Droppings – Just another day on the farm

It’s that time of year when we all get seed catalogues in the mail and start making plans for next years garden. With the unusual amount of precipitation and surprise killing frost we experienced this last year, I felt it would be a good idea to post plans for a very affordable high tunnel that enables you to control your gardens environment.

This is from a posting made a few years ago by a fellow forum member (with permission). The component prices have obviously risen but still remain easily affordable.

I am basically done with building my cattle panel greenhouse, still a few small things to do. It’s 25 feet long, 8 feet wide and 7 feet tall. 6 cattle panels were 23 bucks each (Tractor Supply), 50 bucks for the 6 mil 3 year greenhouse/high-tunnel covering (buddy had a 36′ X 18′ roll he sold me), scrap wood (free), lag bolts, fence staples and a few nails. I used thick heavy duty Zip Ties to connect all the 6 panels together. I used 3 Lodge Pole/Jack Pine logs from my property for roof support since we do tend to get a lot of snow up here in the wilds of North Idaho.

I am also setting up solar power for it, have one 100 watt monocrystalline panel, a 30 AMP charge controller and a 110 amp hr 12 volt AGM deep cycle battery. Going to use LED lights to light the place up and power a fan during the day (bought a 12 volt heating/cooling control unit to automatically power on/off the fan when needed.

Started germination in mid March so I have 30 or so plants that shuttle back and forth from the house to the green house, all in 1 gallon containers. Another 40+ plants germinated and soon to be moved to 1 gal containers.

I decided to only do container gardening in here for now, maybe add a raised bed along the front wall at a later date. I do have 3 raised beds in a fenced in area by the greenhouse.

And then, there’s the video we created for Small & Beginner Farmers a few years ago documenting the build at Purely Wholesome Farm in Loudon, NH ….

Once again I find it necessary to apologize, or at least offer my excuse for falling behind in documenting my farming adventure blog. Both I and my thirty-five horsepower Massey are getting slower in our old age so progress now resembles more that of horse drawn implement days.

However, in 2022 I was determined to get serious about cleaning up the proposed pasture, so we gathered all the logging slash and brush into fourteen rather large burn piles that had to wait for a snow cover to burn due to all the wood chips created by grinding almost two hundred tree stumps down six inches below the surface.

I hired a neighbor and his small excavator to pluck out the rocks too large for my backhoe and then began turning in the 26,000 pounds of pelletized lime recommended by the Univ. of NH. The down side to multiple passes with a bog harrow is the discovery of more and more stones with every pass. Rather than totally discourage my assisting grandson (at the advice of my neighbor who assured me that I’d run out of grandchildren before running out of stones), We decided to bed down the seed and fertilizer after five passes. With enough rain this past Fall to ‘grow grass on a rock’, we opted to Winter-over the lush pasture growth without allowing grazing on the soft soil.

While all this was going on my Angus heifer delivered a beautiful heifer calf in early July. We kept the pair on the resident field and fed out hay to them and the goats such that we could monitor them more closely. All the usual chores (firewood, hay, chickens & turkeys, mowing, vegetable gardens etc.) were uneventful even in the seemingly never ending rain.

So, as we finally settle down for the Winter, our goats have all been bred and a newly added bull calf has been adopted by our cow. Since selling off her heifer calf, she has taken over nursing this youngster and teaching him the ropes, so to speak. Come Spring, I’m sure she’ll be able to relate to him how sparse and bony this now nourishing graze area was when she was his age.

Times have certainly changed over the past few years. The extent of which became apparent to me this last month when my Massey Ferguson tractor sprang a major hydraulic leak from the pump area. First came the shocking price increase for a five gallon can of hydraulic oil, then the virtual shortage of local repair facilities and dealers available to service the machine, and finally the delays to obtain an appointment due to parts backlogs and mechanic shortages.

This morning I found myself contemplating how folks deal with issues when they own a foreign made tractor such as Kioti or Mahindra. Heck, I even heard on the news that our “All American” John Deere manufacturer is moving to Mexico… who’s next? Mack and Caterpillar are facing huge parts shortages as well, according to my diesel mechanic son. With the automobile, medical supply and food shortages it would appear that no industry has been spared from this mysterious calamity. My recent experience with a week long loss of internet has made me realize how dependent I’ve become upon rapid communication and information, especially the weather forecast!

