The Learning Curve

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

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

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

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. 

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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.
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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. 
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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

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.

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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

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

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. 

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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.

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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.

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