The Beginning Farmer

When people find out that we have been gifted 27 fruit tree seedlings the have been saying something along the lines of, “Wow, that will be really great for you in a few years when it gets going”. To that I usually respond with something like, “Well, fruit trees are really my wife’s thing.” “Yeah,” they say, “but think of all the great fruit you will enjoy!” To which I respond, “Yep, there is a reason that I started the farm with pigs, chicken, and cows … I like meat!” But, I really am excited about the possibility of the orchard and can’t wait to see if it takes off.

There are a few things I learned this weekend about 27 fruit trees this weekend though. Above all I learned that 27 fruit trees require 27 holes and that it takes some time and effort to dig 27 holes in a somewhat clay soil! I also learned that sometimes the best location for the orchard is not the easiest place to put the trees. In the process of planting the orchard I had to tear down a calf pen and move a big pile of compost (manure/hay). It is not a big deal and the trees are now in the best place for our farm layout plans, but it did take three days to plant instead of one or two.

And finally, I learned that there are a lot of people out there with great advice and I am thankful for them. Between comments on this blog, my wife’s blog, and from the Practical Farmers of Iowa list we were able to glean a lot of knowledge. That I am thankful for!

In five to seven years (or how ever long it takes) I invite you out to the farm for some fresh fruit!

The above picture tells you all you need to know about my agenda today … We are going to find a spot for and then plant 30 fruit/flowering trees. This means I need to mow down the area where the trees are going to go and then somehow till up a circle around each tree so the grasses don’t compete with the young trees. The plus side is that it is a beautiful sunny day (although a bit windy) and that I’ll have the help of my family. In fact if I was going to be completely accurate I would say that my wife would have my help!

My wife has been doing a bit of research into laying out the fruit trees (you can read about it on her blog), but I think we are going to be doing a little more before they go in the ground. Just want to make sure we have everything just right for these little trees.

Wish us luck … and I’ll post some pictures of the new trees when we have them in the ground.

Lately when my wife has been out checking on the Dexters and making sure our new fence is working she claims that she can hear the grass growing when the sun is shining down (I’ve heard it popping as well). Hearing and seeing the grass growing this spring has made me do a lot of thinking about our forages and our soils. That is why I automatically jumped to the back page of this months issue of “Graze” when I saw the article titled, “Matching plants to soil type is no easy task”. That was an article that I had to check out because our soils and our forages have been on my mind lately.

When I make the drive into town I drive past quite a few pastures and hay fields that are really starting to look pretty good with all of the sun and rain. When I get to our place I see green grass (and it is growing), but it isn’t as thick and tall as many of the pastures I drive by. This is probably because of a combination of a couple things. First of all, I’m sure that many of those places (especially the hay fields) have some sort of soil amendment added for time to time and our pastures have been sitting idle for about 14 years. But secondly, I know that there are different grass types in all of those other fields. Our pastures have a good amount of warm season grasses instead of an even mix.

Anyways, this article really got me thinking about our soil … the type … the nutrients it has … and the stuff that it is missing. Figuring out our ground will probably be one of the more difficult things for me to do because I don’t have any background in that sort of thing, but it is something I’m looking forward to.

Have any thoughts or help?

**This post comes a few hours late courtesy of more fence building on the farm. Hopefully we are done for a couple days.**

The 2009 Practical Farmers of Iowa Field Days are up on their website right now and the schedule should be in the mail soon to all the members, but I had to go and check them out. It looks like another great set of events that should be a help to all of those that take the time to attend. I know that I won’t be able to make it to all of the field days that I want to attend, but below are the ones that I’m going to try and work into my schedule:

