CRP burn

We're planning to burn a few acres of CRP on April 14. Obviously, the weather has to cooperate, but if it isn't too dry, too wet, or too windy, we'll have a nice big crew. Having enough people makes up for a certain lack of experience on our part. After all, we not only want to burn the thick vegetation on the parts that should be burned, but we also want to avoid setting things on fire that should not be! And it's a nice celebration: we'll plan to take the whole tired, sweaty bunch to dinner at the Santa Fe restaurant in Ethel when we're done.
Anybody have any tips or helpful suggestions about the best (or worst!) ways to proceed when burning CRP?

Harvest time

The garden at the Farm was productive this year, thanks to my mother-in-law's green thumb and (I am convinced) the bees, who keep everything well pollinated. In fact, even after some good hard freezes, there is still some Swiss chard that seems quite happy to go on doing its thing until it gets buried by snow. Almost everything else is over and done with, of course, a week before Christmas.
One of the beehives failed (unproductive queen, I think), but we were able to get some honey from the other one. Some we sold, some we ate, and some got turned into my first attempt at mead (now resting in bottles). Next year we hope for more.
The harvest doesn't stop when the garden gives out and the bees hunker down for the winter. The Farm still yields what we need and what we can use. We took another deer this season, a nice buck (after a fat doe last year), and the meat gets shared multiple ways. The little food plots have been visited by birds and animals a-plenty; I "harvested" one head of a sunflower to have a few seeds to scatter next spring.

I don't collect acorns, hickory nuts, or black walnuts, but they apparently feed the deer and squirrels well enough. And the trees themselves are a crop, of course, providing firewood that supplies at least half the heat we need over the winter. (We could probably heat entirely with wood, and maybe we will some day, but for now we simply don't have the time to cut that much wood!) So far we don't need to cut down any living trees: we have all we can handle skidding downed logs out of the steep ravines, and then cutting and splitting and hauling and stacking.
Truly, we often reap where we did not sow. What we "harvest" is not always (and not only) what we planned and initiated and nurtured directly. At least as often, we harvest by simply receiving what the place gives us. This kind of farming isn't far removed from the ancient hunter-gatherers: we try to keep dancing between design, opportunism, surprise, and sheer gratitude. That is the dance of harvest time.

An Elemental Life

If you want to get in touch with life at its roots, life at an elemental level, there's nothing like a hundred acres of farmland (or raising small children!). The reality of the land is both more beautiful and less romantic than the world of ideas (where I usually live). The Farm resists idealization, the soil is resistant to theories. Land is always this specific land, and working the place always means working with this particular combination of the basic elements.

The ancients viewed the world as composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. That scheme turns out to be inadequate for purposes of physics and chemistry, but it's remarkably useful for capturing daily experience with the concrete specifics of life and work on the Farm.

Here's an example: when we got the Jeep or the Polaris stuck in the slippery rain-soaked mud, we wrestled with earth and water. To avoid those problems again, we need to work with the earth (soil) and the water and not against them. The messy details all come about from the way these ingredients interact!

And here's another example: we burned off about 20 acres of CRP grassland last week. It was an impressive interaction of fire and air! We were careful, well-manned, and well-equipped, and nothing bad happened: all the stuff that was supposed to burn did, and nothing that wasn't supposed to burn did! No injuries, no running around screaming in terror! All in all, a successful day. But here's the rub: we were "in control" only in a limited way. The direction and speed of the wind, and the heat and the speed of the fire, were more important for our success than our plan or our tools. A contrary wind could have cancelled the whole business, and fire in the wrong place would have turned it upside down.

To live and work happily with the Farm is a series of adjustments and accommodations, a dance of compromises between our human intentions and the elements we are given to work with. The elemental life of the Farm is a life in which we are not sovereign, not the masters of all we survey. We have to learn to live with only limited control.

