Geese

Geese are wonderful farm birds. Although goslings are fairly expensive, the finished birds get to a nice weight --- and, most importantly, they can do it with relatively little grain. Our geese spend almost all of their time out in the pasture, eating little other than grass. They do swipe some grain from the egg laying hens, when they're locked in the barn at night, but we're fine with that. Grain helps the geese put on a little more weight --- and, most importantly, develop a nice layer of fat.

A woman from Ohio writes with some questions, after having raised her first batch of geese; I sent her a personal response, but in so doing realized that her note (and my reply) would be worth sharing with all of my readers. With her permission, here is her question and my response [I have edited both a bit]:

Hello, This is my first year raising geese. I have the Pilgrim breed. Being that I am so new to this, did I wait too long to butcher them at 7 months? Would they have been OK to process at 6 months? The processor was concerned about them not having pin feathers, which they didn't. But would they have grown out their pin feathers at 6 months or sooner? My birds have free access to pasture (in with steer) and also to free-choice mixed grains with 1/3 pellets mixed in. Do you think that I should not have offered them the grains during the peak pasture season (on unimproved, possibly less palatable, pasture)?



We did pilgrims once; they are a nice-sized bird, and have the unusual trait of being naturally sex-linked; in other words, the males and females can be distinguished by the color of their feathers. Pilgrims also have a reputation for being good natural mothers, which also appealed to us. Unfortunately, they turned out to be "too good" at mothering, and made nests out in the yard...where they got picked off by predators. In the years since, we gave up on trying to get geese to hatch their own goslings --- and stuck with Embdens, because they get larger faster. And they have a nicer temperament than some other breeds (like White Chinese).

The writer's time frame for butchering is perfectly fine. We raise them to the same age she did; I just butchered a bunch, myself. They're delicious at this age. If she'd waited until next spring, that's when they'd start to get tough. I wouldn't have expected pin feathers at the age she butchered them. The geese may have been okay to eat at 6 months, but my opinion is "the bigger the better." I have three more that we're keeping alive, to butcher for eating fresh at Christmas. They'll be 9 months old then, but in our experience that's always been fine.

Our geese are mostly out in pasture with the sheep, but get some supplemental grain when they steal it from the laying hens in the barn. We keep them separate much of the time, but geese definitely have a mind of their own. As long as they're mostly on pasture, grain is good for their development, and helps them reach a bigger size. I think it also helps them develop some fat --- which is absolutely wonderful when it melts off a slow-roasted goose, and can be used for cooking potatoes or spread on bread. The only reason we don't give them more grain is the expense of it. We have a huge pasture, and the geese love grass, so we figure we're saving money by letting them graze it. We also have a naturally wet, semi-swampy area in the pasture that they enjoy.

The writer indicated that she had sent the geese out to a butcher for processing. In her case, that makes sense because her time is worth more to her than the cost of butchering (much like the calculation we have made about butchering lambs or goats.) But if you're not too squeamish about it, I'd strongly encourage you try butchering your own birds. It doesn't require much special equipment, and geese are still small enough to be manageable. (i.e. it's not like butchering a cow or pig). We tie a cord around both legs, hang them from a nail or tree branch, then slit the throat and let them bleed to death. Geese bleed out very fast. The only problem with geese is that it's hard to get all those feathers off. We find that dunking them in very hot water helps a lot to loosen those feathers. Still a chore, but we enjoy doing it ourselves.

How Much Does the Turkey Matter?

As we prepare for Thanksgiving, that question may be on many people's minds. Kim Severson, writing in today's NY Times about a dispute with other food writers (and the ensuing cook-off she won hands down), comes down solidly on the side of "After the Bird, Everything Else Is Secondary."

From turkey comes stock, the flavor-giving fluid that pumps through the entire meal. Good gravy depends on good stock. So does stuffing (more on our stuffing fight in a moment). Delicious turkey does not come from a 29-cent-a-pound supermarket bird with cottony, bland breast meat. They are, as my favorite turkey breeder says, the Red Delicious apples of turkeys.

A bird that has been bred to reproduce naturally and thrive in the open develops tastier meat. I’ve eaten dozens of both, and I will swear to that basic truth on my favorite turkey platter.

There is a catch. Growing a great turkey takes time and serving one costs money. But if you can afford it, it’s the way to go.

The turkeys from Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, Va., spend their days on pasture and get organic feed. Much attention has been paid to their husbandry. They are certified by the Humane Farm Animal Care program. True, they start at
$125. But frankly, no expense was too great in proving Moskin wrong.

It's hard to think of a more fitting tribute to heritage breed turkeys, or a better explanation for why we continue to raise them --- even though the baby poults cost twice as much and reach a finished weight of less than half of what their broad breasted supermarket cousins can get to.

The piece goes on to give some excellent tips for cooking a heritage turkey. If you plan to get one, this article would be a good "clip and save." But hopefully you've already reserved yourself a turkey; most small producers sell out far in advance of Thanksgiving. And hopefully you'll be able to pay less than the $125 that Severson had to come up with.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, for a whole host of reasons. To say that I'm looking forward to feasting on one of our Blue Slate tom turkeys later this month would be a gross understatement.

More Options on Guns

With this week marking the the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there have been a number of stories about the event --- and some interesting stories about Communist consumer goods making a comeback. One "commie good" that has largely gone unremarked in press reports, however, is surplus military firearms and ammunition. The Eastern Bloc produced a lot of really nice weapons, and these are now available in the West at quite reasonable prices. Many gun shops only focus on newer-type firearms, and only carry the Eastern Bloc stuff if a customer sells it to them or consigns it --- but, if you know where to look, picking up an old Commie gun can literally yield a lot of bang for the buck.

First, I'd like to provide a more general update about firearms. Several months ago, I put up posts with thoughts about basic guns that are useful on a farm or ranch, and about the remarkable surge in gun / ammo sales that followed the previous Presidential election. I will reiterate: every farm should have a good pump-action shotgun, preferably a 12-gauge, for home defense and predator control. A longer range rifle can also be very useful, for varmint shooting or hunting larger game, but many find they can can do just fine with a basic .22 rifle. (They are cheap, and so is the ammo.) It all depends on your circumstances, and what you think you might need to shoot. I've personally found that a handgun is nice to have as well; it can be easily grabbed and carried to the barn, and either mounted with a tactical light or used with one hand while the other hand holds a spotlight.

Although ammo in some popular pistol calibers, such as .380 ACP, is still quite expensive and extremely difficult to find (our local Wal-Mart and Meijer stores have been sold out for months, and our gun shop imposes a limit of one 50-round box per customer, and that box costs $26), it appears that production of semi-auto rifles and ammo has caught up with demand. The gun shops I've visited tend to have a good supply of both AR-style and AK-style rifles, and online dealers are again stocking bulk packages of ammo in popular calibers (other than .380 ACP, of course). One online retailer, which just a year ago was "sold out to the bare walls," has lately been offering outstanding cut-rate deals because they are so overstocked. As they admit:

OKAY FOLKS. HERE IS THE DEAL. AFTER AN INCREDIBLE FALL AND SPRING SEASON IT HAS SLOWED DOWN HERE A GREAT DEAL. IT IS NO SECRET THAT IT GETS SLOW IN THE GUN BUSINESS IN THE SUMMER AND EVEN WITH THE THREAT OF NEW LEGISLATION, THIS YEAR SEEMS TO BE NO EXCEPTION.

TO COMPOUND THE PROBLEM OF THE SLOWNESS, WE HAD SUCH A BIG WINTER AND SPRING THAT WE HIRED EXTRA STAFF AND WE WANT TO CONTINUE TO KEEP THEM ON STAFF. AS SUCH, THE ONLY THING WE KNOW TO DO TO KEEP OUR NUMBERS UP IS TO SLASH PROFIT TO THE BONE AND SELL, SELL, SELL.

--- and they are even offering 7.62x39 ammo by the pallet load, something that would've been unheard of just a few months ago. Yep, you can get 40,320 rounds for $7,600 (plus freight), which works out to about .19/round. Since most of us aren't resellers, or preparing for TEOTWAWKI, they also offer 1260-round cases for $250 each. That's not quite as cheap as buying by the pallet, but still considerably cheaper than prices earlier this year.

Which brings us back to Eastern Bloc weapons. One good source for such firearms is gun shows; one can find a dizzying array of items there that a typical gun shop would not be able to stock. But if gun shows are an impractical option, there are other sources. Classic Arms, the online retailer mentioned above, updates its website daily --- and usually offers a fascinating array of firearms. They tend heavily toward AK-variant rifles, but carry the whole spectrum. I usually browse their site once a day, just for the entertainment value and to see what's available.

One of the more interesting firearms they're currently offering is the Draco pistol; think "sawed-off, semi-auto submachine gun version of the AK-47." It's not terribly accurate, and I have no need of one, but for just $350, you can get what might be the ideal survival tool if you're ever stuck in an urban riot situation. It can be fitted with a 30 or 40-round clip of powerful 7.62x39 rifle ammo, but is as compact and maneuverable as a large pistol.

In most cases, if you want to buy a firearm from them, it is necessary to have it shipped to a FFL (Federal Firearms License) holder (typically, a local gun shop), who will complete the background check and record the transaction. This usually entails a fee of about forty bucks, but it varies from shop to shop. However, many of Classic's guns are legally classified "Curio and Relic" --- meaning anyone who has a C&R FFL can purchase such guns from them directly and have them shipped right to one's door. I don't have a C&R FFL, but they are fairly easy to get and not very expensive. Basically, buying one C&R firearm with a C&R FFL saves enough money on the transfer fee to cover the cost of the license.

