Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

We don't celebrate Halloween and don't like talk of death, magic, witches and spirits, but William Shakespeare, in Macbeth, had a line in which some witches said the following:

Double, double toil and trouble;
    Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

When our oldest son moved out, we gave him our old Lodge Cast Iron Dutch oven.  Cast iron pots are awesome to cook in.  We gave him the pot, but didn't give him proper instructions on how to care for cast iron.  Due to the lack of having those instructions, he brought it to us last week, and it had started to RUST!  He put it in the refrigerator with food in it, condensation formed on the cast iron, leading to rust.

So appropriately, we had "double, double toil and trouble" in order to get the dutch oven re-seasoned.  I had an old copy of an article from LOUISIANA CONSERVATIONIST MAGAZINE from 27 years ago that had instructions on how to properly season cast iron.  Louisiana Conservationist is an old magazine put out by Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries.  Clicking on the link above brings you to every issue archived dating back to 1923.  Here is a Link to Article from January-February 1992 about seasoning cast iron.

I have the old, yellowed copy shown here below that we used for guidance:

And here is the summary of how to do it.  I must have highlighted it 27 years ago, so the highlight has started to fade:

Essentially, you wash the pot, coat it with lard or shortening and put in the oven for 10 hours at 350 degrees.  I came home the other night and it smelled funny in the house.  I asked Tricia what was for supper.  She said, "Oh, I'm seasoning the cast iron.  That's not supper!"

Once Tricia finished, the dutch oven was seasoned and ready for use again.  No more rust.

So in order to keep this old pot in good shape, here are the instructions we should have given:
Don't ever put it in the refrigerator.  Not only will it rust, but to me, the taste of the iron leeches into the food, giving it a bad taste.

1. When cleaning, use hot water.
2. Don't ever, ever, ever use a scouring pad on your cast iron.
3. Dry it.
4. Oil it.

Following these steps will afford you the ability to miss out on the double, double toil and trouble with your cast iron caldron full of eye of newt and tongue of dog as it will never rust.  It will provide you delicious meals and will be an heirloom that you can pass down to your kids and they will remember the meals you cooked for them in it.  (Just be sure to pass along directions for caring for cast iron along with it!)

What A Difference a Year Makes

We use Shutterfly to store photos online.  It is an online photo album.  While we do have hard-copy photo albums that chronicle important events in our lives, I like the way shutterfly organizes photos by date.  You can scroll back and see what was going on last year on this date or seven years ago to this date.  It is quite amazing to see a couple of things: #1 How much of our lives are cyclical in nature.  Each year we do the same things at the same time of the year.  As Ecclesiastes 3:1 says, "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven..."  #2 How much our lives change year over year.  Just looking through photos shows how quickly your kids grow up (and we grow older!)  It reminded me to make the most of every day we have!  And to be grateful for what God has given us.

As I was looking through Shutterfly tonight, I was comparing this year at this time frame with what was going on last year at this same time.  We were very tired of the mud around our barn.  We had been unwise, failing to plan, and built our barn in the lowest area of the property.  Trekking through the mud several times a day had worn us down.  Time to solve that.  A year ago we began building a "wing" on either side of the barn to allow more covered area and to keep things dry around the barn.  The photo below shows the north wing complete the last week of October 2018.  The south wing was completed the first week of November 2018.

Here is a photo a year later, showing the north wing completed, dirt hauled in the build up the area under the wing, and the animals enjoying being "high and dry."  Can I add with emphasis that the humans have enjoyed being high and dry, too!  Getting this improvement done has improved our quality of life - seriously!

I read a blog called "The Art of Manliness." each time a new installment is posted.  Brett & Kate McKay write timely advice on all manner of topics to give men knowledge to be more effective - from very practical tips on efficiency, style, "how to" instructions...  I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned from their writing.  Their recent 'Sunday Fireside' article is posted below:

In the realm of personal finance, living “paycheck to paycheck” means that you’re able to just cover your expenses with the money you have coming in, but never save or invest beyond that.
It’s an unfortunate position to be in financially, and it also describes well the way in which many people live life in general.
When you metaphorically live life “paycheck to paycheck,” you do just enough each week to maintain your current existence. You take care of the urgent and outstanding tasks the neglect of which would disrupt the status quo, but you never take action on things that would improve and progress your situation. You thus remain stuck wherever you are.
Changing this pattern — tackling the proverbial project of “getting one’s life together” — can seem overwhelming. But it needn’t be. All it takes is completing one single to-do — one single task that moves your life forward, even slightly — each week.
Make the doctor’s appointment; choose a workout program; turn off notifications on your phone; send the job inquiry email; order underwear; text the invitation; find a recipe; take the pants to a tailor; replace the light bulb.

