Change of Emotions
December 17th, 2007 by Northern Farmer The one thing that I really hate doing is waiting and that’s what I’m doing tonight, sitting here waiting. Waiting for a phone call from the livestock truckers to set up a time for picking the calves up tomorrow. I hate waiting. The good part is that it doesn’t happen all to often, most of the time I never have to wait for anybody or anything. Just wish they’d call, get a time setup and that would be that for that. Grrr….
Today was a good one, about the warmest day this December so far. And sunny to boot. Didn’t get above freezing but it was rather nice out anyway. Everything went off without a hitch today, with the beef and chicken customers loading up and out of here good and happy. There’s one cow at the meat locker to be processed yet and then after the New Year we’ll get going at a steady pace butchering and all for customers till about late spring. Boy, I can’t wait till this week is over with and things can return to a regular pace. I’m more nerved up than a….
Gotta setup for loading out calves tomorrow which really shouldn’t take all to much effort. Just do a little shuffling around with some animals, getting them out of the way. Put up a temporary gate to funnel the calves into the loading chute and move some feeders so the pickup trucks and their thirty eight foot aluminum trailers can drive into the cattle yard and back up to the chute. I’d better go in there with the skid steer loader before they get here and move some of the frozen manure balls. From the size of a baseball to the size of a bowling ball they’re all over the cattle yard and make it difficult for a pickup and trailer to maneuver very good. Exciting topic, eh! But it is brass tacks reality. But conditions are about as good as they get, absolutely no mud, believe me, and the snow was crushed down into a hard base over the dirt base of the lot. Get them frozen manure balls scraped off and it’ll be as smooth as a Wal Mart parking lot.
I’m kinda hoping it’s the same trucker that have been coming here for the last few years because them boys know how to drive! It’s amazing how they can take such long rigs and weasel around and get into place. Plus they’re great to talk too!
News flash………..The phone just rang and it was the trucker that’s been coming here for years and they’re arriving around ten in the morning. Ah…I can feel myself calming down in rapid stages, whew! Now what else can I find to get nervous about?
Well I tell you, there’s not to much that I’m nervous about. I was just thinking about a few years ago when the cattle market stopped. And I mean for a few weeks it was non existent. If ever I was scared about farming and marketing stuff, that was the time. I forget exactly what year that was, not all too long ago, when they discovered mad cow in the American herd. I won’t even get into the debate about it and all, just the reality of how it was at the time. I had about the same size batch of calves that were getting ready to go in the beginning of January. But in December, I forget the day exactly, over the news came that they had discovered a cow in the U.S. that had BSE. Most everyone heard about it that’s reading this but I want to tell about the feelings a person has when the market disappears. And that incident had a huge impact on me, forever changing my views of farming. I’ve been through the fire so to speak. At the time I was planning for an early January sale and as typical in farming I needed the money, fairly badly. Well, you survive on one paycheck a year! The feed situation was just so that we’d get through the winter, depending on selling off them hungry calves also to slow down feed consumption, kinda like this year.
And then the cattle market in America stopped, dead!! It was like some sort of bad dream, it couldn’t be reality, it couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t. And there was no promise of it getting back up. I was trying to figure out how to eat 250 head of cattle and still pay the bills. Christmas that year had me walking around like a zombie, you ever get that unreal feeling. Something totally out of your control that was totally controlling you. The rest of the extended family was all happy and such for Christmas but I just was in a dreary fogged over bad dream. Day after day, no cattle trading in America, news report, news flashes, special USDA shows on RFD TV. What a nightmare.
This went on for a few weeks and in the middle of January there were signs of activity starting up again in the cattle market. And one day we went up north to the salesbarn that we do business with to see how their sale would go. We had heard that any previous sale couldn’t even hardly get a bid on cattle. But we had to see first hand what was going on. And that’s when the cattle market recovered with a roar and I tell you we had our cattle listed on the next sale and were sold at an extremely good price.
