our garden with the horses a few weeks ago, I realized that the left line wasn't responding due to a buckle hooked on the check-rein.   Losing steering is always a bad thing with horses, and this was no exception. Horses naturally like to freak out.  They took the walking plow for a spin through the orchard (fortunately missing all of the trees) and ended up coming to a stop in the raspberries I'd just wired up. The only damage was to a couple wires and some raspberry canes, but both of the old leather harnesses had multiple tears.

I decided that it was probably time for a new set of harnesses anyway, so we're waiting on those at the moment.   The new harnesses use a different design to avoid the problem we encountered, though I'm sure I can still find a different way to screw things up. But every cloud has a silver lining.   While we're waiting for the new harnesses, we've been super productive while we use the tractor for everything.

Winter Update

2011-02-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

Our ewes started lambing a little early this year, with two that popped out the last weekend in January while I was taking a blacksmithing class at Tillers. Temps dropped to -4F last week. Though the lambs were under a heat lamp, that's still pretty cold.

They both developed a cough which we feared was pneumonia (the most common cause of mortality among lambs), but they seem to be holding out alright and don't have a temperature. One of them is a ram, who I just banded this morning. "Banding" is the nice term for castrating with a special rubber band. All things considered, he took it very well. Better than I would anyway.

Rosie

The herdshare dairy is doing well, with new customers trickling in as well as existing customers purchasing more shares. We've purchased our fourth cow, a Jersey we dubbed "Rosie". She's expected to calve in about a week, which should be just in time. If we count the calves, hers will put us at 7 cows.

As a matter of curiosity, I counted the number of teat squeezes it takes to fill our milk bucket. It's about 2,000 squeezes per cow or roughly 1,000 per gallon.

The cows are going through a lot of hay, which forced us to venture down to the hay auction in Middlebury. We bought two nice loads which all the cows like (that's been a problem before -- they're *very* picky cows!).

Just as I was leaving the office at the hay auction, I was accosted by the Amish puppy-peddlers who had exactly what I'd been recently contemplating. Now we have a 9 week old border collie. "Clover" likes to tinkle a lot, so I've been getting a little less sleep this week while trying to make sure the tinkle action is mostly outside. I'm hoping that someday she'll be able to round up the sheep or cows for us, but for now she's content to terrorize our carpets and barn cats.

__________________________

Bobby and I have been getting out pretty regularly, and I decided it was finally time to try a trip into Constantine, the less threatening of our two nearest towns. The drive there is wonderful -- most of it on gravel roads through a game area, with the balance made up of low-traffic roads through farmland. We only had about 1/4 mile of "scary" road, where we have to be on the highway to cross a bridge.

The trip to town went well, but it was cold (temps in the teens). I tied Bobby up to a tree at the boat launch, and then ventured across the street to a cafe for lunch and warmth. I kept a nervous eye on him, as Bobby has managed to loosen his lead rope and escape when tied up before, but he behaved well this time. A little girl convinced her mother to stop the car so they could get out and pet him.

As we turned back onto the highway for the trip home, I took the left lane over the highway bridge, knowing that I would have to turn left shortly after we crossed. Bobby doesn't like semi trucks, btw. One truck came up on our right and slowly passed us. Then another line of trucks came at us in the opposite lane. Bobby started galloping through his own personal hell, despite me pulling the lines back as far as they would go. I unclenched my bladder muscles and thanked him for staying in his lane as we turned off of the highway and slowed back down to a trot.

They say sailing is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror. Driving a buggy is a lot like sailing.
__________________________

Rachel has been taking advantage of the recent snowfall (which looks as if it will be melting this week, unfortunately) on her x-c skis, with me tagging along when I finish my morning chores early enough. Bilbo the sausage-dog goes along too, but has managed to maintain his portly physique despite the new exercise regimen.

Henry and I took some time this last weekend to check out the local ski area -- a whopping 10 minutes from our house, with a dramatic 225' of vertical. He became master of the rope-tow, and by the end of the day was already making parallel turns.
__________________________

In case you hadn't noticed, Mother nature is starting to swing her axe, solving the problems we refuse to face with her somewhat unpleasant methods. In the last 12 months, we've seen major climate related crop failures on nearly every continent but Antarctica, which suffered a 100% crop loss. Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, China, Brazil, Australia, and now Mexico have all seen significant losses. The current political turmoil in Egypt is in many ways a result of these crop failures, as they're the world's largest wheat importer. They also lost the ability to export oil (and pay for their food) last year. Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC bank in Canada, has an excellent article that spells it out. Mubarak was the least of their problems. James Kunstler penned a fantastic blog on Egypt as well. The first paragraph alone is an absolute gem!

It's only a matter of time before this hits the US, and will likely collapse our questionable dollar which is already burdened by our massive debt and the need to import 2/3 of our fuel. Do you think the already strained electrical grid will remain running if that happens? Could you still get clean water if the grid collapses and fuel becomes unavailable? Food? Heat? For most of us, the answer is no, and the results will not be pleasant. Our fully automated society isn't as resilient as it was even 50 years ago. Now is a good time to cover your bases, because you won't be able to do it afterwards.

On the plus side, a collapse of industrial society is our best chance throw a monkey wrench into the processes that the climate models are warning of. Business as usual will otherwise raise us by 4 degrees C by mid century - which the geological record suggests will drive all large mammals (like us) to extinction. Isn't it nice to know that us humans are smart enough to avoid such a terrible mistake?

The Allure of Poverty

2010-12-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

Being as I am a contrary sort of fellow, I see the dairy as having a greater long term potential than my normal "day job", where I work for a software company that supports equipment dealerships around the country. The declines in world energy production will ultimately have a significant and negative impact on the equipment industry (among other things), eventually impacting my job as well.

With this in mind, I decided to sit down and run some numbers. At one time I figured we could realize an annual profit of about $4,000 per cow, which I still think is entirely possible if I weren't stuck on maintaining my ideals (grass-only feeding, calves remaining with their mothers, etc). While I didn't figure out a "per cow" profit this time around, I did calculate the hourly wage that I'm making. So long as I don't try to amortize any of our capital investments (farm, fencing, cows, hay equipment, etc), my optimistic Enron-style accounting says I'm raking in about $2/hr. Not too bad for a hobby, but not so great for a primary career choice.

So let's just say that the slight pay differential between life as a programmer and life as an idealistic dairy farmer makes it very difficult to choose the latter in lieu of the former. When the time comes that "dairy farmer" becomes the better (or only) option, I'm hoping that $2/hr might actually be a good wage, but at that point money might not have any value anyway. For now, I have a renewed love of programming.

____________________________

Our hogs and lambs have all returned from the butcher in neat little packages that have taken up residence in the freezer.

I thought it would be difficult to eat an animal that I'd raised. I wanted separation. A firewall. I didn't want to have to reconcile the death of an intelligent creature with the food I would be eating. I didn't want to name any of the animals that were destined for the butcher, because I thought it would be easier to think of them as faceless objects or numbers. I didn't want to be eating a "pet".

I've changed my mind now.   The fact is that I did love the animals we butchered, and I'm glad that I did. I watched the lambs being born, and helped them find their first milk. I loved watching them bounce around the pasture in the spring, playing the universal game of chase.

I remember the two very cute piglets in the back of the pickup on the hot day in July when they arrived, and how "Popcorn" immediately took a nice cool bath in the stock tank. I remember how much they relished the first field corn I picked and dropped in their pen, and how excited they were when I came to them with a bucket of surplus milk.

There's no shame in ending an animal's life to turn it into food.   The true crime is to have no knowledge -- and thus no true appreciation -- for the life that becomes your food.

The New Slavery

2010-11-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

As a brilliant inventor and statesman, a progressive farmer, and a tireless advocate for liberty and morality, Thomas Jefferson has a rightful place as one of our nations most respected founding fathers.   But despite his many excellent qualities, he actively and knowingly destroyed the lives of other people for his own personal gain. Over the course of his life, Jefferson was known to have owned 600 slaves.

How is it that somebody who was so obviously brilliant and otherwise morally outstanding plays a part in the destruction of 600 people's lives? A character flaw, perhaps?

As with any other person, Jefferson's benchmark for morality was set by the norms of the society he was a part of.   With a few notable exceptions, that society had no qualms with the enslavement of other people for their own personal gain. Something which would appear to be unquestionably immoral to an outside observer was thus unquestioned by the society that benefitted from this behavior.   Morality was based not on right or wrong as we would like to think, but rather upon a lemming-like consensus among peers.

You and I are no different. We base our moral benchmark upon the norms set by our present day society - not upon right vs. wrong.  Not only does the collective conscience of our society turn a blind eye to our behavior, but it effectively punishes those who would question it.

The primary difference between Jefferson's moral failure and our own is that his actions had direct impacts on people he knew and saw on a daily basis. Our moral failures are a bit more nebulous, and thus more difficult to address.  All we can be sure of is that our actions are likely to destroy the life of people unknown, in ways we can only guess at. In fact, our own lives are likely to be among those destroyed - by ourselves.

Though Jefferson did speak out against slavery and make efforts to end it, he remained a slave owner until his death. I'm sure the benefits to be realized as a slave owner were very difficult to give up. I know I'll be the same in this regard, as the benefits of my fossil fuel use are also very difficult to forego. I'll continue to destroy the lives of people and animals unknown, for my own personal gain and convenience. But I still plan to chip away at my own dependence.

Truth be told, no human has ever walked the earth without adversely affecting other people or animals. Our ancestors hunted desirable species to extinction, negatively altering their own environments. Our agriculture has had negative impacts all the way back to its infancy in Mesopotamia. It's simply not possible to be a no-impact human. It is possible to be a low impact human, however. Modern American society makes each of us far more destructive than our ancestors by an order of magnitude. Each of us needs to strive for lower impact, both as a moral imperative as well as for the self interest of perpetuating our species.

The thing is, we'll never know exactly which of our actions were responsible for which effects. Just as the x-ray of a lung cancer patient has no Marlboro logo which would allow us to determine the exact culprit, no future dustbowl will come with a BP or Peabody Coal logo.

I believe that the massive and unprecedented heat wave and fires in Russia are a direct and tangible result of my own fondness for driving to the mountains so that I could go skiing. But nobody will ever be able to pin it on me. Am I innocent because everyone else was also driving cars too?

Favorite Season

2010-11-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

I like winter. The trees whistle as the wind blows through their leafless branches. It reminds me of one of my other favorite sounds -- wind whistling through the sailboat rigging in a marina during a storm.

In spring, just after we're done with our maple sugaring, the peepers (listen to them here) come out, soon to be followed in summer by the orchestra of bugs running day and night.

Fall seems to be the quiet season, but what it may lack in sound is made up for with a spectacular color display.

There's also a "feeling" that goes with fall. Contentment, perhaps. The barn is full of hay, the wood pile is stocked for winter, and everything we raised this summer is now stuffed into the freezer, pantry, or root-cellar. We're still busy, but the sense of urgency is gone. There's no hurry to get the hay put up before the next rainstorm hits.

Two weekends ago we used the horses to spread some of the barnyard manure on our hayfield. Everything went well until the 5th load, when one of the drive chains broke. It didn't bother me a whole lot, 'cause I was ready to take a break anyway, and it should be an easy fix.

The break gave me the chance to take Bobby out for another drive, which I wanted to do anyway. We've been getting out once a week, averaging about 10 miles. There are miles of gravel roads just south of our house, weaving through a wooded wildlife area bordered by small farms. Couldn't ask for a nicer spot to take a sunday drive.

Twice now, we've passed an elderly woman sitting in a lawn chair in her front yard, bundled up and enjoying the fall weather. She absolutely lights up when she sees us, waving enthusiastically. That never happens when you're driving a car.

10 miles seems to be about Bobby's limit without taking a rest. Anything much more than that and he starts to slow down. That's one of the reasons that older towns were rarely spaced more than 10 miles apart; it simply wasn't practical to travel much more than that before the advent of cars.

________________________________________

Our old ram Thunder wore out his genetic welcome, spurring us to find some new blood for the flock. It just so happened that Tillers International (where I took my draft horse classes) was looking to sell their merino ram. I remembered him from my classes, where he always tried to parade in front of the horses when we hitched them up. As luck would have it, someone living just a couple miles from Tillers was interested in Thunder, so we dropped him off and picked up our new ram on the same trip. Thunder found himself with two nice ewes, who immediately garnered his attention and made him forget all about the traumatic move.

Bam-Bam, as we've named the new ram, looks quite impressive with his large curled horns -- like a rocky mountain bighorn sheep. He felt right at home with our draft horses, who look just like the horses he's familiar with from Tillers. He walked up to each horse, extended his right hoof in the air (as if to shake hands) while cocking his head to one side and flicking his tongue. Bruce (our lead Belgian draft horse) wasn't so keen on this new self-appointed friend, and tried to kick him.

Bruce knew I didn't like that behavior, and sulked a bit as I scolded him. Walking back to the barn, I turned around just in time to see Bruce pick Bam-Bam up in his mouth (ala Tyrannosaurus Rex) and drop him. I half expected to find Bam-bam mortally wounded with a massive chunk of flesh hanging from the middle of his spine, but he appeared to be unscathed and undeterred.

_________________________________

We've been looking at wood stoves to replace the electric stove in our kitchen. The new stoves go for somewhere between $4,000 to $7,000, which seems a bit much. They also use a lot more sheet metal where the older stoves use cast iron.

We finally found a neat old 1930's Kalamazoo Stove Company model for a good price, which we'll be cleaning up and installing some time this winter. I was especially fond of this stove because it has a water jacket; essentially a loop of pipe near the firebox which allows the stove to function as a hot water heater.

Slowly but surely, we're chipping away at our electricity use. Some appliance replacements are easy. The wood cook stove, while it will be a bit less convenient than the electric stove, isn't such a big change. Going without a dishwasher takes a bit more time as well, but it's not a big deal either (Rachel disagrees). The refrigerator could be replaced with an ice box (got one) and icehouse (not yet built), but that will be a big drop in convenience. As it is now, I don't think we have the time required to make many more changes.

I think two of the most difficult appliances to do without will be the washing machine and freezer. Right now we can toss a load of laundry into the washer on a whim. Historically, most families had a designated "laundry day" each week. Losing a few hours a week would be a big deal.

There really is no non-electric equivalent for the freezer, unless you count a smokehouse and lots of salt, or canning and dehydrating as an alternative. There's always the option of a solar powered freezer, but the associated battery banks, charge regulators, panels, and the appliance itself are all both expensive and complex, and thus prone to high maintenance. They would contain enough embodied energy to negate any environmental benefits. Suffice to say that the regular AC powered freezer is a huge convenience that will be sorely missed someday.

Yet the fact remains that most people in the world get along just fine without *any* of these appliances. I guess it's all a matter of adjusting the paradigm we've come to accept as "normal".

I figure that our low energy future will look a lot like our low energy past. Travelling more than 10 miles will be an unusual occurence. I'll bet that we don't wash each garment after a single day's wear. A closet full of clothes will be something for the wealthy, whereas most of us will probably return to the historical norm; one set of work clothes, and another set of dress clothes (if we're wealthy enough for the latter).

A 3,000 sqare foot home will again be a mansion or a multiple family dwelling both because the materials to build or maintain a house of that size will be prohibitively expensive (if they're available), and heating such a space will also be expensive and/or laborious.

I don't see this as a grim future, however. It's just a change. Some of it will be good, some of it bad. It'll just be different from our present reality. Embracing it before it embraces us seems like a good idea.

_______________________________________

Some of our hens have discovered that the new hay feeder makes an excellent high-security nesting box.

Adventure

2010-09-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

We've had the buggy out a few times now, with Rachel and Henry even daring to ride. Bobby has been doing well; occasionally shying from odd things at the side of the road (such as a plywood silhouette of a horse and buggy), but behaving well around traffic. We'll give him a little more time on the backroads though before I dare to venture with him into town.

Due to my lack of experience, I wasn't exactly sure how hard I could push him. I let him walk up most small hills and continue walking for a while after each one so that he could rest up. But then on a return leg, he voluntarily trotted up each hill with no hesitation whatsoever. It's apparently much easier to pull the buggy towards home than it is to pull it away from home.

We've started harvesting some of our corn, an open pollinated variety called "Henry Moore". The tallest stalks are about 14' -- some of the ears are sitting at over 8'. The deer were nibbling at it when it was in the silk stage, but have pretty much stopped since then. Henry and I harvested a small garden wagon load by hand, which we've been feeding out to the hogs. It certainly won't be enough to meet all of their feed requirements, but it is neat to be able to provide some of their feed ourselves.

Speaking of the hogs... While walking around in the hog enclosure with Rachel and Henry, one of the hogs started nibbling on our dog Bilbo's leg. At first he assumed it was playfulness, and reacted accordingly. Then the hog persisted and started biting a little harder, at which point Bilbo realized with horror that he was on the menu. He quickly forgot about it though, and followed Rachel back into their enclosure the next day. When I wandered over to talk to her, Bilbo was hiding in the bushes, afraid that the pigs were going to eat him again. He only came out after we assured him that they were gone.

------------------------------

A lot of people wonder exactly why we're doing what we're doing out here on our farm. Really, what's not to like about starting a business where we'll likely never make more than $5/hour if we actually turn a profit? As an added bonus, the raw milk dairy we've started also makes us a likely target for MDA/USDA raids, as has happened with many similar operations. Who wouldn't want to have their computers and files confiscated indefinitely as they did with this nearby dairy, or have a gun pointed in their face?

How about spending untold hours cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking 7 cords of firewood, when we could cheaply heat with propane and have our weekends freed up? Or how about growing our piles of potatoes, spending hours planting, weeding, and harvesting, when we could easily purchase them for a fraction of the cost (if we count our time as money). Why work the farm with horses when tractors are clearly cheaper, more capable, and easier to use? Or why farm at all when it's so much easier to buy our food? What's with the whole Amish buggy thing when we have two perfectly reliable cars sitting in the driveway?

I've been asking myself these same questions. Sometimes I'm sure I know the answers, and other times I'm not so sure. Thus far, the answers still seem to make sense, as we keep doing everything. Here are the answers that work for me...

Green Acres
Most everyone has a bit of nostalgia for "The Country Life", though most folks are smart enough to shy away from acting on it. There are all sorts of benefits to living a rural life, like the freedom to go tinkle just about anywhere we want to.

I suspect this is how my grandmother views our endeavors. She makes lots of comments about clean country air and the like when I speak to her on the phone. But I suspect she still thinks we're nuts, and will soon come to our senses.

Adventure -- The Cure for Boredom
I don't like sitting still. Spectator sports bore me to tears, as does most TV programming. I'm the sort of person who will walk for an hour to avoid waiting 10 minutes for a 10 minute bus ride to the same destination. I haven't endured a single minute of boredom since we moved here.

Last night I got to wrestle with a very agitated Maggie the cow as I put her in our shoeing stocks to get an infected foot bandaged up. After two hours of pulling her to the stocks, dodging kicks, well aimed geysers of manure, and her urine soaked tail, I was definitely not bored. I wasn't very clean, either.

Peak Oil
I've made references to this before. Suffice to say that I think the near future will be very different as global oil production begins to decline. Food and manufactured goods will become both scarce and expensive. The economy turns south on a permanent basis (oh wait -- that's already happening!), leading to feedback loops which I think will ultimately result in the collapse of the electrical grid. I wouldn't be the least surprised if it leads to a collapse of industrial civilization within my lifetime (which is a good thing for the survival of the human race).

The more I prepare, however, the more I realize that my preparations are likely futile. I figure it's always good to hedge your bets though. Growing our own food and running the farm with draft animals seems prudent given what I believe is coming. So does buying a buggy. They might help us transition to a low-energy world if the transition is of the slow variety, but I suspect the transition will be tumultuous enough that they won't make much difference in the end.

Sure -- none of the stuff we're doing is necessary at this moment in time, but I see it all as having significant educational value. It makes sense to know how to do this stuff before it may become a necessity. I know a lot of folks have a "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" attitude, and I think it's going to bite them. Build your boat before the floods arrive, eh?

Climate Change
Continuing with my Chicken Little theme, I really do think the sky is falling. You'd have to be nuts to believe that we can release an eon's accumulation of fossil carbon into our atmosphere without significant consequences. We're already witnessing the death of the oceans -- an event which many people don't seem to recognize the significance of. Anyone seen this google map of the recent fires in Russia? Think of it next time you hop into your car or fly somewhere for vacation.

I'm not worried about saving the planet -- it's us humans I'm worried about. I think we're probably past the point of no return as far as CO2 emissions are concerned, but... it's always good to hedge your bets, as I said. That's why we're spending weekends cutting wood and learning to use fossil-fuel free transportation.

Henry has developed a new tool which may help us convince people to give up their fossil fueled lifestyles. It's still in the development stage, but looks quite promising.

Henry and his new brain-wave transmitter

Tractors never do this

2010-08-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

Doc bolted right for me, as Bobby ran for cover and made me wonder if I should do the same thing. He'd never been aggressive before, but...

Just as I was contemplating my fate, Doc spun 180 degrees and came to a screeching halt, presenting me with his enormous fanny just inches from my face. Planted firmly above his tail was a ~~small bird~~ horsefly which I promptly slapped. It made a satisfying "crunch" as the blood he'd been sucking splattered all over my arm. Doc thanked me and looked quite relieved.

This is fly season, which makes me glad I'm not a horse. The horseflies around here approach 1.5" long, and seem to be especially bad this year. The horseflies don't bother people too much, unlike the smaller deerflies that like to play "trampoline" on the back of my head. They seem to be genetically programmed to only land in this spot, such that you never actually see them. Even if the sun's not shining, I always curse myself for forgetting to put on a hat when they're around.

I had lots of things figured out before we started farming that haven't worked out too well in practice. One of those things was the promotion of dung beetles. Why are dung beetles such a big deal? Because they bury cowpies and displace the face-fly maggots who otherwise inhabit them and grow up to harass every animal on the farm. Most people unknowingly kill the beetles with wormers such as Ivermectin, and have never seen them.

I was quite excited last year to discover that we do have dung beetles, such as the rainbow scarabs shown here. Tunnelers like these are the best, since they actually dispose of the cowpies by digging tunnels underneath and then packing them with egg filled dung balls. Another type is the "dweller", which just lives out a life of bliss while crawling through the food it likes best. I'm sure their world is very much like the "Land of Chocolate" envisioned by Homer Simpson.

I've done my best to avoid the use of dung-beetle killing wormers, but it just doesn't seem to do the trick. They're around, but not in enough numbers to bury many cowpies. Last year I blamed it on the arrival of Doc and Bruce (our draft horses), who had undoubtedly been wormed. This year, Bobby (our driving horse) and Shasta (our newest cow) could be to blame. Maybe the beetles will take over next year, but I'm not holding my breath.

We've got some organic fly spray, which is just a bunch of essential oils (cedar, cinnamon, thyme, etc) blended with mineral oil. Doc knows what it's for, and lets me spray him down with it. Bruce, on the other hand, runs away from me like a two-thousand pound sissy when he sees the sprayer. The cows run away from the sprayer as well. It ain't cheap, but it does seem to work for the animals who hold still long enough to let me douse them. The conventional sprays all use permethrin/pyrethrin, which are actually quite dangerous neurotoxins, so I've been avoiding them.

Let's all hope for a nice early killing frost!

