Category Archives: Farm Advice

This Farm’s Ten Commandments

Posted on by
5
  1. Care for your land, husband your charges, cultivate your gardens.
  2. Feed yourself from your farm.
  3. Share the bounty with your family and friends.
  4. Be methodical in your habits, leave room for joy, work with someone you love.
  5. Be a good neighbor by building and maintaining good fences.
  6. Farm thoughtfully, lightly, repair and heal your mistakes.
  7. Cover your costs.
  8. Buy as little off the farm as possible. Sell or give away what is unneeded.
  9. Be free with your advice to those who are starting out. But listen attentively to those with more experience.
  10. Make a profit. Yet make this the least of the other nine commandments.

Hire the Farm Kid

Posted on by
5

For many years and many times, both personally and professionally, I’ve given the offhand advice, “Hire the farm kid.” Sometimes it has been meant as a literal instruction, but at least as often it has been given as a more general recommendation to hire the person who has a history of family work. It could be the woman who as a child cleared tables, placed orders, and ran the register every evening and weekend at her family’s restaurant. Or the man who grew up cleaning boats at his father’s marina. The advice either way remains the same: Look for the person who learned a work ethic early and applied it often. The person who growing up wasn’t given the choice of whether to pull his or her weight is the one you want.

Incoming storm over the barn

Many have been the paid youth and volunteers to have worked on the farm. (Oh, Good Lord! springs most readily to mind.) The current Kid lives on a nearby farm and reports here every Saturday at 8:30 sharp. As part of our routine I always ask him how his week has been, how his morning has been. The latter is something that isn’t typically relevant except to the farm kid. On any given Saturday, this Kid has already been out weeding in the family garden, feeding the livestock, helping his older brother load a hog for market, all before showing up here to work some more.

Countless are the tasks that make it onto the average farm’s daily to-do list —a list, I should add, that isn’t constrained by hours in an eight-hour workday. Likewise, I ask as the Kid is leaving, what does he have on tap for the rest of the day? More often than not, his post-work chores includes mowing the yard, cleaning the barn stalls, inspecting his bee colonies….

The ethic of the farm-raised youth came to mind recently as I waited for the Kid to show up to work. Historically, you would have grown up in a farm community and most of your peers would have had a similar work background. But today, when kids are coddled at home well into and past adulthood, what is it like for our Kid to get on the school bus and find common ground? When his list of chores to complete morning and evening run up against the latest video game or Tik Tok distraction of his peers, what goes through his mind?

So, I asked him what his friends thought of his farm life. He had at first little to say (not unusual: we were in the midst of tearing out overgrown brambles from a fence line). But after lunch, as we cleaned and put away our tools, he replied by relating a story from when he was much younger than his current age of 15:

When I was 8 a neighbor offered my dad half shares on his square bales if we’d pick them up in the field and store them in his barn. I couldn’t pick them up [They can weigh 50-75 pounds], so I rolled them down the hill to my brothers. It took us all day. The neighbor had two sons who were 16 and 18, and they never came out of the house to help. He said he couldn’t ever get them to work. I thought that was odd. But I felt pretty good to be able to do something they couldn’t.

Clearly, there is a difference between “a farm kid” and “a kid raised on a farm.” And so, my readers, my advice remains the same, “Hire the farm kid.” And if you have the opportunity, raise a farm kid.

………………………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, mapping the collapse of globalization (P. Zeihan)

Hollering for Home

Posted on by
5

No matter what kind of trouble a teenage boy might get into on a Friday night, he will be home in time to raid the fridge for a midnight snack. It is a plain and simple fact of nature. Home is where the stomach gets filled, as the adage goes (or should).

Apparently one of our guests gifted us this “farm helper” last night.

Of all the skills we have learned on the farm (and we have learned plenty in 22 years), among the first and most critical lessons in Husbandry 101 is the importance of hollering for dinner. Teach your livestock to come to feed and your life has been made much easier. Call them even when they’re confined to a barn. Let them associate your bellow with getting fed. They will love you for it.

Yes, stepping out into a field for the first time and hollering for cattle with neighbors in earshot makes you feel like a right idiot. Get over it. I have been with friends who struggled with controlling their livestock. The reason was clear. As the herd ran rampant over distant fields, they would stand in the barn doorway with a bucket and say “Here cattle, come here cattle” and shake the bucket like it was filled with feathers that were about to float away.

You can’t pussyfoot around — you have to call your livestock like you mean it. Start by getting them used to a little feed every day. When we first get a load of weanling pigs, we keep them confined for 24 hours. Each time they get fed, even though they are five feet away, we holler, “Here piggee, piggee, piggeeee!” (The classic “Sooey!” used to call pigs is said to derive from the Latin Suidae, the family that includes domestic hogs.)