But that incident taught me many things, things that changed the direction we were going. Already we knew there would have to be changes from what’s considered normal farming nowadays. But this poured allot of fuel on the fire, a huge amount of fuel. I wanted out of a system where we were so interdependent on the system. I didn’t want to run the farm and our family’s life checking the computer or radio for market reports. I wanted out of the system of taking what you get for price. I never want to be so helpless again. And it drove me!
The rest most readers know, where we started direct marketing our steers. We’re up to around thirty steers a year now and still sell some calves at the salesbarn. But the rate of change is going much faster than I ever dreamed it could go. It won’t be long before the entire herd should be able to be sold directly at the pace we are going expanding the sales. And expanding sales is nothing of my doing, it has a life of it’s own. My biggest thing is to make sure I keep track of the orders.
I do believe the biggest rule to direct marketing is to give the customer something of such a superior quality and taste that it’s impossible to find something like it in any store. And that is what has happened here. Over and over again people ask, “How come your beef tastes so good?” And I honestly don’t know, really I don’t. I have my ideas, like having very little or no grain in their diets. The two and a half week aging process, a durn good strain of black angus cattle, I just can’t quite pin it down. I do think it’s a combination of all of those, plus I do believe with all of my heart that the Lord is watching over it all, in a very special way!
Well I tell you, things sure change in the course of writing one blog post. From high strung, ready to snap, to down right calm and the day set for tomorrow. Plus tomorrow night we have the church service I’ve been writing about in previous posts. All is well on this December evening!
December 17th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
“frozen manure balls” I remember cowchip fights. “Frozen manure balls sound like they would really hurt! As I have mentioned before, i grew up in Arizona. Nearby, was a famous place called “The Lehrner Ranch Mammoth Kill site” I remember going down a excavation trench along the San Pedro River, and seeing this enormous mammoth tusk, about 8′ long, along with some preserved mammoth dung. Since columbian mammoths reached six tons, these were BIG balls of dung. Next to some rib bones was a Clovis point. Rather impressed me. The paleotologist felt that Clovis people ambushed mammoth and camel, and horse, along with ground sloth when they came in to drink. They got caught in the San Pedros quicksand, making them easy prey. My mother once got stuck in San Pedro quicksand, making for a rather exciting affair. So I can understand how 6 ton elephants got stuck. Every time someone brags to me about the deer they shot at a thousand yards with thier high powerd rifle, I remind them people once hunted 6 ton elelephants up close with wooden stone tipped spears. I wonder if Pliostocene people ever had a mammoth dungball fight? the guy who found the mammoths bones was a cattle rancher. In fact, several clovis sites in the southwest were found by ranchers. I think you did the right thing getting out of the “system” selling your cattle. Everybody doing it the “right” way, seems to be going broke. In fact, I’ve noticed that in this era, I’m better off doing exactly the opposite of whatever the “approved” way of doing things is. Economically, morally, etc. It’s a depraved age. I’m glad you don’t mind my long winded ruminations. You’ve got a great blog.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Mark,
You want to talk about a lethal weapon, just imagine a skid steer loader, short wheel base, zero turn radius, clipping the edge of a frozen manure ball with it’s hard tires. That manure ball will fly with the force of a cannon ball and you don’t want to be anywhere near it, not if you want to keep living a normal life that is. I always say, if I get hit in the head and go off to glory from a frozen manure ball, at my funeral just come up with some lie about how I died, you know, like attacked by a bull or something that has a little more honor to it. It’d sound kinda dumb, sending someone off to the promised land because of a frozen manure chunk doing him in. But such is life on the farm. Come to think of it, I never seen that danger mentioned during farm safety week, hmmm. Someone should sound the alarm
That’s durn right interesting about them mammoths. I have a friend that got a buffalo skull from the Powder River basin in Wyoming, about three times bigger than a buffalo skull in modern times. Incredible!
