Jolly The Christmas Cat

A few weeks before Christmas Melissa and I took Carter to see "Santa's reindeer" at Cheekwood, a Nashville botanical gardens that runs some excellent programs for children throughout the year. Carter was enthralled with the reindeer....they were named Jingle and Jolly.....and for days afterward all we heard about was how neat it was to see them and to sit in Santa's sleigh. When you are three years old doing these sorts of things with mom and dad is a VERY big deal. :)

Fast forward to the week before Christmas. Melissa and I had been talking about introducing some pets into our home for some time. We decided that Carter wasn't yet mature enough to handle a dog but for various reasons we thought a cat might be appropriate. One of Melissa's friends heads up a well run cat rescue in Nashville and she mentioned that there were two kittens being fostered at a rural home not far from the farm that were available for adoption immediately. Melissa latched onto this arrangement full on from the start. She set up an appointment to view the cats and within minutes  of seeing them they were on their way home with us. Interestingly one of the cats was already named Jingle; when we asked Carter for suggestions regarding the other one's name it should come as no surprise that he immediately suggested the name Jolly.

If one considers life from the viewpoint of an abandoned pet coming home with us would be the animal equivalent of winning the Powerball lottery. You're going to get top notch healthcare, every bit of preventative medicine we can throw at you, excellent feed, companionship when you want it or need it and as much environmental stimulation as it's humanly possible to provide. Jingle and Jolly took to this arrangement immediately. Within hours of their arrival they were running and playing through the house as though they'd lived here forever.

Jolly took to his new home particularly well. Jingle was justifiably nervous of Carter...every three year old on earth is loud and makes sudden quick movements.....and he tended to make himself scarce whenever Carter was around. Not Jolly.  Every day he was waiting by the door for Carter and I when we came home from his pre-school and he spent the entirety of his waking hours loudly purring while playing and interacting with Carter and with me. His purr never shut off. If Jolly was awake and not running full tilt he was purring. I'm not at all a cat person but it only took a couple of days for Jolly to win me over. Playing with Carter or sitting in my lap was the highlight of his life. I have never in my life seen a happier or more aptly named cat than Jolly.

About a week ago we noticed that Jolly was off his feed and appeared to be losing a bit of weight. We called the vet immediately and set up an appointment the following day for him and his brother Jingle. The vet diagnosed a heavy load of roundworms in Jolly....not an uncommon occurance in feral cats and kittens. This diagnosis made us all feel better. We started a three day course of wormer and brought the cats home.

In the days following Jolly acted exactly as you suspect a cat with a heavy worm load might act. He was normal most of the time but there were periods of decreasing length where he clearly didn't feel good. We figured it was a combination of the wormer and the internal worm die off and we were pleased that he seemed to be feeling markedly better as time went on. Yesterday was a good day.  His energy level appeared to be high and he was full of himself from morning through mid afternoon. He curled up on my lap with his brother and we all had a short nap in the early afternoon. When I got up to feed horses he and his brother changed laps and continued alternately resting and playing on and around Melissa.

Imagine my surprise when I got a phone call from my crying wife just as I was finishing up chores at around four pm. She said that Jolly had been lying in her lap when he had a massive convulsion and fell to the floor so quickly that she had no time to react and stop him. By the time I got to the house....no more than thirty seconds after I hung up the phone.....Jolly was lying rigid on the floor and gasping for breath. I told Melissa that he was dying in front of us and that I would go get a gun to hasten his passing if she thought I should. She made the valid point that he may well be having a seizure and that seizures were treatable so we gently loaded him in the car and she rushed to the vet. Sadly I was right in my diagnosis and he died while enroute to the vet.

I've farmed all my adult life and I've been in the meat business for a good portion of it. I've seen....and frankly caused and/or participated in....enough death to have long ago realized that life isn't often fair. But it's always bothered me, and still does bother me, when well cared for young animals of any sort die for seemingly no reason. As such we asked the vet to do a necropsy. She called back this morning with the probable diagnosis of Feline Infectious Peritonitis. If that's correct, and I suspect it may be, we can take some comfort in the fact that there was literally nothing to be done for Jolly. Simply put, he was unlucky.

I'm sad for Carter and I'm sad for Melissa and for me but mostly I'm sad for Jolly. He should've had better than he got and he never got a chance at it. Most of his short life quite frankly sucked...abandoned, fostered, finally adopted into a loving home and then died in pain, though thankfully fairly quickly, a few weeks later.  In spite of his circumstances he was.....Jolly.....all the time and right up to the very end. His contented purring filled our house right up to the second he had the seizure that killed him. This is his story. He touched this tough old farmer in ways few animals ever have, and the least I can do is share it and never forget him. RIP Jolly.

Hiring Travails and Human Nature

One of the things I've been doing with my spare time is working through a pile of candidates to fill an open part time position on our farm. Most farm jobs are not high paying positions, especially in this part of the world, and the type of candidate low paying farm work tends to attact is not the sort of person we are going to feel comfortable employing to work with our horses. For that reason, as well as our personal conviction that those who work with us ought to be able to hold their heads high when somebody asks them what they make, our starting rate of pay is far above the local average and when someone has proved themselves their wages and hours worked can go up considerably from there.

This strategy has yielded excellent results. Most farms measure employee turnover in weeks or months and we measure ours in years. Still, when we have a position to fill, as we do right now, we seem to sift through a pile of resumes and conduct a pile of interviews. In spite of our best efforts at weeding out the chaff several times we've managed to start candidates that seemed very promising on the front end only to have them fizzle out a few weeks, a few days, or even sometimes a few HOURS into the job!

