Keep an Eye on the Bull at All Times

I broke that cardinal rule today, and I've got a beat up body to show for it.  This bull has seemed much more temperamental than the last one, but I didn't thin k of that when I climbed over a six-foot wooden gate to bust a non-working tank heater out of the ice in the water trough.  After pounding the ice a few times with a wood post, I was trying to pry the heater up when the bull hit me in the crotch with his head.  He knocked me off balance and pinned me against the gate. Each time he pulled back to hit me again, I scrambled to get better footing.  It was a little worrisome waiting while he pinned me until another instant of freedom before he struck again.  Finally, I was able to scramble up the gate and get to safety.  I've got to keep him a few more months to get my cows bred back, but he's worn out his welcome at the farm.

Barbed Wire Telephone Lines

Didn't know this:

In this day of seemingly unlimited telephone service via satellite phones and other modern contraptions, it’s hard to believe we once used common barbed wire to carry messages. Laura V. Hamner, a noted Texas Panhandle historian, wrote about such unique telephone service in her book, Light and Hitch. According to Hamner, pioneers in early-day Claude and Gruver, Texas, recalled nearby ranchers who’d installed telephones and used the top wire of barbed-wire fences as telephone lines. When we purchased our Alanreed ranch in 1949, a telephone line ran from our ranch 8 miles south, and some of it still used barbed wire to transmit crude signals.

When the signal diminished during rainy weather, few pioneers realized it was because the wire was stapled directly to the fence post and grounded out when wet. As insulators became popular, the clever, most-innovative cowboys used every conceivable device as an insulator to suspend the wire and improve the faint telephone transmissions. I’ve seen everything from leather straps folded around wire and nailed to the posts, broken whiskey bottle necks affixed with big nails, snuff bottles, corncobs, pieces of inner tube wrapped around the wire and short car tire straps holding barbed wire telephone wires.
Bigger ranches were among the first to install barbed wire telephones to alert them to prairie fires when working distant corners of the ranch. Line camps located far from the ranch house were contacted and work schedules discussed using the “already-in-place” barbed wire. One-time fence riders also became telephone line repairmen because Ma Bell’s service workers simply didn’t exist yet.
Early phone lines, even the barbed wire variety, were usually party lines shared by neighbors. Eavesdroppers were the biggest problem with those early-day communication networks, and secrets were rare. When a caller raised the receiver and cranked out a call, clicks could be heard up and down the line as neighbors carefully listened in.

That is a bit of rural infrastructure I didn't know about.

Happy Thanksgiving

Farmland

Interesting.

Also interesting, this post at Big Picture Agriculture, on deflation and overproduction of corn, and that impact on the agricultural economy. We've had a nice run on the farm, but I don't think it will last.

A Week at the Listowel Races

Charles Pierce goes to the land of his grandmother to experience an event which her stories had made so real that it was like he'd been there numerous times before he'd ever gone.  It is a wonderful story of farm life, traditional Irish life, family lines and life in general, with horse races, booze and gambling thrown in:

Up and down the round, green-quilted hillsides near Listowel in north Kerry in Ireland, the seven sisters of the Lynch family once tended their sheep. They worked in the summer sun and in the soft rain of the spring and the fall, and in the harder, snow-mixed sleet of midwinter. And every autumn, right around when the harvest came in, they would drive their sheep up the hillsides and down, and straight into Listowel, where their flock would join cows and goats and chickens and ducks, and the sheep of a hundred other families, all milling around with each other and filling the town square with an amazing cacophony of lowing, bleating, squawking, and quacking that nearly, but not quite, drowned out the increasingly lubricated haggling of the farmers and craftsmen and merchants who had come to sell enough of what they'd raised and grown and manufactured to get them through the hard winter to come, with a little left over to spend in the pubs on William Street, or to bet on the horses out at the track tucked into the bend of the river. The sisters never went to the races. Only the men went to the races. The sisters stayed in town and listened to the fiddlers and the people who played the pipes, and they danced with each other after the day's business was done.
Listowel was a farm town, a market town. It was a little less polished than Tralee to the west and the south, or Limerick to the north and east. It was louder. It was rougher. One of the Lynch sisters, Mary Ellen, would talk in her later years of a rally in support of Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the split in the Irish Party over Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. The rally turned into an all-out brawl, the clack of hurleys on skulls ringing louder than the oratory. Called "faction fights," these were come-all-ye bloodlettings, exhibitions of what the Irish called the bataireacht, a form of stick-fighting that rose to an art. These would erupt at weddings or at funerals, or at virtually any public occasion at which a longstanding grievance might detonate at the smallest provocation.