On a related front, civility seems to have reached a new low as well, road rage and short tempers along with rude or no customer service appears to be the new normal. If there’s to be any comparison made between the great depression and our future situation anticipated by economic experts, social order will be the biggest loser. Now is the time to be building local community relationships in preparation for historically fewer resources and more difficult times, when reliance upon our neighbors will be key to emotional and perhaps physical survival. Extremely few families can raise, process and store livestock and dairy products, while gardening a years worth of produce, hay and grains. Barter and cooperation will be required to weather the coming depression.

Wow, am I the only one who sees a legitimate crisis happening? I’ve been called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and all-round nut too many times to not believe that society is suffering from normalcy bias. First we see a ‘novel virus’ resulting in the shutdown of our entire economy, then oil pipelines shut down with the resulting fuel shortages. Then comes fertilizer shortages, payments to farmers to NOT produce, and new USDA regulations further stifling their productivity which, of course, results in food inflation and shortages.

Take all these issues any way you wish, but now we have roadblocks being placed before homesteaders attempting to provide food for their families.

It must have been at least a decade ago that Agriculture Commissioner Lorraine Merrill was the guest speaker at Small and Beginner Farmers Annual Meeting in Plymouth. My most memorable take away from her presentation was the fact that New Hampshire produces only enough food to feed 4 to 6 percent of our state’s population. Considering that our average meal travels 1,500 miles and many independent truckers have indicated that they will simply park their trucks once diesel costs $6 a gallon, It’s going to be quite a shock to folks when they realize food doesn’t originate in grocery stores.

UPDATE: Watch this 3 minute followup to the above video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSRrYVO7URU

Yesterday Jan and I visited a local feed & seed store to purchase some vegetable plant seeds. As one of my stranger habits is to “check out” everything in the consignment isle, I moseyed over to the frozen food area. What a shock to see ground beef selling for $9.99 a pound! HAMBURG for heavens sake!

Suddenly my mind was running the numbers on the value of my 500 pound Angus heifer… why anyone with the space would NOT be raising their own food escapes me. Small & Beginner Farmers of NH has supplied a short video showing the construction of an affordable high tunnel made with cattle panels. It extends your growing season allowing you to control your growing environment.

Food price inflation?

Food shortages?

Fuel price inflation?

March seems to have brought on these, and several other budgetary challenges for many families. I must admit that I immediately ordered six turkey poults and lined up a ‘companion’ for my heifer to spend some quality pasture time together this Summer. That last minute decision in December to breed our dairy goats seems to be prescient now. It’s amazing how rapidly day to day life goes from predictable to “Say what?!” On a more positive note, mud season has become somewhat irrelevant.

Happy Spring

I love all those ‘wisdom’ phrases, You know … ‘A failure to plan is a plan to fail’ or ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ or maybe ‘Idleness is sweet, but its consequences are cruel’. No matter the motivation, I seem to always have some pet project to work on during the Spring season. This year I decided to finally fulfill a decades long desire to build some form of old power source device. It began in the eighties with my plans to build a fuel alcohol still. Then, with the realization that it required corn mash or beet pulp, my goal became the build of a steam engine. That goal met its demise due to the dangers of high pressure steam. I try to avoid suicidal activities whenever possible.

So, finally a practical project that met my original goal without the risk of life or limb… a woodgas fueled generator. With all the recent talk of a long term grid down situation resulting from EMP or utility grid hacking it made sense to build something that could keep our farm operating in the twenty first century regardless of these threats.

Then, with our usual requirement that an investment satisfy at least two necessities, we purchased a means of transportation that is not only EMP proof, eliminating that concern, but also is maintainable by any handy homeowner without the need for specialized tools. In addition, it’s a blast to drive around town! My brother in law spotted it on Craig’s list in Arizona and knew what I was looking for so this rust free 1964 Ford F100 moved to New Hampshire to instantly appreciate in value and grace our farm with its eye appealing character!

With the rapidly accelerating increase in the price of food, fertilizer and fuel, we made a last minute decision in December to breed our goats. Hopefully several of them will deliver in mid May such that we’ll have some livestock available for sale… The proceeds from which pays for our annual hay requirement. There’s never a shortage of composted fertilizer here and our vegetable crops reflect that abundance. So here, in the middle of February we sit, planning for our 2022 garden and hope you are too!

Thanksgiving is finally here! For this homestead that means the end of harvest of both produce and livestock, firewood and hay are all put up for the Winter and all my goats are bred for an early April freshening. It’s finally time to settle on down in front of the wood stove and reflect on all the blessings of another year.