And what kind of Eastern Bloc bang can you get for your buck? I recently picked up a Mosin-Nagant M91/30 rifle for $80, plus $20 shipping and $40 for the transfer. The Mosin-Nagant is one of the most popular battle rifles of all time, and was used in the Soviet empire up until about 1960. It's a five-shot bolt action rifle that is as powerful as a 30-06 --- but uses military surplus 7.62x54r ammo that comes in a 440-round metal tin and costs about a fourth of what 30-06 ammo does. It comes with iron sights, but optical scopes and mounting kits run about $110 total and can be installed without gunsmithing. Presto: instant deer rifle or long range varmint gun. I haven't yet invested in a scope; I've been basically breaking the thing in, shooting in my back yard.

Actually, what I've been "breaking in" is my shoulder: the Mosin-Nagant kicks like a mule, and it takes some practice to learn how to handle it properly. But this beast is in great shape and is as cool as can be. Mine has "1941" and various Cyrillic characters stamped on it --- and comes with a wicked looking bayonet that's about as long as my forearm (and doubles as a flathead screwdriver when disassembling the rifle). One can only imagine the stories that this rifle could tell. Most remarkable, IMO, is the following that these rifles have attracted; one quick Google search reveals a great many user groups, support forums, and sources for parts/accessories.

And there are lots of similarly powerful Eastern Bloc surplus rifles you can get, also at reasonable prices. How about a Yugoslavian-made M24/47 that fires 8mm Mauser ($.29/round military surplus) ammo? Sometimes they also carry ex-Nazi Mauser rifles, which the Soviets captured at the end of WWII and then shipped around the world to their proxy armies. Or, if you're looking for a powerful semi-auto handgun that uses inexpensive ammo, it's hard to do better than a Romanian TT-33 pistol; the list price is $209, and the 7.62x25 Tokarev ammo is around .11/round. Classic also carries CZ-82 ex-police pistols, chambered in 9x18 Makarov, for around the same price; the Makarov holds more rounds, but is not as powerful as the Tokarev, and 9x18 ammo tends to cost more.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: if you've been looking for a powerful but affordable bolt action rifle, but have been discouraged by the high prices for brand new American-made 30-30s and 30-06s at the local gun shop (not to mention the cost of ammo), take a look at Eastern Bloc military surplus weapons. Ditto if you've been trying to find a good semi-automatic handgun. These Eastern Bloc firearms are very good; the Soviets may have made lousy consumer products, but they did know how to make effective weaponry. And with the Berlin Wall down, these guns are available here for reasonable prices.

That, to me, is one of the most remarkable legacies of the last 20 years: I can buy in the free market, and own, a rifle that for decades was employed by those who sought to destroy our freedom and way of life. And how can one put a price on that?

Cash

A few days after taking our eleven lambs to the butcher shop, I got an interesting phone call from the owner. He'd nearly finished processing them, and said they'd be ready for pickup in two days. The call came fairly late in the evening, after the shop's closing time, and I could hear plenty of activity in the background. It sounded like they were indeed swamped with work, and I was thankful they'd been able to work our eleven lambs into their schedule.

He then told me what the total price was going to be. The standard charge would be $55 per lamb, or $605 altogether. (I usually put that on a credit card.) However, he continued, if I wanted to pay cash...he would drop the total to $500.

Needless to say, that's a pretty substantial discount. Some readers may suspect that cash payments are merely a way for a shopkeeper to evade taxes; I can't speak to that...what I do know is that the guy who runs this shop strikes me as a very honest and upstanding person. And I will say this: credit card companies can charge some fairly steep transaction fees, especially for merchants with relatively lower sales volume. For the savings he was offering, I was perfectly happy to go to the ATM and withdraw what was needed (though, being a hard core Casablanca fan, I must confess that I couldn't stop thinking about this classic scene the whole time I was doing it --- the key clip comes at about 1:15 on the linked video).

Given current economic conditions, and that all of us are looking for ways to save some money, I wonder if we will see "cash discounts" become more widespread. I like using credit cards for the convenience, the "float" on the use of the money, and the rewards benefits. (We pay in full each month, so there are no finance charges.) But if merchants are willing to offer a lower price for the use of cash, so they can avoid the CC fees, I'll leave the credit card in my wallet and pay with cash.

Is anyone else out there starting to see more "cash discounts" being offered? I'm starting to think it might even be worth asking merchants straight out, especially smaller shops and tradespeople, what kind of discount they would be willing to offer if we pay in cash.

Why Do This?

A reader from Southern California (actually not far from where our family lived, pre-farm) who wishes he could be doing what we're doing, Kevin Aldrich, writes with some important thoughts and observations:


It would seem that the reason to have a family farm is not so much to grow your own food or have a viable business as to have a means of raising your kids well. They are more “in touch” with real life and work with their hands, not just with their heads and technology.

Here’s a kind of a idea for raising kids—not that I’ve done it for any of mine—but a child’s development could kind of follow the history of the development of humanity. It seems like we are more and more cut off from the life that most people have led through most of human history. Not that we want any of the negatives, like mortality rates before modern medicine, or famines before the Green Revolution, or battles followed by rape and pillage.

Rather, it seems like kids would have a huge advantage if their youths were filled with activities like storytelling, memorization, growing your own food, dealing with animals, running, fighting, using weapons, building fires and doing without electricity, dealing with heat and cold and darkness, writing with pencils instead of keyboards, penmanship, building and fixing things, reading instead of watching, talking instead of texting. Have you seen Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E? People are fat and chair-bound and taken care of by robots. It really is the future.

I guess I think about this because I live on the edge of the center of modern, artificial living...


It really is remarkable how different the Yeoman Farm Children are from other kids their age. They get up each morning, go outside, and are responsible for milking two goats. They take the goats out to pasture. In the evenings, they do it all again (in reverse), and hunt all over the barn gathering eggs, and make sure the various animals have the food they need. They are present when lambs and goat kids are born, alert us to any problems those animals may have, work to ensure the health of all those animals ... and help load mature animals into the truck when it's time to go to the butcher. They know how to cultivate soil, how to plant seeds, how to tell the difference between a weed and a "good" seedling, which tomatoes and peppers are ripe, how to handle fresh produce (and eggs) without damaging or breaking anything. And because their severe food allergies make meal preparation such a big production (in the time it takes most kids to finish off a bowl of Fruit Loops, we're still grinding grain for hot cream-of-rice cereal), they have learned to take the lead in cooking breakfasts and lunches from scratch.

They do not have iPods or cell phones or Facebook pages, do not "text" their friends, have never surfed beyond the EWTN Kids website, and their television viewing is limited and always supervised (and made up of sports, politics, religious, and History Channel type stuff). They read a lot of books, particularly historical fiction. They know how to type, and how to use computers, but do most of their work with pen and paper. They know firearms are not toys, but rather powerful tools which must be respected and handled safely and responsibly.

When we first moved to the country, one of our primary motivations was getting control of our food supply. But the longer we've been doing this, and the more we've observed the way our kids have thrived, our motivation for continuing to farm has increasingly become the whole lifestyle and culture in which our family is immersed here, and the sorts of well-rounded young adults into which the YFCs are growing. It's hard to imagine anything that could've been better for them. Or for us.

Farming Detroit?

It's difficult to describe just how hollowed-out the City of Detroit has become, or how cheaply vacant land (and even houses) can be had. As I like to tell people: if you ever have a little time to kill and want some entertainment, get on Google Earth and fly around Detroit for awhile. You'll be shocked at how much open space there is. Then get on Realtor.com and see how much land you can buy there, in some cases using the coins you can probably dig out of your sofa or from under the front seat of your car.

This piece from The Urbanophile takes an in-depth look at what's been happening to Detroit, and explores the possibilities available to entrepreneurs who are willing to think creatively about what to do with a city whose population has shrunk but whose boundaries have not. There is now some serious, organized urban gardening going on inside the city limits, and many have been exploring possibilities for more serious farming. The piece has a number of excellent links to other stories and bloggers who have also looked at other farming-related projects in and proposals for Detroit.

His conclusion bears reprinting verbatim:

As the focus on agriculture and even hunting show, in Detroit people are almost literally hearkening back to the formative days of the Midwest frontier, when pioneer settlers faced horrible conditions, tough odds, and often severe deprivation, but nevertheless built the foundation of the Midwest we know, and the culture that powered the industrial age. No doubt in the 19th century many of those sitting secure in their eastern citadels thought these homesteaders, hustlers, and fortune seekers crazy for leaving the comforts of civilization to head to places like Iowa and Chicago. But some saw the possibilities of what could be and heeded the call to “Go West, young man.” We’ve come full circle.

Here Goes Nothing

I've decided to let the broody Buff Orpington hen try her hand at actually hatching some eggs. Thanks to those of you who left comments; although all three of you live in more temperate climates than MI, your sentiments reinforced my own inclination.


I gave her a dozen, as I'm uncertain how many of these are fertile. We have multiple roosters, and they're not shy about doing their thing, but they have a lot of hens to cover. Anyway, I went through the 14 eggs that had been sitting at room temperature overnight, and removed the two that were cracked.



Check back in 21 days to see what actually comes of this experiment. Given that she's made the nest in a 40 gallon tub, it should be easy for her to keep the hatchlings together and keep them warm --- and for me to provide supplemental water/feed for them.


What fun is a farm if you never try crazy things?

Broody Henny Penny

I have an odd dilemma: one of our pullet hens has gone broody. She wants to do nothing put sit on a nest, and has picked a spot in a 40 gallon tub with hay in it. Originally, there was an egg in that spot...and she really wanted to hatch it. I took that egg away, but she's still incredibly broody and keeps returning to that spot no matter how I try to separate her from it.