A Tale of Two Piggies

2010-08-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

We have two hogs now, both purchased from an Amish family whose chicken butchering services we've been using. It was a very hot day when they arrived, so we showed them the water right away. This one knew just what to do with it.

Hogs are omnivores just like people, and are known for eating people who pass out or die in their pen. Our hogs don't seem to feel the need to wait for either event, and are both interested in eating me no matter how lively I am (they gnaw on my leg when I'm in their pen). So I guess we're even, now that we both want to eat each other. Hopefully I'll eat them first.

Our broiler chickens have all gone to Freezerland now. We're quite happy with the breed, a newer variety called "Freedom Rangers". They dressed out to a nice 4-5lbs at 11 weeks, and are quite tasty. Although one kicked the bucket (heart attack?), we had no health problems with them whatsoever, aside from the few I ran over with the portable pen.

The more common Cornish Cross (the meat bird raised in the US, aka "Great White Mutant") is known for twisted feet, high mortality rates, and poor foraging ability. But they also finish out in 8 weeks, which means much lower feed costs. We may try those next year just to see how our experience compares.

While I'm on the subject of home-raised chickens, I read recently about a Utah family whose daughters were found to have extremely high levels of arsenic, well above what's considered safe according to the EPA. How did they get it? It turns out that their family was using conventional chicken feed for their backyard flock of layer hens, which was essentially the same feed being used by comercial poultry growers. The commercial poultry growers now add ARSENIC to their feed, achieving the same increase in growth rates that poultry growers have been getting with antibiotics placed in the feed.

So guess what? Eat any "regular" grocery store or restaurant chicken lately? Not only are you getting your RDA of arsenic, but you're very likely getting a dose of FORMALDEHYDE, which is also used in poultry feed as well as in "sanitizing solutions" applied directly to the meat.

So let's see here... that same old chicken you buy at the grocery store now has: antibiotic resistant bacteria, arsenic, and formaldehyde (a known carcinogen) in addition to the usual load of salmonella and campylobacter (66% of all grocery store chicken has one or both types of these infectious bacteria). In addition to that, conventionally raised chickens are being fed a diet of corn and soy, both of which are most likely genetically modified to produce their own toxins, as well as being heavily sprayed with endocrine disruptors like Atrazine (60% of the US corn crop gets this) which are known to cause cancer as well. Anyone wanna go to KFC?

Arsenic in your chicken is yet another fine example of corporations displaying psychopathic behavior, as is very well documented in the movie "The Corporation". If you haven't seen it, go and rent it. It's well worth watching.

While you're gnawing on that chicken leg, let's talk about what makes these corporations behave the way they do. That's also your fault, btw. You know that IRA or 401k you have? The one that has recovered to about 75% of where it was back in '07? Yeah, that's it.

Let's say you've got a couple stocks and a handful of mutual funds. If the funds are anything like the mutual funds offered by my employer's plan, they're full of morally and ethically challenged companies like Monsanto, Halliburton, Wal-Mart, ConAgra, and Exxon.

You've invested in these companies, which makes you their master. Only you don't really exert any control over them. You're not actively involved in their management, so you exert no moral or ethical pressure. You're really just there for one reason, which is to get a little money. Sure, you may want them to act morally, and within the confines of the law. But you're really just there for the cash, and these corporations are designed by law to provide it for you. Whenever a decision is made that will affect your bottom line, they have no choice but to select the option which they believe will result in the greatest return on your investment. They do need to follow the law (or at least not get caught if they don't), but there's no requirement for them to behave ethically.

And really, it's not that hard for them to follow the law when they often write it themselves. The congressfolk they ~~bribe~~ lobby usually don't have much of a problem with the industry writing its own laws.

The Devil and I

2010-07-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

It happens all the time. In conversation, I bring up my plans or goals for minimizing our use of fossil fuels, though I oftentimes wonder why after I've done it. A skeptic, with a wry twinkle in his eye, says something like "I think you'll really learn to appreciate that <insert any fossil-fueled machine> once you try using a <insert non-fossil fueled equivalent here>."

I think to myself, "Yes, but if we all keep using <insert fossil-fueled machine>, I can kiss my kid's future goodbye. Thanks for your concern, a--hole!"

In most cases, the "skeptic" is absolutely right. Using the fossil fueled machine is almost *always* much easier, more effective, more fun, more productive, quicker, safer, and cheaper (at least for now) than the human or animal powered equivalent. I must be naive to embark on a quixotic quest to avoid them.

So why does this skeptic, and the vast majority of humanity, effectively place their money on anything that uses fossil fuel, when they know what the consequences of that use are? I think we're in denial. We're in denial so deep that we refuse to even consider the consequences of our actions. If we've ever dared to glimpse at the future we know is coming, we shut the door on that thought and throw away the key. It's a wonderful human survival trait -- this ability to ignore unpleasant images of your own future and hope they never arrive. Occasionally, we get lucky. Time takes a turn, and the unpleasant situation is averted. Then again, ignoring a problem often makes it much worse.

The thing is, I'm one of these skeptics as well. My problem is that I don't have the ability to forget or deny the consequences of my actions after I've been made aware of them. I simply can't shrug off the fact that my use of fossil fuels is destroying not only my son's future, but the world I live in here and now. Even so, I'll probably still be one of the fossil-fuelaholics for quite a while to come. But I do plan to fight my addiction, for better or worse. I'll be like the smoker who has quit cigarettes on several occasions.

The differences between fossil fueled machines and the alternatives are really dramatic. One gallon of gasoline can produce the equivalent amount of work as a person working for three weeks, in one figure I read. For $2.85 (or about 20 minutes of work at a modestly paid job), I can buy three weeks of work. What a deal! It would seem there is a point at which the deal is so incredibly good that it makes sense to just say "Screw the future -- I'm gonna burn me some gasoline!" Would you sell your soul to the devil if he made you a deal you can't refuse? It seems most of us already have. Is it ever a good deal, too! Heck, if the devil never sweetened the pot, nobody would ever deal with him.

This Fourth of July weekend was one of those times when the deals were just too good to pass up. For the devil and I, that is. This was the weekend we put up our second cutting of hay.

It started out well. Saturday morning, I tedded (that's basically stirring up your hay so it dries faster) one field and raked the second, both done with the horses. Saturday afternoon, I helped out with our neighbors who were baling one of the fields for us. I simply don't have the time to get everything done myself with horses, so this was a concession to the devil. It does beat the alternative of buying hay, since at least some of the work done on this hay was fossil fuel-free.

Sunday was to be a busy day. Started out with raking the remaining hayfield into windrows, and then continued with loading the wagon using the hayloader, all done with the horses. It was hot -- about 90 degrees. Squadrons of horseflies were out on patrol. The filtered sunlight seemed to have an orange glow that accentuated the heat. Doc (one of the draft horses on our team) got pissy and started backing up when he wasn't supposed to, jack-knifing the forecart against the hay wagon while Rachel had the lines.

We got him calmed down, but the little shot of adrenaline didn't really help out after I'd already spent hours in the hot sun. After we brought the first wagonload back to the barn, I tied the horses up to a convenient light pole in our yard, still hitched to the forecart. Something (probably another horsefly) got Doc excited again, so he started running around the pole, dragging the forecart and wrapping the halter ropes for both horses around the pole in a big mess. So I decided to give them a rest. That means unhitching each of them, taking off lines and halters, and bringing them in the barn so they could sit at a tie-stall and eat some hay, and then repeating the process in reverse. That adds another half hour of work to the operation.

Next, I messed up the grapples as I set them into the hay for unloading. Everything looked fine, until the trolley was up at the peak of the barn roof, but the trip line wouldn't budge. We had to bring the hay back down to the wagon to reset everything. I discovered three unique ways to mess up the grapples, each time requiring a re-do.

After two wagon loads of hay put up with the horses (with three remaining in the field), I was absolutely shot. Rain appeared in the forecast for the evening, just to make my day a little better. A quick shower came through, but not enough to hurt the hay. Knowing that Rachel was only in slightly better shape than I was, I decided to follow her suggestion to use the tractor for the third load. It was a life-saver. No time spent to harness up, no need to babysit it, and it didn't get scared by the "BIG SCARY HAY LOADER" the way Doc did when I walked him past it earlier in the day.

I figured that if I was going to make a deal with the devil, I might as well go for the deluxe package. So we used our Honda (a Honda Element) to pull the hay rope. But I didn't just use it to pull the hay rope. It had other fossil fueled amenities that I could partake of, which I did with great zeal. I had that AC cranked on full. Boy did it feel great.

We finished out the remaining two loads the next day using the tractor instead of the horses. Just avoiding harnessing time saved an hour right off the bat. Boy, is that tractor a neat tool. Thank you, Mr. Devil.

Calves, Cars, and Crackpots

2010-07-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

Our two cows which were due in June have both calved. Buttercup went first, with a bull calf we dubbed "Brisket" (aka "Limp Brisket"). His front feet were initially curled back a bit from sitting in the womb wrong, which made it impossible for him to stand right away as calves are supposed to. We brought the vet out, who splinted the legs to straighten them out. He was able to stand with the splints, but couldn't get up on his own, and wasn't nursing well, so we had to tube feed him. I didn't like it any more than he did. Finally, after a week, the splints had done their job. He was able to get up on his own and run around, and started nursing on his own.

Josie waited about 10 days before dropping her calf. After closing the chicken coop one evening, I noticed her standing in a corner of the barnyard with a couple hooves sticking out underneath her tail. I ran to go get Rachel. By the time I'd returned, a nose was out as well. Rachel yelled at me to hurry as I climbed over the barnyard gate, and I ran up to Josie just as "Blossom" plopped out unceremoniously on the dirt before I could catch her.

Buttercup was never a great hand milker, due to her smaller teets. We originally bought her while we were milking goats, and they seemed fine by comparison. However, with a fully engorged udder, the teets shrunk to half their original size, just like you would see the little "nipple" on the end of a balloon disappear as you blow it up. She became the bane of my existence. I had to lube up her micro-teets with udder balm and pinch between thumb and pointer finger, which I would then slide down the half inch that remained of each teet to get the milk out. Frequent resting was required to ease cramps in my thumb.

I resolved to sell her, and found a young guy from Indiana who planned to milk her along with the goats he and his fiancee already have. We sold her along with her calf, as I didn't want to separate the two after they'd already bonded. So now we're down to two adult cows, just Josie and Maggie. Maggie is about to be dried off in anticipation of her new calf due in September, so then we'll be only milking one cow. Might have to buy another, but am not sure yet.

One of the biggest problems we have as hand milkers is teat size. 100 years ago, it would've been no problem. With the advent of machine milking, larger teats have become nothing but a liability (cows sometimes step on their own teats), so the industry has been breeding for small teats ever since.

Though the process is not yet complete, we started pulling the trigger on going to oil-free transportation. Our new driving horse is "Bobby", a standardbred we purchased from an Amish farmer. The Amish use this breed extensively for their buggies, and frequently import them from horse-cart racing tracks, which is where Bobby was originally from. Our buggy and harness are on order, and should be arriving in mid July.

Bobby is a very nice horse, often coming right over to me when I call him. He desperately wants to be part of our existing horse "herd", but Bruce isn't too keen on this new guy, who is the proverbial 90lb weakling compared to the draft horses. He likes to keep Bobby in his place by biting him whenever he gets close enough. Bobby still grazes near them when they're out on pasture, but I have to separate them at night when they're in the barnyard.

We've had a very warm and wet June. Our barnyard blossomed into a muddy pit, which I'm trying to remedy with loads of wood chips. Our garden hasn't needed watering for a month, and my field corn is well ahead of the "knee high by the 4th of July" measurement -- it's already taller than I am. Our second cutting of hay is down and drying now, and will undoubtedly be keeping us busy this weekend.

Bilbo has succumbed to his bird-dog instincts, and has eaten 3 of our young turkeys now. The turkeys were pecking each other's beaks (one now has the soft portion near his nose completely pecked away), so we let them out a little prematurely in hopes of stopping this behavior. The Bourbon Red chicks seem to be especially vicious towards the larger Broad-Breasted Bronze turkeys, of which we're down to 3 now.

The herdshare business is going well, with a few new customers signing up in the last month. We might even be edging towards profitability if I ignore capital costs. Keeping Josie's calf on her has definitely cut production -- probably by a couple gallons per day -- so I'm thinking we may need to purchase a new cow to cover the gap when we dry off Maggie here in a couple weeks.

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On many of the websites I frequent, I see people singing the praises of "alternative" energy. Wind, solar, biofuels, electric cars, tidal energy, or energy storage mediums like hydrogen (which is not actually a source of energy) are all touted as saviors. If only we made the switch, we could all be driving our cars, heating our homes, and running our factories guilt free! (just so long as we ignore embodied energy anyway) These folks are often mystified (<----this link is definitely worth a watch, btw) by the fact that we haven't embraced these technologies yet. I agree with them that there are plenty of excellent reasons to wean ourselves of fossil fuels (the near term survival of the human race, for one), but I don't see the panacea that they see just around the corner. Here's why...

Every source of energy has an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). In the 1930's, oil wells often had an EROEI of 100:1. In 2000, The US averaged 10:1, and you can bet we've declined significantly since then. Deepwater wells (like the now famous well that Deepwater Horizon was drilling into the Macondo field) are quite a bit lower -- typicaly less than 5:1. Not only that, but many of our deepwater fields are producing less than 20% of what they were expected to produce. The Canadian tar sands -- which I understand are now our leading source of imported oil -- are at 3 or 4:1, depending on the source. Natural gas -- which is used to cook the oil out of the tar sands -- isn't much better.

The Hubbert curve of oil extraction is a symmetrical bell curve, and we're just past the top of the bell. The downhill slope, however, assumes an EROEI that is equal to the uphill side, which isn't the case. As EROEI declines, it makes the available energy decline much faster, as is shown in the third chart down on this page.

The natural gas industry seems to enjoy a slightly elevated image when it comes to pollution. However, with a very small (and relatively unavoidable) percentage of leakage, it can actually be much worse than coal for global warming. Newly developing gas fields, such as the Marcellus shale, were being touted as a breakthrough source of new energy for the US. It appears now that the breakthrough was one of duping investors in these fields, as they're not producing nearly what they were reputed to produce. People are also discovering that the gas extracted through hydrofracking in these fields often leads to poisoned wells, or flammable water in their faucets.

So, suffice to say that our sources of fossil energy are in trouble. Follow the curve down from 100:1 to 5:1 over the last 80 years, and it doesn't take a genius to see we're not so far away from 1:1. At an EROEI of 1:1 (and probably long before that), it's time to pack up and go home.  It's also easy to see that each gallon of gasoline we burn in our car today has a much greater carbon footprint than a gallon burned 10 or 20 years ago.   Keep in mind that worldwide consumption, despite the economic downturn (gee, what caused that?), has risen exponentially over the last century, meaning that we're burning through what we've got left at much greater rates than when any of us were born. Everything is accelerating, driven both by exponential population growth as well as exponential growth in per-capita energy use.

There is always nuclear energy, which many people falsely believe is carbon free. Fuel supplies are limited -- certainly not enough to satisfy current world energy use. As it's done currently, nuclear energy is fully reliant upon fossil energy for mining, processing, and reactor construction. The EROEI varies dramatically based upon the process used to enrich the uranium, and is typically better than our current sources of fossil fuel. But I simply don't trust it (and neither do insurance companies, none of whom are willing to insure a nuclear reactor -- they're all insured by the federal government here in the US). Why? Because humans make mistakes. Lots of them. We also like to bomb each other every so often, and cause general mayhem (particularly when energy resources become constrained). Both of these characteristics bode poorly for atomic energy. It only takes one mistake or act of aggression to poison a region for longer than human civilization has even existed. In my not so humble opinion, the risks far outweigh the rewards. In a half century of nuclear energy production in the US, we have yet to come up with a good solution for storing the waste, which is dangerous for 10,000 years. Is that a problem?

So why not wind?   I like wind power. I think it's a great idea. We've used it for centuries to do all sorts of things. But it has limited usefulness. The relatively low EROEI makes it viable only in certain areas, and it can be fickle. Most of these areas tend to be remote, difficult to maintain (particularly in the corrosive environment of marine installations), and far from transmission lines. The last issue can be resolved, but it's an expensive one. I think wind should have a place in our energy future, but it will never be able to fill in the massive gap that fossil fuels are soon going to leave us with.

Solar is also nice. Like wind, it's only viable in certain areas where it can pay for the solar installations. As with wind, these locations are often far from large population centers. It has a role in our future as well, but it would require *massive* installations to meet current worldwide energy needs (which are really just energy wants, btw). In an energy constrained environment, I don't think we'll have the money to pull it off on a large scale. The energy density just isn't there as it is with fossil fuel sources.

Biofuels.  For the most part, they're a joke, and fully reliant upon damaging and unsustainable industrial agricultural practices for nearly every crop grown. Grain based ethanol exists for one reason only -- because we subsidize corn prices with our tax dollars. The best EROEI numbers I've seen put it around 1.2:1. Most put it at below 1:1. Forget about it.   Biodiesel is slightly better, usually producing an EROEI of around 2:1. It also benefits from massive tax subsidies. There simply isn't enough land in the world to both feed us and grow our fuel. Cellulosic ethanol does supposedly beat the EROEI of grain based ethanol, but it's still pathetically low. The energy used by the tractors and irrigation equipment to grow it, the trucks to haul it, and the energy to manufacture all of this equipment is simply too much to justify creating this stuff.

What about electric cars?   GM is shipping the Volt this fall. Nissan has their new "Leaf". Why won't these take off?

First of all, electric cars aren't an energy source. They're simply a different means of energy storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere else. In the US, that's typically coal. You know -- the stuff that we're now destroying entire mountains and watersheds in Appalacia to get. The stuff that's covered the entire planet with mercury (such that no lake -- even those thousands of miles from coal burning -- has fish that aren't contaminated with mercury). The same stuff which the EPA now says is at brain damaging levels in 20% of our kids. It also has the highest carbon output per btu of our common fuels.  We don't want to burn more coal. "Clean" coal doesn't exist except in PR campaigns from Peabody coal. It's a theory, and if ever used, would require that we burn much more coal to power the sequestration equipment. There's plenty of reason to believe that the captured CO2 would eventually leak out anyway.

Another problem with electric cars is that the electric grid is inherently inefficient. About 7% of the electricity pumped into our grid is lost in the lines that bring it to your home. Further significant losses are incurred in charging the battery, and there are significant energy costs in producing the batteries, many of which aren't living up to range expectations, and aren't living very long themselves. The current grid isn't capable of feeding car chargers for everyone anyway.   The money to build a better grid simply won't be there now that our energy sources are drying up. Have I mentioned that our economy (or lack thereof) is directly tied to our energy use? (our current recession is a permanent result of energy decline, imho)

Perhaps I'm a pessimist. I've been accused of it before. But I do read a lot about energy issues, and that reading has me absolutely convinced that the world my son grows up in will be nothing like the world I grew up in. The answers to our "energy problem" don't lie in finding elusive new sources of energy, but in finding ways to live without energy, the way 99% of our ancestors lived, and the way much of the world's population still lives. The sooner we make the change, the easier it will be.

Figuring it all out

2010-05-31T18:55:00.000-07:00

This last week was a lesson in humility. For the first time we put up our entire hay field loose, using the hay loader and hay trolley/grapple forks in the barn. This has been a goal of mine for quite a while, as it's the only practical way to make hay without using a tractor.

Yes, it's much more work; of that there's little doubt. But it's much less work than trying to revive a planet we've put into cardiac arrest -- a requirement if we continue using tractors.

Suffice to say that there was a steep learning curve. I learned that it's not possible to back up a hay wagon into the barn. The only way to back it up is to disconnect and walk it while manually steering via the tongue. A fully loaded wagon doesn't always move too easily. It was hot -- in the high 80's. Good for drying hay, not so good for working. That's how haying always goes.

The hay trolley in the barn worked very well, but it takes a bit of technique though. You have to pull it hard back towards yourself at the center of the barn, fast enough that it trips the release at the center of the track. But you don't want to pull too hard, or 60lbs of sharp pointy steel will come crashing down on top of you from 30' above. I finally figured that I could loop the trip line around a beam, which lands the grapple forks well away from me.

It's hard to say exactly how much hay we put up when there are no bales to count. But, based upon last year's 2nd cutting which produced 160 odd bales, I think we put up the equivalent of 200 bales this time around. We can fit 4 600 foot long windrows on the wagon before we have to return back to the barn. With about 28 windrows, that's 7 trips to the barn and back (actually more like 8 or 9, since it took a few trips before we figured out that we could fit four of them on the wagon at a time).

Before we started, I figured that we'd pitch everything off of the wagon and into the hay loft by hand until it became too high, at which point it would become worthwhile to use the grapples. I was naive. The grapples can unload a full wagon in 4-5 bites, which is much easier than using pitchforks.

The horses pull the hay rope, which lifts a huge pile of hay up to the peak of the roof. As soon as it reaches the trolley, the trolley trip is released, and the whole assembly flies to the end of the barn where it hangs until I pull the release on the grapple forks, when a few hundred pounds of hay drops to the floor with a big woomf!

Another recent lesson in humility was my attempt to cultivate our small patch of field corn using the horses. I was able to focus on the horse's hooves or the cultivator's position relative to the corn plants, but never both at the same time. I think I managed to "save" about 10% of the plants in the last row before I gave up. With the cultivator set to its widest possible setting, there's about an 8" slot through which the corn must pass.

We bought a reproduction of the old "Planet Junior" wheel cultivators, which I've been using instead. It's not nearly as fast, but most of the corn plants get to live for now, at least until I polish my horse cultivating.

BTW -- if you're looking for a non-gas powered option for garden cultivation, I highly recommend the Planet Junior style cultivator. The original models trickle through on Ebay, but they go for about the same price as the reproduction which we purchased.

Buttercup the cow is just about to calve, based on the way her udder is growing ever larger and pinker. Both she and Josie are due on June 5th, although Josie doesn't seem to be showing it as much. Like my great grandparents, we're going to try leaving the calves with their mothers, which is almost unheard of in the modern dairy world, where feeding cheap powdered "milk replacer" is the new norm. Most dairies "beef" their cows after 3 lactations now. My great grandparents had cows that they kept in production well into their teens.

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Eulogy For A Breaking Heart
Gerald Herbert - May 2010

“A young heron among oil-covered mangroves in Barataria Bay, Louisiana"

This photo recently appeared in one of the economics blogs I read. It's not as if I've never seen a photo of a pathetic oil soaked bird before, but this time around I realize that I'm responsible for what it shows. BP is nothing more than our hired hit-man. Sure -- they deserve some credit, but the real guilt rests on the folks who paid them to risk this. Look in the mirror to find your culprit.

Unless you and I change our lives dramatically we're going to do this again, to billions of other creatures, including ourselves. I'm not talking about changing the flavor of our lifestyles ("I know -- I'll sell my SUV and buy an electric car!") because that won't solve our predicament. Major painful changes are necessary (as in making car ownership a distant memory). Yes -- we will be seriously inconvenienced, to say the least. Personally, I'd take the inconvenience over watching my son realize that his future is no brighter than that of the heron in this photo.

You say you can't get to work without your car? Then move to where you work, or find a different job. You would *die* if you could no longer drive to the mountains each weekend (as I once did)? Find another way to have fun, or figure out a way to live in the mountains. Can't live in your house without using fossil fuel heat or air conditioning? Then you're living in the wrong spot. Find a way to eliminate the need for fossil energy. You're smart -- you can do it. Yes, it is that important.

