Merging with my Main Site

For more of my exquisite writing, go to BnmnG.com

The Hay Bale

Ben turned his pickup around carefully because Wayne’s dog was barking and running circles around it. When the truck was in a good spot, Ben got out while Wayne, with a hay spear on his tractor, picked a large round bale of peanut hay from his warehouse. The dog watched Ben carefully. A large, black cow chewed quietly nearby, and three other’s slowly walked along a hill in the distance. Ben didn’t know how far back Wayne’s farm went.

The Dakota sunk a bit as Wayne carefully dropped the bale in the bed. Ben reached into his pocket and pulled out two twenties, which the big dog sniffed at. Wayne backed his tractor up and turned it off. “How you doing, Ben?” They hadn’t spoken since an earlier phone call. “Fine, how about you?” Wayne climbed down from the tractor and they shook hands.

“Have you gotten any bad bales?”, Wayne asked.

“Well the last one was a bit moldy”, said Ben.

It was understatement. The middle was dark, moist, and embedded with white mold that broke into smoky dust when it dried. Had it been the first bale Ben ever got from Wayne he wouldn’t have come back for a second. But it wasn’t the first. Ben had been getting hay from Wayne ever since Mark and Tina mentioned him, and that must have been at least two years before. Ben was happy enough with Wayne not to make a fuss over one moldy bale.

“I ran into a few like that”, Wayne said, “I couldn’t tell from looking at them, but when I got into them I saw they were bad.”

Ben agreed and said, “It was O.K. on the outside. They ate most of it.” Ben was referring to his goats. He had given his goats most of the hay but eventually decided he just couldn’t give them any more. Mold can kill livestock.

Wayne said, “Why don’t you just take that bale.”

Ben was surprised. “OK”, he said. “Thank you. Very much”.

“Well I just want to do what’s right”, said Wayne.

They said goodbye and Ben got back in his truck. As he drove off he thought, “Huh, I should mention this in my blog.”

Wayne Byrum is one of the last American farmers not to be consumed or run off by food factories. His farm is in Gates, North Carolina. He sells high quality pastured beef from cattle that aren’t confined in feed lots. He also sells goats and, of course, hay. His number is 252-357-1742.

Feeding Goats during a Drought

Except for Winter, when we buy peanut hay, we feed the goats by moving them around. We can usually leave them in one spot for about three days but there’s been so little grass growing lately that there isn’t even enough food in a paddock to last a day. So we’ve been augmenting with trees and branches. The two strategies involved are 1) to put them in woody areas and 2) to cut trees and branches and toss them in.

Putting them in woody areas means going in with an ax and a machete to clear a path for the electric net. It’s a lot of work and running the net through the woods is a pain because it gets caught up easily. We put them at the edge of the woods, so their area is half in and half out. That leaves a clear spot for the shed. It’s a lot of work but it’s good for a couple of days.

Tossing in small trees and branches is quicker but has to be done every day. We do this when we run out of woody areas that we’re willing let the goats clear-cut. I can go into the woods and select straggly trees and branches to prune.

Either way it’s a lot of work but the fact that I can do it is one of the things that I like about goats.

Cute but Stupid

hardware_ramp

Originally uploaded by bnmng

Ducklings will drown in a container, even if you’ve ensured that they can get out of the container by waving your hands around and scaring them out. After you leave, they’ll hop back in and, without the wavy-handed boogie-man threatening them, will swim around until they get too tired to hop over the wall. To keep the adorable dumfucks from drowning, you have to make sure their exit path is as easy to cross as it is to walk out of a natural pond. This hardware cloth ramp seems to work. I know it will get rusty soon so I’ll replace it as needed or come up with something else, but there has to be something there.

Another note: don’t use poultry netting to enclose chicks or ducklings. The 1″ hexagonal holes are perfectly sized and shaped to let them get stuck halfway through. Use hardware cloth.

