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.