With all that has been going on lately I have failed to get something done that I really wanted to..
And that is to share a delightful new blog with you. Southview Farm is written by my sister-in-law, Lisa, who is married to my terrific younger brother Matt. You can spot him in the comments every now and then as Mappy. (When he was just a little guy that is what our wonderful Lithuanian landlady called him. He calls me Fred. ....It's a long story). You can see him at his weekday job in today's post at Southview.
Anyhow, check it out! Matt and Lisa are the weavers who made our wonderful rugs, blankets and towels and they have an assortment of interesting animals, day jobs and good kids. You will see fish and looms and horses and lots of nice photography.
********As soon as we get in from chores, which I am leaving now to pursue, I will try to get a picture of yesterday's puzzling object in its usual place. I just thought the patent date was neat, as it gives an idea of the possible age of this old house. (Trust Alan to find something like that.)
******And check this out too! As we pursued a home for our milk last week and this, I kept hearing rumors about what is going on in Maine. Now we find out that it is true. After what we have been through my heart just aches for all these farmers. Meeting organic standards is challenging and costly. These farmers who just got dumped by the people who buy their product have worked long and hard to obtain the organic designation. I hope a solution is found for them and quickly. Milk is a perishable product so hours and days matter immeasurably to these poor folks!
Thank you all for your prayers, kind comments, letters to senators and just plain caring. The prayers worked and your kindness helped us get by.
Late last night a complete stranger called and offered us a market for our milk. He came in today and talked to us, and although we will be making less money, which is not such a good thing, we now have a market.
Hopefully at least, if nobody else runs around behind the scenes messing it up.
I have never been lied to in my life, like I have this past week. People that we trusted knowingly mislead us. Not a pleasant lesson, but I can't thank you all enough.
People are asking what is going on. So far nothing. Dozens of phone calls No answers. It is looking very bad. And we are looking for a used small milk tank truck Anybody know of one for sale?
Update**** Despite feeling somewhat like a steamroller has come through here, there is a positive side to our current nightmare..... And that is you...the people reading this, who have made us feel cared for with your kindness and concern. Your emails and kind words in the comment section help us get through the anxious days and sleepless nights. I can't tell you how much I thank you for that.
We have also had some state officials and Farm Bureau people pulling out all the stops to try to fix the situation. I can't thank them enough for their efforts to save our cows. I hope we don't have to sell them. If we do, we have promised the kids we will hang on to a few of the show cows. Anyhow, my deepest thanks.
From our fisheries and wildlife guy.....Homework was never like this when I was in school. The best assignments I can remember were bringing in frog eggs (and that may have been a voluntary assignment) and writing stories. We sure never got to trek out into the wilds of a farm, armed with mom's camera and a turkey call, to count birds and photograph amazing snow geese and deer and strutting tom turkeys.
We did do some amazingly cool stuff in school though, back in the day, stuff that little matters like lawsuits would certainly prohibit today. Like along about fifth grade, Mr. Davis, our science teacher, took us both to Howe Caverns and down into a wild cave. Can you imagine taking fifth graders into a wild cave today?
I can remember wading down the stream that ran through the center of the wild cave, in soggy, totally inadequate boots, hoping to see bats and marveling at tiny limestone formations that popped out of the walls and off the ceilings and floors everywhere. We had to clamber down a rope from a parking lot to get into the cave....through a sort of well cover, culvert thing with a huge concrete cap that was lifted aside....I can't see that being allowed to day, but that cave has its own photo album in my mind and the pictures are as sharp and clear as if it were yesterday.
Friends and I did quite a bit of spelunking in the college days and I am sure the interest was spawned on those fifth grade trips. I am too old and lame and not exactly skinny enough any more to belly crawl through dark, sleek, wild places deep underground, but I am glad I had the chance once upon a youthful time. And I am glad my mom didn't know about those unsupervised and probably ridiculously unsafe 20-something trips. We gave her enough grey hair as it is.
Here and here are some pics Alan and I brought back from last year's trip to Howe Caverns where we went to celebrate his successful road test. Here are more.
Speaking of teachers who truly inspire students, this fellow taught all three of our kids over the years, and he is one of the two or three best teachers any of them have had. Although he has surely earned his retirement, the school will be lessened by his absence next year.
Don't seem to matter much today. It is 2:30 in the morning and I can't sleep. Over the past week the cooperative we ship milk to changed where it sells our milk. In the course of the contract negotiations they neglected to make sure that they set it up to have a milk hauler for our farm milk. Everybody else got a hauler because everybody else is on the flat and can have a tractor trailer pick up there milk. We alone need a ten-wheeler because of the hill. A giant cooperative is refusing to let our milk leave the farm, on the same truck it has always been on.
So all week no one came to pick up the milk. All week we were assured that this was all getting solved. Finally yesterday we had to dump the milk. And finally yesterday we learned that nothing is solved and there is just a standstill in the negotiations, which we have had no part of.
If we don't have a hauler in the next few days we will have to sell the cows or send them somewhere to board at someone else's farm or some other desperate measure. None of these options would allow us a milk check, which is what we live on and pay our bills with. Plus the boss's entire lifetime of breeding cattle and the kids lifetimes and half of mine will simply be gone. Our lives will be gone, because everything we do every day, every habit, every joy, every pain, is wrapped up in those cows.
You find out just how much you love them when you look at them and think about putting them all on a truck and watching them go.
