Tag Archives: fossil fuel

Fossil Fuels and Haymaking

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“With tossing and raking, and setting on cocks, Grass lately in swathes, is hay for an ox: That done, go and cart it, and have it away, the battle if fought, ye have gotten the day.” Thomas Tusser

Haymaking is a battle, a war with time and nature, a struggle whose sole aim is to make “all flesh grass”. We no longer live a village life, an Amish life or a life with any real community where work is shared. Our farm workers now are the accumulated stores of long dead plant life burned as fossil fuels that power the equipment.

One man, with practice, can manually cut an acre of hay per day, rake an acre of hay per day, rick an acre of hay per day. That is steady physical labor, all day, for days on end, for the simple goal of having enough forage to feed his animals during the winter months.

Fortunately or unfortunately I do not have that type of stamina or time to devote to the manual cutting of hay. Instead we have a 45 horsepower Kubota tractor with all of the necessary implements.

45 horsepower: think about that for a minute, the power of 45 horses harnessed by one man for any number of tasks. Remarkable! We all use machines of such incredible power but so seldom reflect on what the power represents if absent from our lives. Absent and the center cannot hold, as Mr. Yeats wrote. Absent and we do not want to imagine the changes in store, cannot imagine.

This seasons first haymaking was fairly uneventful. On a fair Wednesday evening I hooked up the ancient disc mower to the aforementioned Kubota and began cutting hay. A soothing, methodical process of moving up and down the field cutting the fescue and clover at ground level, mowing is a great time to think. Six acres cut in three hours.

The following evening I tedded the field. Ted is an old English word meaning to spread hay out to dry. In the 19th century a machine was designed to spread hay out and was called a tedder. The tedder I use is my four wheel hay rake. An ingenious piece of equipment, ground driven (instead of “PTO”) I ted by changing the directions of the wheels. Instead of all four wheels pulling hay to a single windrow they work against each other and toss the hay around on the ground. This action speeds up the drying time. Time spent tedding six acres was two hours. Done by hand? Six days.

Friday afternoon I took off from work and raked the fields. Using the wheel rake it took two hours to rake six acres into windrows. It was easy work, with a real sense of accomplishment when completed.

Saturday: I woke early to find the sky heavy with clouds. The forecast had moved the incoming rain from late Saturday night to early afternoon. #%$&! A mad scramble to get the baler hooked up, tires inflated, chains greased, new twine installed and threaded through the machine. A quick trip to the co-op for some of that precious fossil fuel and I was ready to begin baling at 10. The first three hours were very slow. The dew still lay heavy on the dry hay causing the hay to jam the baling tines.

The round baler has revolving tines that pick up the hay and feed it into a chamber. Inside that chamber the hay begins to turn. As it turns it creates a round bale that measures four by four feet and weighs several hundred pounds. When the baler reaches capacity an alarm is triggered. I pull a rope that engages the twine which wraps around the bale securing the hay, a pretty nifty and simple action. A lever activated by hydraulic power raises the back of the baler depositing the bale on the ground. It looks like a large metal bird laying an egg.

Sometime between 12:30 and 1 the dew dried and the baler began cranking through the windrows. Loud, dirty and jarring, riding for hours on the tractor while baling the hay is not pleasant. Finally at 4 in the afternoon, the rain still holding off, the baler squeezed out the last bale and I turned to home. Six acres of hay baled in six hours.

Four inches of rain fell on the farm the next 24 hours. A lot of work to get the forage we need to feed the cattle this winter.

But, it could be worse without fossil fuel…indeed, much, much worse.

….From the archives

Reading this weekend: Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: how human values evolve by Ian Morris

Hogs, uncouth relatives and nannies

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It starts with the clang and rattle of a lid being removed from the feed barrel. A deep belch like rumble, like that of an uncouth relative rolls from the woods, answered by other noises, all gastric in tone. The hogs have awakened. From various locations in the woods, for they all seem to have their own special sleeping spaces, the sounds grow in volume and slowly converge near the gate. I’m still a couple of hundred yards away and unseen. But they know I’m there and impatiently wait until I round the corner swinging a five gallon bucket of feed in one hand.

The feed bucket contains the contents of 10 cans of food purloined from the picked over debris of Donald’s belongings. After we bought his old house we spent a day hauling the bits and clutter from his life to the dump. But the canned food, a few hundred cans worth, well that was worth saving. So each day for the past month I open and heat about ten cans of creamed corn, sauerkraut, carrots, black beans, northern beans, mustard greens, spinach, sweet potatoes, add about five pounds of shelled and cracked corn and slop into the trough, turning deep belches of hunger into grunts of contentment.

Simon Fairlie in his essential work Meat: a benign extravagance
has an interesting chapter titled “The plight of the pig in the nanny state” dealing with food waste due to excessive interference by an over protective bureaucracy. He touches on how a complex system of food waste collection from homes and businesses in Germany and Austria fed six million hogs a year. That is until forced to stop this practice by the E.U. in 2006 and move their production to commodity grains. The ostensible reason was the danger of feeding tainted swill to hogs that could pass on pathogens to humans. The reality was that their system produced statistically zero cases. Provided one follows basic food safety controls feeding slops to hogs is safe, useful and makes sense and has fed pigs for tens of thousands of years.

Instead the E.U. has moved to an expensive system of feeding an omnivore exclusively on grains: grains that could be used to feed people. Hogs have always been the companions of humans living off their excess waste. The timidity of the E.U. certainly had no impact on the third world. Predictably hog production in Europe has declined even as pork consumption has remained steady. China and other countries with less strict controls and perhaps scruples over food safety have filled that void. Shipping pork at a lower price for thousands of miles in container ships to a consumer that had a perfectly sound system of low cost production at hand…now, that makes perfect sense!

In a world of population overshoot, waste of food products seems senseless. Yet every day one hears or reads about the struggle of landfills in the modern world to deal with food waste. Some ingenious people come up with overly complex methods to turn it into compost, methane farms, etc. with high tech and high energy inputs. But the simple low cost method of feeding pigs that feed us is abandoned, except by the small farmer, in favor of subsidized grain production.

The age old “A pig is health” or “a pig pays the rent” are simple testaments to the enduring relationship between hogs and food security for thousands of years of human history. Sometimes a wheel does not need to be reinvented.

Speaking of wheels, the sun is starting to rise and soon our “uncouth relative” will be demanding attention out in the woods.