Getting by

We are. The kids have stepped up and done amazing things. Alan has covered ALL the feeding for nearly 100 animals every day plus going to school plus getting the bagger set up and a little corn chopped. Liz cleaned the barn alone (which is a HUGE job...her hands were all torn up last night) and filled the waterers and did all the calves and so many other chores I can't remember them. Then the two of them milked while Becky and I got some groceries so we will be amply supplied with appropriate junk food (plus some nutritious materials to fill in around the edges.)


This morning the girls and I milked very early as they had to be in school by 8. They had to leave when we were finishing up so I finished alone. Couldn't find a couple cows so they will just have to wait until tonight. It is so foggy and dark mornings. Neither of them is giving much milk so they will be fine. The boss is going nuts wanting to work and keeps coming out to the barn and we keep chasing him back to the house. His shoulder is so messed up...there is a groove in his arm where the muscle came off the bone.


Went to a very valuable meeting yesterday with our new assemblyman, George Amedore. He seems like he may be someone who will work with farmers. I hope so. Liz went too, as she is trying to get into the swing of farm politics in the area. You can't just sit back and let the outside world rumble along without you these days or you will find yourself regulated right out of business. I hope we have raised a set of good citizen activists. I know some of their teachers already drive them nuts with the nonsense they preach. Alan has a guy "teaching economics" in school right now who says that public schools originated because farmers needed to learn time management or they wouldn't be able to become factory workers, because they would go fishing if they felt like it rather than build fences. Oh, and he also says that farming isn't labor intensive any more because of machinery.

I could tell him a thing or two.

Oh, and a hellish awful thing...Patrick Bourque, who has long been bass player for Becky's favorites, Emerson Drive, (he left them in August) died suddenly at his home in Canada. Today would have been his thirtieth birthday I think. We were simply stunned and Beck felt particularly bad as she really liked and admired him.

Not a good horoscope

***Plans are shifting out of place today -- but don't waste your good energy trying to figure out why (because the reason is probably out of your control). Instead, direct all of your good energy toward formulating the most effective reaction to the new situation. You can't afford to have a 'whatever' attitude about any surprises throughout the day. So if something bothers you or frustrates you, take charge and get rid of it. You can put things back on track!***

Above is my horoscope today from Iwon.com. I am not sure if applies to to boss falling while trying to drive a cow out of the barn and dislocating his shoulder, or not, but...
His shoulder popped back in on its own, (after he fainted in the milk house) but the doctor says the muscle pulled out a piece of bone from the top of the humerus. This could heal potentially with 2-4 weeks in a sling. Or he could have torn things that won't heal and need surgery. We don't have insurance so I sure as heck hope not.

Kids all came right home from school and dug in. Professors were nice about letting girls out of class. Liz and Alan fed young stock. Alan fed cows. Liz and Alan are putting an Ag bag on the bagger right now. Becky has several foods cooking and the kitchen in order. I am trying to get my brain going again after standing in the hospital for hours as I guess they don't do chairs.

For the future there is no knowing yet how much soft tissue damage took place. The rest of us are just going to do the milking before the girls go to school. Alan will feed cows when he gets out of school. Now if we can just figure out how to get in forty or so acres of corn that is still out...I may have to hire that done if things don't come along well with the shoulder. Never dull that is for sure.

Shameless bunny

Congress explained

Thanks to a very favorite and incredibly talented cousin of mine, I now understand just how Congress "works".

***this is a video

Amish corn harvest

Hello chicken dinner, goodbye plumber

I stumbled on this via a quote in Food Systems Insider. It was worth a little searching for the source of the quote to find the story about a NYC man who tried to grow and prepare all his own food for a month...in the middle of New York City. (It was a sort of an extreme locavore thing.) He lost 29 pounds trying to feed himself out of his Brooklyn back yard, which perhaps could spell the end of the obesity epidemic, if widely embraced.


I was especially interested to read that it cost him more than $120 per meal to grow his chicken, rabbit and vegetables. I think I can do it cheaper than that here at Northview, even allowing for exorbitant NYS property and school taxes.


I understand the satisfaction he found though. I too find it particularly pleasing when sometimes everything on our table, except perhaps butter and condiments, was raised here on the farm. There is nothing like soup made entirely with vegetables from the garden and beef or pork that we raised or venison from the land. If Liz makes homemade bread it is about as good as it gets. (If you want to be picky, we don't grow the flour or yeast, but still....)


Of course we can't do it all the time, but I love it when we can.