Ok, harvest fair.  Sounds about like the origins of county fairs.  Discussing with his guide how he felt like he knew the place and was a part of it because of his grandmother's stories, he gives a good insight into the importance of narrative, in this case, sports as narrative, in our lives:

I am of this place, because my grandmother was of this place, and she told me about it, and so it became part of what I am...
"When you come right down to it," Pat told me, "running a racetrack is like running a farm. That's why the races here have survived. It was the last thing the farmers had for the year. Once the races ended, there was only the long, cold winter."
What are sports, anyway, at their best, but stories played out in real time? Each of them has a distant beginning, a middle, and an end, all three connected by the slender, powerful tendrils of memories recited. They are part of the collective memory of the tribe. They are how we explain ourselves to each other, down through the generations. Once upon a time, there were five sisters on the hills around Listowel, and one of them had a son, who gave her a grandson. From her, I had imagined hearing the muffled power of the hooves pounding into the turf. I had imagined the soft-running river. I never had been to the Listowel Races, but I had been there all my life.

The whole story is wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Ireland or horse racing, or having fun in general.  On this day of the Bengals-Browns game, his description of his grandmother's stories and the recognition of sports as narrative, I think his story explains every western Ohio Browns fan (and there's a lot of them, way too many, actually) I have ever met.  The reason that is is because they are only Browns fans because their fathers, and most likely, their grandfathers were.  Their grandfathers told the stories about Paul Brown and Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Marion Motley.  They were told the glorious tales of the Browns when the Browns won the NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL, after winning four AAFC titles.  Their fathers probably remember the last championship in 1964, with Jim Brown running over opponents.  I understand how they became Browns fans, I just don't understand why they remained Browns fans after Art Modell packed up the Browns and moved to Baltimore.  I would have expected them to remain fans of the Ravens (ok, probably not) or to have become fans of some other team.  Why would folks in Western Ohio choose to wait 3 years to follow an expansion team almost 3 hours from where they live?  That I don't understand.

Terrible Day for a Local Horse Owner

Dayton Daily News:

Three people are injured and seven horses are dead after dozens of horses escaped an area farm.
An estimated 39 horses got away from a Miami County property on West Sugar Grove Road early Friday morning. Some were wrangled in the 8000 block of U.S. 36 on the western edge of Covington.
Others were found along U.S. 36, where at least three crashes were caused by the roaming horses.
The horses in those crashes died.
Two crashes occurred within minutes of each other around 3:30 a.m. on Ohio 41, east of Covington. Drivers in those crashes were taken to Upper Valley Medical Center for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.
Three horses were killed in the wrecks on Ohio 41.
An additional horse was injured, but later put down by a Miami County deputy with the permission of the owners. The horse's injuries were determined to be too severe to survive, according to deputies.
As of 5:50 a.m., deputies and wranglers still searched the widespread area, searching for more than a dozen horses still unaccounted for. By 8:30 a.m., it was believed all 39 horses were captured.

I've had a cow get hit by a car, and that is a really shitty situation.  Having 39 horses out and seven get hit by cars is a terrible day.  I am glad to see a deputy put one horse down.  When my cow needed shot, the deputy wouldn't do it.  I had to go back home and get a gun and shoot the cow myself.  That wasn't the best start to a morning.