Equipment

What equipment do you need on a hundred-acre farm, at least a third woods and more than half CRP? That's a good question! I admit that, like most guys, my instincts favor as much equipment as possible: lots of engines, blades, tools, gears, and so forth. Any project which requires the acquisition of new tools is a good project. If The Farm were purely a hobby, and if the budget were unlimited, then there would be no practical limit to the equipment we could accumulate. But both of those "if's" are far removed from reality. The farm cannot be a mere hobby, not as long as it's a real home (for my in-laws), a real neighbor (to the other farms around it), and a real habitat (for deer, turkey, quail, rabbits, etc.).

Every "real" farm needs a tractor, right? Well, that depends. A few farmers, of course, still use animal muscles as their main machines: horses, mules, and oxen still pull plows and wagons and other equipment as well as they ever did, and they have advantages. They eat grass and grain that can grow on the land, instead of consuming fossil fuels that have to be purchased with cash. And animal manure can return nutrients and energy to the soil. The muscles of animlas, and of the men and women who work with them, are limited -- and those limits are important in themselves, for they remind us that we are not sovereign or omnipotent.

But no, we did not opt to keep draft animals to work our land. Neither did we buy a tractor. Because over half The Farm is in CRP, and much of the rest is woods or drainage creeks, there is only a limited amount of land to work, so a tractor seemed like overkill. At the same time, the hills and often muddy soil dictated a machine that would handle terrain. So we got a second-hand Polaris Ranger 6x6. With it we can drag logs up out of the wooded ravines and haul tools to work on fences. It has plenty of power, and plenty (though not unlimited!) traction. What it doesn't have that a tractor would have is a PTO hook-up and hydraulics.

The Ranger gets us around and drags stuff or pulls a small trailer. But we're going to need a couple of other items, too. For one thing, we need a big rough-cut or trail mower to knock down the high weeds and grass and start clearing some trails in the woods. I'm looking at self-powered mowers with angled pull bars, so we can mow easily along fences. When it's time to burn a piece of the CRP, mowing a wide strip of firebreak might help prevent things from getting out of hand. For the same reason, we need to get a disc that we can pull with the Polaris. We'll disc or roto-till the firebreaks, and also use the disc to prepare food plots (sunflowers, millet, maybe even barley), and of course get the garden plot ready up next to the house.

It all starts to add up pretty fast! What about a post-hole auger? that would probably have to be a one or two-man hand-held, rather than a machine mounted one, because we have long stretches of fence running through the woods to build and maintain. A spreader/planter would be nice for those food-plots. Do we need a tank & sprayer to haul in the Polaris for fruit trees? And we've felt the need for a snow-plow blade several times this winter.

But we're trying to take it slow. The goal is not to have all the toys any boy could ever want, but to maintain, use, and improve this piece of land in some kind of sustainable fashion. And that means keeping costs down. Besides, the garage is already full.

The Buzz

In an earlier post, I listed beekeeping as one possible productive use of the hundred or so acres which I call The Farm (but which my wife prefers to refer to as "the country estate"). Yesterday I spent a day at a beekeeper workshop, hosted by the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. It was time well spent. A couple of colonies of prime honey bees will soon be moving into luxury accommodations on the property.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I think I imagined a dozen or so retired introverts, tentatively exploring a new hobby. What I found was a crowd of 200-300 enthusiasts of all ages -- and that was just the beginners. A father and son were buying additional hive boxes and frames for their suburban yard. A couple from my own neighborhood have been keeping bees for years (they went to the advanced class). Farmers were there to learn how to add another cash crop to their operations. Vegetarians wanted to learn about meatlless livestock. Vendors were displaying and selling a wide range of equipment.

Hardly any mention was made of the cultural or philosophical or political reasons to encourage people to keep bees. Colony Collapse Disorder has taken a serious toll among commercial beekeeping operations, and nobody knows exactly what's behind it. Bees are so important and beneficial to both agriculture and gardening that it is almost a civic duty to at least consider keeping a couple of hives.