From a contemporary perspective, you and I seem pretty normal. We do pretty much the same thing as everyone else. Our houses are about the same. We all drive cars, and occasionally fly in airplanes.

From a historical perspective, however, you and I stick out like Roseanne Barr at an Anorexics Anonymous meeting. Compared to everyone who came before us, we're fabulously wealthy. My family of three has 600 slaves working for us, and is probably just like yours. Just because we pump our slaves out of the ground in places like the Gulf of Mexico, dig them up from underneath the boreal forests of northern Alberta (now the leading source of oil imports in the US), or blow up entire mountains in Appalacia to get them -- doesn't mean we get to live with a clear conscience. Instead of stealing the lives of folks we've kidnapped from other continents, you and I have resorted to stealing the future of our own kids. But everyone else does it, which makes it alright I guess...

Farmer Training Techniques

2010-05-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

The horses have developed an annoying habit over the last few weeks. They now like to run away from me when I approach them with halters in hand. Bruce likes to tease me. He lets me get close, sniffs the halter, and then spins around and bounds playfully away, farting with every bounce. He still follows when I give up and walk back to the barn though, because he knows my backup plan always involves the grain bucket.

When he's finally harnessed and ready for his bridle, he's decided that he can no longer accept the bit in his mouth unless I smear it with molasses first. I tried not to let him make a habit of this, but he tried harder than I did. I'm becoming very well trained.

Doc has become ever more friendly lately. He walks up to me whenever I'm out on the pasture (so long as I don't have a halter in my hands), as he's developed a taste for back scratching. He's even started reciprocating, and now scratches my butt while I'm scratching his back. Sometimes he gets a little carried away though, and just bites me.

Just before the rain started, I managed to put our plot of field corn in; maybe a half acre or so. The horses did everything -- plowing, disking, harrowing, and planting.

While sitting on the newly converted corn planter, I started to get a little nervous. The drive chain was grinding away menacingly next to my pant leg. The depth control lever was pointed right at my chest, and the row marker was held by a rope which would surely hook my foot if I needed to bail off the back for any reason. It dawned on me that the corn planter might not be OSHA approved.

We put together a "chicken tractor" last weekend. It's basically a portable chicken coop for broilers out on pasture, ala Joel Salatin. Broilers don't live long enough to become smart enough to roam freely, so they stay in this until they're butchered. It allows them to eat some grass and bugs in addition to their grain. We just drag it forward once a day to give them fresh greens.

Word has it that the chicks know enough to stay away from the advancing rear wall as you move it forward, but we had 3 that apparently failed to read their Proper Chicken Behavior manual. When we moved the tractor for the first time this morning, two of them got their legs stuck. One went to birdy heaven. Hopefully we can avoid that in the future, or we won't be eating much chicken this year.

Horses are an easy choice for a farm; they lasted on farms up through the 50's, well beyond the point at which cars became commonplace. Horses for transportation are another matter though, particularly on roads which are still dominated by cars.

I've spent much of the last several months contemplating how our life will change if I replace my car with a buggy. Where can I safely tie up while I'm in a store? What routes will I take in to town? I'd like to take the shortest route, but that's along a busy highway which would be suicide. There are safer routes, but they are considerably longer. That's a big deal when you're relying on a horse's muscles rather than a gas tank.

I say "my car" because Rachel isn't yet on board with "our cars". So long as we retain "her car", most of my contemplation is probably moot, because I'll just use it instead of the buggy whenever the buggy seems to be too inconvenient. I suspect that will be the case about 98% of the time.

How long will it be before energy constraints reduce traffic and make the roads safer? The Pentagon now says we're likely looking at a 10% shortfall in oil supplies by 2015, with shortfalls increasing every year. Will that be enough to change the traffic levels? I couldn't find exact figures, but I suspect that's a much greater shortfall than we experienced during the oil shortages in the 70's. I remember the gas lines from the one in '79, enough to know that it wasn't fun for most people.

Conventional crude production peaked 5 years ago. If we count unconventional crude and condensates, world oil production peaked in July of '08. We're still near the top of Hubbert's roller-coaster shaped curve, but the downhill leg has begun. Net oil production (even including new fields as they come online) is expected to decline at a rate of over 6% annually according to the IEA.

Our world will be a whole lot smaller than it is now if we go buggy (it's like going "batty" - only different). I won't be taking any day trips up to Grand Rapids to check out a find on Craigslist. Buying farm supplies will be difficult. Most of what we purchase is from Shipshewana, about 50 miles round trip by car, and further if we take back roads. That will be out of buggy range. I could take my bicycle, but cargo capacity will be much reduced. Taking the bike in the middle of winter or the humid heat of summer wouldn't be easy either. Maybe we'll rely more on UPS?

There are plenty of Amish in the area -- but the nearest are probably about 15 miles away. Within our own buggy range, there won't be much in the way of buggy accomodations, like the hitching posts that many businesses maintain in their parking lots. The highway department also avoids using rumble-strips on the side of the highways in Amish areas, but our local highways are loaded with them (they can scare horses). We won't really be able to blend in here in Three Rivers.

Most all of my ancestors did just fine without cars. Our house was built well before cars existed. Only the last 3 or 4 generations had the benefit of cars in my family. Granted, earlier generations lived in a world which was organized to function without cars, but much of that infrastructure still exists. Are we as capable as our great grandparents?

Most people that I share these ideas with are pretty dismissive. How can you live (particularly in a rural area) without a car? Everyone is convinced that we'll all be able to transition to electric cars soon, but I think we'll sooner find ourselves buzzing around in flying saucers like George Jetson. The energy which made the technology of the 20th century possible was great stuff, but the technology won't keep flying along without the energy that feeds it.

I guess the obvious consequences of our petroleum addiction are more acceptable when the addiction and associated denial are shared. Just like our sheep, humans are herd animals. So long as we're doing what the rest of the herd is doing, we should be fine, eh?

In the last 15 years we've already started to pay for our addiction by giving up most of the world's coral reefs, among other things. It angers me that everyone seems to be so accepting of this, and so unwilling to stop doing the things which caused it. I wonder if most people even comprehend how important the reefs are to their own existence, beyond the fact that it won't be fun to snorkel on them any more. The oceans as a whole aren't far behind at the rate we're currently pumping CO2 into them. If the ocean ecosystem goes belly-up, a worldwide shortage of fillet-o-fish will be the least of our worries (assuming we're still around to worry, that is).

The Deepwater Horizon Rig wasn't just another oil rig like the many others which fill the gulf. It was an ultra-deepwater rig, designed to get oil at depths well beyond what we've drilled in the past. Much of the oil that remains will be deep-water. Mishaps will be more common due to increased pressures at these depths, and they will also be nearly impossible to recover from, as evidenced by the current spill.

We're going to destroy more and more unless each of us personally kick the oil habit. Have you ever thought of how much you're willing to destroy before you make your own changes? How will you explain to your kids that driving your car everywhere or flying to Hawaii for vacation was more important than preserving the only planet they could have survived on? I don't think they'll view it the way we see it now. This is the one inheritance they can't live without, and we're gleefully spending it before their eyes.

Nobody can expect everyone to immediately stop using cars. We typically live miles from our employer, states away from our families, and have no decent public transportation. We still think it's fine to go for a Sunday drive and waste a few gallons of gas. Maybe it's time to start positioning ourselves for a transition?

There's really no questioning the fact that we will -- sooner or later -- run out of fossil fuels that are economicaly viable. It's just a question of when. I expect that most of us will be forced to make significant changes within the next 10 years as a result of peak oil.

And on a lighter note, this is what a frustrated lamb does when mom won't get up for nursing time.

Red Light District

2010-04-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

Much has been arriving in the mail lately. Fruit trees, grape vines, and now baby chicks. They provide endless hours of entertainment for Coon the barn cat, who dreams of joining them inside their brooding pen.

While some friends of ours were visiting, Rachel notices one of the new chicks sprawled face down on the straw. Uh oh. Kate sees it too, and is thinking the same thing. Should I go and bury it now with everyone here, or just wait 'till later? Oh -- there it opened an eye for a second. So it's still in the process of dying. Great. Just then the chick springs to life and runs to the feeder. Just a deep sleeper, apparently.

Our second ewe finally gave birth a week ago, to a single female lamb. She had a little trouble finding the teets at first but did finally figure out how to nurse alright. We've moved them in with the other ewe who has been roaming our orchard along with her two lambs. Our poor ram now has no flock to attend to, and has befriended Josie the cow. He follows her around like her calf. Josie doesn't seem to mind, and licks him on the head every so often.

Earlier this week, the two male lambs were hiding in a hole where I dug up a tree. As mom walks by, they jump out and ambush her, each one immediately dropping to his knees on either side of her (they're getting big now) and latching on to a teet. Their tails start up like the ringer on a fire alarm bell as soon as they make contact. Mom isn't putting up with it though, and wanders off to leave them staring at each other.

One of the great things about moving to this farm is that we can do a lot of the things we've always wanted to. That's also one of the bad things about moving here. There's an awful lot of temptation to plant anything that interests us. Today that was paw-paw trees, currant bushes, pecans, spruce trees (for future Christmas trees) and a buckeye tree for Henry. Last week it was wine and table grapes, raspberries, blueberries, and more apple trees (the 20 or so we planted last spring weren't enough). This all fits in around our regular chores (milking, feeding, watering, weeding, cutting firewood, etc), which take increasing amounts of each day.

Much of the day yesterday I spent working on our horse-drawn hay mower. One of the oil seals blew out last fall and needs replacement before I can cut anything this year. I spent a couple hours trying to remove the threaded flywheel shaft, using ever more leverage and language to try and break it free, until I realized that I was turning it the wrong direction. Once I was turning the right direction, it came unscrewed with barely any effort at all.  With the shaft removed I needed to replace the bushing that sits behind the oil seal (and which is probably the reason for the failed seal). Spent another hour mangling that as I tried, unsuccessfully, to remove it. Projects like this make me feel smart.

The day after I returned from a business trip to Bellingham earlier this month, we drove down to Yoder's auction (about half of the Amish seem to have this name), which was a sight to behold. There must've been over 500 buggies parked there in addition to nearly as many cars and trucks.

This appears to be the grand-daddy of all Amish auctions, with everything from restored wringer washers by the dozen (the amish use these powered with a gasoline motor) to horses, furniture, farm tools, and ponies. A bunch of Amish kids were flying around the field in pony carts and catching Henry's attention.

We were there shopping for our next "car", but didn't see a whole lot of interest despite a fair number of buggies entered in the auction. There were a couple that I thought might be worthwhile if the price was low enough, but the buggy auctioneer was so slow that I couldn't take it any more, so we finally gave up and headed home.

Maybe it's for the better that we haven't found a buggy yet. Since the world is ending soon, I've also thought that it might be nice to have a water source that works when the electrical grid fails. Earlier I was thinking that a nice Aermotor windmill would be the way to go, but our location doesn't lend itself to wind power very well, and they're not particularly cheap.

We're investigating a solar well pump, which is quite a bit cheaper than a windmil, as well as being more suitable for our location. I like the fact that they don't need batteries, which seem to be an achilles heel in most solar power systems. These are a bit cheaper than windmills, and could use our existing well. The main downside is that they don't work all that well at supplying a pressure water system, so the best bet would be to install a big storage tank (more $) and pump from that. That means no showers or sprinklers or "normal" faucets.

We would still be reliant upon a relatively complex (and thus failure prone imho) system for our water though, so I would like a hand pump as a backup. So maybe we should just go with that. It would require a separate well, but we could keep our decadent standard electric well pump in the mean time, and still take showers or water the garden with sprinklers until the grid goes down and the hand pump becomes our only option.

Speaking of failing electrical grids...   One of the things I really like about our house are the big maples that shade us in the summer from the east and west -- but not the SOUTH, where shade would be most beneficial.. The powerlines run accross our narrow front yard, making tall trees there a no-no. I'm thinking that I should plant a nice sugar maple under the powerlines anyway. By the time the tree reaches the power lines (10 years?), I think they'll be out of commission. It's like placing a bet on the demise of the grid.

Just think -- in 10 short years we could be living in a world without coal fired power plants spewing mercury and CO2 into the atmosphere. Monsatan and the type of agriculture it spawns would crumble. No grid means no gasoline, so we'd all be walking or using bikes and buggies. There would be no more traffic noise from M-60 near our house. A veritable utopia would erupt, until we realize that we can't buy toilet paper, or nails, or chicken feed, barn roofing, lumber, buggy parts or...

I could make some really neat copper bracelets out of the old powerline wire though.

Mmmmmmm.... manure....

2010-03-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

The large mountain of manure we've accumulated behind the barn is being eaten away, as we load up some manure for the garden. It's much easier to load into the spreader than it was to scoop it all up over the last few months, especially now that the manure heap is still much taller than the spreader. Bilbo the dog was very excited, as he views the manure spreader the way most children view their neighborhood ice-cream truck

One of our ewes gave birth to two nice lambs a little over a week ago. We had been expecting them for the last month, until Rachel noticed two black shapes in a corner of the barnyard one morning. Both are black ram lambs, so I'm trying not to get too attached (males get to become lamb chops here in a few months). They're awfully cute for now though.

Mom was in a very licky mood after they were born. Normally she runs from us as if we're crazed axe murderers, but not after the lambs were born. She would lick them, then lick us, then lick them some more (that's how she dries off the lambs). When she wasn't licking anyone, her tongue was still running full bore licking the air. Nearly every photo I took had her tongue sticking out.

Thinking that we had better live up to our name, Henry and I put a few bluebird houses up on the pasture fences this last weekend. I was a little worried that they would sit unused, because the wind over the tensioned electric fence really makes them resonate. Each one sounds like a mad bee hive when the wind picks up. Today, I noticed a pair of bluebirds loading one of the houses up with nesting material (our outhouse also doubles as a birdwatching blind), so maybe it's still alright. I'll have to check back after the next windy day and see if they're still there.

I'm apparently not the only person in the world who thinks Hummers and horse drawn vehicles might be the wave of the future. My friend Hazen found this excellent project and emailed me about it. It may be a tad more stylish than an Amish buggy, but I think the buggy would win in a drag race.

On Farming and Nutrition

It wasn't all that long ago that my primary concern about food was cost. I was a big fan of the 99 cent Whopper. I giggled to myself as I went through the Burger King drive through, knowing that I was outsmarting them by purchasing nothing but their money-losing hamburger promotion when they were hoping I'd buy some high-profit fries or pop to go with my meal. I was pretty sure that my frequent climbing and skiing trips would render the artery clogging cholesterol harmless, and getting fat was a non issue as well.

At the time, I thought that I only had to worry about what was *in* my food. I had never thought to worry about what *wasn't* in my food.

I developed an interest in farming a few years ago, when my friend Ed introduced me to the idea of small farms, some of which actually made money. I was always interested in farming, but had previously written it off as a possible career choice, because I thought the only farms making money were thousand-plus acre industrial farms which were neither affordable to buy nor fun to work. I wanted to farm like my great-grandfather did in southern Illinois. They milked a half dozen cows by hand, raised hogs and chickens, and grew veggies for the Chicago market. Maybe I just want to emulate them because I know so little about their farm. I once visited it when I was 6 years old, although the farm had new owners at that point.

As I started reading more and more books about farming, a common theme emerged. Farmers (organic farmers in particular) usually found that their animals or crops didn't get sick when they had proper nutrition. Elliot Coleman, a famous vegetable grower, claims that he has almost no pest problems when his plants get everything they need. When a bug infestation occurs, he figures out what the plants are missing, and adds it to the soil to solve the problem. Joel Salatin, a famous livestock farmer in Virginia, discovered that his cattle never developed pink-eye (which is very common in cattle, and can cause blindness) so long as they received enough iodine. He now feeds them kelp -- which is high in iodine -- and never has a case of pink eye. Most cattlemen just treat the pinkeye with antibiotics.

It doesn't take long before the farmer realizes that he's the same as his crops and animals. Many human diseases are a result of poor nutrition. Western medicine is just now figuring this out to some degree, with vitamin D deficiency. A doctor at the University of Washington I was listening to a while back said that, "We have learned that we shouldn't be thinking in terms of the rate of diabetes in women of a certain age class, but rather in terms of diabetes rates of vitamin D deficient women of a certain age class". In other words, most of these diseases, like cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, are allowed to progress due to our body's inability to fight them off. Our bodies are typically full of cancer cells and surrounded by pathogens. Our immune system keeps them at bay so long as we keep it supplied with plenty of ammunition.

Living in the US, it's hard to think of how our diets could be deficient. Our supermarkets are stocked with what is probably the widest variety of food ever made available in the history of humankind. But if you look closely, most of our food has been modified to have a maximum shelf life, with nutritional value losing out as a result. Our milk is skimmed, pasteurized and homogenized. Our canned goods are heated to very high temperatures to sterilize them. Fruit juice is heated, condensed, and reconstituted. We've been told that animal fats are bad, so we substitute vegetable fats which have essentially no nutritional value. We can only eat so much, so everything we eat that is of low nutritional value deprives us of something which is important for keeping our bodies functioning.

An excellent example is flour. Most baked goods are made of white flour (either partially or entirely), which has had the germ removed from the wheat. The germ is actually the most nutritious part of the wheat grain. When I scattered some wheat behind our old house in Bellingham to see if it would grow there, slugs came and ate many of the seeds, but only part of each seed. Guess which part they ate? The part they left is the only part that we consume in white flour. Seems to me that the slugs are smarter than most humans when it comes to nutrition.

One of the main reasons we now use white flour is because it lasts much longer than whole wheat flour. The wheat germ contains oils which will quickly go rancid and spoil the flour, so we remove it. That's one of the reasons each town had to have a flour mill before the advent of white flour. It had to be milled nearby, or it would go bad in the time it took to transport it.

After we figured out that people got sick when we removed the wheat germ, we engineered a solution by creating "enriched flour". So we solved the problem we had just created. But, I suspect, we didn't really solve it completely, because we don't know what all was removed. Humans always like to assume that we know much more than we really do.

Weston A Price, a prominent Ohio dentist from the earlier part of the last century had always assumed that everyone had bad teeth like most of his patients did. Then one of his family members started travelling the world as the age of air travel began, working for National Geographic. He visited exotic locales all over the globe. Wherever he went, he came back with stories about people who all seemed to have perfect teeth.

Dr. Price grew curious, and decided to figure out why. He and his wife spent nearly the decade of the 1930's travelling everywhere from remote Swiss villages, to the islands of Scottland, to the natives of northern Canada, the South Pacific, Australia, and a number of other places I can't remember.

Wherever he went, he found one theme, over and over. People who had transitioned to the modern "western" diet of refined, processed foods had far more cavities, poorly developed skulls (resulting in crowded teeth and sinus problems), and much worse health overall. People who still ate their traditional diets invariably had much better overall health. After analyzing many of the food samples he collected, Dr. Price concluded that the traditional foods were many times higher in vitamins A and D (as well as another unknown nutrient which he dubbed factor-x or something to that effect) than their western diet substitutes. If you google "Vitamin D" now, you'll find that western medicine is just now discovering what Dr. Price concluded 70 years ago.

My take on this is that we don't need to study nutrition textbooks to eat well. We just need to eat whole, unprocessed foods. If people weren't eating something a few hundred years ago, we probably shouldn't be eating it now. Michael Pollan has a great rule as well: Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised.

My interest in farming is driven by a number of factors, but nutrition is a big one. Growing much of our own food is quite time consuming, but I think it's worth it.

Regressionist Transport

2010-03-17T18:45:00.001-07:00

Here's the view from our new outhouse, looking out over the barnyard and pasture. The open seat beckons...

I never before suspected that using it would be such a pleasant experience. We now get to defecate to the sounds of singing birds, clucking chickens, and snorting horses, in addition to our own soothing sounds. It's just like playing the tuba in an orchestra.

We looked at a new car last weekend. Both of our current cars are just a little too convenient and reliable, which makes it easy to take frequent trips (usually inspired by cheap craigslist farm equipment). We really need to do something about that. I never feel good after driving for more than an hour.

When purchased, our new car will have a maximum range of about 20 miles, and a top sustained speed of around 10mph. It will have no airbags, crumple zones, climate control, seatbelts, or radio. Like the Toyotas in recent headlines, it will also be prone to speeding out of control. There's definitely some potential for steering problems as well. The car we looked at was afraid of stumps and house for-sale signs, so we decided not to make a purchase.

This is what our new car will look like.

I'm not quite manly enough to sell the other cars yet (and I suspect Rachel might veto that decision), but I am easing into the new transportation paradigm. An IEA official recently said that it will soon be unusual for people to travel 30km in a day, so I figure we're just getting a head start. Note that the IEA is notorious for their rose colored glasses when it comes to predictions of future oil supply.

I tend to suffer from a lack of self control, as I suspect many other people do as well. If there's a pack of cookies in the house, I eat them as quickly as I can (see -- I'm willing to sacrifice my own health for the benefit of my family!). The trick is simply not to buy cookies, because I'll rarely go through the effort of driving to the store just to purchase something I shouldn't be eating anyway. The same thing is true with cars. They're so convenient that they make it easy to go anywhere on a whim. Maybe they need to be a bit less convenient.

Some of you may have heard of Jevon's Paradox, which essentially says that when something becomes more efficient (he was observing coal powered steam engines at the time), it results in more energy use, because it's suddenly cheaper to do what you want to do with the energy. Owning a Prius, according to this paradox, actually encourages you to drive more because there's a reduced fuel cost. Maybe we should all buy Hummers (they'll be a collector's item soon -- even better!) to steer away from climate change?

My last post drew some concerns that I may be suffering from severe depression, mental illness, or suicidal thoughts (and this post will surely bring the men in white coats), but I would like to assure you that I am neither depressed nor suicidal (mental illness is still debatable). I actually find it very exciting to be dealing with our current TEOTWAWKI situations, particularly the converging crisis of energy and climate issues. My own actions alone will not make a lick of difference by themselves, but maybe I'll have some company someday.

I see industrial society's current course as suicidal, and would prefer to avoid suicide, even if it means giving up my god-given right as an American to worship the automobile. How about yourself? Most people I know seem to have a preference for the suicide (and homicide, as it turns out) option.

I took a day off of work this week to plow up a strip of our field for planting a new osage-orange hedgerow. As with most other things, I like to do the exact opposite of what other farmers are doing, like the farmer down the road who is currently ripping out his hedgerows with an excavator to make room for a big center-pivot irrigation system.

The weather lately has been wonderful, as evidenced by Henry's attire. (just click on the play button below -- for some reason this video clip doesn't show the first frame)

Procrastination

2010-03-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

I've always felt that someday there would be an event, probably a catastrophe of some sort, which would make it clear that I -- and everyone else -- would have to change the way we live if we wanted to continue to live. Aside from some minor feel-good changes, I could continue to live a comfortable and conventional life like everyone else until this event happens. When this event occurs, everyone would understand the gravity of the situation and *seriously* change the way we live. Making changes at that point would be easier, because everyone else would be making them as well.

It's clear to me now that this event has already occurred, but we all missed it. It wasn't really a single event, but rather a series of events. That makes it harder to spot. With few notable exceptions, nobody that I know has responded.

