Chicken on the garden pond pickin' out snow

That was the week that was.....

Wait a minute. It's not over yet!

Weekend, storm rips up section of barn roof, making a big mess of steel and boards. The hay mow is now rather drafty.


Monday, deer cutting and Christmas tree raising. Blacksmith to trim horses' feet.


Tuesday, wrote the Farm Side early, did the books and banking. Takes me about two hours to spend the milk check these days.

Wednesday, insurance adjuster, milk tester, grain truck and Select Sires rep. We bought another rack of Rain, because two out of three kids picked him out of the young sires line up. Set Tom looking for some Four-of-a-Kind Eland for us too. My sweet little Erin that was killed this summer was by Eland and I want to try to breed another one. We also had the old semen tank filled with nitrogen. If it hasn't sprung a leak we are going to give it to a good friend who has helped us out in many major ways over the years. He fed cows for weeks when the boss had his appendix out a few years back and really bailed me out with fixing silo unloaders and such. We will throw in some semen from our own bulls too. Some of them have turned out pretty good and he can use them for clean up if he wishes. Cleaned house too, including shaking out door mat and sweeping mud off porch.

Thursday, cats deposit large, eviscerated, very dead, rat on nice clean door mat. Thanks guys, I love you too. High school Christmas concert tonight. The boy sings in chorus and bangs on various implements of percussive pain in concert band. I love the choral part of the deal. However, the band instructor loves complicated, hard to play and intensely boring music, so I will spend that part of the show trying to decide which of the mops of blond hair on tall boys at the back belongs to my tall blond boy, and which to his pseudo-twin, Pat. (They have convinced one of their friends that they actually are twins despite Pat being six inches taller and living a couple miles down the road. Amazing what underclassmen will believe.)

Friday, wait a minute! I don't have a darned thing scheduled for Friday, except taking Becky to college and getting some groceries. Whoopee!!!!!

The boy tree

The kid got a second deer on Sunday, so yesterday he stayed home to get it in the freezer. It was just a little spike buck, but the meat will be welcome this winter. The beef that those yokels in the rant a few posts down let hang for a month is barely of "okay" quality, thanks to their cavalier treatment of our meat, so we are going to be eating a lot of venison.

Anyhow, all through the tedious process of boning out a whole deer, he was antsy with the desire to get done and get out on Seven-County Hill to look for a Christmas tree. Because the kids have asthma he has never enjoyed a real tree. We have a stately, but phony, fir thing that serves, but it surely isn't a creature of the wild forest. It was edging on toward dark when the last package flopped on the freezer shelf and the knives were lined up on the counter for mom to wash. He grabbed his chainsaw and took off with the 884 bucket tractor as soon as he was done.

About an hour later he showed up with a fat, bushy little white pine. Not exactly the most sought after of Christmas shrubbery, but it is cute just the same. As all the official ornaments are stashed upstairs in a closet we spelunked around in the china closet and various drawers and hidy holes looking for strays. Then the weird thing happened. I shined the flashlight into Grandma Lachmayer's china closet, looking for a cousin-made creation I knew was lurking there. Instantly a tinny rendition of Silent Night rang out.

What the heck! My furniture is not in the habit of serenading me when I look inside. As that same cupboard is the repository of much treasure, from marbles, stray old coins plucked out of the woodwork of this ancient domicile, and every other oddity that someone brings in, we open and close the door all the time. There generally isn't a resounding Christmas carol to greet us. However, after much searching and emptying (and the incidental discovery of the little rooster ornament we were seeking) we tracked the tune to its source. Years ago mom gave me a little "Mary Moos" music box....and it is light activated. Guess the battery is pretty special and the thing liked the shiny flashlight. Anyhow, it wasn't the ghost of Christmas past celebrating the introduction of a real live tree after all these years, just a neat little resin decoration.....still it gave me pause.

If you fill it, they will come....

Herd of collies

*Mike, Nick and Gael. The slightly stunned expression on Mike's face is because Nick, the rowdy dog, has just run into him and knocked him down.

Cord McCoy

Cord McCoy was kind enough to grant Liz an interview via email. You can read his bio and his answers to her questions over on her rodeo blog, BuckinJunction. Cord is a highly successful PBR bull rider she was lucky enough to meet at Turning Stone this spring.

A case of mistaken identity

Liz says that the calf that followed me home, (see below) or actually to the cow barn the other day was Soiree, not Dakota. Liz is the oracle of cow identification here at Northview, so I will not argue. Plus she owns both of them. This differing identity is significant in that Dakota is the daughter of a retired show cow, Dallas, and granddaughter of our best-ever show cow, Frieland LV Dixie, and thus would be expected to be a bit of a pet.

Soiree on the other hand is out of Soir, the worst kicking, meanest, most miserable, nasty, ill-tempered so and so in the barn, and one which I flatly refuse to milk under any circumstances. Soir is out of Star, who although she is a sweet old thing now, used to jump every fence on the place, and wouldn't ever come into the barn until she was darned good and ready. She was not impressed by Border collies either and just stomped the heck out of them if they got in her way.

So how did this come to pass? I truly have no clue but I am not complaining.

The neatest thing

There is a new editor over at the paper, whom I just "met" via telephone this week. He seems like a really nice guy. He called me today to explain something to me and I am afraid he must have thought I was a bit of an obliviot when I returned his call, because I didn't quite get what he was talking about. As regular readers know, today is my day to ferry Becky over to SUNY Cobleskill and sit in the parking lot for a couple of hours drinking orange juice, reading exciting books uninterrupted, (a Kathy Reichs Bones book today) and talking pictures if something wonderful comes along. (As it often does, since that campus is more like a park, than, well, a park.) It's a tough job but someone has to do it. The day's newspapers are usually on my reading list

However, today for some reason we got an extra copy of Thursday's paper instead of today's so I didn't see the Farm Side. So I didn't know quite what my new boss meant when he talked about "Diary" being spelled wrong. However, as soon as I was off the phone I ran and got the Recorder and saw what he was referring to. He put the address of Northview Diary in the little blurb at the bottom of the Farm Side about me being a regular columnist and all. And although the web address was correct, the title was Northview Dairy...which makes perfect sense after all.

That is so cool! I am just delighted. Thank you, thank you! Most of my friends, who stop by to read ND, come from west of the Mississippi or south of the Mason Dixon line. Maybe local folks will visit now. I can only hope.