Between candidates, employees and customers I thought I had seen quite a cross section of human nature and behaviour and I have but I recently ran across TWO situations that are still bothering me and that I'm still working through in my head. In essence it's the same story repeated twice so I will repeat it here as a single instance. We had two candidates who seemed like excellent fits for the position right up until I started talking about wages and hours. Both already held part time jobs. Both told me they were looking for more income and more work.  Most people have been very pleasantly surprised when we got to this part of the conversation so imagine my surprise when I saw deep frowns develop on both candidates face. I was so disconcerted that BOTH TIMES this happened I stopped talking and asked if everything was all right. The answer I got...the same answer twice....stunned me. The candidate's both told me that this job could never work out unless we paid cash under the table. If they took the position at the starting wage we offered and worked the hours we wanted and actually reported the income...as we have to if we're going to deduct it as an expense.... their benefits....I assume government benefits but I don't know that for sure....would be clawed back or cancelled.

I've tried to work my way through this and I'm still struggling to relate. I've been taught since I was a child that it was up to me to provide for me and my family AND ALSO to be a good citizen who reports all his income and pays his share....I wish I thought it was fair.....of taxes to the government. If it required working eighty hours a week to get this done then that was my burden to bear. I've done it for extended periods and I can attest that it's not much fun. In my working life I've always contributed far more to the government in taxes than I've ever received back as services. I'm blessed that I've been able to do so but it's also never occurred to me that there was any other way to live one's life.

It's easy to say that these people are lazy degenerates that just don't want to work. That may well be true in some cases but since both were already working I don't think it applies in either of these cases. In fact the underlying emotion I sensed in both these cases was fear tempered by perhaps some shrewdness.....not laziness. I don't know enough about either person's personal story to be able to make further comment without becoming incredibly judgemental so I'm not going to do so. There are certainly plenty of situations out there where I can understand why someone wouldn't want their benefits trimmed back.  Equally there are others that I'm sure would leave me asking some very hard questions. I don't have answers, only questions.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch I've still got a position to fill. Hope everyone is having a great day today.

An Encouraging Message about Farming

There is a popular post on social media right now and the gist of the post's message is that farming is a great way to live but unfortunately there isn't enough money in it to make a living at it. One can almost hear the heaving sigh that inevitably accompanies such a statement. Every time I see this post I leave a sensitive and politically correct message so that everyone who reads it after me will know how I feel about the message. The gist of my politically correct and sensitive message can be summed up in one word.

Bullshit.

I hate mealy mouthed excuses. Why not call it what it actually is by saying something along the lines of, "With my current mindset making a living farming is beyond what I'm capable of doing or thinking about at this point in my life." That's probably not bullshit. Neither is, " I make a good living doing what I'm doing and I'm not willing to change but at times there are things I miss or think I'd love about making a living farming."

If, like me, you really, really do want to make a living farming then the very first thing that needs to change is the message, verbalized or not, that's floating around in your head. I believe there is plenty of money to be made in agricultural activities and I believe it's my job to find some part of this huge industry that excites my passions AND that is potentially lucrative enough to make me a very, very good living. Somebody asked me recently whether or not I envisioned boarding horses and raising cattle for freezer beef for my living as a young man. The truth is that I envisioned neither but the greater truth is that I would farm millipedes just as happily as horses, cows or crops if it allowed me to live the sort of live I want to live AND make a reasonable living doing so. And if the market drops out of cows, horses and crops you probably shoudn't rule out Paradigm Farms millipedes!

It ought to be the job of every single agricultural college in this country to find and bring in local speakers who have started successful agricultural businesses from scratch and let them share with each and every student that making a living farming is viable and entirely possible. I promise this was NOT the message that got preached to us back when I was in school and dinosaurs roamed the earth. A big part of the problem is that the majority of my professors didn't believe it was possible to start from scratch and make a living farming so they actively discouraged us from doing so too. But I'd encourage everyone who reads this to think about what would happen if we encouraged our young people to try. That would be an agricultural revolution worth participating in!

Accumulated Heat

One of the first things successful farmers learn with regards to plant growth is that it's a lot more necessary to think about and compensate for what you're environment *doesn't* provide than it is to worry about the stuff that it does. In most years in most of the US I've come to the conclusion that the largest limiting factors for plant growth might be lack of soil fertility, lack of soil depth to bedrock, lack of water availability or lack of timely water. I've come to this conclusion mostly based on the availability of maps and data that explore every one of these items in detail. Locally I can access more data than I care to think about on every one of those topics for free either through our local UT extension office or through our local NOAA weather forecast office.

We worried about all of the aforementioned things in Ontario when I was farming there too, and our local OMAF office also had reams of data available on soil fertility, average precipitation and soil moisture, etc. But none of the things I mentioned even came close to our biggest worry. In spite of being in the southernmost part of Canada most of Ontario has a marginal climate for maturing grain corn and other heat sensitive warm season crops. There is also a significant yield drag on early maturing grain corn varieties....not as big as there used to be but still very real. Thus the safest crop varieties to grow from a maturity perspective are also the ones with the lowest potential yield which is far from ideal from a farm income perspective. In order to mitigate risk, every Ontario farmer (me included) selected corn hybrids and other crops based on the amount of accumulated heat (corn heat units) we could expect on our farm as per the map below (map courtesy Ontario Ministry Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs).



Every corn hybrid in Ontario was classified by days to maturity (normal measure in the US) AND corn heat units. Thus when I bought a hybrid suitable for my farm SW of Peterborough I felt comfortable selecting hybrids up to roughly 2850 CHU. If I planted it before the fifteenth of May and if we didn't get an unusually cool summer or an unusually early frost it would reach physiological maturity, or close enough to it, most years. We kept on farm weather records and recorded our own corn heat unit accumulations for many, many years. 