Killing Bugs with Fire, and Flame Cultivation

Wired:

Whenever I post something with a photo of a spider, I can reliably predict that the first or second comment will be “OMG Kill it with Fire!!11!!”
It’s happening more and more often, and it’s not my imagination. When you look at trends in use of the phrase, it seemed to become common in 2007, and has been slowly creeping up since then. About the only event in 2007 that I can plausibly relate to “Kill it with Fire!” is the release of Microsoft Windows Vista.  In general, attempts by members of the general public to kill things with fire (spiders or insects) end in disaster. (examples given)......The only legitimate use of fire for control that I know of is using fire for weed control in agriculture.  It’s usually given the quite awesome name of “Flaming for Pest Control.”  Here is an example:

This is why agriculture is so awesome, BTW. There just aren’t that many professions where you get to drive a giant flamethrower. Flaming is generally used in organic systems, which is a bit puzzling, since it uses propane, diesel, and produces lots of greenhouse gases.

While that is badass, it just doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.  

A Pleasant Surprise

We got into one of our historically tougher fields today.  It has a lot of clay knolls, and always has some ugly looking areas at planting time.  I was expecting to have some of the best yields we've gotten out of that field this year, but was keeping my hopes realistic, like around 175 bushels per acre.  To my great surprise, it is rivaling some of our very best dirt.  So far, the monitor shows 206 bushel average, and the last three or four semi loads have averaged 215 to 220 bushels.  Based on that small anecdote, I would short corn futures if I were you. 

Harvest Continues

We're getting on the downhill side of harvest, but as the lines get longer at the elevator, less and less gets done.  Between the shit show that is my town job and the hours of operation while the elevator is open, I haven't had much time to sample the wonders of the World Wide Web.  I'll peek around and see if I see anything notable.

All I can say right now is, yes, the start of Obamacare has been a mess, but let's not spend the next five months wondering day after day if the subsidized insurance will go into a death spiral or not.  Assuming they work out enough bugs to get people enrolled, let's give this thing a few years to see how it turns out.  I remember people talking about how big of a disaster the Romney/Massachusetts program was turning out to be, but everybody seems able to live with it now.

Not a Good Day

This:

I was getting over a little bit for a car when the combine started sliding down the ditch and into the worst wet hole you could imagine.  It was tipped far enough over that the front wheel was spinning and throwing some smoke about time I got the hydrostatic turned off.  We tried pulling on it with two tractors, but it was getting buried deeper.  Eventually, we got a wrecker out there, and working with a tractor and the wrecker, we got it out.  I tell you what, climbing up that ladder and then walking down a really steep slope into the cab felt really weird.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day than today.  I'd say the odds are in my favor that it will be.

Now That's Steep

The Atlantic features pictures of Gruyere cheese makers in Switzerland as they make cheese and their cows pasture in the mountains for the summer.  This picture blew me away:

Cows graze in a field at the Tsermon mountain pasture in Gruyeres, Switzerland, on July 30, 2013. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse) #

Holy shit is that steep. They also have pictures of the end of summer procession of the cows from the mountain pastures down to the valley.  Last year I had a picture from one of these in Bavaria.  That's beautiful country.

Fall is Here

The Atlantic features a bunch of photos of the arrival of Autumn.  My favorite (other than the one of the Oktoberfest waitresses holding sparklers) is this one:

Bavarian farmers transport their cows on a boat over the picturesque Lake Koenigssee, on October 5, 2013. Before the winter season approaches, the farmers have to drive their cattle down from their Alpine meadows to a narrow valley that can only be reached by boat. (Reuters/Michaela Rehle) #

Lost To History

I was trying to clean up my house and came across a back issue of The Atlantic and happened to read an article about the farm boom by Chrystia Freeland, who grew up on a farm in Alberta.  At the end of the article, she compares the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and other jobs that can be outsourced to the massive migration from the farms to the cities in the early 20th century.  I had never heard this before:

Of course, that still leaves open the question of what to do about all those jobs being lost. One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard professor who is probably America’s most esteemed labor economist, has, together with his partner and fellow Harvard professor, Claudia Goldin, studied how they did it. The answer, Katz told me, was heavy investment in education: “Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, California—these were the leaders in the high-school movement.”
Katz said this big investment in education was a deliberate response to the rapid technological advances and productivity gains in both agriculture and manufacturing. Farmers could see that machines meant fewer hands would be needed on the land, while new jobs were being created in the cities. So they built schools to educate their children for those new roles. The strategy worked: high school made the children who stayed home better farmers and gave the rest the tools to leave. In fact, the Farm Belt’s high-school movement was so successful that farm children who moved to the big cities soon became the bosses of the native-born urbanites. “They tended to be more educated than the city slickers and move to better jobs in the city than the locals,” Katz said.
The challenge those Midwestern farm communities faced same 100 years ago was remarkably similar to the challenge much of America faces today—an economic transformation that is making the country richer and more productive, but that also means most of our children won’t be able to do the same jobs we do. A high-school education was enough for the children of farmers in the early 20th century. Children today will need college, with an emphasis on quantitative and analytical skills, if they are to thrive.
But while today’s problem would seem familiar to those early-20th-century farmers, today’s response would not. “We did a better job in that period of preparing the next generation for their new context than we are doing today,” Katz said. “These areas made the right level of investment in education. We have not even approached the equivalent today.”
The farming towns of the past saw themselves as true communities, with a collective responsibility to ready their children for the future. That sensibility has broken down. “Areas that had a larger share of older citizens actually were more supportive of education, which is the opposite of today,” Katz told me.

While I know the schools of the Upper Midwest generally kick ass, but I never thought that rural areas would have been the leaders of the high school education movement.  Anyway, I agree with the position that towns back then saw themselves more as communities, although I would suspect that farm towns today see themselves as communities much more than most suburbs do.

Harvest Moon This Week

Scientific American:

This Thursday's full moon carries the title of "Harvest Moon" for those living in the Northern Hemisphere. But what gives the special moon its name?
The moon officially turns full when it reaches the spot in the sky opposite (180 degrees) from the sun. That moment will occur on Thursday (Sept. 19) at 7:13 a.m. EDT (1113 GMT).
Thursday's full moon is the one nearest to the September equinox this year, making it the Harvest Moon by the usual definition. Other definitions of the Harvest Moon, according to Guy Ottewell's Astronomical Calendar 2013, are the full moon on or after the date of the equinox, or the full moon in October. [The Moon Revealed: 10 Surprising Lunar Facts].
Although we associate the Harvest Moon with autumn, this year's version is actually the last full moon of the summer season. In fact, it's this summer's fourth full moon, an oddity of sorts since most of the time there are only three full moons per season.
Since this summer had four, the third full moon is designated as a Blue Moon, which was indeed the case last month. The 2013 Harvest Moon comes less than 3.5 days prior to the Autumnal Equinox, although a Harvest Moon can occur as early as Sept. 8 (as will be the case next year) or as late as Oct. 7 (as was the case in 1987).

The only full moon names I ever remember are the Harvest Moon and the Hunter's Moon.

American Value : Herb Dishman : China, TX

This is pretty damn good, and also features the first farmer I've ever seen with ear lobe stretchers (I guess that's what they are called):

American Value: Herb Dishman: China, TX from Nomadique on Vimeo.

U.S. States As Seen From Other States

Business Insider, via Ritholtz:

After seeing an excellent poll that asked Europeans what they thought of other European countries, we talked to our polling partner SurveyMonkey Audience to expand the questions and try it on Americans, to see how they felt about other states.
The results were hilarious, informative and tell you everything you need to know about the dynamic between the states.
We asked respondents — 1603 of them — to answer each question with a state that wasn't their own. The poll was carried out using SurveyMonkey's Audience feature, which was more accurate predicting the 2012 election than numerous traditional pollsters. 

They put together 22 maps from the survey here.  Here is a summary map combining the data:

 I agree with a pretty decent percentage of these.  You can tell that not too many people from outside the Midwest are enthused with the beautiful farmscape in the breadbasket of the world.

When it Rains...

Actually, it probably ought to say, when it doesn't rain, because we're getting pretty dry right now.  The best year ever is starting to look like the best corn crop with an average bean crop.  But to go back to the title of the post, things have seemed to be falling apart the last few weeks.  Not only with the weather, but with work.  We've lost two folks in our engineering department, in which I do some work.  Then, today was the last day for my immediate boss in the environmental and safety side of things.  He handled all of the safety for three companies while I helped him out with the environmental side of things.  I've tried to let people know that I am not qualified to handle any of his duties, but I haven't really heard how they plan on taking care of things while they work to find a replacement.  Probably some of that work will devolve to me.  And I won't even get into where I really am killing myself.  Anyway, under normal circumstances I'd say that the sun will shine again, but right now, I'm looking for a rain cloud as a positive outcome.  Actually, for the vast swath of humanity, I'm still sitting pretty good.