I’m not afraid of snakes… I’m not afraid of snakes…

But I’ll admit to a bit of discomfort from these two big guys lounging above the doorway to my 8×8 feed shed.

On the Injured List

Jay broke his leg. Since chickens have a ‘no excuses’ policy, the other roosters have been harassing him mercilessly, so we put him in a cage. We thought it would be a good idea to put him with a batch of chicks.

After a few days, we decided he wasn’t happy with the situation and gave him his own cage.

Duck Motherhood

Our usual plan is to let the ducks raise their own ducklings. This usually lasts about two weeks before the mother looses track of her brood and the ducklings eventually wander off to do their part in providing nourishment to natural fauna. It’s amazing to me that the Muscovy breed actually manages to propagate itself in the wild. The ducklings get confused about who their mother is. I occasionally see them following roosters around, and once I saw one trying to keep up with the guineas. Since the mother can’t count, she doesn’t notice her flock diminishing. I suppose after the last one disappears she gets an idea that something’s wrong.

As an experiment we’re trying to circumvent that process by enclosing the ducklings in a little pen. The mother can fly out whenever she wants.

She has difficulty getting back in. I think it’s because she gets fixated on her ducklings in a line-of-site orientation, and can’t imagine going the wrong way (up) in order to get to them. So she just wanders in circles around the cage. The ramp helps. We had to put it sideways so we can chase her in a circle around the cage and eventually up the ramp.

Problematic Pigs and Parasites

The pigs gave me double heartache during a week that Sasha was away visiting relatives. First, they started getting out of their large pen, and second, I saw that they had parasites. The parasites are large white worms (that’s what they’re called as well as an apt description). Discovering them is an unpleasant experience.

My wife and I tend to jump into farming adventures with both feet and then figure out what we did wrong after something bad happens (actually, she jumps with all four of our feet). In this case, we could have prevented the parasites by moving the pigs around, which is something we always intended to do but haven’t gotten around to yet.

I don’t eat pork due to some connection I feel with my ancestors, although the rest of the family does. When I describe the many reasons I don’t like raising pigs, Sasha accuses me of justifying my irrational repulsion of pig-meat (but I do like the smell of bacon). I think my reasons against raising pigs are valid.

Although many people say that pigs aren’t really piggish, I disagree. I provide them with clean water and they still drink from the mud puddle that they shit in, and that’s why they’re prone to hideous parasites. They’re filthy and brutish, and ( I acknowledge the irony of saying this) their a lot like humans. Their body chemistry is close to ours: They eat similar food to ours and their shit looks and smells like our shit, which means any disease that they develop is likely to be dangerous to us.

But Sasha loves the other white meat, and is actually following a higher calling than her affection for sausage. She’s experimenting with methods that people can use to raise food on a low budget, and wants to spread the word that people can learn to survive by interacting with the land, rather than trying to amass wealth and depending on others to feed them. If an old New Yorker and the daughter of mathematician can do this, than so can others.

I treated the pigs with horse medicine hidden in Twinkies and am working on training them to stay in the confines of an electric wire. What I’ve done so far is run the wire near the bottom of the fence that they have been burrowing under. Once they learn to respect the wire, we can move them around more easily, like we do with the goats.

I’ll let you know how it all goes.

World Hunger: One Solution is a Leading Cause

I submitted the following for one of my classes. The assignment was to write a “Cause and Effect” paper.

World hunger persists despite tremendous scientific advancements. A person might think that we haven’t yet figured out how to produce massive quantities of food. That belief, if it were true, would explain why the government continues to provide billions of dollars to large corporations to find cheap and efficient ways to produce food and food-like substitutes. But in fact, we don’t have to produce more food, and corporations like Monsanto and ADM, far from providing solutions, divert critical resources from promising efforts while becoming , themselves, a major cause of world hunger. The lucrative experiments of highly connected agribusinesses are unnecessary because we already produce enough food to feed the world. Instead of asking how we can punish the ground to force out more crops, we should be asking how to raise adequate quantities of healthful food, consistently and sustainably, and do so in places where people who need it have access to it.