Using corn as an example it's widely known and widely disseminated through print media exactly how much accumulated heat it will take to get any given hybrid of corn with a known heat unit rating to waist high, tasseling, silking, dough stage, and black layer, etc. Farm newspapers track this information every week throughout the growing season and compare it to long term averages and  information from the previous year. The same information can be and is applied to alfalfa maturity, grass maturity, small grain maturity and to a lesser extent soybean maturity. 

There are several measures of accumulated heat used in the US but as far as I know there aren't any which are systematically used to select crops across most of the country. Perhaps growing degree days (GDD) base 50F might be the most widely utilized for corn but most grain corn gets sold on days relative maturity which is no more than a rough guide as to when a crop might mature. This makes some sense because in most years most of the US corn belt is warm enough that accumulating enough heat to mature any temperate season crop isn't a big concern.

Strangely enough, accumulated heat does become a concern here in this part of the south, toward the northern end of both the cotton belt and the C4 warm season grass belt. While there is some general information on which cotton or hybridized warm season grass varieties might do best under normal local summer conditons as far as I know there is no systematic yearly tracking of GDD base 60F temperatures as applied to the relative maturities and yields of appropriate local warm season grass varieties. If there is I would sure like to see it. Any UT extension personnel reading this blog is welcome to correct my information.

The Dark SIde

For all the joy and light that come with farming there is a dark side too and it is no joke. I just learned a few minutes ago of yet another friend who succumbed to injuries after being crushed between two pieces of large farm equipment on his Ontario farm. He was forty seven years old with a wife and kids and now he's dead a week before Christmas.

Over the years I've been to way, way, way too many funerals that were directly attributable to farm accidents. Virtually all of the deaths were incredibly gory and with only a couple exceptions they were also almost all preventable. One of our neighbours was crushed to death when his tractor fell off a wobbly jack as he worked underneath in his shop. Two more friends have succumbed to silo gas. A couple more died when they were electrocuted. Another died in a tractor rollover. Yet another died when he fell off a roof. Another middle aged friend was riding on the three point hitch as his dad planted grain. He died after getting run over by a planter and cultipacker combination ten feet behind where his dad sat.

These aren't second hand stories or statistics. These are people that I've known all my life. Young people, or middle aged, mostly college educated, most with families. And that's not all the deaths either, just some that I remembered as I worked my way through writing this piece. I won't even start down the list of injuries; too many to name or even remember.

It ought to be sad that it's noteworthy that my whole family has managed to keep all their eyes and limbs despite a lifetime on the farm. To a degree  it's prudence on our part, but there's a lot of luck involved too.  My friends an neighbours didn't secretly harbour a death wish. They just got complacent and momentarily careless at a time when their luck ran out. It's easy to get complacent around big animals and big equipment. When you work up close with both every day you forget that one wrong move or a spook at the wrong time can put you in a lot of danger. It seems like overkill to switch off the tractor every time you dismount when you've left it running a thousand times and never had a problem. But the truth is that it only takes one mistake to kill you, as all of the people mentioned in this blog found out. Literally, there but for the grace of God go I.  I've made most of the same mistakes that got these folks killed at one time or another. I've either recognized that the situation was dangerous and caught myself in time or I've been lucky or both. For Melissa and for Carter I hope this continues. I'm trying a lot harder than I used to. But so were most of the ones I mentioned above.

They always say at the funerals that these people died doing what they loved and I guess as far as it goes that is true. But dying in a gruesome farm accident decades too early seems like a hell of a price to pay for doing what you love. Not much of a post this close to Christmas....sorry.....but it's what's on my mind and I have to get it off.

Digging Deeper

For those of you who didn't know already, Melissa, Carter and I moved to a home we built on our Lynnville farm a few weeks ago. Moving always seems to come with and create it's own uproar and this moved proved the rule in spades. That said, we are beginning to settle from frantic and frenetic into a more comfortable rhythm as our routines begin to stabilize.

Although we've owned and worked this property for nearly four years my knowledge of it remains superficial in most respects. I can't tell you yet where the first spring flowers rise, nor can I describe how sunlight and shadow move across each part of our land as the days and seasons progress. I don't know what most of it looks like, at least away from the driveway, on a bright midwinters night. I can't yet tell you how the different soil types on this farm and the plants that grow on them respond to light, heat, drought or cold. I don't know where the frost comes first. And that's only the beginning of a lifelong list of stuff I can't tell you. I say lifelong because that's how long it takes to really get to know a farm, and only then if you spend most of your working days upon it. When I'm a used up old man I will, if I'm lucky, be able to tell you this stuff.

That said, the process of becoming intimate with this piece of land has begun. I can now tell you where the sun rises and sets on an October morning, or I could if I were blessed with aptly descriptive terminology. For now it's enough to know that the process has begun. I'm smiling as I begin the process of learning about this land and creating my own memories on it.

Contemplative Weekend

I spent much of this past weekend in a contemplative mood. Partly this was due to the weather, which quite frankly sucked. Early May in the mid-South is supposed to be glorious; it's supposed to feature lots of sunshine, warm days, brief showers, green grass and blessedly cool nights. This May has featured non-stop rain which is why I have time to type out a blog in the middle of the afternoon but really that's another topic for another day.

