Take a deep breath

Lilac on a sweet spring breeze.

Wow, yay Liz

Liz just got her grades for her fourth semester and she has a 4.0! We are so happy for her.

Paulo Crimber and Guilherme Marchi signing autographs at Turning Stone

A Champion? Maybe, maybe not.

What do you think?

When a guy who loses his wallet and sets the whole family to tearing the house apart searching for it, so he can drive up and get straw? And then finds it in his pants pocket. (You think GRRRRRR..!)

He was well paid back while building fence, by nearly stumbling upon a setting hen turkey, who flew right in his face and nearly gave him a heart attack. She then rocketed off through the woods careening off the trees and brush and making an awful racket. I can see the headline now, "Farmer done in by injury caused by collision with large black bird."

Is the most challenging material to get back out that gets sucked up into the dredges when the state is dredging the river to keep the channel navigable? (Bowling balls, which conjures up all sorts of interesting conjecture.)

Of a woman who claims to be sane, but buys a bull calf sight unseen, from someone in Connecticut, that she has never met? (Time will tell. He was delivered this morning; His sire is Calbrett HH Champion, so maybe he will be one too. Weirdly, although I didn't realize it when I bought him, his great granddam is a cow that the boss was contending bidder on at an auction way back when we still were doing the 4-H club. That was the year we gave all the kids in the dairy club imaginary money to spend at the Dairy Fashion Sale and they all bought the same heifer. I can not believe that through an amazing bit of serendipity we now own a descendant. Hope we can keep him growing.)

Of all this rain? (We do not need it and the people in Missouri do, so let's send it all down there. Then maybe we can get some more corn in.)

Thanks Mom

Today is Mother’s Day, a day we dedicate to honoring our mothers, who dedicate themselves to our wellbeing all the rest of the year. My mom visits my brother and his family on this actual day, so the kids and I did our mommy visit yesterday.

Mom was a rock to us kids growing up. No matter how crazy things got in our chaotic world she was (and is) always calm and reasoned. Patient. And loving. Always loving, no matter how awful we were or are.

Mom taught me to cherish family first and to realize that who we are is built upon a foundation of who there was before us. She has always worked hard to keep us connected with extended family and to help us understand how who our ancestors were shaped who we are. (It is sometimes easier to accept personal quirkiness when you know that a hundred generations of Montgomerys before you were similarly and equally quirky and weird.)

Although when I was a kid genealogical research seemed to be a deadly boring pastime, reading journals that she discovered, visiting cemeteries where long ago relatives are buried and tracing the dedications on their weathered marble gravestones brought the past alive for me. When you contemplate the Civil War in terms of your own family fighting there, then coming home to try to salvage their family farms, it ceases to be an abstract history lesson and assumes a reality that a list of dead strangers cannot offer.

I have my mother to thank for that insight. In fact I always wondered what drew me so irresistibly to farming. I came right out of the box loving animals and the land and growing things, even though I was born in the city. All the close relations were railroad men or factory workers so where did the farmer gene come from? Thanks to Mom’s research we found legions of farmers just a couple of generations back. I guess I came by the addiction honestly.

I have to thank her as well for dragging us kids along wherever my father’s passion for knowledge took them, although at the time sitting in the station wagon waiting at yet another antique store seemed somewhat less than scintillating. Because she kept us with her, I love books and living with antiques, and understand the imprint of the Iroquois upon the region (from many hours of sitting at digs sifting red and blue trade beads and fragments of "worked" flint and hand made pottery out of rich black dirt). I have seen up close and personal the abundant minerals that are hidden in New York’s mountains and streambeds, and in fact collected the ones in the links. I know all about Scotland and have visited the land of our ancestors vicariously several times. (And despite early-life immersion I still like bagpipe music.)

I love you mom. Keep up the good work!

Look what Alan found

Here

The new market

Went to a meeting of the new milk marketing cooperative yesterday. Alan was my escort and he can be quite a gentleman when he wants to (with time out to run out to the lobby and do some deer hunting on a video game.)

