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

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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! 

Dealing With Annie's Mastitis

Annie, our Nubian goat, has struggled with mastitis for a while.  Milking her has always been a pain - for us and for her.  She kicks like a saddle bronc every time we milk.  She doesn't let her kids nurse for very long.  We normally shy away from antibiotics.  We normally try natural remedies.  Up to this point, we've been unsuccessful in the methods we've experimented with.  We resorted to trying an antibiotic treatment to attempt to finally clear up Annie's mastitis.

Tricia purchased some Today syringes which are to be inserted into the teats in order to inject the meds to fight off the infection.  You can purchase this at your feed store or Tractor Supply Company. Tonight we started the "Today" process.  We'll see how it goes tomorrow.  Ha Ha!

We went out the the barn at night right before supper and used alcohol to wipe down Annie's teats in order to keep things extra clean.

I have cleats on the milking stanchion and we put ropes around Annie's feet and secured them to the cleats.  This will keep her from kicking as we insert the syringe about a quarter inch into each of her two teats and inject the medicine.  We put some dairy ration and alfalfa pellets in her trough to somewhat distract her.

Tricia inserted the syringe into her teat and injected it all in.  It went surprisingly smooth!

She held the teat closed and used her thumb and index finger to push the meds upward into her bag.

Nothing dripped out.  We did the same thing on the other side.  The directions say to use every 12  hours, but only two doses.  Others, including some veterinarians, say to use it until it clears up.  Tricia did the California Mastitis Test after the second dose and she still showed some slight mastitis.  We may give it one more dose and then test again.  If it doesn't clear up, we may have to culture and see exactly which bacteria we're fighting and get the appropriate meds to knock this stuff out.

Kind of discouraging, but we'll keep trying.  Perhaps we'll find the "Annie-biotic" that will work.  I know Annie (and Tricia) will be happy.

Rendering Tallow

When you bring an animal to the slaughterhouse, the entire animal is yours.  You can ask for anything you want off of him and they will bag it up and send it home with you.  We always ask for the bones and the fat in addition to the meat.  The bones are roasted and boiled to make a nice beef broth.  That can be used as a base for soups.  You can use it in place of water when cooking rice to make your rice taste richer.

The fat is another thing we ask for as we make beef tallow from it.  In THIS POST FROM 2015 we take you through the steps of rendering beef tallow.  You can click on that link for the whole process, but today we'll show you the end result. 

The bull we brought to slaughter this year wasn't skinny, he was just real lean.  All muscle.  Not much fat.  A certain amount of fat is needed when making ground meat and half of him was used for ground meat.  In the end, we just had one small bag of fat for making tallow.  Tricia cooked it down on the stove until most of it liquefied and then poured it into a pyrex baking dish.  It was transparent at that point.  Then it was put into the refrigerator and it turned into a creamy white color with a tinge of yellow. 

We cut it up into chunks and put into a gallon-sized zip loc bag and then put in the freezer.  As needed, we'll pull out a square of fresh rendered beef tallow.

So what do you use beef tallow for?  Well, use it in place of cooking oil.  Tricia keeps a little ramekin of beef tallow by the stove that she uses.  Lately, we've been using it to make homemade soap.  We've made three batches so far and it has put a dent in our inventory of tallow.  Since Astro the bull was very lean and we were only able to render one pan of tallow, we'll have to contact a friend who brings calves to slaughter and see if he'll give us a big bag of fat.  Until then, we'll ration this tallow and/or slow down on the soap-making.

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

Hidden Nests

Since taking Astro to the slaughter house, we've moved Aussie into the bull pen that Astro once inhabited.  Now there's only Clarabull out with Rosie, Luna, and Clarabelle.  Each evening when we do late afternoon chores, the cows all come in for their feed.  Except for Clarabull.  He doesn't get fed anything at night, but we bring him in the corral and separate him so that he won't drink all of "our" milk overnight from his momma, Clarabelle.

I always have to climb over the fence and walk up to him.  He's eating on the tall grass and is in no rush to be locked up in the corral.  I get behind him and push on his rump and coax him slowly toward the barn.  As I was walking I noticed a hidden nest that our hens laid in the tall grass in one of the paddocks.  No telling how long they've been there.  I don't trust them, so I'm not going to pick them up.  They may all be rotten, and I'm just going to leave them alone.  Perhaps a hen is setting on them and just stepped away to get to the hen scratch that Tricia just threw out in the barnyard.

Most of the hens are predictable and they lay their eggs in the hen house nesting boxes.  Those that don't, lay their eggs in the hay near the round bale.  There are always a few hens that are unpredictable.  They'll go off, lay a nest, set on the eggs for 21 days and show up with some babies behind her. 

We've been experiencing a serious problem with a hen or hens.  We have a hen or hens that have picked up a very bad habit of eating eggs.  Each afternoon there are broken eggs in the nesting boxes that have been eaten by chickens.  So wasteful!  Then, the yolk gets all over the unbroken eggs in the nesting boxes and make cleaning the eggs a major chore.  The uneaten egg yolk/white drips down into the hay in the nesting boxes and with 95 degree heat, begins to smell really bad.

We've read all about this 'cannibalism.'  We keep the bin of oyster shells full, so we know it isn't a calcium deficiency.   We are feeding them plenty, so they shouldn't be so hungry that they feel the need to eat the unborn chickens.  To top it off, this is the time of year where egg production drops substantially.  We want those eggs to make it back to the house, NOT getting eaten by chickens.  It is a bad habit that we need to stop right now!

Perhaps the hidden nest in the tall grass in the photo above that Tricia and I found is hidden by a hen that doesn't want her eggs eaten by other hens.  Therefore, she's laying them in the tall grass where the cannibals can't find them.  Smart girl!

An Update on Our Mulching Project (When the Chips Are Down)

In THIS POST FROM JULY, we posted about getting wood chips to start experimenting with the Back to Eden gardening method.  Here's a little update.  The wood chips keep on coming.  So far we've received 16 truck loads of mulch.  It is stacked high and deep in the side yard.  We probably won't win any "Yard of the Month" awards with all these piles on the property!  We're almost out of room, and I've been moving it as fast as I can with a pitchfork and a Gorilla Cart wagon.  Just as soon as I have a pile moved, two more piles arrive to take its place!

Below is a 45 foot garden bed in our side yard that I plant purple hull peas in during summer months and potatoes in the spring.  The purple hull peas just completed producing and I figured it was time to apply an 8 inch layer of wood chips to the bed.  I used a wagon to haul them from one of my many piles, dumped it out and used a pitch fork and a rake to spread the wood chips evenly.

In early February, I'll scrape back the mulch to plant Irish Potatoes.  The soil underneath will be soft and easy to work.  I'll plant the seed potatoes in the soil, adding some compost.  As the potatoes grow, I'll cover with wood chips, and the potato plant will grow right up through the chips

The wood chips are chipped up pretty good.  The pile is hot.  The bacteria is breaking down the chips into soil.  Oh, another way we are using the wood chips is to mulch around trees in our yard.  I do not like weed-eating.  The roots around our live oak trees make is near impossible to get close with the mower, and that leaves a lot of weed eating to do.  Mulching around the trees (hopefully) will cut down on the weed eating.

I have a few more trees to mulch around and then I will begin stacking the mulch in the back of the garden again.  From there I'll move it to the garden as we get things planted.

When the chips are down, we'll see how this experiment works out!