Accomplishing just one task a week may not seem like much, until you realize that at the end of the year, you’ll have moved your life forward in 52 ways. That’s far better than living “paycheck to paycheck”; not only will these small-but-consistent steps put a little something away for you in “savings,” their accumulation will also garner interest, reaping dividends as the weeks become years, and the years become decades.  

It is a good thing to get things done.  I like to get things done.  It is a good thing to look back and see progress made and enjoy even small steps or small victories achieved.  Sometimes we are victim to being so happy to mark things off the to do list and working so hard that we fail to celebrate.  As far as getting things done, I'd like to think that we do better than "living paycheck to paycheck."  However, we need to do better at enjoying the fruits of our labors when we get things done.   

Roasted Bones

Now that it is a LITTLE cooler, we feel better about firing up the oven.  First thing on the agenda is to make a little room in the freezer.  We still have the last remaining beef bones from the last bull that we took to the slaughterhouse.  As we discussed a month ago, when we bring a bull to the slaughterhouse, we ask for most everything.  One of the things you get is several bagfuls of bones.

What can you do with bones?  Well, the first thing is use them to make some beef broth.  In past years, we've simply put them on the stove top in a pot full of water and slowly cook for up to two days.  This results in a real nice beef broth.  This time, we are going to kick the broth up a notch or two and ROAST the bones in the oven prior to boiling.

Tricia preheat the oven to 425 and put the bones on a stoneware tray.  She roasted for about 40 minutes. 

Here is a shot of the bones coming out of the oven all roasted.

She put the roasted bones in a dutch oven and covered with water and brought the water to a boil.  Once it came to a boil, Tricia turned down the heat and simmered all day long.

In fact, it is 10 pm and the broth is still simmering.  She'll cook all day tomorrow as well.  The flavors will deepen and intensify.

After another full day of cooking, Tricia will run the beef broth through a strainer.  We'll give the dogs the bones.  As far as the broth, we'll use it in soups, we'll substitute the beef broth for water when cooking rice.  It always makes the rice taste richer, more flavorful.  Tricia mentioned using this broth to make a French Onion Soup in a few days.  Delicious!  That hits the spot on a cool day.

We do have some beef broth in the pantry that we canned in years' past.  However, we have a lot of bones in the freezer, so we'll be making fresh beef broth as often as we need it.  I'm anxious to taste the broth to determine how roasting the bones makes the broth better.

Insurance That Costs Nothing

Four years ago a friend of our drove up into our driveway in his old pickup truck.  He got out and said he had something for me.  I like talking to this gentleman.  He is brilliant and knows about everything.  He likes telling stories and spinning yarns about growing up in the country and on the bayou and experienced country life, truly living off the land.  We often share vegetables with him and from time to time he brings me some interesting exotic seeds to plant.  Last year he brought us two quarts of blackberries that were as big as a quarter.  I was curious as to what he was bringing me.

We walked around to the back of his truck and he lowered the tailgate.  I thought an alligator or a snapping turtle might pop out.  He reached in and grabbed four stalks of sugarcane.  It was heirloom, Louisiana purple ribbon cane.  He told me that most sugarcane grown around here now is hybrid cane.  It doesn't grow that tall and is bred to produce sugar - lots and lots of sugar.  He told me that he was sharing it with me for insurance.  He didn't want me to eat it.  He wanted me to plant it and keep it growing so that if he ever lost his, he could come to me to get more.  I thanked him and promised I would do so.  I did take out my pocketknife and eat a chunk of it, though.

In 2019, the sugarcane is still growing.  I re-plant it every year.  This old cane is not short.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every stalk is at least ten feet tall - some even taller!

Right now in Louisiana, we are full-swing into "grinding season."  This is when commercial sugarcane producers state wide are harvesting cane and grinding it where it will be taken to sugar mills for processing.  I work for an oil company that is currently working non-stop to keep these farmers supplied with diesel to run their equipment.  These farmers are working throughout the night to bring the crop in.  You can see them working in the fields with lights on.  Their tractors and trucks track mud onto the farm roads.  A nuisance, yes, but I'm willing to live with it in order to get some Steen's Cane Syrup for my biscuits.