We've lost her as an egg layer for several weeks no matter what (once they go broody, hens stop laying --- much like mammals stop ovulating when they're pregnant). I'd normally be inclined to give her a dozen eggs or so and let her "have at" brooding them in a nice isolated nest that no other hens can get into and lay more eggs. We're big believers in letting mother hens do their thing, and hatching out a brood of chicks they can raise on their own. But here is the problem: 21 days from now (when those eggs would begin hatching), it will be mid-November. In Michigan. Unless she's the mother of all Buff Orpingtons, those chicks would need supplemental heat for quite some time. The dead of winter is a lousy time to be letting a hen walk around with a clutch of chicks.

FWIW, we have eggs coming out our eyeballs and I can easily spare a dozen for this experiment. But I'm not into animal cruelty, and would hate to see a dozen chicks freeze to death.

Any thoughts from my dear readers? I need to make a decision shortly.

Urban Chickens Have Issues

Living in an urban or suburban area, and thinking about raising some stealth chickens? Today's NYT has a nice rundown of "issues" that others have encountered. And you know what? Many of these "issues" are difficulties you'll encounter in raising chickens, and other livestock, no matter where your house is located.

An excerpt:

They get diseases with odd names, like pasty butt and the fowl plague. Rats and raccoons appear out of nowhere. Hens suddenly stop laying eggs or never produce them at all. Crowing roosters disturb neighbors.

The problems get worse. Unwanted urban chickens are showing up at local animal shelters. Even in the best of circumstances, chickens die at alarming rates.

“At first I named them but now I’ve stopped because it’s just too hard,” said Sharon Lane, who started with eight chickens in a coop fashioned from plywood and chicken wire in the front yard of her north Berkeley home. She’s down to three.

Ms. Lane, who is close friends with the restaurateur Alice Waters, wanted exceptional eggs, plain and simple. But her little flock has been plagued with mysterious diseases.

She has not taken them to the vet because of the high cost, but she goes to workshops and searches out cures on the Internet. She has even put garlic down their throats in hopes that the antibacterial qualities of the cloves might help.

“I’m discouraged but I’m determined to figure this out,” Ms. Lane said. “I still get more than I give.”

The last line I quoted might be the most important one in the story: Raising chickens, or any other kind of livestock, is often discouraging. But there is a wonderful reward that comes from the very struggle to figure out what the problems are and in trying different solutions. And along the way, you learn that --- despite pouring your heart out and doing everything you can imagine doing --- animals die. But you keep going. You learn. You do things differently the next time.

And you know what? Whether your next batch of chickens dies or thrives...you get more than you give. Because you've learned, and you've grown, and no one can take those experiences away from you.

And, yes, you will eventually get some really really good eggs. Just keep at it and never give up.

Getting Started

Our family very much enjoys having other families over for dinner and giving tours of the farm. It's particularly gratifying when the guest family has been thinking for some time about getting started with a farm of their own, and we are able to give a practical introduction to what such a farm could look like.

A few weeks ago, a close mutual friend introduced us to a family which had recently relocated to the general area from out of state. It turned out that our families had a lot in common, and we were glad when they accepted our invitation to come over for dinner. The kids immediately hit it off, and all of them were soon having a grand time tromping around the barnyard. The adults sat down to talk; in the course of the conversation, they explained that they were renting an apartment until their old house sold, at which point they planned to begin looking for a place in Michigan.

Things have been going well, and I received the following email recently:

Hey, do you have a recommendation for a couple of books on "hobby farming" or small scale farming? We're set to close on the 10 acre house in two weeks and are starting to think about what to do first. We're thinking big, big garden, and some animals like chickens, turkeys, or pigs. I suspect it is easy to get in over your head pretty quickly with all the excitement. [My wife] has made contact with the local 4h group, which seems to be full of Catholic homeschoolers. Anyway, I thought you'd be the guy to ask since I remember you saying that you must have read every book there was on the subject.

Indeed, the list of books in the blog's right margin is only part of the library we've accumulated. But if I had to choose just one book for the aspiring homesteader, it would have to be Carla Emery's The Encyclopedia of Country Living. As I told my correspondent, there is no single book that is as comprehensive as this one. It covers a massive amount of territory, easily enough to get you started with whatever you want to try. Once you decide that you like a particular thing (chickens, pigs, gardening, etc), you can invest in specialized books about that subject. Mrs Yeoman Farmer and I spent hours reading Carla Emery's book, even while still living in a California subdivision, and it was a huge help in allowing us to hit the ground running in Illinois.



I'd also add, as has been stated ad infinitum on this blog, Do Not Try To Start Too Big. It's extremely tempting to jump in with both feet and try a hundred different things at once. Slow down. Do your reading and study. And try one thing at a time --- each of them on a small scale.



Blog readers, do you have any other good introductory / overview books that you could recommend to my friend (and others in a similar situation)?

Life and Death

On a day like today, with lambs having been taken to the butcher, and when a melancholic mood is practically unavoidable...it's always nice to have things brightened a happy arrival. And today, we had two such happy arrivals:




Button, one of our dairy goats, surprised us with twin kids. One male, one female. The timing couldn't have been better: this means that we will now have at least one doe in milk all winter.


Deo Gratias!

The Butcher

Homeschooled Farm Girl and I just got back from the local butcher. Our flock was shorn over the weekend, so this was an ideal time to get the lambs processed. We got up early, then jammed eleven lambs into the back of our old 1984 Ford Bronco II. The trip is always interesting, to say the least, with that many nervous animals in the back --- especially when slowing for stop signs, starting back up from stops, and going around curves.

As I've noted previously, these custom slaughter operations are getting increasingly difficult to find. Back in Illinois, we had to drive a great distance to reach the one and only place for many miles around that still does this kind of work. Here in Michigan, the place is closer --- but it is still our only option. With the decline of small farming operations, it seems there has also been a decline in small meat processing operations.

The one near us is one of the survivors. It's run by a man named Jack, and he looks to be in his mid to late fifties. He has employees, but he is personally involved with every aspect of an animal's trip through the facility. Dressed in a blood-spattered white apron, he meets our truck when we pull in the back with a load of lambs or goats, helps us unload and secure them in a holding pen on death row, and then goes around to the retail portion of the place to write up our order. Put all the animals together or keep them separate? How many people in your family will be sharing a package of steaks or chops? You want the ribs, or should we remove the meat and grind it? Shanks? Rear legs as whole roasts? You want the organs? Neck as soup bones? Okay, I think that's it.

Jack is not a chatty or extroverted guy, but this morning he happened to mention something interesting. As he finished writing up our order, I asked him if we could get a couple of male goat kids in next week. He flipped through his order book (it's all still done by hand --- nothing in the place is computerized), and sighed about how incredibly jammed they are. And then he added something to the effect of, "I hate killing those little baby animals, and having to charge you for all that labor."

I assured him they weren't "babies," but that I totally understood if he wanted to wait on taking the goats in. He said we should hold off, because (waving at the calendar on the wall), they are super busy from the time of the Fair through February. Nobody wants to over-winter anything more than they need to. And then there are all the deer that hunters want processed. You could see from his face, and the way that he leaned on the counter, that he's tired. But the tiredness was more than physical, and gave a further hint as to why these custom slaughter operations are getting harder to find (despite how much business they can do). "Everybody wants us to kill this, kill that," he said, shaking his head. "When I first started doing this, it was easy for me to kill everything. I'm starting to hate killing things."

Killing things isn't fun. We butcher our own chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese; I've personally killed and cleaned hundreds of birds over the last several years. But I've been holding off on butchering our larger animals. As HFG and I drove home in our truck, I couldn't help feeling a little guilty for "outsourcing unpleasantness" onto someone else. If I invested in a good set of knives, and a block-and-tackle, I could butcher our lambs and goats myself. It wouldn't be pretty, and I wouldn't be able to package things up as neatly as Jack's people do. But is the quality of the finished product the only reason I've balked at butchering our own lambs? Am I hesitant about looking a lamb in the face before putting a bullet through its brain? Do I have the emotional strength to cut the lamb's throat so it can bleed out as it thrashes with death throes? Can I get my hands dirty cleaning out a lamb's intestines and lungs? And pulling the pelt off?

I don't see "butchering my own meat" as a moral obligation or anything --- but I am a believer in taking a personal stake and having a personal connection with one's food, unless there's a good reason not to. For instance, there is simply no way I could possibly butcher a beef cow. But lambs are small enough for anyone to handle. And if squeamishness is the real reason I've been outsourcing this work to Jack, I'm starting to wonder if I should at least give butchering a try next fall with one of our lambs.

Wanted. Very Much Wanted

Our family continues to prepare for the adoption of Yeoman Farm Baby; all has continued to go well with his gestation, and our family's excitement in anticipation of his due date is growing daily.

Naturally, we have been spreading the word among friends and colleagues. In this regard, I recently had an interesting experience --- one that Mrs Yeoman Farmer and I both believe should be shared.

I was attending a conference last week with about 25 other Catholic men. In the course of introductions and various conversations, I mentioned that we were preparing to adopt a baby who will be born soon. Everyone responded to this with great joy and congratulations, and many obviously wanted to know more of the details. To this end, one older gentleman asked, "So, did you find a mother who's having a baby she doesn't want?"

Careful readers will note that this question actually had two parts. The second part caught me off guard, so I initially focused my reply on the first part. No, I explained, we didn't find her. She found us. Or, rather, a mutual friend/acquaintance connected her with us. The way everything played out, all of us were utterly convinced that divine providence was behind these events.