But the hundreds who showed up for the Saturday workshop needed no persuading. They were there, as far as I can tell, because they had already made up their minds that keeping bees was something they wanted to do -- whether for profit, or because they liked to eat honey, or because the bees would benefit their orchards, or out of sheer love for Western Civilization.

What people were looking for yesterday -- and what they got -- was not the why of beekeeping, but the how. How is a new hive assembled? How do you work safely around the little beasties? How do you get a new queen? How do you recognize and treat common bee pests and diseases? How do you harvest the honey? It was a full load of practical information: from honey-supers to small hive beetles, weighing the relative merits of different kinds of hive tools and the argument about queen excluders (a.k.a. "honey excluders" depending which side you're on).

The thoroughly down-to-earth focus of the whole day, and the ease with which I could get practical answers to all the dumb, novice questions I had, was refreshing and empowering. I've now ordered a beginners kit which will include structures (bottom board, boxes, frames, foundations, and covers -- and, yes, queen excluders!) for two hives and the basic tools and protective clothing to get me started. Queen kits will be ordered soon! Watch this space. . .

Woods

"Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest."
(Wendell Berry)

Winter is a good time to think of the forest. The pace of life slows down enough that you can listen to the slow beat of the forest's heart. We realize that trees are our main crop: and this crop we harvest where we did not plant, and we plant what we will not see through to full maturity.

Most of the leaves are down, and you can see more clearly how the land lies, and how the trees stand on the landscape. The gullies are more severe in some places than I thought last summer. There are a lot of trees down, either cut by the previous owner or dead from disease or pests. It looks like the guy who used to own this land was thinning out the shagbark hickory, so we have several years' worth of solid firewood out there, if we are willing to do the work to drag it out and cut it up.

And as winter settles in around us, we are more dependent on the woods, because the main heat in the house is a wood-burning stove. A few nights with temperatures in single digits make you love good firewood, make you a connoisseur of the hard, round chunks that will burn hot and last for hours through the night. That shagbark hickory we've been cutting and splitting packs a big energy punch: roughly 25 or 30 million BTUs per cord.

But you cannot consume a forest forever, so winter is the time to plan how we will re-plant trees in the spring. The Missouri Department of Conservation offers bundles of bare-root seedlings (mostly native species well suited to our area) at very reasonable prices. We  put together an order which is a winter dream of our children’s (and grandchildren’s) forest, not ours.

More Urban Agriculture

Not too long ago, I commented in these pages on an interesting piece in The New York Times about urban gardening. Now The New Yorker, that most urbane of all periodicals, is getting in on the act. Their staff writer, Susan Orlean, has an article in a recent issue about -- are you ready? -- raising chickens. Technically, Orlean does not live in the city, but in a more rural setting where having a few hens (and a rooster by mistake) does not scandalize the neighbors. But she writes for people with a lot less green space. Even real city folks, she says, can (and maybe should) raise their own poultry.

There are some cities in the U.S. that have ordinances against keeping chickens. And it's not always easy to figure out, or learn, what the rules are where you might live.

Urban chickens need the right equipment, and perhaps the ideal place to start is the Eglu. I don't keep chickens, and I don't plan to, but if I did I would start with an Eglu--simply because it looks like something out of The Jetsons. I'm more interested in raising quail, so I might investigate whether an Eglu can be modified for those much smaller birds. (If I try that, you'll read about it here!)

There must be some kind of urban poultry movement starting, because there are blogs devoted to the subject. (Okay, I know that there are blogs devoted to every subject! My point is--chickens!? in cities!? Who knew?) You can check out TheCityChicken.com, or UrbanChickens.net, or CityChickens.com if you think I'm kidding.

