Northern Farmer

Windy day around here, snow’s blowing over the roads, could get a little slippery in spots here and there, but that don’t matter all too much for us tonight cause we’re just sittin at home staying warm. Wood boilers are all fired up till around six tomorrow morning, cattle are all done for the day. Our laying hens are on strike, don’t know how long that’ll hold out. Them girls had better get a change of attitude quick or else. Feeds in short supply the way it is around here and deadbeats are not welcome around the farm lately. The young Partridge Rocks should start laying in a week or two, time slipped by last summer and I got them pretty late. My fault, so I ain’t perfect, but those chickens are a tad bit lower in priority than the rest of the stuff around here. Here, beef is still king, that’s what pays the bills and costs the most to raise too. That’s what takes up my days, the beef herd.

We’ll be short on feed in a few months, I tell you, them cows aren’t going to come out of this winter fat, I’m just hoping there’ll be grass this spring to help them recover from a lean year. Now I know the experts say to feed them perfect in every way, that you can’t starve the profit out of a cow, well they’re right up to a point. But you can also go broke doing everything perfect, according to the rules. I’ve done this before, keeping em lean and mean, they survive and so do we. Don’t like it all to well, but what’a you gonna do? Besides they’re a far cry from starving, just have to pull back and make it through like the rest of us.

Lucky was the word last summer when a friend from church found us 120 “big” round bales of reed canary grass. The cow herd gets one a day, plus a very limited amount of silage compared to other years. Then in the afternoon I bust open one round bale of baled up corn stalks that I made at a neighbor’s farm and there’s not on trace of it left after an hour or so. Totally gone! I can’t wait till there’s grass, and hopefully a year that returns us to crops growing and not being devastated, pastures green all summer, creek a flowing. What a dream. I knew last summer when the rains came at the tail end this would be a long haul till mid-May when grass returns to this neck of the woods.

Now does this sound like a hard luck story or what? Maybe I should put me up a PayPal button and get some donations coming in, eh! Naw, it ain’t all that bad, cause come next summer it’ll be over with, at least for a while. On the bright side, we can’t hardly keep up with beef orders, and we have allot of beef to be ordered! Will be butchering again tomorrow morning and then take a Christmas break and resume full steam sometime in January. I’m finding out, again this is kinda against the rules a person reads, that we have a easy time selling in later winter and spring. People must be recovering from going near broke from Christmas and also there’s the outdoor grilling season just around the corner and folks want beef! The king of meats! Well anyway at least around here. I don’t know, I can eat beef every day of the week and never get tired of it, now if I was to try that with chicken it wouldn’t take long and I don’t think I could keep it down. And I’m talkin good chicken too, not the garbage they sell in stores.

I’m kinda recovering yet from last weeks heavy schedule, and next week’s will be allot tougher, gotta sell around sixty calves, load em out on Tuesday and get my butt up north to the salesbarn on Wednesday. Plus on Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening we’re having a guest preacher at church, so I ain’t gonna be missing that! Plus all the regular day to day things thrown in between. Then things should calm down to almost nothing over the Christmas and New Year weeks, at least that’s how it looks to me. Then hopefully spend the rest of the winter catching up on odd jobs around here.And also the goal is to finish up the Bible College studies and be done with that. Of coarse knowing me I’ll go on to more of that, just seems like something I gotta do. In fact I love it!

So Faith and farm, that’s life here, well I supposed I could throw the word family in there, but that should be a given if a person has the word faith in there. Because how could anyone have faith and not consider the family second to God? A close second, they all tie in together. But God is first, then the family kinda takes care of itself because of it. Pretty heavy theology, eh. Just some dirt farmer ramblings is all. I never could compete with all these folks writing so beautifully about God and faith and all that stuff, nope. Just lay it out the way it is and that’s about it. But this ain’t some Crystal Cathedral, it’s justa farm, and that’s the way I like it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 5:42 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.