At Least Somebody Gets It

Dairy meeting in Cobleskill yesterday (and no, we couldn't go, having to keep up with keeping up).

I hope all this legislative attention to what is truly becoming a widespread disaster comes in time to help our neighbors and us too. After talking to our lender, feed company reps, milk company officials and other farmers in recent weeks we are beginning to see that this situation is unprecedented. We are fortunate in some ways, not being as deeply in debt as is often the case. Still, we are facing decisions we don't want to make if something doesn't change and soon

Farms are going to go out of business. Lots of them. Soon. Here in upstate NY they are the backbone of the economy, perhaps the last viable industry before the area becomes a great big housing development, providing a nice place for commuters from the cities to live.

CWT keeps dumping thousands of cows into the beef market, keeping prices depressed so you can't even sell a few extras to pay your school taxes. I am really glad to hear that some legislators are looking into solutions, even short term ones.

Don't Try This at Home

Inside the heifer barn hay mow

Yesterday Liz and I continued our ongoing getting-ready-for-winter marathon. We took a break from food production and preservation to head to the heifer barn to bag up some sawdust and wood chips. Her goal was baby calf bedding. Mine was something to put in Nick's doghouse and run. (Come real cold weather, he will come inside, and have straw for when he is out, but for now sawdust is warm enough.)


While I waited for her to finish turning Mandy and Blitz out in the barnyard for the day I decided to start without her. Our heifer barn is an antiquated kind of tired-around-the-edges structure, which was once the milking barn for the farm that went with our house. Made for Jerseys, the stalls were too small for even Holstein heifers, so we replaced them with pens years ago.


During last winter, a gang of big heifers ran in and out of one of the pens as they wished and were fed outside along a fence. Over the course of the winter, a noticeable quantity of feed and its inevitable by product built up along that fence, which is right across the handiest way to the heifer mow where the sawdust is.


It has rained a lot this year.

I didn't think of that.


Rather than struggle through head-high weeds and grass, I started to cross that pile of feed and the after affects of feed with my grain bag and shovel. Yep, Nick was going to be comfy at night if I had anything to say about it.


I managed to take about eight steps out onto the "stuff". I could feel a little sinking sensation, but heck, how deep could it be? And if I used a sort of quick tippy toe action I ought to be able to get across.

Or not. Just about exactly in the middle my left foot sank right to the top of my rubber barn boot (thank God I decided to wear them instead of sneakers!)


I was really, really stuck. Could not move at all. Boot was about one inch from filling with water. Other foot was still on top, but mighty precariously so.

I hollered for Liz.


She couldn't hear me.


I couldn't just stay there until someone came, so finally I did what I had to.


No, it is not nice to be barefoot in those circumstances.
Yes, I am glad I had a shovel with which to extricate that left boot.
And yeah, after I finally got loose and got my foot clean and my wool sock back on and my boot back on I went down and chopped a path through the weeds and grass so we could get into the barn the other way.

I sure hope Nick appreciates what I went through for him.

Outside the heifer barn

Must...........Have........Coffee

I generally write all this stuff early in the morning before the house becomes a humming hive of people dumping clothes on the dining room table, floor etc., yelling for vice grips, dogs barking, cat howling for canz and mom hollering, "Get those shotgun shells off the kitchen table/dining room table/counter/washing machine etc."

Thus some of the typos are caused by my general literacy level (or lack thereof) and some of them are caused by coffee (or the lack thereof).

Should you be wondering by now where all this is going....yesterday, while going about a busy day involving bookkeeping, cleaning up after the weekend and making wild turkey soup out of the wild turkey I overcooked the day before, I planned a post about the joys of having a window over the kitchen sink.

And it is a joyful thing by the way. I don't know if anyone has ever done a study on how much time a farm mom spends doing dishes, washing and cutting up vegetables from the garden and boning out wild turkeys and other things, wild and domestic, but it is a lot. A nice view of unmowed lawn and shaggy heifers grazing under glowing maple trees kind of takes the curse off the boring if you know what I mean. (Add an iPod and it is almost fun....better than what everybody else did yesterday anyhow, which is cleaning stables.)

However when I sat down to write about it, I realized that every thought on the topic, except for the topic itself that is, had fled my mind. Plus the pictures I took for it came out about as humdrum as doing dishes is. (One of these days I will wash the window and knock down the big wasp nest on the frame).

