Emigrating to the US

I want to talk today a little about the details of the process of emigrating from Canada to the United States in preparation for another blog post I am going to do at a later date.

As anyone who is a regular on this blog already knows, I and my family have a long history of emigrating to the US either temporarily, or in some cases, permanently. We vacationed here as a family every year and we spent considerable time with my grandparents at their home in Elmira, NY. Before I emigrated, I had already spent an aggregate of three years of my life in the US, so I was already much more familiar with the nuances of the country (and the nuances of crossing the border) than are 99 percent of those who immigrate (including others from Canada).

Crossing into the US as a temporary visitor from Canada is easy to do. Unknown to most travellers, Canadians are issued a "paperless" B1 (tourist) or B2 (business tourist) visa good for up to 180 days based on the answers one gives to the border patrol guards. I never had any hassle whatsoever entering the US temporarily as a Canadian citizen and I have crossed the US border in this capacity a whole bunch of times.

When I applied for and got my position with Blue Seal Feeds in Vermont, I entered the US nearly hassle free to work with a professional agricultural degree on a Trade NAFTA visa; by far the easiest way for a Canuck to move south more permanently. I literally showed up at the Peace Bridge in Buffalo one afternoon with no appointment and all my paperwork in order and was processed in less than an hour. This is NOT what you hear in any media report talking about illegal immigration.

When Melissa and I were married the following year, we decided I would emigrate to the US permanently with the goal of becoming a US citizen. As such, we applied for an adjustment of status while I was still living and working in the US on my TN visa. About six months later, after much paperwork, background checks, and fingerprinting, I became a temporary green card holder. After a year, I applied to become a permanent green card holder, and after another two years, I applied for American citizenship and was sworn in as a US Citizen at the Davidson County Courthouse in Nashville in March of 2009.

Although the paperwork, fingerprinting and background checks were repetitive (and very thorough in nature), as long as one took care to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's", there was nothing difficult about gaining US citizenship except that it took fair amount of time and cost a little bit of money in fees. From the time I decided to adjust my status while still in the US until I became a US citizen, there were periods that it was more difficult and more of a hassle (from a processing standpoint) to cross the border and there were a few short periods when it was just easier not to even try. Again, the paperwork spells all of this out very clearly and it's easy to comply if one is thorough about going over the paperwork.

If this entire endeavour sounds kind of complicated, it is, but the entire point of the post is that it is often not HARD to immigrate to the US legally, provided one does one's homework first.

Some of you may find this background info kind of interesting, but I think ALL of you will find the follow up post I am going to do interesting !! :)

Fall in the South

After a long summer that started early and finished late, we are enjoying the beginning of an extended period of pleasant sleeping weather and bright, warm days that, with only a few exceptions, will last till Christmas or beyond. In this climate, autumn is my favourite time of year. The heat of summer is mostly a fading, if recent memory, and we have months of cooler but still pleasant weather ahead of us.

It's hard to believe it, but I never liked autumn when I lived in Ontario, probably because it was followed by winter; by far the hardest, longest season when one works out of doors in the north. Fall usually came in a rush in Ontario. Except for the harbinger species which started to show colour in August, most things retained their green through September, until one day toward the end of the month when everything seemingly changed colour at once. This lasted a week or two and often the colour would be exceptionally pretty until the next good front came through and then whammo everything was winter bare.

Autumn in the south is more subtle and progresses much more slowly than I remember it in Ontario. Our harbinger species down here are the nut trees (pecan, hickory, walnut and butternut) which lose their leaves and begin dropping nuts in early September, followed by the bois d'arc (bodark or osage orange) trees which begin shedding large, inedible fruit in mid September. Unless it's dry (like it is right now), most of the rest of the trees remain fully green through mid October and then slowly begin changing. "Peak" colour (which is kind of a misnomer because usually we change colour one species at a time rather than all at once), ususally happens the first week in November. The Bradford Pears are the last trees in the landscape to turn colour down here. Usually they put on a bright red show from Thanksgiving into early December.