Most Americans weren't really looking for the big event, because they don't like the implications. Those who knew about it probably just chose to look away. We've never had such an event that the wonders of technology couldn't deal with, so another group is comfortably convinced that we'll be able to deal with this one as well. Hey, we sent people to the moon, didn't we? Give us enough fossil fuel, and there's nothing we can't do! (oh wait -- that's how we got into this mess!)

Exhibit A, (and B, C, D, and E...)
If you're one of the rare few who bothered to read about the recent events in Copenhagen at the climate conference, you may have come accross mention of the fact that the IPCC scientists have recommended that we keep our temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius (that's 3.6 degrees Farenheit). Seems like an arbitrary number. I might want to take my sweater off if the temperature in my living room suddenly rose by 2 degrees, but it doesn't seem like a whole lot.

Two degrees is important because that's the point at which most climatologists believe that a number of feedback loops will be triggered, making much greater temperature changes impossible to avoid. At the Copenhagen summit, no significant agreements were reached. We essentially agreed that we're going to keep marching right past 2 degrees. The last time temperatures increased as much as they are now projected to increase within this century, nearly every large animal went extinct. Though this train is headed for a cliff, nobody wants to ruffle the passengers by applying the brakes. Seems logical, doesn't it?

The IPCC has proven itself to be far too conservative, as we've already exceeded most of their 2001 projections for the current year. When the IPCC is confronted by a lack of data or some controversy, they exclude that subject from their projections in order to keep everyone in agreement. Such is the case with arctic methane releases as a result of melting permafrost. There simply isn't enough data yet, so this super important feedback mechanism has been excluded from their models.

The evidence coming in now is that we've already triggered the feedback loop of methane releases. Check out this video of people on a frozen bog in Siberia. Much of the methane currently being released is beneath the Arctic ocean on a shelf near Siberia in the form of "clathrates", also known as methane ice. Submarines in the arctic have recently noted massive columns of bubbles rising to the surface. It appears likely now that we'll see the north polar icecap disappear within this decade, for the first time since humans have walked the earth.

Aside from the methane releases, it's become apparent in recent years that the ocean is now becoming saturated with CO2, which lowers the ocean's pH near the poles (where most of the plankton exists). We've already found areas in the north Pacific which can dissolve calcium carbonate shells. Strangely enough, I've also read about recent drops (about 30% if I remember correctly) in plankton levels at both poles.

We've known about bleached coral reefs for quite some time now, with major bleaching events occuring in back into the 1990s. In a previous life, Rachel and I had plans to cruise our boat around the Pacific for a few years.  I followed a number of blogs written by people who were doing this sort of thing. One couple who left Florida and headed west accross the Pacific and Indian oceans noted that the first healthy coral they saw was in the Red Sea. In fact, they were surprised to learn that coral wasn't normally a bleached white color like they'd seen everywhere else.

Another friend of ours was on a scuba dive in this same Red Sea along with a group of Israelis who had been diving in the area before. When they exited the water, the Israeli group started crying because the reefs had died in the time elapsed from their previous visit. Keep in mind that coral and plankton remove much of the CO2 from seawater and turn it into limestone. We're destroying the coral that is part of our life support system. The ocean provides about 50% of the oxygen you're now breathing.  Do you really want to find out what happens when we kill it?

Though it seems strange in the middle of winter here in the northern hemisphere, we recently experienced the single warmest day ever recorded.  It concerns me that we experienced this in spite of the fact that the current sunspot cycle is at its minimum . What do you think will happen when it starts to climb again?

Ocean currents are one of the biggest factors influencing our climate. There's been some concern that the increasing melt rates of Greenland's glaciers would flood the north Atlantic with fresh water, which floats on the surface of the heavier saltwater. This could potentially shut down the thermohaline circulation system that drives the gulf stream. If you watched the news this last winter, you probably heard that the UK was being hammered with one of the worst winters ever recorded. Chances are that you didn't hear anything about the suspected cause (particularly if you like to watch Faux News). It just so happens that we saw the gulf stream divert itself towards the west coast of Greenland. While the UK looked like the north pole, the west coast of Greenland was quite balmy -- in the 50's -- in the middle of winter.

If the sum of this evidence doesn't constitute the big event I refer to above, I'm not sure what will. It's time to make some changes.

Ideally we'd all wake up tomorrow and find ourselves living in bark huts and chipping flint arrowheads. Well... that's an ideal from a climate stability perspective anyway. Aside from thoughts of seeing my wife in a buckskin bikini, I don't find that lifestyle particularly appealing either. Besides, there are too many of us to live that way now.  It's also hard to pay your property taxes with squirrel hides these days. Suffice to say that the current system imposes some constraints on the changes we can make.

But at the same time, I don't think changing your lightbulbs to CFL's and buying an electric car is going to cut it. We need to reach a 90% reduction in carbon emissions to have any hope of a future, and these feel-good measures don't measure up.

We need to "regress" to the low carbon lifestyles of our ancestors as fast as we can, step by step. You don't have to go back too many generations to reach a 90% reduction in your carbon footprint. I don't think that the lives of our ancestors were as awful as many of us have come to believe.

Transportation, home heating/electricity, and material consumption are probably the biggest toes on our carbon footprint. We've got the heating part covered, having gone to 100% wood heat at a small cost in material consumption -- a woodstove.   None of these changes are ever black & white.

Material consumption is a tough one, probably the hardest to tackle. Just buy less, and reduce your need to buy as much. Living in a smaller house means you buy less paint, fewer roofing shingles, have less need for heating fuel or electricity for lighting, and have less space for that big screen TV. I think houses like this are the wave of the future, whether for financial or environmental reasons.

Moving to our current rural location enabled us to eliminate fossil fuel based heat, but it set us back on the transportation front, where we were previously using bicycles for 90% of our needs. Bikes don't work as well with younger family members that are too big to fit into a bike trailer though.  The extremes of Michigan weather make bikes a bit less appealing as well.

But there are alternatives to the car and bicycle. They're dangerous, inconvenient, expensive, and not very capable. But when faced with the certain outcome of continued car use, I'm beginning to think they may be worth some consideration. Stay tuned for further thoughts...

The Season of Rest

2010-02-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

Farmers work hard in the summer, but they get the winter off. Or so I once thought. Maybe that's true for farmers who don't deal with livestock. After a very busy spring, summer, and fall last year, I was looking forward to a bit of R&R, sitting in front of the woodstove, reading about all the farming stuff I should know already, and maybe fixing up the house a bit if I felt like it. For some reason, this leisurely winter has yet to arrive.

I've been a bit lax lately in updating the blog, but have been spending plenty of time on the computer, working on the new business website for our farm. A domain squatter wants $1500 for "bluebirdfarm.com", so we added the "andorchard" part to the domain name a bit prematurely (our fruit trees are all about as thick as my thumb). We're now officially open for business, and are listed on localharvest.org as well.

"Hayman Road Farm" just didn't have a ring to it, being a leftover name we used to differentiate this property from others before we bought it. Bluebird farm sounds a little generic, but it does have a special meaning for us, as the bluebirds really like fenced pastures. They returned to our farm when we returned the former cropland to pastures and put up our fences. They're always out sitting on the fences in the middle of the pasture, waiting for a bug to fly by. I'm not sure how many bugs fly by at this time of year, but they still hang out in the same spot. Our bird book says bluebirds shouldn't be wintering this far north. Guess we need the new climate-change updated edition.

We've got a third addition to the bovine barnyard brigade - Maggie. She's a full blooded brown swiss, which makes her much larger than our other cows. She's well aware of her size, and immediately assumed her role as Queen of the Barnyard. The Queen is always first into the barn for milking, and she also gets to push everyone else out of the way at the hay feeder. She arrived at the farm already pregnant, as evidenced by a large "P" painted on her elegant behind.

Our sheep were sheared a couple weeks ago, and went from being overheated to shivering. Yeah -- I thought it seemed a little strange to shear at this time of year, but the woman we bought them from swears by it, saying it's easier for the lambs to snuggle against the ewes. Having the ewes give birth in February gives the lambs a head start before they're out on pasture where they'll invariably pick up worms, which are especially hard on them when they're younger.

The morning the shearer was to arrive, I noticed that Bruce (our lead draft horse) had an owie on his foot. We brought the vet out, who found an abscess that just needs to work its way out of his hoof. I liked that diagnosis, because I had awful visions of sending him to the glue factory. The vet needed Bruce set up in the shoeing stocks, which happen to be upstairs in the barn. Next to the shearer and her victim, the vet and Bruce, and the two remaining sheep, one of our hens decided to come in and lay an egg on the hay bales, which she announced to the crowd. The barn is a very happening place.

Not knowing a thing about shearing before ours were sheared (sheep are a neglected reading subject for me), I turned to my trusty Youtube for guidance, where there are several videos of shearing competitions. I learned there that sheep have an off switch. Flip them on their back, and they give up and go limp. Armed with my new-found knowledge, I headed out to the barn to try it for myself. Sure enough, ours do it too. The tough part is catching them first, as sheep are always certain that us humans are out to kill them (maybe they're just really smart).

After they were sheared, I noticed Thunder (our ram) sniffing the ewes' behinds as if he hadn't previously noticed that they were female. Later I caught him displaying his manly appendage as he shuffled accross the stall all hunched up. I worried that he was just now discovering his sexuality when he was supposed to have done that about 5 months ago, but it appears now as if my concern was unfounded. One of the ewes is starting to "bag up" (her udder is getting ready for action), so she'll be lambing soon. Hopefully the other ewe will follow suit shortly.

Rachel and her mother are quite excited for our own wool, and are waiting at the ready with their new spinning wheel. These definitely take some skill to use; I tried it, and the results weren't pretty. We'll still send it out for processing, but it is neat to think that we could grow and manufacture our own clothing. Stay tuned for some exciting fashion statements.

Though there's still plenty of snow on the ground, we've had a few nice days lately, with temps climbing into the upper 30's. We have an old woodstove/kettle combination that I bought at an auction, hoping to use it for condensing maple syrup. I cleaned it up this morning, and then went to see if the maple sap is flowing yet, which it is. So all three of us visited each of the maple trees near our house and have about 15 buckets up now. We collected a few gallons, which are condensing on the woodstove in our house for the time being.

Regressionist

2010-01-02T02:57:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article about my favorite corporate monopolistic whipping boy the other day -- Monsanto. Their PR folks are putting forth the idea that we need their technology to "feed the world", and they've convinced the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to spread their spawn in promotion of this idea. Yes -- Monsanto, the company who brought us Agent Orange and carcinogenic RBGH in our milk, is actually a philanthropic organization. The company who encourages the contamination of unwitting farmers whom they then sue for copyright infringement, feels that only they can feed the world.

The big question in my mind is: Haven't we already fed the world a little too much?

Never mind the fact that their genetically modified seed is regularly outproduced by conventional hybrids, or the fact that numerous studies have linked consumption of their GMO products with increased health problems and reduced fertility rates (hey -- then there would be fewer of us to feed -- maybe Monsanto really is on to something!)

It's been shown that the bacteria in our digestive tracts are assimilating genetic material from GMO grains into their own genetic structure. One of those traits Monsanto has introduced into their products is the ability of the plants to create their own toxin, which is a potent insecticide (it's normally created by the bacteria Bacillus Thuringiensis). Wouldn't that be a real bummer if Monsanto has turned people's guts into personal pesticide factories? It's not as if their products have a history of unintended side effects, right?

Oh, and by the way... about 60% of the items on US store shelves now contain GMO ingredients, so chances are you're part of their experiment. Europeans have banned GMO ingredients in most of their food, but we here in the US apparently enjoy volunteering as unpaid lab rats.

An acquaintance of mine who is also interested in working his farm with horses recently greeted me as a fellow "regressionist". I've never had a term for the sort of things I like to do, but I like it. So from now on I'll refer to myself as a regressionist. The first use of this word that I came accross referred to people being hypnotized to bring back memories from past lives, which isn't quite what I'm doing. Or is it?

There are a number of good reasons to become a regressionist farmer (I use the term farmer loosely -- it feels presumptuous when I'm really not yet making my living at it). First of all, it's much more fun than sitting on a tractor. Neither tractors nor horses have catalytic converters, and Eau de Horse beats Eau de Exxon hands down.

Second, it generates no direct carbon emissions, and I think that's important. And last but not least, I'm of the opinion that fuel will be far more scarce by the end of this coming decade, to the point that fossil-fuel supported farming will likely collapse. So a regressionist farmer is in essence a futuristic farmer. I'm the George Jetson of farmers! And if by chance I'm wrong on #3, the first two are reason enough to keep it up.

If our fossil fuel based society really does go completely awry as many are now predicting, we'll probably be just as screwed as any farmer who now burns thousands of gallons of diesel a year, but... maybe we would do better in a limited collapse scenario. The future makes for a moving target that's tough to hit.

The more I think about "sustainability", the more I'm convinced that my regressionism doesn't really take it far enough. At the very least, we will always be reliant upon fossil fuels to create much of my farm implements, or for a new barn roof, for example. So this really isn't that sustainable.

Sustainable societies have existed here in Michigan, but we shot most of their members or gave them smallpox blankets. The Native American lifestyle, which persisted for 10,000 years, was usurped by our industrial society which looks as if it will likely take out the whole planet in just a few hundred years.

So if you value sustainability -- the kind where you don't have to worry that your lifestyle is destroying the life of your children, an aboriginal society is your model. It's what we should all be shooting for. We can't get there anytime soon, since we've overshot the carrying capacity of the planet several times over with our use of fossil fuels, and contaminated or destroyed most everything that the natives relied on, especially here in the midwest. But with time, as our population subsides and nature rebuilds, it may again be possible. Someone is going to have to pull us out of our societal nosedive if we want to contemplate a future though. The recent circus in Copenhagen has proven that this will by necessity be a do-it-yourself project.

Barnyard Politics

2009-12-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

I've read a lot of farming books, but some things just aren't covered. I've yet to see a chapter on barnyard politics, so everything I've learned there has been through my own trial and error (heavy on the latter).

First of all, there's a pecking order, both for each type of animal as well as the individuals of each type. Our order is as follows:

Bruce (draft horse)
Doc (draft horse)
Josie (dairy cow)
Buttercup (dairy cow)
Thunder (the ram who thinks he's at #3)
#57 (ewe)
#56 (ewe)

First, let's start with the horses. Bruce is fat. There are a number of reasons for this: He came to us that way. I mistakenly thought that eliminating grain from his diet would cure the problem, but a summer on pasture has disproven that theory. He should be getting worked more, but such is the life of a weekend farmer's horse. Now that he's eating hay for the winter, I have a little more control over his diet, but not as much as I'd like. As the boss horse, he makes sure that he always gets his fair share of the hay, and he gets to define "fair".

My new theory is that if I feed the horses hay at two separate locations, Bruce will only be able to defend one at a time, giving Doc his fair share (as defined by me). It seems to be working, but Bruce is still fat. I did see a liposuction machine for sale on Craigslist last week -- only $1800...

It's important that the animals are fed in accordance with their pecking order, or trouble ensues. If I feed the cows before the horses, the horses nibble our barn as if it's a big gingerbread house. I doubt the barn tastes very good; it's really just the horses' form of blackmail. The chewing doesn't stop until the hay comes out.

When we first bought the sheep, Thunder was still quite young, and couldn't reach into the hay feeder I had built for the cows. He quickly learned to jump up into the feeder for easier access. He's now full grown, but still jumps up into the hay feeder to eat.

One evening I made the mistake of putting hay in the cow's outside feeder before stocking the milking station. It was dark outside, so I couldn't see very clearly. Josie had returned outside, and I chased after her to get her back into the barn. She was using her nose to shovel a bale out of the feeder and on to the ground. I didn't put a second bale in the feeder though. It took me a couple seconds to realize that it wasn't actually a bale she was working on. It was Thunder, now pinned against the slats. He didn't move at all or make a peep. I wasn't sure if he was in shock, or dead, or was still trying to hold his ground. Or maybe he couldn't feel a 900lb cow through his wool cocoon.

Now Josie gets her hay at the milking station immediately after the horses are fed, but before I open the door for the cows or put any hay outside. But all is not well in the barn.

In the interest of producing higher quality milk, reducing e-coli, and improving our cow's health, I've eliminated grain as a regular part of the cow's diet. She was just fine with that, and made the transition much better than I'd anticipated. In the absence of grain, however, she demands gourmet hay. It has to be better than pasture in the summer, and it has to be better than her "regular" hay in the winter, or she won't come in.

The loose hay we put up last summer was her favorite, so that's what I used until it ran out a week ago. Knowing that there would be hell to pay if I didn't have anything to keep her at her trough, we went to the hay auction and bought 50 bales of the softest, greenest hay I've ever seen, which at $8/bale had better satisfy Josie's picky palate.

The first night I served this to her, she sniffed it, reached deep into the trough, and shoveled it out onto the ground. I put it back in, and she shoved it back out again. Hmmmm....

She's since decided that the new hay is alright, but has developed an annoying habit. Legume hay has leaves, some of which typically shatter in the baler and spill out as the bale is opened up. That's the tastiest part of the hay.

Josie likes to fluff the hay up a bit so that the leaves fall out. Then she tosses it all out of the feeder and licks up the leaf bits that remain. When the leaf bits are all gone, she starts craning her neck to reach the hay she just threw out, dancing in her stanchion and giving me fits as I try to milk while protecting the bucket from her dancing hooves.

So now I've added yet another item to the endless list of farm tasks. Build a new Josie-proof feeder that will keep her from tossing out her hay. I'll get to it one of these days, probably after I'm freshly inspired to build it when she puts her hoof in the bucket.

Below is some footage of an intelligence test we recently administered to Henry and Bilbo, cleverly disguised as a game of keep-away.

2009-12-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

The William Arbuckle company of Toledo, Ohio makes some fine stuff! Our "Tiffin" corn sheller is probably over 110 years old, and still works wonderfully. Their corn shellers are such a pleasure to use that 5 year olds who typically prefer to lounge around in their underwear will jump at the chance to operate one.

Armed with a bushel of field corn from our garden and my experimental plot, we set to work, and now have a couple gallons of shelled corn to make our own cheese puffs with.

One evening I decided to bring the camera down to the barn with me for milking time, where I snapped this photo of warm fall sunlight streaming in through the windows.

It's a very pleasant place to be, with the cows munching their hay to the sound of milk streaming into the pail. There's the occasional protest from one of the barncats being molested by Bilbo in the corner. I can hear the horses chewing on the barn, hoping they'll annoy me enough that I toss them some hay to make it stop.

Since I've taken that photo, things have changed. It's much colder now, and not quite as pleasant.

Michigan has four very distinct seasons, and winter just arrived this week. I like them all, but some a little more than others. Winter has a sort of austere beauty around here. The leaves are gone from the trees, and I can suddenly see through the woods that seemed so dense until now. The wind makes a whistling noise once the leaves are off. It reminds me of the wind in the sailboat rigging when we lived aboard our boat in Bellingham. It's often snowing, but so far it's been just a few scattered flakes, each a perfect star. They don't accumulate, but seem to disappear as they hit the ground.

Rachel did a fine job of announcing winter's arrival, saying "It's 22 degrees, and I'm going outside to use the outhouse!" I wonder if she'll make the same announcement when the temps go below zero again.

The barnyard, despite a load of wood chips, had grown very muddy over the last few weeks, especially after being churned up while I extended our water line to the horses' paddock. It's not a problem anymore though, as the mud has all frozen. It's nice that the wheels on our poo-cart no longer sink into the mud, but they don't roll over this frozen stuff too well either.

Our barn seems to produce its own barn-cats through spontaneous generation, as evidenced by the appearance of "Coon" the kitten late this summer. She's a true barn-cat, as I rarely see her outside the barn at all. She survives on a diet of second-hand chipmunks left by Meowie and Burrito, along with some milk donated by Josie.

A trip to the vet this week revealed that she's got pneumonia, so she gets to play house-cat for a week while she's on antibiotics. She now lives underneath the woodstove.

While bow-season didn't produce anything for me this year, firearm season went pretty well. The bucks, as I'd anticipated, grew careless. I had a 40 yard shot at a 6 point buck who was busy making a scrape. He ran away as the smoke cleared, just as healthy as ever. I guess there was a little too much brush between us.

Later in the evening of opening day, I spotted a nice buck running along one of the trails I've cleared with the tractor. This time the shot went where it was supposed to, and he was down within 50 yards.

Our local library hosted an astronomer a few weeks ago, and Henry was quite excited to go out and sleep under the stars after seeing his presentation. We loaded up the backpack with sleeping bags and found a nice cowpie-free spot out in the middle of the pasture.

Henry saw his first shooting star, and I was amazed by how many airplanes there are flying over our house at any given moment. We lasted until 1:00am, when Henry announced that he couldn't sleep any more, at which point he ran for the house and spooked the horses who thundered around the barnyard and terrified him.

There's an old play-house in our woods which I had promised to bring up to the house for Henry. I was going to do it with the tractor last summer, but never got around to it.

This year I finally had the time to bring it back, but was able to load it on to our stone-boat and drag it back with the horses. It's not in the best of shape, but should last at least until Henry loses interest in it. Inside is a "witch's kettle" made from the top of an old cream separator.

I managed to find an old Oliver 99 walking plow at the auction in Topeka, which is perfect for the smaller space of our garden. We harnessed up the horses and went to work. I worked the lines while Rachel steered the plow. The plowing went very well once I stopped staring at the plow and paid attention to where the horses were going.

Multi-purpose Outhouse

2009-11-04T12:09:00.000-08:00

We had some wonderful fall color this year, with the house surrounded by the yellow glow of the big sugar maples that surround us. Then over the course of about 3 days, everything came down in a leafy blizzard and left the yard a few inches deep in leaves. The chickens are beside themselves with all the new scratching opportunities, and now spend hours kicking leaves around.

The outhouse, though not yet fully complete, is now operational. It's all sheeted, and two of the three windows are installed, but it still needs siding. Although it still gets some use, the sawdust toilet in the house isn't a whole lot of fun to empty, so we avoid it as much as possible.

The popularity of this new building is actually much greater than I'd anticipated. One of our new hens has decided that she likes laying her eggs in there (the door, which went on last weekend, doesn't yet have a latch to keep her out). Our barn cats quickly discovered that it's an excellent pick-up spot, great for mooching attention from the human-folk who are briefly immobilized there throughout the day.

I met some of our neighbors for the first time last week, a couple who seem very nice. About 15 minutes after letting the dogs out for a potty break, I received a phone call from them. They live through the woods and across the state highway down a long driveway. Bilbo likes to roam, apparently. We initially thought that Memphis would help show Bilbo where the "home turf" was, but he's been doing his best to corrupt her instead, as she follows him around on his wild explorations.

So, last weekend, we bought an "invisible fence", which is a shock collar triggered by a signal wire you run around the perimeter of your yard. Bilbo made a few forays across the wire with a special spring in his step, but has since decided that staying in the yard is just fine.

I finally decided to open up our new pasture for the animals, even though the back end doesn't have a fence around it. I put up a polywire temporary-fence, which seems to be working alright so far.

Josie's production went up a little once she was back on pasture, and I like not having to shovel manure in the barnyard and haul hay around. This will give us a couple weeks of reprieve until everyone has to start eating hay again. If last year is any indication, we'll probably have some snow here then anyway.

My hunting endeavors haven't gone all that well this year. I saw lots of deer in the first couple weeks of the season, but no bucks that were close enough. I finally resolved to take a doe to get the freezer filled. I took one long shot that I missed, and haven't had an opportunity to take one since. I think they all know it's deer season now, and have become completely nocturnal. In a week or two the rut will start, and then the bucks will start to get careless, or so I hope.

