Northern Farmer

What a day here, warm and sunny. Most years we wean calves by now but this year it’ll happen a week or so later. Conditions have improved that much in the pastures that we’ll wait a few days longer to catch the calves. It can be quite an affair trying to catch and separate the calves from there protective angus mothers sometimes. In one pasture a mile or so south we can’t walk them home so we have a catch corral built out there. The goal is to lure them in for a few days, both the cows and calves and at an opportune moment run and close the gate. This can sometimes set off a wild set of events but in the end we get them separated and truck the calves home quick. The three home pastured herds are easier because we just bring them in and separate them and run the cows back to their pasture. After a few days when the noise level goes down to that of a major airport, they can really bawl and the cows mooing non stop for at least a couple days, we get ready to run all the calves through the chute.

Now days it’s not easy to get help, well lets just say it’s darn near impossible for this kind of work. Working our calves requires about six hours of hard work with at least five or six people. The last few years the only reliable help has been the local Mexicans that work at either the beef packing plant or the turkey plants around here. The local Mexican population is mostly rural Mexicans from about one hundred miles west of Mexico City. And most of them are related. Good workers and some have become good friends.

It’s hard work that we do, and I do most of the chute work. The help’s main job is to keep the cattle coming in the chute. One thing I can tell you is that after a day of this you know what work is. Through the past couple of years it’s evolved into quite an event. Now after the work is done in the late afternoon some of the wives of the help, (they came too, preparing food), have a feast of their local recipies for us. The help always get a kick out of it when I’m eating really “HOT” food and start to sweat. Well, that’s why beer was invented, for just those times.

Having been to Latin America, and not as a tourist, I know how the country folk think. So it’s easy for me to talk to them and find out what they plan to do. Remember these are country folk from farms and ranches. It all boils down to what I am against, NAFTA. Here, north of the Rio Grande, farmers and ranchers pretty much know it was a raw deal, only benifiting the Multi National Corporations. These agrarian folk from south of the river know it and hate it too. All they want is to have it like it always has been, small farms and ranches, feeding themselves and their communities. The only reason the Mexicans that I know are here is because of NAFTA! I will stop short of preaching here, but it does get to me how the people in the country are being munipulated by this New World Order. These folk that I know don’t even want to be here, but their crooked government, like ours makes it as the only way. I ask them how do they get through the border and they tell me, “we just drive through in Arizona”.

The folk I know want to go back, and I can’t hardly blame them. Must be a shocker, the Minnesota winters. But really they want to just farm like they have for hundreds of years. We’re working right now setting up a solar irrigation plan for one family to take back down and help out their dryland farm. You know, I’d be pretty darn happy to know that their farms make it. These ain’t some farms that we would ever import from, just local agrarian folk taking care of there own. And one should see how excited they get when they get that glimmer of hope to return to the land. One farm at a time, here and there, we’re making progress.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 6:47 pm 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.