On another day I would have been happy to see that NYRI is a dead issue and our neighbors won't be getting a monstrous power line through their backyards. Today my heart and soul are sick, especially for Liz who loves her cows like children. I am happy for them in a vague way, but I can't feel any delight.
If you have any ideas let me know...or at least pray for us. I spent three hours on the phone yesterday and won't know until at least Monday if any of my frantic calls will bear fruit. I am going out now to check old Zinnia who took it in her head to look like calving last night....
Update***Here is more on this topic. Guess I am not the only one concerned by it. Google isn't too happy either. I am sorry that I am not writing about animals and spring time and the good stuff that is (or should be) going on. That is partly because serious problems are flourishing like fungus and there isn't much fun to talk about. However, there is also the fear factor about where this country is going.....There is so much insanity popping up in the news, all day every day, it is like watching the first Gulf War unfold on television. Or the second. It scares you silly, but you can't walk away from it.
Talk about shock and awe! Here is a Senate proposal (that will probably pass unfettered) to give a government official the right to shut down private Internet networks if they think a cyber attack is under way. Right now, thanks to a conspiracy that the media has virtually admitted to, to publish only positive materiel about liberal causes, the regular news is worse than useless. Most political dissent takes place right here in the blogoshere. I try to discipline myself to mostly write about farm stuff, but this is too much. I personally rely on this medium for nearly all my news and commentary. Without it I would be blind.
To give the very people I am worried about the power to legally shut off the information faucet is appalling, egregious and wrong. We just watched a Senator have his conviction thrown out of court because of prosecutorial malfeasance. What is going to happen to us peons if they close our conuit to unfiltered information? I really am frightened by the prospect. The time to stand up and scream for our right to freedom of information and freedom of discourse with the people we talk to here on the Internet is right now, today, before this bill is shoved through like it was good for us.
I am not a baby who needs Washington to secure my computer for me and I suspect you aren't either (notice that they screamed about what Conficker was going to do to us for a couple of days and then slipped this in as if they were saving us from a fate worse than worms?) However, the same people who think they have the right to decide what eat think so.
Call your Senator! Or send him an email. While you still can!
I love this phrase from the New York Post, from an editorial piece by Fred Dicker.
"The wrecking ball of a new state budget, approved in Kremlin-like secrecy by the troika, also ranks as one of the biggest betrayals in process and substance by a governor in New York history."
NY has traditionally been one of the worst places in the country to do business. In just the past couple of decades excellent manufacturers of gloves and clothing have been forced out of business or hustled off to foreign lands by the tax, spend and hire your family, friends and neighbors mindset in state government. However, this budget and the secrecy involved in the budget process (the minority party was barred from discussion) set new standards in legislation. Too bad they are lower standards rather than higher. I read somewhere this morning that the budget is predicted to cost every tax paying family $5000 dollars in new taxes and fees. Now that is what I call sharing the pain.
Carpe Diem has some interesting information comparing agriculture in Cuba to that in the good old US of A. Let me tell you...right now we have it good, but that could change and fast. Here is the whole story. Read it and be afraid....
What does this have to do with the USA? Read this one.
I really hope that isn't "our" grey fox! Most of these pics were taken yesterday as Alan and his class partner crawled around the farm in between rain showers taking photos of animal signs for class. Others were taken during the fencing trip. As you can see we have lots of wildlife on our place, and they spend their time eating each other and generally having a great time. The guys saw nine tom turkeys in full strut mode. But I really hope that isn't our fox! Or her pups.....
Everything is pretty brown here in the Northeast, although a few more sunny days like yesterday and that will most likely change. Here are a couple views we took while building fence in the heifer pasture yesterday.
I am hoping no crisis occurs today (it has been an entire week in crisis mode it seems) to stop Liz, Alan and me from getting at the heifer pasture fence today. The boss is going bargain hunting over at McFadden's spring auction today so he won't be here. Wish he was handy with the camera so he could take some pics of the marvel that is that sale. It is one amazing farm machinery auction with hundreds of tractors and implements and probably thousands of people. Quite a sight to see, although not at all my cup of tea.
And I was wondering and pondering this morning as I made my first cup of coffee and looked into Grandpa Lachmayer's eyes in his photo by the stove.....do he and Grandma and Great Aunt Lulu and Uncle Mack play pinochle in Heaven? Do they sit around a small, square table, laughing and slapping cards together and talking about the huge McGivern/Lachmayer clan? They used to get a real bang out of playing cards at camp when we were kids. Although the game still makes no sense at all to me and certainly didn't then, we felt secure hanging around under the card table with our toys or petting Great Aunt Lulu's funny little Boston terriers and pugs. Can you remember back when somebody else was the grown up and you could rely on them to take care of the hard decisions for you? And make lunch (even if you hated egg salad)? And keep an eye that you didn't go astray? I can remember always being desperate to get outside and catch frogs in the tiny rivulet that flowed across in front of the camp.....they must have hated to see me coming. Sometimes I miss that sense of being cared for.
I learned to make spaghetti sauce from a series of experts, including grandmas, mama and a Sicilian family when I was in college. I have had a lot of practice. The other day I made a batch with some fresh sausage from our piggies and hamburger from our last beef. And the Italian seasoning I was forced to learn to make when the kids began to cook everything from eggs to steak with the stuff. It turned out rather well (if I do say so myself). Been too busy to bother with pasta so we have been eating it on bread. Not all bread is created equal so....
Alan and I begged Liz to make a batch of her super/wonderful.really, really great, homemade bread.
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