The Beginning Farmer

I had a few more thoughts this morning as I was reading this article on the swine flu outbreak and thinking about the comments from yesterdays post. As I said yesterday I thought it was only a matter of time before there was a connection made between confinement hog houses and the flu outbreak, regardless of whether or not the connection was real. And, I am not the least bit surprised to see that there are countries out there that have placed restrictions on American pork because of this outbreak.

High density corporate confinement agriculture is beginning to get a bit of a black eye around the world. All you have to do to realize this is take a look at all of the laws that are being put in place to change the way confinement farming is done. And, all of this is happening despite efforts of conventional agriculture groups to let the public know that their way is the best way for the livestock, the farmers, and the consumers.

But, there is one thing that is missing I believe. Sure the average consumer doesn’t appreciate the smell and look of large confinement buildings. They don’t like the thought of pigs being raised tightly packed together in pens. And, they are even willing to pass laws by a significant majority (sometimes) to restrict the use of crates and other things in farming.

What is missing though (I think) is the majority of people willing to pay a higher price for humanely or naturally raised pork. Until that happens they can pass all the laws they want and restrict confinement buildings in their areas, but confinement agriculture will not go away. And, each time there is an outbreak like this one (regardless if it is related to confinement buildings) the large confinement corporations will take the blame and pork prices will fall impacting farmers big and small.

At least those are my rambling thoughts this morning…

I figured it would just be a matter of time before I found an article looking into the link between the Swine Flu and confinement agriculture on the front page of one of the news websites. And, that time came this morning for FoxNews.com. In an article titled, “Swine Flu’s Ground Zero? Residents Point to Farm,” from the Associated Press we see the connection being made by a community of people somewhat close to Mexico City. Their contention is that they have been experiencing problems for a few months now because of hog confinement farm located about 5 miles north of their town.

The article is full of the townspeople blaming the farm, the farm saying that they were doing everything up to snuff, health experts saying that it could be the cause, and agricultural people saying that there are no signs of sick pigs in Mexico. Really the article gives no conclusion either way and just throws out the possibility that this is the case.

What really hit me though was this quote from the farm manager, “All of our pigs have been adequately vaccinated and they are all taken care of according to current sanitation rules.” I do not know if the swine flu outbreak in Mexico was caused by confinement farms (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was and I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t), but to me this statement says a lot about our culture.

We have become a culture that wants to do enough to get by and then no more. We no longer love to follow the spirit of the law, but are content to just stick to the letter of the law. Our business models very often factor in quality of life and benefits for the community, they only look at the bottom line.

And, when those ideas are applied to a farm with 15,000 pigs spread out between 18 confinement buildings I think we can have some problems. What happened to the idea that we wanted to do things as best as we could … provide the best jobs … the best work environment … the best pigs … and the best pork?

What is your take on the Swine Flu outbreak?

One thing that I have found out about our Dexters is that when it comes to electric fence two wires seems to be better than one. A couple years ago when we were putting up the first fences to contain them out on pasture we just put up one wire low enough that both the calves and the cows would hit it … the cows jumped over. Then we raised the wire about bit to keep the cows in … and the calves walked under. Of course this was our main perimeter fence (there was a perimeter fence, but we didn’t want them wandering that far) so we decided to go with two wires.

Last week I decided that I was going to let the five heifer calves out on some grass near their winter pen. I strung up one wire all the way around and gave them a nice sized area with plenty of grass. After about ten minutes they were walking though the fence … and getting a little shocked. So, yesterday between rain showers I went outside and added a second wire to their fence and it seems to be working!

I do believe that once we have the perimeter fence up, and our wires have a little more juice going through them, we will be able to go back to a single strand to keep them in their area for the day. Then it won’t matter so much if the calves wander away because they will have a pretty good reason to come back and we can set the height to keep the cows in.

As always I’m learning as I go by trial and error … I seem to focus on the error.

**I would have posted a picture, but it has been raining practically non-stop for the past few days so I didn’t make it out with the camera. Hopefully tomorrow.**

Have some spring planting to do? Need to put in your field of open-pollinated corn? Got 40 acres that you need to get planted quickly? Do you need to get that 40 acres in quickly? Why not try out the new John Deere DB120 planter. It is a 48 row planting machine that is 120 feet wide (30 inch rows) and that 40 acre field you need to plant … well, that should take about thirty minutes and you might even have some time to spare when it is all said and done. On the flip side of this whole planter deal, I was recently give a one row garden planter (similar to this one). And, I was pretty excited about it.

I actually don’t mind this huge planter on one level because it is made by an Iowa company (not John Deere), and I don’t really want to go on about other things related to the fact that it exists. I’m sure John Deere is making it because there is a need and I hope things go well for them with the sales. But, what is mind boggling to me is this…

The cost (that I was able to find online) is $345,000. I saw that and then I really started to think … $345,000 … Wow, I could buy 80 acres of pasture with a house and buildings, some livestock, some equipment, and other things I need to build a small farm. In fact if I diversified that small farm and did some market gardening along with livestock through direct marketing I could also probably make a living for my family.

