Flying to Patagonia

I am here in Puerto Montt near the bottom of Chile and consequently the bottom of the planet where the Pacific Ocean, which one normally thinks of as lying to the west, surrounds the peninsula here both in a southerly and westerly direction. The wind is howling and the rain blowing in this corner of Patagonia where rain falls some 300 days of the year.

My wife and I have left behind the dry climate of Santiago for a few days amongst what in Spanish they call “naturaleza”. Here there are not one but three volcanoes each higher than the next. The Volcan Osorno looms above the town of Puerta Varas reflected in the waters of the lake Lanquihue as if in a postcard. A postcard is in fact the only way we can see the top of the volcano today because of the cloud cover.

I've left the goat farm in the hands of a goatherd and the vineyard in the care of another farmer while I come here to both repair relations with my wife, who lives in Santiago, and look for work in the USA. Each day I answer emails from IT recruiters in the USA and talk on the phone with prospective employers using the wonderful program Skype. It's two cents per minute.

Today we are taking the ferry across to the island of Chiloe. You board a bus which for 7,000 pesos ($12) will take us to the town of Castro including the 45 minute board ride across the bay. Yesterday the ferries were shutdown because of the howling gale. So we braced against the rain and joined the legions of high school kids hanging out at the mall while I looked for a charger for the battery for my camera.

I find it amusing the the hostel where I am staying is located on the Avenue Salvador Allende and I am heading to Castro. My wife is a pinochenista or supporter of the dicator Pinochet who sacked the Marxist President Allende and took on the role of leader of the military junta. Emotions over this period of time run deep which I learned when I made the mistake of naming my second book “Wine Communism and Volcanoes”. I should have called it “The Gringo and the Harvest” because the winery owners here, who for the most part supported Pinochet, are embarrassed by their communist past and my book did not sell well here.

That does not matter now as I have written a new book with a larger publisher which I believe we will call “Virginia Wines from Grapes to Glass”. I turned in the last chapter friday—now the process of editing begins. So I have something to do to fill the days before I return to the grind of the daily corporate job.

Gricel, my wife, and I went to the office of Lan Chile airlines last week and looked for a promotion, cheap flights to wherever. We thought of the Valle del Luna in the desert to the North or Puntas Arenas which is at the bottom of the country. But both locations were too expensive so we settled on Puerto Montt which is no disappointment at all.

Two days ago we hired a van and went with a family from Valpairso and two single girls from Ecuador and Argentia to visit the volcano here and see the lake. As such things usually transpire by the end of the day we were all friends and had exchanged email addresses promising to share photos with people we will never see again.

Geography in this part of the world is large on a scale which is hard to imagine. Driving up to see the Saltos de Petrohue (Petrohue Rapids) we passed a lofty mountain that rose straight up into the horizon which the chauffer told us was the precordillera. The Andes here are called the “cordillera” and of course “ precordillera” would mean the foothills but in their towering immensity they are taller than anything we have in the well-eroded mountains of Virginia Appalachia. In Virginia we have little tiny trout swimming in the stream but in the stream here there are salmon roughly a meter in length, huge animals laying their eggs on their way back to the ocean.

After Puerto Montt we spend two days in Chiloe.  The strongest earthquake from recorded history rocked this region in 1960 sinking the coastline by a meter.  To get to Chiloe you take a bus which then takes a ferry across to the island.  It's a pleasant location with a cloud of sadness hanging over it for 9,000 people are unemployed having lost their jobs in the salmon farming business when a virus invaded the fisheries.  The fisheries are still closed after two years.

If you go to Chiloe visit Castro and there stop in and talk with the owner at Loco Tony's supermarket.  He is a retired fisherman from Maine.

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Flying to Patagonia

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Virginia BMP Farm Cost Sharing Program

After the drubbing I took from my last two posts—mainly on rappnet--I decided to write something cheerier and return to the agricultural theme of this web site.

Local farmers be advised there is money there for the taking if you are willing to fence your cattle and other livestock out of area streams. This essay is the tale of my participation in the BMP (best management practices) cost-sharing program.