In between the showers I spent most of my time either fixing on farm equipment or sorting through the large collection of junky equipment that my father-in-law accumulated over his twenty year tenure on this farm. The stuff that I'll use on a regular basis is slowly making it's way to our other farm and the rest is either at the commission sales place down the road or has gone to the scrapyard. It hit me just how empty the equipment shed and yard had become yesterday morning when I went back to take a picture of the newish 8 foot Bush Hog I bought to complement our big one and the small one. This is going to sound like an odd statement, but until about a week ago if my father-in-law had magically re-appeared the place would have looked much as it did when he passed last year. Now it really doesn't. I had the same thought when I sorted through the machinery and other assorted things many years ago when my dad died, and again when I was sorting through his stuff after my ex-wife's father died. Tom and I went to our local equipment dealer many times, mostly to haul stuff home, and part of the ritual was that we stopped at a crappy Mexican food joint to have something to eat each time. I stopped at the same place on my way home from delivering the last load of his stuff and I wish I could say this too brought back fond memories but I had forgotten about the inevitable indigestion and gas that accompanied any trip to that particular Mexican restaurant. It's one tradition I won't miss at all !

Yesterday I had a Facebook message from the neighbour that rent's my old farm in Ontario. He was planting  corn and he worked at it all day and well into the night, taking full advantage of the sunshine and fine weather they are currently having. It's been long enough ago since I've planted that farm that it was almost like hearing a story about a past life as opposed to something that was occurring in real time. One thing I don't miss from farming at the northern edge of the corn belt is the mad rush to get warm season crops into the ground at the first available opportunity in order that they'll have time to mature before it freezes in the early fall.

And so passed my contemplative weekend. Carter hit the terrible two's in full stride a few weeks ago. Full stride is how he takes on most things so I had better take advantage of the few remaining minutes of quiet in my Monday to do something about the tasks on my desk ! Hope all is well with my blogger friends out there.

Pausing Time and Laying Foundations

Carter will celebrate a birthday later this week and I have to say that I am almost comically nostalgic about it.  Although each day looks much like the one that came before it he is changing very quickly. The shy, underweight and wan little boy who arrived home with us early last summer has been replaced by a happy, exuberant, healthy bouncy toddler. As his parents our job right now is to help him get through all the day to day challenges that make up the life of any toddler. Our two favourite words right now are "No." and "Gentle".

It seems like every parent likes to complain about how expensive and time consuming their children are. We are no different. But the caveat for all you non-parents out there is that your children will be as time consuming and as expensive as you want them to be. As parents the very best we can do is to lay a sturdy foundation for him and hopefully he will be smart enough and confident enough to build on it over time. I want Carter to consume a considerable amount of my time and energy, especially right now while we're laying the foundation. We've set up our lives in such a way that it's mostly a joy to spend time together, whether we're at work or at home. Although solid foundations need not be expensive I also want to provide him with stimulation in other ways, some of which cost money. Carter is enrolled in part time daycare with several local children who match him in age. If it all works out as we hope it will he will go through our rural elementary and high school with some of the children as his lifelong friends. Our local primary school is only a mile away from our farm and the high school sits just up the road from it. We did a lot of planning ahead before we purchased our land and we were thinking at least as much about building our lives as we were about building our business.

Carter's favourite thing to do at this moment in time is to initiate family hugs. He climbs up on either Melissa or me and pulls us by the neck until we're all three touching heads together. As we lift him and hug him tight he always laughs with pure joy like he's got the whole world by the tail. He's seldom the only one laughing. I wish those moments could last forever because I feel that way too. I never understood why parents wanted to freeze moments in time but I do now. If I could freeze that one, I would do so.

Happy birthday son. Your mom and dad love you very, very much.

Lawyers Guns and Money

I'll be the first to say that I really don't understand gun politics here in the United States. Both sides seem so radically rabid and heavily politicized toward their respective stances that it seems there is no room for any reasonable discourse or middle ground. Every time we have another tragedy involving guns both sides ramp up the rhetoric even more. I find many of the comments on both sides to be equally distasteful. Unfortunately somewhere in the middle is exactly where I stand on the matter which means that whenever I open my mouth on the topic I seem to offend everyone. I like sport shooting at targets and given the number of varmints that inhabit farm country I feel the need to be modestly proficient with most small arms, rifles and shotguns. I currently own seven guns in various calibres and barrel combinations including several rifles, a shotgun and a couple handguns. I'm currently looking at purchasing some sort of tactical 223 to use as a small calibre varmint rifle mostly because tactical actions tend to be more trouble free than some of the lower end non-tactical weaponry. Unfortunately there are none of those to be had right now at any sane price.

I'm going to state for the record that wherever you personally stand on Second Amendment rights is fine with me as long as you can state your position in a respectful manner. America is a big place and everyone is entitled to and encouraged to have an opinion about stuff like this. I have friends who's views range all over the spectrum on this topic and I'm completely okay with that.

I understand that we can't ignore the Second Amendment and in that spirit it will probably surprise you to learn that I'm against banning the ownership of any particular make or model of gun. In fact I question whether gun control is very effective. Farmers like me use and view guns as tools. Having the right tool to do the job makes the work easier, quicker and safer. As most of you know it's hard to dig a fence post hole with a square mouth shovel. Similarly, but for very different reasons it's hard to kill a coyote or a rabid raccoon with a rimfire .22 or a handgun.  Lots of my Canadian friends own lots of  weapons that the government probably knows nothing about and I don't think there'd be any reduction in threat to public safety even if the government did know about them. The truth is that I and people like me could own entire rooms full of automatic tactical weapons, handguns or whatever you want with exactly no increased threat toward public safety. It's my belief that the key here isn't so much which weapons people get to own as it is policing which people get to own them. In my opinion there is a significant fraction of society that isn't mentally stable enough to consistently handle the level of power that accrues to those who own guns. Poor decisions far too often lead to unenviable consequences when guns are involved. In my opinion we'd do well to identify as many of these people as possible and make it as difficult as possible for them to get hold of guns and ammunition. We're never going to win them all but that's still no excuse for doing nothing in my opinion.

