Howard's Farm

Howard's Farm from Ivan Cash on Vimeo.

Hoosiers Still Can't Figure Out Clocks

Pacific Standard:

So what makes certain parts of Indiana likely to dissent? The state’s refusal to adopt a single time zone is easier to explain: Much of the state wants to be on Eastern Time, the time zone of Wall Street and of nearby Louisville and Cincinnati, but its western corners are metropolitan areas that draw on neighbors (Chicago and the Evansville tri-state area) who observe Central Time, so it splits the difference.
DST, though, is more complicated. The way that DST messes with time is to take the summer months and dislocate their noons from the sun: The “springing forward” pulls noon an hour (or more, depending on your location) before the sun’s highest point, whereas the “falling back” restores the natural match. This can mean that, come June, if you’re far West in a time zone, the sun won’t reach its highest point until, say, 2:00 p.m. If you’re a farmer, that distortion robs you of good working time. And one of the farming regions that’s farthest west in a U.S. time zone, and so most likely to lose the most agricultural working time to DST, is the Eastern Time part of Indiana.
For Indiana farmers like Laverne Stoll, who plants beans and makes hay in Loogootee while also working part-time at Graber Post Supply in nearby Montgomery, a 2 p.m. solar noon can throw off the whole system. “It can be a certain time on the old Standard Time, and we think we should be putting up hay,” Stoll says, “but the dew’s still on the ground, and it just throws us back and throws off the whole schedule of things.” And it was because of objections like Stoll’s that, through 2005, much of Indiana declined to participate in DST.

That whole argument that farmers get screwed by daylight savings time makes farmers sound really dumb.  I mean, without daylight savings time, sunrise would be at about 5:20 am, instead of 6:20, while sunset would be at 8:15 pm instead of 9:15.  There is no loss of working time.  My old neighbor Woodie used to frequently bitch about daylight savings time screwing farmers (he also claimed that Allis-Chalmers gas tractors were more fuel efficient than John Deere diesels).  I never pointed out that it didn't make any difference.  Does it matter if I get into the house at 9:00 or 10:00, or if the alarm goes off at 4 or at 5?  No, so please pipe down, or tell the reporter that daylight savings time makes it really hard to go snipe hunting or cow tipping.  Don't make farmers sound ignorant of basic arithmetic.

A Lazy, Hazy Evening

After a long weekend and Monday side dressing corn and baling hay, I'm sitting on the porch this evening, poking around the internet on my laptop and listening to the Reds game on grandma's crank-powered radio, which was acquired to ensure she could listen to The Truckin' Bozo on WLW after society collapsed because computer programmers were too lazy to upgrade code to grapple with the turn of the century.  Now we've got all our spring work done, and since we've still got a couple of weeks to get ready to run my obligatory field of wheat, I figured I could take an evening off.  Plus, it's too hot to do anything but sweat your ass off.  I just happened to notice that June is already half over, and I now realize that those crazy old bastards really were right when they talked about how quickly time passes.  Now all those damn fool kids look at me like I'm nuts when I tell them the same thing.  Don't worry, whippersnappers, you'll be saying the same thing when I'm dead and gone.

Storytelling Foul

I was telling a Woodie story last night, and forgot one of the best parts, the cliffhanger.

The story was one I heard Woodie tell a couple of times, and it was set at a land auction.  This farm was selling, and one of the main bidders was some hillbilly, seemingly straight out of the hollow, wearing bib overalls with tobacco juice dripping off of his chin.  The auctioneer kept mentioning to the guy that the winning bidder would have to put down a 10% payment at the close of the auction, because he didn't think the guy had a pot to piss in.  The guy would acknowledge that and keep bidding.  Finally, he got the winning bid and told his wife to go out to the car grab the milk can.  So his wife went out to the car and brought back the milk can.  The guy opened it up, and it was empty.  He told his wife that she grabbed the wrong one, so she went back out and got another one.  He opened it up, and pulled out enough cash to buy the farm outright.

When I told this story, I left out the whole part with the wrong milk can, and jumped straight to the cash filled one.  That's why I'm not nearly as good of a storyteller as Woodie.

Bock Is Back

I picked up some Christian Moerlein Emancipator Doppelbock yesterday, so I'm sure spring is on the way.  The days are getting longer, the national groundhog predicted spring is coming, spring training and Lent start next week, and now the doppelbock is in stores.  At this time of year, even I get optimistic.  That is one powerful season.