Unplug the television

Probably everybody in the world but me already knows this thing about televisions.
The "sucking power whether you have them turned on so you can watch Supernatural or whether they are just attracting dust like the black hole they resemble" thing that is.

However, until I read it in a Kim Komando update I was trying to puzzle out, why, when we bought the girls their own televisions when they came of age, the power bill suddenly skyrocketed, even though they are rarely home and don't really watch much. Kim had the answer one day though. Modern TVs are always "on" so they can recognize the remote control. Of course it didn't take me long to begin a semi-scientific experiment. I told the young ladies who reside with us to unplug the darned things whenever they were not actually watching. The boss volunteered to do the same with his.


In less than one month our budget plan with National Grid dropped over thirty dollars. I expect with a full month of this practice it will offer an even larger savings. I am dancing little jigs and grinning ear to ear. Thanks Kim! So if you have a television and can stand to reprogram the time thingie all the while, unpug, unplug, and be paid in serious savings for your trouble.


***disclaimer...I am NOT a TV watcher and when the kids were little we didn't even have one. They read, were read to, or joined us at everything we did, from business trips to turning going after the cows into a nature walk. We were much more likely to take them down to Schoharie to collect brachiopods than to watch Disney with them. I despise most of what is offered on the very well named idiot box. However, when the girls hit the age of officially grown up we figured they were old enough to choose. Besides I was sick of the fights over the remote when the boss wanted to watch football.

Out near Richfield Springs

Strange mornings

Dakota

Had to make a quick trip to the house this morning just at the end of milking. I was in a hurry to call the propane company and thus was dismayed to discover a medium-sized heifer on the lawn behind the house. However, to my complete and utter amazement she gave a happy little hop and moo and started right down the hill to me. I threw some chicken feed pellets in a bucket that was handy there by the back door and headed to the barn. She trotted happily along behind me at peace with her world and glad of my company until we had to pass Nick's kennel. He was reacting to her presence about like any frustrated Border collie would and she was afraid to pass his triple strength screaming black turmoil.

"Kennel time!" I bellowed over his tumultuous uproar and he beat a retreat into his dog house and shut up for a moment. From there the trip all the way to the cow barn was uneventful, with the heifer, (I think Dallas's yearling, Dakota), even waiting while I opened the gate for her before proceeding right on through. There are days when I am really, really glad that Liz makes pets out of all her calves. This one isn't even a show calf. Amazing.

Election edumacashion shocker

Elaine Shein over at Blogriculture, the Capital Press newspaper blog, has one of the most powerful pieces I have read in a while over there today. She discusses studies showing that a majority of people get a majority of the information upon which they base their election choices from political ads! Elaine's article is very thought-provoking, asks a lot of important and hard to answer questions, as well as most likely being a nice refreshing dose of maturity after my post below. Hope you get a chance to read it.

Beware, tirade ahead

I don't know if I should even write when I am this angry. Maybe a chill pill would make more sense. It seems that every time we find a meat processing plant that does our beef the way we like it, they go out of business. We loved the SUNY meat lab; they did a great job. We tried another place after the dean closed them up, but they were horribly high priced. Therefore, we took our most recent animal to a company we used for years, back when some very competent older people ran it. We stopped going to that plant when the old folks sold out to some geniuses who sent back meat with steaks off opposite sides of the same cow that were so divergent in size that we could tell somebody got a little creative about who got whose meat. Since we sent out a Belgian Blue with rib steaks the size of platters and the weird ones were palm sized, but probably came off a prime angus, we didn't really do too badly out of that deal but still...

I didn't say anything to the boss when these new characters quoted him a real cheap price even though my feeling wasn't good about it. The feeling was right. They have had our steer for twenty-nine days, about two weeks past when we should have had it back. And they STILL have not cut it. (Beef normally hangs ten days to two weeks. Three weeks is pretty long, although we have hung them that long and had good meat. If the cooler the animal is hanging in is not a real good one the meat starts to taste funky after a while.)

For the nasty man from that company who just finished reading me out on the phone for having the audacity to actually CALL his place on the phone about the matter.

1) If you don't want me giving your girlfriend a hard time on the phone, don't leave your customers hanging on, waiting and wondering if you are ever going to cut their beef for weeks past the time you said you would have it ready. So what if I talked to you about it before? That was last TUESDAY. And the boss called you the Monday before. I don't think calling back six or eight days later is pressing you too hard. And tell her not to explain the aging process to middle aged farmers. Trust me we are familiar with it. I want to eat the meat not get Medicare for it.

2) Sorry you have had people sick and meat cutters out and all. We were real reasonable about that the first couple times we called. After a while reasons become excuses. That is OUR milk-fed steer sitting in your cooler getting older...and older...and older. Just how long CAN beef hang before it turns into something else?

Bah! I am too mad to spit!

Of course the guy will eventually cut our meat and it will probably be perfect, but we have been worrying...and worrying...and worrying.

Oh, and I persuaded the boss this morning, with very little difficulty to book the pigs he is fattening right now into the expensive place we went to after the meat lab closed. You get what you pay for and peace of mind is priceless.

**thanks to all ND readers for letting me get that off my chest so the smoke will stop coming out of my ears and I can go get some work done.

8 Point Buck

Here is a link to a picture of Alan with his deer. I put it on my low traffic blog so as not to hurt too many tender sensibilities, but his big brother and assorted other relatives want to see a picture.

Frost Farm

Mornings are getting plumb wintery these days.....

Big buck

In between doing almost all his daddy's chores the boy got his first deer today. He came in all quiet and asked me to put his 20-gauge away for him and get the camera as he got a little bitty spike buck. Completely deadpan. I did as he suggested and went outside and there in the tractor bucket was this huge thing with the biggest antlers I have ever seen outside pictures from out west. It was only an 8-point, but a big, big deer. Nicest one we ever got here on the farm for sure.

So he is happy tonight.....and tomorrow we are cutting up venison I guess. I would post pictures, but they are pretty gory for polite company.

In sickness and in health

Question: what do you do on a farm when everyone gets really sick? Answer: The same thing you do when you are not sick, only it hurts more. Somebody has to milk cows every twelve hours, they must be fed their grain twice daily and be served forages on a regular schedule. Cleaning stables can possibly be put off a little, but really should be done every day and if you burn wood for heat and hot water someone needs to get some. That is just the basic schedule of that which must be done. It never stops and cows don't care if you are sick.