Our wonderful companion dog, Bingo is still able to negotiate the stairs outside despite his degenerative myelopathy, now in its third year. Just like his master, he suffers from occasional vertigo but not a complaint from either of us as there are many with far more serious and debilitating conditions. We’ve all survived 2020 without so much as a sniffle, and haven’t suffered any angst over current political situations either, because God has it all under control!

This year’s festive fowl weighed in at a shade over 45 pounds when dressed out so, with only some of our family joining us this year (don’t want to trigger the ‘Karens’ by saying how many), those who will be here have been instructed to bring lots of Tupperware… This was the first year that our Grandson, Chaz helped us harvest the turkey, and though he has been involved with the preparation of broilers in the past, traditions are meant to be passed along to future generations. Just think, instead of telling their own children about how they walked to school, two miles up hill in both directions, they’ll be reminiscing about the years they had to wear masks all day and stay six feet away from everyone else. That’s why some things just must not change, providing an anchored foundation when the world gets weird. It’s called ‘tradition’, not to impede human development, but to provide a benchmark against which any ‘new normal’ may be evaluated.

I ’ve felt compelled to sit down in a quiet place and ruminate as to why I can’t keep current with this blogging thing. Some of the thoughts I’ve considered have to do with:

The fact that everyone has opinions, and they differ.. mine are no better or worse than others.
I’m averse to talking about stuff that isn’t relevant to a self sufficiency agenda.
I’d rather not discuss steps I’ve taken to prepare my family for upcoming shortages or lock-downs.
I’m not a doctor (nor have I played one on TV) so discussing Covid-19 preparations is meaningless.
Politics and Religion are age-old no-noes so that won’t happen.
Discussion of the recent or forecast weather is less than boring and we have no control anyway.
Crop alerts are readily available from UNH and no one reads this blog that frequently (if at all).
My hobby is electronics design involving low level software, so that really limits the audience.

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Perhaps it’s the fact that, here on the farm, things change so slowly and only after much consideration? Maybe it would be more practical to just post pictures (each worth a thousand words right?) and let the reader deduce objectives, challenges and activities involved. I thought those pictures, comparing the recent news with Great Depression days, a few posts ago would inspire conversation. I guess my readers didn’t wish to comment.

Some of our latest activities include dressing out the access road to our new pasture with over 600,000 pounds of crushed bank-run gravel, we dropped a years worth of firewood log trees awaiting cooler weather to cut & split. My grandson and I cleaned up the backyard pasture in preparation for the return of our steers to their Winter digs next month. The trees, branches and brush resulting from the last wind storm fed eight burn piles. We have separated our ladies from the buck since the recent cold spell led him to believe it’s time for him to seek ‘romance’ but, since we prefer April kiddings, he has a while to wait.

Sometimes I have to wonder if describing the physical labor aspects of farming frightens prospective homesteaders away? Maybe it’s the old question: ‘Want to make a million dollars from farming? Start with two million.’ Like many punchlines, there’s a kernel of truth to this humor since most farming is seasonal in its activities. To keep your head above water one must have various skills to incorporate during the non productive months. Many farms now produce Maple Syrup products, offer rough cut log sawyer services, hayrides, sleighrides and so on. Where our primary product is dairy from seasonal breeders, our cash flow suffers during the Winter months since the goats require grain and hay year round, gardens are bedded down and farmer’s markets are scarcely attended.

Compared to the ‘free’ grass of spring through autumn (and the farmers markets filled with four times as many customers during this same period), the winter months are a reliably stressful time on our bank account. Seasonal challenges like these are precisely why supermarkets are so popular. Our rewards for overcoming these challenges lie in the joys of animal husbandry: bottle feeding Spring kids and calves. There’s also the peace of mind knowing where each future meal will come from in these uncertain times.

Once again, it has been quite a while since my last post but my excuse is the great weather we’ve been experiencing allowed us to get all the crops planted, weeded and mulched. Twelve raised beds in addition to a high tunnel and a 600 square foot bed requires quite a bit of time to prepare for the growing season.

Speaking of ‘growing season’, we managed to put up 17,000 pounds of hay over the past week to support our livestock this coming Fall and Winter. I’m not sure that I can recall ever getting all my required hay in the barn before the official start of Summer. It’s a nice secure feeling when the hay loft and woodpile are both full and ready for whatever Mother Nature throws our way.

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