One of my favorite stories from my old neighbor Woodie was about how he would help out a plumber in the winter to make some extra money during the downtime on the farm.  His boss did a lot of work for the Lange brewery in Piqua, but he tried to time it so that it mainly occured during the time the brewery was making bock beer.  They would just walk through the brewery with tin cups, and there were kegs tapped in almost every room.  Sounds like a pretty good job.

More On The Four Crop Rotation

NYT (via Big Picture Agriculture):

My uncle Everon, who died last summer, farmed the home place when I was growing up. He would have been surprised to learn that he was following the principles of an early 18th-century agricultural experimenter named Charles Townshend, who, apart from his fascination with turnips, was every inch a viscount. Townshend’s discovery — borrowed from Dutch and Flemish farmers — was that crops grow better, with fewer weeds and pest problems, if they are rotated in a careful sequence.

Townshend’s rotation — like the ones George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used — included clover, wheat, other small grains and turnips, which made good winter food for sheep and cattle. My uncle grew no turnips, but he, like all his neighbors, was using his own version of the four-crop system, at the heart of which was alfalfa.

Getting to the four-crop rotation wasn’t easy, historically speaking. The Romans knew about crop rotation, but by the Middle Ages, farming was based on the practice of letting the land lie fallow, unplanted — resting it, in other words. The purpose of that practice, like crop rotation itself, is to prevent the soil from becoming exhausted when the same crop is sown over and over again. In early American agriculture, only sophisticated farmers like Washington and Jefferson were using crop rotations in their fields. There was simply too much good land available. It was too easy to farm a piece and then move on when the soil was depleted.

I'm going with three crops on my main farm, with a long-term field of alfalfa on the side.  I haven't figured on sowing hay into the wheat, yet.  Those double crop beans are just too tempting.

Revisiting Crop Rotation

Wired:

Liebman, inspired in part by a pioneering Iowa farmer named Dick Thompson, wanted to bring integrated pest management back, but augmented with technology’s new tools. On 22 acres at Marsden Farm, his team planted three plots with different rotations of crops. The first followed a two-year rotation, alternating between corn and soybeans, as is customary in the region. It was managed the usual way, with lots of chemicals.
For the second plot, the researchers rotated over three years between corn, soy and oats, with red clover planted in winter. The clover, which absorbs atmospheric nitrogen, was planted between crop rows and plowed under as soil-replenishing “green manure” in spring. On another plot, instead of red clover the researchers planted a fourth-year crop of alfalfa, which can be used to feed livestock. The animals’ manure came back as fertilizer.
On these fields, the researchers still used herbicides and pesticides, but not the usual way. Rather than spraying them routinely over large areas, Liebman’s team applied them only when necessary. “We use low-dose products in the smallest quantities possible,” he said. “We’re not against their use. What we’re arguing for is using them as carefully deployed tactical options.”
Liebman called these applications “therapeutic measures.” Therapy wasn’t often needed. Having different crops with different life cycles made it harder for weeds to grow. What might flourish among corn and soy, for example, was disrupted by oats. When red clover and alfalfa were mowed, weeds were chewed up before they flowered. As for insect problems, low pesticide use, along with habitat provided by cover crops, allowed pest-eating bugs and birds to flourish.
After eight years, Liebman and Davis used eight times less herbicide in the three- and four-year rotations than in the conventional plot, they report in the new study. Ecotoxicity in surrounding water was two orders of magnitude lower. Thanks to clover and alfalfa, the experimental plots also used 86 percent less synthetic fertilizer.
Most important of all, the experimental plots were as productive as the conventional.

My old neighbor Woodie ran a four crop rotation almost his entire life.  My neighbor up the road uses corn, soybeans, wheat followed by hay, which he pastures in the fall and winter, chops in the spring, then tears up and plants corn which he chops or picks.  The problem with implementing such a rotation in many places is that most farmers don't want to do all that work, and don't want to have the livestock around to provide the manure.

The Catalpas Are Blooming

Well, Woodie's later sign that it's corn planting time is now here.  I don't think I'd wait this long to get started, but the yield on some of the corn planted in June last year was good enough to convince me that this isn't too late to plant.  Some guys who didn't start planting last year until June, and harvested in February were able to out yield our May planted and October harvested corn.  Every year is different, and every section is different.