Nice enough folks, including some neighbors who are real good farmers and probably to know what they are about.. In fact we sat with some real engaging people, with whom we much enjoyed talking.

However, the sense of my fellow members having a real grasp of milk marketing wasn’t there. They seem to rely on their board for direction, which is of course what they are there for. Still I think, no, I know, that I am going to miss Canajoharie Cooperative and Allied Federated Coops. The independence is gone. Big brother is watching. Oh, well.

Best Food Nation

Here is a new industry driven website intended to tell the farmers' and ranchers' side of the food production story. I haven’t had time to read it all, as it covers a lot of territory from beef to potatoes, but it seems to do a pretty good job of offering a somewhat simplified version of the realities of farmers' stewardship of land and animals.

I think this kind of thing is the right way to go in the effort to combat the propaganda shoveled around by animal rights and other activist groups. I have found that nearly every time I make an effort to explain why we do something on a farm, even something that might seem a little weird or wrong to a non-farm person, they at least try to comprehend. However, even with a newspaper column, this weblog, and years of sitting with the show string at fairs chatting with the city folk who wander by, I can only talk to just so many people. Same for every farmer and rancher. There aren’t very many of us and we tend to be kind of busy. Activists on the other hand have huge budgets and massive numbers of volunteers and paid staff.

Maybe web sites like this, especially if they send out plenty of press releases to the MSM can help with the job of counteracting the garbage people have to wade through to learn about how their food is grown.

I am going to give Best Food Nation a link in my sidebar anyhow.

Another Day in Paradise

What do you say to a veterinarian who literally drops everything and darned near flies to your place to save a dying cow? Well, "thanks", comes to mind…along with, "good job", not to mention, "sorry the gate was still closed".

And that is just what we found ourselves saying this very morning along about at the end of milking. The day was already well on-the-way to over the top chaos. First the cows didn’t come down from pasture, (or at least none of the older high producers did). The boss had to go get them and be rather persuasive before they could be convinced that they really needed to come down the hill.

Then Hattie, Liz’s 2-year old Jersey show heifer sat down and had a bull calf right in the middle of milking. Not too bad yet, although it is tanker day and we did need to get done promptly.

While we were scurrying around shifting machines and washing cows, the boss decided to give some pregnant cows their routine injections of selenium. That mineral is quite deficient in the soil around here. We normally give all the cows a few cc's two to three weeks before calving, as it helps prevent retained placentas and other birth-related problems. Still no big deal.
Then about a half an hour later old Balsam, a successful retired show cow of Alan's, went right off the deep end. She began kicking her head, drooling great strings of saliva and began to swell up all over. She seemed to be having convulsions while standing up. We knew immediately that she was going into anaphylactic shock and needed epinephrine.

We didn’t have any. All we had was an Epipen that we keep on hand for Liz’s bee sting allergy. I called our favorite vet and asked if it would help. The dose was a fraction of what is needed for a cow the size of Balsam, but she said to give it anyhow and headed down our way.
I no more than got back to the barn with the medicine when the blacksmith arrived and needed help catching DG, (who despises men).

By the time I had him haltered Kris was already opening the gate herself, for which I humbly apologize.

A few injections later and poor Balsam was beginning to relax and stop swelling and I was beginning to catch my breath from all the running from the cow barn to the phone to the horse pasture and back.

Thanks to the quality of animal care that we take for granted from our veterinarian, Balsam will probably be all right. However, if she makes it through this episode and has her calf all right, she will certainly not get a shot of selenium next year. And I sure do hope things slow down for the rest of the day. I am too old for this.

Bulls walking through the hallway in the casino

East meets West

We visited a whole different world yesterday and to my surprise I liked it there. Liz took me to a Professional Bull Riding event at Turning Stone Casino up in Verona. I did not really want to go, as I am no big fan of bull riding, (I hate to see guys get hurt).

