Now, however, things are back to normal, whatever that is. And here’s the tale:

We had planned to take delivery of our replacement steers from our neighbor a few days after harvest of the last ones, in early July. Harvest went well, and by all accounts, as well as the data from the processed weights, the beef turned out better than it ever has. After a few days downtime, we arranged to have the new cattle brought over. It was in the early stages of our July heat spell, with temperatures in the 90-95F range. We chose a day that was relatively cool (90F), but obviously not cool enough.

The steers were exceptionally skittish (never a good thing in a 800lb beast), due to the heat, as well as the fact that the neighbor had just cut them out of the main herd a day before, so they had never lived by themselves before. One of the steers was a twin, and always hung out tight with his brother. The topping on all this was that there was a yellowjacket nest just outside of the corral where they were acclimating that got run over by the delivery truck. Hot worked up cattle…hot worked up yellowjackets. Get the cattle more worked up, get the yellowjackets more worked up. You see how this goes. They lasted about an hour and a half, when while I was watching, their circling of the pen accelerated until one of them reached escape velocity…namely, enough bravery to dive into a woven wire and electrically charged fence. Where one goes, the others follow, so the end result is a gaping hole in the corral and a small herd of steers running down the road.

But it doesn’t end there. Fortunately, the neighbor’s adjacent pasture was empty, and had a gate located on the road…a quick zip ahead of them to open the gate, and a little light pressure, and they were in, if not in my pasture, at least contained and safe.

So the next day I spent the afternoon in the scorching 95+F heat, patching and beefing up the hole in the corral, as well as dispatching the yellowjacket nest. The neighbors loaded up the boys again in the relative cool of the evening, and we brought them back to the now woven, plus barbed, and twin electrically charged corral. And they stayed there….for about 8 hours. Come morning, I was walking about a couple hundred feet away to check on them, and they decided that I was the cause of all of their discomfort the previous day. Escape velocity was reached again, through the beefed up corral, in the exact same spot they went through the first time. This time, however, they didn’t want to use the convenient gate to get back into the neighbors pasture…they saw some shade in his trees, and bolted over an old fence into some thick doghair fir and vanished…for 2 days. The thought of losing a few thousand dollars of beef on the hoof to the vagaries of the Coast Range was fairly disheartening, to say the least. Add to that the inevitable stories of the ghost cattle in the rain that people would tell for years afterward, and I was getting pretty bummed out.

A couple of days later, we managed to coax them out of the shady trees, and back into the neighbor’s barn…again. Rather than banging our head against the wall…again, we opted for the charm offensive…the steers stayed at the neighbor’s where they grew up, where there was good shade, a big bale of hay, and I’d go over there once or twice a day to give them treats and get them to associate me with good things. After a couple of weeks of that, they would walk right up to me and nudge the bucket, hoping to get some alfalfa. Now that the weather has cooled off, it seemed that we were on track.

So last Thursday night was the big test…around 8pm, we loaded them, again. Drove them over, again. Instead of the little corral, we gave them half of our big pasture. At first, I thought we were going to be starting from zero (or worse) with them…when I’d show up, they would trot down to the far end of the fence and watch nervously. But, at least they stopped at the fence. Now (Weds), they are pretty interested in me, and while still cautious, can be coaxed to walk up to within 20′ of me to eat some alfalfa treats.  The next step is to rotate the pasture in a few days…hopefully I won’t have a story then, too.

The first 3 were taken on 12/22, and the last one was on 12/25. It’s kind of hard to see, but notice that the picnic table is completey covered by snow in the 2nd pic. (If you scroll down to the pics from earlier that week, you can see the progressive increase in snow.) And after the 17-18 inches on the bench on the 20th, we got another 8 or so inches.

I think we’ve mostly recovered, apart from the roof on our bedroom deck, which partially collapsed. At least the barn roof held up!

More pics…

measuring the snow on the back bench…

measurement detail… about 17 inches…

This afternoon around 2pm (12/20) – notice how you can hardly see the underside of the picnic bench…

This morning (12/20)…

This was yesterday, looking toward the road…

It’s now sunny and beautiful – I’ll try to post another photo later today. I think our biggest worry now is the fact that with 12 inches of snow on the ground, the wire keeping the steers in is much closer to the ground than before. Hopefully some of the snow will melt a bit today before we get anymore!

As I write this, it’s still snowing. We have about 6-12 inches in various areas. I’ve included a couple of pics – one from Monday morning (taken from inside since it was 14F and the door was frozen shut!) and the other from about an hour ago. Notice that in the 1st one, you can’t even see our back deck anymore…

Snow Globe: December 16

Sun on Snow: December 14

Your Turkey Is On The Chopping Block

June 2008

Last Thursday was meat cutting day at the farm. Usually, processing days are pleasurable. Cutting and wrapping requires that we have extra hands on duty, and the long hours spent breaking down a couple beef carcasses inevitably results in a steady flow of bawdy humor and happy camaraderie. But on this particular morning, as I pull into the farmyard, the mood is black. Clint, who runs the saw in the cutting room, hurries by. “Look out”, he mutters, as I shuttle my daughters toward the house to see Grammie, “It’s bad in there.”