Here's a LINK to a local syrup maker that's been a local favorite for over 106 years.  I love this stuff.  I wanted to try my hand at making cane syrup at home.  In this Post From 2017 you can click and read where I walk through the steps of successfully making a batch of homemade syrup from some of the cane that our friend gave us.  It was a fun experiment and I enjoyed eating the syrup until we used it all up.  On a pretty evening last week, I was admiring the tall sugar cane in the garden and planning on what I was going to do with it.

For one thing, it is time to harvest it and plant a few stalks to keep my end of the bargain to our friend, and I'll certainly do that.  It is simple to plant.  You dig a four inch trench, lay the stalk in the trench and cover with dirt.  New sprouts of sugar cane will emerge at each joint in the cane.  I haven't decided if I'll make another batch of syrup or not.  It is not economical to make in small batches as I learned from our experiment.  I will definitely cut and eat some.  That is a given.

Earlier this week I cut four stalks and we've given them to another friend to plant.  They want to establish it in their garden.  It will be insurance if our sugar cane ever succumbs to crop failure or freeze.

I like this form of "insurance" as you don't have to pay for it.  It pays you.  I think that's SWEET!

Let's Get this Party Started

Now that the sweet potatoes are harvested and a four inch layer of wood chips provide a cover for the garden, it is time to get started with a new, hopefully easier method of gardening.  I don't have a tiller and have always worked up a very large garden with a shovel and hoe.  I am 53 years old and I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep that up.  To add to that I work a full time job in a city 42 miles away.  I leave my home at 5:15 am each morning and return at 5:15 pm - at the earliest each day.  That leaves me with little time for gardening - a hobby that I love.  Especially when the days get shorter, I run out of daylight.  Let's not even talk about WEEDING the garden!

Soooo, I finally gave in and decided to try the "Back to Eden" gardening method.  We're going all in on this as we've received 20 truckloads (so far) of wood chips.  Who knows, next year I may be back to traditional gardening, but we like to experiment and learn and don't mind trying.  I decided there is no time like the present to get started.  Here goes.  I used a rake to move the wood chips away from the soil, leaving about a 6 inch stretch of soil uncovered.

We love sugar snap peas.  It is a favorite cool-season crop of ours.  The stalks grow tall.  The flowers are beautiful and the peas are delicious.  I like to just stand by the trellis and snap off the young, immature pods and snack on them.  Tricia stir fries them, adds them to fried rice and soups and salads, and cooks them with butter as a side dish.  I like to order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  The seeds are open-pollinated, so you can save the seeds from your mature plants and plant them year after year.  (Last year we ATE all of the peas, breaking an old axiom: "Don't eat your seeds!")

I say this all the time and I'm sorry I repeat myself, but seeds are always a miracle to me.  I like to pour them in my hand and look at them.  Here is a handful of "dead" seeds.  They've been sitting in a paper envelope for months.  No soil.  No water.  No sunlight.  These could be soaked in water and be eaten, but no.  These peas will be put into the soil.  They'll sprout and produce a hundred-fold of what I'm holding in my hand - probably more.  Delayed gratification.  It requires patience.  And work.  And it is risky.  But the rewards can be huge.

I gently worked the soil to loosen it.  I didn't work it deep - just enough to make a nice seed bed.  The wood chip mulch that has covered the soil has kept the soil moist and easy to work.  I placed the peas 4 inches apart all down the row next to the trellis and then covered with a thin layer of organic garden soil and watered it in.  When the peas have sprouted, I'll train the seedlings to climb the trellis.  Then I'll rake the wood chips over the exposed soil to discourage weed growth. 

That's it!  Last year, I would have worked the entire area with a shovel, used a hoe to pull up a row, worked up the seedbed on top of the row and then planted.  This year it is so much easier.  I actually had time to get ready to plant my Waltham Broccoli seedlings.  I used a string to mark a straight line and used a rake to move the wood chips away from the soil.
 

I planted the broccoli seedlings and watered them in.

Tomorrow night I have church, but my plans are to plant the rest of my broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings Thursday and Friday and then plant carrots and all of my other winter crop items starting on Saturday.  I'm a little late this year, but we'll see how things go.  It feels good to work in the garden.  The weather is nicer, with temps in the 70's.  We'll keep you posted on this new gardening method, telling you the victories as well as defeats.  Wouldn't it be nice if this method truly was easier and better?