• Getting Started Grass-Feeding Beef (June 1st): This event takes place near Keystone, IA at the Wallace Farm. It is a 160 acre farm that has been converted from commodity crops to a diverse pasture based system. There will also be a woman from ISU talking about the cost of production.
• Making $ense of Meat Marketing (June 22nd): Mike Lorentz of Lorentz meats will be there along with a few other Iowa farmers discussing pricing, distribution, and placement among other things. Hopefully I will be able to make this one!
• Rise and Shine Farm Tour (July 11th): Taking place at the Tjelmeland farm this field day will cover their egg business, transition to organic row crops, and some discussion of prairie reconstruction. The bonus is that it also includes an egg breakfast.
• Strip Tillage, Living Mulches & Pasture Walk (July 29th): On the surface this one might not have as much interest to me because of our farm goals. But, I am interested in the pasture walk and I especially want to attend because the Abels family who is hosting the event attended the first church I worked at!
• Completing the Cycle – Soil Health to Finished Animal (August 21st): This one seems interesting because their will be a pasture walk, a look at cattle mob grazing, and a herd dog demonstration. I know there are people on either side of the herd dog discussion, but it is something I’m interested in learning more about.
• Water, Cattle & Organic Transition (August 29th): At the Grice Family Farms field day it sounds like there will be some interesting stuff to learn about cattle paddock systems and water systems. Plus, I’m always interested to hear about the ideas behind organic transitions.
• High-Density Grazing & Transitioning to Pasture Profitably (September 10th): Holistic management, high-density grazing, transitioning row crops to pasture, grazing recordkeeping, and multi-species grazing. This sounds like a can’t miss! Hopefully it works into my schedule.

If you would like to check out all of the field days that are available this year just head of to the PFI website (link above). Hopefully some of you get a chance to get out to one of these great events or at least to a field day near you.

This has been a busy week on the farm and in town, so I haven’t had a chance to be very consistent on my early morning blog posts. But, today I just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you. First of all I want to say thanks to all that read the blog and encourage/educate me. As I have said numerous times before this has become way more than just a place for me to put down my thoughts, it has also become a great place for me to learn (and I hope others are learning along the way as well). Secondly, I want to thank my wife!

Without her on the farm (and her willingness get out there and do everything) this would not even be possible. She feeds and waters the animals when I can’t, gets the cows back in by herself, fixes fence, works on the garden, does construction work on the house, takes care of the kids, keeps up the house, and on and on and on. And most of the time she has to do these things alone because I’m away at soccer or at the church. I couldn’t do it without her!

Because of soccer commitments (and everything else) we have not been able to get going on our PowerFlex perimeter fencing project. Nevertheless the cows (and especially Barnabas the bull) have decided that it is spring and they want to be out on the green grass. I don’t blame them one bit, but I just haven’t had time to tackle all of the projects that need to be done. But, my plan was to go to a meeting this morning (and arrive early to write my blog post) and then run out to the farm to put up some electric fence so that they could have grass. Needless to say, that isn’t what happened.

First the calves got out when I was building a new paddock for them (not their fault … this was a user error). After getting them back in I had just a few minutes to get ready before needing to leave to the meeting. My wife happened to look out the window as I was getting ready and said, “Where is the bull!” We went out to try and get them in, but they are just spunky when they get on the grass and it was going no where. So, I decided to settle for the better part of valor and skip the meeting so I could put up the fence … meanwhile the three cows and the bull that were out just wandered the farm.

After a few hours, a trip to McCorkles Hardware and a lot of help from my wife I finally have a nice electric fence up. I would say that the perimeter of the area they have now is about 3/8ths of a mile, so they have a bit of room to roam. I will be rotating them through that area and always giving them a gate back to their winter pen so they can have water. It isn’t ideal at all, but it will get us by for now.

I have been following this H1N1 outbreak for the past week or so since I first posted about it and the developments have been interesting to say the least. The reactions and articles have run the gamut from, “make sure you don’t look at a pig” (those seem to be slipping away and I didn’t see many), to “let’s remember to call this the H1N1 flu virus not swine flu”. But, as of yesterday (at least this is the first I heard about it) Canadian authorities are reporting a swine herd has been showing symptoms consistent with the virus that has been making it’s rounds and that they probably/may have picked up the bug from a worker on the farm who recently returned from Mexico.

