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.

Farm Equipment Show

The best way to attend a big equipment show when you're actually wanting to see things is the way that almost nobody chooses....alone. A couple of Fridays ago Melissa gave me the day off and I set out for my once a decade trip to Louisville to visit the National Farm Machinery Show.

Oh the things I saw ! It was like taking a little boy to a big candy store and telling him that he had the whole day to look around and sample things.


It was a long day; I left the house about 6 am Central time and I arrived at the show about three hours later (but on Eastern time...so actually four hours by the clock) which isn't bad given that Louisville is 230 miles to the northeast of us. In spite of going to the show alone the world of production agriculture is small enough that I didn't stay that way for more than a few minutes at a stretch. Several times an hour I would literally bump into someone I knew and if I had the time I'm quite sure I could have killed several days doing nothing more than visiting. One of my Aggie classmates from Ontario knew I was coming to the show that day and she brought me a couple types of Canadian candy that are unavailable in the US, bless her heart.

The primary reason for attending the show this year was to look at Brillion type seed drills. As farm equipment goes, these things are extremely simple, durable and very easy to maintain. If you know what a cultipacker is, think about mounting a grass box on top of it and you pretty much have a Brillion drill. Because I'm planting into silt loam, I would really like to add a coulter cart and/or a set of rolling harrows on a cart ahead of the drill to scarify the soil a bit first. I don't want a full no-till rig and I sure don't want to tear up my established grass....think minimum till and you'd be getting close. Although I've never seen a rig set up exactly this way I knew that all the manufacturers would have reps on hand and I correctly figured they could advise me on how well this might work as well as what sort of coulter caddy's (there are legions of different kinds) I might want to add ahead of the drill.

It's easy to put a set of blinders on and forget that there is a whole big world out there and I've found this is at least as true in business as it is in one's personal life. In both cases it's important to take the time to reconnect, recharge and perhaps most importantly to constantly re-open your mind to new ideas. Visiting with folks, looking at new equipment and attending seminars with people doing innovative things from all over North America is an excellent way to do this. Now that I'm home here farming full time I might have to figure out how to attend these sorts of events on a more regular basis.

[Boy spell check sure didn't like all the agricultural terms in this post. The whole thing turned into a sea of yellow. I think the best one was that the sole offering it gave me for "cultipacker" was Goldberg.] Tee Hee.

Fresh Turned Earth

I come from the generation of farmers who made the switch from full tillage to no till and I mostly don't regret it. When you have several hundred acres to get over and a limited time in which to get it done, tillage, especially moldboard plowing, is a slow, monotonous inefficient drudge of a job. I've spent my share of time on tractors slurping along in mucky soil trying to get the last field plowed ahead of rain, snow or freeze up with engines maxed out and a weather eye on the sky and mostly what you do is grit your teeth, wince a bit and get it done. I've also spent a bunch of time buried in a dust cloud ahead of a big disc, cultivator and/or drag harrow in the spring and I have to say I don't miss that very much either.

What I do miss is the type of tillage that is as much functional art as anything else. Except for the Amish and a few recluses who never made the change you have to go back at least one generation before me to find folks who really know how to do this right.

Up in Ontario I used to enjoy watching a small dairy near Woodstock that did their plowing with two Farmall M's each pulling an International 2-16 moldboard plow. The family patriarch ran one and his son, then a man in his 50's or 60's ran the other. Their form of crop rotation meant that they never plowed anything but alfalfa stubble and they only had about fifty acres to get over each fall. The whole farm was plowed at exactly the right stage of soil tilth and moisture and each furrow laid over perfectly on the one before along perfectly straight rows. One quick pass with a small cultivator in the spring and they'd be ready to plant corn. I wish I'd thought at the time to take a picture of it.

The picture I never took was exactly the picture my grandfather spent hours trying to pound into my brain. If you take the time to set the plow up right and if you strike out straight AND wait for the right soil conditions plowing can be done easily if not effortlessly and spring tillage can be accomplished quickly and easy too. Too much horsepower makes it easy to overcome brain power as he used to say with a shake of his head.

Two years ago, Melissa and I stopped on a sideroad for a good while to watch an Amishman plowing with two well matched and well conditioned horses. He was fully in tune with his horses, the plow and the soil and he was doing an excellent job of managing all of it which made it pure pleasure for us to watch. It reminded me of someone I know and I wish I could tell him that as I arrive in early middle age I really was listening back then.

Observations About Russia

As many of you who follow our other blog know, Melissa and I spent a week in Moscow back in late January.