Frankly there are a lot of things that worry me a whole bunch more than gun politics anyway. First on that list is a government that spends nearly twice what it takes in every single year while patting us all on the head and telling us it's going to be all right. If I did that in my business every year I promise it wouldn't be all right. My creditors would get nervous and pretty soon the jacked up interest I was paying on my borrowed notes to appease my creditor's nervousness would force me to shut down. The financial crisis in Europe tells me that countries that are heavily in debt face the same situation.  It also scares me to death to learn that less than half the people in this country contribute a single dollar towards federal income taxes. Is it any wonder our economy is in poor shape ? How could it be otherwise ?

That's the end of my diatribe on guns and money. Unfortunately my brain is too tired to introduce lawyers at this point so I guess it'll have to wait for next time.

Update

I apologize to (both) my faithful blog readers out there on my lack of posts lately. As some of you know Melissa and I have had our share of illnesses, family emergencies and other challenges this fall and winter and of course there is Carter to think about these days too. That said, being a dad is by far the best job I've ever had.

One of my cousins who lives in Toronto now mentioned that everyone he knew was complaining about the relatively deep snow that had blanketed the city over the past several days. He mentioned that he had wet pant legs and feet too but instead of making him angry it made him remember some of the good times he'd had growing up in the little village my family has called home for a very long time. As you may imagine this got me feeling nostalgic too. Relative to Toronto, my little home town gets quite a lot of winter as you might guess from viewing the photo below. Wet boots could and did very easily turn into wet pants and even sometimes wet shirts as we slogged through what seemed like feet of snow for months on end. When I review some of the photos we took, and particularly those taken back in the 1970's we DID slog through many feet of snow for months on end, at least relative to today.

It would be hard to separate the village's history from that of my family because they are basically one and the same. My aunt took the photo above from the driveway of my cousin's home. Prior to his tenancy my grandparents lived in the house when they retired from the farm and prior to that my grandfather's aunt or great aunt resided there. The stone building on the right was my great-grandfather's blacksmith shop. My grandmother was born in the house that comes with the shop and my aunt....the one who took the picture above....lives there now. And so it goes with nearly every house along the half mile main (and only) street. In addition to knowing the current inhabitants and the history of the house in question the chances remain good that I'm related in some way to to a current or former inhabitant. To this day the place retains a very high concentration of families who have roots that they can trace...often without the need to leave their house...for a century or more.

I speak from experience when I say that it's hard to leave a place like that but it's eye opening too and it's not all bad by a long shot. This will not be a surprise to most of you but I learned that most of the rest of the world does NOT work in ways similar to my home town. Some of the ideas that I grew up with and that still seem normal to everyone who lives there are honestly quite strange now that I view them as a (partial) outsider.  I've also learned that success at integrating into a new place is primarily based on one's own attitude. If you expect things to be the same as they were in the place where you left I promise you will be disappointed.

As I mentioned earlier all the talk of snow, sledding parties and skating has me feeling nostalgic for the best parts of my boyhood and the wintry part is pretty hard to replicate when I'm staring out the window at green grass and blooming flowers. But of course green grass and blooming plants mean spring and spring very much is my favourite time of year and always has been. Must run now to check the price of grass seed at our local farm supply store. When today's warm rain settles the ground and it dries out it will be time to start re-sowing the pastures. Hope both my readers are well !

Why I Farm



No comment from me could explain why it's important to me to do what I do half as eloquently as these pictures above. Both were taken earlier this week at our Lynnville farm. Enough said.

Health Insurance and Medical Bills

I had a fairly urgent outpatient surgery done on me a few weeks ago. A quick trip to my GP verified that I needed the procedure and he scheduled a meeting with the surgeon for the next afternoon. A week later I showed up at the hospital shortly before seven in the morning and I was sitting in this chair typing on my blog and eating an early lunch by 11:30. No complications and knock on wood so far it's been a very easy recovery which I am now half way through. My care was very good and all the services rendered were timely and professional.

Melissa, Carter and I have a fairly comprehensive medical policy through Blue Cross. Being self employed, we pay the whole shot...no break for us We have pretty high deductibles and the deductible is 3X higher for our "family" than it is for either of us, but I'm not going to complain about that right now. We walked into our health insurance policy with our eyes wide open and there are legions of cheaper if less comprehensive options out there.

What I *AM* going to complain about is the tiered billing system that seems to be normative in American health care. We got our hospital portion of the bill today.  Combine that with my surgeon's bill and the anasthesia bill and my little surgery looks mind bogglingly expensive. And so it would be if I was uninsured and had to pay for it out of my pocket which is why I have health insurance in the first place. But what I would have to pay if I didn't have insurance isn't anything like what my insurance company actually pays and thanks to the explanation of benefits they are required to provide I get to see this. Think 20-25 % of the actual "bill" between my deductible and the insurance company's portion and you'd be in the ballpark.

Can you name another service where the difference between the negotiated price for a large entity and the price for a guy off the street who wants to pay in cash is a 75 to 80 %  reduction in favour of the large entity? If I walked in to a feed store or a fertilizer depot and asked for a 75 % discount  I would get laughed out of the store and our customers would be up in arms if we tried it with them...rightly so. In my opinion whatever the price of my surgery is it ought to be pretty well the same regardless of who pays the bill. I understand that a portion of society won't or can't pay their bill and I understand that collecting the money or writing it off needs to be built into the cost. That's standard business procedure. But charging an individual four times what an insurance company pays is not standard business procedure in any other industry I can think of. If what the insurance company pays is actually reflective of the charge then the public is getting hosed in a very, very large way. Frankly if I knew I could pay what the insurance company pays I would probably change my policy from comprehensive to catastrophic and pay the difference out of my pocket. In this writer's opinion addressing this issue would go a very long way to making health care and health insurance a whole lot more affordable for everyone, insured or not.

