The Beginning Farmer

For the past few months (since I began receiving “The Stockman Grassfarmer”) I have been enjoying reading the “Weed Grazing” column. Grazing weeds instead of completely eliminating all weeds is something that hit my radar this past summer when I was on a pasture walk promoted by The Practical Farmers of Iowa. The host talked about one of the pasture seed mixes that he used and the fact that it included a weed (can’t remember what for the life of me). Many people on the tour were surprised that he had intentionally seeded a weed, but they all did admit that they had seen their livestock eating it and even selecting it over some grasses.

I think that proves how much of a psychological thing our fight against weeds can be. Kathy Voth, in this months issue of The Stockman Grassfarmer, relates a quote from the 1934 Book of Knowledge. It said, “Agriculture is an eternal war against weeds.” Also, in the book was this line about the ‘only’ benefit of weeds, “is that we add to our own strength by ‘vanquishing these bitter foes’.” Does this have to be the case?

Of course there will always be troublesome weeds that are no good and even dangerous to our livestock, but we can’t paint all weeds with the same brush. Ms. Voth writes in the article that, “many weeds are as nutritious as alfalfa”. During the droughts of the late 1930’s the Russian Thistle weed helped sustain many small livestock farms. In California the weed distaff thistle is often green when other grasses have given up, and it’s proteins can help cattle and other ruminants keep up good levels of rumen microbes.

The article talks about using a grazing management plan to help control the weeds on your land. Of course you will never completely win the battle, but with the help of your livestock you can control the battle and possibly even enhance your pasture by letting your livestock graze certain weeds that could help sustain them in a drought.

So, what weeds do you see your livestock munching on?

In the March, 2008 issue of “The Stockman Grassfarmer” there is an interesting article by Bud Williams titled, “A Short History of American Grass Finishing”. It is almost an understatement to say that grass finishing is not a new idea considering the fact that many animals were created in such a way that they could digest forages for gain and energy. As Mr. Williams says, “It is grain feeding animals that is reasonably new. It mainly came about as a way to market grain.”

There was a whole series of events and circumstances that led to the growth of grain finishing, but the article points out a few of the bigger things (this is the type of thing I find interesting because of my love of history). Two of the larger factors in this increase were the lower cost of transportation/fuel and the implementation of tractors on farms. The new transportation/fuel allowed farmers the chance to move animals and feed easily. They could now specialize in finishing steers or running cows and calves instead of have a birth to finish operation. Also, the new tractors allowed a farmer to grow more and also specialize in just a couple of crops. Then they could take advantage of that transportation and move their grains to those finishing cattle. Of course there were many more factors, but these two played large rolls.

But, times are changing. Grain and transportation costs are still relatively inexpensive (at least in the sense that it is possible to buy), but because of the way that our finishers, growers, and processors have become centralized there is a possibility that things will only get worse … especially for the small farmer. Right now I would guess that is all but impossible for me to jump into the commodity beef, pork, or grain markets. The amount of land, machinery, and facilities I would need would make it impossible. But, instead of looking at that as a downer I need to see it as an opportunity.

Actually Mr. Williams makes good point, all farmers should be thinking about quality grass finishing because you never know which way things will go or what opportunities there will be. There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, much of our grass finishing knowledge has been lost, although there is a lot out there and more coming out everyday. Secondly, much of our beef/dairy herd in the United States have also have forgotten how to finish well on grass … or more specifically our current agricultural system has bred it out of them.

We need to be learning how to produce quality forages for our livestock and rebuilding those breeds that can thrive in the environment they were created for. The opportunities will always be there, but they may be even bigger with many of the changes we could see coming.

Chapter nine of Ron Macher’s book “Making Your Small Farm Profitable” deals with machinery, in fact that is the title of the chapter! The thought of machinery is one of the many things on the front of my mind right now because of our hopefully impending land purchase and the work that will need to be done (house, septic, electric, water, fence, hay shed, etc.). We are going to need to decide what we will need, when we will need it, or even if we need anything at all.