The Future Of Farming

With climate change and other issues, it looks very challenging (h/t Big Picture Agriculture):

Back to the table: The clinking of knives and forks accompanied brief discursions on biochar (use charcoal in your soil and other handy tips from the 1800s), climate change (weird weather is upon us), and the soil crisis (20 kilograms of topsoil are lost for every 25 kilograms of corn produced in this country). The rivers of America run brown with our patrimony while farmers are enserfed to big business, while employing legions of actual serfs to service their fields, according to several of the speakers at the conference.
In fact, ethical conundrums abound when it comes to food. How to reconcile stewardship of the planet and the moral imperative to provide better food (and nutrition!) to the billions starving? How to reconcile a lifestyle founded on getting fat and a need to convince others not to widen their own girths? The central tenet of the discussion: this doesn’t have to be a conflict, technology can save us from having to choose, whether through genetically modified crops or lab grown meat. But the cow cells grown in culture still have to eat something as well as nourish. So how do we convince others to eat less meat while still enjoying a nice steak?
Setting those social quandaries aside for a moment, there are at least six other major challenges facing agriculture in the 21st century, according to farmer Fred Kirschenmann, president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Those are: climate change, depleting natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, mining soil, aging farmers, and the end of cheap energy. As it stands, modern farming relies on a stable climate, endless supplies of fertilizers and water as well as being “enormously dependent on energy,” Kirschenmann noted at the conference. “It takes 10 kilocalories of energy for every calorie of food we produce. It’s the least efficient system we’ve ever had.”

I have a feeling, things will be much different if I live to be as old as my neighbor Woodie.  He saw us go from real horse power to tractors.  Hopefully, I won't see us go the other way.

Ways Woodie Was Ahead of His Time

There were at least a few ways in which Woodie was ahead of the agricultural curve.

First, he was a no-till farmer from the late sixties on.  He got in on no-till the first time it came along, and he stayed with it, even with his four crop rotation.  At the same time, he switched to 20 inch corn and soybeans.  So when Marion Calmer was building his 20 or 22 inch corn head in the late '90s, Woodie was using his 30 year-old 20 inch corn head manufactured by Gleaner. 

Woodie also told me time and time again that he'd been saying for years that farmers needed to boost the corn seeding rates and cut their bean populations.  The rest of the world has come around to his conclusion. 

Lange's Brewery

Today at work, somebody mentioned the Lange family, which ran a Coca-Cola bottling plant in the city of Piqua back in the fifties and sixties.  I mentioned that before they ran the Coke plant, they had a brewery at the site.  That reminded me of one of my favorite Woodie stories of all time. 

He told me that when he was young, he would assist a local plumber in the winter to make extra money.  He said his favorite job was when they would work at the Lange Brewery.  According to Woodie, they carried tin cups around with them all day when they worked there, and in every room they went into, there would be a keg tapped.  They could just fill up their cups whenever they wanted.  He further told me that the plumber always waited until the late winter/early spring time frame to work at the brewery, so that there would be bock beer on tap when they were there.  I think that other than on the farm, this was Woodie's favorite place he ever worked.

I have to admit, that does sound like a pretty enjoyable workplace.

The Honeysuckle Is Blooming

According to Woodie, now is the time to plant corn.  I guess we got done just a little bit early.  I probably ought to check the phase of the moon, also.  Apparently, we're supposed to plant under a waxing moon.  Hey, that's good too.  We missed the perfect time.  Damn it.

Things Woodie Told Me That I Didn't Believe

A short list:

Allis Chalmers gasoline tractors were more fuel efficient than John Deere diesels. (Woodie hated John Deeres, and had a WD-45, two D-14s a D-17 and a Gleaner combine, along with a Case 930 (maybe) Comfort King)

The EPA forced all coke oven operators out of business in the United States, and we imported most of our coke from Canada. (I don't know how much coke we import, but there have been coke ovens in operation my whole life in Middletown, where I believe Woody lived at one point in his childhood)

 That the Kentucky hay hauler sold Woodie's July first cutting hay to race horse owners.  As the neighbors called it, Woodie's elephant hay could only have been sold to guys with brood cows.  There were weed stems as big around as my finger in that stuff.

That Ohio would continue to go down the tubes unless it passed a right-to-work law to pummel unions.  With the current Republican governor and legislature, we might find out if that's true.  Or we could watch what happens with the hicks next door in Indiana, who just passed the law.  This was another theme which our lean consultant was yapping about.  I don't know if it has anything to do with lean manufacturing, but I think that dude watches a lot of Fox News, which really seems to screw up a person's bullshit detector.

