Farming through Covid 19

This blog got started in February and has been incubating around the edges of the daily sad news cycle, disease, racism, a crisis in leadership and in community in the US…that have just reinforced the starting thought.   It then lay dormant for 6 months and a friend reached out and tactfully asked me, ‘have you died?’…  in a much less shocking way… so that’s brought me back to the blog in Mid October a week from our national election… this might be a good time to try to push it out the door…  you’ll see it’s badly out of phase with the current season, as I look out the window at our first dusting of October snow here in Wisconsin.

I think the essential appeal of the Agrarian Dream is the sense of control over the essentials that homesteading brings.  Reading the little house books, or the foxfire books, or just about any homesteading literature… there’s a great deal of adversity and despair, but there always seems to be a pumpkin in the attic, some straw to twist and burn in the fireplace, or a pig that can be butchered.   We’re enjoying that sense of security, as well as thinking about what we can do to share the abundance as it comes.  

Our own small markets are disrupted as many have been.  Amanda’s thrice weekly trips to Madison, that included egg deliveries to friends and colleagues, have ceased, her work either disappearing or moving on line depending on the client.  The egg sign has gone back out at the end of the lane, so at least no one driving on our road will be short of eggs.  Our cheesemaking market development is on pause for the season, as our target B2B markets of high end, local centered, restaurants are on life support.  The lambs are getting to pick up the slack and we’re fortunate to be working with these flexible animals, who can manage on the milk line, or just raise their lambs, unlike our neighbors milking cows, some of whom are having to dump milk, while grocery stores and food pantries are short of supplies.

There’s no denying the sense of comfort and satisfaction it creates to know that even in “total lockdown” while we shelter in place, that there’s still a 1 mile walk around the perimeter of the land.  There’s still a long to do list, and in the spring with the days getting longer and warmer there’s no threat of starvation and even little threat of monotony.  The diversity of farm work keeps things varied and the spring weather of the upper Midwest going from 75 degree highs to 29 degree lows in 48 hours also make for excitement.  Two months on in mid-July we’ve already had two long stints of August weather…had the AC running for two one week stints… it sure feels like global warming is real. 

The garden is in full on jungle phase at this point, everything is growing exponentially, weeds included, though no working off the farm, and not travelling for my consulting business, things are in better order than they deserve to be.  A first good cutting of hay is in the barn and a second cutting badly wants done but the weather isn’t cooperating. 

Lambs have grown quickly with their Mom’s milk and a first load is going to Equity this week or next.  Our prices (touch wood) have stayed pretty good at auction, but our access to butchering continues to challenge.  We got the first opening on the schedule for JANUARY for five lambs.  I have the sense that the disruption in the big plants that have had so many problems with Covid, has pushed demand down to any little place it could get absorbed, and that’s frustrating our efforts to build a meat business.  We’re going to shell out the money, and pay the nuisance tax, to get licensed for on-farm frozen meat sales (one of the stack of licenses from Wi you need to sneeze on a farm here…)… so that we can get lambs processed when we can, and have meat on hand year round when people want to buy it.  We’ll see if that turns out to be worth the effort, but without it we’re never going to be a stable enough supplier to build a market.  In my basic approach to life of mitigating the downside scenarios we ‘weathered’ our male lambs this year, we took this decision in May, when the big food processors we’re in major train-wreck phase, and it seemed we could face a downside scenario of not being able to sell lambs off the farm.  By weathering the males we can avoid having a bunch of 200 lb teengage rams trying to kill each other and us, forcing us to euthanise the way pig producers have had to (for other reasons).  That looks unlikely now, but still gives me confidence that our 8 month old lambs we process in January will be tasty and without taint.

Then the summer got busy, as it always does, and the blog got neglected… so maybe a nice place to round out the year is revisiting-

 “The Larder”

Fuel:

Firewood-  About 4 cords put up in the shed, about 4 cords of milling scraps drying in piles.  About a cord of elm, my go to “I’m behind” wood, ready to be split at the shed, and a fewmore cords on the ground.

Electric- solar array still humming away and still exceeding our use, though that should change this month.

Ag Diesel-  After a spring top up we’re down to about 100 gallons.  As it accounts for about 95% of our on farm hydrocarbon use, at some point I’ll do some first order maths and see how much of our diesel burn I can reasonably account for with carbon capture on woodlot.

Propane- is getting very light use now that I’m home most of the time…House tank 700 gallons, barn tank 300 gallons.

Food (mostly tracking the stuff we aspire to be self sufficient on):

Veg and future veg-

• Green beans- canned: 3 case of 12 quarts
• Beets-  About 6 quarts canned
• Salsa-  About 6 quarts of red and 6 quarts of green
• Peppers- about 10 pints chopped, bagged and frozen.
• Potatos (i’m right there with you Dan Quale)-  ~ 75 lbs, holding nicely a week after the dig
• Dry Beans-  about ½ a quart, dry beans got missed this year when things got busy…- 

https://www.seedsavers.org/good-mother-stallard-bean

• Lots of saved seed, very little commercial seed.  I had a particularly bad year with commercial seed, poor germination… Gurney’s may be getting culled from my supply chain..
• Two quarts of dried hops waiting for my seasonal brewing inspiration.
• Some well established wild Asparagus and some poorly established new aspargus beds

Animal protein and sources-  

In the freezer-

• About ¼ of a delicious farm raised hog that Amanda bought from one of her cheesemaker mentors- a new one, but holding up well
• The equivalent of 2 lambs, grown here on farm and butchered nearby, consisting of the cuts we don’t like the most (this is what happens when you eat the whole animal)
• 1 turkey
• 1 duck

Sources-

• 5 chickens of three laying breeds, After a varmit issue this spring, we re-stocked with 2 more Ameracunas… no one is laying now in mid October with our shortening days.
• 2 ducks who may at some point lay eggs
• A vibrant flock of East Friesian/ Lacaunne composite dairy sheep doing well and ready to breed next month.
• Abundant deer and turkey on the back forty.

Feed-

The grass is still holding a bit of green, but that may stop with todays snow.

About 75 round bales of Alfala- Grass- Straw from 4 nice cuts this year.

2 acres of corn standing in the snow waiting for me to get out there and start picking (by hand).

1 ton of oats raised on the farm and harvested with my 1953 Allis All Crop Combine (woot woot).

At the start of October things are looking pretty good in the larder !

And we’re still Covid Free…