Walking out to the barn at sunset and giving a holler, “Here chick, chick, chick!” then watching the chickens, heads down at a fast waddle, stream from all points of the compass. When you’re under the gun and required to treat a lamb for scours right now, shaking a bucket and blasting out a booming “Come on, girls, come on!” then having 50 ewes and lambs stampede toward you from 400 yards away. Those immediate responses to your call are more than just satisfying; they’re critical.

Pigs, though, are somewhat different. They will come running if still confined to their paddock. But if they have escaped, slightly different rules apply. They may, if hungry (and pigs, like boys, are almost always hungry), follow your cries and a bucket of feed back to home and hearth. Or they may ignore you. (In which case they will typically return overnight, homed in on the trough of feed … unless, of course, they don’t. See Big Sandy Callin’.) Regardless, recapture is more easily done when any stock have been handled and when they associate the sound of your distinctive call with safety and feed.

Last night several couples joined us for a St. Paddy’s dinner celebration. Shortly after arriving, one of the couples told us of a flock of sheep out on the road a couple of miles away. Cindy and the couple went to assist. Turns out, the farmer was out of state and unable to help. Twenty-odd lambs had already scattered every which direction, and only a flock of 8-10 greeted the three and one other neighbor. It was apparent those lambs had never been “called to dinner,” or even left their barnyard. How much more smoothly things would have gone if with a simple holler of “Come on, girls” and the rattle of a bucket they had turned toward home. As it were, after 40 minutes of coaxing lambs toward their barn half a mile away and vehicles stacking up on the country road, Cindy and guests turned and headed home for their own dinner, leaving the job in the hands of the newly gathered reinforcements to finish.

Was it a coincidence that we who had stayed at the farm had just stepped out on the porch and yelled, “Come on, Cindy, come on”?

………………………………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: Drink time! in the company of Patrick Leigh Fermor (D. Payas). A short memoir of time spent with PLF by his Spanish translator.

Living at 1.5 Speed

Posted on by
9

Newly harvested winter squash

“Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes and figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe.”—Epictetus

I enjoy boring people with the same punchline over and over. When asked how long it takes to make my gumbo (or a similar dish) I say, “Two years. A year to raise the hog to make the sausage, and two years for the rooster to mature, become useful at breeding, and then become even more useful for the pot.” The point, of course, is the same as that of Epictetus, one reinforced daily by farming, that small pleasures and life necessities take time. The process, the journey, if you will, is wed to the destination. One does not happen without the other. Be patient.

Some time back I was weeding in the garden with one of my apparently endless supply of nephews. We were chatting about reading books and listening to audiobooks, and he stopped me with a comment about his habit of listening to books at 1.5 times the speed of the normal recording. His reasoning was simple: he has limited time and an endless number of things he would like to listen to, so he speeds up the book so he can get on to the next one.

That comment, uttered as we yanked pigweed among the rows of tomato plants, has stuck with, and troubled, me ever since. Not because I think my nephew may be short-changing his experience while listening to whatever young adult schlock he has chosen to waste time on, but because his thinking so clearly encapsulates the zeitgeist of the millennium. That is, by putting one’s senses into overdrive, one can, even should, increase one’s experiences.

Perhaps it is our age difference. His life’s project is before him. Mine is clouded by the uncertain murk of a future too fast approaching, with a timeline of anywhere from another 32 years to … yikes, tomorrow. Regardless, his comment seemed emblematic, a touchstone, of our culture at large.

I sympathize (even as I do not comprehend) with a desire to experience more in life, to get more done. What I object to is the speed with which let us call them 1.5ers expect their experiences to wash over their lives like endless waves, skipping steps in a process that should be savored.

You cannot truly read a book without starting at page one and ending at the final word. Likewise, you cannot raise a child to be a responsible adult by concentrating only on years 2 and 13, cannot become a farmer by simply purchasing a parcel of land. Each act is an essential part of the play. Learning to see and experience the whole cycle, being patient for it, is part of the joy in living. Perhaps then, the lesson to be learned for those 1.5er moments in each of our lives is this: Those things we feel the need to rush are not worth pursuing. In leaving them unpursued, we allow more time for anticipating and then enjoying the ripened figs in the years we do have.

……………………………………………………………………………..

Reading this weekend: Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (C. Lasch) and What’s Wrong With the World (G.K. Chesterton)

Unsolicited: Advice to a Nephew on Starting a Farm

Posted on by
8

Livestock tanks double as a swimming pool

One of my nephews is in the process of buying a farm. This is the same somewhat directionally challenged nephew I wrote about in The Path We Take, so I figure any pearls of wisdom I can scatter along his chosen trail might be of use in marking his way.