The gentleman nodded. And then I turned my attention to the second part of his question: is this a baby that she doesn't want? To expand on the answer I gave him: NO! In fact, the birth mother very much wants this baby. She loves him with all her heart, as almost all mothers naturally do. She would lay down in front of a train for this baby. She very much wants to raise this baby herself, and to give him all of her love --- but, at the same time, she knows she is not in a position to supply what he needs. She loves him so much, she is sacrificing her own desires ("wants") for the greater good of her child.

I should emphasize that in giving this reply to my questionner, my tone was not at all one of correction; it was rather one of explanation and of sharing insights that we ourselves had been learning in the process.

It is hard to imagine a more complete, or a more selfless, love than what we have observed from our birth mother. She is a mother who very much wants to keep her child, but loves him too much to actually do so. And when our son is old enough to understand, we intend to tell him precisely that.

This is our happy Yeoman Farm Baby, as of a few days ago:




We can hardly wait to meet this very wanted baby and welcome him into our family.

Too Much Milk

From the Department of Unintended Consequences From Messing With Nature, today's NY Times reports on a new development in the dairy industry: sexed semen, resulting in...

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly be worse.

The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it.

“It’s real simple,” said Tony De Groot, an early adopter of the new breeding technology, who milks 4,200 cows on a farm here in the heart of this state’s struggling dairy region. “We’ve just got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and coming.”

I personally don't have a problem with artificial insemination; it can be an excellent tool for improving a herd's genetics, by bringing in genes that would otherwise be unavailable on a given farm. We know many small breeders who use it for sheep and dairy herds. But I do find it remarkable that no one seemed to see the consequences of widespread adoption of "sexed semen" coming.

Driving around the country here, there are several smallish dairy operations with herds of Holstein cows. And, if you look closely at the other small farms, you'll often see individual Holstein steer calves being raised for meat. Holsteins are not the most efficient breed for meat, but provide a nice 4-H project for a farm kid and a good amount of beef for the typical rural family. In other words: even though male Holstein calves don't fetch a lot of money, they do have some value.

If the agricultural sex-selectors really want to make a difference, by eliminating males which have no value at all (and are otherwise immediately exterminated), they ought to focus their energies on the chicken industry. Help the egg producers hatch 90% females in their Leghorn flock, and you'll have made an enormous contribution. Unlike the situation with cattle, which must be bred (and therefore must continue producing calves) to keep them in milk, if the egg producers managed to hatch 90% females they could simply scale back the total number of eggs incubated. We could get the right number of replacement pullets, without hatching enormous numbers of cockrels which would need to be immediately euthanized.

Or, we could just encourage more yeoman farmers to raise traditional dual-purpose breeds of chickens. But that would be too easy.

Organic Tuscan Kale

We have absolutely GOT to start growing certified organic Tuscan kale on our farm. I had no idea the lengths to which some people would go, and how much they would spend, to purchase it. And that purchasers (at least ones with their own bullet-proof limos) are also willing to fork over five bucks a dozen for eggs.

Seriously, I never thought I would see a story like this one in the Washington Post:


Let's say you're preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don't have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here's how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. "Now it's time to buy some food," she told several hundred people who came to watch. "Let's shop!"


Go read the whole thing. Then pick your jaw up off the floor.

Defusing the Population Bomb

At the risk of turning this into "Norman Borlaug Week," I wanted to pass along an excellent piece from Gregg Easterbrook about the father of the green revolution.

He gives a nice review of Borlaug's accomplishments, and the significance of his work. This datum in particular is startling:

Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre; by 2006, the figure was about 155 bushels per acre.

Making a similar point as my original post about Borlaug, Easterbrook observes:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

But Easterbrook's most important --- and insightful --- observations might be these:

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

"Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

Go read the whole thing.

Following Up on Dr. Borlaug

A quick follow-up: I cleaned up yesterday's post on Dr. Norman Borlaug, trimmed it to under 1,000 words, and the good folks at MercatorNet published it today.

And if I could clarify one thing for all of you: I am not a "supporter" of the industrial agriculture model that developed as a result of Dr. Borlaug's work. But neither am I so deluded as to believe that model can be overturned any time soon, or that --- given how the agricultural industry has developed --- it would be possible to replace that model overnight with anything that would be nearly as effective in meeting global nutritional needs. That was my point in citing the example of synthetic fertilizer; I'd prefer to see more grass-based livestock operations that are not as reliant on monocultures and row crops, and therefore not as much in need of fertilizer --- but that's not the reality of modern agriculture, and isn't something that will change any time soon. I think it's important to emphasize that even if we may not like some of the consequences the green revolution has spawned, and even if we think some of its farming practices should be changed, we need to be honest in admitting that hundreds of millions of people are alive today who likely would have starved to death without that revolution.

Is the nutritional content of those people's food as good as it could be? Of course not. Can we do better? Absolutely. But we need to start somewhere, and I celebrate the "pro-life" achievements of Dr. Borlaug's green revolution. And will continue to do everything I can to produce higher quality food for my family, and to encourage others to produce higher quality food for their own families, using more sustainable farming techniques.

The Puzzle of Dr. Norman Borlaug

Ever wondered why food today is so incredibly cheap and widely available? Why we no longer see so much footage of starvation and famine in third world countries? There are many reasons, of course, but much of it can be summed up in two words: Norman Borlaug. Dr. Borlaug passed away this weekend at the age of 95, and is generally recognized as the architect of the “Green Revolution,” the explosion of crop yields and farming productivity that occurred after World War II.

Dr. Borlaug’s New York Times obituary includes a fascinating description of just how profoundly his work transformed agricultural practices and the resulting outputs.

Dr. Borlaug’s initial goal was to create varieties of wheat adapted to Mexico’s climate that could resist the greatest disease of wheat, a fungus called rust. He accomplished that within a few years by crossing Mexican wheats with rust-resistant varieties from elsewhere.

His insistence on breeding in two places, the Sonoran desert in winter and the central highlands in summer, imposed heavy burdens on him and his team, but it cut the time to accomplish his work in half. By luck, the strategy also produced wheat varieties that were insensitive to day length and thus capable of growing in many locales, a trait that would later prove of vital significance.


The Rockefeller team gradually won the agreement of Mexican farmers to adopt the new varieties, and wheat output in that country began a remarkable climb. But these developments turned out to be a mere prelude to Dr. Borlaug’s main achievements.


By the late 1940s, researchers knew they could induce huge yield gains in wheat by feeding the plants chemical fertilizer that supplied them with extra nitrogen, a shortage of which was the biggest constraint on plant growth. But the strategy had a severe limitation: beyond a certain level of fertilizer, the seed heads containing wheat grains would grow so large and heavy, the plant would fall over, ruining the crop.


In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. Yet crucially, the seed heads did not shrink, meaning a small plant could still produce a large amount of wheat.


Dr. Borlaug and his team transferred the gene into tropical wheats. When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new “semidwarf” plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing.

The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties.


This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.

Particularly in sustainable agriculture circles, many point out that Dr. Borlaug’s Green Revolution, like every revolution, included its share of unintended consequences and created problems of its own. Chief among these: the industrialization and corporate domination of agriculture, the depopulation of the countryside, and squeezing out of small family farms. Modern farming is no longer conducted on a “human” scale, and the overwhelming majority of people in developed countries have lost all connection to where their food comes from.

I understand these sentiments well, and sympathize (at least in spirit) with much of the critique of modern industrial agriculture. However, I am under no illusions that it is possible --- or even desirable --- to put the genie of modern agriculture back into its bottle. Fertilizer is a prime example; the large confinement livestock operations have never been better at capturing animal waste, but even all that manure falls far short of what is needed to grow crops on the scale needed to feed the world’s population. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are a practical necessity. As Blake Hurst, himself a commercial farmer, points out in his excellent article, The Omnivore’s Delusion:

Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with "natural" fertilizer. ... And cows do not produce nitrogen from the air, but only from the forages they eat, so to produce more manure we will have to plant more forages.

Hurst goes on to discuss the planting of cover crops (aka “green manure”) to supply nitrogen naturally, but demonstrates that this is both impractical and would remove a great deal of cropland from production. I love the Amish, and the way they farm, but we can’t pretend that Amish farming practices can feed the world.

Don’t get me wrong: I highly recommend the small-scale agriculture that our family is engaging in, and I hope that more families follow us in adopting this lifestyle. But it’s difficult to imagine “yeoman farmers” like ourselves ever being able to feed the world with what we’re doing. Heck, we can’t even (entirely) feed our own family this way…and we’ve met very few families who even come close.

We do produce all of our own eggs, and almost all of our meat, and what we can’t raise here (beef) we buy from a neighbor who does. But, even there, I need to be honest. Our egg layer and broiler chicks all come from a commercial hatchery. So do our ducklings, and our goslings, and our turkey poults. All the feed they consume was grown by “industrial” farmers and mixed up for us by the local grain elevator (with industrial-strength equipment). Our sheep are exclusively grass-fed, and our goats are largely grass-fed, but the does could not produce enough milk for us without supplemental grain from the elevator. Our egg chickens are free to forage, but their egg production would suffer badly without supplemental grain. In short, without the extraordinary crop yields and productivity of modern agriculture, we would not have the relatively inexpensive feed grains that ultimately make our family’s micro-farm possible.


