Busier than normal Fall

The past few weeks have been a blur. We are still basically setting up our business all the while operating it, and farming, and fathering. It is a Fall worth remembering for what we've accomplished, but it has been stressful and busy beyond belief.

Our milling building is nearing completion as far as being ready to accept new bagging equipment. We are also planning to renovate our mills for increased efficiency. Right now we are having to re-load the mills 40lbs at a time and I would like it if we could simply pour the amount of wheat that we need to mill and walk away. New hoppers on top of the stone mills will solve that problem. We've achieved our Food Safety grant, that was good news. Now we have a little help purchasing new bagging, mixing equipment along with some new bins and other infrastructure.

A view of the yard from our brand new grain bin

The harvest for 2012 is one I'd as soon forget. This past summer was simply too much rain, too much wind and too much hail. Yields were down as much as 80% in some fields due to flooding and then a late August hail storm. What wheat we did harvest appears to be very good quality. The protein is great and the appearance is as beautiful as ever. Looking forward to baking with it for sure. Still to harvest, after a killing frost, is the oats and the flax. We need the frost to kill the underseeded Red Clover. Once that happens, we'll have the ability to straight cut the crops with the combine and then use the grain drier before we store the crops. Again, the weather has been great, but we usually have a good frost in early to mid September. What a year we've had!

combining wheat

Looking back on mistakes made, some small successes, some advances made and hope that what we've accomplished this year will pay dividends in 2013.

feb 5 blizzard

And yet another blizzard to contend with. Outside the wind is wailing. Through the window I see the snow speeding across the fields. The cows are miserable. The roads are miserable. I am miserable.

Actually, I am not entirely. The house is indeed toasty warm with a gentle fire rolling in the stove. A little glass of rum and ice is a luxury beside me on the desk as I type. Things could be worse.

I did have to experience the wind and blowing snow first hand while watering the cows and repairing fence earlier tonight. That whole process, on a night like tonight, simply reinforces my ideas about the price of food...it isn't high enough!

Thankfully, I receive little opposition to my pricing of our farm products. I try my best to keep things fair and so far my customers are extremely educated on the subject...they get it. They get that it is a tremendous amount of work to do things right, the hard way. The small-scale way, without chemicals and poisons, and unsustainable borrowing practices. I suspect that they appreciate that work and devotion and I appreciate them.

So, with ears and nose stinging with cold, I continue to do what it takes. To haul the grain, water the cows and mill the flour in order to make our little farm work and provide good quality, locally grown, organic food to as many people as I can.

Dreaming of spring.

snow low

In my recent posts I have been purposefully ignoring the problems that we are facing this winter with the sheer enormousness of snow that we have received so far. This winter's snow accumulation is nothing short of frustrating for me. The snow is stacked up so high in the fields that the fence which was once 4 feet high is now simply a step-over for the cows. I have had to raise the fence in spots with bamboo stakes to stop the cows from their regular raiding of the hay stack. Tonight, I think I finally have it figured out. The solar electric fencer is back operating at full power (now that I've dug it out of the snow bank) and I've parked the tractor in front of the favorite escape route. 

Our driveway has become a cow path of its own and I am now no longer able to keep it cleared wide enough with the tractor to allow the water delivery truck access. We had to call the county to come in with the grader so now I am at their mercy and timeliness to get our cistern filled. We are now on water saving mode more than usual. I hope that the grader can come tomorrow early enough to allow us to call the water delivery guy. 

On Sunday the wind was blowing so hard that there was a blizzard with clear sunny skies. The snow had completely enveloped the driveway. My neighbor saw me struggling in a futile effort to get out and he graciously started digging our driveway with his tractor from the road while I started from the house. Two tractors and 3 hours later and we have a driveway path cleared barely big enough to allow our vehicles through. 

A fun day of snow fort building!

On the positive of all this snow the kids are having fun....and we'll have lots of water around next summer to make up for our years of drought. I just wish that things could settle down into more normal patterns. It seems to me lately that there is far more extremes than ever before. More drought. More wind. More snowfall. More thunderstorms. More hail. Enough already!

i miss combining

It is always at this time of year that my thoughts return to fall. There is a certain light, a smell, a feeling about fall that I have experienced almost my entire life. It is because the fall means combine time!