Thanks!
December 19th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Tom,
You always make me laugh….and a wee bit green with envy!
Hope all is well with you.
Regards,
Scott
December 19th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Hey Scott!
! All is well with us here! Last night was the start of the special services at church with Rev. J.C. Smith from out your way. This is big for our little church!
But this was all serious
http://americanpentecost.wordpress.com/
So today it’s selling calves at the salesbarn and then heading back to church, kinda like in the days of old, services that have power!
God Bless!
December 19th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Tom, you’re a lucky man to be able to direct market some of your beef. We are off the milk truck due to low volume and evey 6 days or so I dump 1,200+ lbs of milk in the spreader and blow it on the field. No milk means no milk check for December. Hope we get some girls freshening soon! Sad to say, but I sometimes dream of going total farmer pirate and selling home made butter (illegal in Wisconsin without special schooling, a one year apprenticeship and a license. Betcha didn’t know that butter was so complex and dangerous!). I want to be a Christian buit’s oh so hard to behave myself when it comes to Uncle Sam.
December 19th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Brent,
Just walked in the house from the salesbarn. Calves were about steady with last year. 504 pounders going at $1.20. Some 400 pounders doing $135. So that’s that for that! I’m praising the Lord that they did so well!
But the money is in direct marketing and that’s where almost 30% of our cattle are going at this time. In a few years, (if it ever rains in summer), I hope to have it at 100%. I’da kept at least 40 steers for direct market if there’d be any feed. So now I just kept around thirty again. But it will rain one of these summers and we can feed a pile of cattle on this place, that’s when things will finally fall into place!
The one good thing about the beef is that we do have a lot more leeway in marketing than dairy does.
Thanks!
December 20th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Tom,
Those manure balls do make it tough to negotiate the cattle yard. And those truckers can really manuver those trailers. Of course my oldest son says that since they are so long the are really easy to back up. Maybe its easy for him, but I bet I would have trouble.
Brent,
I suspect you could find a direct outlet for that milk. I know a couple that is direct marketing milk and they have trouble keeping up with demand. Also know a couple of places that might be interested in making cheese. How far are you from the Twin Cities?
Jim V
December 20th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Jim,
We are located in NE Wisconsin, not far from Green Bay. The only way we could direct market our milk (without going thru all the hoops that the state has put in place to eliminate competion for the big guys) would be to basically move “underground”. I would love to hear (read) some opinions on where our duty to be obedient to the state ends and our duty to supply our fellow man with the finest unadulterated food begins?
December 21st, 2007 at 9:41 am
I’d be interested in hearing some thoughts about that too - the limits of duty to the state. In my area, zoning requires 5 acres or more to keep livestock. Now, I don’t consider chickens livestock, but I’m not sure how the zoning people would feel about that.
Matt
December 21st, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Jim,
If I must say so, I’m durn good at backing up just about any trailer made. Even a regular four wheel wagon. I’d have to agree that those longer trailers do make it a tad bit easier for backing than a smaller jobby. But then again I learned it all from allot of practice
Brent and Matt,
Well, I’ve said before, (many times), that what they don’t know won’t hurt them, (the state). The best way to approach all of this is just hush up. The trouble mostly starts when a sincere person or farmer goes to the government wanting to do what’s supposedly right. Then all heck breaks loose, with paper pushers who have nothing better to do in society trying to act like they know something and want to push people around in a maze of rules that they don’t even have any idea about. A short while ago I posted about the Minnesota constitution saying farmers can sell any product off the farm unhindered by the state. In my eyes the constitution is the LAW of laws as far as the state goes. Every regulation has to answer to the LAW of the state. That’s where I stand on this.
Zoning can be tricky, but many times there again, just shut up and nobody cares most of the time. Most problems are when the property owner goes asking the government if they are doing it right. Zoning is mostly a local thing so one good thing about that is that one person does have more power to change things.