Thus the boss and I, who succumbed in quick succession to whatevertheheck Alan brought home last week, are grateful, oh, so grateful, to have the "kids". (At 16, almost 19 and 20 and a half or so, they really aren't kids any more, though we call them that, to differentiate them from the "old farts", the other generation, so to speak).


As I mentioned before Liz cooked the Thanksgiving dinner. And milked Ralph's string of cows. And fed me drugs, Robitussin, Tylenol, (better living through chemistry) gallons of Gatorade. Put dogs out and in and did laundry. As soon as Alan was back on his feet, he pitched in filling stove, hauling wood, feedling cows, watering calves, helping milk, whatever was needed, including serving his mother assorted medicines and piling on more blankets. Becky was Becky, giving everyone a hard time, but prepping cows and feeding milk calves and taking care of horses as needed. She delivered books when I was well enough to read them.


Now I am on the road to recovery and other than a serious need for SOMEBODY to do some dishes I am not too far behind. Not like I would be if they hadn't all pitched in anyhow. The boss is still pretty sick, but was able to come in last night and go to bed without milking or doing chores and I am sure he is grateful to the crew too. The cows never missed a meal or a milking, the house is warm and the human contingent is well fed (those of us that can eat).


I guess it was truly a Thanksgiving to be thankful for. In some ways.

60-Acre Lot Woods

**Photo by Alan

Things to be thankful for

We all have many of them. Today my favorite is a 20-year-old daughter who can and will (and did in fact) cook the entire holiday meal from the turkey to the squash and yams because mom is sick as a dog. Thanks, Liz!

More cannons

Zendo deb of TFS Magnum was kind enough to stop by and leave a link in the comments so I can look at lovely Civil War cannons (and even buy one, should the boss win the lottery this weekend). Thanks deb.

Overheard in a grocery store near here..

"I can't believe I have to buy STORE potatoes this year! I went to the farm where we always go and the farmer said he was sorry but he didn't have anything but canners. Too much water, can you believe it? I can't see why he didn't keep his crops dry and now I have to buy these store potatoes instead of getting local. And the squash. Same thing. He said it all got moldy and died. Now why didn't he take care of it? I hate buying at the GROCERY store!"

My cannon

A Coyote at the Dog Show has a fine new post called Dangerous Toys for Dangerous Boys, wherein he describes a number of fun, but not so healthy playthings like pow'r tools 'n personal jet packs. I highly recommend it.

Also on the list of potentially deadly toys is a cannon. Swen explains in clear and riveting detail just how to charge and fire said cannon, which was of great personal interest to me. See, there are two things I really want for Christmas...lust after in fact. First on my list is a functional military tank, with which to deter poachers and tres-peserters. Think of the reaction of Joe Redneck, out of season deer hunter, when one of them babies bursts out of the hedgerow, tracks clanking and turret twisting, like a hound dog on a hot scent! I smile just to think of it.

A cannon to set in front of the house, with the business end pointed down the driveway is the second one. I would much prefer one that actually works, but I won't complain if it just LOOKS scary.


In fact here is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies,

Earl: What kind of fuse is that?
Burt: Cannon fuse.
Earl: What the hell do you use it for?
Burt: My cannon.


Every one in the family can mimic that deadpan, "What else would it be?" tone used by Burt Gummer to perfection. In fact, the barn blackboard is often decorated with neat chalk drawings of cannons of all sorts, with my personal favorite being the Civil War cannon.

Canada geese

Winging west, flying low and fast. Click for a better look.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Hope your day goes better than okay.

Love you,

Dotter

Mohawk River flooding

Last night's rain brought the river up out of its banks and into the cornfields over by Fonda again. Wish they would get the canal closed down for the winter and the locks and dams open so at least the fields would dry out and we wouldn't have to worry about it getting into the towns again. Looks as if it is never going to get done raining this year.

Not much sleep here last night, what with the rain and Alan being so sick.

Misleading

An email update from My Cattle.com showed up in my inbox today that had a really misleading teaser on it. It proposed that the national ID program would offer an overlooked benefit, protection against cattle theft. "One of the most basic incentives to have cattle permanently identified is theft."

On the surface there is no problem with that statement. True permanent ID, such as branding or tattooing, provides a lasting way to tell one cow from another.

However, the story's author added this pure BS statement that really got my dander up, "In the falderal (their spelling not mine) surrounding livestock ID and the tragicomedy that has become the National Animal Identification System, it's too easy to lose sight of one of the most basic incentives to have cattle permanently identified: theft."

Balderdash! NAIS is all about selling ear tags and keeping data bases on farm activities and has nothing to do with preventing theft in any way, shape or form.


Even though the author of the article never said in so many words that ear tags equal permanent ID comparable to brands or tattoos, that premise was strongly implied.


Sorry, tags in cows ears are about as permanent as drifting snowflakes in Florida. If they don't fall out or the cows don't rip them out, it is easy as pie for a thief to cut them out.

Such malarkey, it just kills me.

Scamper cloned

Charmayne James cloned Scamper. I don't think there are many animals worthy of the expense but if ever there was one it would be that horse.

Flu shots

What is it about flu shots anyhow? We get them religiously because all three kids have asthma. (If you think flu is bad for normal people, you should see what it does to asthmatics.) Every single year, as soon as I make the appointment to go see the good Dr. K, someone gets way too sick to get a shot.

It NEVER fails.

This year I made one for Alan and me for tomorrow afternoon....didn't even try to get fancy and get both girls in at the same time or anything. Fat lot of good that did. He came home kind of croupy last night and now he has a 102.4 temperature and is lolling around in the living room, sick as a dog. Now I will take him in for a sick child visit instead, get a steroid inhaler, probably an antibiotic, and start playing try-to-get-the-flu-shot tag, hoping to get it done before the flu gets him. It's enough to turn you grey before your time.

Introducing the newly renamed

*Miss Sausage*

*Lo Mein*

*photos by Alan

A week on the farm

Here is a recap of news from the farm for this week.