Getting off my soapbox now. :)

His Name is X

[ I wrote this post nearly a year ago, just before our first trip to Russia to meet our son. He's asleep in his room as I write this addendum and we couldn't be prouder or more pleased with how our story has turned out. ]

His name is "X", and we don't know very much about him at all. We don't even know what he currently looks like which is odd given that in a few weeks we're going to Russia to begin the process of making him our son. I can't speak for Melissa but I have the butterflies a hundred times worse than I've ever had them before in my life. And I've got questions running through my mind all day every day. Will he like us when we meet him ? Will he like his life here with us ? What does his life look like now ? Am I fit to be a parent ? What is Russia like ? What's being an orphan like ? Each day that goes by, the questions intensify. Those of you who are or were first time parents get the idea, I'm sure.

Right now, child X remains one of 750,000 unclaimed and abandoned Russian orphans. He's lucky compared to some because he hangs his hat and bib in a relatively well endowed Moscow baby home. In spite of his current circumstances I think it's fair to say that he'd have no chance if he wasn't adopted. Most children aren't adopted because most Russians view orphan kids as broken and unfixable. The system ensures this perception remains accurate because the kids are kicked out of the orphanage system when they are sixteen and statistics say that forty percent will die or be in prison within two years. How sad is that ? How bad must your own circumstances as a parent be that you would voluntarily give up your child to an institution to raise knowing the probable outcome and thinking that they would still do a better job than you will ?

For me, the worst part of this process is that although this is one of the biggest moments of my life I can't share it with anyone because it's not a sure thing yet. There is still some niggling chance that a Russian family could claim this child ahead of us. I know some of you reading this are saying to yourselves, well if not him then you're going to bring home another, so what's the fuss ? I guess that's right to a degree, but if it's possible to love someone you have never met then child X is already loved. And claimed. And wanted, too, very much so, as every child should be. We have thought about him and talked about him every day since we got our referral.

As much as we can make it so, this child's life here ought to be a good one. We've built our farm and our business around the idea of raising a family in a nurturing, safe and supportive environment with his mom and dad both available to him at a moment's notice and with at least one set of grandparents close by. We debated adoption for a long while. In the end, I wonder why we debated the concept for so long when every critter in our large menagerie is adopted. What could be better than sharing the wholesome farming life we've created with a needy, unwanted and unloved child ? At this point, I can't wait to find out.

I Hate Farm Equipment

I have a publication called Amazing Farm Inventions lying open before me on my kitchen table right now. The theme of this month's magazine is, " Made it Myself; Ideas Born in Farm Shops". Some of the ideas are pretty off the wall and some are pretty impressive. Clearly the folks who did this obviously like working on equipment  in their shops AND they have enough spare time and brain power to think their way through some seriously complex projects. 

I find both of these things extremely impressive because I operate at a much more fundamental level than this when it comes to farm equipment. When I jump on a tractor seat early in the morning what I really, really want it to do is start and run for as long as necessary with no problems or interruptions along the way. Then I want to shut it off, go to the house and forget about it  until I need to use it again. When my baler isn't tying properly or the middle row unit on my corn planter inexplicably seizes up and refuses to drop seed or I manage to put a rock through the feeder house and sieves on my combine I tend to get angry and frustrated rather than creative. The same thing happens when tires go flat, batteries go dead, pto shafts fly apart or any of the other maladies that plague farm equipment occur on a somewhat regular basis. It's not that I can't fix most of the stuff when it breaks. It's that I get no joy whatever out of the process, especially when everything here is serviced on time and put away ready to go.

Gramps used to say that machines didn't break when they were parked in the shed. I agree but I will take that a step farther and say that machines don't break if you don't own them at all, either. If I could figure out a way to cost effectively custom hire every bit of machinery work done on my place I would happily do so. I'm not one of these guys who farms because I have an iron fetish.  Given that a lot of my full time farming neighbours are hiring more and more of their time sensitive machine work done I don't think I'm alone in thinking this way, either.

Don't even get me started on equipment that is so poorly engineered that it's difficult or impossible to service, adjust or fix without dismantling it. If folks like me who buy equipment have to contort ourselves into pretzel-like shapes to change a fuel filter or check the oil it probably isn't going to become one of our favourite tasks. When it comes time to replace it, we will probably be looking at a different brand. Speaking of fuel filters, why is it that none of the tractors I own have an easily accessible fuel shut off valve located on the line somewhere above the filter ? It's easier to soak my arm in diesel fuel every time I change a fuel filter than it is to find and turn the fuel shut off valves on both tractors at this farm. But I digress.

Truthfully, I can't really imagine what it would be like to farm with no equipment whatsoever. Four wheel drive tractors, front end loaders, round balers, bush hogs, manure spreaders, air compressors and innumerable other pieces of equipment make my life tremendously easier than it would be without them, especially when they run right. And when they don't believe me when I say I can turn the air blue with the best of them.

Resuming...

When I was in my fourth year of high school I served as the President of the Student's Council. One day I was sitting at our kitchen table preparing a speech to give to the student body at an assembly the following day. I always stood and read my speeches out loud before I gave them and my audience that night was, as usual my mom and dad.  When I got done I asked what they thought. Mom hemmed and hawed but dad cut right to the chase. He pulled me aside after mom left and said, " Son your speech was good in terms of grammar and syntax, but you're not smart enough yet to be that long winded." Although it took the wind out of my sails a bit at the time he was exactly right back then and twenty odd years later he is still right. When compared to giving speeches the great thing about blogging is that you don't have to be very smart to offer up long winded posts on topics you really have no business writing about. You just have to keep at it. After a long pause to deal with all that life was throwing at me it looks like I'm back, at least for the moment.