At first glance BMP is a no-brainer proposition. The states of Virginia will pay you 75% of the cost of putting in a well, fencing, and a frost-free watering system if you agree to keep your animals from wading and defecating in the water. Plus you get a 25% state tax credit for the portion that they do not reimburse. The reason this is desirable is animal manure is high in nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Their manure flows down the stream, into the river, and into the Chesapeake Bay where it causes algae blooms, red tides, all sort of maladies.

Now the program is voluntary. One day it could become mandatory and that certainly will set local farmers howling. Some say they would be forced out of business if they are required to fence off their streams. That's not true for all but the poorest farmers. There's no reason not to participate in the program if the state will pay the lion's share of the cost. Some farmers are simply philosophically opposed to the idea. Some of these complaining cattlemen are just tax farmers who keep cattle simply to keep their farms in the land use program thus lowering—you could say “lowing”---their real estate tax bill by 75%. They are out there now buying so-called “land use cattle” driving up the prices for calves at the spring auctions.

My own reason for participating in the program was financial. All winter long I had been hauling water two times per day down to my goats as the water I gave them quickly froze. So what I needed was a frost-free system: a mirafont.

The mirafont is elegant in its simplicity. It works sort of like a toilet with a floating and a valve. A pipe driven into the ground allows warm air from the subsoil to keep the water free of ice. A plastic ball floats into the space above the water and the animals learn to push down the floating ball and get a drink of water.

I applied for the BMP (best management practices) cost sharing program through David Massie at the Soil and Water Conservation office in Culpeper. The board of directors there took a look at my farm and approved a fence and frost-free watering system for 700 feet of stream footage. They said I did not have enough goats to justify a well so Clyde Pullen, the contractor I hired for the job, simply hooked my mirafont watering system directly to my existing well. As I grow my farm I plan to apply again: next time maybe I will have enough goats to justify a well.

The whole project cost me about $7,500 for which BMP will pay approximately $4,000. It's a bit difficult to calculate what portion of the project went toward the conservation project and what portion went toward the other project I finished which was to fence in 4 acres of forest (i.e. the other side of the stream easement) and run electric and water lines 800 feet down to my pasture. (The idea is the goats will clear the forest over time and turn it into pasture.) Clyde and his crew rented a Kubota backhoe and dug a trench 30 inches deep some 700 feet down my driveway. Then my electrician, Greg Lukas, installed three electrical plugs and put lights in my greenhouse and tool shed. For the electrical work I traded two years of hunting rights on my farm. (During the Great Recession barter has supplanted cash in some cases.) Clyde installed two frost-free hydrants. This way I will have water for my garden, my green house and my other pasture where the herd sire lives and where there is no mirafont, yet. As for the fencing I did all of that myself. The state paid a subsidy for the cost of the fencing, the cost of the mirafont, the water line, and the electric charger to power the fence. And I have contributed my own, albeit modest, effort to keep the Chesapeake Bay clean.

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Virginia BMP Farm Cost Sharing Program

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Laid off from the Day Job and Nursing two Kids by Hand

Problems on the Goat Farm: Unemployment and Nursing two Kids by Hand

Two disasters befell the goat farm this week. First, I got laid off from my day job from Sprint. Second, the mother of two of my day old goats died. So I am bottle feeding her two kids while I buried their mother this morning with the tractor.

In the last 20 days thirteen baby goats have been born on the farm. Two of them died—one had bite marks from some wild animal and the other perhaps got bacteria in its umbilical cord and dropped dead without warning. I had followed the textbook procedures and instructions from friends. I had vaccinated all of the mothers a month before they delivered so that the mothers would deliver immunity to their kids through their colostrum. And I dewormed the mothers the day they delivered so they would not die of anemia. Still I found myself in the veterinarian's office this week a little moist eyed as the vet put down one of my kids. Farmers are supposed to be hardened in sprit as birth and death are part of life. But I had been with this little girl since the evening before trying to force feed her milk I had drawn from her mother's teats. With no registrable temperature and despite steroids fed through a catheter the little babie die in a box on Dr. Massie's office. A little bit of me died there with that doe.