2019 Sweet Potato Harvest By the Numbers

One last post on the 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest.  Here's how the sweet potato patch looked prior to digging them up:

Before

And here is an "after" shot once all the sweet potatoes were dug up, vines were tossed to the animals to eat, and a 4 inch layer of wood chips was spread on the soil to cover:

After

Quite a change, huh? As discussed in a previous post, we separated them out into different containers, grading them in four categories:

• Small roots and Pieces (to feed the cows),
• Small
• Medium
• Large Monster Sweet Potatoes (took two buckets to hold 'em)

I placed each container on our bathroom scale in order to see how many pounds of sweet potatoes were produced this year.  We always like to keep good records to see how things stacked up year over year.

And here is the final tally after all of them were weighed:

The large sweet potatoes weighed a total of 50 pounds.  The mediums weighed a total of 74 pounds.  The small weighed a total of 68 pounds and the bits and pieces weighed 34 pounds.  The grand total of the sweet potato harvest was 226 pounds.  Let's subtract out the small ones we'll feed to the cows.  We harvested 192 pounds of sweet potatoes for us to consume.  That surpassed our previous record harvest of 186 pounds back in 2017.

I bagged them up in onion sacks and hung them from the ceiling in the garage.  This allows good air flow.  It is best to allow sweet potatoes to cure for a minimum of 3 weeks to allow the starch to convert to sugar.  This makes for a better tasting sweet potato.

We look forward to eating a bunch of sweet potatoes over the next year.  The first ones will be cured and ready around Thanksgiving.  Perfect!

Late For Breakfast

Dateline: 19 October 2019 7:38 AM

During the week, it is still dark when I leave the house on the way to work.  On the weekends, we sleep a little later before heading out to feed the animals and milk the cows and the other morning chores.  Once the sun rises, the roosters crow and all the hens leave their roosts and head to the gate to wait on us.  They have very small brains, but they KNOW at which gate their people will come through to bring them breakfast.  We're enjoying a nice cup of coffee and don't mind if the animals wait on us for a little bit. 

They wait impatiently at the gate until I arrive.  I gently push them out of the way.  My hands are full - two milking buckets, a bucket full of water with two clean rags, and my cell phone as I'm on call all weekend.  Many times when I lift the gate latch and open the gate, a hen will dart out.  This is frustrating.  I'll set the buckets down and go chase the errant hen.  I'll make her promise to never do that again and once I have that assurance from her, I'll toss her back over the fence.

I walk toward the barn, opening the gate.  By this time, the two mama goats along with their kids notice my arrival and come running to the barn.  The cows look up and slowly make their trek in from the pasture to the barn.  Before the cows arrive, I open the nesting boxes.  We close them all at night so the hens don't poop in them.  Then I go into the feed room and mix up everyone's feed, adding minerals to the buckets and then I open the feed troughs.  These are sealed each night so rats don't poop in the feed troughs.

By this time the cows are at the gate.  I feed the Aussie the bull and Buckwheat the goat and then I feed all the hens some hen scratch mixed with laying pellets.  This gets them out of the way.  I learned the hard way that if you let the cows in before feeding the chickens, the cows will step on the chickens and you'll have crippled chickens.  Distraction is key.

The cows are let in the corral and into the milking barn.  They are washed up and then milked.  It takes approximately 20 minutes per cow to milk them out, including washing.  The goats are fed and then everyone is let out of the barn.  The lights are turned off and we go inside to pour milk and wash buckets.  It takes about an hour from door to door.  It is a lot of work, but it is peaceful - especially when the weather starts getting nice - like now.

We're always looking to make our process more efficient.  We've solved our mud issues around the barn.  The rat problem we were having is way better than it used to be.  I guess our main issue right now involves the hens.  One (or some) of our hens has developed a very bad habit.  They are eating eggs in the nesting boxes.  The broken yolk gets on the other eggs, creating extra work when packing up eggs in cartons.  We've read numerous ideas on the Internet on how to stop this.  So far, nothing has worked.

There is an old saying that "You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet."  That's true, but many of the eggs that are being broken are being eaten by the chickens - not us! 

Wrapping Things up in the Garden

Every day I've been driving like Mario Andretti, rushing home to harvest sweet potatoes.  The days are getting shorter, so I have to pack a lot of work into an hour and a half.  To the best of my calculations, I think I have exactly one and a half days left of harvesting and then I'll be done.  Each day after harvesting, I immediately cover the soil with wood chip mulch to discourage weed growth.