That a nursing mom drinking a beer each night would increase milk production.  In truth, he attributed this to a German lady who told his mother that if she drank a beer every night she'd have enough milk to feed the baby, give some to the cat and squirt a little in her husband's coffee.  But then he followed that up by saying his mother followed the woman's advice and drank a beer every night, and they were very good-sized little kids.

Another story attributed to German neighbors (which I believe they would say) was that a person shouldn't drink cold water, because it would kill them.  He always followed it up by saying, "but they sure liked their beer cold."  I believe that story was real, but I, like Woodie, didn't believe that cold water would kill a person.

Woodie On Planting Corn

As long as I knew him, Woodie didn't get in a big hurry to get the crops in.  Of course, since I first met him when he was 72, this might not be extremely surprising.  Woodie followed a four crop rotation on his farm, which consisted of four fields, so every year he had one corn field, one soybean field, one wheat field and one hay field, with the rotation of each field following that order.  Each field was about 30 acres, so when he made hay, he cut a third of the field at a time, usually about a week apart.  At that time, he was usually making first cutting hay in late June or early July.  It wasn't very pretty.  One year, I spent four weekends in a row at Woodie's, the first weekend baling hay, the second weekend was straw, followed by two more weekends of hay.  One or two years in his early 80s, he actually made a couple of cuttings of hay.  It was kind of like he got a second wind or something.

Anyway, when it came to planting corn, Woodie had two sayings.  The first one was that the best time for planting corn was when the honeysuckle was blooming, the time frame of which seems to vary, but generally seems to be around mid-May.  His other saying was that the best time was when the Catalpa trees flowered, which is usually around Memorial Day or early June  (I can remember the Catalpa blooms because our parochial school would walk to the park for field day during the last week of school, and I remember picking up one of the Catalpa flowers and trying to take it home to give to my mom because I thought it was so beautiful.  Yeah, I was a sappy kid).  I wasn't sure if somebody would have to choose between the two for which to follow, or if it had transferred from Catalpas to honeysuckle as later maturity corn hybrids came along and farmers started planting earlier and earlier.  Anyway, there are years like last spring where we might end up planting in those time frames due to the weather, but our family's current target starting time is the week of tax day.  Some of the bigger farmers are moving in late March if the weather is right.  Woodie would scoff at those guys (and us).

Also, I saw this on facebook, and immediately thought of Woodie, even though it was posted because another local farmer used to drink Goebel so nobody, especially his kids, would steal his beer:

Woodie's Coal Furnace

One day when I was at Woodie's house, he went down to the basement to tend to his furnace.  I followed along.  The furnace was an old coal furnace.  It was a big old forced air furnace, much like the ones I saw at UD ghetto houses, those having been converted from coal to natural gas.  Woodie had a small stoker hopper, which was a little bigger than a telephone pedestal.  Between that and the main furnace was an auger which fed the coal to the burner grate.  He took a shovel and scooped a couple loads into the hopper from the coal pile in the corner.  After that, he opened a door on the furnace and took a poker and poked around the clinkers ans ash, then scooped them out and threw them in a bucket.  He let that sit outside for a while, then he took the bucket out to the barn bank and dumped the cinders in the wheel tracks. 

Back in the '30s and '40s, he had run a route driving a truck down to southern Ohio to a mine to pick up loads of coal, then bring it back to sell to people locally.  He mentioned once in a while how terrible those company towns were, and how badly the workers got ripped off by the company.  That never caused him to support a union, though, at least not that I can remember.  He always swore that Ohio would always be bad off until it became a right-to-work state.  I still doubt that that would have any impact.  Anyway, the year before I saw the furnace, he had gone down south with his grain truck and picked up a load of coal.  If I remember correctly, it cost him $750 for the coal, and he thought it would last about 3 years.  I believe that once he burned that coal up, he decided that it was a good time to get a propane furnace.  I think it was too much work for an 87-year-old to be going up and down stairs every day to shovel in coal.  I was glad I got to see it before he got rid of it.