About two weeks ago the stable cleaner chute split in half, rendering it impossible to remove cow manure from one large section of the barn except by shovel and wheelbarrow. What with the boss's cracked ribs from being slammed by cow number 96 and the chain still being in the gutter, having a clean barn has been fraught with misery. I guess the parts have finally been shipped and the final repair should be getting under way quite soon. Thank God.


The barn cat, Sausage, who was named for her globoid shape as a kitten, (having always been a bit greedy), now has a surname. She has recently become abusive of the horsebarn kittens, Blondie and Kashette, and is generally about as obnoxious as a cat can be. So we changed her name to Sausage Lo Mein....


Alan found a spot on the back of the farm where some folks, with whom we have had unpleasant contact before, have cleared a section of our land, well within the line fence. (That fence has probably been there since the farm existed.) There is litter and garbage (and a rather less pleasant byproduct of human occupation of the area, complete with the sort of paper that attends that use) all over. The grass is all stomped down and they put a posted sign ON OUR LAND facing US! Way on our land. Guess a letter from our lawyer is in order, since a certain sort of squatter's rights law holds sway in New York State. If you don't want to lose title to your land you cannot let people use it as if it were their own. Wish the city *&)&$$#'s would either stay where they came from or take a minute to understand the laws governing rural property. This is at least the third such incursion since last fall. The men keep putting up fence and signs and they keep going around them. Bah!

There has been quite a red-tailed hawk war going on all week in the field beside the house. There is a resident pair that nests just across the property line and another, lighter-colored bird has been hanging around in their territory. Don't know if it is their young one that they want to cut the apron strings or an outside bird, but they don't like him much. It makes for quite a show.

Poaching started yesterday (as usual) and instead of complaining about among ourselves it we called Encon. I heard shots from something really big when I was bringing the dogs in early in the morning. Probably a 10-gauge. Then Alan found a doe just on the other side of our back fence shot to pieces and left. I wasn't surprised as I knew the shots I heard were from something way too big to be shooting turkeys with. (Turkey season is open; deer doesn't open until next week.) Encon said the next time we hear shots to call right away and they will get a game warden here post haste. We havn't called them in before because they are understaffed and far away, thus unlikely to really be able to do anything. However, last year poachers spent the two weeks before season opened cleaning out ALL the deer on the farm. Thus our guys who wait to hunt legally and do it right (not leaving the carcass in the woods because they put about a dozen shells into it) didn't get one. Seems wrong somehow.

Edgar Guest

Mom sent me this poem this morning, saying that Guest was my Grandma Lachmayer's favorite poet. It reminded me so much of raucous Thanksgiving dinners around her dining room table, with the "Allied Union" collecting dishes of dressing and cranberries and such up at our end of the table and making the rest of the family ransom them and so many people crammed into her and Grandpa's little house that the rafters squeaked, that I had to share. Thanks mom, I love it.

***Someday I am planning to tell the story of that table and the many things that have happened on, under, around and to it over the years. From puppies chewing the feet to cousins getting their fannies fixed on top of it, it has quite a history....and it sits right over there in my dining room now waiting to host our Thanksgiving feast in a couple of weeks.

Thanksgiving

Edgar Albert Guest

How many of me?

Try this site to find out how many Americans share your name. Not too accurate though. It says I don't exist...or a least no one with our last name exists.....and there are five of us here, at least.

What do you say, dear?

To a man who tells you at 10:45 on Friday morning that he has an appointment to talk to a crop insurance rep at 3 PM?

In your kitchen?

On a day when it finally looked as if you were going to get some time (in between filling prescriptions and buying groceries) to visit your parents?


For the first time in a month?

When he knew about it since Monday?

When you live on a farm with three full time students, who own at least five pairs of always-muddy boots, (which are always left in that same kitchen, mud and all), along with three indoor dogs, piles of barn clothes and all the assorted untidiness that goes with busy people who make a living doing a very dirty demanding job? When the kitchen door is where they come in from the barn, the fields and the campus (our campus has cows too.)

Perhaps the question should rather be, what do you DO to a man who does that!

***I know what I wanna do, but I don't think it's legal....time to go mop the kitchen floor.

Deer tracks

Hello Moon

Here is last night's rising moon, taken by Alan's binocular method. As you can see, younger hands are steadier hands. Looks kind of like a rotten jack 'o lantern.

Halp us Jon Carry we r stuck hear n Irak

Thanks to Cousin Scott for this answer from some soldiers in Iraq to the esteemed Senator's comments on their level of education. At least SOMEONE has a sense of humor!

Looking out the living room window

We were slumped in various locations around the living room, comfortable in our Sunday chairs, like so many limp vegetables when Alan spotted a white-tail buck (8-point, or so mr. bright-eyes says) and two does in the overgrown horse pasture just outside. They were a good 800 feet away, so even though we could see them quite clearly, we had little hope of getting good pictures. Kind of frustrating, since we love to share.

Then the kid had the inspired idea of lining the lense of the digital camera up with the lense on the Bushnell birdwatching binoculars....and amazingly, hey, presto, pretty deer pictures!

Smart boy, I think I'll keep him.

Retired cow dog at work

*Mike, eyeing a heifer though the fence*
*She is not dog broke and not a bit impressed*

*Young stock coming down to look at that glaring dog*

Sky

No NAIS noticed again

Remember this post?


Back in August, I thought it was a pretty big deal that Walter Jeffries' No NAIS.org was mentioned in Drovers Alert. Now the same website has been mentioned in this USA Today story.

I for one, am glad to see it. The very valid arguments against NAIS need mainstream attention and I am thankful to the hardworking farmers and ranchers ***who are getting it for us.

Even a state veterinarian, who is in favor of NAIS, admits that there are major flaws in how the program is set up today,

"As for arguments that the program is unconstitutional and a violation of privacy, "I can't counter that," Hoenig says. But he tells the farmers, "In an emergency, you're going to be coming to people like me for help. So give us the tools we need to do our job."


Giving them tools to do the job is all well and good, but they are asking for weapons of mass destruction when a BB gun would get the job done just fine.

***Update...upon further reading I realized that Sarpy Sam's No Mandatory Animal ID, which is linked with the word "rancher" above is also mentioned in the article. I didn't recognize it, as his url is different from the name of his site.

Happy Halloween

Another game for your spooky enjoyment.