So I will go get my first cup of coffee out of the microwave, let Gael in, since she is barking on the porch, and see if anything comes back to me.


Later:
Hmmmm, nope, nada, zilch, nothing.........the coffee is cold. The cat won't shut up because we are out of canz, and the other cats knocked a bucket down, effectively locking the back door shut and causing me to have to use farm wife ingenuity (not to mention colorful language) to get the door open.....My brain won't cooperate.....sorry about that.

Macro Monday

For more Macro Monday......

Sunday Stills....Happiness is

To me happiness is mostly about my family, but they are hard to get together in a bunch for a photo.
So happiness is also:




Frogs, (last one of the season I promise). They die if they try to winter over in the garden pond, so when it starts getting cold we take them out and move them to other wet and watery places...however two of them are being very stubborn. This one was taken to the creek over by the cow barn a couple weeks ago, yesterday he was back. He is so determined. I mean just look at that chin! And there is another one that keeps ducking under whenever I walk near the pond....they just don't know what is good for them I guess.




And hearts on cows. I love hearts on cows, and it turns out both of Liz's aged cows, Mandy, the Holstein, and Heather the Jersey, have hearts on their shoulders.

(I also am made very, very happy by my SWD Valiant heifer, Bastille, but I could not get a decent photo of her no matter how I tried.)





And here....I am happy here. There is no "bloom where you're planted" about it. I love my home. I love the valley. The fields, especially when there are heifers grazing across them. I love the nights and the days and the sky and the land...happiness is being lucky enough to live some place that fits so well.



For more Sunday Stills

Juglans Nigra

Or, wow, Mom, you sure are blind.

Some years ago a good friend gave me a number of black walnut seedlings that volunteered on his lawn. I really didn't have any place to plant them, so I gave a few away and stuffed the rest down into the mounds left by woodchucks in the wild field in front of the house.


When I say wild I mean that you really can't walk there because of the chuck holes, logs, brush etc. It was all I could do to crawl down there with a shovel and a bucket of baby trees.


Therefore they were on their own. Either they grew in the woodchuck holes....or didn't.

I never saw them again.

Until yesterday. Alan has been studying woody plants at school and has developed a real eye for juglans species. And those huge, really, really tall sumacs I have been ignoring down below the driveway, all the while saying that the walnut trees must not have taken.....are black walnut trees...complete with nuts!

I feel silly, but delighted to have big, robust walnut trees all my own.

Calling all Parents of College Kids (Caution/Mild Profanity)

What on earth do you do when your half way decently raised young-un is paired in a tiny college dorm room with a person who thinks it is just dandy to bring the BF back to the room and spend the nights in loud...well...use your imagination? We are not talking quiet and discrete and possible to ignore here...we are talking chasing each other around the room at three in the morning screaming and yelling and then....

I mean the beds are just a few inches apart. I am stymied. Heard about this kind of stuff and seen daughters of a number of friends forgo education at top schools to come back to local colleges and live at home so they didn't have to deal with stuff like that...and worse I guess. I know it's college. They are grown ups. Etc....but dang, the grown ups I know have more class than that...or most of them...or maybe I am missing something. Maybe these kids all want to grow up to be David Letterman.

Advice from those more experienced with college kids would be much appreciated. Up until this semester the kids have lived at home and commuted to SUNY Cobleskill, a fine school from which Liz graduated first in her class, which alas does not offer a degree in anthropology or archaeology.

We just don't know how to handle this...or how to suggest that our girl handles it. We were thinking of sending this extra-large economy-sized black belt guy we know...up to put in a quick appearance or something...however, it is getting to be not funny and we are about done with joking about it.

If the rest of the privileged, spoiled brats want to party, drink, smoke dope and so forth all through their time at college, cheating themselves, their parents, and the employers they will work for in the future, by not learning a blasted thing at college I guess that is their right. Damn if I think it's fair that they are cheating my kid too. Thanks in advance for what I know will be the best advice in town....and have a great weekend.

Climate Audit

Joated over at Compass Points has a good post on the broken hockey stick graph and other climate change shenanigans. Check it out.

Climate Audit

Popcorn Sniffing Dog

Needed at SUNY Potsdam.