Why would anybody want chickens in the tiny backyard of an Manhattan brownstone, or elsewhere in the concrete jungle? Well, for one thing, they lay eggs, and a couple of nice, fresh eggs every day is not a bad thing. But some people are attracted to these birds as pets: as objects of affection and companions. In other words, we humans seem to have a connection to other living creatures. We enjoy their company, and we care for them and feel affection for them, even if they provide us with no tangible benefits. A couple of hens, scratching at bugs and clucking contentedly in the backyard, renew that connection for us even when our lives are largely alienated from the earth we live on.

Orchard Dreams

"I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods." (Wendell Berry)

I've commented here before that I'd like to plant an orchard on The Farm. Nothing grandiose or industrial in scale: perhaps five or six apple trees, as many cherry trees and perhaps some pears. Planting an orchard is a sign of hope, an act of confidence and optimism about a future unseen. He who plants an orchard makes a long-term commitment to a specific piece of ground. He gives a gift to his children and his children's children.

The Farm--this Farm--is a little patch of rolling hills, where the natural state of the landscape is a patchwork of woods and grassland. To plant an orchard would woo the nature of that particular place, cultivation most in harmony with the character of the land itself, and therefore holds the promise of being both fruitful and happy. No sense trying to grow what the land doesn't want to bear, or planting against the grain of the soil.

Besides, I like apples, and almost everything made from apples. Ditto cherries. Less wild about pears, but one needs variety, right? I dream of getting a cider press and bottling fresh juices on a crisp October day. As a dabbling homebrewer, this could put me in touch with cultures around the world where cider fills the culinary niche occupied by beer in other places. Brittany, Normandy, and southwestern England, in particular, cherish the venerable art of cider making, as do the Basques and the hill tribes of Rhineland-Pfalz.

Getting from here to there is another matter. Choosing, buying, and planting trees is the easy part. The little saplings won't survive long if we don't protect them somehow from the ravenous local whitetail population.

My first thought was to fence the whole orchard area with 7- or 8-foot deer fencing. Nice idea -- until a little research put a pricetag on that project. It turns out it's pretty easy to spend over a thousand dollars to protect a dozen fruit trees, and that is just too much (unless we're aiming at commercial production, of course; then we could recoup the investment over several years of profits).

I think we'll have to settle for improvised solutions, using whatever old fencing and posts we can find around The Farm. And this does not diminish the pleasure of dreaming hopefully toward my orchard. The art of cultivating with the nature of the land instead of against it involves compromise between what we want and what the land can provide. And there is another kind of compromise to learn: between a theoretical ideal and the affordable.

The Farm in The City

I saw this column while very far from The Farm, on a plane from Philadelphia to Zurich to be exact. It's not that often that my agricultural leanings are fed from the venerable pages of The Gray Lady. This may be another sign of something -- I'm not sure what! -- or a clue to the puzzle of this thing we call popular culture. It might mean something like this:

The line between urban and rural is not sharp and clear. Because we live on the earth, even in those densely packed, overbuilt, and artificial environments we call cities, the earth has away of breaking through and re-asserting itself. Our technology and our architecture lay a thin crust over the ground, and given the chhance, the ground will do what the ground does best: send seedlings up through cracks in the pavement.

I suppose someone will quibble that the New York Times piece on tomatoes in Brooklyn is not really about farming but about "gardening," as if the two are clearly distinguishable. But what is a city garden but a farm painted on a very small canvas, and what is a farm but a garden that got out of hand? Both share the same media, the same instincts, the same struggles, the same culture. My favorite little magazine Hobby Farms is launching a new publication called Urban Farm, which sounds like an oxymoron, but is really just another clue in this puzzle i'm trying to work out.

I remember sitting in a classroom in western Kenya while my students scribbled away on their final exams. Looking out the window I savored the sight of the lush Kisii hill country in the distance and the bountiful vegetation surrounding the building. Vines had found their way in through one of the windows, and seemed to be flourishing happily inside the room. I got the impression that, in Africa at least, all our development and building amounts to little more than a temporary clearing of the natural growth on the hills. As soon as we turn our backs, the vines are in at the windows and start their work of reclaiming this little patch of earth.

