Northern Farmer

I don’t think there’s anyplace on earth where a person can think and come up with all sorts of ideas and dreams than out on a larger field doing a tillage or harvest job that requires little attention. Example, raking hay. It’s about as easy and as enjoyable as a job can get. And if the field is a quarter mile long or longer I can usually solve all of mine and the worlds problems sitting under the umbrella on the old John Deere. But being the frail human that I am I’ve forgotten just about everything by the time I’m back in the yard. I know some people come up with ideas laying in bed, but that doesn’t work for me because after a day around here the bed means sleep.

In my previous postings I didn’t give many details of farm or family so I’d better catch up on that now a little. I’m 49 years old and happily married to my wife Eda. We have two daughters, Rachel, 13, and Rebecca, 10. I farm full time with the main thing being our herd of Black Angus beef cows. We have around 150 acres of hay fields, 40 acres of corn, 40 acres of oats, roughly 50 acres of meadows for hay, with the balance being pasture. All totaled it’s somewhere over 500 acres. We have 200 chickens mainly for our own use, 50 Barred Plymouth Rocks, 50 Silver Laced Wyandottes, and 100 White Rock cockerels. The White Rocks are being raised outside in a portable pen that’s moved daily. The others are in a old fashion chicken coop that was built in the 1920s and is in excelent shape. They get outside in chicken runs. We used to raise hogs, in fact up until 1998 we raised anywhere from between 1000 and 2000 a year. We got out that year before the crash hit in December of 98. Now I raise some now and then in the warm months, mostly for our own use. They can put a Troy Built to shame in preparing a new garden area.

From the early 90s till now huge changes are taking place here on the farm. Until that time we could make a fairly decent living with the system the way it was and were coming out ahead and expanding to the point we’re at now, (we started with 88 acres). Maybe it was because the markets were really markets back at that time. Of course they had their ups and downs but a person could figure out the trend and profit fairly well. I could see that changing in the mid 90s around here. There were basically two choices,one was, follow the present course, follow the advice of Farm Journal and all the other farm publications, borrow, get bigger and bigger, produce more, etc. The trouble with this route is that there is no end in site. A person cannot win because they’d always be falling behind. Also being caught in this trap a person would have to rape the land.

The second choice was the one we followed and are still following. Family friendly farming,(where have I heard that before?). I won’t get into that on this post, I’ll save it for future ones.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 7:03 am and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.