I like the principle that Mr. Macher begins the chapter with. “Machinery and tools should save time or reduce the need for additional labor. Otherwise, they are a waste of money.” This is a good basic principle to take into account when you are thinking about the machinery you are going to need. I would also throw in something about whether or not it would be more economical to hire someone or rent the machinery to do certain jobs that don’t happen that often. At least until the money or the need is really there.

For example, I can think of lots of uses for a tractor with a loader for the farm. It would be helpful in building our house and hay shed, putting in the fence, and maintaining our pasture and woodlot. If we are able to swing it somehow I think that will be one of the things first on my list. On the other hand, I have been thinking about hay equipment (small square baler, mower, rake, and wagons). Is this a “need” or something that we should hold off on in the beginning. Of course we are going to need to bale hay (probably on 23 or 24 acres) for our livestock, but would we be better off renting or paying someone to do it. There are downsides to both having and renting/hiring and I will have to put a lot of thought into both sides of thinking.

In another section of this chapter Mr. Macher points out that hand tools should also be considered a piece of machinery (remember they can also reduce labor). Hand tools should be the first things we look at he writes and points out the importance of having quality tools that will last and really help make the work easier. Of course you can’t do it all by hand, but you would be surprised by what is possible.

There are also sections on fencing, processing equipment, and even computers in this chapter. All of those things can be an integral part of the farm and need to be looked at in terms of cost, maintenance, and productivity. Mr. Macher has also included some charts (that are slightly out-dated) at the end of this chapter that give some variable machinery/equipment costs per hour, per acre, and so on.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention his small section on using draft powered implements. I know that there are a few that read this blog that are doing this or hope to do it and it does offer many benefits for the small farm. I’m just not sure if I’m ready to take that step yet!

This has been a very busy week! Not just with land stuff, but also with work. I do think that this is just a taste of what is coming … On Monday I begin coaching soccer (high school girls), we have a bunch of big things coming at church, and hopefully we will be closing on the land in a few weeks and then getting things set with the building loan and building itself. But, before we get into all of the craziness I thought I would throw up a few more pictures of the land and why we like this places so much.

On the left is a picture of the highest point on the property. It is in the Northeast corner and the land slopes away towards the South. This is one of the other places that would be a possible building site, but we like the idea of being closer to the trees rather than out in the open waiting for trees to grow. Also, it might be a good spot for cattle facilities or other things in the future. I will say that I do enjoy the view from up there and like to look out over the surrounding farms!

Here is a picture of the “CRP” land that we are leaving in the program. As you can tell from the picture it doesn’t exactly fit all of the guidelines for inclusion in the program, but we will take it … like I said yesterday, “it is what it is”. After the land comes out of the program we are considering using some of this area as an orchard or berry patch, but we will just have to see what would be best over time. It is kind of a pretty hill and I think it will be a good place to do a little hunting!

This is one of the reasons we like this place. There are only two houses beyond where we would like to build and then the road becomes what you see in the picture … a class “B” road. That means no maintenance and little traffic. The only people going down there (and they could come from another direction not past our building site) are a couple farmers who own the land and maybe some hunters. We are not secluded on a dead end road, but in some senses it may feel like it. As I may have mentioned earlier, the location just feels right for what we want to do and were we see our family moving.

I hope you have enjoyed this week long look at a 40 acre piece of land. Hopefully in the weeks and months to come I will be able to discuss some progress and shamelessly ask for more help! I do know one thing … this “beginning farmer” thing is about to take on a whole ‘nother dimension…

What makes this land special? Why choose something this size? What about this place really jumped out at you? You may be wondering about our answers to some of those questions, and to tell you the truth we tried to ask ourselves these questions and more as we were making the decision. Besides the fact that we need to find a place for cute calves like Tabitha who was born Monday (more on that another day), I thought I would throw out a few of the reasons that we decided to try and purchase this exact piece of land.