I have also always thought that people who can actually turn a living animal into meat for their table are all too rare and much undervalued. I think the author of this story and his family got that concept very clearly by the end of his experiment. Especially his family....

"Howard said she only began to see his side of things after she banged her head in a dark corner of their basement on a slaughtered Flemish Giant rabbit.

"She asked me if she had hit her head on a dead chicken. When I told her it was a 20 pound (9 kg) freshly-skinned rabbit, I broke down and wept," he said. "I think that's when she realized I wasn't getting off on all the blood and gore, and it was beginning to wear me down.""

I remember all too well the first time I had to butcher a rabbit. It was a very long time ago and it was a matter of get it done or go hungry. It is a skill I don't use much today, but I am not sorry to know how. I give this guy a lot of credit for attempting this experiment and I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions.

"But now his family has a greater appreciation for the business of food and the people who grow it, he said. And the toil made the food rewarding to eat, even if his kids didn't eat everything he grew."

Johanns resigning.

Pretty big news here. I wonder who will be the next Secretary of Agriculture.

What on earth!

I was struggling to get a fire going in the outdoor stove yesterday when I heard the oddest sound. It is noisy here on the hill with a constant backdrop of traffic sound from the Thruway and the trains, so I had to strain to pick it out among the din. It was a sort of purring, clacking sound, hard to describe, but something like a squeaky wooden carriage wheel in the far distance.

As I made my way back and forth from the house with various combustible materials, such as a few scraps of old pine that used to be a flower box and ever more recent newspapers I kept noticing the sound. However, because it was soft and the traffic in late afternoon is loud, I just couldn't find the source.


Then as I paused for a second on the back step, catching my breath (I have this really nasty cold), I spotted a furious whirl of movement out on the heifer hill.

Turkeys! I never did get them all counted, but there were a lot and they were just going crazy. Running back and forth, up and down, and around in circles all over one little section of the hill. They were like little old ladies at a fire sale rushing from table to table and clucking over bargains. Really, it was as if they had completely lost their minds.

There were at least ten adults, which seemed very disturbed by the goings on, like referees at an out of control soccer game. Perhaps twenty poults-of-the-season were indulging in a turkish frenzy. They chested up to one another like boys confronting each other on the playground. Then whoever felt taller would grab the other guy by the back of the neck and they would twirl in tumultuous circles, all the while purring and chuckling musically.


It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in the great outdoors. They went on and on about whatever they were up to,mostly keeping a little circle, perhaps sixty feet in diameter, but sometimes spilling out across the hill, then always returning.


When I finally got the fire going at least an hour later, they were still at it. I suspect that the little family flocks of two or three hens and this year's young that keep to themselves all summer are combining into the gigantic flocks of a hundred or more that hang around here all winter. I am thinking maybe they were sorting out the pecking order and deciding who was going to be leading the cornfield onslaught and picking up the tastiest alfalfa seeds. Whatever they were up to, I just loved how musical their chick-to-chick battles seemed. Sibling rivalry sure doesn't sound like that here in the house.

Our milking shorthorn bull

Checkerboard Magnums Promise

His blood typing finally came in so he can go to Dependabul in ten days to be drawn. Then we may sell some semen on him if anyone is interested in using him. He is quite well bred, with a lot of milk and type on the dam. Plus we can AI our own Holstein heifers and get smaller calves, which are much more valuable for sale than the traditional Jersey cross calves.

The other bull we did blood work on turned out not to be what he was sold to us as. We decided to cut our losses as we are sick of waiting for his former owner to find the needed paperwork and for new papers maybe (and maybe not) to be issued. Thus the vet performed the necessary surgery to turn him into a steer and he is now destined for the freezer. We didn't pay a lot for him, but it cost me ninety bucks to blood type him and that will be a total loss. Oh, well, we are out of beef and Herman, the beef steer I was already raising, has a way to go yet.

Promise's pedigree, Sire: Checkerboard Magnum
Dam: Horizon Peggy Sue EXP
Paternal Grandsire:Meriville Peerless
Maternal Grandsire: Three Springs Sundance

Foggy mornings, bright afternoons

You make me smile

Two folks generously nominated me for this, but I am too tech-thick to know how to duplicate the graphic. I will just say thanks and that everyone in my blog roll has taught me things. Shared their lives and homes and thoughts with me. Introduced me to their families and friends and pets and livestock. Helped me understand their part of the world better than before...and become valued friends, even though I have only met them in print.