When we get finished, we'll begin planting.  We need to get that done QUICKLY!  Our time is running out!  The sweet potatoes just seem to be a bumper crop this year.  They are plentiful.  They are big!

There's really only a few things producing now... Sweet potatoes, peppers, eggplant, louffa gourds, and okra.  Sweet potatoes will be done in a couple days.  Eggplant are almost done.  Okra will continue until the first frost.  We're eating a bunch of okra and have put some up in the freezer as "gumbo season" is upon us. 

Oh, I almost forgot.  There is one other thing still producing with no signs of letting up.  Zinnias.  You can't eat them.  Well, I guess you could, but I'm not gonna.  They're just pretty.  Previously, I would never use up space in the garden to plant flowers, but I saved seeds from zinnias I planted outside the garden last year and this year, planted them IN the garden.  I'm glad I did.  They really brighten up things.

It is nice to see the variety of colors.  Zinnias grow great in the heat of summer, too, and just keep blooming and blooming from spring to late fall!  I'll save the seeds from these and plant a row again next year. 

Bushy Tailed Bandits

The first cool front dropped temperatures into the 70's, but it warmed up with a vengeance after a few days of teasing.  It is back in the 90's again, but the weatherman said to expect another cool front, bringing temps back into the 70's.  I can't wait.  To celebrate this onslaught (hopefully) of cooler weather, Tricia and I have been thinking about driving to Beaumont and purchasing a new fire pit.  We've had our eyes on one outside Buccee's that is built in thick-gauge steel and built to last for a lifetime.  It has a grill on a pivot so that you can build wood fires on it and barbecue.  Our old fire pit has rusted out.  It did give us many years of service, so we can't complain.

Here's the other thing about the beginning of fall.  Leaves start falling.  That's a good thing, but something better falls out of the trees - PECANS!  Last year we harvested exactly ZERO pecans.  It was the first year that we didn't get any pecans.  Most years we pick up buckets and buckets of them.  We shell them and freeze them and use them throughout the year to snack on and to use in various recipes.

So craning my neck upward, I begin assessing this year's crop.  I can see some up there.  I began calculating how many future pecan pies will be baked when those pecans ripen and fall to the ground.

But we've always been told to not count our chickens before they hatch, right?  It was not until I looked down beneath the pecan tree that I saw the dire straits we're in.  Can you see what's littering the trampoline mat?

I'll zoom in a bit.  What you are looking at is chewed up pecans.  The stain on the trampoline is the rich pecan oil that has leaked out of the chewed up pecans.

Who is the culprit, the perpetrator, the vile, evil doer?  I submit to you Sciuridae.  That's the Latin family name for Squirrel.  The bushy-tailed bandit.  The rascally rodent.  It is nice to share, but if we aren't careful, the squirrels will eat every pecan and we will have no pie.  Troubling thoughts indeed.  I looked for a meaningful squirrel poem that would memorialize my thoughts, but alas, there are no poems about squirrels that capture my ruminations.  So I had to write one myself.

Our pecan trees are really loaded down

With thousands of pecans that will soon be hitting the ground.

But there's trouble in paradise and this is why,

The Bushy tailed bandits are eating my future pies.

They watch me each day as I drive off to my job

And they come out of their nests and commence to rob.

But I have a plan I'm cooking up in my head

It involves a shotgun loaded with high powered lead.

Then like autumn leaves on breezy nights,

The dead squirrels will fall from lofty heights.

I'll look into their beady eyes

And relish the thought of my rescued pies.

October 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest Begins

Each year October arrives.  College Football season is in full swing.  The first cool front blows in.  A few leaves start falling and you realize it is time to dig some sweet potatoes.  In springtime every year for the past 15 years or so, sweet potatoes pop up voluntarily (unplanted) and take over the garden.  Every year I say it, but it is so neat that this is one crop we never have to plant or tend to.  The vines gobble up 1/3 of the total square footage in the garden.  It looks like a jungle.  If you walk through it, you wouldn't think that there is so much going on beneath the surface of the soil.

I'm not gonna lie.  Digging sweet potatoes isn't an easy task.  You must get a shovel and turn over every square foot of soil, searching through and picking out the sweet potatoes you've unearthed.  The sweet potatoes ain't gonna dig themselves.  Let's get busy!

Beautiful sweet potatoes are just under the soil hiding.  We dig them out and toss them into buckets.