Dry years mean poor to non-existant colour; many trees lose their leaves early with no colour change at all. Despite a wet start, this will be such a year. We haven't had a drop of rain since mid August.

Bermuda grass, big and little bluestem, johnsongrass, dallisgrass, and zoysiagrass all slowly senesce and give way to fescues, clovers, and bluegrasses as nightime temperatures begin to get under 50 degrees with some regularity. We've had two or three cool nights lately and we're in the middle of this process right now. Often the pastures look deader here on an 80 degree October afternoon than they do in January; definitely not like that where I come from ! I'm waiting a few more days for the warm season grasses to fully senesce before I give the pastures their final mowing of the season. Depending on the rain situation we may still get considerable cool season grass growth, but probably not more than the horses will be able to keep up with from now until next March.

Along toward the end of the month or early in November, we can expect to wake to a white frost on the ground although a serious freeze (mid 20's or below) usually has the decency to wait until after Thanksgiving. The horses are beginning to thicken their coats for cooler weather and Canadian man has stopped sweating like a horse at the slightest exertion.

Hope everyone else is enjoying fall right now too !

Ambivalent Thoughts on Hunting

As we head toward autumn in the mid-South, cooler weather is bringing lots of thoughts about deer hunting and as bow hunting season opened in Tennessee yesterday I thought this might be an appropriate time to share some of my personal thoughts and feelings about hunting.

I grew up in a place rural enough that nearly everyone in it took deer hunting very, very seriously, as they do in parts of rural Middle Tennessee. In my youth it wasn't uncommon for the classroom to be half empty on opening day and I assume it is still that way. It wouldn't be to strong a statement to say that deer hunting is a part of the culture where I grew up.

I know there are a variety of valid reasons that people choose to hunt. For low wage earners, deer season represents perhaps the best chance at putting a surplus of meat in the freezer. A lot of hard working folks rely on deer to supplement their larder and lower their grocery bill and it's hard to argue with that.

I don't row crop farm any more but when I did it was easy to ascertain by the level of crop damage in my fields how the local resident deer population was faring. Some years damage was sparse but most of the time crop damage was extensive and in those years it was hard to argue with anyone that there weren't too many deer. In Ontario, some of my large extended family used to partake of deer hunting on my land with my permission, and I enjoyed being a part of the camaraderie that ensued before and after the day's hunt. As a part of the unspoken "fee" for hunting my land, my cousins would bring me a part of their harvest and I enjoyed having a meal with them too.

In spite of all that, I'm not much of a deer hunter myself and I never have been. There are a variety of reasons for my lack of enthusiasm for hunting and these include reasons like not really having time to not really enjoying spending my leisure time freezing my butt off in a stand on a cold Ontario November morning. But the real reason...the one that I mostly leave unspoken, is that I don't personally find much fun or sport in shooting to death an animal that really hasn't done me any personal harm and that I really don't need for food. I always feel kind of sad even when necessity calls for me to put to death a member of a verminous species, and I'm just not very interested in taking a life and calling it fun.

I'll be interested to read the comments on this post !

Us vs. Them

There very much exists in rural North America today a culture of us versus them, with farmers standing alone on one side (along with all the "pro-ag" agribusiness professionals and integrators, most of whom haven't had a dirty shoe since Nixon left office) and everyone else on the other. It wouldn't be an oversimplification to say that farmers (often not unjustifiably) think everyone is out to get them and wants to change their way of life (with change being the operant word in this sentence). Because I am a full time farmer who very much looks and acts the part, I am more or less immediately welcome on the "farmer" side of the fence wherever I may be. This can lead to some interesting situations, especially when I think out loud about what I really believe, which is often very much at odds with the generally accepted "rural reactive" mentality of 2010. Here are a few examples, followed briefly by my thoughts in italics.

1. "One of these days, folks in this country are going to be hungry again if we're forced to abandon "x" way of doing things. And maybe if that happens prices in commodity agriculture will finally go up enough that for the first time in your life you might be able to make a decent living farming, but I'm sure if you work at it you'll come up with a way to screw it up and then complain about it. Or more likely we'll find a better and more sustainable way of doing things that will lead to even bigger surpluses and lower prices than we're already dealing with.