Perhaps the most important by-product of Dr. Borlaug’s Green Revolution is the shattering of Malthusian theories. Thomas Malthus argued that because population increases geometrically, but agricultural production only increases arithmetically, human populations would eventually outstrip the ability of farmers to feed them. Malthus and his modern disciples (such as Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich) therefore argued that stringent population-control measures were the only way to solve this dilemma.


But Malthus failed to anticipate the extraordinary manner in which technology and innovation could literally change the rules about agricultural output. As the late Dr. Julian Simon pointed out in numerous books and other research writings, human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we are truly “the ultimate resource.” Humans, because of our brains and intellectual ability, are equipped to solve problems and produce far more than we consume. Particularly when markets are allowed to function freely and offer incentives for meeting the needs of other people, and governments protect property rights, human beings have proven themselves capable of coming up with extraordinary breakthroughs to solve the problems of food production. As others have put it, every child is born with a mouth to feed --- but two hands to help work. And, as Dr. Simon would add, a brain to help innovate.

And that leaves us with a puzzling final observation. Despite his personal experience in revolutionizing the way food is produced, and having witnessed first-hand the ability of human intellect to find new ways of feeding a growing world, Norman Borlaug was and remained an advocate for the population-control movement. His references to “the population monster,” and other similar formulations, even hint at an underlying misanthropy in his beliefs --- as if the problem is too many people in the world, rather than not enough freedom and market incentives for innovators to find ways to supply the needs of those people. I greatly admire what Dr. Borlaug was able to achieve in his work, but am left wondering why he could not recognize the profoundly anti-Malthusian implications of his achievements.

What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall for the conversation that Norman Borlaug and Julian Simon might be having right now on the other side…

Hay Hay Hay!

One reason for the slow posting of late is the extraordinary amount of harvest activity that kicks in on the farm in late summer. Add to that an extraordinary amount of professional work that's come in recently, and I'm going an embarrassing amount of time between blog posts. Hope to get caught up toward the end of next week, when everything should be slowing down a bit.

Last Thursday, the big harvest project was HAY. We brought in our third (and final) cutting of the year, and it was extremely rich in alfalfa. The way hay works, three cuttings is considered a good/standard year. The field is planted in a mix of grass and alfalfa; the latter is what provides most of the protein in hay. The first cutting of the spring is very heavy in grass, but has some alfalfa. This year, thanks to a good application of fertilizer last fall, we got 465 bales in our first cutting. We brought in the second cutting on July 14th, and got 240 bales; it was less bulky, due to the grass slowing down in the heat of summer, but richer in alfalfa.

This year's third cutting was only 123 bales, but they were overwhelmingly alfalfa and will provide a wonderful, protein-rich supplement for the sheep this winter. And in case you're keeping count, cutting #2 yielded 51% of the number of bales we got in cutting #1. And cutting #3 yielded 51% of the bales we got in cutting #2. That is par for the course. You get fewer bales as the year goes on, but they're richer.

The farmer who helps us decided that he would make a single trip around the field making bales and stacking them on the hay rack; that was pushing the upper limit of what the rack could hold, but he didn't want to waste time making two trips to the barn. Instead, he stacked the bales seven high. Our two youngest kids, who'd been riding around on the rack as the bales came it, had the absolute time of their lives: as the bales stacked higher, they got to climb higher. And higher. And higher. By the time the tractor and hay rack were coming in to the barn, they were literally almost as high up as the power lines running from the road to our house. They needed a ladder to come down.

It's a wonderful sense of security to have many hundreds of bales of hay stacked to the rafters in the big red barn. We have much more than we'll need for the next year, but our thinking is that we shouldn't sell any. If drought conditions limit next year's harvest, we'll be very glad to have these extra bales in the winter of 2010-2011...especially because, in a drought year, hay purchased on the open market would be extremely expensive. And it's not like this stuff goes bad, as long as you keep it dry in the barn. If next year's harvest is another bumper one, we might sell some of that hay.

For now, I love looking at the beautifully-cut field and remember that all the haying work is now done for the year and the produce is safely gathered into the barn.

We Could Make a Fortune

...if we could build a guest house and find some folks willing to spend $300 per night for a "haycation." And I'm sure the kids would greatly appreciate getting some help milking the goats.

As the NY Times reports:

In a world where small farmers need to diversify to keep their fields afloat and city dwellers are more desperate than ever to learn where their food comes from, a “haycation” for about the price of a nice hotel room in Manhattan didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea.

For my family, the appeal was a fancy floored tent with a flush toilet and running water. On the Web site, it looked bigger than a junior one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side.

I’m no stranger to this kind of thing. My mother grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. I was once so tough, I hiked for days across Alaskan tundra. But I have gone soft from all this city living. And my partner makes a point of telling me regularly that her people don’t camp.

On the other hand, we have a toddler who had never seen a live chicken. And I was desperate to get out of the city and eat vegetables still warm from the sun. So what if I had to do chores? How tough could a $300-a-night farm stay be?

This is essentially how we talked ourselves into spending a long weekend at Stony Creek Farm in Delaware County, N.Y., a part of the Catskills so rough that most everyone who grew up there describes it as “two stones to every dirt.”

Go read the whole thing. It's fun. It might inspire your next vacation. And for all our out-of-town friends and family who came to visit overnight and got to help out with chores for free this summer: Do you feel lucky or what?

Seattle-to-Portland 2009 Ride Report

This post is a break from what we usually discuss here, and is very long to boot. Many regular readers may want to skip it. As noted recently, I returned home to Seattle last month for a few days; at that time, I promised a full report on the Seattle-to-Portland (STP) ride, the event which had been the primary purpose of my trip. It's taken me this long to sit down and put that report together. I write such a report after every major cycling event; I am sharing this one on the blog for anyone out there who may be interested in my experiences and who may want to learn from my mistakes and observations. You'll note the clipped style (many sentence fragments) is also quite different from what I usually post.

A couple of quick notes up front: I was an avid cyclist when I was younger, but have been away from the sport for many years. This year's STP was a personal challenge, to see if at age 40 I could get back in shape and again hang with the pack. My first STP was the 1984 two-day ride, which I did at age 15 with a good friend. I came back the next year and did the one-day ride, and then was totally hooked on that version of the event. For me personally, it was actually easier to pull through and do 200 miles in a single day than it is to ride 100 miles, sleep who-knows-where (usually a gym floor), then get up and ride another 100 miles with full body soreness. Also, given how large the event has now grown, I'd frankly rather be sharing the roads with 2,000 people than 8,000 people (which is the rough division between one-day and two-day riders). This wasn't an issue in 1984, when there were only 1,800 riders total.

Anyhow, I did the one-day STP in 1985-1989, 1992-1994, and 1996. After that, between distance and family and work obligations, it became impossible to travel to Seattle for the event. To put the 13 year break in perspective for you STP veterans: the last time I did STP, we were not only still starting in the Kingdome parking lot...but there still was a Kingdome. Family and work obligations eventually got to the point where I couldn't even train for cycling; I did my last double century ride while living in California in 1999, and then basically hung up the bike for many years. Only in the last few years have I discovered the pure joy of tandem cycling, with my kids serving as stokers; they have allowed me to again become a good cyclist while remaining a good father. I still do plenty of training alone, on my solo bike, but riding with the kids has been essential for rediscovering the sport. I highly recommend it for anyone who's wanting to ride more, but is also concerned about spending time with growing children.

On to the ride report itself:

Overall a wonderful ride, with nearly perfect weather. I was in good shape, and felt good most of the way. I was concerned because my longest training ride was only 80 miles, but 1,360 solo miles and 440 miles with kids on tandems seems to have been enough to make up for it. The weather was a little too warm, but better than being a little too cold. The temperatures topped out in the mid-80s by afternoon, but were very comfortable up until then. Best of all: we had a tailwind pretty much the whole time we were in Oregon. Couldn’t have asked for much better conditions, or a much nicer day on the bike. Sure don't envy the two-riders, who had a chilly drizzle for Day Two.

I shipped my old Bianchi to R+E Cycles, and they assembled it and did a full midseason overhaul before I arrived in Seattle. The guys at R+E are awesome, and I highly recommend them. They did a complete drivetrain cleaning and adjustment, trued the wheels, replaced all cables, re-wrapped the handlebars, etc. Definitely needed the service.

For gearing, I was running a 52-42-30 triple in the front and a 12x19 eight speed straight block cluster in the rear. This is perfect gearing for Michigan, but was only boarderline acceptable for STP. I never had to push the bike up a hill, but there were several times I wished I had something lower than 30 x 19.

Stayed at the Travelodge in the University District, just up the street from the start line. Began at 4:45 sharp, and was in the very first group released from the start. Weather was comfortable at the start; wore shorts, STP 96 jersey, and an old long sleeve t-shirt under the jersey. Used a flashing red taillight for the first 25 miles or so, but a headlight was not necessary.

I was amazed at the size of the ride. There were literally always other riders with me. The first 24 miles were screaming fast, and I arrived at the REI food stop in Kent after just an hour and 16 minutes. Used the restroom, filled with water, and got back out on the course after just five minutes or so. I did okay on “The Hill;” I had a gear that was just low enough, and it felt good to stand on the pedals and climb.

Spanaway was an awesome stop, with outstanding service from local kids, but the restrooms were way across a wide field. Spent more time at Spanaway than I’d anticipated, but that was okay. My goal was to finish the ride feeling strong, rather than finish as fast as possible. Taking a little extra time at rest areas was part of that strategy, and I made a point of not hurrying. Called home, and the kids were excited to talk to me.

The course now includes a long stretch of bike trail from Yelm to Tenino, which was excellent. I ran out of water just as the trail ended, so the mini-stop at mile 86 was a huge relief. Filled up with water, and cruised the remaining 12 miles to the Centralia rest area at 10:20 AM.