Our horses have some chronic thrush (that's a bacterial infection on their hooves). It's not a big deal, but I need to clean them out and apply medicine daily. At first, Bruce would visibly transfer all of his weight to the foot I was trying to lift, but has since mellowed out and usually cooperates now. Doc would play "ring around the mulberry bush" with me when it was his turn. Now it usually takes a bit of sweet-talking before he'll grudgingly allow me to mess with his feet. Today he kicked loose and stomped on my foot. That felt *wonderful*. Last week the cows banged the metal roof on their hay feeder and spooked the horses while I was cleaning Doc's hoof. I thought I was about to be dismembered, but only got knocked over.

The turkeys are all happily nested in our freezer now, so we won't be running any more turkey-drives back from Stan's house. They were regularly visiting Stan and his wife, apparently feeling quite comfortable among their roving herd of guinea hens, geese, chickens, and peacocks while partaking of the abundant feed. One of the hens learned to tap on their back door looking for handouts. Although we initially planned to do our own butchering, the Amish farm where we've been buying chicken offered to butcher them for $5 apiece, which seemed like a good price. We've eaten one so far, and it was very good. Meat tastes better when images of the butchering process aren't lodged in your memory.

We've been watching the Star Wars series over the last few days, which Henry absolutely loves. Every stick has become a light saber. This evening while I was bottling our milk, he presented me with a light-saber performance outside the kitchen window. It's strange for me to think that I first went to see the new Star Wars movie with my own father when I was exactly his age.

Sci-Fi has always been about reading current trends and extrapolating them to the next step; a way for us to explore and contemplate what may be just around the corner. Back when I was 5, the wonders of space exploration were still very much on people's minds -- and Star Wars extrapolated that trend to a possible future of space-based civilization.

It's clear to me that our future can never be in space, which makes these movies feel quaint to me now. Humans are a product of our own planet, and as such are inseparable from it. The mix of bacteria which make our digestion (and thus our life) possible, is probably found only on this planet. We've developed immunity to untold numbers of pathogens, the mix of which is almost certainly unique to earth. The amount of gravity our skeletons are adapted to, the composition and pressure of the atmosphere we can breathe, and the temperatures we can tolerate are all unique to this planet. We -- and the planet we live on are as unique as a snowflake. Even if we could find and easily travel to other planets which are similar to our own, we could never expect to survive there.

As we've recently entered the era of increasing energy scarcity, the ability to build or fuel spacecraft looks like it will also be in terminal decline. But to me, it seems as if it was a silly dream to begin with. I think that our future -- if we manage to preserve it -- probably looks a lot more like our past.

Winding down

2009-10-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

Summer is drawing to a definite close now. Today our weather reminded me of Bellingham (our old town in Washington), about 45 degrees, rainy and windy for much of the day. Our pasture isn't growing a whole lot at these temperatures, and I should probably be putting the animals on hay soon.

When Buttercup the cow returned from her summer vacation of hanging out with some fine young bulls, she and Josie became the best of friends. And then one morning, they *really* became the best of friends, engaging in highly visible displays of passion right next to the road for all the passers by to see.

Having by then spent a few hundred dollars breeding Buttercup (both with multiple AI's and the bull visit), and with Josie being bred before we purchased her, I was a little disappointed. With Buttercup's track record, I was starting to think that she might have to make a permanent visit to Hamburgerland.

I called the AI lady, but she wasn't able to make it out until early the next day. That's a little late, but I figured it wasn't going to hurt anything but my wallet (and hey, who cares about that?). Nearly 5 weeks have passed since, and I haven't noticed any more signs of heat in either cow, so I've got my fingers crossed. If all goes well, we'll have two calves here in about 8 months.

While my mom was out for a visit, we had to hook up the horses for a ride around the farm on the forecart, but first I wanted to pull a white oak out of the woods for a new post in the barn, to be used in rebuilding the horse stall that Doc destroyed by pushing against it with his BIG butt.

I made a point of doing everything on this post the hard way -- no power tools, no chainsaw... everything done by hand or horse. I felled it with an axe, pulled it out of the woods with the horses, cut it to length with an old crosscut saw, and squared it with a broad axe. I'm proud of what I did, but it really made me appreciate that I don't have to do it that way all the time.

Yesterday we harvested our first honey, from our single hive which sits out near the garden. The hive has two "supers", which are the boxes that contain "extra" honey -- above and beyond what the bees will need to get them through the winter. That's the honey we get to keep.

Step one is to get the supers off of the hive, and the bees off of the frames. They get kind of angry when you pull their hive apart, but I let them have it with my smoker. The smoke makes them think that a forest fire is about to consume their hive, so they eat a bunch of honey and calm down. Or something like that. I forget what the bee book said exactly. One of the problems with running a farm is that I no longer have the time to read up on how I *should* be doing things.

Once I had the two supers removed, I set up my new honey extractor outside near the garage, thinking that a messy task like this might not be suitable for the kitchen. It took me about 10 seconds of running the honey extractor before an angry swarm of bees showed up (they can smell honey) and scared me back inside.

With Rachel and Henry's help, the honey frames were all eventually cleaned out -- netting us about 5 gallons of honey and a couple pounds of wax. At $30/gallon, this is probably one of our more profitable operations, so long as I don't factor in costs for the hive, extractor, bee suit, and my time (and mental anguish).

While it's not exactly complete yet, we are making progress on the composting outhouse. It's all framed, the roof is on, and a little bit of sheeting has gone up thus far. If a tornado comes through, we're all going to the basement of the outhouse, as it's probably the best built structure on our property.

It's bow hunting season again. I haven't quite lived up to last year's experience (when I shot a nice buck in the first hour) but I have been seeing deer. Just this evening after dinner I was out for about 20 minutes, sneaking up to a bunch of does in our alfalfa field -- but no bucks. I've seen a couple bucks, but always just out of range (because they saw me first). Our neighbor Stan says he's seen some very nice bucks at the back of our field lately, so there's something to look forward to if they stick around.

Our turkeys are nearing the end of their brief lifespan, destined to become thanksgiving dinner, turkey sandwiches, and the like. For now, they're both entertaining and annoying. They love to strut around the yard when we're around, with all the toms puffed up and fanned out, dragging their wings along the ground. One disappeared, so we're down to nine now. Not sure if she ended up in someone else's freezer, or perhaps a coyote's stomach. Or, perhaps she left to join her wild brethren, as their territories have started to overlap as our turkeys wander increasingly further from the barnyard.

One day after giving the horses a good workout, Rachel decided that I should try riding one of them. I picked Bruce, because he seems a little more relaxed than Doc. Note the bike helmet I'm wearing -- a sign of supreme confidence in my fine steed (I would've also worn body armor if I had any). Despite my misgivings, Bruce performed well, and responded just as well to me working the lines as he would if I were walking behind him as usual. He's awfully big though; riding him feels about as secure as sitting on top of a tanker truck. I thanked him for not throwing me off and squishing me.

Rachel has been digging a mysterious hole in our basement, which she says is for "storing cabbages". If I disappear anytime soon, I would suggest that you look for me there. I think the forced use of a sawdust toilet (and upcoming outhouse) may be wearing on her.

A crappy weekend

2009-08-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

Crap has been a subject of much focus lately, this weekend in particular. But a crappy day does not a bad day make (at least not necessarily).

A little while back, an unsuspecting bathroom-goer made a grim discovery. A mysterious someone had plugged the toilet yet again. Rachel rushed in to assist, plunger at the ready, yelling "Clear!" before attempting to restore circulation to the afflicted fixture. Pushing the plunger down produced a nice little geyser from outside the toilet, which hadn't happened before. Hmmmm...

I loosened the bolts to lift the toilet and discovered that they really didn't need to be loosened, because three of the four were completely rusted through. There was no wax sealing ring to replace, but rather a home-made rubber washer and globs of sealant. The pipe underneath was crumbling away - I think it had an asbestos flange. So it wasn't going to be a simple wax-ring replacement, but rather a plumbing repair as well. I don't really like toilets (except at certain times) anyway. They use electricity (via the pump in our well) which puts them on my black list.

So instead of sinking a little money into a simple repair/replacement project, I decided it was high time to sink more time and money into a much bigger project. It's time to build the outhouse!

This isn't just any outhouse, but a *composting* outhouse. That's the plan anyway, as the outhouse doesn't fully exist yet. A fancy-schmancy double-seater affair to allow complete composting of the "product" before removal is required. It would be almost as romantic as those dual-showerhead showers in fancy houses, except you're only supposed to use one side at a time, until the chamber beneath fills up.

Our neighbor Stan volunteered to teach me to lay cinder block this weekend, which is about 3/4 complete now. Next weekend should finish the foundation, and after that it's on to the rest of outhouse. I'm making it up as I go -- hopefully the inevitable design flaws won't be too daunting.

Some of you will be visiting us soon, and are probably wondering if the outhouse will be finished by then. Perhaps you're wondering if you'll have to stumble outside in the dark of night, searching in vain for the correct outbuilding. Maybe you'll get lost and end up as Buttercup's next love toy, discovered face down in the barnyard the next morning. Worry not! You won't be relegated to the bushes when nature calls, as we do have an interim solution.

We also have a "sawdust" toilet in the bathroom for the time being. It's a fancy frame and toilet seat that fits over a 5-gallon bucket, which uses sawdust to accomodate your offerings. Don't remind me that sawdust *also* requires energy to produce (perhaps using more energy than the toilet it replaces). I can't be burdened with petty details.

Our neighbors accross the street keep horses, and like most horse owners have an abundance of horse crap. Being as I am the proud new owner of an ancient manure spreader, I offered to relieve them of this awful burden, which they were happy to unload today.

When Bruce mentioned that he would be cleaning out their horse barn, my first thought was to hook the spreader up to the tractor. But that would involve 1) pumping up the leaky tire, 2) detaching the brush-hog, 3) fueling up, and 4) setting up the tow-bar before I could hook up the spreader. After a few minutes of deep thought, I realized that this would take just as much time as harnessing the horses, which made it an easy decision.

Bruce and Doc seem to know what's coming, and didn't want to turn into Bruce and Kelly's driveway at first (yes, our neighbor has the misfortune of living next to a horse with whom he shares a name), but eventually they relented and resigned themselves to their crappy fate. A strong magnetic force seemed to pull them back towards our barn each time we passed, but they managed to resist it with my assistance on the lines.

The spreader worked beautifully, spewing a fountain of poo in graceful arcs accross the pasture. The weeds which overpowered my grass seed have never had it so good!

Rachel has been dutifully harvesting the bounty of our garden. We'll have enough potatoes to feed half of Ireland this winter. She's also made kim-chee, sauerkraut, relish, and too many types of pickled items for me to remember. We also canned tomatoes for the first time -- one batch of tomato sauce, and another of ketchup. Several hours of prep, cleaning, and cooking down a four-gallon pot of tomatoes rewarded us with 6 and 1/2 pints of ketchup. Like most food items we produce, it's really best not to compare our time and energy spent with the alternative of just buying it at the store. I think the lowest wage in Bangladesh would compare favorably with our wage if we figured out what we "earned".

With Ron's help (that's my father-in-law), the woodshed I started nearly a year ago is now standing. It was immediately recommissioned as an equipment shed, however, so our firewood is still living under leaky tarps. We put it together using timber-frame construction, which is both a lot of fun and much more work than conventional construction. At least all of the beams were free. The turkeys like it quite a bit. One of them flew up to inspect my work while I was putting the last few sheets of roofing on.

One evening after dinner, Henry decided that it was high time for a salamander hunt in our basement. This is one of the fringe benefits of living in an ancient house of questionable structural integrity. The basement didn't disappoint, and boy did we eat well the next day!

Buttercup has a new companion now, Josie the cow. Josie is a 3/4 Jersey 1/4 Holstein cross from a nearby dairy. She's very friendly, and had no transition problems moving to the farm. She's been producing over 5 gallons a day ever since she arrived at the end of July. Twice a day, after I release her from the milking stanchion, she uses my butt as a scratching post.

As Josie arrived a month ago, Buttercup was just leaving in the same trailer, off to her vacation at Camp Studly Bull. Buttercup just returned from her vacation, and seemed happy to have a new companion. They're inseperable, and both come into the barn for milking time, although Buttercup won't be milked for another 9.5 months.

With Josie's arrival, we've started up our cow-share operation,and are officially open for business. We even have a customer already. Drinking 5 gallons of milk a day was getting really tiresome, so I'm happy to be able to share it now.

We're still cutting firewood for this coming winter -- 5 cords cut and stacked now, with another 1.5 cords to go. I wish this was all done last spring, but... we've been kind of busy. At least we're ahead of where we were at this time last year. I've been hauling whole logs out of the woods with the horses, rather than cutting them up in place. That takes the truck out of the loop and reduces fuel use. In the interest of eliminating fossil fuel use, I should be getting rid of the chainsaw too, of course. Maybe next year. Yeah, next year.

Trial and Error

2009-07-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

When you buy a tractor, chances are that you can put some gasoline in it, turn the key, and start working without too much trouble. Mowing with horses, however, is different. For one, each owner may use a slightly different set of voice commands. The previous owners would whistle to get the horses to move quickly. I can't whistle loudly to save my life. Usually they'll respond well to a "Step Up" command, but sometimes they seem to forget.

My first attempt was to mow a very thick stand of white clover and grass that I'd planted as pasture. We don't have enough animals on the pasture yet, so I thought I'd section it off and maybe get some bonus hay. While I did manage to mow a few hundred yards, the sickle bar kept plugging up and locking the wheels (which are what drive the mower blade). At the time I was sure my problem was due to a lack of fine tuning on the mower, but I later learned that white clover is the bane of all mowers because it grows so thickly. The tractor mower actually did worse, and even my neighbor's haybine had trouble with it.

But before I learned that the clover might be my problem, I started rebuilding the mower bar. Here was a good chance to use the expensive parts left over from an aborted attempt to fix up an old Ford mower (which I earlier purchased for use with the tractor). After a day of frustration, I thought I'd got things together well enough to use. However, after a few seconds behind the horses, the friction on the blade was too much and broke the wooden pittman stick, which is the strange sound that starts partway into this video.

So I couldn't use the Ford mower parts on my International horse drawn mower, even though they were nearly identical. There's a lesson learned for a few hundred bucks. On the bright side though, I've discovered that the Amish stock new parts for the horse drawn mowers. And best of all, their prices are a small fraction of what I paid for the Ford parts at the dealership.

Finding the Amish farm supply store was a dream come true. At previous times in my life I sought out climbing shops, then marine stores during my sailing phase, and now it's horse drawn equipment stores. Shipshewana Farm Supply is my new favorite store. Not only do they stock a multitude of horse drawn implements and supplies, but they're cheap!

With my new parts from the Amish farm store, I set to work last weekend and managed to successfully rebuild the mower bar. I also put a new tongue on a forecart I found on Craigslist (that's what Henry is sitting on here) This evening after work, I harnessed up the team and mowed about an acre. Steering the horses isn't quite as precise as steering the tractor, but we did all right. They kept improving as did I.

My revelation for the evening: It's really hard to steer when your view is constantly blocked by two humongous horse fannies.

We've got a new cow in the works, a Jersey from a local dairy farm that's selling off a few cows. We're waiting for results on a Johnes test before we take delivery of her, which will probably be in a week or two. She's got bigger teets than Buttercup, so I'm interested to see how much easier she will be to milk.

Speaking of Buttercup, I think we're going to have to try something different. She's now been visited by the AI lady three times to no avail. Next try will be to have the vet artificially get her to cycle before being inseminated so that we're sure our timing is right. If that doesn't work, we've gotta find a bull for her to go and visit. Maybe she's just holding out for the third option.

Last week's weather finally stayed in our favor, and we managed to get our hayfield's second cutting in the barn without a hitch, with our neighbors Stan and Sharon helping out with a haybine and baler. We managed to get about 8,000lbs of hay from 2.5 acres, which isn't bad. Our old barn isn't the sturdiest of structures, and putting in the new hay did make me a little nervous. The night we put it up, I had dreams about our barn tipping over and caving in from all the new weight.

Our turkeys are now about the size of small chickens. Their new home is in the basement of the barn, where they roost in the evenings. For about the last 5 days, we've been letting them roam the yard, but they seem to have trouble finding their way back into the correct door of the barn. I've had to herd them back in each evening, with today being the first day they found the way themselves. They don't strike me as the brightest minds of the avian world.

We've been contemplating a doggie successor for Memphis, but hadn't quite decided on a breed. Pheasant hunting in Michigan isn't quite what I'd hoped for, so I'm a little less interested in a hunting dog than I once was. We thought about a Great Pyrenees "livestock guardian dog" for a while. Getting the sheep made me think that we might want a border collie, but Rachel wasn't so sure about a hyper breed like that.

At the Amish harness shop (one of several nearby) a week ago, we stopped in for some horse collar pads and a minor repair. They happened to have a "puppies for sale" sign out front, with a momma chocolate lab and her one male pup roaming around the yard. Henry was beside himself playing with the pup while we waited for the repair, and after sleeping on the idea, we returned to bring him home.

"Bilbo" is quite energetic - and became even more so once we got rid of his tapeworms and fleas. At first it seemed as if he were already house-trained, but he's since decided that going in the house is a-okay just so long as nobody sees you in the act. Rachel just discovered a nice little Bilbo nugget on the tile by our woodstove, which has my name on it when I'm done updating the blog. He likes shoes, straw hats, earphones, Henry's stuffed animals, and "Chipmummy" the mumified chipmunk which the cats left for him. He was even nice enough to leave that last item inside one of my shoes yesterday.

Henry thinks it's fun when Bilbo tries to "make puppies" with him, which he encourages by crawling around on the carpet with his fanny in the air. I tried to explain why that's not a good idea, but there seems to be a bit of a comprehension gap. I remember having a similar discussion with my own father about a puppy I had when I was young. I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about either.

The garden is going well this year. It's big, and the weeds were starting to win there for a while, but seem to have abated now. With our many rows of potatoes, I wasn't so sure I could keep up the squishing remedy I used for the potato beetles last year. So I relented and tried out an organically approved pesticide called Spinosad. It's made from a soil fungus if I remember correctly, and it worked wonderfully. It supposedly excites the bug's nervous system to the point that they go into seizures and die. I'm not convinced that a chemical capable of that is good no matter how it's made, but this one does appear to be benign. The label had almost no cautions whatsoever. Just like DDT when it was first introduced.

Our tallest corn is now over 8'. Sugar snap peas are all done, and we have small watermelons and cantaloupe on the way. We've been eating carrots, beans, summer squash, lettuce, etc. Rachel has also been doing some pickling. I think our first corn is only a couple weeks away now. But I can rest assured that the local racoon population knows that as well. Maybe Henry needs another 'coonskin cap?

One day while using the brush-hog along the road in front of our house, I noticed an odd shape in the middle of the road a few hundred yards away. I stopped and stared for a bit, and realized that it was moving, albeit very slowly. I ran over to investigate, and discovered this attractive creature, who was a little less than enthusiastic to meet me.

Horses and Turkeys and Sheep -- OH MY!

2009-06-01T18:03:00.000-07:00

On a fateful morning last week, I set out to retrieve Buttercup from the pasture for the morning milking. As I passed by her new $150 mineral feeder with the swiveling rain guard, something looked askew. The entire feeder (which she's never actually used like she's supposed to) was flattened. Hoping that it was still usable, I did my best to bend it back into shape and continued on to go find our cow.

Buttercup was clearly hot and bothered, and expressed a strong interest in meeting me up close and personal, like the cow in this video. I made sure not to let her fall behind me, but as we passed the mineral feeder, she broke away. She then proceeded to show me how she had flattened it before. Apparently the curved rain guard looks like the back of another (very sexy) cow.

Later that day the AI lady paid Buttercup another visit. So, hopefully, in 9 1/2 months, she'll have a calf. If the mineral feeder is flattened again in 22 days, that means we need to bring the AI lady out again.

In addition to our cow excitement, we've cut our first hay. The weather is always a nemesis when you have hay out drying in the field, so I decided to hop to it and get the hay cut when the forecast showed 7 days of no rain.

After a few days of drying, it was time to rake the hay into windrows. Despite the forecast, some rain started to sprinkle halfway through this job, but it didn't amount to much. Not enough to damage the hay anyway. A day after that, we had a mystery rain storm come to attack us at 1:30am. I checked the forecast while it was pouring rain outside, and there was zero mention of rain. A check of the radar showed a single storm forming out on lake Michigan, and heading straight towards us like a missle, and dissipating shortly thereafter. This rain was enough to damage the hay, but not too bad.

Rain was finally in the forecast for the evening of Memorial day, but the hay wasn't 100% dry yet. If we baled it, it would become moldy and useless. If we left it in the field, the additional rain would make it worthless. That left us with one option not normally considered by sane people, which was to put it up loose, as was done before the invention of balers. Loose hay, so long as it's not stacked too high, can still dry out without molding. We didn't have enough room in the barn to put it all in without stacking, but we did get a few pickup loads put away, and it's now dry and looking good.

I thought that forking all of the hay by hand would be a terrible chore, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. At least it was fun until about the 6th truck load. Tossing 5lbs of hay on the end of your pitchfork is much more pleasant than hefting 50lb bales around anyway.

In order to get as much hay as possible in each truckload, we had to squish it down. Our certified professional hay squisher was invaluable for this.

We soon ran out of space to spread the hay out in the barn, so decided that it might be a good time to learn how to make a haystack. It might get moldy, but at least it wouldn't burn our barn down if it started to heat up. At best, it might allow us to keep more of the hay from this cutting.

Although the hay did heat up a little, it hasn't molded yet, and may very well survive as good hay. In the good old days, such stacks were just left outside with no tarp; the hay on top acted as a thatched roof while the hay inside remained dry. The stack did shrink quite a bit though -- it's now about half of the height shown in the photo.

Our new horses seem to like the haystack, which is in their paddock. I hadn't really planned on getting a draft team this early, but was keeping my eyes open to make sure I had an idea of prices and availability so I could jump when a good opportunity arose.

As it turns out, that opportunity came up, so we've made the largest single addition (by weight) to the farm's animals. Doc and Bruce are a team of 8 year old Belgian geldings.

They spent their first hour galloping around the barnyard and exploring their new farm. Doc soon discovered that the many small trees in the barnyard make great scratching sticks for those intimate spots if you back over them and rock back and forth.

But wait, that's not all...

The weekend before we got Doc and Bruce, we made another addition of pasture-eating livestock.

Being financial wizards, we've decided to enter the highly lucrative wool business (shearing typically costs more than wool can be sold for). We've picked up three Romney sheep, a breed known for high quality wool. By next year at this time, we'll all be wearing our home-made wool underwear.

I would post a photo of the sheep, but they're not the most photogenic, as they're typically running away from us. We'll get one... eventually.

Finally, we now have 11 week-old Narranganset turkey chicks from a woman who hatches them in Kalamazoo. They'll be around until Thanksgiving when Rachel has volunteered to gut and pluck each one of them all by herself.

A Woman Scorned

2009-04-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

When we first bought Buttercup last November, she was overdue for breeding. I soon realized that I need to learn how to identify and keep tabs on our cow's heat cycles. After a vet determined that she was in fact in heat, we brought out the AI lady and had her inseminated, but she didn't take.

