The 2009 Season (Year 1 of ?)

It truly has been an exciting ride our first year, with both ups and downs, successes and failures. We entered into this with certain vague expectations, but without experience to back us, mostly uncertainty at how our various enterprises would turn out. What follows is a cursory wrap-up of the 2009 season, the first of what I hope to be many season wrap-ups. Much written here I've covered in earlier posts, but it's worth repeating.

Turkeys!

Sometimes, a word just needs an exclamation point. In my estimation, turkeys! is almost always one of them.

This Friday, Nov. 20 and Saturday Nov. 21, our turkeys meet their fate. We're slaughtering on the farm with a mobile processing unit. The intrepid folks from the Montana Poultry Growers Coop (namely Mark Rehder and Jan and Will Tusick) will be on hand Friday morning at 9 to do a few hours of training on the mobile processing unit as well on poultry processing in general.

Consider yourself invited for either or both days. We'll have a group of friends and family on hand to help with the processing, so if you're squeamish, no worries: There are plenty of things to do, not to mention the need for morale support.

Map to the farm:

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We have 75 turkeys to process, a little less than half of which will go to our Thanksgiving CSA members. The others have been sold direct to diners in Great Falls, Missoula, Helena and Bozeman.

Here is the schedule for picking up your turkeys and CSAs:

Great Falls-area customers:
Between 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21
2509 Upper River Road (Courtney's mother's house. Thanks Mom!)
Map:

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Conrad-area customers:
Between 2-4 Sunday, Nov. 22
504 S. Virginia Street, Conrad (our house)

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Missoula area customers:
Between 4-6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22
1118 Jackson Street (our friend Jason's house. Thanks Jason!)

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2008 "harvest" day.

Autumn Tasks

This fall has been quite unpredictable. We had some pretty cold temperatures, where the mercury dropped to just above zero. We hustled all turkeys back in the brooder house where they could keep warm better (and eat less to do so). Most of the leaves dropped from the trees, still green, not having the chance to go through their color change. Since that cold snap, we've had more traditional fall weather and this week, it's predicted that the daytime temp may reach nearly 70 degrees.

The turkeys take it in stride, sadly oblivious to a major event for them in two weeks. They're back outside, enjoying this beautiful autumn weather, gobbling and chirping happily.


The garden after disking.

Our good friends Tim and Sarah helped us plant garlic during a warm snap. I got the tractor and the disk on the field to work in some of the crop and weed residue. Unfortunately, I don't have a working tractor with a loader or a working manure spreader, otherwise I would have spread some aged cow manure on the vegetable spot. We did manage to throw down the litter from the brooder, which will add some good organic matter and turkey poop to a small part of the garden.


Planting garlic.


Chucking straw onto the garlic.

Heat and Iron, Hammer to Metal

Last weekend, my brother and I spent a day with my blacksmith friend Jeffrey. While my brother has dabbled a bit in metal work, I have not, and I wanted to get a feel for what it takes to manipulate metal to build useful things for the farm. My dream would be to have a small blacksmithing setup on the farm: a propane forge, an anvil, an air hammer, and a leg vice. There, with my vast amounts of free time, I would build my own gates and latches, hammers, hoes, and other hand tools.




Hand-forged blacksmith hammers and tongs.

This dream is all a part of the larger vision of exploring different crafts, and developing hand skills and a measure of self-sufficiency. I'm not deluded enough to think we could be completely self-sufficient, nor would I want to be. To me, complete self-sufficiency can mean self-ish and would lead to isolation from the surrounding community. At Prairie Heritage Farm, we are striving to build our personal community and be a part of the larger community. An ideal world to me would be community-wide self-sufficiency, where everybody contributes valuable skills and trades. So, not everybody is a home brewer and bicycle mechanic and blacksmith and electrician and carpenter, etc., but rather one person might have a few skills and for those they don't have they call on their neighbor to help them out.

What follows is a series of photos of Jeffrey forging a leaf out of some square stock.