Tonight I just got back from the drug store where I bought two baby bottles to feed my orphaned day-old goats. I had been unable to get them to suck on the calf-sized nipple that I had affixed to a bottle of Goat-Savr powdered milk. They sucked on my fingers and nibbled on my shirt all the while yelling for their mother. But unless they learned to feed from the bottle they would die of starvation. I tried everything the book told me: cover their eyes to emulate the dark under their mother's udder, tickle their rectum as their mother would do. Then it dawned on me that the nipple designed for a calf was too large for a goat. So at the Walgreens I bought two nipples and voila both kids drank a whole bottle of milk. Now they are sleeping peacefully on the couch at my side and have quit crying for their mother. For the next two months I am their mother as they will require feeding 4 times per day.

This of course ties me down as I look for new work. I cannot help but be angry to yet again have been tossed out by the brutality which is capitalism where morality matters not and profit is the only goal. I once had my own company but am not much of a capitalist because I never laid off anyone even when there was no work. Of course Sprint has a fiduciary duty to its stock holders to lower costs and maximize profits but that is what is wrong with this system in which we live in the USA. Sprint was making positive cash flows and had billions of dollars in the bank so there was no crisis there. Their former CEO Gary Forsee had been singled out by some magazine as the worst offender in the malfeasance which is executive compensation and greed. He had paid himself $22 million dollars two years ago as the company shed customers unhappy with the poor customer service and dropped calls. The new CEO Dan Hesse promised to do better and I believed his every word. I was encouraged as each quarter we met our targets and my own bonus was usually equal to one month pay. But the board of directors was not happy that Sprint's operating costs were 20% of revenue and not 15% as was the case with AT&T and Verizon the primary competitors. So Dan tossed me out along with 5,000 other fathers and mothers and tax paying citizens and replaced them with people in India a dozen of which I had personally trained.  Of the people left behind in the office in Reston and Kansas many were working on immigrant visas.

There is a new type of McCarthyism lurking in the halls of corporate America where you are not supposed to mention the visa status of those you work with. But having been laid off twice in the past 8 years and replaced by Indians I feel compelled to speak out. I had asked the Vice President at Sprint where I was working whether priority would be given to U.S. Citizens over workers on immigrant visas during this round of layoffs. He said “No, we're all God's children”. But the stimulus bill  has required that U.S. Citizens be given preference when the decision is made to cut head count. This is a rule which is widely circumvented especially by Indian contracting firms that illegally bring workers to the USA when they have no position for them here. The corporation is able to say “this is not my doing” when they delegate work to these these H1B body shops.

For ten years now Indian immigrants have steadily replaced US Citizens in the workplace. Bill Gates is so enamored of their prowess that he declared Southern Indians the smartest workers in the world. It's made me so mad I want to leave the IT field and do what I really want to do which is farming and working in the vineyard. But I am a prisoner---tied down by the need for health care I must have full-time work. Like most farmers my day job pays for agricultural hobby and my farm losses are a hedge against the taxes I pay working for the corporations. Last year my farm had an income of minus $31,000 USD.

I have bittersweet relations with Indians as the advertising for goat meat on my web site is written in Kannada, Hindi, and Telegu. I had had the idea to direct market goat meat to Indians but are finding them too cheap to deal with. Unlike the gringo the Indian does not understand nor care for the idea of “organic”, “sustainable agriculture”, and “local farming”. They simply are interested in what does it cost. It's frustrating beyond belief as I had hoped to make them my customers.  I have the same emotion as Indian headhunters phone me up as I look for work.  The gringo will ask me about my experience.  The Indians only concern is "what is your billing rate?"

Indian immigration is a theme I have written about before as they have so abused the systems to now outnumber US Citizens in the IT work place. Take a look at this essay which appeared in two Indian publications including this one http://mediakit.indusbusinessjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=8BC1B012FC0D4682A435C4D1B601370A

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Laid off from the Day Job and Nursing two Kids by Hand

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Dr. Richard Smart, The Flying Vine Doctor

The Australian Dr. Richard Smart—known as the “Flying Vine Doctor”--rocked the viticultural status quo when he dismissed the notion that only the French can make world class wines. The French success, he wrote in his book “Sunlight into Wine”, is more of an accident of geography. The characteristics of the gravely, slightly alkaline soils of France can be replicated elsewhere by pruning and training the vine to have a proper balance of fruit and foliage. Science trumps tradition. New World grape growers started building trellises he designed and New World wine sales surged while French wine sales slumped. Recently Dr. Smart flew from Tasmania to Virginia by way of Georgia to explain his principles to 150 grape growers at Veritas Vineyards. There he spent some time with “Virginia Wine Lovers” magazine.