However, I can’t remember the last time I had that much fun. We got autographs from the riders, sat behind a woman who bred one of the bucking bulls, (who answered any questions we had about the bulls, contractors and contestants) and drank bad coffee in one of the cafes while we watched the people walk by. Cameras were permitted so I took tons of pictures, but the bulls were a lot faster than my shutter so most of them are just colorful blurs. Sometimes you can pick out a pair of horns or a cowboy hat though.

The contestants were amazingly well-mannered and pleasant guys, taking time to chat with each person in the autograph line and being incredibly courtly, (even the ones who were bleeding all over the table from the scrapes and cuts they got in the arena.) I might add that Guilherme Marchi is about as handsome as they make them, right along with having very charming manners.

I expected the casino to be embarrassingly glitzy and garish, but except right in the gambling areas it was hushed and elegant and very welcoming. We figure that farming is all the gamble a sensible soul needs so we didn’t even play a slot machine, but we liked the place and were impressed by the security.

Obviously with all that money changing hands a lot of guards and police are needed but they were unobtrusive, professional and actually quite nice. There was certainly no danger of getting lost in the gigantic place, as there was always someone around to ask how to get where you needed to go.

Liz drove, both ways, bought the bad coffee and fed me McDonald’s on the way home, as well as paying for my ticket for a seat in the second row, right in front of the chutes.
Thanks, kiddo, it was great! Let's do it again next year...and have Alan show me how to speed up the camera.

Turning Stone. ..fast bull, slow shutter.

Gael, the queen bean. 

Alchibah

I am trying my hand at a new kind of writing. So far it is a lot of fun.
Jeff at Alphecca is producing, with the help of all sorts of other folks, an online science fiction novel about forming a government and society on a new planet, in a new century.
Check it out at Colony Alchibah. I am sure you will have no problem figuring out which colonist I am playing.

Flower Drum Cows

The cows went out to pasture yesterday for the first time this year. When the old ones like Star, who at eleven is second oldest, Butternut, another senior citizen, and all the other veterans of many years at grass saw that the lower gate was open, they headed for the hills.

Literally.

It was not quite the same story with the two, three and a few of the four-year-old cows. They were much more intrigued by the fact that they could run for about a half a mile at a rip than by the new food source.

So run they did.

All day.

They ran up the hill. I looked out the window, not a black and white body to be seen. Five minutes later, with a thunder of hooves on packed earth, they were back, mooing at me, and staring as if asking what they were supposed to be doing.

Then they were gone again.

It was a noisy, busy day. Of course there was a bunch in the barnyard when the corn truck came so I had to hold gates with a big stick, since they thought all open gates were there for their entertainment.

An of course, when it came time to bring them in the barn for milking there was a conspicuous dearth of bovinity anywhere to be found.

The young ones were evidently still on the prowl though. As soon as they heard the grain auger they showed up at the door, wide-eyed and blowing.

However, the old ladies had to be escorted all the way down from the farthest hills. They knew a good thing when they tasted it. After a long day of vigorous grazing their backs were dotted with spent flowers from the box elders, wild plums and maples that are in bloom. They were quite contented and full of milk. I hope things are a little more peaceful today though.

No time to write

Accepted students' day, two weeks of college finals keeping the kitchen table under cover of a sprawl of books, cards and assorted study materials, the Participation in Government project wherein we must drive to and obtain signatures from every conceivable government agency for miles around, fence building, stone picking, herb planting, firewood, hay, calves and two beefers to go to the auction; it is just nuts around here.

It is hard to even remember slower days. The big conclusion from the PIG project is that there are way too damn many people working for the government in upstate New York and they all take LONG lunch hours. It was possible to find only about twenty percent of the many we searched for actually occupying their offices to get their John Hancocks. What with gas prices and how busy we are and will be, the teacher will have to make do with MY signature on a note detailing our search. I hope my kids never need to know where the jail and the welfare offices are anyhow. If they do, then I have been doing something way wrong all these years.

We are real proud of Liz who got an award for scholarship because of her GPA and being on the Dean's list all four semesters. Sadly she was too sick to attend the ceremony.

The bunny wrangler feeding a chickadee