Cat Bowling

For those who want to get an early start on Halloween festivities.***


http://www.itsga.com/fun/cat_new.swf


***For cat lovers, no animals were harmed in the making of this game. They were "spared".
***For non cat lovers, bowling for cats says it all.

I don't mind

It is a closely held secret how I feel about driving Becky over to the college for her Friday classes. Liz takes her other days, but has nothing scheduled on Friday so it is my turn. The other day the bookstore lady from whom Becky buys me a coffee for the drive home mentioned to Liz that she felt sorry for me having to sit in the car all that time.



Let's see, how can I handle such punishment week after week? It was so still this morning early that you could hear the leaves falling. They made a sibilant rustle like the pattering of a crisp rain at the beginning of a summer storm. The air was crystal clear after last night brought us the first real killing frost. Oh, we have had a few little ones that polished off the tomatoes and cannas, but last night it hit the mid twenties. Driving down the valley it was so clear that a church steeple appeared to be suspended in space like a knife on a string. You could spot pigeons soaring miles away in the pristine sky.



Oak trees unfurled a sprawling magic carpet of gold and red and chestnut across the mountains. Stark shadows sharply outlined those mountains in the brilliant slanting sunlight. The view was so beautiful coming down into the Schoharie Valley that it almost hurt to look at it.

Once I parked a scattering of crows dive-bombed the parking lot. Amusing to watch one alight on a slender, brittle twig and try to balance, flicking its wings and teetering awkwardly. One flew so close to the open car window that I heard the rustle of its feathers like a whisper of silk right next to my ear.


Canada Geese, flock after flock of them, crisscrossed the sky, flying low and fast. Or they wheeled, calling plaintively, over some body of water out of sight below the campus. I sat in the car, warm sun at my shoulder, a good book in my lap and no more work to do than to leap out of the car occasionally to snap another picture of the unfolding morning beauty. Poor me.

Sycamore leaf

This landed on the car right in front of Danescara when Beck and I were driving by today. We were on a wild goose chase to see a strange, long, wooden sail boat go through the lock at Tribes Hill. Somehow it got so far ahead of us that we missed it. We often make a run for the lock if we see a real cool boat going past the house out on the Mohawk. I sure would have liked to get a look at this one, but it was not to be. Nice leaf though. Big too, that is a full sized pencil there.

Congratulations Sam

To Sarpy Sam at Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere, one of the best of the best, on three years of insightful blogging. He is one of my first reads every morning.

Wild weather

We had a few bright flashes of sunlight today, which was pretty welcome. The boss found at least one field where he could actually get some corn chopped without having Alan tow him with the White 2-105 4-wheel drive. A lot easier that way.

Sweeney vs. Gilibrand

Fired off the Farm Side this morning SIX HOURS before deadline. I am way proud of myself, but really, it was an easy topic and darned near wrote itself. Although newspaper subscribers will have to read between the lines to figure out who I was ranting about, I will save you the mental anguish. I was all fired up about the campaign between Sweeney and Gillibrand for the US Congress. Good Lord, those two are like whiny little kids, not an issue between them, but plenty of childish tirades and he-said-she-said trash talking.

I love to put the things Becky has learned in college sociology class to work in rating their honesty. She says that when someone is lying they tend to glance involuntarily downward and to the left. Watch 'em when they rant and rave. See where they are looking?

Thankfully, no matter who wins that contest neither of them will represent this district. We just get to suffer through their campaign rhetoric on television. Can't wait until November 8th!

FFA and the vegetarian

Not much time to write these days (broken stable cleaner, two sick cows, three feet of mud in the fields with corn harvest only just begun, seventeen calves in the barn and a partridge in a pear tree) so I will share another great story. This time you can read about the vegetarian animal rights activist who will perform at the annual FFA convention. Amazin'!

Another view back on the hill

* taken from Seven County Hill field looking west across the Sixty-Acre Lot*

Meth

Nothing funny about meth. Nothing amusing about the way it is showing up in rural areas like this. However, this story of how some young, er, dumb and dumber fellows tried to steal some Sudafed to make some is hilarious. Not everyone uses cat food in quite that manner.

Argghhh....

Talking turkey

Hunting that is. (Note the fashionable duct tape fastening the orange vest together. This boy has style.) I know there are those who don't believe in hunting, but we have at least two hundred turkeys on our three hundred acres. (They gather together in the winter and we count them so we know.) The two or three a year that we roast will not be missed...and they are fat from eating our corn and alfalfa.

Partly because he is an avid hunter, this boy knows every inch of our land like other kids know the ins and outs of video games. In this picture he was showing me where he shot three turkeys with one shot one time (quite by accident). He loves to take me out to share his special places...an old pallet leaning on the rocks in the Sixty-Acre Lot hedgerow where he can hide and watch the wild things go by, a puddle where a dozen green frogs lurk, waiting to plop into the water with a startling splash. The old dam, the owl tree, he leads me to them proudly when we have time. I have visited all these places before when I was young and eager, but it is good to see them again through his fresh, fervent eyes. He is a capable tracker and so keen of nose that he can SMELL where the birds have been. My nose isn't sharp enough to notice until he points it out to me, but he is generally right.


It is comforting in a way to realize that the nature walks we took the kids on when they were little, turning over rocks to look for salamanders and spying on birds, have come full circle. Now we are the ones being taken.

How bad the corn is

This morning the sky was lumpy and dingy grey as if someone had stretched a dirty sock across it. For a while the sun tried to spill down between the lumps, but by the time we were done with chores there wasn't a ray to be seen.

It is plumb depressing. It just rains and rains and rains. A flood watch is on for all day tomorrow. Again.
The river is already bank full from all the snow up west last week . Meanwhile the guys go out to try to chop corn and the fields are quagmires. They are getting two or three loads a day on good days and barely enough to feed the cows on not-so-good days. Yesterday the boss jack knifed both feeder wagons bringing them down the hill. Dangerous. Worse when it is the forage wagons that he is bringing down. I don't know how they are ever going to get the corn in if it doesn't dry up soon.

The picture is how bad the corn is in at least one field, from all the rain this summer. There are fifteen or twenty feet or more between the stalks on half of the field, none at all on part of it, then a good stand up where the drainage is better. Very worrisome.

Tragic news

The death of a fellow student* of our girls, the teenaged son of a favorite professor, has been rattling our world this week. This is too sad for easy discussion, so I will just let you read about it. The alleged perpetrator is not a student at the college, but notice that the police apprehended him in a dorm.