"Know Your Soils"

The soil on The Farm ranges from Armstrong clay loam to Gorim silt loam. If that doesn't mean much to you, don't worry. It's a foreign language to me, too.

Everything I know about our soils comes from two sources. The first is the detailed conservation management report prepared for us by the local NRCS office. Each field--and even the distinct parts of each field--is carefully described and analyzed. Turns out we do not have any Menfro, which is the Missouri state soil. (I bet you didn't even know Missouri had a state soil!)

My second source of soil knowledge is first-hand. A couple of weeks ago, my brother and his overweight Labrador named Hagrid came for a weekend visit in their Jeep. When the drizzle on Saturday morning ruled out golf, we decided to head for The Farm (which he hadn't yet seen).

We had only been there about 30 minutes when our combined supply of good sense -- which is never as great when we're together as either of us can manage on our own -- ran out completely. I opened the wire gate to the pasture across the road from the house, and he drove the Jeep in. To get a better view, I opened the next gate, too, and he drove through that.

And then he was stuck. The drizzle-saturated clay suddenly seemed the consistency of pancake batter, and all four wheels of the Jeep were spinning uselessly. No matter which direction the Jeep was pointed, or which direction we spun the wheels, the vehicle only moved one direction: downhill. And downhill was not helpful, since at the bottom of the hill was a soggy creek and cow-trodden mud.

We took turns pushing and driving. We chopped branches to stuff under the wheels in an effort to grab some traction. We rocked the Jeep back and forth. We dragged big scraps of old carpet from the trash heap across the road, and stuck them under the wheels of the Jeep. That last one actually kind of worked, until the carpet was soaked with water and slimy clay mud; after that the carpet gave as much traction as shaving cream, and weighed about a hundred pounds a square yard.

The story has a long, sad ending, which involves cold wind and sleet, a tow-truck which got stuck worse than we were, and a drive home in the wee hours of the morning. Only Hagrid seemed to be enjoying himself: wind and freezing drizzle is a Labrador's natural habitat. We consoled ourselves next day with breakfast at Denny's. My brother's email when he got home summed it up pretty well: "had a great time. Hope we never do it again."

The NRCS soils report appeals to me in a kind of techy, cerebral way. I've always enjoyed learning foreign languages. But getting my brother's Jeep profoundly stuck in that wet patch of "Bevier silty clay loam" just north of the road was my real education about our soil.

What Do You Do There? (The Farm as Hobby)

Now that you have a "farm," what do you really do with it?

I said before that we weren't really interested in becoming working farmers: we didn't really want to plow, plant, cultivate, harvest, and market fields of hay or beans or corn. We didn't want to commit ourselves to the constant demands of a commercial livestock operation (and don't be naive: five cows are nearly as much trouble as fifty, and much less profitable!).

The fact is, I am mostly interested in hunting on the place. Whitetail deer, wild turkeys, and bobwhite quail are the crops I really look forward to harvesting. I have reason to believe that they are already there, to some extent.

And with some management of the land, they should thrive. We will put in some sunflowers and millet to provide a little food and cover for the birds. We'll avoid thinning out the woods too much, and make sure the creeks and drainage areas have plenty of cover for shy deer. Starting in 2010, we'll start a rotation of controlled burning to improve the CRP grasslands for quail habitat. We'll shoot coyotes and bobcats that put pressure on the small game.

There should be plenty of room on the property for a nice big garden, without bothering the game. In fact, I'm a little worried that the game will eat the garden: we'll see! A very tall fence might be in our near future.