Can Virginia produce premium wines with all this rain and humidity?

Virginia is not the only place in the world where you are growing in humidity. It occurs in much of Europe. Bordeaux is an example of a place with rain and humidity. So you can do it. I like to say it’s a bit hard to do it. It’s easier to grow grapes if you have no rain fall and you irrigate. However you can get by. The high humidity has been an issue with some vintages. But then again there’s lots of places in the world that are humid. I would have to say that high summer rainfall is a problem here and some other places because we like to stop shoot growth before veraison and if you get a lot of rain before veraison that is hard.

Do you think Virginia can ripen Cabernet Sauvignon? Some growers say plant cabernet franc instead which is a Loire grape where it is cooler than Bordeaux. It requires fewer growing days to mature. There are people who grow it here and some who will not like Dennis Horton.

This is not a question you should ask me because it requires knowledge of Virginia and I am hardly an expert on that. But in Pennsylvania I have heard some people who question the suitability of cabernet sauvignon in Virginia. And I saw why bother if you gripe about it. There’s enough bloody cabernet in the world without Virginia adding to it.

I know you have worked in New York and Pennsylvania. How do Virginia wines compare with those of New York?

I’ve had some good wines here. The wine that has impressed me the most is viognier, undoubtedly. What I do find distressing here is people are hung up on the international varieties. They are slavishly planting cabernet and chardonnay. This is not healthy. They should be looking for their own varieties. 

Twenty-Five or thirty years ago people in Virginia said you can only plant hybrids here. Now vinifera has had success. Do you think Virginia, given the humidity and rain, should be planting more mold and rot resistant seyval and vidal or do you think we should kept the focus on vinifera varieties?

I think keep the focus on the vinifera. That’s not to say there aren’t some good hybrids and not to say there won’t be more good hybrids in the future. Vinifera with some with some disease tolerance--that’s the ideal. Part of the problem is that people--partly your own profession is to blame--promote varietal labeling and consumers are averse to trying new varieties. And that is a shame because there is such a rich wealth of great varieties. I was just in Georgia where there are 500 indigenous varieties and they make wine only from some 10 or 20 of them and the others are not even evaluated.

You said vinifera will have greater disease resistance in the future?

Yes, that is because of breeding programs. 

What can Virginia do to improve wine quality?

Keep experimenting with varieties. I suspect there is going to be a red variety as good as viognier and I suspect you haven’t tried it yet. I encouraged the group this morning to try some varieties from Eastern Europe. The weather is similar there.

Tell me about talking to Virginia grape growers today.

Tony Wolf [Virginia Tech’s viticulturist] encouraged me to put some perspective on the business here. I told the people they are making it hard on themselves with a lot of small operators and small vineyards. Not a very serious investment. The one we just went to Pollack they match up against some of the best vineyards in the world. And I think of people like Tony Wolf who I regards as one of the best grape researchers in the world. I think there is a good chance for the Virginia wine industry. You have something here that much of the rest of the world admires and that is wealthy consumers. And you have so many around here. You got to work on the reputation of Virginia wines. I think the way to do it personally is to do it in external wine shows, international wine shows. You need to keep plugging away like good old Jefferson did.

(The article originally appears in "Virginia Wine Lovers" magazine.)

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Dr. Richard Smart, The Flying Vine Doctor

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Kidding

The first goats were born on Rosewood Hill Farm this morning.  Exactly 5 months from conception the first female I ever bought had twins.  Within minutes of being born the babies were up and walking.   I was hoping on this day it would be warm but we have snow.  Still they have found a dry spot under a pine tree.  

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Kidding

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February Snow and the Deadline

I apologize to my readers for not writing too much lately.  I've been busy writing a new book on Virginia wineries which I hope to complete in just a few months.  So I've taken a break from magazine writing and of course from reporting and writing updates for this blog.  Rest assured rosewoodhillfarm.com will resume with a passion and soon.