Dear Nephew,
• Farming attracts fads like bare legs attract chiggers. There is No Magic Next New Thing to succeed. Go old school and care for your land, animals, and family, work hard, and be frugal.
• Ground yourself. Read anything by Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, and Joel Salatin.
• Arm yourself, reasonably. Shotgun, hunting rifle, .22 caliber — all have a place on the farm. You don’t need anything else unless you are preparing for your own Ruby Ridge. In which case, you should rethink your reasons for wanting to farm.
• Move to the country not to get away from people but to get closer to them. Prepare to have neighbors on whom you can rely, not just wave at.
• In that vein, start by helping others: Notify the nearby farmer when his cattle are heading down the road; better still, assist in putting them back in the field. Volunteer to lend a hand in butchering the neighbor’s deer or chickens. Join the old man across the lane when he’s picking up square bales.
• If you attend church, pick one that is part of the community.
• Buy a pickup truck, preferably a four-wheel drive. There’s no need to get a farm truck duded out with heated seats and sunroof. There’s also no need for a livestock trailer at first; just rent one at your nearest farmers co-op.
• Get an older tractor that you can repair and that has the power you need. You have the mechanical skills to keep it in good condition. An American-made 35-45 hp from the 1960s or ‘70s should serve you well.
• Raise what you like to eat. That applies to vegetables, fruit, and livestock. If celeriac, aronia berries, and emu meat are your go-to ingredients for a romantic dinner, then dive right in and raise them. If not, then make a new list.
• That said … one of the great joys of having a farm is to experiment with what you grow. Just cover the basics first, and consider these variables in your decisions: What do others in your area grow or raise? What does the land support? You wouldn’t invest in an olive grove in Minnesota, and you wouldn’t farm salmon in Louisiana.
• Plant fruit, nut, and shade trees as soon as you can afford it. Sow cover crops or oversow grass seed in your pastures, then fence, fence, and fence some more.
• Share your overabundant harvest. If you’re wanting to sell your bounty to others, think about this: Where is your market? It’s liberating to live three hours from the nearest large city, but who will buy what you produce? Begin putting together a list of outlets for possible customers.
• Treat what you raise with respect, and cook it with love. I know you are of sound Louisiana stock, but you also have been culinarily disadvantaged from a life spent in Texas. That is just a plain, undisputed fact. Which is to say, make gumbo every cold Saturday night and red beans and rice every Monday.
• Do not under any circumstances add miniature livestock. At best, minis are a fad; at worst, they will leave you starving when the shit hits the fan. A full-size pig provides a large amount of meat in an astonishingly short amount of time. Not so with pot-bellies. A farm is not a petting zoo. If you want an animal friend, get a dog.
• Learn to sketch. Start drawing site plans for fencing, outbuildings, orchards, gardens, treehouses. (Okay, maybe not treehouses, although you do need to allow for a little whimsy in your life.)
• Take pictures. Your farm will change daily.
• Farm tools are essential. Acquire these sooner rather than later: come-along, logging chain, post-hole digger, post setter, two pairs of fence pliers, chainsaw (or two or three), rock bar, gardening hoes, mattocks, sledgehammer, knives (pocket knives, boning knife, pruning knife, machete), pitchforks (five-tine, four-tine, and the precious, scarce, and most used, the three-tine).
• Buy a gas-powered generator or two. Living in a remote valley at the end of the utility line, you’ll need it sooner or later. A freezer full of meat without electricity is a sad, smelly business.
• Get very familiar with these terms: rotational grazing, green manure, grassfed, free range, organic food (or, as your great-grandparents called it, food), sheet mulching, fallow, hard work, Aspercreme.
• Contact your county extension agent. He can and will help. You don’t have to know everything.
• Work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to learn and execute smart resource management practices. From erecting a hoop-house to choosing which trees to cut in a woodlot, NRCS is one of the few federal agencies that help the small farm make improvements. Its services are not a handout — you do the work, and in return you get expert guidance and financial assistance.
• Go to any and all estate sales. Well-cared-for farm tools last forever.
• Finally, set up a hammock. You won’t ever have time to relax in it, but it will serve as comic relief when you pass it a dozen times a day drenched in sweat.

Good luck, nephew, you will do fine and find your own way. Although, your uncle does respectfully suggest that a compass would be especially handy to keep in a back pocket.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
Reading this weekend: The Silver Ley (Adrian Bell), the second in a trilogy of autobiographical novels on farming in England during the interwar years.