Seems every few nights somebody burns popcorn in the dorm where Becky lives, causing middle of the night fire drills that last beaucoup long. Last night's took place around two AM...and it was raining.

It is cold there, colder even than here, where Liz and I just turned the furnace fan on for the first time this season. (The stove is always going for hot water and the plenum has been open to allow passive heat for a couple of weeks now.)

I gather that the non-popcorn-burning population of the dorm would like the culprit with the overactive microwave to be banished from all aspects of late night munchie reduction. They are becoming far too familiar with the appearance of the parking lot under the streetlights.

Thus the call for a talented canine to sniff out the offending grain destruction expert and bring the situation to a close before all the students (some in night dress ill-suited for the season) get chilblains or worse.

No Frost Yet

I am amazed by this. There have been threats all around us and a little ice on the cars a couple of times, but still no freeze. I am in no rush...personally... Fall colors so far are subdued, with a few brilliant reds and oranges here and there like flags at a rally. Mostly the hills are a dark, dark green rarely seen around here. I wonder what the 'Dacks look like. If anybody can get away to get Beck, maybe we will find out.

We are having a dilemma about the sago palms, of which I am quite fond. A small animal vet we use in dire situations sent around an email telling us that ingesting the leaves is fatal and incurable for pets. Therefore they aren't something we want to have accessible.
Meanwhile I like them.

No pets visit our bedroom...the door is always closed and only the cat can get upstairs anyhow. Gael is too lame to climb them. I want to bring them in and put them up there until they can go back on the sitting porch in the spring. No pets there either.

Alan wants to let them freeze and throw them away.

So they are still out there still, awaiting a decision or a hard frost, whichever comes first.....

Got Nuthin'

"Wanna buy a cinnamon roll?"
(Sometimes you see very scary things this time of year. Imagine what Halloween will be like!)

Or not much anyhow. The boss is trying to get the tire on the stock trailer fixed so we can haul a few select critters over to the sale to pay the taxes. He drove all the way to Middleburg yesterday to pick up the tire he had ordered. Got partway home and got to thinking that it didn't look quite right.

It wasn't.
Wrong entirely.
He took it back and they gladly ordered him another, which they said they will deliver today. Unexpected good service is always a nice surprise.

We had a mess of cold, miserable rain over the past couple of days. Makes for mud and a lot of wet clothes, that just won't dry. (Still better than winter.)

And what is it with the weather wonks anyhow? As soon as a new month starts they begin a new rain count. Thus if it rains 10 inches on the last day of the month and then is dry for a week, they intone gloomily, "We are down several inches for this month."

Do they honestly believe that all the rain from the previous month just went away, sort of like a torn off calendar page? They irritate me mightily.

Macro Monday

For more Macro Monday

Sunday Stills...Signs of Fall

For more Sunday Stills.....

Bright Sides

(After all the gloom and doom I figure I owe them to you)

Ever since we started showing at the Altamont Fair I have wondered about some night calling insects we first heard there. By the French Fry booth in fact...just down from the cider house...They make a scritchy, scrapey sound that is quite loud, but I never could pinpoint one to see what it was.

Then a few years ago I started hearing them here too. Probably they were here all along, but I didn't notice...maybe the multitudinous crickets drowned them out. Soon I found myself standing outside for a few extra minutes on late summer's evenings, listening and wondering.
What the heck was making that noise?

I thought for a long time that they might have been katydids, but the songs in online catalogs were never exactly right. It was frustrating.

The other night I was coming to the house in the early darkness, listening as usual, when one tuned up his song about three feet from my head. I spun around, flashlight probing, and there he was in all his green and buggy splendor, a gigantic katydid. So that mystery is solved.

Then there is the morning sun slanting across dew-soaked Queen Ann's lace...spotlighting the red six-bar gate and making it look like it was written in fire against its cowey background. Geese zig-zagging north, south, east and west, barking like a world full of beagles and turning the tame sky wild.

Finding dozens of minute orange, red, and gold crab apples adorning the tiny tree that volunteered along the driveway. Their colors are more vibrant than the sugar maples even, like delightful Christmas balls decorated in fresh fall colors. (They will show up tomorrow in the Sunday Stills post.)