City Kids

Dust Bowl Redux

Via Big Picture Agriculture, this is depressing:

“We had eighteen months of no rainfall,” says Ogden, whose curly gray hair, ready smile and blue eyes make him look startlingly like the actor Gene Wilder. “We sold a lot of equipment last year. When you’ve had people who have worked for you, it’s hard to let them go.” As he considers what will happen to his family if his farm fails, he starts to cry. “I’ve got college degrees, but with my age it’s going to be hard to find something in this job market.”
Ogden’s friend Matt Rush is also struggling to make ends meet. He recently took a job with the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau in Albuquerque, four hours from home. He, too, cries as he considers his prospects. “This is who we are,” he says. “When your livelihood becomes your identity, you can’t just stop.” He pauses, tries to talk himself into optimism. “It’ll take a while to get her Sunday clothes on,” he says, referring to the land. “But she’ll look good. It’s so wide open. You can see the sun coming up and the sun going down. You can see every star in the heavens at night. When it’s green, it just feels so alive to me. When it rains, you can see it in everybody’s faces—how relieved they are. Contributions go up in church on a Sunday after it rains.”  Eddie Speer homesteads a small farm outside Lubbock. His wells have almost run dry; his wife, Laura, worries that she might not have enough water for cooking, washing the dishes and bathing. “We wake up every morning, and if we didn’t know God was taking care of us, we couldn’t get through the day,” he says. “We pray for rain—in church and privately. We ask God to bring rain and bless our farms.” .....I want Speer’s prayers to be answered. But I fear that Ed Moore might be more realistic. Moore looks over the land on which he rides his 15-year-old Appaloosa, Lady, at the end of each workday. You can almost see the sigh forming in his chest. “I don’t think we’ll ever run out of water [entirely]. But it’ll get so expensive we’ll have to quit,” he says. He stops to gather his thoughts. “You ask about this land. I don’t have a clue why I love it. It’s flat. Very hard to make a living. If I were really smart, I’d go somewhere where the average rainfall is forty inches. But this is home. And I don’t like to fail.”

That is so sad.  I think Ed Moore is right.  The rain-fed Midwest is where it's at.  Hopefully it stays rain-fed.

The Farm Life Versus the Urban Life

Anne Buchanan compares her sister's life on the farm to her's:

I had to take a sick baby goat to bed with me last night,’ my sister said. ‘I found her lying in a corner of the greenhouse barn getting ready to die.’ ’Did she make it?’ I asked. ‘Yep,’ said Jennifer. ‘I tubed her and gave her some electrolytes when I brought her in, fed her and wrapped her up in a towel, and took her up to bed. She peed all over me around 5am, so I brought her downstairs and put her in the barrel with the two boys. It’s a bit crowded, but they’re all going out to the barn today anyway.’
Jennifer and her husband Melvin work Polymeadows Farm, a small goat dairy farm and dairy plant in Vermont. They are currently milking about 120 goats. During kidding season, twice a year, the newborns spend their first night in a barrel of hay in the kitchen. This is important during Vermont winters, but also in summer, so that Jennifer knows the kids are healthy before they go out and join the rest.
My sister and I live very different lives. She’s a dairy goat farmer and I do genetics research at Penn State University in the middle of Pennsylvania. I spend much of my day at a computer in my small office, or sometimes in the genetics lab that I manage, and she spends her days outdoors, haying, watering and graining her goats, bottle-feeding the babies, milking the dams, or in the dairy plant making cheese or yogurt and bottling milk.

The first line of the third paragraph works for my sister and I, also.  She's got her life in the big city, and I've got the life on the farm.  I haven't brought any calves into the house (although somebody did guess that I did when I asked what she figured I'd done that night with the newborn calf [I'd dragged it across the pasture on a tarp]), but I have hauled them to the barn at my house in my Ford Focus.  Buchanan's whole story is pretty good, especially the description of the seasonality of farming.  That is what I like the best about farming.