The metal heating up in the forge.


Jeffrey hammering the tip.


Drawing out the end of the stock.


More drawing out.


Shaping the stem.


The beginning of the leaf shape.


The air hammer works the metal out.


Some hand work.


More hand work.


The leaf.


The gate upon which the leaf will eventually be attached.

Winter?

Fresh snow on the Rocky Mountain Front.

Fall in Montana has never been that long - usually at least a couple of weeks. This year, I'm not sure it lasted more than a few hours. The leaves starting turning, then it began to snow and the temperature plummeted. This morning, after a night of temperatures in the low teens, all the green leaves on the trees that didn't have a chance to show off their bright autumn colors, are now blanketing the ground.


Turkeys try their hand at gardening.

The turkeys are as resilient as ever, just eating more to stay warm. I put them on the spent garden to let them work the ground a bit and eat up weed seeds and cabbage and chard leaves. Because it's going to get down to around 4 degrees in the next couple of nights, my lovely wife and I herded the whole bunch from the garden back into the brooder, where they're at least out of the wind and wet. It looks as though it will warm back up a bit, at which time I'll likely herd them all back to the garden for as long as possible before I go over the ground with the tractor (I hope - unless it's too wet or the ground freezes).


Turkeys love chard, but who doesn't?


Shivering turkeys! It's snowing!

Crash and Harvest

As the season wound down, so did my computer. My hard drive gave up the ghost after only 9 months. Warranty replaced it, but not all that data. I don't have any particular attachment to most of what was on the hard drive, but I am quite upset about losing a season's photos and journal entries. I'm both angry at my computer and at myself for not diligently backing up my data. I'm searching for the lesson in all this (like, technology bad, simplify your life, etc.), but unfortunately, I think the lesson is, back up your data.

Despite that setback, the farm rolls on through its 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th frost. The turkeys continue to gobble, and Courtney and I have stored away the potatoes, onions, and winter squash. The emmer has been harvested and sits in the back of the truck in the quonset, safely out of the rain.

Actually, the emmer harvest was emblematic of all the support we've received our first year, especially from our close friends and family. My good neighbor (who picked up my lentils) was unable to slip away from his farm to pick up my emmer with his combine. So I called on my father-in-law Clyde, who does custom cutting for some of his neighbors. Saturday, after our final farmers' market, we met at his place, along with Court's brother, wife, and son. The caravan was as follows: Court in our pickup, Renee in hers, me in Clyde's pickup, flagging for the combine, Clyde in the combine, and Steve in the truck. We all worked to clean out the combine and truck, and it wasn't long before the combine picked up all the swathed emmer, dumped it into the truck and my 15-acre field's season was over.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some data to back up.


Steve and Sam put the truck together and clean it out.


I cleaned out the combine, happy for all the help we had.


And we're off.


The pickup header sweeps the swathed emmer into the machine.


The emmer in the combine bin.


Dumping...


Dumped.

Breaking Bread

White lentils, Painted Mountain Indian corn, heritage spring wheat, whole wheat sourdough bread, and shocks of two varieties of heritage spring wheat grown on the Farm.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the heritage and ancient grains we're growing on Prairie Heritage Farm and how we might market them. It's one thing to simply love growing something, but if this farm business is to be a reality, the other side of the equation is figuring out how to sell what you love to grow.

Since we had a killing frost this past week, our farmers' market table had some room on it. I have been considering baking whole wheat sourdough bread from the grain we're growing on the Farm for quite a while, and so I thought I'd test the waters this past weekend.

I baked 4 loaves of bread, though with store-bought organic Montana wheat since our grain hasn't been harvested or cleaned yet. I offered customers samples and asked them if they liked it, and if they'd ever buy loaves of it in 2010. Most said yes, they liked it, and yes they'd buy loaves. Good enough for me. About 15 minutes before the farmers' market was over, a family came up for a sample and asked if they could buy the display loaf (the prettiest one). Sold. (And so begins my other career as a baker? Anybody want to spot me for a stone grain mill, a floor mixer, a proofing cabinet, and a masonry oven?)

