Northern Farmer

It’s drying up around here at a fast rate. Around a week ago I couldn’t even imagine what spring would be like. But a few days of sunshine and some clear western air coming through sure does fix things up in a hurry. We’re starting to calve this last week, slow starting but it’ll be picking up steam shortly. I think we have seven as of this moment with a lot more showing close up. Yesterday, Sunday, was a great day. Headed over to church for Sunday service, beautiful day, warm out with just a slight breeze. I figured I could finally break the rules and not wear long underwear, you know, live dangerously. Didn’t even take a jacket or a vest. Was thinking that everything would be warm as always there, plus with warm temps outside for once I mean it really made sense. But as life would have it the gas furnace was on the blink at church, not working at all. It was like a refrigerator in church! What’s a simple dirt farmer to do without his long johns? I figured I was in a pickle, gonna be shivering up a storm, I mean it was cool in there. Kinda like opening up a machine shed during a rapid warmup and it’s still freezing inside. Brrrr! But as things would be one church member, (bless his heart), had a bunch of jackets in his car. Now don’t ask me why but he did. So there’s Tom in church wearing a Chevy racing jacket, and darn happy to be wearing it. Luckily there ain’t any snobs at church, (or Ford fanatics), and that jacket done did the trick. A guy just gotta thank the Lord for small favors eh!

After church we toodled home, didn’t stick around all to long cause I figured it’s kinda handy to be home in case a calf was half way out of a cow in the calving pasture and decided he didn’t want to come out no more. That’s my job, thankfully it’s rare, but sometimes a person has to coax those rascals out with whatever means possible. Thinking back I think we only yanked one last year, not bad for the size of herd we have. One cow already had a calf when we drove by, looked good, so no problem, ate a quick dinner around 1:00 and got on out there. Then I decided to backscrape our driving lanes that were all rutted up from the mud but drying fast. That’s just driving backwards with the Bobcat with the bucket tilted down. Does wonders. My mistake was I was near our little gravel road on a nice day. Now in farm country that means almost anyone and everyone that drives by stops and shoots the bull. More so on Sundays because there’s more non farmers driving by then. Not the usual weekday gang. The second one to stop, a bit after talking farm talk with the first one and the first one having left. By the way, a ten minute job can sometimes take hours when your a farmer working close to the road.

The second drive by bull shooter was the area bee keeper. I kinda like the guy and always have a lot of respect for someone with more livestock than us. I wonder how many million head he owns, oh well, good guy for being such a big shot. Now when I sometimes read other blogs and they’re talking bee keeping i just skim over it, not really much interested. Well, you get stung and have an arm the size of a Texas watermelon and see how interested you are in bees. But I sure like having the bee man in the area. Cause I figure his bees do a lot of good on our farm. But we were talking for an hour or so and the similarities of regular farming were amazing! Same problems, flooded with contaminated Chinese imports, “industry” folks saying how it was such a benifit.Yup, same story as us farmers have. I asked him about them bee mites or whatever they’re called that are wreaking havoc around the nation and he told me stuff I’ll never forget. Remember, this is a family bee man, like a family farmer. There’s a difference in bee people as I found out. There’s those that follow the industrial model, and then there’s our bee man. Our bee man uses his head, doesn’t follow the expert and low and behold, he’s thriving. He told me that his bees are unaffected by mites and many other common industry problems. So I say talk on guy. Well, remember, this is no novice, he said a few years ago he got a different strain of honey bee that came from Russia and they can handle mites with no problem, plus can handle the Minnesota weather and thrive. He was saying that the bee industry is getting to be like the modern dairy industry in that they are having a hard time reproducing enough breeding stock to even stay even. But no problem with his stuff, in fact he’s even selling breeding stock. Now pardon me if I talk bees like cattle but what can I say!

He told me about the lie of supposed organic honey. In fact one reason so many hives are dying out was because of an approved organic pesticide made by a big ag pharmaceutical company. You heard me, a dangerous chemical that has a toxin build up in hives and contaminates the bees and then causes hive kill outs. He stays away from the approved methods and uses some truly organic stuff, which is known as truly organic around the world, everywhere except this country. Made naturally out of rhubarb leaves or something. Works wonders, no toxins, but no money for big ag, thus not approved. But our bee man is doing good, about half his sales being private, and he sells a lot of honey.

But the day was sure slipping away when a person’s shooting the breeze out on Dairy Rd. He must of seen that I was getting fidgety and got a guilt complex or something so he dug behind his pickup seat and handed me a jar of honey butter and a jar of his regular clover and basswood blossom honey. I just realized I was well compensated for standing on the side of Dairy Road for over an hour on a Sunday afternoon!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 8:14 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.