It’s the end of the first solar year of my post-professional life, and a little over 6 months into the Land Ethic Journey depending on where you start the clock.
A good time for reflection and the farm scramble slows down for a few months this time of year.
Temperatures have returned to more seasonable double digits in the 20s to low 40s since that freakish ultra low dive in October. We’re picking corn, by hand, from our ~ 2 acre ish plot, for feeding for the sheep and chickens this winter. I keep pondering a machine picker, or a combine, but the bottleneck and need just moves to another place. If I get a two row ear picker, then I need a grain wagon to put behind it to collect the ears, and an elevator to move the ears into my ~175 year old wooden corn crib. If I get a combine I need to add to that, a grain bin, with some drying capacity, to store the shelled grain in. So for the 4th year running I’m pulling ears and tossing them into the back of my UTV.
I’m squandering a few hours in the mornings and evenings, at sunrise and sundown, frightening our local deer with a variety of weapons. A crossbow purchase has increased my hunting flexibility greatly. I still chase them in the gun season as well and it’s nice having more time, but I’m still learning the land. I’m getting a good sense of location and flows of animals, and can pretty much see nice deer of some kind about 50% of my sits. I’m getting takable shots less often. It’s clear I need to invest the time and energy in some elevated blinds if I really want to consistently harvest. I hate the over-investment of money and time associated with that, but the nature of most of our ground is that I’m seeing deer at <50 yards most of the time, so if I’m not sitting in position for a shot (as in facing 90 degrees away), my movement to line up spooks them… having done some blind sitting with my buddy in Iowa over the weekend, and having a huge buck just stare at him oblivious after 4 dry fires (long story, but the lesson is, hunt with a gun you’ve shot in the last month…), because we were 20 feet in the air… well, it’s a big help to make clean kills, which I definitely aspire to do.
But, as observed by another good Iowa friend, the enforced mediation of just getting out in the woods before sunrise, or sunset, and sitting still and quiet for a couple-three hours… is its own reward, and a great meditation. Hopefully I will get something in the freezer this year as we have exhausted our lamb until February…
The wood pile is holding out well, despite the early onset of cold weather and deer hunting has been a great opportunity to contemplate the many 10’s of huge dead elm trees still available for heating purposes. They will be followed by Ash (see earlier posts on global trade driven extinction…) and it seems there is so much dead and dying ash in southern wisconsin I can’t even sell it for pulp. Very distressing as we have some 36” diameter ash in the back 40 …
It’s odd the books you run into and the times you run into them. Shortly after starting my Land Ethic Journey I stumbled onto the book ‘Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder’ An attempt at an actual biography of Laura, rather than the imagined but “true to life” stories the Little house books present. (https://www.amazon.com/Prairie-Fires-American-Dreams-Ingalls-ebook/dp/B0727NC3NN/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=prarie+fire&qid=1576617404&sr=8-1) For those of a certain age we were treated to the TV version of this as children and my own daughter was introduced to this charming dark childhood tale in book form. The ‘Little House’ books are ones of many that stimulate the Agrarian dreaming of middle class Americans and it was funny to run into this book on the beginning of my land ethic journey. It’s an actual biography, heavily researched and well cited. It’s interesting enough, despite that, to keep the pages turning, and a worth read. The author’s thesis seems to be agrarian dreams are bunk, and the Ingall’s were duped, and really Laura’s childhood was awful and traumatic and ultimately lead her own daughter to be somewhat mentally ill. Another way to process the same facts was that Pa should have just stayed in Wisconsin, and busted his but to earn some money and buy some land, rather than chasing the dream of a ‘homestead’ all over the American west, and certainly some of the logic of those times (“rain follows the plow”) was amazingly deciptive and fanciful thinking. The takeaway stands the test of time… one can have a good life on the land, if one has good off farm income, and that’s really what lead to the second, fairly happy, half of Laura’s life, supported by her true-ish but not grisly, tales of her childhood.
It forces one to wonder why a measurable subset of the human population is so attracted to the idea of putting down roots on a plot of ground that’s big enough to do for yourself, and make your own way. The appeal of ‘you won’t be rich but you won’t be hungry’ seems not quite universal, but certainly abundant in professional and wage workers of all types. Few do it, less succeed. The economics are not attractive and our first 6 months books bear that out…
Random reflections-
Things I’m satisfied with-
The garden harvest:
- 100 odd pounds of potatoes safely tucked underground in an improvised root cellar.
- Copious bags of frozen peppers and onions for omelet making and other cooking tucked into the freezer
- Canned ketchup and tomoatoes in abundance
- The usual 3 cases of green beans on the shelf
- Carrots in abundance and still keeping well in cold storage
Crops:
- One acre of the best corn in Jefferson county… a rare year when being small helps a lot… planted on time, harvested dry, estimated at about 225 bu / acre
- I want to say I’ve mastered making alfalfa hay… beautiful green leafy stuff, nice and dry… a story about right equipment and learning how to use (and not use) it, by observing the neighbors habits… very pleasing.
Livestock-
- The chickens are returning to laying, and we’ve bought less tha
n 2 dozen eggs from the store in 9 months, despite frequent omelets for breakfast and dinner
- A ½ a tasty pig in the freezer purchased from Diana at Dreamfarm (https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Farm/Dreamfarm-352876451408896/)
- The promise still of some venison in december.
- Slots at the butcher for 3 lambs in January
The dairy-
- The sheep milked well after a few weeks of shenanigans, milking became almost pleasant and I really felt like I got in the groove.
- The milk production levels lined up frighteningly well with my spreadsheet projections of 4 odd years ago. Which were based entirely on EBVs from the spooner genetics… suggesting that a milking herd of <30 sheep is going to suit our production goals really well.
- Amanda made some wonderful cheese that made me really optimistic about producing a premium product that some of my favorite restaurants and shops will be excited to sell
Projects-
- Getting stuff finished in general
- Replacing my rusty old electric resistance water heater with a shiny new hybrid electric
- Finally completing some finish carpentry in the house (window trim) that had stood undone for 4 years.
Things that didn’t go so well-
Livestock-
- I loved raising my feeder pigs this year. They are great animals with a ton of personality, but because I didn’t book the butcher 6 months out I had to take them to equity, and I lost a solid 20 cents a pound…on nearly 1000 pounds of animal… even with free labor. A real bummer and a good, if expensive, lesson on not even thinking of trying to compete in commodity production.
The dairy-
- More mastitis than I would have liked, probably because we still have more to learn than I wish… but thanks to our non-organic choice, a good large animal vet, and thoughtful use of antibiotics, we had no fatalities or culls due to mastitis this year. Progress but never good enough.
Projects undone-
- I had this fantasy that with not working off the farm I’d finish tons of stuff on the to do list… it’s still distressing long, sawmill to finish assembling, cheese plant to project manage to completion, some plumbing improvements in the parlor are all waiting for a magical mixture of other transient things being completed, and the right weather time and motivation…
The garden-
- A really weird weather year delayed harvest of anything edible well into the end of July.
Thoughts for the future and schemes-
- A high tunnel greenhouse ????
- Still fantasizing about 3 acres of oats, an allis all-crop combine, and being totally independent for feed, fodder and bedding for the sheep…
- Finish that dam sawmill assembly, then drop some of those huge ash while they’re still good, and mill them for timbers
Thanks for reading and have a great 2020 !
Jon’s Land Ethic Journey 
Good progress with all
Challenging year
Learning with a few hard knocks
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