So ever since, then, I've been paying close attention to Buttercup's behavior, as we're planning to have her bred in May now. She seems a little more spunky when she's in heat. Or is she just being spunky for no reason? I make frequent fanny inspections, but it's still hard to tell when she's in heat.

A couple weeks ago, I ventured out to the barnyard after work, for our customary friendship building session, which involves me feeding her some carrots and petting her while she licks my clothes. She immediately noticed me, and ran right up for our encounter. Usually she's a little more shy about it, but hey -- maybe these friendship building sessions are really working?

Next thing I know she's reared up on her hinds and is coming at me, ready to bring our friendship to the "next level". I made sure not to turn my back as I made a hasty exit. So now I have a very positive ID of one of Buttercup's heat cycles. In a few days now she'll come back into heat. I'm not sure yet if I should venture into her pen for another positive ID.

This morning before work, I was walking through our new orchard where I found a cow-pie with a pile of dirt on top. To the untrained eye, this would just be a... uh... cowpie with dirt on top. But to me it was something much more exciting.

Lifting up the cow-pie, I discovered some burrows underneath. Henry and I went to go get a shovel and inspect the burrows. As soon as I lifted up the soil, out popped a big dung beetle, complete with a ball of manure that she had buried.

Why is this exciting? First of all, dung beetles are extremely beneficial, because they dismantle the cowpies which would otherwise be hosting all sorts of nasty parasitic flies. Of the three main types, "tunnelers" which hollow out the cowpie from the inside are the most beneficial, and that's what we'd just found. I had assumed that they don't make it this far north, and none of the farmers I'd asked around here even knew what they were. Chances are that most farmers haven't seen them, because conventional wormers kill them.

I haven't figured out what kind of beetle we have yet, but will be searching dilligently. They're all black, and have one large and two smaller horns on their head.

As I alluded to a while back, we've been very busy this spring. The last couple months have been spent putting up 800 feet of woven wire field fencing around our garden, 2,000 feet of electric fence around our pastures, planting the garden, planting the new orchard, plowing/disking/dragging and seeding about 4 acres of new pasture, and working with the Amish crew we brought back to re-roof the barn. This weekend I'm hoping to finish off the electric pasture fencing so that Buttercup can be set free and stop eating hay. We've been planting some more in the garden, and I also have a horse-drawn corn planter (converted for tractor use -- but I'll switch it back to it's rightful state soon enough) that I'm planning to use on a corner of the newly tilled pasture.

Plowing a field is definitely destructive, but it's something we have to do at least once to get our pastures seeded in as we want them. Turning up soil is actually one of the biggest sources of CO2 in the atmosphere as well -- because all of the carbon in the soil becomes oxidized when it's brought up to the high-oxygen environment at the surface. Some sources say this actually exceeds the amount of carbon we've released through the burning of fossil fuels.

In addition to harming the soil, plowing isn't particularly nice to wildlife. Even if you're vegan, I can assure you that your eating habits kill animals. I've found plenty of minced snakes, dismembered salamanders, mice, and turtle eggs, not to mention the thousands of beneficial earthworms and insects. However, I did manage to find one plowing victim who appeared to be unscathed -- a baby painted turtle.

Speaking of pasture, ours is growing very well now, or at least the stuff we planted last fall is. Our hayfield is up about 7" tall already, and the adjacent clover/grass pasture is nearly that tall as well. Now that it's all grown up, I can't see all the rocks which cover our fields. That makes me happy, but my mood might change when I start hitting the rocks with the sickle mower in a few weeks.

As I inspected our newly planted pasture this morning, I was heartened to see some tiny sprouts starting up. I then moved over to inspect the bare ground that I'll be planting to field corn this weekend, where I found the same sort of sprouts all over. Hmmm...

Back to the new roof on our barn...

While they had the planks off of the roof peak, I took the opportunity to inspect our hay trolley and track, which runs along the entire ridge of the barn. These were used for stacking loose hay, before tractors made hay balers an option. Everything looks to be intact, and I think it will all be usable for the upcoming hay season. I'll probably get our neighbor to bale most of it, but definitely want to try putting some of it up loose, as I plan to eventually put all of our hay up that way.

Emptiness

2009-04-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Today was a beautiful day. Sunny and in the 50's with a brisk wind. A windy day is always a good day for me. Wind makes the world come alive.

As I walked back across the pastures towards the house though, the goat's half of the barnyard was empty. Ashley and Mary Kate weren't out sunning themselves, or running up to the fence to greet me. Ashley wasn't looking out her favorite window. Though I had just buried both of them, I still half expected to see them there in the barn.

Yesterday, in the mail, we received the results for some blood tests we'd had taken on our goats and cow. Both of the goats tested positive for Johne's disease. It's a chronic degenerative disease, for which there is no cure. It affects only ruminants, and most are only susceptible to contracting it in the first three months of life. Our goats were born within a couple weeks of each other on the same farm, and were probably both infected then.

It's difficult to test for as well, since symptoms rarely show before the animal reaches two years of age, and tests often return false negatives. Apparently about 70% of all dairy farms have some infected animals, so it's not uncommon.

I suspect that it's not unlike tuberculosis in that many animals may carry the disease without expressing any symptoms, unless their immune system becomes compromised. Even so -- even if we could keep the goats in good health -- the risk of infecting their kids or Buttercup's future calves is unacceptable. So I had to put them both down today. I think it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done.

Some of my best memories as of late are of sitting in the barnyard in the evening after work, with Rachel and Henry. Buttercup would come up close to see what we were up to. Mary Kate would nibble at my jacket in an attempt to get a head-scratching out of me. The chickens seemed to always show up and start scratching through the leaves, and the barn cats would come out looking for attention. Being surrounded by all these creatures really creates a sense of well being. I just have to remember that all life is temporary.

When you get livestock, you know that someday you'll likely be butchering them. I figure that making sure they live the best life possible is the important part. I didn't have much of a problem butchering chickens, probably because I knew from the beginning that they would end up as food. Chickens aren't particularly endearing, but the goats, however, were just as affectionate and playful as dogs.

I like dairy animals in part because they're not all butchered after a year or two. I guess I allowed myself to grow attached to these two because I didn't expect that they'd have to be butchered or put down for quite a few years. Such is life, eh?

Henry says we should put up a good head stone for the goats to remember them by. I think it's a good idea.

Now on to other, less depressing subjects...

Last week Rachel and Henry held down the fort while I had my first direct experience with draft horses in a four day class at Tillers International. Along with three other students and a handful of Tiller's interns, we worked with four Belgians, learning how to harness, drive, plow, disk, harrow, seed, and log with the draft teams. Tillers even has a freshly restored road grader that we hooked up and used for a bit.

Though I've seen them before, what really struck me is how *enormous* these horses are. It wouldn't take much for them to squash me like a mosquito, but they're exceptionally gentle.

One of the cool things about draft horses is that they tend to know where you want to go. That's a good thing when a hapless student messes up his gee and haw commands. Or so I'm told...

The down side of that is that they don't always think you want them to go where you really do want them to go. When we switched from plowing to disking, I could tell that they were still trying to walk in the furrow while I was trying to get them on a different path.

Tillers is a really neat organization. Aside from teaching a number of classes in everything from training oxen to timber framing or blacksmithing, they work to promote the use of draft animals (primarily oxen) in many parts of the world where they make a big difference in people's lives. They have an amazing collection of old farm implements. Many of the older implements are easily copied by craftsmen in these countries, as they often use much more wood than metal.

A couple weeks ago we started planting peas in the garden, and came to the realization that our chickens would soon find the sprouts to be irresistible (as our old chickens did in Bellingham). So -- we've started fencing it in. As luck would have it, Rachel found an ad in Craigslist for black locust fenceposts, which are exactly what we wanted (they're never available in stores), so we've now got a nice big stack which should see us through our fencing endeavors over the next couple years.

Fetch

2009-03-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

A few years ago when we moved aboard our sailboat, Rachel discovered that I have a penchant for becoming singularly focused. The boat needed work, and that's just about all I could think about for the first year we lived aboard (or, arguably, for the 5 years we owned it). While my focus was probably good for getting the boat whipped into shape, it wasn't exactly a recipe for marital bliss.

Before we moved to Michigan, I was warned that there would be trouble if my obsessive-compuslive nature returned. I'm doing my best, but this time of year is particularly difficult. Our pasture is starting to grow again, and I need to get it fenced in so our animals can use it. The barn still needs some work. The garden needs to be prepared, and I need to prep a couple acres for my field corn. I need to get our 7 cords of firewood cut so that it has time to dry before we need it again next winter. We need to cut fenceposts for putting up our perimeter fence. After purchasing two loads of hay that our animals refuse to eat, the pressure is on to find some that they *will* eat. The hay mower needs to be rebuilt, and the trim in our house needs to be finished, the basement needs to be cleaned up, insulation needs to be finished, I should really rewire the basement lighting, and fix the cellar doors, and...

Earlier today, Rachel and Henry were playing with a big ball of his. Buttercup ran up to the fence and bellowed at the ball. So, Rachel threw it into her pen to see what she would do. Buttercup clearly enjoyed herself, but I can't say the same for the ball.

Our barn has an old pigeon coop built up above the hay loft. It's been vacant since we moved in, but we had some visitors today. I think I even heard some pigeon hanky-panky going on, so perhaps there will be more soon.

Ashley the goat is still kicking. No more runs, but she's very weak right now. The worms and coccidosis appear to be gone, but we don't know if she has another ailment or if she will slowly recover. At least she can lounge in the sun these days rather than shivering in her stall like she was a couple weeks ago.

Spring is definitely here now, at least for the time being. Our ponds are about halfway melted out, and I hear frogs in the evening now. Sandhill cranes are prancing around in the field again, and the mourning doves have returned. The fun we've really been waiting for -- mosquitoes -- are starting to annoy once again. I'm hoping tomorrow evening's forecast of 21 degrees takes care of them for the time being.

The deer are out in our pasture nearly every morning and evening. At first I thought it was pretty neat to see, but now I'm starting to wonder if I really like that, and have started chasing them off. I'm trying to grow these pastures while they're trying to eat them, and there are quite a few out there. Hmmmm....

Winter Waning

2009-03-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

Spring is teasing us a little more this week. 70 degrees today made the memory of last weekend's single digits grow dim and fuzzy. But -- since this is Michigan, we know the warmth is only temporary. Rachel did notice the first robin of the season though, and the cardinals have started singing their "spring" songs.

We got out for a little ice skating earlier in the week; perhaps the last of the season. Today we walked out to the same pond after dinner, and the ice was already melted several feet from the shore in places.

Our goat Ashley is turning out to be the veterinarian's best friend. Or worst nightmare, depending on how you look at it. About a month after we got the goats, she had a serious bout with worms that lowered her milk production enough that we decided to dry her off. Worms are a common problem with goats -- most goats get wormed at least 3 times annually, but usually just during the warmer months. We had been using an herbal wormer, but it apparently doesn't handle heavy worm load very well. Ever since then, she's been getting wormed again and again, with ever increasing frequency. Her partner in crime -- Mary Kate -- seems to be a model of vibrant health.

A few weeks ago, it got to the point where (shortly after being wormed yet again) she had developed bad diarrhea. I quickly learned not to stand within 15 feet of her fanny when she sneezed, because she was firing out both ends. The vet's new diagnosis was coccidosis (a microbial infection normally affecting only young goats). We treated her for that, and she started to firm up a bit, and then quickly reverted to her former state.

We've been supplementing her copper intake, as that's a common deficiency with goats that can lead to these sorts of problems. She gets more coccidosis medication, enterotoxemia treatment, pepto-bismol, pro-biotics, vitamin B injections... but her rocket-rump still persists. It's clear that her immune system is not up to the task, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to tell what the reason is. All we can do is remedy the common causes (such as copper deficiency) and hope that we get it right before she keels over.

On a "real" farm, where each animal is viewed with an eye towards cost/benefit, she would've been disposed of long ago. She seems relatively happy for now, but there's a good chance that she'll have to be put down if her problems persist despite various treatments. If it comes to that, I'll be the one to do it, and I'm not really looking forward to it. I guess that's one of the not-so-fun parts of playing farmer.

We picked up a horse drawn hay mower last weekend - a McCormick Deering #9, which I'm very excited to try out. I'm thinking that horses won't be coming for another year yet, but maybe this fall if our pasture looks good and our hay stores are healthy. I'll be taking a 4-day course in draft horses later this month, which I'm really looking forward to as well.

Buttercup the cow is growing ever more sociable. She moos back to me when I talk to her now, and occasionally turns around in her stanchion at milking time to give me a big goobery kiss. Whenever I have some work to do in the barnyard, she wanders over to see what's up. She's also pretty responsive. If she comes into the barn when she's not supposed to (such as when I'm out forking her manure into the compost heap), all I have to do is tell her "no" in a stern voice and she skedaddles back outside. She clearly knows when she's being bad.

Buttercup has also developed a fondness for the barn cats. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, she reaches down to "groom" them with her monstrous tongue while they cringe in disgust. Even if I don't catch her in action, I know when she's been playing barncat hairstylist, because the cat looks like she was attacked with a can of hair mousse.

Rancho Relaxo

2009-02-14T16:39:00.000-08:00

When daytime highs are in the single digits and there's a foot of snow outside, playing in the yard isn't particularly enticing. Rachel and I like to sit down and relax with a book by the wood stove in the evenings. Henry does his part to enhance the tranquility.

Things finally warmed up a bit last week. We went from below zero to 65 degrees in a few days, and the snow disappeared. All of the formerly frozen doggie-mines deposited in our yard over the last few months are thawed, laying in wait to hitch a final ride on my unsuspecting boot. I'm also reminded of the fact that our yard is still a mud-pit as a result of the water line installation last fall.

With the snow gone, its fun to play outside again. But all is not well at the Hayman Road Farm.

Lurking in the bushes is Fergus, the Evil Rooster of Death. After a couple flap-and-scratch attacks (Fergus thinks Henry is moving in on his ladies) sent our brave young farmer running back inside, we decided that it was time to fight back.

Armed with a beekeeper's helmet and a big stick, Henry was ready to show Fergus who was boss. We weren't entirely successful, however. A rooster flapping in your face (even while wearing a bee-veil) is still scary enough to force a hasty retreat.

Rachel has mentioned that Fergus may "need to go into the stewpot" -- an idea which Henry is in full support of. I'm hoping we can work out a more amicable solution.

We're apparently not the only people with this problem -- I noticed another rooster has been offered on our local Craigslist because "our son is scared of him".

Despite Fergus's obvious shortcomings, he does seem to serve a good purpose (aside from the obvious one of keeping all his ladies satisfied). He's exceptionally good at keeping the flock together. Whenever a hen has to run back to the coop to drop off an egg, Fergus is there to guide her back to the flock with a good cock-a-doodle-do. When one of the hens turns up a pile of tasty worms, Fergus is always there to announce the find as the other hens come running. I'm not sure what other predators (besides Henry) he may be fending off, but it seems as if he could do some good there as well.

Mission Accomplished

2009-01-24T18:44:00.000-08:00

With a twinkle in his eye and a smug look of accomplishment, Curious the goat returned to his farm today. His stink level declined quite a bit once our ladies were no longer in heat. I was thankful for that when it came time to heft him into the back of the pickup for the ride home. Henry also has a smug look of accomplishment, but I think it's for a different reason.

The snow has been deep for a few weeks now, settling down to about a foot. It was quite cold for a while -- down to -9 degrees, which I discovered is our threshold for freezing pipes. A little propane torch action on the bathtub drain solved that problem though. Some day I'll insulate our pipes, but most probably need to be replaced first.

Our neighbor Stan has taken it upon himself to plow our driveway (which we greatly appreciate), as his four-wheel drive tractor with a front end loader is much better than our old Ferguson in the snow. Upon learning that Henry was using the snow pile made by his tractor for a sledding-launch, he decided to make it even bigger and more worthy of a sled launch. Henry felt that Meowy the cat might also enjoy a sled ride.

I've thus far been pleasantly surprised that our rodent problems don't seem to be all that bad. I keep a few traps out, mostly in our basement and garage, just to be safe though. About once a month, I catch a few. They seem to come as a family, as I rarely catch just one.

Until last week, I hadn't considered the bounty of indoor hunting opportunities offered in Michigan. When Rachel heard some scratching in the laundy room, I came downstairs to investigate. My cheap Chinese pellet rifle, despite it's horrible accuracy, appears to be effective at indoor ranges.

Considering where our economy is headed, I feel that indoor hunting skills like this may come in handy in the future. They could really help to stretch that grocery budget, and food can't possibly get any more local.

You know how realtors like to describe a "fixer" house with a witty statement like "Bring your paint brush" when "Bring your bulldozer" would be a more accurate description? Since our rennovation money ran thin, we've decided that there's a lot of wisdom in those ads.

Since the "polish a turd" policy started in our living room seemed to work pretty well, we decided to continue the policy and paint the dining room as well. So long as you're in the next room and have poor eyesight, it looks pretty nice now.

As we were setting up the room for painting, we set out some light plastic drop-cloths to protect the floors. I'm not sure they're really worth protecting, but it seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the dropcloth wouldn't stay put. It kept billowing up like a parachute as the wood stove is sucking air through the myriad cracks and gaps in our floor. I've since attacked all the gaps from the basement with a can of spray-foam, and also added some fiberglass insulation. I haven't tested the new airflow rates with a dropcloth though. I'm not sure I really want to know what the results would be.

Some like it stinky

2009-01-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

I'd heard that bucks were stinky, but when Curious first arrived, the stink wasn't really that bad. In fact, I'm not sure I really noticed any bad smells. I was pretty sure that everyone was just over-reacting.

Then, things changed. Apparently his stink machine takes a few days to warm up, and the presence of two fine ladies was just what he needed to get it going.

I'm not sure exactly where the stink comes from, but suspect that his "goatee" may be a source. Every time I'm in the goat's pen, he tries to rub his chin on my thigh. He's not particularly aggressive about it; just very persistent. Every time I turn around, he's there, with his chin moving into position.

There is at least one source of the stink which I'm quite certain of. Curious creates what he thinks is both a refreshing drink and a fine cologne, all rolled into one. I'll let you figure out what it is. I really make sure I keep my distance after he's been partaking of himself that way.

I finally ordered a cheap pair of hockey skates off of Ebay after some unsuccessful attempts at finding a pair at the Goodwill, so now we all have skates. We've been out skating on one of our ponds, which was really nice. A friend of ours invited us to skate out on Corey lake (the big lake about a mile north of us), which has frozen over. The ice on a lake of that size is laced with cracks from the expansion of the ice, although they don't seem to be a hazard at all. We could hear strange echoing noises while we were out on the lake, which is the sound of new cracks forming.

The snow started falling again a couple days ago, so skating is out for the time being. Hopefully there will be enough snow that we can break out the skis.

With the weather not particularly conducive to working outside, I've been cleaning out the barn. Up until now, I was just cleaning sections as it became necessary to use them. It's nice not to have to maneuver around the old junk, bat guano, broken glass, and ancient straw.

Nerds in Love

2008-12-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we went to pick up a "rent-a-boyfriend" for the goats. His name is Curious. Henry grew concerned that Mom and Dad weren't really asking the important questions of the goat's owner, so he had to fill in for us. "Does he have any sperm?", he asked farmer Tony. Tony replied that he probably did. Definitely a good thing to know about.

Ashley, who still seemed a bit down after her latest worm episode, has perked right up. She *really* likes Mr. Curious. With a coy look and a "come hither" flick of her tail, Ashley lures him over. Curious's tongue flops out, and he starts with a nasal snickering while nibbling at Ashley's neck. She nibbles back. Her tail flicks again and captures his attention. As he begins his move, Ashley rears up and spins around to give him a head-butt. Life isn't easy for us men-folk.

Mary Kate wants nothing to do with Mr. C. You can see the utter disgust in her eyes as she stands in the corner watching his clumsy advances on gullible Ashley, and she often tries to intervene. She slips between them and gives Curious a solid knock on the noggin quite frequently. Just to make sure he remembers it, she rears up on her hinds (making her taller than I am) before coming down at him.

Buttercup was in a good mood this evening, as she started bouncing around the barnyard like a spring lamb. I reciprocated on my side of the fence, and we went back and forth a few times. Like a lot of other people who've never worked around cows, I was once convinced that they were not particularly bright or charismatic. In Germany, for instance, a common insult is to say "You're as dumb as a cow". I don't think they're dumb at all. They didn't exactly evolve to fly rocketships, but they're very good at what they did evolve to do. Don't ask me what that is though.

I was previously pouring Buttercup's grain ration right next to the hay in her feed trough at each milking, and got a little fed up that she kept tossing the hay out to get at the grain. Now I give her grain first. When she's cleaned out her trough, she steps back and looks at me. I pull the bucket aside, and go to fill up the trough with hay. Problem solved. No more dancing in the stanchion while I try to simultaneously keep the bucket near her udder but away from her hooves.

Buttercup apparently likes to take a Sunday stroll. Exactly a week after her first adventure that inspired my last blog entry, she got out again. This time, it was zero degrees out, with a wind chill of about 20 below. I think the wind rattled the barnyard gate open, so at least it wasn't a result of me being stupid in exactly the same way as last time. I was stupid in a different way, which somehow seems better. I now know to make sure that the latch chain attaches to a point below the hook on the gate.

After milking Mary Kate, Rachel noticed that Buttercup wasn't in her usual spot, and walked around the barn to see if she'd gone off to the other corner of the barnyard, when she discovered the open gate with departing hoofprints. She ran back to the house to inform me, and I went out to inspect. Sure enough -- she had escaped again. The tracks were on the same path as before, so I started my morning jogging routine. As I made it out to the road, I could see her at the top of the rise to the west, merrily trotting along.

Rachel grabbed Henry and followed us in the car, hoping that she might be able to herd Buttercup back in the direction of our farm. I finally caught up to her at the neighbor's house, and followed behind her into the soybean field. It was really blowing there, with little snow-devils whipping accross the field, and drifts that nearly topped my barn boots.

Buttercup saw Rachel and the car, and paused as I walked around to approach her from the other side. She let me approach, and came up to sniff my hand. With a playful bounce, she spun around and sprayed manure all over the snow. Then she turned around, and walked back on her own path right into the barnyard with me right behind her. It was apparently too cold for a Sunday stroll afterall. She did pause in the neighbor's field, long enough for me to take notice and look up to see a pair of foxes sneaking into the brush.

This last Sunday we decided that it might be a nice time to try skating on our pond. Henry and Rachel have some skates from the Goodwill, which were in definite need of breaking-in. Earlier in the week we'd had 60 degree weather which had melted all the snow, which pooled on top of the ice and re-froze quite nicely. I really need to find some skates for myself now, as Rachel really looked like she was having fun. Henry was excited to try his skates, but grew a little less enthusiastic when he wasn't able to instantly learn how to use them.

As I closed up the barn after this evening's milking, I stopped to watch a car pull slowly into our neighbor's driveway. It was dark, and they only had their parking lights on. Someone got out, donned a headlamp, and walked up the driveway towards their shop, which sits away from the house. I grabbed a flashlight which immediately went dead (D'oh!) and headed over to investigate. As soon as I stepped out our front door, the car backed out, headed down the road a bit, and finally turned their headlights back on.