Spent a half hour at Centralia. Weather was starting to get warm, so I left my T-shirt there. Food at Centralia was okay; had a couple of baloney sandwiches, filled up with water, and got back on the course.

Just past Chehalis, as we were heading back into the countryside, I got into a minor accident. Was in a pack of about 20 riders, and the course took a 90-degree turn to the right. I watched the wreck develop in slow motion. A young man cut across the path of the woman right in front of me. I could see that she’d be unable to avoid him; sure enough, he sliced right across her front wheel and she went down hard. I slammed on my brakes, but knew I’d be unable to avoid her. Braced myself, hit her bike, and tumbled to the pavement. Scraped up my right knee, but was more concerned about my bicycle. The rear wheel wouldn’t turn, and I was afraid it’d been potato-chipped (or had busted spokes). Several riders stopped, including a medic, and checked out the woman who’d been in front of me. Her arms were badly scraped, but she was okay. Her riding companion asked if I was okay, and I said I was, but showed him my rear wheel. Fortunately, it was just a matter of the rear brake being jammed from the impact. He was able to realign it, and all of us were back on the road. Big relief. I saw the two of them again at Lexington; they were leaving as I was arriving. All of us assured the others that we were doing fine, despite our scrapes. The medical support on the ride was unbelievably good; I got my knee cleaned up at a first aid station in Vader, and really appreciated the help I got.

Along the way, I called Danby, another amateur farmer (and one of the blog’s frequent commenters); he lives a few miles off the course, and we’d agreed ahead of time to try to meet. I told him I was incoming, and he met me at a mini-stop near his house. We spent about 10-15 minutes chatting. Was very glad we were able to get together.

Was getting tired, and running out of food, between Vader and Castle Rock. Stopped at Castle Rock for about 15 minutes and filled up with water and used the restroom, but the available food was mostly candy. As my stomach was begging for carbs and protein, I decided I could stretch what I had until Lexington. Spent about a half hour at the Lexington stop, enjoying the excellent wrap-style sandwiches they had. Finally climbed back on the bike at 2:40 PM; was miserable battling winds and lousy roads/traffic into Longview, but I realized that the winds seemed to be blowing from a direction that would favor us once we crossed the bridge. That lifted my spirits.

The bridge itself was worse than I remembered. Lots of traffic whizzing by on the way up, then the expansion joints on the way down could be dangerous if not handled properly. I wanted to fly down the bridge at 40 MPH, but each expansion joint was dealing a horrible THUD to my front wheel. Fearing a tire blowout, I slowed down and took my time. Some riders were "bunny hopping" over the expansion joints at full speed, but I honestly didn't trust myself to try that. Ended up reaching the bottom safely, then began the long slog down Hwy 30.

The stretch to St Helens was by far my slowest of the day; averaged just 15.5 MPH between rest stops. Was pretty much all uphill from the bridge to St Helens – I had not remembered that. I’d thought the hills rolled more. Struggled a lot here, especially since there were fairly few people to ride with. Took a much-deserved half hour or so break at St Helens. Watermelon was wonderful, and I got some excellent cookies. Ice water made a big difference, too. Was quite hot by now. The folks staffing this rest stop knew how tired we were, and went out of their way to be friendly and of service. If any of you are reading this, please know how deeply appreciative I am for what you did.

St Helens is on a plateau, and it was largely downhill to Portland from there. My spirits were high, and I made very good time to the city limits, but after entering the city the stop lights killed my average time for this section of the course.

Reached the finish line just before 7pm. That was a respectable enough time for me, and above all I felt fairly good. I knew I wasn't the strongest one out there, and this wasn't my fastest double century ride, but speed wasn't my goal; finishing strong was. The other things which contributed to the strong finish: I was fanatical about eating and drinking before I felt hungry or thirsty. Having a Camelbak hydration system helped a lot, as water was always just a turn of the head away. And the regular rest stops ensured I never ran out of food. Also, I found that taking two ibuprofen tablets at each rest stop helped ward off and control soreness in my shoulders and back.

The next morning, I picked up a rental car, packed up my bike, dropped it at a 24-hour FedEx/Kinkos (yes, it was much cheaper to FedEx my bike both ways than it was to take it on the plane as checked baggage), and started driving back to Seattle. Stopped to see some extended family in Shelton, and spent a wonderful afternoon hanging out with them. Felt quite sore all day, but tried to keep moving and stretching. Stopped at Whole Foods that evening and picked up a fresh salmon to carry home with me; this was an essential gift for the family. Caught the redeye out of Sea-Tac at 11:20, and was home Monday morning.

Will I be back to ride again next year? I'd love to, but between having an infant in the house and it being a busy year for work, it's doubtful I'll be able to leave the farm for that many days in the middle of summer. Not impossible. Just don't put money on my being out there on the course before 2011.

Bats!

I love bats. Especially now that we live on a property that includes a perpetually wet, somewhat swampy area, bats are wonderful for controlling the massive mosquito population. But even in Illinois, I would enjoy sitting outside at night and watching the bats fly back and forth past our farm security light, gorging themselves on the myriad insects drawn to that area. Every farm should be blessed to have a bat colony somewhere on it. It's hard to think of a more effective pesticide-free means of insect control. In fact, some people have even gone into business selling bat houses (unfortunately, bats not included), so you can attract a colony to your property.

So, bats are terrific...as long as the bats stay where they are supposed to. That was decidedly not the case last Saturday evening, when our family returned home from a visit with Mrs Yeoman Farmer's father. I unlocked the back door, and then returned to the van to retrieve some things while MYF and Homeschooled Farm Girl made their way into the house and then went upstairs. The next thing I knew, both MYF and HFG were running back out to the porch at full speed.

"It's a bat!" HFG shouted.

"There's a bat in the house!" MYF echoed. "I need you to take care of this, because we cannot take the kids in there until it's gone. We might need to drive back and spend the night at my dad's house."

I agreed to do battle with the bat, but needed an essential tool. "Where could I find a tennis racket?" I asked.

MYF dispatched Homeschooled Farm Boy to the barn to find one. As I stood outside on the porch, looking in the glass pane of the back door, I could see the bat flying laps around the downstairs portion of the house. But it would disappear from time to time, so I suspected that it was also flying up the stairs and all over the rest of the house. "I sure hope it doesn't get stuck in a closet or something," I commented.

Once HFB delivered the tennis racket, MYF had all three kids troop out to my office to wait. I took a deep breath, stepped through the back door, put on a pair of gloves, and tried to summon up all my courage. Standing there with the tennis racket, I felt like a knight getting ready to ride into battle.

Suddenly, a big, black, bird-like thing came hurtling out of the darkened front room, flying toward me, but maneuvering as crazily as a Japanese kamikaze pilot trying to penetrate enemy flack. I swiped at it with my tennis racket, but the bat easily turned and sped through the kitchen and back toward the front part of the house. Getting a bright idea, I propped the back door wide open; driving the bat out of the house would be the very best solution.

I cautiously made my way to the front part of the house, turning on every light and keeping my eyes wide open for any sign of the bat. Just as I propped open the front door, the bat appeared again and began flying toward the back. I chased it, but right before the bat reached the back door...MYF appeared there, and the bat again turned and flew crazily through the kitchen.

Together, MYF and I prowled through the downstairs of the house. Once we were convinced it was clear, I crept up the stairs. Unfortunately, I told MYF, all the bedroom doors were open. The bat could be anywhere! Suddenly, it came flying out of the boys' room and straight toward me (or as straight as a bat can fly --- it was still looking a lot like a crazed kamikaze). I swiped at it a couple of times, but it disappeared into HFG's room.

I called this news down to MYF. "Shut that door, so we can trap it!" she shouted back. But just as I began heading for that door, the bat came hurtling out. MYF was coming up the stairs, and the bat hovered for just a moment trying to decide which direction to go next. That one instant of hesitation was all I needed: I dealt a massive overhand serve with the tennis racket, connecting and sending the bat into the carpet with a heavy THUD. "Got it!" I exclaimed. Relief, that we would be spending the night in our own house and not driving a half hour back to my father-in-law's, swept through me.

"It might only be stunned," MYF cautioned. Glad to be wearing gloves, I carefully picked the bat up. It seemed very dead to me, but I figured we shouldn't take any chances. I took it straight to the garbage can, deposited the bat, and made sure the lid was securely fastened. We told the kids the bat was dead, and they all cheered as we returned to the house.

How did I know to use a tennis racket? I have MYF, and her father, to thank for that. When MYF was a girl, they lived for a time in a house that had bats in the attic. On several occasions, bats would get into the living portion of the house. Their family found that bats, with their radar navigation, could easily steer around brooms and other soild weapons. But a tennis racket was different --- the bat's radar largely penetrated through the webbing, allowing the human a much greater shot at a direct hit.

Did I want to kill the bat? No. I want to emphasize that my first preference was to get the bat out of the house, because I greatly value the contribution bats make to pest control. There are non-lethal ways of trapping bats, but given our particular circumstance those did not look like they would be successful on Saturday.

For those of you thinking about moving to the country, make sure you think about bats. They can be intimidating at first, especially if you've watched too many vampire movies. But they are an integral part of country life, and ought to be fostered. Just make sure you're prepared to take action if one of them finds his way into a place where he really shouldn't be.

Chicken Underground

My apologies for the slow posting of late; work turned extraordinarily busy, but looks to be clearing up in the next day or two. I have a few things I've been thinking about and planning to post.