Anyway, a little history first. Melissa has spent considerable time in Western Europe but this was my first voyage off the North American continent. I have to say that a ten hour flight that crosses ten time zones is something of a rude awakening to international travel for someone who complains about the change from Central to Eastern time whenever I go anywhere east of Nashville. At any rate, I jotted down a number of observations while I was in country and which I will share for your reading pleasure here. For those who might be reading from Europe, please note everything here is written from someone with a rural North American perspective. Also please be aware that I wrote most of this while I was in Russia on very little sleep, so everything is very fresh but some of it might not make a lot of sense.

1. Some bathrooms are "pay" toilets, except here you pay a lady who sits at a desk outside the bathroom before you enter and you are given three squares of toilet tissue for your trouble. These bathrooms are typically very clean and it's usually worth the time it takes to find one and pay the small change required to enter. It's a real good idea to carry some extra tissue with you just to be safe.

2. When you buy something at stores they do NOT automatically bag it for you. You can get plastic bags, but you have to pay a small surcharge for them. This was kind of a revelation when I schlepped several bottles of water from the store back to our hotel by carrying them in my arms.

3. Most toilets have very high water pressure but they stop flushing when you release the handle and almost certainly use less water and do a more effective job of removing waste than our "low flow" toilets. I was most impressed with the toilets.

4. Fresh fruit, and especially berries are extremely expensive. I assume this is because the cost of importing those goods off season is very high. We are very spoiled everywhere in North America in terms of the year round inexpensive cost and high availability of every kind of produce and fruit.

5. Government offices, hotels, malls and larger stand alone stores almost all have security guards at the door and metal detectors that travellers have to pass through. Oddly, it seems as though you only rarely have to show ID's at these places.

6. In terms of entering the country for tourism, etc, I believe the US and Canada actually have Russia beat for difficulty in doing so.

7. Moscow can be an extremely expensive city for tourists and English is not widely spoken outside the main tourist sites. With a few exceptions, it makes sense to pay for a local translator in order to score better deals on things as well as to understand what the hell is going on around you. Even at $ 100 or more per day the cost of a traslator is worth the money in terms of what you save. Using our trip as a case in point, the rack rate on our room is $ 600 per night and the English bubble hotel restaurant buffet breakfast is $ 65 each which is convenient but EXTREMELY expensive. Two hamburgers from the same English bubble restaurant with soft drinks and coffee cost eighty US dollars as we found out on the night we arrived. A good, knowledgeable local translator can easily cut these costs by 50 to 75 % by showing you where the deals are and by bargaining on your behalf with most of the folks around you that don't speak English.

8. In most Western European countries if you stay on the tourist track, with minimal effort you can usually figure out what basic services are being offered even if you don't speak the language and no one around you speaks English. That is not the case here. We find that the Cyrillic alphabet is nearly impenetrable to our addled and jet lagged Western brains. After four days of trying I can now figure out which bathroom to use and where the exit is and that is the sum total of my knowledge.

By the way, EXIT is BblXOA. Easy, right.

9. Russian business hours are typically 9 or 10 am until 6 pm, making finding a spot to buy an early, cheap breakfast other than McDonalds very challenging. Even McD's doesn't open until 7 am.

10. I have never heard of most of the car models on the road here despite the fact that the manufacturers are the same as those found in the US. Most Russians who drive buy new cars and there isn't much of a used car market here yet.

11. Petrol is sold at very small gas stations....usually four pumpss at max....that might be located just about anywhere but that are most always right along the side of the road. The typical distance from the edge of the road to where the pump is located would be 8 feet or less with no barrier separating the road from the gas pump/station. Petrol cost is roughly the same as that found in the US.

12. Most Muscovites do not have cars and thus services (banks, restaurants, food, pharmacies) tend to be located very close together because the majority of people walk to them. Supermarkets here are tiny. There is no widespread equivalent to Super Wal-Mart/Target/Home Depot/etc and if you are used to having a car and these stores at your instant disposal it is an inconvenience not to have them available.

13. Russians are not big smilers unless they are greeting a personal friend. With exceptions, they tend not to understand that a quick smile from a North American is intended to put a stranger at their ease. Outside tourist circles I have found that it makes people uncomfortable when I smile or greet them on the street as I would do at home . Normally if I am greeting a stranger and I'm not smiling while doing so, that stranger had better be worried.

14. There are no supersize drinks and portion sizes tend to be considerably smaller than those found in the US. I ordered a large Sprite while we were eating supper and it was considerably smaller than a small Sprite found at most restaurants in the US. It also cost ten US dollars and refills are not free. Tap water is safe to drink but does cause difficulties for folks from overseas. Tap water isn't free either.

15. I find it very embarrassing that I can't speak a word of the local language nor can I understand more than a few basic words of script. A Russian who didn't speak or read English would have a much harder time in my neighbourhood than I am having here.