An odd white caterpillar that wiggled so fast across the grassy ground that it was hard to get a picture of him. The wild turkey that for some reason visits the wood stove every morning. Chipmunk striped baby chicks in the calf pen. Mama is so funny, keeping them behind the gate by pecking at them amazingly hard. I think baby chick is the lightest substance known to man. They seem to move by levitation....especially when dodging that stabbing beak.

George and Laura, the fluffy white banty chickens Teri gave to Liz last year as baby chicks. They are always together and look so striking, like bright white feather flags everywhere they go. And tiny George, who could sit in the palm of my hand crowing the sun up (and down and all day in between) is king of all he surveys. Woe betide Mr. Fluff, or the speckly rooster or the brown ones if they step in his way or look crosswise at his precious Laura! He is one tough cookie for all his dainty appearance.

Every walk to the clothesline, trip to the cow barn, visit to the woodstove, or jaunt to feed the pony brings a wealth of sweet surprises to every passing day. Bright sides everywhere you look.

Finding Grace

I won't lie to you. Things are getting so bad here and on thousands of dairy farms...and farms being put out of business for little fishies...and all kinds of farms...and in homes where jobs are suddenly gone and lots of other sad and frightened places across this great nation, that despair is a daily companion. You talk....every day...about what kind of job you might find. What you will do if you give up.
At your age.
Your level of experience.
You don't sleep much.

I know there are regular readers in the same boat, finding it suddenly, unexpectedly, uncontrollably hard to get by. I won't name them, but I read their daily fear and sadness. There are plenty of people facing a lot worse than us. At least we still own the place and the cows and machinery. At least we have the option of selling them if we have to. Many don't.
I hope they do at least have the incredible good fortune that I do myself.
To be loved.
To know it.

This morning in my in box was an email with the words and chords to Steve Earle's Dixieland. My beautiful brother took the time to figure them out for me, so that should I ever find a minute to get out my guitar and tune it, I can play it. He sent me the song on a CD a few months ago and I fell in love with it. I have the best family anyone could ask for and I love them. Plus I know that they love me.That is grace and as long as that is there I know I have no right to complain.

Bell Weather??

How Can I Take This Guy Seriously?

Progressive Dairyman=a farm publication. Agriculture oriented. You would expect the editor to be familiar with ag terminology.

Wouldn't you?

However, in a recent article about us all being afraid to spend money we don't have, the editor makes a reference to a term often used in discussion of economic trends:

"The consumer confidence index is a measure of this trust. It is a bell-weather market signal and a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Bellwether is an old agricultural term. It refers to a castrated male sheep, which is used to lead a flock of sheep and has a bell on its collar. It is used today to discuss political and economic indicators.

It does not however, refer to a cumulonimbus ringing the wind chimes on the porch.

Picky, I know, but I am becoming very aggravated with any number of ag publications full of advice for farmers during this crisis. It is easy to sit in an office and say do this or do that, but not so easy to fulfull these suggestions when your checkbook has been running on empty for months and every dollar you make costs you two. I mean which one of the two you lost do you spend as that first dollar mentioned in the article? And what kind of weather would ring that bell?

California Water

The 39 MIlk Strike

John Bunting has links to incredible coverage of this long ago event. If you can take time to click the links and read the whole story, please do. I admit to having skimmed for now...deadlines loom and milking impends.....Somewhere in the hutch we have a picture of the boss's father and the father of one of our best friends taking part in this or a similar affair at about the same time. There were some terrible events back then...which the old fellow often recalled for us before his passing.

Wordless Wednesday

Cow in the Road

And I swerve to the left.



Well, actually it was goats in the road and we just followed the herd, the folks doing the herding and the police car up 67 until they got to their farm and turned off. Could have been a disaster I guess, but it was amusing for Liz and me in an otherwise not so entertaining day.

We were on our way back from the hospital where mom has been admitted. Her chemo is not going well and prayers would be much appreciated.



We asked Alan to run the long distance errand we had planned so we were free to go to the hospital. He willingly obliged but in all the excitement of hearing about his grandma, he heard Gardinier's (dairy supply) as Granger's (other parts and motors) and ended up many miles beyond Little Falls, kinda lost-ish. He managed to figure out where he went wrong after a bit, but by then Gardinier's was closed so he didn't get the part.

I guess Liz and I will go again today, as it is the drain trap for the pipeline washer and pretty essential to operations.