Last night I rushed home from Charlottesville as fast as one can "rush" in a snow storm.  The day was warm with temperature in the 50s.  No one took the weatherman seriously when he said he would have snow because it was so warm.  But snow is what it did and more is forecast for today.

I stayed out late at a dinner party and told my host I needed to get home to feed my guard dog Molly.   My neighbor Melvin Jenkins gives Molly beef bones so I often find her laying next to his house guarding his cattle instead of on my property guarding my goats.  The dog goes back and forth looking to see who will give him a better meal.

I have two dogs: a working dog and a "soup dog".  Melvin gave my black lab Will this name meaning an animal that lies around waiting for food and does not do much of anything else.  Will has been reduced to wearing an electric collar and sleeping in my bed and on the couch since I cannot trust him to go outside too long for he will run off.  His one redeeming feature is he can retrieve geese when I shoot them down in the middle of the lake.  Molly, the Great Pyrenees, on the other hand never runs off--except to Melvin's of course and that is within eyesight--and does a superb job of guarding the goats.  At night she barks at whatever moves in the forest and chases raccoon up in the trees.  In the day she takes a well-deserver rest.

This morning I got up and pat Molly on the head, brushed the snow from her coat, and then walked down to the pasture to snap pictures.  Now I am need to stop writing before I run out of words so I can transcribe the interviews I made last night and cobble together another chapter for the new book this afternoon.

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February Snow and the Deadline

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The Bulldozer

 

They say that everyone ends up like their parents or at least one of their parents and for me I believe that is true with regards to the ideas I have had for this farm.  My father had lots of business ideas, most of them did not work out and he had to pull back on several of them.  He only made money with his tugboat company and regarding farming he tried everything from cattle to catfish even farming eels for the Japanese market.  But the only thing from which he ever profited on his farm was hogs so he said.  So it is with me as I keep shifting gears on my farm here trying to find someway to make it pay.

 

With this history behind me I came up with what I can now call the ridiculous idea to plant a vineyard on the mountain where I live.  I say ridiculous because the only people I have found here in Virginia to profit from grapes are those who invest in a winery or who plant a lot of grapes.  I’ve invested in a winery buying stock in The Winery at LaGrange an investment which has done well.  But as for growing grapes I’ve decided it is better to do that for someone else and let them pay me by the hour.  Then I will make money regardless of the circumstances and the owner can worry about the birds, hail, subzero-weather, raccoons, or whatever malady may befall the vineyard.

 

A lot of people are smitten with the idea of having their own rolling vista of grapes and aspire to have their own vineyard without realizing how difficult that can be.  I can tell you it is not for the faint of heart nor for the city dweller who does not like to work outdoors in the heat nor cold.  So it was with five years of experience planting grapes that I briefly thought about having my own vineyard until common sense prevailed and events overtook me changing my mind.  My 65 acre farm is ideally situated for that with a southeastern exposure and elevation rising from 600 to 1,000 feet.  The proposed vineyard site would have been ideal, rising above the frost, giving me three extra weeks of growing time over those vineyards down in the valleys or flat fields.  But the problem with this site is it covered with trees which would need to be excavated.  For that I would need a bulldozer.

 

I have already mentioned my investment in The Winery at LaGrange.  When Chris Pearmund and his partners started to clear the land, they bought bought an International Harvester bulldozer.  The partners there took turns driving it around and were as giddy as a bunch of school boys with their new machine. Chris tells the humorous story of clearing a bush or tree from near the old manor house.  That obstacle had to go but there was a hot power line overhead in the way.  No one wanted to drive the bulldozer, which of course is made of steel, underneath the power line thus grounding the machine and one’s self to the electric grid.  So Chris powered up the dozer, pointed it in the right direction, and dove off as the machine approached the bush and electric wire then hopped right back onboard in time to steer it away from crashing into the building.  I wonder how he could have done as the tracks would have been moving thus threatening to grind the bones and flesh of anyone who tried to do that into the dirt.