1. Our number one reason is that it just felt right. It sounds kind of cheesy, but we did spend a lot of time in prayer about this and despite all of the hurdles we just felt like enough doors were being opened to go ahead. It won’t be easy, but we think it is the right land … of course if the something falls through on the loan we would feel okay.
2. We looked at other properties with houses and buildings and bare plots of land in varying acreages, but this just seemed like the best bang for our (lots of) buck. We could have purchased a place with usable buildings and a nice house, but then we wouldn’t have had the land. Or we could have found a smaller piece of land, but then we wouldn’t have much room to grow. 40 acres seemed like a good enough size for a small diverse farm and it is the most we can afford.
3. Location, location, location! On a day when the roads are super muddy and the driving is slow it is only about 12 minutes to the church where I work and about 6 miles out of town, so it is a good distance for us. Also, it is located in such a place that it is easy to get to the farm from Des Moines if/when we could begin on farm sales. And, it is just a pretty view. The lay of the land itself is beautiful and the borrowed views around us are great!
4. It is a pretty clean property. One thing you face on many farms in Southern Iowa is the junk ditch. You know the place where everyone throws their old appliances or vehicles. My dad’s farm has it, my uncle’s farm has it, and I know other people who have a similar place on their farm. On this particular piece of land the closest thing to “junk” is two neatly rolled bundles of old woven wire dropped in a spot that was eroding. It is nice and clean!
5. There are a lot of other reasons, but one last thing we liked about this piece was that it just seemed like the right mix. Just enough timber and the right amount of pasture to have a small diverse farm. We have a woodlot that we can use to heat our house, pastures to run livestock, and places for an orchard … garden … and berry vines. The Southernly slope of the pasture is a bonus, and if we want to there are two great places to build a pond. On a acreage of this size it just seemed like the right ratio.

Those are just a few of the reasons we liked this place and hopefully we will be calling it home this summer. There is a lot of work to be done and I know we can’t even grasp what all that will entail, but we are excited about what is ahead of us and ready to work together!

I thought I would take a little bit of time today to share some of what we have learned about taking land out of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) … gifs kkirafoxx you can read about what the CRP is HERE. As I have mentioned before most of the land we are in the process of buying is in CRP right now. In fact of the 38 acres there are 31.5 acres in CRP right now, and as far as we can tell they have been in for about 14 years. But, taking land out of CRP isn’t as easy as just deciding to do it … it takes money and time!

We are planning on taking out the 26 acres of pasture and leaving the other 5.5 acres in the program. Normally land that is placed in the Conservation Reserve Program needs to be land that could be in crop production, but our land owner must have know somebody! The 5.5 acres we are leaving in is mostly a wooded hill on the other side of a ravine. We will leave it in as long as we can and collect the money … probably until the contract ends.

I have heard of CRP contracts running for different amounts of time, but I think normally they are around 7-10 years in time. When you sign up you must basically leave the land alone, although you are allowed to do some waterway improvements and seeding or even mow a path through the land. It can be used for hunting and mowed down in the winter. But, if you want to take it out of the program before the contract is up you will have to do a few things … and by a few things I mean give them money.

You must pay back all of the money that has been paid out during the time of the contract. Those payments include the contract money and any other cost sharing money that was given for land improvements. Next you must pay interest on that money which varies from year to year. In our case the interest was as low as 2% for one year and as high as 5.5% for another. Really, the interest isn’t that big of a deal. Finally, you must pay 25% of one years payment for “Liquidated Damages”. They are quick to point out that the “Liquidated Damages” fee is not a penalty!

Now, it is important to recognize that you must pay this back regardless of whether or now you received it and in some cases if your contract was extended (instead of ended and then a new one put in place) you may have to go a long ways back. I talked with someone the other day who had recently found out that they would have to pay back 14 years worth of payments! I’m not saying it is right or wrong … just saying how it is.

For us, we are just looking at the CRP buyout money as part of the land expense and we decided that it still made the land reasonably priced for the market. I can understand why some farmers are pushing for a provision in the new Farm Bill that would allow them to take the land out without having to pay back anything, but I don’t think it is going to happen.