I wasn't sure if anyone had been dropped off, or if the car's passenger had returned while I was in our house. I spoke with the neighbor (an elderly couple who appreciated my effort), and walked around their shop, but found nothing amiss. She mentioned that another neighbor had fought some intruders a few years earlier, and later died of a heart attack a few days after the struggle. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't catch anyone, but it's probably best for all involved that I just scared them off.

Buttercup's Big Adventure

2008-12-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

Buttercup is a mellow girl, except for the few times when she lowers her horns and chases goats or chickens around the barnyard to let them know who's boss. As with most cows, she's into routine. She follows the same path out through the barnyard to her "cud corner" every morning after eating breakfast and getting a big drink.

With this in mind, I figured that she wouldn't be much of a flight risk when I opened the barnyard gate to drive the truck out after unloading some wood chips in the muddy spots behind the barn. The goats I knew to be opportunists, so I made sure to lock them both in the barn before opening the gate. With Buttercup, I just had to keep an eye on her in case she moseyed over in the wrong direction.

After sequestering the goats, I opened the gate, hopped into the truck, turned the key, and looked out the window to see a large brown and white object slowly moving towards the gate.

I hopped out, not wanting to scare her out of the barnyard, and casually walked over to her, thinking I'd just head her off at the pass. She maneuvered around me, headed out the gate, and made a break for it. Thus began Buttercup's big adventure.

My first thought was that I'd just taken off her halter a few days before, and didn't have any lead with me, but it really didn't matter. I did have some bailing twine in my pocket, so made a loop out of that to slip over her horns when I got close enough. But she wasn't interested in me getting too close.

She took off accross the small field to the west of our house and headed west (away from Hwy 60, fortunately) at a nice trot with me in hot pursuit, wearing my big wool Filson coat and rubber barn boots (I wonder why Olympic runners never wear these things?). I think she overheated about the same time I did, so she slowed down with me about 50' behind her. I wasn't too excited about her being out on an icy road (cars might have a tough time stopping if they saw her), but no longer had any say in the matter. She was going out for an adventure.

She first stopped at our neighbor's house to the west, where they have a barn with some goats and a horse; she thought it looked like a nice place to hang out, and looked over the barnyard fence for a while, but kept me at a distance. Then she turned around, back towards our house, but left the road to check out our neighbor's property (the one who's extra sensitive about trespassers, of course). It's just a hunting property, so he doesn't live there and didn't see this, fortunately. His property is mostly overgrown farm fields with lots of briars. They don't seem to bother her as much as they did me.

Then through the woods, past a beautiful pond (must be some good ice skating there!), accross a soybean field and accross county line road. She was starting to slow down quite a bit at this point, but still wouldn't let me near her. Finally she paused in another soybean field, nearly a mile to the west, and I swung a big circle around her until I was able to push her back towards our house.

She headed back accross the field in the direction she'd come, crossed the road, and picked up her old path. I grew hopeful that she'd follow it all the way home, which is exactly what she did. She kept her nose down almost like a bloodhound, and even knew to skip the detours.
I've traced it out for all to see above. The red was her departing route, the blue her returning route. I really need to set up our electric fence.

We also managed to rid ourselves of the oil furnace that dominated our basement this weekend. Put up a craigslist add, and after a few false starts, I had a taker who even removed most of the ductwork. The basement is much improved.

I finally got our rail put up near the top of our stairwell, so now we don't have to cringe every time Henry veers a little too close.

Winter

2008-12-12T18:42:00.000-08:00

Nothing terribly exciting to report lately. Ashley the goat, who had chronic problems with worms earlier in the year (quite common for goats and sheep both), started having problems again. Rachel read that grey goats often suffer from copper deficiencies, and that copper deficiencies may lower a goat's resistance to worms. So maybe that's why she's having so many more problems than Mary Kate (who is brown).

One day she was looking particularly bad; she wouldn't stand up, and was shivering quite a bit as the worms really lower blood sugar and make it difficult to keep warm. Hearing stories about goats essentially dropping over dead in such situations caused a little concern, so we brought her inside to lay down in front of the wood stove that afternoon. She immediately perked up, but started screaming the instant I left the room, so I spent the rest of the afternoon working in the living room where she was. I was pleasantly surprised to see that she didn't leave any goat berries for us to clean up. Memphis the dog, however, was quite disappointed.

It was 15 degrees when I went out for this evening's milking. That means frozen teat-dip, but I've figured out that I can thaw it in the bucket of warm water I bring down for the pre-milking cleanup. I also figured out what I think was one of the causes of Buttercup's "dancing" in the stanchion, particularly towards the end of milking. We had left her halter on these last few weeks, thinking it was akin to a dog collar like the ones we keep on the goats. I decided that it wasn't really needed anymore, so took it off to reveal some sores along her jaw where her chewing caused it to chafe quite a bit. She seems to be a little less agitated now.

I've thus far tried to keep this blog on the subject of our adventures in farming, but I think it's time for a rant. Those of you who know me well know that I couldn't keep it hidden for too long. Below are the thoughts that run through my mind on most days.

Everyone who has ever been born is either dead, or will die someday. There's nothing new about that. Not everyone gets to live a long life; disease, famine, violence, accidents, and wars are an unavoidable part of human existence. But throughout most of history, I think most people have known that the potential to live to a ripe old age was always there, even if they themselves died young. Maybe their children would lead long and fulfilling lives.

I think that's changed now. I'm nearly certain that I will never reach "retirement" age, and I'm doubtful that my son will ever reach my current age. While I sincerely hope that I'm mistaken, I'm not really haunted by this thought anymore; I've come to accept it. On occasion I'm angry about it. I'm angry when I think that human greed and ignorance are the two things which have created this situation. But then I remember that human greed and ignorance on this scale are really unavoidable. So it's just something I have to accept.

So what dark and terrible force do I think is going to end our lives so abruptly? It's the coal generating the electricity to run the computer I'm typing on, among other things. You see, making carbon dioxide is the one thing that us 6.7 billion humans are *really* good at. In fact, there wouldn't be 6.7 billion humans if we weren't really good at this. The only reason there are this many of us is because we figured out how to use fossil fuels.

Maybe you've heard someone like Mr. Gore warn of a "tipping point", past which climate change rages uncontrollably due to feedback loops and leads to the end of civilization as we know it. Anyone who warns you about this is either ignorant or misleading in my opinion, because we've already passed it. Our planet is the Titanic, and we've already hit the iceberg. I won't blame you for trying to patch the leak, and will respect you much more than those who claim there's no leak. But I think the odds are stacked against you. Chances are that you've done little or nothing to patch the leak though, as have I.

So here's the iceberg I see floating in our wake. Here's the gash in our hull. CO2 is already at 380 ppb in our atmosphere, and rising something like 2ppb annually. The rate of rise in CO2 is going up quite a bit faster than the rise in our emissions, because all of the carbon "sinks" are collapsing.

Over 50% of the worlds coral reefs are now dead (some figures and anectodal evidence put it closer to 90%, so I'm being conservative here). Coral formerly absorbed massive amounts of CO2, in the form of calcium carbonate, which it turned into rock (limestone). In addition to warming the planet, CO2 has the ability to acidify water. A recently published study from the University of Washington showed that the rate of acidification is now progressing at 10-20 times the previously accepted rate used in climate modeling. Another marine survey has shown that the plankton (which are the basis of all life in the ocean) levels are down roughly 40% from a few years ago. Acid seawater kills plankton. Unfortunately, acidification occurs first near the poles, which is also where the bulk of our plankton live. Much of the oxygen in our atmosphere comes from these plankton. If the ocean goes, our oxygen goes away, and away we go. It's a real bummer.

And just for you folks whom Exxon and Peabody Coal's propaganda teams have convinced that climate change is either a myth or is "a natural cycle", the acidification scenario doesn't involve climate change. It's just carbon emissions.

So let's say that some new acid-loving plankton takes over and saves our collective fanny. It's not unreasonable to think it might. In that case, I figure that climate change will eventually toast our tootsies. If you think that climate change is a "natural cycle", then we'll all be killed naturally. Go warm up your Escalade and keep voting Republican.

The north polar icecap appears as if it'll be gone within 6 years (this figure keeps being revised to match that pesky reality -- a few years ago they thought it should live at least another 70 years). This alone is evidence that we've tipped. Ironically, the oil companies are scrambling to see what new oilfields the retreating ice has made available. There goes human greed and ignorance again.

So on the off chance that we haven't tipped, I think it's a really good idea to cut your carbon emissions, and I'll respect you more if you do it. Buy a Prius if it makes you feel good, but it won't really make a lick of difference so long as there are 6.7 billion of us around. We would need to cut our emissions over 90% if we hadn't already tipped, so anything short of that is really inconsequential.

If you really want sustainable, it's time to trade in your Prius for a spear and a loincloth. Unfortunately, that only works when there are far fewer than 6.7 billion people, and where we haven't poisoned most of the streams and lakes that were once the focus of subsistence living. We've burned that bridge.

So there's really not much to be done, other than that which makes you feel as if you're doing some good. I guess it's just time to sit back and enjoy the ride while we're all still here. Make the most of your life while you've got it. Enjoy yourself!

2008-11-24T18:56:00.000-08:00

If I can get down to the barn about a half hour before Rachel and Henry in the mornings, I can have Buttercup milked out before Henry starts chasing the cats and serenading her with the "Buttercup Song". Once these activities commence, she starts dancing in her stanchion while watching all the excitement going on around her. I don't usually make it down quite that early though. Milking a cow who's dancing the two-step is a challenge, first because I have to keep the bucket underneath her, and second because she's a clumsy dancer who steps on her partner's feet. I can now attest that having a cow step on your foot doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have to amputate a mangled toe (as happened to my uncle Frank). But it doesn't feel particularly good, either.

For most people, spending an hour each morning and evening *every day* to milk a cow sounds like a nightmare. I have to admit that I was one of those people, and may yet be one again. Maybe it's just the honeymoon phase, or perhaps Buttercup is secreting some mind-altering substance into her milk, but I actually enjoy it. The actual milking time for the cow is 20 minutes, and 10 minutes for the goat (only one is still being milked right now). The rest of the time is used up getting their feed or filtering, bottling, chilling the milk, or cleaning milk pails.

I'm still learning to deal with things like thieving goats and frozen bottles of teat-dip, but haven't found any of it to be unbearable. Mary-Kate is the more rambunctious of the two goats, and has learned that every open gate is an opportunity which can't be passed up. If the opportunity looks like it'll be cut short by an attentive faux-farmer like myself, it only means you have to run faster than the farmer does.

Previously, when I opened the outside door to let Buttercup into the barn, Mary Kate would sneak in to flip the lid off of the garbage can we use for storing grain, inhaling it as quickly as she could before I could yank her away. She has it down to a science now, and can flip the lid off without even pausing, using her front teeth. Being smarter than a goat, I've figured out that I have to close the outside door to the goat stall before I open the door for Buttercup. But sometimes I still have to open the gate to bring water or scoop a cowpie from the goat's stall (Buttercup comes in during the day and steals their hay if we don't give her enough, leaving telltale signs to step in). I had to open the gate twice at this evening's milking, and Mary Kate didn't let either opportunity go by.

Ashley, our other goat, is a gentler soul, but she's not above stealing a few bites of grain. She used one of the open gate opportunities to make her move, and ran for the grain can. I think she saw us using the handle on the top of the lid, and was trying to do the same thing without success by the time I caught up to her. Mary Kate used Ashley's diversion to steal a few bites of hay from the bale we keep outside their pen. Eventually, if I really am smarter than a goat, I'm hoping to have a theft-free evening. Hopefully the goats don't figure out how to operate the gate latches before then.

All the animals seem to like to congregate around the barn during milking time. The cats always show up, knowing that they may get their milk-bowl filled up. The chickens have decided that the barn makes a luxurious coop when it's cold and snowy everywhere else, although I try to discourage this behavior. A couple days ago, I checked on the goat's hay feeder and found an egg sitting in it, but usually they make the trek back to the chicken coop to lay. Although Memphis (our dog) is very mild mannered around the cow, Buttercup is convinced she's a wolf, and lowers her horns if Memphis gets too close. I'm not sure what she thinks of the cats. One day, I held Meowy over the fence while Buttercup came up and licked her, so they must not seem too threatening. Burrito the cat often plays with a wiggling stem of hay in Buttercup's trough while she eats.

With our newfound abundance of milk, Rachel is making more cheese. Her mozzarella is turning out well now (using the "30 minute" recipe which takes about 90 minutes), and she made her first hard-cheese; a round of Gouda which is now aging in our basement for the next 3 months.

The first weekend after we brought Buttercup home, I rented a Bobcat with a trencher tool (looks like a huge chainsaw blade) to lay some water and electrical wire out to the barn. The recommended depth out here is 4 feet, to avoid freezing the waterline. The ditcher worked beautifully for the first half of the 125' run, but the sandy soil started caving in for the second half, forcing Rachel and I to re-dig the ditch by hand. A couple days after I filled the ditch back in, the snow started, and has covered the ground ever since.

2008-11-03T19:05:00.000-08:00

It was a warm, gentle evening. I sat with her in the dim light, whispering softly and caressing her for hours, but she refused my advances. My skills were surpassed only by her ability to resist me. I spent the rest of the night tormented by my failure, fearing that it might be the sign of things to come.

Buttercup, our new cow, wasn't particularly happy to be moved to her new home on our farm, and she let me know it. As I was backing the horse trailer up to our barnyard for unloading, we heard some commotion as the truck was being bounced around by the trailer. I stopped the truck and walked back to inspect.

She had managed to crawl under the divider, giving her enough room to turn around and face the back of the trailer. Determined that I wouldn't catch her, she leaped straight out of the horse trailer, right over the closed doors. Udder and all. Still stunned by the spectacle of this incredible flying cow, I was heartened to see that she was heading down towards the barnyard on her own. Maybe she saw the goats and chickens there, and knew that it looked like her kind of place. The gate to the barnyard was still closed though, so she turned around and ran out into our partially fenced pasture, where she could have easily headed for Canada if she so chose.

After a few minutes inspecting her options with me trailing behind her, she turned around and headed back towards the barnyard. Rachel opened the gate, and in she went. Step 1 was now complete. Cow delivered, not running down the highway. That's good.

Next, I had to resurrect one of the ancient milking stanchions that we found in the barn. I don't believe the previous owners ever kept milk cows, so I suspect they had probably sat there for at least 70 years. One still had latches and appeared to be workable. I would've had this ready to go before the cow, but we were really just "browsing" for a cow, and I didn't think we'd come home with one this weekend, or even this year for that matter.

Following the advice of every "homesteading" type book, I was convinced that we wanted a Jersey, a breed which is known for manageable size, gentle dispositions, and the highest butterfat content. Although I'm sure we could've eventually found one for a decent price, they're not easy to find. Shopping for livestock isn't really like going to the store where you can find exactly the brand and size you're looking for. The Jersey we looked at two weeks ago wasn't particularly gentle (she liked to kick when being milked). Imagine trying to milk a mosquito bite, and you'll have a pretty accurate idea of her teet size. There's no way we could've milked her by hand.

You also have to keep in mind that dairys don't typically sell their good cows. Most every cow on the market is there because of chronic mastitis, low milk production, a blown ligament on the udder, difficulty calving, or any of a thousand different ailments.

When we went to go look at Buttercup, I was a little skeptical of her owner's glowing description, but I figured we might at least learn a little more in going to look at her. She's an Amish raised Ayrshire - Red Holstein cross. Ayrshires are a Scottish breed which seem to be moderate in most all respects, and Holsteins (more commonly black and white) are the super-producer breed that makes up about 95% of the US dairy herd. They're big, and they produce a lot of low-butterfat milk. I wasn't particularly excited about the Holstein part, but the Ayrshire breed sounded interesting. The average cow of each breed is 1200 and 1500 pounds, both of which are much more cow than I think would be good for our farm.

Buttercup is quite small; to my untrained eye, I would guess about 800lbs. Despite what looked to me like some rough handling by her owner, she was quite mellow, and didn't kick or fidget in the least when we tried milking her by hand (which I believe was the first time for her). Her small udder hangs high (this is good -- large udders often lead to problems with infection), and her teets are small but definitely workable for hand milking. She looks healthy, so we decided that she fit the bill.

I finally had the milking stanchion ready to go, and it was now well past her usual milking time. After a few minutes of playing chase back and forth accross the barnyard, I decided to make some "fake" fencing with ropes I have hanging in the barn. I figured she wouldn't know if they were electric or not, and might respect them.

It worked -- my ropes funneled her right through the open barn door into the stall where our two goats were huddled in terror. Two furry rockets launched out into the yard, ears and udders flapping madly. As far as they're concerned, Buttercup is about the size of a tyranosaurus rex, and is probably carnivorous. They kept a very watchful eye on her today.

After getting her in the barn, I was able to get close enough to Buttercup to try milking her. I wasn't sure I would be able to get her into the stanchion at first, so just tried milking as she ate a little grain borrowed from our goats. Nothing came out but a few dribbles.

I cleaned her udder some more (warm water is supposed to encourage milk "let-down"), over and over. Still no milk. So I thought maybe I could simulate the small tugs of a milking machine. Still nothing. Rachel suggested that our generator might resemble the familiar sound of a milking machine, so I started that outside the barn. Still nothing. I moved her to the stanchion, and gave her some more grain and hay. Still nothing. I talked sweetly to her, massaged her, scratched behind her ear... and she still refused to let her milk down. After a few hours of this, I finally gave up at 9:00 and went inside to eat my first meal of the day.

I had ultimately milked perhaps one pint from a cow that should normally produce at least two gallons, which means that for all practical purposes she didn't get milked that evening. That's really bad; a missed milking will lead to production losses, and can also encourage mastitis, (a bacterial infection of the udder). I didn't sleep well, and had thoughts of spending all this money on a cow who would now go dry. She'll eat about $4/day in hay and grain, which gets really expensive when no milk is being produced.

This morning's milking went a little better -- 5 quarts. This evening she was up to 6 quarts. I imagine she'll drop a little from her previous production level, but we're pretty happy with this amount. Unless Henry can down a few gallons of milk per day, we're going to have a lot of milk.

Ultimately I would be interested in selling "cow shares" (that's the only legal way to sell raw milk in Michigan), which can be quite lucrative if you can develop a good customer base. I'll have to know what I'm doing, and this is where I'll start to learn. Until then, we'll probably be giving some milk away, dumping some, and perhaps feeding a calf or some pigs with the surplus. Rachel, of course, will be making all the cheese she wants. One big advantage to cow's milk is that it separates into cream (goat milk doesn't) so that we can make butter or ice cream.

Another advantage to cows is that I think it's easier to run a grass-based dairy than it is with goats, who prefer brush over grass (goats eat like deer do -- they prefer to nibble a bit of every bush they can get to). It's much easier to grow and manage grass. All grass diets are much healthier for the cow as well as the people who drink the milk (the dangerous strain of e. coli is a product of grain diets in ruminants, for example), but are probably a little more difficult to manage. In New Zealand, where the people are smarter than us Americans, all dairys are grass based. They don't subsidize corn the way we do here, probably because Cargill and ADM don't write their agricultural policy.

Logging Camp

2008-10-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

Tarps over the woodpile work for a little while, but they're not the greatest. This point is driven home when you try to straighten them out after a windy day and one of the lakes that has formed on the top comes rushing down to wet your pants for you. So we've decided to build a wood shed. Our property has plenty of pine trees planted by the previous owners which need to be thinned out, and they'll now make some nice poles for the woodshed. All we'll need to buy is roofing.

We all ventured out to one of our pine stands for an afternoon of playing logger, and had a lot of fun. I felled the first tree with a chainsaw, but after that decided to just use the axe. I like to do things the hard way (note that I'm still quite happy to use the tractor if not the chainsaw), so that it won't be such a shock when the economy collapses and that's the only option available. But that will certainly never happen so long the fiscally conservative republicans remain at the helm of this great country.

After felling, limbing, and bucking up all the logs, we hauled them out of the woods and to the house with the tractor, which works well with a 3-point crane and a chain. Here's a video:

Logging is hard work for people who aren't smart enough to use a chainsaw, so we had to take a break in the afternoon and press some cider. Rachel had previously picked the apples on the trees at her parent's house. It was kind of neat to drink cider from apple trees that she planted when she was about four years old.

We had our first frost on the 19th, and have a had a couple more since then. I remember 80 degrees only a few weeks ago, and this Sunday there's a chance of snow. The weather changes fast here.

I've uploaded a few photos of the fall colors. The sumacs (particularly poison sumac -- my favorite) turned red first, and then the sassafras turned yellow. I've been waiting for all the trees to turn colors all at once, but they aren't cooperating.

The goats needed another worming, so we're without milk again for a few more days while the medication makes it through their system. Hopefully we don't have to keep using the hard stuff like this on a regular basis. The kittens are taking this especially hard. They run outside to lick the grass when I have to toss the milk out.

We're looking at a Jersey heiffer this weekend. That will definitely ramp up the milk production if we buy a cow. Rachel is trying to remain a voice of reason, but I like the idea myself. I don't like the idea of lugging several buckets of water down to the barn twice a day though; I really need to get some water lines installed. Cows also eat way more hay than goats, and may go through as much as 1 bale per day. That gets expensive, so we would likely set up a "cow share" to sell some of the milk. This is about the only legal way to sell milk in Michigan without investing 10's of thousands of dollars.

Rachel is attending a workshop tomorrow on the legalities and requirements of selling milk in Michigan. Most of the speakers are state and federal inspectors, so I suspect it's mostly intended to squash people's ambitions. In most states, the laws were written by the large industrial producers to squash small competitors, and Michigan is among the worst in that regard. A couple generations ago, it was quite common for a farm to sell milk (typically raw) to their neighbors.

Henry is experimenting with new parental management techniques as of late. In addition to the frequently used tools of the tantrum, whining, and pleading techniques, he's recently decided that threatening to "not be with us for a whole year" might be effective. I mentioned that he wouldn't like living by himself in the woods for that long, and he seemed to agree. The least-favored parent at any given moment may also be told that "It's hard for me to tell you this... but I love <the other parent> more than you now."

Turkeyville

2008-10-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple weeks, I've managed to sneak up on the turkeys that frequent our farm without even trying, on a few occasions now. They're wiley birds, and are typically seen sprinting for the nearest patch of trees. But for some reason, they just weren't paying attention lately.

This was enough to make me think that I might hunt them successfully, without the usual investment in full-body camouflage, decoys, calls, and everything else which Cabellas will gladly sell me. It's only legal to hunt them with a bow or shotgun, so you've got to get pretty close (about 40 yards max)

Our neighbor Stan just happened to be interested in hunting in our tree stand, so he and I swapped spots for a couple days. He's got a tent blind set up, which makes for a good spot to sit where the turkeys don't notice you. They were so thick around the blind that he was shooing them away, since he was after deer.

I spent the last couple days out there, a bit in the mornings and again in the evenings. It turns out that the tent blind doubles as a mosquito feeding station when I'm in it. My constant squirming and swatting probably didn't help me lure any turkeys the first night, but it got much better once I came back armed with some mosquito netting over my head. I was so stealthy that a chipmunk came and shared the blind with me for a while, but no turkeys showed up. I did spook a bunch of them the last time I walked out to the blind though, but these ones saw me well before I saw them.

Just to rub it in, the turkeys have been hanging out in our fields as if they were a herd of cows. While I was standing out in the driveway chatting with Jim Wetherbee (whose family owned our farm since the '50s), they came walking accross the pasture in the middle of the day.