It is a stressful time, but an extremely satisfying time. It is a time full of hope and angst. Scratchy, itching collars. Swollen, bleeding knuckles. But soon after it is done I miss it greatly. After the excitement of Christmas my mind floats back to sun filled days of early October and the sounds and smells of harvest time. I am not quite sure why I look back more than I look forward. I guess I have just always appreciated harvest time more than any other time of year. It is simply my favorite.

finally harvesting!

The weather over the past week was pretty good up until today. Last weekend it finally became dry enough for us to be able to do some combining. Starting to harvest on Sept. 26th is one of the latest starts we've ever had. Dad tells the story of not turning a wheel until the first of Oct. one year, but I must have been too young to remember. Here you can see us harvesting our certified organic yellow peas. These peas will be used for human consumption...pea soup! or for animal feed. I will have to spend a little effort trying to market them after harvest is over. These are the peas that Pea Butter is made from.

New Heritage Seeds Arrived!

This is the package that greeted me in the mail yesterday. I recently joined the Seed Sanctuary sponsored by Salt Spring Seeds. Dan sent the seeds to me very quickly after I joined and they look wonderful. Of course I had to open each package and have a look at the varieties. The purple barley is amazing and I really hope to be able to create a market for this grain. First though, I have to successfully grow it out into enough seed to plant commercially.

We will start with these small seed packets. I will prepare individual places in either the kitchen garden or the corral garden. These seeds will be planted in short compact rows to enable pollination. I will thresh these grains by hand or in the threshing box and then save them for next year. From the one pack of Red Fife...I am guestimating that I should end up with somewhere around 3 or 4 pounds of grain? That 4 pounds will translate into perhaps a bushel, that bushel will produce 15 bushels, that 15 bushels will produce around 200. So you can see that within 4 years of initial seeding, I will hopefully have enough to plant in a field of some reasonable size.

Heritage Wheats

I have recently obtained samples of several varieties of heritage wheat. What is Heritage Wheat you may ask? Well, that is a good question and to be frank, I don't know. What I do know is that there are different answers to this question depending on who you ask. To me, a heritage wheat variety is one that is "antique". A variety that was developed say sometime prior to 1940. You see, it was about this time that the war effort was in full swing in laboratories across the world. New weapons were being developed that included chemicals that had the potential to defoliate and poison entire cultures of people. Luckily for us (tongue in cheek) these chemicals became the basis for modern agriculture. They magically and without consequence, enabled farmers to grow crops with fewer weeds, more productivity and in the case of dessication, shorter seasons. Oh yes, and on a lesser side note, some companies were able to make a few little profits.

So, after WWII these same agricultural companies who were busy developing different ways of poisoning the earth were also funding the development of their own breeds of grains. These varieties could survive the chemical baths that other, lesser species couldn't and therefore farmers could spray till their hearts content to get rid of weeds and bugs and other maladies. Soon, these new varieties were the predominant ones and the older varieties selected for natural resistance to lodging and growing seasons and competitiveness were forgotten. With such specific breeding and even genetic manipulation, the new varieties of grains are genetically uniform and very shallow in genetic material. The old breeds are known as landraces and are genetically very diverse. They are able to adapt within a few years to different climates and growing conditions and most importantly are not registered or owned by anyone in particular. Of course some of the antique varieties from the 20's and 30's were registered by hard working breeders in government ag. offices and farms across the continent. These breeds were naturally selected and crossed with other heritage varieties to produce plants with significant genetic diversity and traits that enabled wheat to be grown in places in Canada where shorter seasons or natural obstacles prevailed.

What all of this means is that the companies in question were able to enslave farmers and decieve them into believing that registered, copyrighted seeds in conjunction with associated chemicals were the only modern way to farm. As is the case with all other known forms of modern farming hierarchy, the people making the vast proportion of profits were in fact these companies...peddling their wares like modern day versions of the tonic hoaxsters of years past.

Luckily for us today there are enlightened farmers and most importantly, enlightened consumers who are demanding a return to intelligent and sustainable farming practices using landrace, community owned seeds and organic agronomy.