If you have any CRP questions fire away … because of this I have learned a lot more about the program than I knew going in! I wish we wouldn’t have to pay to take the land out, but it is what it is…

With so many thoughts running through my head with our hopefully impending land purchase I have decided to dedicate this week to blogging about it and shamelessly asking for input! Today I want to focus in on the pasture. The picture on the right gives you a close up (you can click the pictures for a larger view) of what most of the grass on the land looks like. The pasture is about 26 acres in size and is most a South facing slope. You can scroll down to the past to posts to see an aerial shot. Also, there are two water ways running down the pasture that will need special attention so we don’t have a couple of Grand Canyon’s on the place!

One of the questions that we are facing is exactly how to get rid of the grass that is there right now. I don’t mean we want to kill it all off, but we need to clip it down to size for various reasons. First of all there are huge ant hills everywhere. As you can tell from the picture on the left they are pretty tall. That is Caleb standing on one that is over a foot tall! It wouldn’t be so fun to hit those all day long as you were cutting hay. So, we need to make the grass shorter so we can knock down all of those ant hills. Secondly, starting the spring with new growth is probably a good idea for our cattle and for the hay that we will make.

We have two options. Option number one is that we mow it down. I have the wonderful fortune of having a father who test drives lawn mowers. He could come up for a while and knock it all down and find the ant hills (by running into them). One problem with that idea is that you will have a lot of grass clippings on the pasture … that may or may not be a good thing. The other option is to have the rural fire department come out and burn in off. That would expose the ant hills and give it a fresh start this spring. Right now I am leaning towards option number two, but would love any thoughts on the subject.

The second question I am thinking on is whether or not we should attempt any seeding this spring. For quite awhile the land has been in the Crop Reduction Program (more on that tomorrow) and at some time I believe it was seeded to some sort of switchgrass (not sure on the variety). The stand of grass is pretty strong and there really aren’t many weeds in the pasture except for some brambles and berries pushing in on the edge of the woods. But, I am wondering if I should or shouldn’t try and inter-seed some sort of clover. Also, I really have no idea how the switchgrass will stand up under Management Intensive Grazing. I have done a little reading on switchgrass as a forage and it sounds like it is good as long as you keep it clipped at about six inches, but I haven’t found out how well it does with grazing.

I really can’t wait to see things green up this coming spring as the pasture comes to life. I can already image our Dexter herd out grazing on the pasture!

The thing about bare land is that it is … well … it is bare, empty, and void of buildings! That is the case with the 40 acres that we are in the process of buying, so we will have to build everything that we are going to need. A house, storage, shelters, and fences will all have to be built because we are starting with a blank slate. On one had that can be a bad thing because of all the work that it will take to get things up and running, but on the other hand it gives us the opportunity to do exactly what we want exactly how we want to do it. I’m going to try and be the optimist and run with the latter of those two options!

Let me start with the easy stuff first … One of the reasons that I brought up the fencing questions a little while ago on the blog is because I knew this land might be a possibility. You can get an idea of the land we are working with from the image at the top of the post. Initially I think we are going to fence along the road and the along the wooded area. I think with a little work the fence on the West side of the property could be usable, but we may end up putting up fence just inside of that and going with high tensile electric all the way around. Yep, right now I believe we will be going with high tensile electric. I’m not sure how many wires yet, now that I’m looking for it I am beginning to see it around quite a bit. In fact there is a PowerFlex dealer not to far away so I think we are going to check them out pretty soon. Once the boundary fences are established we will use all portable fencing inside and then eventually make a few more permanent fences if needed.

As far as storage buildings or livestock shelters go … we will probably tackle those this fall or as needed. We may make some basic portable shade for the cows and beef up the chicken pen a little, but other than that the fence and the house are much more important building projects.

Which leads me to the house. This is the thing that is probably going to be the most stressful because we don’t have a ton of budget to work with. We knew going in that we were going to have to choose between a larger chunk of land or a nicer house. As a family we decided that we wanted the land because we could always upgrade the house!