As soon as we dig them up and before weeds can overtake the garden, we're doing a new thing this year - we are putting a 6 inch layer of wood chip mulch over the dug up soil.  We'll talk more about this tomorrow or Thursday.  If you compare the first photo in this post with the one below, you can see that we are a little better than halfway through the harvest.  Wood chips line the harvested ground.

Here's where Tricia gets involved.  She's not real keen on digging, but she is a good "sweet potato sorter and grader."  She goes through all the harvested sweet potatoes so far and separates them by size.  We have a bunch more to sort/grade when I finish harvesting the other half of the sweet potato patch.

In the first bucket, we have the "bits and pieces."  These are the small roots that are just not worth it to peel and cook as they are too small.  Many of these get accidentally left in the soil and sprout up next year.  These we picked, however, get used by adding to our cow's feed.  Cows love sweet potatoes!

The next bucket contains the small sweet potatoes.  These will be peeled and cooked to make latkes, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato hash browns and sweet potato pie or empanadas.

Then Tricia has graded out some large ones.  These will be baked in the oven, cut in half and put melted butter over them.  Yum!

And finally, there are the mutants.  These are ridiculously large.  They are definitely edible, but you have to watch them as some of them will be stringy or woody.

It is crazy how monstrous some of these are.  Look at Big Bertha, right here:

Nothing is wasted in this harvest.  I think the animals have October circled on their calendar.  They love it when we harvest, because the sweet potato vines get tossed over the fence and there is a fall feast going on!  From the 9 o'clock position in the photo below, there is Salt, Pepper, Rosie, Annie, and Clarabelle all eating the vines.  They'll eat and eat and eat until they can't eat anymore.

I'm hoping to finish up the harvest by the weekend.  We'll give an update soon.

The Perfect Day

A cool front blew through late Friday, ushering in pleasant, low humidity weather and a north breeze that was reinvigorating.  Morning chores, for the first time in months and months, was sweat-free.  The animals seemed to relish the comfortable weather, kicking up their heels, frisky and happy.  I did some work in the garden (more on that tomorrow).

Russ drove in to spend the day with us as did Benjamin.  We had something very important to do.  It was election day.  We studied the sample ballot and headed off to the precinct.  We vote at a Volunteer Fire Station.  The same ladies work the polls each year.  They always have gumbo cooking and it smells good in there.  We go in the voting booth, close the curtain and cast our vote.  It was a special day because it was Benjamin's first time voting.  For years and years, we've always brought our kids with us to vote.  Now they can ALL vote for themselves.  What an opportunity to have a say in your government!  What a country we live in!

We do need to pray for our Country and its leaders.  John Adams had a quote that is very appropriate.  He said, "Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."  As we drift more and more away from the Judeo-Christian heritage of our founders, what will we look like?  We can pray and we can vote.

It happened to be my birthday on Columbus Day, so after enjoying time outdoors in the garden, my wife called me in for some appetizers - Chicken Livers wrapped in bacon!  We were like magicians.  We made them all disappear.  The family went out of the way to make it a great day.

To add to that, Tricia had a Shrimp & Okra gumbo on the stove all day.  A good dark roux, fresh, homegrown okra, Gulf Shrimp, homemade gumbo file' and some smoked sausage.  Talk about good!

The icing on the cake, literally, was when Tricia pulled out this bad boy...

Chocolate Blackberry cake with mascarpone cheese and blueberries.  It was so tall, the cake dome wouldn't fit on top of it.  After we cut into it, we had to place a big mixing bowl on top of it to cover it.

We finished off the slices of cake for dessert and sat down ridiculously filled.

Then we sat and watched my #5 LSU Tigers take on #7 Florida Gators.  It was a battle and a great game and at the end of regulation, the Tigers came out on top.

I went to bed satisfied and truly blessed.  What a perfect day!

An Outlook on Farming in America in 2019

Image Credit

I read a good book by Wendell Berry called "The Unsettling of America."  I think it is one of those books that you keep in your personal library to go back and read again.  I recently read an article from the NEW YORKER - Wendell Berry that had some interesting quotes.  I pulled out a few excerpts that I'll post below.  The bolded part is the question asked by the author of The New Yorker and Wendell Berry's answers are below it.  Below that, in bolded green, I wrote down my thoughts as this article was so timely.:

What’s your outlook on farming in America?
Between 1940 and 2012, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by four million. The absence of so many farmers and their families is seen as progress by the liberals and conservatives who have been in charge of the economy since about 1952. Meanwhile, the farmland and the few surviving farmers are being ruined both by destructive ways of production and by overproduction. The millions who are gone have been replaced by bigger and bigger machines, and by toxic chemicals. If we should decide to replace the chemicals and some of the machinery with humans, as for health or survival we need to do, that would be very difficult and it would take a long time.