As all of you who read our Paradigm Farms blog already know, we lost Melissa's dad to cancer early last week. Melissa did an excellent and unimproveable job of writing a very moving tribute to her dad and I probably ought to let that topic rest. However, before I do I have one story I'd like to share with you here.

For a whole variety of reasons, we decided it would be best to send Melissa and her mother to Moscow on our third and final trip to bring home our new son Carter. During the week they were away her dad and I spent a lot of time together and he became more and more restless as the week wore on. Melissa, her mother and Carter were due on a late evening flight from New York the day they were to arrive home so I was somewhat surprised to find Tom sitting wide awake outside in his chair with every light in the house and garage on at 4:32 am when I left to start morning chores. He waved at me on the way by to let me know everything was okay....well, more or less okay anyway. I got through with my work and came home about four and a half hours before their flight was due. I stepped out of the shower and much to my surprise I found Tom waiting in my driveway ready to go get supper and get on to the airport. Supper took about fifteen minutes and the drive to the airport killed another three quarters of an hour. Tom spent much of the remaining time pacing the large mostly empty waiting area with a half full cup of cold coffee and telling everyone in the room that he was waiting with me for his daughter, wife and new grandson to get off the plane. When the plane finally landed and folks started appearing at the gate he was so worked up that the TSA agent working the control point had to ask him to back up several times. He was instantly smitten with Carter, but in truth he was no more smitten than he was with any of the rest of his grandkids. It just felt that way. I lost my dad more than fifteen years ago and in a lot of ways Tom became something of a surrogate parent to me. I will miss his presence very, very much.

Foreign Possibilities

It really is a strange old world we live in sometimes. While Melissa and I waited to board our Delta flight to New York a few months ago at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow I spotted a tall youngish guy in a check shirt and jeans who wore the permanent tan of someone who spends their life outside in the sun in every kind of weather. He was also wearing a baseball cap that advertised a cattle breeding farm in Nebraska. As I checked him out so too he checked me out. When our mutual appraisal was over he gave me a small smile and a short head nod both of which I returned. I thought that was it until after I sat down; the big farmer was sitting directly across the aisle from me.

With ten hours to kill and another farmer close by you can believe we did some talking as the plane crossed the Atlantic. Turns out this guy grew up in Nebraska but was currently the manager for a big 6000 head/30,000 acre Angus breeding farm in Kaluga, Russia a couple of hours south of Moscow. The Russian/American partnership/farm imported all it's genetics from the US and was in the process of setting up a total farm to plate system including a packinghouse and a small feedyard to finish the animals on corn silage. I quizzed him pretty good on climate, soil conditions and local available agricultural infrastructure and as near as I can tell that area of Russia has a climate and soil conditions similar to those found in southwestern Minnesota. The only odd part was that despite vast native grassland resources and a suitable climate for raising huge herds of beef there is no real native beef industry in Russia. I can attest to the extremely high prices of beef at the grocery stores I visited in Moscow and it blew me away that most of the beef I saw was imported from Australia. Russia is a pretty volatile place economically and otherwise but putting two and two together I think this may well be a heck of an opportunity for those who get in on the ground floor. It certainly managed to get the wheels spinning in my head !

Ours really is a world of possibilities. I've heard all my life about the underutilized but extremely fertile chernozem soils found in a broad belt from the Ukraine across southern Russia and into Siberia. What I heard from my farmer friend confirmed much of what I had heard through second hand sources before. If managed properly this region has the potential to become a huge player on the world stage in terms of agricultural production. Maybe one day between now and then I'll get to go back and actually see it with my own eyes !

First Bloom Dates

If any of my blog followers want to play along with me I am quite interested in knowing when various measures of spring arrive at your house. My dates for Lynnville, TN are in parentheses.

On what date did you notice the first forsythia blooming ? (Feb 2)

How about the first lilac in bloom ? (Mar 3)

How about Daffodils ? (Feb 2)

When did you first mow your grass ? (Mar 1) How long was it at that time ? (cool season 6-12")

How about last frost ?

For the farmers in the audience, when did you start hauling manure (Feb 29)? Seeding small grains or pasture (Mar 2) ? Planting field corn (don't do this any more but noticed corn planters rolling Mar 21)?

If enough of you play along (and feel comfortable sharing your approximate location...southern Vermont, eastern Ontario, Toronto, Ottawa, etc.) this could be fun. Feel free to share any other spring-type information too !

Organic or Not

According to Wikipedia, "Organic foods are produced using methods that do not involve modern synthetic inputs such as synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers, do not contain genetically modified organisms, and are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives."

Fair enough.

I'm going to start this post by saying that I have no bones to pick with organic producers or honestly any producers as long as they operate their farms with integrity. The problems start when producers, marketers and regulators say or allude to doing one thing and then go and do something else entirely. This is equally true in both conventional and organic agriculture. Even more problems accrue when organic producers try to use industrial production methods to ramp up scale. That's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Type "organic feedlot" into your favourite search engine and see what comes up. I think you'll be surprised.

If you can't use synthetic pesticides to control weeds and insects and you can't use commercial fertilizer to replace the nutrients that are harvested and removed from your soil along with your crops then one has to modify production methods in order to achieve reasonable production and pest control while maintaining soil and animal health. Long (7 year +) crop rotations with small areas under cultivation and with most of the acreage in well managed pasture under a system of rotational grazing will go a long way to making organic production methods work as they ought to do. Lots of forages combined with lots of animal manure applied appropriately will build soil fertility and minimize pests. Animals that live in uncrowded conditions and that are moved to fresh ground every day or two will have minimal problems with pests and diseases.

The gold standard mentioned above feels sometimes like it's almost impossible to achieve. And if you're trying to go organic and you deviate very much from it I promise you'll get bit in the rear sooner or later. Sometimes you'll get bit in the rear anyway, just for fun.