2. America has the cleanest, safest and most abundant food supply on earth. Okay, I'll bite. But at what cost to farmers, animals and the environment ? I also think a lot of folks in Canada, Europe and Australia would raise their eyebrow at that statement, especially regarding food safety. And if you ever entered a grocery store with the intent to purchase in any of these places, the price and quality of the food on offer in those "foreign" places would almost certainly surprise you.

3 There ain't no money in farming.....And if you continue to do what you're doing right now there ain't never gonna be, except nobody ever says that part out loud for some reason.

4. I don't understand all these damn people that spend money on animals when there are people suffering. It's seldom that simple. Often those who have compassion for animals put their money where their mouth is and help a lot of people too.

I find the older I get the less patience I have for stupid, reactive people who are stuck in thought processes like those listed above. Maybe eventually we'll collectively stop talking this sort of nonsense and hunt a different way out of the mess these speakers find themselves in today.

What would you think if someone started spouting these sorts of thoughts in your presence ?

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Paying attention to animals

Animals don't think and process information just exactly like we do, nor do they react like we do to various sorts of stimuli. This may seem self evident to many of my readers but it gets us into trouble with farm animals in two different ways.

The first happens when we attribute human reactions to animals. We ALL do this at least to some degree and enough of us do it often enough that there is a term for it...anthropomorphism. Maybe we urge our dog in because it's cold or wet or both outside, and we get frustrated because Fido doesn't want to listen to us. He's comfortable under the conditions at hand and maybe he's enjoying playing in the mud. The same thing befalls us when we deal with farm animals and horses. Melissa and I joke that we've spent a hundred thousand dollars on run in sheds to appease horse owners. This must be correct because the only time we ever see the (damn!) horses in them is on perfect days like today....75 degrees and partly sunny. With a very few exceptions, when it's raining and 35 it seems to us that they are ALL outside grazing, whether or not they have blankets or rainsheets on.

The second happens when we fail to adequately take into account an animals reaction to certain situations. I'll pick on myself and my family and use the example of loading cattle onto an enclosed truck or trailer for reasons of transport. For years the accustomed way to do this was to pen cattle up tight (often difficult to achieve on short notice) in a corral or catch pen they had rarely if ever been before, back the truck up, open the truck/trailer door and force the whole bunch on with raised voices and sticks. We never did use prods, but they are liberally used on some farms. At best this method led to terrified and irrational animals which led to frayed human nerves and short human tempers. It also leads to severely damaged catch pens, cattle and loading facilites because stressed cows sometimes go bonkers and when a creature weighing 1500 lbs goes bonkers, mister you've got trouble on your hands.

At some point, somebody in the family got angry and frustrated enough with this methodology to come up with a better way to get this job done. With a little foresight and planning, it's very possible to eliminate 95 percent of the trouble from moving cows. Today, I feed every cow destined to leave this place some sort of treat in the nearest corral every day for months before the anticpated departure. We make very clear to our human help that anyone who raises their voice or tries to move cows with force gets a one way trip home and will never work on this place again. We park the trailer (with the door wired open) in the loading chute weeks before we move cattle to get them used to it AND we feed the cattle IN the loading chute as well as in the trailer to get them comfortable with it. Guess what ? By paying attention to, acknowledging and overcoming their fears, today I can pen up and load a trailer full of calves by myself in a few minutes. Nobody gets hurt and the animals aren't stressed. My goal is to have half the cattle on the trailer chewing their cud, and while I don't always achieve this result, I've managed to achieve this level of comfort before.

Barn Interior, Tool Revelation

I've spent this week working away at finishing out the interior of the new barn down in Lynnville. I took the picture below about an hour ago, There is a fifth stall to the right of the picture that isn't visible but it's at the same stage as the rest of them.

Early next week I hope to get concrete poured in the storage area, the wash rack and the (large) feed room so I can frame in the walls and get them insulated well before cool weather arrives. I hope the electric co-op will be ready to string poles etc. so we can have some lights, plugs, and maybe an internet connection so that Melissa isn't solely responsible for communicating with clients each and every day.