16 Russians speak very softly and it is rare to hear raised voices, sirens or honking horns even in the middle of traffic and pedestrian dense Moscow, a city of fifteen million people.

17. This one is really strange. The whole country....airport, hotel, cars, tourist sites, upscale malls, hell EVERYWHERE.....smelled like boiled cabbage. I like the smell so I didn't find it unpleasant but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was very different.

Other Ways to Sell Grass, Part 1

Winter is when I have a bit of extra time to do some reading and I tend to spend quite a bit of my free time reading and thinking. I am especially intrigued by ideas that are a bit outside the conventional box but which seem to make considerable sense even though they may not be widespread in terms of their adoption. I read with interest an article on the front page of Stockman Grassfarmer magazine this month on the New Zealand concept of grazing dairies and sharemilking. It seems as though some of those from the island down under have relocated to the central and southeastern US and they have brought their concepts with them. It is certainly an idea which I think could be made viable in slightly modified form here in the mid-south.

Most of the land in this part of the world isn't really suitable for anything other than grazing and yet most of the dairies built here are modelled after large confinement operations in the midwest where climate and soil conditions are very different. Although there are some excellent dairies based on this model this has never made much sense to me because it negates the biggest cost of production advantage we have; we don't need the infrastructure or housing found further north because of our ability to grow forage more-or-less year round.

We are able to take full advantage of this with our horse boarding operation and with the beef cows. I've wondered for a long time whether or not we should try to exploit our climatic advantages further with the addition of a small, seasonal dairy that mostly relies on grazing with the possible addition of small amounts of grain and protein in early lactation which is when they need it most.

Sharemilking is something I have no experience with at all except that I've talked with some families who have done it or are currently doing it, but the concept sounds at least somewhat interesting from a ROI and ROE perspective. It's hard (and extremely expensive) to start a dairy and make a living while floating the full cost of the land, cows and other infrastructure when one is starting from zero. This concept is one of several that allow a tenant/sharemilker to build equity in his/her cows first and once the herd was paid for he/she could then move forward with buying land if that was what he or she desired. As I understand it the tenant owns the cows and provides most of the labour while the landowner (obviously) owns the land and milking facilities. The milk cheque is split depending on who does what with the idea that all parties will have some inducement to make things better.

Both concepts made for interesting reading and thinking, that's for sure. Whether or not I ever choose to do anything more than think about it, this is the sort of stuff that keeps my mind occupied and (mostly) keeps me out of trouble during the colder months.

A Farmer's Clothing

When people think about what a North American farmer ought to look like the immediate picture that comes to mind is a Midwestern sort of fellow in workboots, bib overalls, a flannel plaid shirt or plain work shirt and a hat of some sort. This clothing caricature isn't completely unreasonable either, especially not in my case. If you're here for a visit and decide to snoop in my closet enroute to or from the bathroom you'll find multiples of everything I mentioned earlier. I like flannel plaid shirts or heavy blue Dickies work shirts on winter days. I own several pairs of bib overalls and bib coveralls and when the weather is cold and wet I wear them a lot. I wear work boots at every season of the year.

Easily the most iconic item in a typical North American farmer's wardrobe is his collection of seed corn/fertilizer/farm equipment hats. Every farmer I know has closets full of these freebie hats, although lately companies seem to be getting stingier about who gets them and how many they are allowed to hand out.

The day I left for college I had three hats with me in the truck. The one on my head sported multi-national Pioneer's seed corn logo, another was from regional Hyland Seeds and the third one was from our local grain elevator, W.G. Thompson and Sons. I'll admit none of these hats provided much of a fashion statement but that was never really the point. One of the girls I was kind of seeing at the time suggested I update my image by going to the local department store and purchasing (and wearing) a hat without an agricultural logo across the front. I went along with her until I realized she wanted me to pay sixteen bucks for a hat with a check mark on it. I told her that if I ever traded in my work boots for running shoes and Nike wanted to throw in a "free" hat to seal the deal I'd probably wear it but damn if I was gonna pay money directly out of my pocket to walk around advertising their product for them. Well, honestly. We broke up about a week later.

In the summer there is nothing lighter or more comfortable for keeping the worst of the sun off your head than a wide brimmed open weave straw hat and I wear one most days when it's hot out. I put it on in the morning and except to wipe my brow it stays on my head until I'm done that night.

As far as fashion goes I've been so out of touch for so long that I fear there is little hope for me at this point. That's okay. I feel about fashionistas just about exactly how they feel about me. The only one who possibly suffers from this is Melissa. At least she doesn't make me wear a sign that says "I'm not with her" when we go to town.