We've got a new feature this week -- video! They're posted over in the upper-right hand of the blog, along with the photos. One is of Henry singing his "Burrito the Cat" song, which is how he entertains the cats (and Rachel) while he's sitting in the barn during the morning milking. Youtube's processing darkened it a little too much, but you may still be able to make out Henry holding "Burrito" the cat while he sings.

Another video is of Fergus the Rooster, displaying his new crowing ability. He's becoming a real man now, with all the responsibilities that entails. He's been demanding plenty of piggy back rides from the hens, but gets a little confused and stands on them backwards sometimes.

Our hens just started laying this week, and are fortunately returning to the coop to use the nesting boxes. Rachel was watching as one of them finished her business and stepped outside, giving the "Where is everybody!?" noise. Fergus, down near the barn, heard her, and ran in the direction of her call, pausing to crow a few times until they made contact and were reunited.

Last weekend was a little taste of summer again, with temps in the low 80's. The asian beetles took advantage of the warm weather to crawl into every nook and cranny in our house (they like to winter over wherever it's warm), where we met them with the vacuum cleaner. They look just like orange lady bugs, which is what I thought they were when we first moved here. There's also another beetle called a "box elder bug" which has been showing up inside the house, although not quite in the same numbers as the asian beetles. I'm about ready for a good bug-killing frost, myself.

The fall colors are really ramping up now. No good photos yet, but we'll get some posted. I've also been sampling the nuts that grow on our farm. Hickory nuts are supposedly one of the best tasting nuts around, but you have to find a tree producing nuts where the meat come out of the shells easily. I haven't found any of those yet.

Today I tried cracking open a few black walnuts. While they're not particularly easy to extract from the shell either, they are much bigger, and taste great. Better than regular walnuts like those you buy in the store, as the skin doesn't seem to have a bitter flavor to it. Walnut husks stain quite well, as I now have brown fingertips from peeling off the husks. There's some sort of worm that lives in the husks, but they don't seem to be getting into the nuts themselves.

Our pastures are coming in nicely now. Not all the green is good (there's a good amount of weeds in addition to the clover, alfalfa, and grasses), but I've got to say I'm pretty satisfied with how they're turning out. I don't think we'll have much trouble grazing them next summer, or getting a cutting or two of hay.

What made David and Rachel do such a silly thing?

2008-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

If you've read any books by Michael Pollan, you can skip this entry. If not, the NY Times has an excellent article he's written to the next president. It's a long article, but you could consider it a "Reader's Digest" summary of his books. He makes several excellent points, all of which have in part inspired us to start our small farm. Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

This is where we're headed...

2008-10-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

This post doesn't have much to do with our farm, but rather is a video clip (there are three, each about 10 minutes long) which I strongly recommend that everyone watch, and share with everyone they know as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z586rnEI6Qo&feature=related

Monster Buck!

2008-10-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

Having hunted for the last 12 years in Washington where I went as long as 4 years without getting a deer (and this even when I lived and worked in the woods as a forester), the idea that I could sit in one spot and expect one to walk within 50 yards seems almost laughable. For instance, during last year's season in Washington, I hunted in the foothills above Bellingham, covered over 20 miles in a day (okay -- I didn't plan to go quite that far, but became navigationally challenged) and didn't see so much as a single doe. Hunting in Michigan is different.

This morning was opening day of bow season, so I figured I'd go out and sit in my new treestand and stare at the trees and birds for an hour or two before I had to start work this morning, which is all that would happen if I tried this back in Washington.

About 10 minutes after sunrise, a doe came down the trail I had come in on. She paused about 20 yards away, pretending to eat some leaves while keeping her eyes and ears focused on me, then popping her head up to see if I had moved. She knew something was up, and finally turned around and left.

Another 20 minutes after she left, I heard the sound of a horse. Not sure what you'd call it, but it's the sound a horse makes when they exhale and let their lips flap. Maybe the neighbors were out riding horses, I thought. I turned my head to see three bucks making their way through the woods past me, about 50 yards away (about the maximum effective range of a bow). The first was at least an 8 point, and the two behind him both appeared to be 6 pointers.

I drew my bow on the leader, just as he disapppeared behind some trees. Then buck #2 came into clear sight, so I let the arrow fly, and the deer bolted. It was a long shot, and chances are that I misjudged the distance (arrows have a very curved trajectory compared to a bullet, so guessing the distance wrong by 5 yards is enough to send your arrow into the bushes rather than the intended target). I waited a bit, as you're supposed to do to keep a wounded deer from running rather than bedding down nearby as they grow tired.

Finally I climbed down to see where my arrow ended up. Sitting in the bushes, there it was. It had pink frothy blood on it, indicating that it had passed through the lungs. That's a good sign -- it means the arrow hit the "kill zone", and that the deer won't go far. Now to just find the blood trail...

I could clearly see the soil churned up where the 3 bucks had run off, so started following. And following. The woods here are a latticework of deer trails, but it had just stopped raining, so the old tracks were washed out and relatively easy to tell from the new tracks. As the deer run, however, they might only leave a hoofprint every 10-15 feet, so it's not always easy to know if they've turned on a side trail until you follow it.

I followed the trail as far as I could -- about 1/8th of a mile, where I could no longer find any fresh tracks. Not once did I see a drop of blood, which seemed odd for a lung shot, and made me think that the wounded deer had given me the slip on a side trail somewhere.

I headed back to the house (saw two big turkeys on the way), letting Rachel know about my adventures, and picked up our dog Memphis. She's old and deaf, but she loves deer and still has a good sniffer. In her younger days, she would go nuts seeing one outside our camper, and would chase them through the woods as fast as she could go, letting out yelps of frustration as they easily outran her through the brush.

Memphis and I headed back to the scene of the crime, travelling through a brushy area that I thought the deer may have gone through (but to which I saw no tracks). It wasn't long before
she became "occupied" and stopped following me. I turned around to follow her, and came accross a very well marked blood trail. Memphis had wandered down to the pond, and there, floating about 20 feet out, was a big furry deer back.

I'm not sure why he would've chosen to run into the water. Maybe it makes a good hiding spot (we spooked a fawn hiding in this pond last summer). I've heard of other deer doing the same thing, but never thought it might be a pattern until now. I couldn't see the rack though, until I waded out to pick him up. I phoned Rachel to let her know the good news, and decided to just pull the deer through the water over to where we could load him into the pickup. She met me just as I reached the end of the pond, where she snapped the two photos you'll see in the link for 10/1/08.

Now Taking Reservations

2008-09-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

For everyone who is thinking a farm might be a good idea on a day when the dow drops 777 points (clearly a sign that Jesus is coming), we're now taking reservations. The Peeling Wallpaper suite is still available, as is the Scratching Rodent room. Payment may be made in goat milking, cutting firewood (by hand, of course), or hanging drywall.

Here's a bit of a recent Michigan cultural experience I'd like to share...

A week ago we stopped at the "Main Street Pub" in Vicksburg on our way back from visiting the harvest festival at Tiller's International (it's a school that teaches cool stuff like farming with draft animals). I figured any place that called itself a pub in this day and age must have decent beer, which is rare in Michigan. Sure enough, when we got in, the wallpaper was printed with pictures of microbrew bottles like Alaskan, Deschutes, and dozens of others. Definitely a good sign.

The waitress came to take our drink order, and rattled off their beers on tap, "Bud, Bud Light, Bud Dry, Bud Ice... " and kept going with a couple names that I wasn't familiar with (either that or my hearing wasn't good enough to understand what she was saying). I asked if they had any microbrews. Rachel suppressed a giggle. The waitress paused, with a perplexed look, and said "I don't know what that is."

We've found precious few good restaurants (well -- one actually -- but it's not cheap) by Bellingham standards. I think that every single restaurant we've been in had a TV in each corner. Perhaps it keeps the patrons from inspecting their food too closely. It's a good incentive to grow and cook our own food, I guess.

Speaking of TV, guess what's in the waiting room of the local pediatrician's office? That seems to me like putting cigarette vending machines in the lobby of a hospital.

The harvest festival at Tillers was fun. We've been wondering if there are any like-minded folks in Michigan, and this is the first place we found whole hordes of them. It was a bit like the Bellingham farmer's market, full of organic produce vendors. There were seminars on fermented foods, urban farming, and a demonstrations of sorghum pressing (for molasses) and plowing with oxen.

They also had hay rides with draft horses doing the pulling. Henry could barely contain himself as our wagon drew near. Rachel had to remind him not to destroy the eardrums of our fellow passengers as he excitedly pointed out some other animals on the farm. We had to take two rides.

The previous day, I attended an Amish farm auction, where I was checking out some horse drawn farm equipment. The Amish really seem to be into auctions. There were probably 50 buggies there, most of them full. The women set up a lunch counter and sold baked goods. There was a household goods auction inside one of the barns (attended mostly by the women), while the farming goods auction was all outside, attended mostly by men. Most of the kids under 10 were running barefoot. I bought some bits for a bit-brace (basically a hand operated drill), but decided not to stick around to bid on the larger equipment, which the auctioneers save for last. There was a nice buggy in the auction as well. Doesn't look quite as comfortable as a car, but it might work a little better if gas isn't available.

Our woodstove is now fully installed, and just in time. Today has the feel of the first real day of fall. This last week has been dry, with temps in between 50-80. The next few days are supposed to be rainy, with temps from 40-60.

Last Saturday I started in on my project to fill the little holes that invariably start in a 140 year old stone foundation where the mortar has turned to sand. I was thinking I'd just trowel a little mortar into a few holes to keep rodents out. As with most home projects, this one grew a little bigger than I'd planned.

I started with the obvious places, where mortar was missing (many places have been patched over the years and appear to be sound). Realizing that a stone was loose, I pulled it out. And another, and another, and another, until I had a hole big enough to reach my entire arm into, in pretty much all directons. Whoever built the foundation put nice rocks on the exterior, and filled the interior with the smaller chips left over. They didn't use much mortar in the middle either. I guess it's a good thing that earthquakes aren't too common out here.

You can't polish a turd, but you can sure try...

2008-09-14T19:39:00.001-07:00

The "you can't polish a turd" thought kept coming to mind today as we painted our living room with the assistance of Rachel's parents.

We had originally planned to just live with it until next year, but it's pretty bad. When it comes to the most "ghetto" part of the house, it gives our bathroom a run for its money. The bathroom had several holes in the partially rotted floor (from old plumbing installations) and a resident cricket (now with a girlfriend cricket). The cricket usually hides under the trim near the toilet and sings for me when I visit, but last night he came out for a stroll while I was cutting my hair.

The living room has 140+ years worth of wallpaper, all of it peeling or peeled to reveal crumbling plaster, and an occasional nest of asian beetles. It's kind of fun to play "name that decade" as you peel off each layer.

The living room is where our sole source of heat (a woodstove) resides, so any major projects here need to be done in the summer months. Realizing that peeling the wallpaper down to a paintable surface is a futile effort at best, we decided that it may be worth it to have a drywall contractor replace the walls for us before the wood stove goes in (we have maybe a couple weeks before things get cold). After getting the contractor's estimate, we decided that the peeling wallpaper really could be painted, at least until next summer when we should have time to drywall it ourselves.

While the new paint does calm down the many competing prints of the different wallpapers, it also serves to highlight every bubble, edge, and hole. The paint rollers have a great ability to wet the wallpaper and make it peel up underneath them as well.

Some of you may have heard me gloat about how Michigan doesn't have the perma-drizzle that Bellingham suffers from 9 months of the year, but I think I would take perma-drizzle over our weather for the last two days. We lost track of exactly how much rain we got after emptying the rain guage several times, but I believe we were between 10 and 11 inches over the last 48 hours, as the remnants of a tropical storm, followed by the remnants of Ike rolled through. Toads liked the weather though, and were out in force.

The sprouts out in our newly planted pasture didn't fare so well as every dip in the terrain turned into a babling brown brook full of our topsoil. I think much of it will recover, but it's tough to see $1100+ dollars of seed and countless hours of tractor work get beat up and washed away.

This morning, Rachel and Henry heard a strange noise through his bedroom window. Rachel asked Henry what he thought it was, and he said "That's a chicken -- that's the sound they make when a raccoon is eating them, or maybe a weasel." Thinking that Henry might be right, I ran outside to investigate. Sure enough, the sound came from the coop. Sitting in the middle of the roost was our solitary rooster (recently named Fergus) surrounded by his harem, trying out his newfound crowing ability.

Random rambling

2008-08-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

No major events to report as of late. No new animals, and no particularly important projects. (Once the money runs thin, those sorts of things have a way of petering out)

Rachel has been making goat cheese. Thus far she's made a couple batches of chevre and one of mozzarella. The chevre is a nice spreadable cheese, and is fairly quick to make. The mozzarella was an all-day ordeal that nearly killed Rachel, so I suspect she won't be making a whole lot of that. I noted to her afterwards that not many small cheese producers sell mozzarella, and now we know why. There are about 100 different steps (slight exaggeration), for which you have to keep the milk/cheese at a set temperature for an exact time, and there's a lot of stretching involved, as you need to stretch this kind of cheese like you would taffy. The stretching comes late in the process, starting about the time you're completely exhausted.

I've been working on a tile platform for the wood stove, which is nearly complete. The base and frame are made, the tile is on, and I just need to grout the cracks between the tiles and seal it. I'm up to about 5 cords of firewood now, although the last cord and a half are still out in the woods. At least the trees are down and the wood is starting to season a bit.

Fall is starting to show around the edges out here. The poison ivy is starting to turn red, and I've seen a couple maples start to turn. I'm also starting to turn red, as the two trees I cut down last weekend were wrapped in poison ivy. No matter how careful I am, I always seem to get just a little bit on me.

We've got our first 5 acres of alfalfa/grass hay mix planted, and this morning I noticed the first cotyledons poking up through the soil. Hopefully they're not ragweed sprouts. My earlier ideas of mowing the remaining pasture and interseeding is looking like a non-option after some experimental plots, so I think there's going to be a lot of tractor work in our future.

A couple evenings this week we were over at a friend's house (Karla), whom we met through a local foods group. She's just purchased a neat old farm, where I helped mow some of the weeds down in her fields. It was fun to drive the tractor over to her house (about 6 miles, taking 40 minutes). Like riding a bike, you notice so much more than when you're driving a car.

I don't know why, but her fields were absolutely filled with preying mantises. They were everywhere while I was mowing. They look really strange when flying -- like two dragonflies who became stuck together in a head-on collision. The old farm house is in many ways similar to the one we purchased, so we'll now have someone to co-miserate with.

Speaking of dragonflies... about a week ago Henry and I were out walking through our own fields. I noticed a lot of dragonflies buzzing around me, and stopped to look up. I've never before seen so many dragonflies in one place. It was quite literally a large "flock", of perhaps a couple hundred. Dragonflies eat lots of pesky bugs which they catch in mid-air, so I like them a lot. They're like bats in this regard, except they don't poop on everything in our barn's hayloft the way the bats do. I'm thinking the bats will at least let off in the winter; guess we'll soon find out.

Last weekend Henry and I decided that the ponds weren't just for walking around, but were for wading in. They've shrunk a little bit in the summer heat, reaching the top of my thighs now. We used Henry's butterfly net to catch a few frogs, but no turtles or monster water beetles this time. The ponds even have some small freshwater clams. Saw quite a few ducks, more than we saw earlier in the year. Teal and widgeon, I think.

We've learned how *not* to pick watermelons this year. We've picked about 4 now, waiting about a week between each one. Each of them has been just on the cusp of ripeness, but not quite there. New theory is to wait until the vines wither. We have been eating some of the little melons that our friends Dave and Terry gave us seeds for as a little going away present. They're neat little melons with a skin similar to a cantaloupe, with green insides. A great size to eat for one person without leftovers.

Out tomatoes are big this year, and have been for a few weeks now. They just don't seem to be interested in ripening. Not sure if there's some trick I haven't yet figured out, or if we just need to be more patient. The tomato worms have disappeared, having been around for about a week. Looks like the colorado potato beetle which was plaguing our garden is gone too. They seemed to only last for about 3 weeks in July. The japaneese beetles which covered Henry's "4-o-Clock" flowers, giving eachother "piggy back rides", have gone for the year as well.

The last time I checked our hive about a week ago, the bees hadn't touched the "super" frame, which is where they make the honey comb that we get to keep (the lower two frames are for the bees to live on through the winter, and the upper frames are for us to steal). So I figured this year was a write off, spent in building up the hive strength rather than in getting honey. However, I noticed today that the neighboring property to the west is filled with goldenrod that's just now coming into bloom. Checking the front of the hive, I noticed a lot of good little bees coming back with goldenrod-colored pollen. Maybe they'll fill up the super after all.

Speaking of the beehive, we have a toad who lives on top of the hive, underneath the "roof" board I set on top. I've seen him there for the last month. Last time he had a little friend with him. I always set him down when I open the hive, and last time he stuck around so that I could set him back up on top when I was done. Not sure what sort of bugs he gets up there (I don't think it's bees), but he seems awfully happy.

Dog days of summer

2008-08-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

It's hot now, every day. This last week was in the upper 80's or low 90's. Things are really starting to dry out.

Goat milking is becoming routine now. Ashley is the grey goat, and is very mellow. Mary-Kate, on the other hand, is a handful. She typically gives a kick about 1 minute into milking, at which point I put the hobbles on her and she's fine for the remainder of the milking. I'm not sure why she does that. She's also quite fond of our bag of black oilseed, which we throw in with their grain as a special treat. Any time I don't have a hold on her collar, she makes a bee line for the bag and stuffs her head in as fast as she can, in hopes that she'll get a mouthful of the stuff before I catch up with her.

In an average day we get just over 5 quarts of milk now. As good as it is, it's hard to drink that much milk, so Rachel has a bunch of cheesemaking supplies on order. This is what our fridge looks like now

Yesterday evening we went to the St. Joseph valley tractor show, which is held about a mile from our house. Loads of neat old old tractors, including steam tractors. In true midwest style, everyone was driving golf carts or riding mowers around the grounds. That's apparently how midwesterners maintain their ample figures (heaven forbid that anyone should have to walk!) There was also a swap meet, where you could buy lots of junk that people found in the back of their garage. A few of the items for sale were actually tractor related.

One thing which surprised me was the number of restored "antique" lawn tractors. To me, these riding mowers have all the aesthetic appeal of a pair of dirty socks, but then again there's a lot of things I still don't quite understand about the midwest.

After a number of weekends cutting, splitting, hauling, and stacking firewood, I'm up to a grand total of 3 cords. Only 5 more to go! Ugh. I can only imagine how much fun this would be cutting everything by hand (without a chainsaw, that is) like the people who lived in this house for the first 75 years probably did. Maybe we'll just move into our chicken coop if it ever comes to that, so we won't need so much firewood to heat it. The chickens can just move into our house then.

One thing that's pretty neat out here -- there are tons of amphibians around. One morning this week, while picking potato beetle larvae out of the garden, I noticed no less than 6 little frogs (they're the size of your thumbnail) sitting on just the potato plants. It's nice to have help in keeping the bug population down. Every time I go into our basement now, I can find toads and salamanders, who all seem to be quite happy down there. Also helpful on the mosquito front are myriads of dragon flies. Today I was looking at the barbed wire top strand on one of our fences. I noticed about a dozen dragon flies sitting on it, each spaced about 6 feet apart, waiting for a little unsuspecting bug.

Earlier this week, our neighbor Stan invited Henry and I to go fishing with him for bluegills. I seemed to catch only undersize fish (this is normal for me), but everyone caught lots of them, and we ended up with about a dozen keepers. They're quite tasty, but I know it's best not to research what's actually in them. The state of Ohio (which is next door) has come out and said that there's not a single body of water in the entire state where it's completely safe to eat the fish, primarily due to mercury pollution from coal burning power plants.

The goats arrive

2008-07-20T20:05:00.001-07:00

Our first "real" livestock arrived this weekend -- a pair of Nubian Dairy goats. Their names were Mary Kate and Ashley (as in the Olson twins), but we're working on new names. Henry wants Mary Kate to be "Periwinkle" which is his favorite color at the moment (blue has always been his favorite color, but now he's refined it to periwinkle blue). I'm thinking maybe Dolly and Pamela (as in Parton and Anderson respectively) would be good names. Or perhaps Jenna and Barbara, as in the Decider's daughters? Vote your choice in the comments below...

Milking a goat is interesting. Imagine taking a cheap little squirt gun, and using it to fill a 2-liter pop bottle twice a day, *every* day. That's a lot of trigger squeezing. Only squeezing a teet isn't quite as easy. Your forearm will get *really* tired. Ashley has smaller teets, which take some special care. Squeeze it the wrong way, and it just sprays all over your hand instead of going into the bucket. Tonight, Mary Kate decided that we weren't good milkers, and let us know this by putting her hoof in the milk pail just was we finished. Suffice to say that our dog Memphis got to drink a lot of milk this evening.

I spent much of today clearing out the black cherry from the fence rows around our barn yard. Apparently, goats love to eat the leaves, which are toxic. While I was cutting these down, I realized that I really need to remove the rusty old fencing, which will be a fun project. Trees have woven themselves through the woven wire in a number of places. And just for fun, there's a little poison ivy hiding in there, ready to keep me itchy for another 3 weeks (that's how long my last itchy session lasted).

The weather has been hot and humid lately. Like living in a bathroom where someone is always taking a hot shower. We had a bunch of rain on Saturday, but I managed to get out and seed in one of our pastures before the rain really hit. I just seeded into mowed weeds, but there seems to be enough bare soil that I think I'll get good germination.

Clearing brush, just like Dubya!

2008-07-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

This last weekend was a mad rush to brush out all the fence lines for the fencing contractor who started this week. Our new brush hog (basically a big lawnmower towed behind our tractor) made this job much quicker, and is really a lot of fun to use. Unfortunately for me and the local phone company, I've discovered that obstacles (such as... a phone service box) are most easily seen just as they pass under the mower.

I've also discovered that poison ivy can get to my skin through clothing, and takes a long time to wear off. Par for the course, I guess. Alas, my dream of being among the lucky 30% of people who are immune to the stuff have been shattered. At least I know enough not to use it as backwoods toilet paper, which is more than can be said for one member of our family.

Mullberries are all over now, as are blackcap raspberries. I find that I'm easily distracted by these when I'm clearing brush.

Deciding where to install our permanent fences is a tough decision, and I'm certain I'll regret some of our placements. If only our property were a nicely cleared square of pasture, it would be so much easier.

Running fences through the woods means 1) lots of work to clear out the trees 2) trees will fall on the fence and destroy it, and 3) our animals will probably hide in the woods when I'm looking for them.

My other option would be to run them along the edge of the woods. I think this is actually worse, as all the trees on the edge lean out into the pasture, ensuring that all of them will eventually fall on the fence.

Another conondrum is the type of fence to use. I'm going with woven wire and a barbed top strand, because I don't trust electric fences. A high-tensile electric fence would cost half of what a woven wire fence costs. I don't trust electric fences because I read too much chicken-little hogwash about our energy future. I want my fence to work when the reliability of our electrical grid here in Michigan starts to resemble the grid in Baghdad. Of course, I'm still going to be using electric fencing for all of our temporary partitions, as doing so with permanent fencing would cost tens of thousands of dollars.

So later this week, with our fencing up, we can start looking at some real animals (something beyond the chickens, barn cats, and bees we have thus far). First in line will probably be a Nubian dairy goat.