 

After the winery finished with the bulldozer I bought it for $8,000.  I thought that was a steal but I didn’t realize that they had employed a full-time mechanic which a bulldozer really needs, full-time.  Chris had paid more than that for the dozer and then had to replace a hydraulic pump deep inside the bowels of the monster.  To split the machine apart to replace one individual pump cost $8,000.  With that pump newly renovated I would not have to worry about that cost I assumed.

 

I had the idea that  I would use the dozer to clear the trees from 8 acres of forest on the mountain above my land.  I thought I could use a cable and then drive the dozer downhill using the momentum of the machine to snatch heavy stumps from the ground.  The area where I wanted to plant my vineyard was a 15 degree slope which is a little steep but not too steep to operate machinery.  So this seemed reasonable.  I hired a logger to log the farm and thought he could cut clear cut this area.  But as you can read in this other essay I could find no logger to cut each and every tree off my vineyard site.  Also the money that I got from logging my farm was not enough to plant an 8 acre vineyard which had been my plan.

 

So now I had a bulldozer to drive around the farm and nothing to use it for having scrapped my vineyard plans.  .

 

The statement that “you learn everything the hard way” certainly has been true for me.  I learned that my bulldozer was not a bulldozer at all but a “loader”.  This meant it was mainly for digging and not pushing things over or grading.  I learned that when I tried to fix my driveway.  I had spent $6,000 hauling gravel up onto my driveway when my insurance company threatened to cut off my coverage unless I put down a solid 1/3 mile footing for the fireman’s heavy water-laden truck.  After a time the driveway formed ruts from vehicle traffic so I found that smaller cars could not climb the hill without bottoming out.  A learned this when a reporterette from a local newspaper who had come to interview me walked up the hill with her photographer in tow.  Of course I was eager that such pretty young women be able to drive up and see me when they wanted so I proceeded to grade the driveway with the loader.

 

A loader has a bucket in front that you can lift high overhead to pick up and move dirt.  A dozer has a blade to smooth out the landscape which cannot be lifted in the air.   The bucket on my loader had teeth instead of a smooth edge so when I went to fix the middle hump in my driveway it gouged out holes.  The loader was so big it felt like navigating a boat as I proceeded to carve up my driveway.  I could scarcely see in front of me so I could not tell if the bucket was smoothing out the dirt or churning up the same.  The loader cut groves in the driveway and I only made it worse as I raised and lowered the bucket trying to steer a smooth course.  My driveway ended up rougher than ever.  My kids in the back of my pickup truck fairly bounced off the ceiling as I drove up and down the farm from that point forward.  For months the ride was so rough that I soon abandoned the driveway preferring to navigate through the pasture instead.

 

I finally found a logger who rescued me by both logging my forest and repairing my driveway so it was again suitable for truck traffic.  Then I pointed the loader at 6 acres of woods that had been pasture many years ago and proceeded to bulldoze it flat.

 

An off-the-road bulldozer has a track with a metal blade perpendicular to the same.  So as the track moves the dozer hugs the ground and digs itself in.  But my dozer had street tracks with no perpendicular blade.  With its 60 horse power diesel engine it could push down small trees but not big ones because instead of digging down into the earth the tracks just spun.  I pushed over 6 acres of hard woods and pine trees—including one which bounced off the roof of the dozer careening above my head—but could not move the biggest trees nor grade the soil to my satisfaction.  Unlike Bill who had logged my farm I did not have much patience so I just drove the heavy noisy machine all over the place rolling over sapling and bush alike.  I pried the front grill lose from the machine and knocked the smokestack off.  When I was done the pasture looked more like a moonscape littered with piles of trees than a smooth landscape ready to plant to grass.  So Bill the logger rescued me again when I paid him $2,000 to clean up the huge mess I had made.

 

The left clutch on the dozer failed so I could only make right-hand turns which was OK since I could still get where I wanted to go as long as I went there in a circle.  A couple of water hoses wore out and the  air cleaner needing replacing for which I  paid the winery mechanic $900.  So with my pasture where I wanted I gave the dozer away free to someone simply if them agreed to haul it away.  In all I don’t consider this adventure a waste of time as I did get the land I needed cleared for $8,000 + $2,000 + $900 = $10,900 which after all was a reasonable price.

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The Bulldozer

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