Nowadays the sad fact of the matter in farming is that most of the stuff the majority of farmers do is actually illegal, at least around our neck of the woods. I figure I could get thrown in jail for just getting up in the morning with all the rules and regulations, but I just shut up and do what I have to do.
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:35 am
Brent,
Romans 13 talks about submitting to the governing authorities. Romans 13:4 says “….for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.” So Biblically the government’s role is to punish evil doers. You could probably also argue the the government should provide for defense of the country. I think our government has overstepped its Biblical bounds in a lot of areas. If the government orders something that is contrary to God’s word, we have a duty to obey God first. For example, the Bible says that parents are responsible for training and teaching their
children - not the state. If the state were to order my children to attend the government schools, I would disobey. If the state were to rule that I could not feed my children raw milk, I would disobey since I am responsible to provide optimal nutrition for my children. Biblically the state does not have this responsibility. The milk pasteurization laws
are based on old science. More recent research has shown that raw milk from healthy cows has ant-bacterial properties. We should not be basing our laws on science, which is fallible, but instead on the infallible Word of God.
I have seen raw milk help a number of people with ailments that they have. I have a friend whose arthritis worsens when he does not drink raw milk. There is a woman at our church who has crohn’s disease. Drinking raw milk reduces the problems she has with this disease. There is also a toddler in our church who develops problems when drinking pasteurized milk, but does great when drinking raw milk. I have seen acne clear up in teenage kids when they drink lots of raw milk. I don’t think the state has the right to deprive people of a food that can improve their health.
You probably need to look at the Wisconsin laws and come to a conclusion as to what your conscience will allow you to do. I recall that some judge in Wisconsin ruled that the state only had jurisdiction over sales of raw milk when a farmer was selling to a milk processor. I don’t know if this ruling still stands. I do know that a couple of years ago my wife visited a dairy farm in Wisconsin that was selling raw milk and butter. You might be able to get some legal advice and protection from the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which has just started up in the last year. I know a dairy farmer that has joined this Legal Defense Fund and I intend to join as well.
Matt,
John 22:38-39 says “Jesus said to him You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So ultimately it is our duty to love our neighbors and do them no harm. The higher principle is to love our neighbors. I can’t imagine that a few chickens would cause problems unless you have a bunch of roosters waking the whole neighborhood at dawn every day. It would seem that as long as your chickens are not a nuisance, having chickens shouldn’t be a problem. Even the city of Minneapolis allows people living on their small postage stamp lots to own chickens. You will probably need to figure out if your neighbors will complain, since they are most likely to be the ones that might turn you in to the zoning police. I see lots of people in my area break zoning laws. Seems that as long as they are responsible and not making a nuisance of themselves, they have no problems. Lets see, I suppose I should count my animal units to see if I am over my county imposed limit ….
Jim V
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:29 am
Jim,
In other words, just do what is right!
I’ll probably be joining up the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund too. Don’t just pay to sit around and complain about all the things thrown at us, gotta do something about it!
Now Jim, you wouldn’t be breaking any local zoning laws would you
I know I never, ever would 
Or any other laws for that matter either, (cough)! That saying, “Farmer Pirate” doesn’t imply someone going along with the system in my humble opinion.
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Tom,
Remember my duck issue? If you don’t count the 20 or so ducks that supposedly account for 4 animal units, I am maybe within the my alloted animal units.
I keep adding heifer calves so we are slowly expanding. With my animals on pasture most of the year, I am doing a much better job of managing manure than the neighbor who has 20+ head of cattle - about half the animal units that he could have. This neighbor has his cattle shed situated where the rain water washes through the sheds and carries all the manure down into a waterway. I’ve seen three feet of manure and mud in his shed and watched it swish on down into the waterway and then on into a creek. I had to be very careful not to lose my boots when trying to move a cow out of the worst of the manure. Funny how those zoning regulations really don’t keep someone from mismanaging manure. 
Jim V