I feel so much sympathy for the friends and family of the young victim. Not much more to say about it.
*Correction, the Gazette says not a student, although the girls knew him from campus.

As requested

*Shagbark Hickories behind Seven County Hill*

Finally made it up to the top of the farm today to get the overview photos of the farm requested by mrs. mecomber and my dear friend, numberwise, (in Vitamin Sea's meme the other day). Becky and I took Mike and walked a good part of the way, but every now and then Alan picked us up with the truck, as he was working getting wood in.

The rides were most welcome. Seven County Hill is named that because you can supposedly see seven counties from there. You can certainly see quite a distance, although there is no telling what counties you are looking at. We saw many amazing and wonderful things, including a three legged frog, turkeys, vultures, and a marsh hawk.

*The three-legged frog*

*Looking out over the valley from the 30-acre lot*

Seven-County Hill

*Click for a better look*

*The villages of Fultonville and Fonda can be seen from here*

Here how the world looks from the top of Northview's tallest hill. On a day like this it is cold and windy up there, but it sure is pretty. We just missed a spell when the sun was playing shadow games with the clouds, making brilliant patterns of dark and blazing colors from the maples and poplars. When it is sunny and clear you can see several more sets of mountains behind the ones in the background.

However, by the time we got home from Bellinger's Orchard with some nice Ida Red apples, it was mostly all grey and threatening, so the pictures aren't all they might be. Oh, well, Alan and I had a great time poking around on the back of the big hill, which drops off in a very steep bank to a few fields in the back of the farm.

Pumpkin Tide

A lovely picture of a St. Augustine, Florida church, surrounded by burnished gold-orange pumpkins, was posted recently by Florida Cracker on his wonderful blog, Pure Florida. It reminded me abruptly of one of my favorite poems. I had pretty much forgotten it, since it was something I liked way back in college when being seen reading counter culture poetry was quite the thing to do. Still, the instant I saw all those pumpkins lined up in front of that beautiful edifice it jumped into my mind as swiftly as a leaping whitetail.

Here it is just in time for the Halloween season.

The Pumpkin Tide
I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea.

from The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster 1968 by Richard Brautigan

What's up at the paper anyhow?

I dunno. A few weeks ago the Farm Side started showing up on Saturday some weeks when Friday is its normal day to run in the Recorder. That seemed to happen when I got real close to my noon Wednesday deadline before sending it, so I figured that I was not getting it done in time to make the cut for Friday. Then they started leaving off the tag line about me being a dairy farmer and regular columnist and all. I didn't pay much attention; this is a busy time of year and it just wasn't a big deal. However, a good friend was bugged by it and called the new publisher and complained. She phoned me after the fact and said he was very nice and told her he was sorry about it. I chuckled and thanked her for noticing and caring enough to take the time to bring the situation to the man's attention. As long as they kept paying me, I wasn't going to get too excited about it.


Then this week they printed it with no byline, no grinning mug shot, no tag line, no nothing, not even the name of the column. Come on now, how is anybody even gonna know what they are reading, except that at least it was in its usual spot on the side of the Friday editorial page? (If you actually want to see it you will have to spend a buck as the paper has a pay per view website.) There have been quite a few changes at the Recorder lately and maybe that is what is going on here. The masthead is bigger and has a nice drawing of a windmill. In fact the whole look of the newspaper has changed, mostly for the better I think. Still, I hate to see that look change so much that I am no longer part of it.

Are they trying to irritate me enough to drive me to full time blogging? Sort of a death by a thousand (paper) cuts type of thing? Do they hate me? Was it an oversight? Should I cry and pound my heels on the floor?

Or should I laugh and wait to see what they do next week? Yeah, that works for me. That's just what I'll do.

Doggone it!

I mostly mind my own business where other people's dogs are concerned. However, yesterday I was just plain perturbed by a doggy situation the girls and I experienced. We were at Wally World buying an elbow brace. I blew my right one a couple of weeks ago struggling with a barn door that had come off its rollers and it has been getting progressively worse. I parked, as is my habit, in the rows in back down near the swamp. There was no one else around.

However, when we returned to the van there was a gigantic blue truck parked about as close as it could get to our driver's side door.
And in the open back was a beautiful blond Doberman.

Loose.

Completely unrestrained.


She was a gorgeous dog, although there were several rather serious scars marring her lovely golden coat. She wore nothing but a choke collar (something I would certainly never leave on an unattended dog).

I felt strongly uncomfortable, despite having no particular fear of Dobies. (Some of the nicest dogs I have ever met have been Dobermans). However, I have worked with dogs all my life, and this dog gave me the willies. Determined not to show breed prejudice, I unloaded my stuff into the back of the car (including an extra-large bag of dog food), all the while keeping half an eye on the occupant of the next vehicle, who was about five feet from my face. The girls and I kept up a stream of nervous chatter about the dog and her presumed-to-be-idiot owner while we worked. When we done loading our things I turned to walk to the driver's door. The dog came quickly toward me and leaned out of the truck bed with an "I mean business" growl rumbling in her throat. She bared her teeth right at my face.
Needless to say I went around to the other side of the car to get in.

A few seconds later a man jumped into the truck and drove away with the dog still loose in the back. We marveled at his unconcern.


What kind of dimwit leaves a dog loose in the back of a truck in a busy parking lot anyhow?
And what kind of malicious fool does it with an aggressive dog? It certainly isn't fair to the dog, no matter how well trained and it isn't too safe for passersby either. I sure hope I don't meet him again.

Yummy

A new product has just hit the shelves in the Middle East. Its release was timed in order to coincide with the Holy Month of Ramadan. When this Camelicious substance reaches our shores will it sweep Coke and Pepsi aside in its wake? Will Mountain Dew be replaced by Desert Dew Drops? Only time will tell, but date-flavored camel milk may be the Yoohoo of the future.

Evergreen Cemetery

*Fonda, NY*

Catskill Game Farm closes

This is the last weekend for the big attraction and naturally the animal rights idiots are there protesting. The place has an incredible record of breeding endangered species in captivity, helping to assure their continued existence on earth, but there is always somebody who has to stand on the sidelines whining and waving signs. And of course they get the headlines and camera time.