You are supposed to pick ten other bloggers to whom to pass this on, but I never was much one to follow the rules. I just can't choose ten favorites from the 30-odd blogs in the side bar not to mention those of my family (some of them are pretty odd too).
I like 'em all. I read 'em all, almost every day. So here's to all of you...you make me smile.

This little piggy learns a lesson

Two weeks ago the boss and Liz made a trip down to Medusa wherein resides the wonderful family from whom we purchase pigs. These folks breed really good pigs, long and lean, and they grow like crazy. The end result of growing a pig for your freezer depends in part on how well you care for it, but the quality of the pig you start out with also makes a huge difference. They have never sold us a poor one.

This year the guys decided to raise three pigs as we made a lot more sausage from the last pair and they didn't last long. Nichols does our meat processing for us and they made our sausage to our exact specifications (very mild). We loved it.


Anyhow, these three little fellows were part of a huge litter and were kind of on the wild side when they came home. However, they soon discovered that when the door to the 4-horse trailer that we use for a pig pen opened, someone on the other side had a pail of milk. Or a dozen ears of field corn. A zucchini. Apples. Tomatoes. Grain. They soon really liked to see the door open.


In fact when the boss opened the door the other night one jumped right out. Oops! Because they are a little wilder than our usual pigs he was frightened and immediately bolted away in a panic. The trailer is in the barn yard. The cows were also in the barnyard waiting to be milked. Instead of heading for the high country like any sensible piggy, this one ran right into the center of the herd, much to the chagrin of the bovine bunch. A forty-pound squealing, bristly, thing racing among their feet was unprecedented and just plain unnatural. They did what cows do in such circumstances. They kicked the heck out of him. He somehow struggled back up to the trailer and the boss herded him inside, where he flopped down in the straw on his side.

When the gang and I came over to milk a few minutes later the boss greeted us, "I guess one of my little piggies is going to die."

He recounted Lewy's tale of woe. We all trooped up to the trailer, where a few minutes earlier the pig had been slumped in the straw panting and quivering and looking not long for this world. When that wonderful door opened however, he somehow dragged himself up out of his death bed and limped over to the food dish where he looked up expectantly. He was noticeably lame in the rear trotter, but he still had his priorities straight. Maybe things weren't so bad after all. A few days passed with no further porky excitement.

Just now I asked the boss, "How is your little piggie?"

He replied, "I can't even tell which one he is any more."

However, when the door opens for pigs to be given their many and various gustatory delights, nobody jumps out of the trailer.

Todd Fritsch

Video

***there is just something about the kind of bands that play county fairs....

Lucky and the new piggies

Mickey Mouse ears

****Tomorrow if things aren't as crazy as they have been the past two days I will tell you of the adventures of Lewy, the third little piggie, who found out something about cows yesterday.

Speaking of hmmm

Thanks to Miss Cellania for this story on the effect of high ceilings on thought processes. This old house has at least ten footers. Heck the windows defy commercially available drapes by being too darned tall unless you like open space either at the top or bottom. So we do without; I like to see the sunshine anyhow and no one can see in way up on this hill.

Anyhow, now I know why I am weird.

( “When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,”)

Yup, that's me all right....abstract thought indeed.

The sleep of the just

Or just sleep? We took a quick run over to Central New York Farm Progress Days today. Didn't stay long as these are busy times, what with corn chopping in full swing and all. This isn't our truck, BTW but I wouldn't mind if it was. We passed this one shortly after the incident below.

Anyhow, today the weather was spectacular, the show was pretty decent, although perhaps not up to past years, and the ride home was especially pleasant.

Out the car window near the auction

Most especially when we made a short detour to look at some machinery that is coming up for auction this weekend. As we rounded a corner on a tiny back road we came upon a National Grid truck. That is our area electrical utility and seeing their trucks isn't so uncommon. However, I am not so sure about the guy sound asleep in the driver's seat, head thrown back and mouth wide open. I hope it was his lunch hour, although it was two in the afternoon. I wanted to take a picture to share, but the guys wouldn't let me.

I did take a few others though.

This company supplies our milkhouse cleaning supplies.

****Update, I haven't spent much time reading blogs today, what with traveling, but I just visited Liz's, BuckinJunction. She posted yesterday on 9-11 and what she has written made me proud to be her mother. I mean, I always knew she was a good kid and all but this was just special for someone only 21 years old.