I find Grammie (a.k.a. my mom) in her office, staring at the farm spreadsheets, one hand on her forehead as she clicks through the numbers.

“What’s wrong?”

“The price of broiler mash went up $20″

“What else is new?” My tone was sarcastic.

“In one week.”; It went up $20 per ton in just one week. The feed mill says there’s no end in sight.

Price hikes are a grim reality for everyone. The cost of transporting our meats to farmers markets has doubled since 2005. So have the costs for heating the brooders and hauling the livestock. The week prior, the price of casings for our handmade sausages tripled. And in only one year’s time, the price of grain has doubled.

We’ve grown used to it. We are a diversified, pasture-based livestock farm, which means we are in a far better position than most folks when it comes to surviving rising fuel costs and a global food crisis. Grazing ruminants — cows, sheep and goats, can convert forage into good food. And they can make use of our hilly, rocky, frost-prone hillsides that simply can’t grow crops. Poultry and pigs are not ruminants. They are omnivores, and require grain to supplement their diet if we are to produce enough to sell. Because we keep them out on pasture, our grain requirements are minimal compared to producers managing concentrated feeding operations. Still, feed costs make up a good portion of the farm budget. The survival of our family business is like plate spinning, where we focus simultaneously on several elements of the family farm equation: greater diversification, stepped-up marketing, cost cutting, and increased self-reliance.

In truth, we find plate spinning rather enjoyable. Today’s small farmer must be into such a game, willing to assume some risks and to be creative with business management. Generally, we are stimulated by the challenges, forever ready to sit down with calculators, pens and pads to hash out whatever confronts us. If this didn’t hold appeal, we’d all have 9-5 jobs. So I am surprised at the gravity in my mother’s voice.

“Mom, Stop seeing the glass half-empty. We’ll figure out something.”

“Damn it, the glass is half-empty, Shannon!” And her eyes fill with tears. “It’s the turkeys. I can’t control the costs on the turkeys! What are people going to do for Thanksgiving?”

But, I think to myself, the glass is still half-full. The hard times we all face are marked by a generosity of spirit within our community. Daily, I am inspired by the little things folks are willing to do with the understanding that we all need to pull together: The feed mill faces fuel surcharges on all its products. It passes none of them along to the farmers, figuring the increased grain prices are too great a burden already. Many of our expenses have doubled, yet our grassfed meat prices remain steady. Our poultry and pork prices have only gone up 11% in two year’s time. Neighbors call before driving to town to see if anyone on the road needs something. Interns offer to take reductions in pay.

My mother, however, isn’t wrong. The glass is half empty, because the generosity stops with the common man. Like the big oil companies, agribusiness is getting fatter and fatter while the common folks’ bank accounts grow lean.

Last year, neglecting to mandate conservation measures, Congress mandated a five-fold increase in the use of biofuels. According to a story in The New York Times, one fifth of our national corn crop is now used for ethanol production. Increasingly, farmers are planting more and more corn, which cuts the acreage available for other crops, like soybeans, thus driving up those prices as well (1). Next, take a disaster, like the flooding in Iowa, and add it to the mix. I called our local feed mill to find out why our broiler mash prices went up $20 a ton.

“It

These 2 pictures show the seasonal creek that flows into the pond behind our house. In normal high water, the channel is about 18″ wide, and normally much lower. The beaten-down grass show the 3-4′ wide swath that the water made after the storm, and the remains of some straw bales I had set there a few years back to capture sediment from the ripping/keyline project. (Looking at that post, I realize I never posted more pictures….add it to the to-do list)

The straw bales look like someone walked through with a chainsaw and carved them out of the way…good thing they are no longer needed for that purpose.

Several years ago, we installed a culvert to replace the one that had blown out in the 96 floods, before we arrived here. In order to protect the outfall area, we placed hundreds of pounds of broken concrete as a splash apron to absorb the water’s energy. Here you can see that the water shoved most of that concrete about 3′ downstream, exposing the geotextile fabric that we had placed to hold the soil in place beneath the concrete. Looks like I’ve got some concrete moving to do, and perhaps some staking of the site with rebar to hold it all in place.

For the most part, the farm held it’s own. A few road issues, a couple of willows snapped off. The worst damage is the culvert into our back pastures that went in last year.

It’ll be a little bit of work to shore it back up, but not nearly as much as if I had gone with the smaller, NRCS recommended size culvert. When I went out to check it on Monday morning, it was still intact, but the water was up to the top of the pipe and still rising.

Our neighbor who has been in the valley since the 60′s says that she’s never seen rain like this, so perhaps I won’t have to be fixing that culvert every few winters….I’m hoping.