I wish we could get away to go to the auction. Although I have no interest in owning an addax, a yak or a rhinoceros, they have peafowl, guinea hens and exotic chickens. I could go for something like that maybe. I certainly miss having guineas. Ours used to fly up to the top of our 72-foot high tower and cackle and screech for hours as they surveyed their territory. For some reason I found that amusing. They are also wonderful for curing horses of being spooky about noisy things bursting out of the bushes. They spend all their time in a state of frantic alarm and after a while the equines pay no attention to such antics... a big help in a region where there is an equally feather-headed wild turkey under every other bush.

Speaking of screeching. About an hour before first dawn today I was luxuriating in my cozy nest, fairly wallowing in the knowledge that this is my morning off. No need to haul cold, still-damp sneakers onto stiff, achy feet to trudge through what feels like half a mile of mud to where fifty muddy, cranky cows await. No need to work for four hours before breakfast and second coffee. No need to do any darned thing I didn't want to.

Suddenly, SOMETHING let out an awful wail that sounded like it was right beside me.
Close.
Real close.
I thought one of the kids was having a nightmare. It came again. And again. And again. I realized that it was outdoors, but it was the most unearthly sound you could imagine and it was right next to the house.

I woke up the boss and we jumped out of bed to find Liz about to pound on our bedroom door. It had wakened her too. Of course it was still pitch dark and the land was blanketed with dense fog, so thick you couldn't see across the driveway. Whatever it was it was gone by the time the sun came up, but I kept dogs in, much to their chagrin, until I could actually SEE them when I let them out. Chances are it was a coyote, but it just didn't sound normal. We have the wild brush dogs around all the time and although they have a pretty unearthly cry we are used to them. Could have been a rabid one or a dog that had been hit by a car and was running in the dark. There is just no way we could tell because of the fog. I went out on the porch for a while, but couldn't see at all no matter how bright a flashlight I had. I suggested that the boss take a .22 or something to the barn with them, but he didn't. I am not going out to fill the stove until the fog lifts. It's cold, but it isn't THAT cold.

**Update...along about noonish when Alan finally stumbled down the stairs (having the morning off himself and having stayed up to watch the Mets game in its entirety last night) blond hair puffing over bleary eyes and jammies hanging off his bony hips, we got....dum da dum dum......the REST OF THE STORY.

We asked him if he had heard those infernal Hellish shrieks that paralyzed the rest of us with shivering terror.


"Oh, yeah," he replied. "That was Gael* howling back at the coyotes out on the hill. I heard her but I was too sleepy to go down and holler at her."

*Border collie number three, in season and evidently in the mood for love...any love.

Danged dog!

Maple

Blogriculture

I stumbled upon a stellar West Coast agriculture blog yesterday, by way of checking out my Site Meter to see who visits here. Someone did a search for "dairy farm blog" and found both Blogriculture and Northview Diary.

Blogriculture is the blog of two writers for the Capital Press Agriculture Weekly paper, which looks to be a tremendous source of useful ag info. Interestingly, one of Liz's best online friends, a writer whom she competes with on Its Your Turn, writes for the paper as well. They were kind enough to Blogroll me, so I am returning the favor. Take a minute and check out Blogriculture and the Capital Press. I am personally looking forward to a promised upcoming post covering a very interesting trip.....

"We send me this weekend to an Oregon farm to watch a crane drop, from the equivalent of 10 stories high, a 1,000-pound pumpkin on a Mazda hatchback."

I can't wait to read that one!

Fall color as promised

*Lovely old carriage house down in the village of Fultonville*

*The neighbor's sugar maple*

*Staghorn Sumac down along the driveway*

Checkerboard Magnums Promise

This is our purebred milking shorthorn bull, Promise, perhaps an anomaly on a Holstein farm, but calving ease on heifers is important to us and his babies bring a good price at auction. Beautiful Broadway is the one red daughter we have from him. All the rest have been various combinations of black and white.

This will take you to a picture of Promise's 90 point dam.

Here is a picture of Promise before we bought him. Sadly his speckles vanished.

For laurainnj at Somewhere in New Jersey

Great Border Collie site

Carina shared this site with me. It is truly hilarious to anyone who has ever been around a BC...or even three of them.

The dogs at Northview

A recent comment from a good blog friend in Michigan reminded me that not everyone at Northview Diary can read the column I write for the Recorder, the Farm Side, thus not everyone has already been bored to death with our three border collies.

Let me rectify that situation. Mike was my first border collie dog. I bought him from a local breeder, who has since moved to the left coast. Mike Canaday also sold me Gael, who was out of the same dam, Floss, and sired by his open trial dog, Robin. I liked Mike so much that I bred Gael to Bill, Mike's sire to get my young dog, Nick. Floss and several other dogs in the pedigrees of the three collies were actually imported from Scotland.

Mike (the man, not the dog) once brought Robin to the farm with some sheep and another fellow, his dogs and a horse, to practice for the national sheepdog trial. He just let the sheep out of the horse trailer and turned them loose. The darned things bolted for the barn and raced down the cow barn driveway towards the road. Sheep are fast. My heart was in by throat. I was envisioning carnage with wool and lawsuits and jumping up and down, when Mike released Robin and whistled something. Within seconds, literally seconds, even though Robin had never seen our farm before and hadn't seen the sheep go, I was pinned against the gate by a milling, wooly flock. He had gone over the bank, through the creek, and down below the sheep to fetch them back. Those open trial dogs are plumb amazing!


Border collies of the real sheepdog persuasion, as opposed to AKC, where good looks are all important, can have any length of hair and be just about any color you can imagine. As long as they work, it is all good. Mostly black dogs are pretty much preferred because sheep can see them better and don't mistake them for other sheep. Two of our dogs, Nick and Gael, are of the shortcoated sort; Mike is a pretty boy. They never need grooming, he requires frequent unraveling.

All three dogs work. Mike as a young dog was quite talented, although he has retired himself now at almost twelve. However, they have no where near the skill level of dogs like Robin or even nursery trial dogs. This is my failing as a trainer, not theirs as dogs, although Gael is a bit weak for a cow dog. Training sheep dogs is the hardest thing you can imagine....like parenting with sheep.

Read Mike's Ten Tips page for a little insight into getting a Border Collie puppy started.