Another idea we have is to sell whole grains at the farmers' market. People could buy lentils or spring wheat, or whatever else we might have, by the pound. A nice addition would be freshly ground flour from our wheat, but then we run into food processing regulations which would require specific infrastructure that we may not be able to afford. We may have to look into it.

Finally, we'd like to create a grain and seed CSA, where after an up front payment in the spring, customers receive 100-200 pounds of grains and seeds in the fall. We would focus on crops and varieties that aren't readily available, such as heirloom dry beans, heritage spring wheats, ancient grains, white lentils, and Indian corn. I tried growing small plots of amaranth, quinoa, and teff, but I have a ways to go before I figure out how to grow them commercially. This idea of a grain CSA is not a new one. I know of programs in California, Canada, and New England, and I'm sure there are others.

The different varieties of ancient and heirloom grains and seeds are numerous, and if we are able to just scratch at the surface of our agricultural heritage, then we maintain the possibility of diverse tastes, all highly nutritious, and we keep our breeds and seeds vital.

FIRST FROST!

Sad, droopy summer squash.

Milk Thistle

Blooming milk thistle.

Milk Thistle is one of the "alternative" crops we're growing on Prairie Heritage Farm. "Alternative" in this case means the alternative to wheat, barley, and corn, making it pretty easy to grow something that is alternative.

Milk thistle seed is used to improve liver function. I've eaten whole and find it nutty with a slightly bitter aftertaste. I've heard of some people putting it into tea and some grinding it and sprinkling it on any number of things.


Thousands of ladybugs crawl over the heads helping me with the aphids.

The plant looks an awful lot like a couple of noxious weeds around here: bull thistle and Canada thistle. Noxious it's not, though. It's a beautiful plant that has broad spiky leaves splashed with white (hence the "milk" in the name) with large purple blossoms. It has spikes from the top to the bottom, though, and harvesting entails dressing up in armor since the plant will poke through denim or any other similarly wimpy material - like kevlar.



As the blossoms dry out and the seeds (attached to little parachutes) start to emerge, I walk through the patch and cut those heads. So far I've been cutting every other day, but soon, I think, I'll be cutting every day. I've heard of people using their big combines to cut milk thistle, but in doing so, you have to determine the optimal moment when the most are mature and cut them all down at once. By hand cutting (which I can get away with on 1/10 of an acre of the stuff), I only cut those heads that are ready and let the others mature.



The seed with its parachute still attached.

The Combine and the Scythe

I've purchased two pieces of harvesting equipment this season that couldn't be farther apart in the history of gathering grain. I bought a late 1960s International 503 combine from a neighbor, and a scythe with a design that is 100s of years old. It's funny, but the combine is a modern piece of equipment yet it's over 40 years old, and my scythe is an old-world implement but the one I have is brand new.

I bought the combine after messing with the farm's combine, a Gleaner G, for a while and putting a few hundred dollars into it (even before getting it started, which hasn't happened yet). My father-in-law told me about this International and I had to decide whether I should continue to sink money into the Gleaner to get it started and very likely discover other issues with it once it ran, or to drop a few hundred dollars for the International (it was being offered for $500) which already starts, and fix the things I already know need fixing. I ended up buying the International for $350. I had to overhaul the carburetor and I'll need to replace one belt, fix a leaky hydraulic cylinder, and replace some reel bats. I figure I'm way ahead of the game than I would be with the Gleaner. I may still tinker with the Gleaner - I've already replaced a tire, patched a bullet hole in the gas tank, and overhauled the carburetor - but I can relax and do it at my leisure (of which, of course, I have an abundance).


International 503 combine.