Very sad about the dramatic decrease in U.S. farms in 72 years!  I was just talking to my Dad about the sentiments brought up in Wendell Berry's answer just last week.  The farmers that are left are in stretched very thin.  They are farming more land, with fewer employees and more expensive equipment.  They have very little time to be a true husbandman or steward of the land.  They plant and they harvest.  They don't have much time for being a caretaker for the soil.  Landlords are left with an absentee farmer on their land.  The farmers are trying everything they can do to make ends meet.  There is lots of stress as the stakes are much higher in farming these days. 

Why would it be so difficult?
Because there is no farmer pool from which farmers can be recruited ready-made. Once, we could more or less expect good farmers to be the parents of good farmers. That kind of succession was hardly a public concern. When farmers are taught, starting in childhood, by parents and grandparents and neighbors, their education comes “naturally,” and at little cost to the land. A good farmer is one who brings competent knowledge, work wisdom, and a locally adapted agrarian culture to a particular farm that has been lovingly studied and learned over a number of years. We are not talking here about “job training” but rather about the lifelong education of an artist, the wisdom that come from unceasing attention and practice. A young-adult non-farmer can learn to farm from reading, apprenticeship to a farmer, advice from neighbors, trial and error—but that is more awkward, is personally risky, and it may be costly to the land.

Here's where the rubber meets the road.  When I graduated from college, I remember my Dad telling me that my investment was the suit on my back and the briefcase in my hand.  My investment was next to nothing.  Every two weeks a paycheck was deposited in my bank account.  My Return on Investment was ridiculously high compared to his.  He didn't need to tell me, but his investment was much higher.  He had land and very expensive equipment (tractors, combines, trucks) - not to mention the upkeep and maintenance on both.  He had employees that depended on him.  He had capital improvements.  He had a production loan to cover the costs of seed, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides.  He had to pay the crop duster.  Back breaking labor was necessary to bring your crop in.  You were at the whims of the weather, the government, crop disaster, etc.   Then after harvest, the price you got for your commodity was always in doubt.  Prices could fall beneath the cost of production.  These seemingly insurmountable barriers to becoming a farmer make it very risky for a young person to farm. 

It seems counterintuitive for agriculture to keep moving in the present direction.
The solution is not simple in the approved, modern way. It’s not deterministic, which is what people really want. They want it to be decided by fate, or technology, or genetics, or something. To bring it back to politics, I was an Adlai Stevenson man when I was eighteen. I loved his eloquence. I couldn’t tell you now what he thought of farming. But when Eisenhower came in, his Secretary of Agriculture was Ezra Taft Benson, who said to the farmers, “Get big or get out,” a heartless and a foolish thing to say. My argument is that this ended official thought about agriculture. We were not to worry about it anymore. If farmers go to town that’s just more laborers for the labor pool, just more consumers of industrial food.

Oh, our agricultural research universities like LSU, funded by check-off dollars has greatly increased yields over time, but unfortunately the price of inputs has increased at a greater rate.  Farmers, if they are lucky, make just enough to 'give it one more year to see if it will get better.'  The "Get big or Get Out" quote by Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, was perhaps a true statement, but to me, it marked the beginning of the end of the rich farming heritage of our nation's past.  Technology.  Productivity.  Innovation. All good, but the ability to grow more with less labor changed the fabric of rural America.  Young people left the farm and moved or commuted to the cities for employment.  Main Street USA crumbled and soon boarded up storefronts replaced bustling small towns.  We changed from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers.

Tricia and I moved to the country and as I look out of my front window, I see a field that was once in soybean production, but is now being surveyed and staked out for a new subdivision.  This is going on all over our country as fertile fields are being covered with concrete and starter homes.  In terms of agriculture, where do we go from here?  I don't know.  The shrinking pool of farmers in our country are still very productive.  They literally feed the world.  For those with a love of the land and farming, but an inability to commercially farm for whatever reason, there is still an opportunity to enjoy to pastoral life by having a homestead farm and raising a few animals and crops for your family on small acreage.  You won't feed the world, but you can feed your family, and that's a good thing!