Websites about working Border Collies.
United States Border Collie Handler Assoc.
American Border Collie Assoc.

Blondie

*Here you go Liz, as requested*

A meme!

Sort of. A regular commenter on one of my three very favorite blogs, (Pure Florida) started a neat photo exchange thingie for this weekend that sounded like a lot of fun. So I am going to play along.


Vitamin Sea is Laura's blog, worth a read while you check out other bloggers all around the country who are taking pictures of their hometowns, fields, forests, oceans and rivers this weekend and sharing them with us all. I am just waiting for the sun to come up before I head out with the camera to see what I can find to photograph. It is opening day of fall turkey season, so I am going to stay near the house. Of course it is pouring.


Wish I had taken the camera with me when we went out bringing heifers down yesterday. We brought all the springers in with the cows, so we can put the open heifers in with the bull in a couple of weeks. It was SO pretty on top of the heifer pasture hill, with the trees just starting to change and all the little white churches shining their steeples out among them.

I was amazed to find that I was able to comfortably hike up that big ol' hill TWICE! We went up first to get a half shorthorn heifer calf that wild little Mary had hidden in a tiny cup-shaped hollow we call the calving grove. (Cows have probably been hiding babies in there for a couple hundred years or more, ever since this has been a farm anyhow.) Then we had to go back for Mary, who for some reason wouldn't come along with her baby. Every breath was like a cool drink of water on a hot day. You could just feel the air recharging your lungs. In the heat of summer that hill about kills me. In fall I was able to charge up it faster than the boss.....the first time at least. He had a bit more stamina on the second trip.


Our resident red tailed hawk screamed as he sailed above us and the other heifers ran along side us dancing at the fun of it all. It actually was fun....for work.

UPDATE: I believe after reading posts on other blogs that I am supposed to take requests....so what would you like to see photographed here at Northview Farm?

Fall colors are kind of subdued this year

Bunny

*For matthew didier

The dogs

*Mike and Nick, 3/4 brothers*

*Nick, who is not thrilled about the camera*

*For carina

*Gael is in season and can't have her picture taken with her son and brother...

Moth TV

The boss, a man with a true magnetism for low flying bats, (along with an intense horror of them,) came up with a pretty good reason why bats start showing up in the cow barn in late September.

The outdoor bugs are mostly gone.

(Except mosquitoes of course.) We always wondered why they come in, because they don't bother us until quite late in the year. However, now, around eight PM, they flutter down out of the haymow and dive bomb us while we work. They are just eating stable flies, to which they are most welcome, but with all the rabies around, we wish they would stay the heck away from our heads.

According to moth TV, the boss is probably right. On a normal summer night Alan and I can spend ten minutes watching our special television every night on the way up to bed, and never run out of interestingly different species of moths to exclaim over. Now one or two skittering up and down the glass of the window on the front stair landing it is a lot. For some reason that high window is like a magnet to them, although other lighted windows in the house are insect free. These creatures of the night are plumb amazing, a study in delicate shades of brown, tan and cream that is as intricate as a 1000 piece puzzle.


Anyhow, the bats drive us nuts as soon as it begins to get dark. The other night one actually landed on a white porcelain light receptacle and began gobbling up flies that were clinging there soaking up the warmth. I never imagined a bat landing to munch lunch, but this one hung there for several minutes until the light evidently got too hot for his little feet. Then he went back to buzz-bombing us. I can't say I am sorry that the little flying mammals will soon follow the bugs into hibernation.

Speaking of rabies, Alan saw what was probably a rabid woodchuck yesterday. It was fumbling and stumbling around on the ground in a most alarming manner. Thankfully he was on the tractor. Not so thankfully it was the first time he went out without his .22 all week.

New England Asters

*Sorry about the blurry picture, but this little green wasp or fly didn't sit still long and left very soon. Any idea what it might be? Perhaps a cuckoo wasp?*

Grain not to blame

Last week, the New York Times, which loves to hate conventional farmers, blamed the recent outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in spinach on cows fed grain diets. The story carried the sensational title of "Leafy Green Sewage." Even though use of any fertilizer product that has anything to do with cows on leafy vegetables is strongly discouraged by the FDA (if not downright outlawed), the activist newspaper eagerly snatched an opportunity to bash animal agriculture.

Now an actual, real, honest to gosh, scientist has pointed out that they are full of hooey. On US Newswire comes a story, quoting Dr. David Renter, an assistant professor of veterinary epidemiology at Kansas State University, as saying, " E. Coli O157:H7 Not Limited to Grain-Fed Cattle"

Turns out that sheep, deer, bison, raccoons, birds and cows that live on grass and hay, not to mention the humans who harvest the crop and are often as much as a quarter mile from the nearest bathroom, can all carry the disease in their digestive tracts.

Shame on the Times for being so quick to trot out the latest in unscientific bilge for a blame game in such a time of crisis.

Spitzer not a farm guy

Days are getting very short, less than twelve hours of sunlight now. This means dragging a flashlight along to every milking and hard times getting any crop work done between chores.

I have been asked to aid some other farmers in drafting a letter to the NY Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer, about the current fad among milk processors of marketing so called BST-free milk. BST is a naturally occurring hormone, synthesized by Monsanto, and used by some farmers to increase their cows' appetites and thus their milk production. It has always been rather controversial, even though it is impossible to detect differences between the milk of cows that have been given it and cows that haven't. For the record, we have never used it here at Northview.

However, of late, some milk companies have asked their farmers to sign pledges not to use it so the the companies can market their milk as BST free (even though it really isn't, as all cows produce this hormone naturally). No problem there. We need to offer consumers what they want and if there is a market, good. And I repeat we don't use it here at our farm anyhow.

Problem is the milk companies are charging consumers a whole dollar more a gallon and paying the farmers not one cent for producing it for them....even though it becomes more expensive to produce milk without it. It is just another example of so-called farmer cooperatives becoming instead for profit companies and making those profits by stepping on the necks of the real producers of our food. I will gladly help draft the letter, although I don't expect that it will accomplish anything. Spitzer is busy running for governor, as he has been since he took office as AG. He has no interest in fairness to farmers, or as far as I can see in upstate at all. NY is bleeding dairy farmers like a gushing torrent, with farms all around us selling the cows and looking for new lives.
Unfair practices like this will just speed the death of the state's number one industry. The fools.