Northern Farmer

The wind is howling through the pine trees in the yard this evening, coming from the north west, a slight change in weather happening. I can’t complain though because this has been a week of catching up with all the normal October jobs around here. I hauled in sixty five large round cornstalk bales today that I baled up yesterday. Not a huge amount, but everything I can make saves me from buying forage. The corn stalks that we got from the neighbor will help a bit in keeping the main cowherd half way satisfied through winter. I just hope we can keep on grazing for some time yet, everyday grazing is a day not feeding. Also I can keep on making corn stalks as weather permits and the price is right, free. But if something happens with the weather I’ll be satisfied that we gave it our best shot this week.

Maybe in a few weeks this work load will slow down somewhat when we get into regular winter feeding and chores. When it does slow down then it’ll be hog butchering time. Now I ain’t a hog farmer, although I’ve raised many, many thousands of them in the past, but I always like to have four around the place for our own meat. Special raised! We do all the butchering and processing, a hundred percent. I figure if there’s one thing anybody out in the country should know it’s how to put meat on the table with their own hogs. Years ago everybody had hogs and I’m not talking about farmers either. When you drive through the older parts of our area’s towns you’ll always see an old building in the back yard that had some chickens and hogs in it years gone by. When one studies up a little bit on American history, hogs were the main thing for most families.

I’ve written in the past about us smoking our own sausage and the like, we mostly use our neighbor’s smokehouse but lately I’ve been thinking about building one for ourselves. Our neighbor’s is only used for hot smoking, that’s where the fire is right in the building. The one I’m thinking about will be able to hot smoke or cold smoke. I’ve been looking at smokehouses, all sorts of them. I’m not talking about those teenie things they sell for a few hundred dollars in the catalogs, I’m talking a building. But I don’t want to pay any money for it either. That rules out cement blocks or other boughten materials. Then this week it came to me, a log smokehouse. Why not. We’re not talking huge here, maybe six by eight feet. Plus we can even make the shingles out of white oak. Hmm. Then I figured I could get most of the stuff premade this winter working in the comfort of our old pig barn which is now a woodworking/butchering building. Come spring time that thing could be assembled in an instant. We’ve got plenty of logs laying around that are just right and plenty of big blocks for making shingles so that’s that for that! See how a person makes more work for themselves after spending the week on a tractor in the field. Always cooking up some new thing!

But that’s something I always dreamed of having and I think we’ll do it. Something fairly permanent, inexpensive and will give us a greater ability to preserve huge quantities of meats the old ways without having to rely on modern piped in energies like electricity. Next down the line I’d like to build a huge walk in root cellar that could handle a whole season’s worth of garden produce, but that’s down the line a bit because I can’t change everything over night. Yup, always something to do!

Also I want to write this evening how much I appreciate Good Farmer John helping out here on the blog most of the year. I for one truly believe in what he’s undertaking with Authentic Agriculture. I’ll be signing up in the next couple of days. Folks that are of this mindset that we have on the blog here should appreciate a person like John that has the vision to not just talk or write about things, but who takes the bull by the horns and does something about it. I know for a fact our family will give him our full support! Because I can write and write and write but without an action to back it up it’s all worthless. Besides I was always a David and Goliath type of person and see this as an opportunity to start swinging my sling a bit more on the culture of death!

I’m seeing our beef market growing fast and it has nothing to do with me because people are just popping up to buy. The main market consists of very conservative Christian families. The word is spreading and I can see where I’ll have to get more used to handling a much larger customer base. That’s fine with me. At this rate we should be out of the “system” in less than a handful of years. Who’da ever thought it would happen that fast when we first decided to go direct. Advertising expenses are zero! Glory to God for taking care of us. In fact it’s going so well that even with last summer’s drought disaster it’ll work out much better than previously thought! I must say, there’s blessings for people who will just have faith in God and then put their nose to the grindstone and get to work. Because it is working, more than I ever imagined it would!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 7:10 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.