In the meantime, I must share this wonderful story about urban chickens:

The "chicken underground" is on the march.

Gay-Ellen Stulp and Stephany Miskunas are lobbying the Lafayette City Council to allow them to keep pet chickens at their homes in the historic Highland Park neighborhood.

Stulp said she wants city council members to amend the ordinance that forbids having chickens in the city. The city council's Public Health Welfare and Safety
Committee plans to consider the matter.

"It's been a blast," Stulp said of her quest. "I can't believe the discussions I've gotten as I go around with my petition.

"It's a little hobby. They are pets. I guess I'm now part of the chicken underground."

Go read the whole thing here:
'Chicken underground' emerges in Indiana IndyStar.com The Indianapolis Star

Food, Inc. Review

About two months ago, I posted about the movie, Food, Inc. The film still isn't showing anywhere near me, and the publicists still haven't sent me a review DVD. So...I still can't produce my own review.

However, Julie Gunlock of National Review has seen the movie and has written an excellent piece describing its strengths and shortcomings. Her key observation:

Food Inc. boils the subsidy issue down to the basics: Farm subsidies artificially reduce the cost of some food — mainly manufactured and unhealthy snack foods — and create incentives for farmers to produce massive amounts of some commodities no single nation can possibly absorb.

So, what happens? Well, as Food Inc. demonstrates with the help of an upbeat soundtrack and colorful pop-up images of ketchup bottles and batteries, people start getting pretty creative with how to put those commodities to use. Enter corn — lots of corn.

U.S. corn farmers are paid to produce more corn than people can eat normally. As a result of this overproduction, corn is everywhere. Corn derivatives can be found in nearly one-quarter of all the products in the grocery store — from peanut butter to Twinkies. And of course, corn subsidies led to the creation of a clear, liquid sweetener — HFCS, or high-fructose corn syrup.

It isn’t only corn subsidies making HFCS as popular as it is today, but also sugar tariffs. While the government reduces the price of corn, it simultaneously hikes the cost of sugar through a complex set of tariffs that make the price of cane and beet sugar more than three times the price of sugar in other nations. Food manufacturers naturally choose the lower-cost corn-based sweetener. Who can blame them?

But this toying around with prices comes with consequences, and Food Inc. connects the dots between farm subsidies and America’s growing health problems, such as obesity. A report by the Heritage Foundation examined this issue last year and came to the same conclusion...

I Want My MTV!

It's a little odd admitting this, but...I found something to like on MTV in recent weeks. MercatorNet has published my article about it, which can be found here.

Lost Lamb

We lost a lamb to what was almost certainly pneumonia overnight. He'd developed a terrible wheezing hack in his lungs last night, and was struggling to catch his breath. He hadn't seemed that bad earlier in the day, and I'd wanted to give him a chance to beat it on his own; the sudden nose-dive at 10pm caught me by surprise. I told Mrs Yeoman Farmer that I'd take him to the vet if he survived the night...but that has turned out not to be necessary.

Losing an animal as valuable as an Icelandic lamb is always a big disappointment, but the incident has led me to reflect on a couple of thoughts:

First, animal deaths have gotten much easier to take --- and now cause much less emotional distress --- than when we we first began farming. The very first animal we lost was a baby chick from our initial batch of broilers. MYF brought it inside when it was having trouble standing up, and we did everything we could to keep it going, but it just wasn't meant to survive. I remember feeling a sense of personal inadequacy, like I'd failed in some fundamental way. That sense of personal failure would grow more intense when we lost more valuable animals --- like the time I fed what turned out to be poison hemlock to our baby goslings, and four of them keeled over dead in the brooder within minutes of each other. The worst of all was when we lost fully-grown sheep to worms or white muscle disease; these were mature breeding stock, and to see them go down was a big blow.

As time has passed, it's not so much that I've become calloused or hardened to the deaths of animals...but rather that I've grown to realize that unexpected deaths are simply a natural part of life on a farm. We certainly work to take good care of the animals, and don't neglect them, but sometimes deaths still occur despite our best efforts. It isn't a personal statement about us, and I've grown to learn not to take it personally. Instead, this morning, I turned to the 13 healthy lambs and gave thanks that we still have so many --- and that this is the first lamb we've lost in well over a year.

Which brings me to the second point: We have lost far fewer lambs in Michigan than we did in Illinois. And we haven't lost a single mature sheep here, whereas we lost a few of them in Illinois. MYF and I were discussing this, and we think there are three main reasons:

1. Hard Water. In Illinois, we didn't have water pipes leading out to the pasture. Unless we ran three long sections of hose from the house to a stock tank (a huge hassle to do every day), we had to rely on rain water for the sheep. We collected plenty of rainwater off the barn, stored it in an enormous water tank, and released it into the sheep stock tank as needed. We realize now that this ultra-soft water may have been fine for watering a vineyard or supplying poultry water, but the larger mammals would've benefited from the iron and other trace minerals in well water. Here in MI, our water is very high in iron, and we have pipes in the barn. Pretty much all the water our sheep and goats drink comes from that well. Not surprisingly, we haven't had a single case of anemia here --- whereas in Illinois we lost many lambs that way.
2. Mineral. Here in Michigan, the sheep come into a nice secured barn every night; in Illinois, they'd had more simple pasture shelters. It had been very difficult to ensure a steady supply of supplemental mineral. Here, they have a mineral feeder in the barn that never gets rained on and never gets knocked over, and I keep an eye on it every morning --- and am constantly filling it. I am buying much more mineral here than in IL, which is a good thing --- it tells me that we weren't using nearly enough of it before. I'm convinced it's contributed greatly to our flock's overall health.
3. Pasture. We have a much larger grazing area here for the sheep, and the grass is much longer. In Illinois, they'd eaten it down so low, they were constantly grazing in their own droppings as they looked for fresh grass. Here, they have lots of long grass and leafy brush to feast on, so they're never ingesting parasites that may have passed through their droppings. This leads to the parasite chain being broken or at least greatly weakened.

Farming and animal husbandry are a constant learning process, and require frequent adjustments. Often, it's trial and error (and experiences of failure) that are the best teachers. The lamb we lost overnight will almost certainly not be our last, but I'm trying to keep the focus on how far we've come and how much healthier our flock is now...and what practices will help keep us on that upward trajectory.

Driving the Yeomans

Mrs Yeoman Farmer and I were on our way home to Northern Virginia from the Tridentine High Mass at Old St. Mary's in Washington, DC. It was the fall of 1996, and the future Homeschooled Farm Boy (then a baby) was napping in his car seat as we cruised through the District of Columbia on Interstate 395. I'd just pulled onto the freeway, and traffic was fairly heavy for a Sunday evening; I'd spent so much time wrenching my head around looking for an opening in traffic at the end of the on-ramp, I hadn't noticed any speed limit signs. But this was a freeway, so I figured the speed limit would be at least 55 MPH --- and that's about what the other cars were moving at. So I settled in, and did my best to stay with the pack.

A moment or two later, we came around a bend and I spotted a police car on the right shoulder. Glancing at the speedometer, I confirmed I was still going 55, so didn't bother getting nervous or slowing down. Until, that is, I looked in the rear view mirror and saw him pulling onto the roadway with his lights flashing. The next thing I knew, he was right behind me and chirping his siren. I began looking for a safe place to pull over, and soon both of our cars were on the right shoulder.

The officer, who happened to be black, approached my window and asked if I knew why I'd been stopped; I replied that I honestly had no idea. He informed me that I'd been driving 56 in a 45 MPH zone, and that he'd like my license and registration and proof of insurance.

"Forty-five?" I asked, incredulous, as I dug around for the documentation. "I honestly thought it was 55, because it was a freeway. That's why I didn't slow down when I saw you."

"Well, it was posted at 45," he said, taking my documents and retreating to his patrol car.

As the officer did who-knows-what, I fumed aloud to MYF about how ridiculous the whole thing was. I was going 55 on a freeway and wasn't passing anybody! And he pulls me over! She agreed, but there wasn't much else she could say. HFB was waking up and fussing, and she soon had her hands full getting him calmed back down.

The cop eventually returned from his patrol car with my documents --- and a ticket for some amount of money that was about to disrupt our fragile, tight-as-a-drum finances, especially once my insurance rates jumped as a result. I was irritated, but had enough presence of mind to suppress my irritation, take a deep breath, and wait until he'd left before saying anything negative. Even then, I simply muttered something to my wife about probably having been stopped because we had Virginia license plates. MYF made a comment about how unfair the whole thing was, and we were soon back in traffic making our way home. And, yes, I noticed that the first speed limit sign we passed read "45 MPH." I kept the car in the right lane, the speedometer needle at 45, and fumed in silence as we drove.

The story does have a happy ending: I mailed in the ticket with a written explanation/appeal, but no payment. We moved across the country a few weeks later, and I managed to keep my mail correspondence with the DC Metro Police going long enough for my ticket to get totally lost in the District's bureaucracy. We never paid the fine, and the ticket was never reported to our insurance company.

The incident eventually faded from my mind, and I didn't think about it for years --- until last week's story about Professor Henry Gates' run-in with the Cambridge (MA) police. When officers showed up at his house investigating a reported break-in, all he had to do was give a calm explanation as to why he and his limo driver had had to force the front door open, and produce picture identification with his home address. Instead, he followed the officers outside and began ranting to the whole neighborhood about "this is what happens to black men in America."

Actually, I thought, this is what happens when you have a chip on your shoulder, lose your temper, and taunt the police.