Marnie

I have been reading a number of blogs, which feature marvelous insect photos and lots of interesting posts on such things as tagging monarch butterflies. Today Burning Silo had a photo of a "surprise" indoor monarch, which reminded me of an incident that I had forgotten.


You see once upon a time we shared our home with a butterfly too. It happened one fall when Alan was quite small. An early frost had struck overnight ending the growing season with a decisive bang.


We were driving up the hill to the house, which was not our home yet, when Alan called out, "Look mom, it's a butterfly." And sure enough, among the bushes that straggle willy-nilly beside the drive was an empty chrysalis with a butterfly clinging below it.



We crawled out of the car and rushed over to look. He was young enough then that such a sight was a new and truly exciting event. (Eh, I admit it...we would still be just as quick to stop today and he is a senior in High School now.) As we got closer we could see that things weren't good for this poor insect though. "Her" wings had only half opened and had hardened into a crumpled, curled-over black and orange mess. I suppose the frost may have been the culprit. We left her there and went about our business, but at night she still hung there, wrinkled and weary. We decided that since more bad weather was forecast and since Alan was a little boy who hated to see anything suffer we would take her home.



At that time we lived about a mile from here in a house in the village, as the boss's folks lived here. There didn't seem to be any serviceable jars for monarch housing, and with those wings we didn't figure she would be going anywhere, so we released the critter, christened Marnie by her benefactor, in our tiny bathroom.


Since the kids had studied butterflies in school Alan knew enough to make sugar water, which he offered her in a soda bottle cap. She promptly obliged by sitting on his finger sipping neatly through her cunningly unrolled "butterfly straw".


Thus began about ten days of feeding her interesting sweet things, checking your toothbrush for butterflies, and finding her sitting on your shoulder when you went in to wash your hands. We brought bunches of late flowers in for her and she knew just what to do with them. She had to work hard to fly well enough to join you as you prepared to shower, but fly she did. Alan took her for "walks" outside, perched on his outstretched finger. She stayed with him, seeming content. Someone was always hollering, "Don't let the butterfly out of the bathroom," every time they heard the door open.


We really enjoyed her; it was fun to have a butterfly in the house. However, there were a number of close calls when she escaped from her little prison and found her way to kitchen or closet. It was not easy to find her again and I was afraid that one of these incidents would lead to disaster or that she would be injured when someone picked up a towel or something (she often chose to perch on towels).


Therefore, one brilliant sunny afternoon when over 30 wild monarchs (with properly flat and handsome wings) were sipping at the mums in the side yard, I took Marnie for a walk. I wasn't sure what would happen, but I needed the story to have a happy ending for her very young benefactor. I wasn't planning on bringing her back to the house.


Amazingly, as soon as she felt the sun beating down over the bank of glowing flowers, she lifted off my finger and spiraled off over the lilac bushes. She circled higher and higher until she was out of sight, flapping diligently off toward the river.


She was an insect, (not necessarily even a "she" although anthropomorphically we called her one.) I don't imagine we even existed for her and that her landings on our persons were incidental rather than planned. I rather doubt that she made it to Mexico or lived to reproduce. Those wings probably didn't carry her very far on that late fall afternoon of freedom.



However, we have comfortable and fond memories of sharing the bathroom with a butterfly and an everlasting soft spot for Monarchs just the same.

We did it!

.Danick Dupelle

David Pichette

Emerson Drive...this time in Ebensburg PA******

******which is WAY too far from here for us to go. WAY too far.

****got up at three on Saturday to milk, drove all day (Liz) went to the concert and fair, drove all night (Liz). Got home again at five on Sunday. Milked again. Feel very, very poor. Very poor

Will they do it?

Are the three women of Northview brave enough to hop in the car and go here to see this (scroll to the bottom to see what is on tomorrow afternoon)?
I am not sure but things are leaning that way.

Homeland Security

....and cow feed. You will be (as I was) comforted to learn that the Department of Homeland Security is keeping us safe from cow feed. Yep, I have it on good authority that samples of chopped hay and corn are often flagged for further investigation at the post office level. (Fermented or fermenting feed tends to smell "funny"). Then the folks who are fighting terrorism, cow by cow, can test the samples for themselves. After assuring themselves that the little sample baggies contain only grass and grain they send it along to the nutritional lab for which it was intended in the first place. Then the farmer and the feed company guy get the info they need to balance the daily ration for the cows.

It is always good to know how our tax dollars are being spent....and wonderful as well to feel safe and well-protected from immediate and obvious dangers such as feed samples.