If we want to get more serious about things, there is room for up to 6 acres (!!) of garden area, which would keep us all busy most of the summer, and might supply vegetables, herbs, and flowers to sell at area farmers markets. There is a growing movement of "community supported agriculture" that encourages people to buy and consume local produce, and this tends to favor small, family operations more than large, industrial farms. It is entirely realistic to imagine a one- or two-acre garden that could produce a couple of thousand dollars a year

Across the road from the house is a long pasture, about 4.5 acres, along a ridgetop. It is sheltered on the North by the oaks and hickories of our woods. It has a nice southern exposure for full sun. It looks like a beautiful place to plant an orchard. Apples, pears, cherries, and maybe hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts -- wouldn't that be nice? With a small pump we can water them from the spring-fed pond to tide them over the hot dry spells of a Missouri summer. Most of the pruning and harvesting can be done during family work-weekends. There is probably room there for a couple of hundred trees. This sounds like the sort of thing that could quickly get out of hand.

If we have a big garden, and we start planting fruit trees, we're going to want some honey bees. In fact, given the global problem of Colony Collapse Disorder, and the tremendous importance of bees as pollinators for all kinds of plants (wild and domestic), I consider it our duty to the future of civilization to encourage a hive or two on the place. A good spot would be over at the east end of that area north of the road where I want to put the orchard; from there they can also pollinate the garden next to the house, without the bother of a swarm of bees right next to the house.

Somewhere in this plan there should be a patch of hops. Hops grow on bines (which are different from "vines" -- look it up!). The aromatic flowers are harvested in the fall and used for -- you guessed it! -- beer. It turns out there's also a sort of world-wide hops shortage, so growing our own makes sense, and might be a money-maker, too.

The worrying collapse of honey bee colonies, and the looming shortage of hops are two terrible signs of the fast-approaching collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. It's our duty to humanity, to our children's children's children, to cultivate a little pocket of these precious resources.

The Farm as Family Project

We were looking for an investment that didn't depend on the vagaries of the stock market. One option, of course, is real estate. If you own land it never simply evaporates (unless it's in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans or something), so it's never worth nothing. Or so they say. Several of us in the family felt this way, and we'd been thinking about it (separately) for a while.

I also wanted a place to hunt. Hunting deer on public land in Missouri isn't bad, but it's inconsistent, and you always have the feeling that you're hunting the spot where somebody just got the big buck -- or worse, that some other (less careful) hunter will be shooting from the other side side of the thicket. Besides, landowners get a nice break on deer (and turkey) tags to hunt game on their own property!

Deer and turkey are the major game in northern Missouri, but with proper land management the area is good for quail, too. Even ring-necked pheasant can be encouraged (though for those big birds, the closer to Iowa the better!).

My in-laws needed a place to retire. The ideal spot would be closer to their children and grandchildren (but not right in anybody's lap, perhaps). They would be more comfortable in the countryside than in a city. The house needed to be decent, but not that large; one story, big garage, cheap to heat, modern kitchen. It had to have a good spot for a garden.

Since "retirement" was part of the plan, it meant that we didn't want a real, working farm with all the maintenance and chores and daily hard work implied by the term! We didn't really want to get into the farming business of planting and harvesting crops or caring for livestock. Ideally we wanted a place that would basically pay for itself (or at least cover the taxes) with little or no work on our part. Finding a place with most of the acreage enrolled in the CRP program (more on that another time!) fit the bill very well.

In the back of our minds was the future option of putting another cabin or two on the place, so more of us could stay there and not be in each other's hair too much. And that meant it couldn't be too small a farm; we wound up with 100 acres, split by a paved road, with two or three potential building scattered around.

In all there were seven of us interested in pooling our resources to buy together. Combining our assets meant that we could get a bigger, nicer place than any of us could afford alone. But it also complicated the arrangements a bit, especially since the amounts we could invest were equal. After doing some reading on various options (incorporation, joint ownership, etc.), we decided to form a "limited liability company" (LLC). It cost us a few hundred bucks (using LegalZoom.com) to put the paperwork together, but after that the paperwork and tax process is quite simple, and we don't need to worry about complicated estate law or probate tying the place up. Since we thought (and still think) that we might eventually own more than one property, we called the new company "Wind Hills Properties LLC" -- drop us a line!