From everything we've read and seen about the incident, it seems clear to both MYF and myself that the individual with the "racial narrative" in his head was the Harvard professor; Officer Crowley seems to have conducted himself with the utmost professionalism. Our only complaint about the arrest is that the Cambridge police dismissed the disorderly conduct charges.

Let's return to 1996, and the shoulder of I-395. As upset as I was about a perceived injustice, the fact remains that the officer had a good reason for pulling me over. I didn't agree, and was understandably angry about the traffic stop, but had the self-control to remain calm and wait for my opportunity to "tell it to the judge" and let the system work. But let's suppose that instead, I'd had the same sort of "racial narrative" in my head that Professor Gates evidently carries around with him. I most likely would have jumped from my car and accused the D.C. cop of having pulled me over because I was a white guy with out-of-state plates in a heavily black city --- and that he was giving me a ticket only because he was angry that I'd married a black woman. That he was probably trying to prove he had some power over me.

Those of you who know me know that I don't see the world through the prism I just described. But had I said and done those things, and had I refused the officer's instructions to return to my vehicle, the cop would've been completely within his rights to have arrested me for disorderly conduct. And my wife would've been completely within her rights to have not spoken with me for the next six weeks.

That seems clear enough to us. What MYF and I find particularly troubling about the Gates story is the sharp divide in the way most blacks and whites have reacted to the basic details of the case --- and in the way black and white perceptions of and assumptions about the police diverge so sharply. As a recent Rasmussen poll finds:

Seventy-three percent (73%) of African-American voters believe that most blacks receive unfair treatment from the police. Just 21% of white voters share that view. Thirty-two percent (32%) of black voters say that most policemen are racist, but 52% disagree. Among white voters, just seven percent (7%) believe that most policemen are racist and 71% say they are not.

I'm not so naive as to pretend that race doesn't play a role in police work. As recently as this year, my father-in-law was visiting my brother-in-law's family in a large East Coast city with a history of ethnic tension. On two separate occasions, while out for a walk on the streets of his son's upper-middle-class, heavily white neighborhood, my father-in-law was stopped and questioned by the local police about what he was doing. My father-in-law knew perfectly well that he was being questioned because he was black, and therefore looked out of place in that neighborhood. But he was friendly and cooperative, answered the officers' questions politely, and came away reporting that he'd had "a really nice conversation" with one of the cops. He didn't point fingers, didn't make accusations about how "black men in America" are treated, and didn't raise his voice. He treated the officer with respect, and was treated with respect in return.

Treating people with respect, and not constantly looking at the world through the prism of race, are pretty simple lessons, really, and ones that MYF and I have been teaching our kids. Too bad the President of the United States passed up an opportunity to be truly "post racial" and to have made this same point when asked about the incident in his recent press conference.

As for MYF, this is what she told me:

"I am incensed at Gates' behavior toward the police, I'm infuriated by the President's and the professor's race-baiting, and I'm embarrassed that both of them are giving blacks a bad name."

And there is nothing more I can add to that.

What is Home?

My apologies for the slow posting of late; I've returned to Michigan after several days visiting Seattle, where I grew up, for the first time in nearly two years. It was a wonderful trip; altogether too short, but when you have a farm...getting away for even a few days in the middle of summer is asking a lot. I went alone, and am grateful that Mrs Yeoman Farmer and the Yeoman Farm Children (particularly the older two) were able to carry the burden in my absence.

The purpose of my trip was to ride the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic on July 11th, and I will be putting up a separate post describing that adventure. It's an event I've done many times in the past, but not since 1996. Being able to get in shape again, and manage all the logistics of getting myself and my bicycle to Seattle (and then to Portland) once more, fulfilled a dream that had been simmering in my mind for several years. As I pedaled along Lake Washington Blvd on Saturday morning, with the rising sun framing the Cascade range in purple, and Mt. Rainier standing with all its immensitude in the crystal clear summer daybreak, my heart overflowed with joy. I'm really here. I'm really doing it. This is truly happening. Everything in the world is exactly right.

It occurred to me that this could be a rough working definition of "home": not simply the place where a person happens to be living at the moment, but the place in the world where everything seems right. The place where a person senses he belongs, and the place from which a person feels exiled when he is not able to be there. Circumstances and grave obligations may force a long --- even permanent --- exile. But it takes much more than relocation to change one's sense of "home."

I had several days, largely to myself, to reflect on these and other thoughts. In a sense, the trip was not unlike a retreat. I spent last Wednesday getting to Seattle and retrieving my bike from the mechanic to whom I'd shipped it. Then, apart from reconnecting with an old friend for dinner one night, and the big event on Saturday, and spending Sunday afternoon with relatives, I had few scheduled obligations for the rest of the trip. I was able to spend much of Thursday and Friday simply riding all over...and thinking, and praying, and reflecting. I rode the Burke-Gilman trail to the small town where I grew up, pedaled past our family's first house, and rolled around town.

The community swimming pool was still there. So was the football field. And the Ranch Drive-In. But there were also uncomfortable changes: the local library --- my favorite spot as a young child --- was now a cold municipal office building; the books had been relocated into a larger and more modern structure nearby. One of the grand old school administration buildings had been razed and was now a parking lot. Other buildings had disappeared. There were new buildings I didn't recognize. And so on. And so forth.

And I couldn't help asking myself: Is this where everything seems right? Because it's funny how, the longer you don't live somewhere, the more it lives in memory ... even if the reality has become quite different.

In that town, and all over Seattle, I did see plenty of other places and things that were familiar and comfortable, and were reassuring in their seeming permanence. But despite the joy of being in Seattle, it was hard to avoid a simultaneous sense of melancholy...because nothing in Seattle is truly "mine" any longer. I couldn't stay. I couldn't be attached to it. As much as I may feel a sense of belonging in that city, I don't truly belong there now. And it was these two competing senses about "belonging," pulling in opposite directions, that triggered the melancholy.

Because no matter what I might feel, the inescapable reality remains: I chose to leave and go to college in Chicago. I chose to take a job in Detroit after college. I chose to attend graduate school in California. And, above all, I chose to marry a woman who grew up in Michigan, with deep roots in that part of the country, who very much dislikes the part of the country in which I grew up. One of the better definitions of "adulthood" that I've come across goes something like this: doing the things we ought to do and need to do, and not necessarily the things we want to do. And in our family's case, there is no doubt about what we ought to be doing, and need to be doing: living in rural Michigan, near the town in which MYF grew up and has so many friends and so much family. And I have no doubt that "adulthood" was calling me to do all the other things (education, career) that took me farther and farther away from Seattle, one step at a time. Funny how easy it was to take each of those steps, without reflecting on the larger picture of how much distance each of them was putting between me and the city I loved so much. And yet even if I had seen the whole picture, with all its consequences, I wouldn't go back and change any of those steps.

I will no doubt be living in Michigan for many years, and I have few illusions that the passage of time will make it seem any more like "home" than Seattle always will. I will always be, in some sense, an exile here. But you know what? That's okay. And the more I pedaled around the region where I grew up, and the more I thought about it, the more okay with everything I became. My family is infinitely more important to me than getting to live in any particular place...and at the end of the day, I'm much happier living with my family in a place that is so completely right for them than I ever could be if they were compelled to live in a place that was "right" for me but completely wrong for everyone else. Because it's ultimately not being in any particular place that makes us happy...it's being with the people we love, and above all it's living our lives in the way God wants. And I have absolutely zero doubts that that this little farm in this little town in this Rust Belt state is exactly where God wants me --- and my family --- to be.

Street Farming

For all of you who are wondering how you can get started farming, right where you are, this weekend's NY Times Magazine has an excellent story about Will Allen's efforts to spread the practice of urban farming.

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.

[snip]

Today Allen is the go-to expert on urban farming, and there is a hunger for his knowledge. When I visited Growing Power, Allen was conducting a two-day
workshop for 40 people: each paid $325 to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”

Just imagine if we could get something similar going in Detroit. I don't think it's even possible to count the number of vacant lots there...

Not Just Us Small Farmers

It's good to see that it's not just us small farmers who are up in arms about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The NY Times has an excellent story today about large western ranchers who are resisting participation in it.

Mr. Platt said he already did all he could to fight epidemics. He does not bring any outside animals into his herds, and he happily staples on metal tags that identify animals to help with brucellosis control. But as he drove his pickup from grasslands into dense thickets of piñon pine on this highland desert that requires 100 acres per cow, he explained why he thought the federal plan was wrongheaded.

Mr. Platt called the extra $2 cost of the electronic tags an onerous burden for a teetering industry and said he often moved horses and some of his 1,000 head of cattle among three ranches here and in Arizona. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person, who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, Mr. Platt said. And there is no Internet connection on the ranch for filing to a regional database.

Looking over the 22,000 acres that his cattle share with elk, pronghorns and mountain lions and where animals can easily disappear, Mr. Platt scoffed at the idea of reporting every death, as animal health officials prefer.

“They can’t comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,” he said of federal officials. "They don’t appreciate what is involved logistically.”

Beyond the individual ranchers profiled, the story nicely summarizes many of the program's aspects that we find so troubling.

Underlying the opposition is the fragile economics of ranches and small farms, which are already disappearing. The extra cost of radio tags, scanners and filing reports when animals change premises would be crushing, some smaller producers say.

“My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops.

“I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.” Paul Hamby, owner of Hamby Dairy Supply in Maysville, Mo., and a vocal opponent of the plan, said, “It is very much an economic and class warfare issue.”

“Fifty years ago,” Mr. Hamby said, “hundreds of thousands of farms raised hogs, and now very few players have control of the market. I believe one of the reasons for this plan is to consolidate the cattle industry.”

Go read the whole thing. It is excellent.