You can read the full article at this link, but for the time being here are a few interesting quotes:

“But officials quickly urged caution. Swine flu regularly causes outbreaks in pigs and the pigs do not pose a food safety risk, Dr. Brian Evans, executive vice president with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, told a news conference.”

“The traveler has recovered, and the estimated 200 sickened pigs are recovering as well, officials said. No pigs have died, and officials said they don’t think the flu has spread beyond the farm.
Normally, detecting influenza in pigs would not generate a response from food safety officials, but the current circumstances are different with the international flu outbreak, Evans said.
“The chance that these pigs could transfer virus to a person is remote,” he said, adding that he would have no issue eating pork from the infected pigs.”

“According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studies have shown that swine flu is common throughout pig populations worldwide, with 25 percent of animals showing antibody evidence of infection.”

On a totally related side note … you may have noticed that hog prices have made a decline in the days after the news of the flu started making the rounds.

A few weekends ago some friends of ours came down for a weekend on the farm. I truly enjoy visitors and love to show them around our place and share our dreams and passions. Most of the time this means that we take a hay ride if the conditions will allow it, so on a sunny Saturday we hooked up the hayrack and set out for a jaunt around the farm. I have to admit that I really have fun driving the tractor around and talking about the farm.

As you can see from the picture above things started out fairly well. It was a beautiful spring day and the kids were having a blast. Along the way I decided to stop and pick up some fire wood because I knew that we were expecting a cold front soon and that a fire would be nice.

After cutting wood things took a turn for the worse. The sun was still shining and it had been over a week since the last rain, but before I knew it we had encountered some mud. It didn’t take long for the mud to overpower the tractor and we were soon stuck.

The above picture shows the tractor tires before I had them buried. The one good thing is that I had enough foresight to just stop before I had it buried up to the axle … of course it did eventually get buried up to the rims…

To make a long story short … not only did the tractor get stuck, but as you can see the Expedition became lodged in the bog as well! Thankfully we have some great friends with even greater tractors who were willing to come pull us out of our mess! Since then the only thing that has been down in that valley is the bull … when he has escaped … and that is a story unto itself.

Later this morning I’m meeting up with the builder that put up the shell of our house to discuss the location and size of our new multi-use shed. If you have been around the blog for awhile you may recognize the little diagram I made when I was trying to figure out where to put the shed. When I put that picture together I was pretty set on location number three because of it was close to both water and electricity, but now that we have lived here through the end of winter and the beginning of spring I think I am changing my mind … plus I found out that it would cost much more than I wanted to level out the spot (it wasn’t super bad, but would make stacking hay a little tricky).

What I realized is that location number three wouldn’t work as well as I had hoped because of a few reasons. First of all, in order for it to be easy to back things into all three bays of the building I would really have to move it over to the east a bit so that I could clear the electrical transformer box. That move took me to ground that slooped to the northeast. Secondly, If I wanted to build in that general location it would mean that I had to move the building forward and thus kind of wipe out the garden spot. I really want the garden there for many reasons, so that just didn’t work.

But, probably the biggest reason was because I plan on having deep bedding for the cattle on the east side of the building with an lot running out on that side. And in wet times (winter thaws and spring) that slope towards the ditch is very muddy. It just wouldn’t be a good area to keep our livestock in the winter.

After seeing all of that and living here for a while I think we are going to go with a slightly modified location number one. I think I will back it up a little from that spot and move it so the right edge of the shed pretty much lines up with the left edge of the house (but probably not exactly). This gives us a flat spot for the building and the top of the hill for our winter lot (not as muddy). Plus it is really only about 25-30 feet further from the water and electricity than where I would have had to put the building if we went with location number three.

Our busy schedule paid off for once. It made us drag our feet on the shed because there were other more pressing matters and then we had the opportunity to see our land at work and get a better idea of where things belonged. I can’t wait to see it up though!