Imagine the 10,000 acres of land that many of the farmers buying this planter are farming split up into 200 acre small and diverse family farms providing food for their communities. That would be 50 family farms … I think that would be pretty cool, but I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there more intelligent that I am that could show me how it just wouldn’t work…

How many hours are there in a day … all I know is that there isn’t enough this time of year. All of the responsibilities are starting to add up, and there is still a ton that needs to be done on the farm. But, there is some good news. The storm shelter is being installed today, of course that also makes more work in the form of building doors for it and doing some landscaping around it. Oh well… Here are some pictures from around the farm.

This morning I was checking out the Practical Farmers of Iowa website to see if they had any information up on this year’s field days (they didn’t, but I’ll keep checking). But, I did find an interesting workshop, in Fairbury, Illinois, sponsored by the Illinois Farm Beginnings program. The workshop is on Saturday, May 23rd from 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM and it is all about equipment for small farmers. According to the description at this link they will talk about how the small farmer can us old and new equipment in creative ways and how you can even do it inexpensively.

I doubt that I will be able to make it to this event considering that it is about 300 miles away, but if you happen to be in that area it might be something to check out. It does bring up a good discussion question … if you feel like discussing today?

What are some pieces of equipment that you feel the small diverse farm needs to get going, and are there any creative ways that you can use older equipment? I know one thing for sure, if you keep your eyes open and look for the smaller equipment (horse drawn or otherwise) you can often find a good deal … or even better pick up something for free.

So far on our farm we have the tractor, small plow, haybine, rake, baler, post hole digger, two barge boxes, two hay racks, and we are in the process of picking up a small disc (that needs a little work). With this equipment that we have acquired for a relatively small amount of money (excluding the tractor) we will be able to provide our own hay from the farm, set up fences, work the garden up, do general work around the farm, and even save some feed bill money by buying corn directly from the field at times. I am pleased with our small line of equipment.

By the end of this week I will be half way through the soccer season (it really is going quickly). Of course that means that we are not that far away from summer and their is still a lot of work to do on the farm … stuff that I wanted to get done during the “spring”. So, I’m going to have to ratchet up the work level a bit and take advantage of all the sunny evenings that don’t include a soccer game. With that being said, one thing that you need for just about every project is materials. During our last class of the Grow Your Small Market Farm program our teacher pointed out a great site to locate some stuff that could come in handy on the farm.

The site is through the Iowa DNR and is actually a waste management site that contains listings of all sorts of stuff that businesses (of some sort) are needing to get rid of. She said most of the time the stuff can be had for next to nothing or even for nothing. You can check out the link above and see for yourself what is available, but I have found some good listings for pallets and dimensional lumber that I want to check out.

Of course I also you Freecycle and even Craigslist, but do you know of any other sites like this to help reuse materials. It seems that something like this would be a farmers best friend!

While looking up a movie preview yesterday I found a trailer for a new movie called, “Food, INC.” As described on the Apple Quicktime site this documentary, “lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.” As you can see from the trailer below it appears to be an interesting movie that includes a few of the usual suspects when it comes to this type of film (Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan).

My one hope is that comes across as well as “King Corn”. I think those guys did an excellent job of putting together a documentary that was not heavy-handed or forceful in it’s agenda. They were able to present the facts and build a persuading argument through them. Hopefully “Food, INC.” is able to do the same thing! (As a side note you can watch the opening of the film here)

On a related note while looking for “Food, INC.” clips on YouTube I ran across another documentary titled, “Shall We Gather at the River.” I couldn’t find as much about this film, but it is along the same lines as other “food and farming” documentaries coming out now. You can watch a trailer below.

I would say that the fall is the time of the year that most people get out the plow (the ground is usually much more dry), but since there were piggies living in the spot that I wanted to plow I had to wait until the spring (and a dry week). As you can see from the picture above, the stars aligned last Friday and I was able to get the two-bottom plow in the ground and turn over the dirt in the old pig pen.

Not only did I plow up our garden spot, but I also went and hit the neighbors garden spot with the plow. I was amazed at the difference in the ground between our two spots. Ours had some decent black dirt (and composting manure), while the neighbors was sod being turned over for the first time and it was almost completely clay. And, the two spots weren’t much more than a quarter of a mile apart. Although, by the bricks we found after turning of the dirt at the neighbors I wouldn’t be surprised if that spot had once had an old shed or if it was even the garbage pile at one time.

The next step is to hit it with a disc and then come back with the garden tiller if it still needs to be broken up a bit. In the future we won’t have to do as much work, but since this is a first year garden and because it was hard-packed by the pigs it needs a little more tillage to break it up. After all that is done we get ready to plant sweet corn … I can’t wait!