World hunger has never been caused by a lack of world food supplies. It has always been caused by the inability of some to gain access to food while others have more than enough to share. In fact, even successful efforts to increase food production have actually contributed to the food crisis. The so called “Green Revolution”, a campaign to implement new farming technologies in poor countries, was celebrated for its improvements in agricultural production but displaced millions of people, caused ecological harm, and did not halt the rise in world hunger (Gimenez, 5).

The good news is some people are asking the right questions. Organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are not asking if we can produce enough food, but if we can do so using organic methods that allow crops to be raised by local farmers without harming the soil. The answer is yes. Organic agricultural methods produce more nutritious food than industrial methods and can improve access to food “outside the mainstream markets, where most hungry people are found”, according to a presentation to the FAO by the Rural Advancement Foundation (Sigh and Christman, 1).

Still, billionaire executives continue to profit from government research grants by claiming that they’re fighting world hunger by increasing production. What they’re actually doing is using American tax dollars to drive traditional farmers out of business and corner the market on food distribution. According to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database, the U.S. government spent more than $177 billion in agricultural subsidies during a twelve year period, with seventy five percent of that money going to less than ten percent of the recipients (EWG 1). The results of this expenditure include the disappearance of the traditional farm, huge quantities of nutrition deficient food substitutes, and a less secure world where people are becoming dependent on fewer and fewer sources of nutrition which, in many cases, are inaccessible to them.

But the corporate executives and their government allies are not just undercutting regular farmers with low-priced industrial food substitutes; they’re actually creating laws that make it illegal to farm. When asked what some of the “biggest challenges” he faces are, Joel Salatin (a hero in the sustainable farming movement) replied “The on-farm hurdles we’ve faced, from drought to predators to flood to cash flow, are nothing compared to the emotional, economic and energy drain caused by government bureaucrats” (Phelps, 3). By passing laws that make it illegal to process meat on the same land that the meat is raised, by requiring slaughter houses to actually provide exclusive facilities for inspectors, and by the ominous NAIS, which should be killed, our government is using it’s authority to kill the small farm business.

As Americans discuss the evils of “redistributing wealth,” and consider the Randian philosophy that it’s wrong to help the poor, we should realize that wealthy executives and their government counterparts talk about letting taxpayers keep more of their “own money” while diverting billions of dollars to themselves and exacerbating the impoverished conditions that they claim to be solving. We don’t have to spend more money than we’re already spending to make a difference. If we spent that money supporting small farmers in our own country and throughout the world, rather than the corporations that are driving them out of business in an effort to monopolize the world’s food supplies, we would begin to make progress towards solving world hunger, rather than making the problem worse.

Works Cited

“EWG Farm Subsidy Database Update”, Farm Subsidy Database. 14 April 2008. Web. 28 Feb 2010.
http://farm.ewg.org/farm/

Eric Holt-Gimenez “Food First”, Institute for Food and Development Policy. October 2008. Web 1 March 2010.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/about/who/staff/eholtgim

Phelps, Megan. “Everything He Wants to Do is Illegal.” Mother Earth News. Byran Welch, 1 Oct. 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2010.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Joel-Salatin-Interview.aspx

Michael Sigh and Carolyn Christman. “Organic Agriculture and Access to Food.” Rural Advancement Foundation International. Web. 3 May 2007. Web. 28 Feb 2010.

Sus Destructivus

We’ve been very lax about the fact that our three little pigs can get out of the pen by squeezing under the fence. They’ve been harmless until today when they tore up the front lawn. Luckily, we don’t really have a front lawn because we haven’t finished the house, but the mess they made will make one hell of a sloppy mud puddle the next time it rains. One of the reasons we’ve been so lax is Sasha loves them. They really are cute. But it’s time to take care of that fence.

« Previous Entries