I've built, fixed and renovated a lot of stuff in my life including multiple large buildings and multiple thousands of feet of board fence. Until last week, I drove each and every nail in every building project I've ever done with a hammer and an awful lot of muscle power. About a week ago, my father-in-law (bless him) went to Home Depot and when he came home he presented me with a Paslode nail gun and a couple of thousand nails. My infatuation was instant, deep and prolonged. I'd sleep with the thing if I could figure out how. Yes, seriously. I will never be without one again.

Off the top of my head, other shop tools I very much like include:

BIG air compressors that have the capacity to handle any air tool

Every air tool ever made, but especially air sockets and wrenches. Seriously.

Plasma welders

Stihl chain saws. I have a collection. Love 'em, every one.

Chop saws and grinders - They beat hacksaws and files all day long

Really good miter saw, table saw and Skil-saw.

Pipe wrenches - in a pinch, I can undo nearly anything with a pipe wrench

A really good, sharp little hand saw

Floor jacks with high tonnage capacity. I own three right now and I use them constantly

I'm missing a lot of stuff, but this is a pretty good start.

What tools do you consider absolutely essential in your life ?

If I can select some Melissa approved hinges tomorrow morning, we'll have five fully functional stalls at the new farm (one is out of the picture). Considering the barn interior was a bare dirt floor on Monday morning, and considering that I am the carpenter, I'd say this is progress.

Organic Animal Agriculture

A few years ago Melissa and I looked very seriously at going down the organic road with our beef operation. Ultimately, we didn't do it, and in the remainder of this post, I'll attempt to explain why we didn't.

However, before I get to that, maybe first I need to back up a step and explain *why* we were looking at it in the first place. Obviously, the most important step in thinking organic is having a core of fundamental beliefs that is congruent with what the organic agriculture movement is trying to achieve. On the surface at least, so far, so good. I am fully with them on long term, proactive controls, soil building, happy animals, and cyclical production models and methodologies. In many respects, organic agriculture is not incongruent with what we're doing with our beef animals right now. The thought was that if we could get certified it might give us another story to tell and the additional oversight might be be a selling point for some of our customers.

Unfortunately, when I started digging deeper there began to accrue some negatives to offset the positives. Here is a short list, along with some of my thoughts.

Farming is my business and my living rather than my hobby, so going organic is, for me, primarily a business decision. It's been my experience that it's seldom a good idea to knowingly make a business decision that takes you backwards financially, because if you're like me you will unknowingly make enough bad business decisions to sink a battleship all by yourself ! We ran a lot of math on going organic and we found that it was a wash with what we were currently doing from a financial standpoint. In this case, what I saw was a whole bunch of work and time to go through the certification process to win the use of a sales tool that would accrue this farm (at best) limited financial gain.

About this time, I began to look closely at some of the practices that were encouraged and discouraged by the certifying agencies with regards to stockmanship. It didn't take very long to find things that were massively incongruent with my beliefs; enough so that even if the money had been really right I couldn't have gone forward with with the certification process.

I guess I'm kind of wierd but I actually *like* the animals that live with me here on this farm. I want to give them every chance to live their lives as healthy and happy as possible, and if they get sick I want to treat them with the best and most efficacious treatment to get them back to a state of wellness as quickly as possible. Sometimes, the best treatment for sick animals involves using antibiotics. When it does it's my opinion that dosing them correctly and treating disease early is a lot more effective for the individual (and for the herd) than waiting and using them as a treatment of last resort.

Treating sick animals is no fun, either for the animals in question or for us. We take a lot of preventative steps to avoid the need to treat sick animals in the first place, either with or without antibiotics. One of the most important steps we take involves administering regular vaccinations against endemic diseases.

Both vaccinations and using antibiotics as first line controls in certain disease situations fly in the face of organic agriculture standards today. That's okay. It takes all kinds to make the world go around and if everybody were like me it'd be a pretty boring place. That said, I believe my protocols do as right as possible by the animals on this farm, and at the end of the day the most important thing has to be liking the face that looks at you in the mirror every morning.