Woodie On The Depression

About eight years ago, the Dayton Daily News had a Christmas short story about a farm family on Christmas Eve during the Great Depression.  The father heard a noise or a dog bark, grabbed a shotgun and went out to investigate.  He found a neighbor trying to steal a chicken from the hen house.  The man broke down and told the farmer how his family was starving and he was trying to find some food for his children.  Even though the family was not well off, they shared what they had with the neighboring family and a valuable Christmas lesson was learned by all. 

I had gone over to Woodie's to drop off a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream as a Christmas gift.  He liked to drink that straight out of the bottle sometimes, or mix it in his coffee at other times.  He pointed out the story in the paper, and told me to read it.  After I did, he told me about how his brothers worked on a bridge crew for the WPA.  One day, one of the other guys on the crew didn't show up for work.  Later on, they found out the guy had been shot and killed when he attempted to steal a chicken from a neighbor's farm.  Woodie still couldn't get over the fact that a man was killed over a single chicken.  He said those were terribly hard times, and he hoped we'd never see days like them again.  I hope we never do either.

Woodie, An Introduction

It has been two years since my old neighbor died.  He was one of those rare characters you meet who makes life interesting.  I first met him when I was 16, and he wanted me to help out baling hay.  When I got over there, there were several guys I went to high school with also there to help.  Woodie happened to have a wire baler, and wanted all of the help to use hay hooks to handle the bales.  This was a skill which took me a while to learn.  Not only was I flinging the hook, missing the bale and hitting my leg, but I was nearly throwing out my back trying to lug the 60 or so pound bales.  I wasn't worth a cup of spit that day as baling help, as I needed to grow some more to be very worthwhile.  I also wasn't up for one of the major perks of baling for Woodie, which was the free beer provided during the day.  Mom would have seriously frowned on me drinking at that time, so I passed.  But after we finished each load, or sometimes if a bale broke and we had to feed the broken bale back through the baler, Woodie would get off of the tractor, offer us a drink of water or a can of beer, and start telling us a story about the olden days.  The guys I worked with hated the stories, because they just drug out the work day.  They had things to do after we got done, and wanted to get out of there.  I, on the other hand, didn't.  I found the stories to be fascinating, and the break from the labor helped me catch my breath.  Over the next 15 years or so, I heard a very large number of stories, some of them a number of times, while drinking Goebel (Joe-Bell, the fine French lager) beer from the 1942 refrigerator out in the barn, which he and his wife had gotten when they got married.  In the future, I'll try to relate some of the stories and the things I learned about farming when farming was honest-to-God work.

An Old Job-Killing Technology

Derek Thompson:

Technology can kill jobs. Or, to put things more softly, it can replace certain jobs. Robot arms replace human arms in our factories. TurboTax does the work of tax preparers. We mourn the disappearance of these position even as we enjoy the most important consequence of the technologies, themselves: more useful goods and services at a lower price.
This is an article about an old job-killing technology. But the job that it made most obsolete wasn't the worker -- at least, not the kind of worker you're probably thinking of, nor the kind that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts. This is an article about how the mighty tractor killed the farm horse. But it's also a story about how innovation replaces us, and how the economy can get bigger, faster, and stronger, while also making us feel obsolete.
In 1910, 25 million horses and mules -- one for every four U.S. citizens -- could roam the nation's farmland mostly free from technological competition. The tractor had been invented decades earlier, but the contemporary models were either ridiculously big or ridiculously expensive. The first commercial gas-powered units, sold in 1902, weighed more than a male elephant ... and they weren't much more affordable, either.
But this is how innovation works. First, we make new things, and then we make those things cheaper. The price and size of tractors fell rapidly over the next decade. Introduced in 1917, Henry Ford's smaller, cheaper "Fordson" was the iPad of tractors: the definitive, consumer-friendly genre-busting technology that immediately dominated a formerly desolate market. Round after round of new technologies -- power lifts, rubber tires, diesel engines -- eventually established a dominant model that made the 1940s the decade of the tractor.
That decade spelled the end of the farm horse.

 I remember my old neighbor telling me about when his family traded in their team of horses on an Allis-Chalmers tractor. He was still pretty emotional about it.  For a second there, I was puzzled, why would a dealer take horses on trade for a tractor.  Then I remembered that farmers always have to trade in equipment, because then they think they are getting a deal.  Plus, the dealers didn't want to break it to the folks that the horses were worthless.  Better to take $20 off the price of the tractor than to break the farmer's heart.

That reminds me, I still need to write a post or two about that old neighbor.  In the next couple of weeks, I will.