In spite of what you may believe sometimes there isn't much difference between organic and conventional production methods, either. I'll highlight my points with an example.

Sweet corn producers have battled European Corn Borer (ECB) for a long time. Long rotations help control this pest and most producers, both conventional and organic, practice long rotations. Organic producers also sometimes plant a refuge....another crop that's more attractive to corn borer than sweet corn. But if ECB really comes on like it does in some years none of this will be enough to save your crop and other methods will be called for.

Here are some of the things you can do to control ECB infestations.

1. Grow GMO sweet corn that has bacillus thuringenesis (Bt) genes already in it to combat European corn borer ?

2. Grow conventional non GMO sweet corn and spray it with Furadan or other insecticides multiple times to control European Corn Borer ?

3. Grow organic non GMO sweet corn and dust it with Bt powder several times during the growing season.

As near as I can tell, option three is/was in compliance with at least some organic certification programs.


No matter their stripe, farmers face a myriad of unexpected problems and even the best farmer gets caught with his pants down periodically thanks in no small part to to the fickleness of nature and animal life generally. There is more than a little truth to the statement that anyone aspiring to start an organic farm ought to probably spend some time learning to run a conventional farm first so that when the inevitable challenges come there may be a fail safe in place instead of instant financial ruination. I've farmed my entire adult life and it still surprises me how quickly animals can get sick and how vigorously weeds can grow.

In some ways our farm would qualify for organic certification, especially on the cattle side, but in spite of the possible economic benefits I've never bothered to try to achieve it and I doubt I ever will. While I don't love using them, sometimes a few dollars worth of fairly benign pesticide will do a lot less damage and provide better results than will any certified organic procedure. Likewise, sometimes judicious use of vaccines and antibiotics will save a valuable animal and/or prevent a devastating disease outbreak before it has a chance to run amok. While I think there is much to learn from well run organic farms, I don't like some of the constraints that come with organic certification.

Keep 'em Poor Down on the Farm

I have before me a recent issue of a dairy publication that I still take despite trading in my rubber boots for.....rubber boots.....some years ago. This particular publication is old and respected. I particularly enjoy reading the articles that highlight how a small group of individual farms handle various management challenges that come along in any sort of farm business. But my blog today isn't about any of that.

The editorial in this magazine exhorts the dairy industry to address some of the rhetoric put forth by some of the organic buying groups operating in the US. Fair enough, some of it needs to be addressed and frankly some of it very much is rhetoric. But the lengthy part of the editorial that stated "If we all followed this mantra then food prices would rise and more of the world would go hungry and this would be a bad thing" got my goat today

Let me state right here that I won't be signing up to drink Kool-Aid with either the editorial staff at this magazine or with anyone in the organic industry any time soon. I also don't want anybody to go to bed hungry. But the irony of their statement is that a few pages before the editorial in the very same issue of this magazine is a page long article comparing dairy farm numbers from 1992 and last year entitled, " Fewer Dairy Farms Left the Business". In the past twenty years the number of dairy farms in this nation has shrunk by 61 percent. Having participated in said industry for a number of years and in a number of ways I can state with some assurance that the reason for such a precipitous decline is that there isn't much money milking cows.

My first duty as a farmer isn't to feed the world and it isn't to worry about folks going to bed hungry. It's to run my business in such a way that that I provide a good living for my wife and family so I don't have to worry about *them* going to bed hungry. As such, higher farm gate milk prices would be very welcome were I to decide to start milking cows.

To read that continuing to produce cheap food is exactly what needs to happen in a farm driven, farmer read magazine where the potential readership has declined by 60 percent in the past twenty years mainly due to economic conditions tells me all I need to know about the writer. I don't know who's side he's on but it sure ain't mine. In my mind the cheap food cult in agribusiness is as anti-farmer as they come. I wonder if we really would be better off if we ditched industrial agriculture and tried a different route.

Mud

When Noel Perrin said that Vermont had six seasons, not four he could as easily have inserted Ontario in place of Vermont and he'd have been equally correct. The two extra seasons to which he refers in his books are "locking" and "unlocking". You can use the terms freeze up and thaw in place of locking and unlocking if you wish, but I stand with him in saying that these "seasons" really do stand between fall, winter and spring.


Most years Ontario, Vermont and other northern places would be thinking about entering "unlocking" some time in the next couple of weeks, but this winter has been so mild parts of southern Ontario really never did freeze up. In a more normal season the warm March sun begins to melt the snow and frozen ground from the top down. When the snow is mostly gone and the first inch of soil melts it turns into mud that is super slippery...greasy was the term we used for it. Each successive warm day melts more frost and the mud gets deeper and more serious as the days progress until finally the frost lets go underneath and the soupy soil finally begins to drain. How long it takes till the frost lets go depends on the snowpack and how deeply the soil is frozen. In years with a big snowpack that came late with a lot of cold weather first it can take a LONG time for the soil to unthaw and an even longer time for the mud to fully disappear. Back before no-till I remember running into patches of frost in shady areas with the discs or C tine cultivator as late as early May.



Tennessee is mostly a disappointment if you like mud. Except in low, boggy places and areas of high traffic the ground never gets past the beginnings of the greasy stage. A couple inches of gravel will keep a firm bottom in most high traffic areas. Even areas that are routinely under water fail to get muddy, at least the way I remember mud in Ontario where at times in March and April if you weren't on a hard surface you were stuck regardless of what you were driving.

This year we went from damp soil to bone dry in the course of about three days. I ate enough dust while sowing grass seed and harrowing manure earlier today that I think I'm going to wait for a shower to re-commence spring's work. And with that thought I'm going to find a shower and wash the dust off me.