That's the story of the combine. And now the story of the scythe. As on any farm, there are quite a few overgrown patches of grass and weeds and in particular, a large population of bull thistle and milk weed on the canal bank. I took the farm's large American scythe (an important distinction which I will explain in a bit) and tried to whack at the thistle, but quickly realized I would be there all day and sore and crippled by the end of it. I ended up cutting them down with the loud and obnoxious weed whacker with a brush blade attached. Knowing there are plenty of overgrown areas on the farm that I'll need to deal with, but not looking forward to the noise and vibration of the weed whacker, I did some research on scythes and discovered there are two types: the American and the European. Now, I prefer many things European over their American counterparts (namely coffee and bread), but I'm by no means Eurocentric and don't think ALL things European are better (with my nose in the air), but when it comes to scythes, there's no comparison. The American scythe is a large, cumbersome thing with a heavy snath (shaft) and a blade that's been stamped in a drop-forge press and ground sharp on a high-speed grinding wheel. The European version is lightweight with a blade that's been hammered to a fine cutting edge. To sharpen it, you hammer the steel out thin and hone the edge with a whetstone.


European scythe.

The American scythe is better in one regard: it looks far more wicked and cool than the European scythe.


American scythe.

I have two blades for my scythe: a ditch blade and a grass blade. The ditch blade is shorter and wider, so it can cut through thick weeds and even some very small saplings. The grass blade is longer to cut slender grass, hay, and grain. I have four 1/4 acre plots of ancient and heritage grains. Though the International is small by comparison to modern combines (20-foot header vs. 35-foot header), it's way too big for a little 1/4-acre plot. I do have access to plot combine (like ones used at experiment stations), but it's not running properly and I haven't had the time to mess with it. So I'm considering harvesting at least one of my plots with my scythe, hand-binding stalks into bundles and stacking into shocks.

First, though, I had to build a grain cradle. A grain cradle is a device that attaches to the blade and snath of the scythe the keeps the grain facing the same direction when the scythe is swept across the field. Without it, the grain falls into a pile with the heads facing all different directions. The cradle catches the grain as it cuts it, and drops it in a pile all with the heads facing the same way, so when it's bound, one doesn't have to individually orient each stalk of grain.


Grain cradle.

Traditionally, harvesting was done with a lot of help and was one of many community-oriented events. I'm not sure I can pull that off around here (yet), but after this year, you can be sure I'll be working on getting more people involved in the drudgery on Prairie Heritage Farm.

As I travel through this first year of farming, I find myself constantly looking forward (what do I want to try to grow next? how will I market and sell it? can we make a living? how will I incorporate more animals? what size utility tractor do I need to cultivate row crops and pull a small drill? how will I afford it?), while reaching into the past to discover so many wonderful ideas and techniques that have been shoved behind us in our mad dash into the more "efficient" and "better" future.

What's been interesting, though, is I've developed a deeper understanding for why we headed the direction we did. I'm also better understanding our relationship to time and how that affects what we do or don't do on the farm. Both are topics for another post on another day.

Swathing Lentils

I swathed the lentils last week. Lentils are poor weed competitors and mine didn't come up as thick as I'd planted them, so there was a wide diversity of weeds to fill the gaps. Nobody can say my field was a monocrop, that's for sure. Even though the lentils are dry, there was so much green material in the field, I had to swath it all so it could dry out. Once it's all dried out, I'll go back in and pick up the windrows with a combine that has a pick-up header attachment. Actually, my very helpful neighbor (who I borrowed the swather from), will likely pick up my lentils with his combine since the combines I have available aren't ready yet - more on that in a blog post coming soon.


The roller on the back packs the windrow down just a bit so it doesn't blow away.


Cutting.


The finished field. So nice and tidy.

Hey now, humm-a-na humm-a-na, SOLD!

That tractor went for $32,000.

I went to a farm auction a couple of weeks ago in Shelby. It was the first I'd ever been to. I had my eye on a Versatile swather and a Gleaner M combine. A neighbor farmer thought the Gleaner might for for $500. That's incredible when you consider a relatively new combine might cost a farmer upwards of $300,000 these days.