Right now we are looking at a 36 x 45 x 12 post frame barn (like the image on the right) that would be roughly 1600 square feet. Then we would build our living area inside that barn … err … house in an area around 1200 square feet leaving the rest for storage. Of course it would have a slab concrete floor and we would probably build a very small lean-to off the side with a cellar because we live in Iowa (tornadoes). Our house will have no air-conditioning and we will heat with wood in order to save money. We will install some electric base-board heaters for backup though.

We are still going through the plans and talking to builders about putting up the barn for us. Once it is up we plan on doing all of the interior work ourselves and building a bare bones home that will be full of love … but not much else! This is were living simply and making sacrifices for what we believe we are supposed to be doing becomes real, and we are excited about the possibilities.

A few more details … there is no electric, water, or septic on the farm, but the power and rural water lines are on our side of the road so it is not that big of a deal. Also, it is important to realize that right now we are looking at bare bones and no frills. In fact we see this as a temporary house or one that we can “fancy” up as we desire. Hopefully we will live in this barn for a while and then turn it “back” into a barn and a on farm store.

I would like to open up everything for discussion and suggestions though. I would especially appreciate and thoughts, links, or book recommendations that would help in the building of the barn/house. Do you have any great economical ideas on insulating a post frame/pole building? Let the discussion begin! 🙂

Well, this is pretty big news for us … This past Friday my wife and I made an offer on a 40 acre piece of land it was accepted! Of course there are still plenty of details to work out, but barring any major problems or unforeseen things we should be able to get it. This has been in the works for over a month now, but because of various reasons we weren’t really telling people about it. Plus, I don’t like to get my hopes up too much until things are more certain so I didn’t want to be blogging about and thinking about it more than I needed to. But, now that the offer has been made and accepted we are pretty excited to talk about the land.

Let me tell you about the land we are buying. As I mentioned it is 40 acres (well, really 38 if you want to be picky) about 6 miles outside of the town where we now live and where I work. In fact it is on the same side of town as the church and the high school so that is pretty handy. Twenty-six acres of the land is pasture that is a very strong stand of switchgrass right now and the remainder is timber. I think that is a very nice ration for the amount of land that we have. With land prices the way they are now this was as big as a parcel as we could afford, so we like how it is divided up as far as timber and pasture is concerned. Most of the pasture is on a gradual South facing slope which means the snow should melt quickly and it will warm up nicely when the sun comes out. The timber area is at the bottom of the hill and then it starts to rise again as it hits the Southern edge of the property.

We really like the location of the farm as it isn’t too far out of town, but it is fairly secluded on a road with only two houses past us before it turns to a low maintenance dirt road. We shouldn’t have much traffic, but we are in an area that also will be plowed out in the winter. Also, it is easily accessible from Des Moines and the by-pass South of our town. I think that will be a plus when it comes to marketing. In fact only a couple of miles away there is a brand new vineyard and we are near many of the farms I visited on the Farm Crawl last year.

As with any purchase there are a few downsides. First of all, there are no buildings on the place … and there never has been. That means we will be starting from scratch in every sense of the word, but a blank slate is nice sometimes. Secondly, there is no fence along the road (this property is on a corner). And finally, the 26 acres of pasture and another 5.5 acres are all in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) right now. That means we will have to buy out the land in order to use it, and we plan on buying out the pasture acres.

One last piece of good news. Yesterday at our church annual meeting (I’m the youth pastor) the congregation voted to allow the board to sell the parsonage we live in. That means that we will be able to move to the land! We were ready to buy the land just to have a place to farm, but had really hoped that we could live there also and now that looks like that will be a reality. We are so thankful for the approval of the congregation and the blessings that we have at this church!

But, with that good news comes the daunting task of making a place to live! I will share a little more about some of our ideas along those lines tomorrow…

The first picture above is the aerial shot of the land … The next picture is a shot of a little bit of the pasture area … And, the final picture shows some of the woods when we walked around the land for the first time.