From the beginning, I could see that auctions are a whole subculture (or maybe simply a culture) all their own. It was mostly old men, I'm guessing farmers. There were even people there that brought folding chairs who set them up in front of the auctioneer while he yammered off a piece of equipment, folding them up when he finished, and setting them up in front of the next item to be auctioned off. My friend and fellow organic farmer Russ was there. He's been to quite a few auctions in his time, so I hung out with him and asked him lots of questions.

All the little things were auctioned off first, then in the afternoon they got to the machinery and when it came time for the swather, my heart jumped and I got really nervous. The auctioneer started the bidding at $200 and I almost rose my hand, but decided to wait and see what would happen.

This is usually the way an item would get sold: the auctioneer would say, "Let's start this at $200." Then he'd go into his high-speed rambling with the next bid squeezed in between some rapid speech. Some old farmer would wave his arm or shout, then another would do the same, and they'd be off. After that the auctioneer would simply look back and forth between the two who would be nodding ever so slightly, the price climbing by $5 or $10 on the smaller items and $25 or $100 on the bigger ones. Eventually, one guy would shake his head no and the other guy would get the item. Occasionally a third or fourth person would jump in, especially if someone dropped out, but mostly each item would quickly shake out to two people.

As most of the other items went, so went the swather. A couple old men started going back and forth on my swather and it wasn't long before it was more than I wanted to spend. It went for $750 which is probably a screaming deal since it also came with a conditioner and a grain header (which was pretty beat up), but I chickened out and I'm probably better off for it.

The Gleaner M I was eyeing went for a song: $300. The header was all torn apart, but everything else looked pretty good. One thing that I wondered while I was considering some of these pieces of machinery was, how do you get these things home? What if I ended up with the swather? What about the combine? I don't know. Bid on a big flatbed semi, I guess.

It was a full day that I walked away empty-handed from, but what a scene. I wish I'd at least made the opening bid on my swather, but if I'm in this farming game long enough, I'll have plenty of opportunity to get into a nodding match with some old farmer.

Of Mice and Men and Weed Seeds

My new friend - notice the blood rushing to its head.

The mouse saga continues, but good news, as I see it. First a little backup. I attended a farm tour in Big Sandy and a handful of Montana State U. profs were talking about their research. Though not part of his research, one mentioned hearing of a study of small mammals and the weed seed banks in farm fields. Apparently, small mammals (such as mice) are wonderful allies in the elimination of weed seeds. One field in the study saw an 80% decrease in the weed seed bank due to small mammals.

What this requires, of course, is good mouse habitat of diverse grasses on the field edges or in unproductive fields. Though it appears I'm already providing good habitat for mice, it's obviously not in the right places. The researcher cautioned spilling crop seed, otherwise the small mammal will eat that and be satiated.

The first thing I did when I got back to the Farm was pull all the traps from the greenhouse and the turkey brooder and set a live trap in their place. It didn't take long before I had my first mouse which I took to the far southeast corner of my lentil/emmer field where I let it go and told it to get to work.


Lydia inspects the trap and wishes she could check out the inside.

AERO Ag Task Force Meeting

The Vegetable Field at the end of July.

The Farm will host an AERO Ag Task Force meeting Friday, September 25. I mention it now so you can mark your calendars. AERO is the Alternative Energy Resources Organization based out of Helena, Montana. This is the organization's 35th year of developing sustainable solutions and building strong communities with their work in renewable energy and regenerative agriculture. I'm in my second year of serving on the board.

The Ag Task Force is a forum for AERO members to discuss issues regarding food and farming. September's meeting will include conversations on raw milk policies in Montana, foodshed mapping, and a Food and Ag Blueprint. If anybody has issues they'd like to discuss at the meeting, leave a comment on this blog post or call the AERO office at 406-443-7272.

Stay tuned for more details leading up to the meeting. Hope to see you there!