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.

Continue Reading...

February Snow and the Deadline

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Continue Reading...

The Bulldozer

Sphere: Related Content

Logging the Farm

People who attack logging as being unfriendly to the environment have no idea what they are talking about.  The unenlightened believe to “clear cut” a tract of timber is morally equivalent to committing a crime.  The land will be defoliated, they say, the soil will erode into the watershed.  The trees which wick up the CO2 we exhale will be replaced by a barren and scarred landscape.  Even Wendell Berry, the poet who writes philosophically about farming, attacks clear cutting in one short sentence in “The Unsettling of America”.  He does so without explaining what clear cutting means, simply tossing out those two menacing words “clear” and “cut” as if that were enough to convey his message of evil run amok.  For the shallower thinker those two words would be enough because they are so firmly etched into our psyche that they need no elaboration. But when I asked the Virginia Department of Forestry to survey my farm, clear cutting is exactly what they recommended.  That will probably surprise the laymen but it makes for the best possible forest.

 

Bill Twarkin is as humble and honest a fellow as you are likely to ever meet.  He hails from Upstate New York and has felled timber in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, and most recently in Madison County, Virginia and on my farm.  My consulting forester, Kevin Lyle, had surveyed the timber and put out a request for bids but no one had even placed a bid finding my forest of rather low quality.  The bigger local loggers were busy felling trees at The Marriott Ranch and the 8,500 acre Lane farm in Woodville.  So Kevin talked to local lumber mill operators and they recommended Bill.

 

Bill owns his own logging equipment: a John Deere bulldozer and a single axle logging truck complete with a hydraulic lift and boom.  Like the average working class fellow none of this was paid for in full so Bill owed the bank money on both.  His equipment now sits for sale at a local trucking company Bill having completed the job and deciding that logging is no longer profitable for him.  He says his 1995 model bulldozer is worth perhaps $35,000.  I am not sure what the value of his logging truck is.  The problem with it is its one axle design.  Bill got pulled over by the cops last spring and given a ticket for $5,000 when his rig was found to be many tons overweight.  To haul such a heavy cargo as logs one needs multiple axles to distribute the load and satisfied the policeman’s truck scale when it measures the weight on each tire.

 

Bill started working on my farm in the fall on 2007 and fell the last tree in the summer of 2008.  He had worked for almost 9 months logging the property but it was not a continuous ordeal.  He designed his schedule to get two loads per week hauled to the lumber Augusta Lumber mill near Amissville by Wednesday because that is when they made their tally for the week and cut their checks .  Bill’s wife had a government job in Washington, D.C. and this was the reason he and his rig had relocated from New York State.  She took lots of vacation time and Bill went with her.  Some times it was too wet to log.  Other days Bill had mechanical trouble.  He needed to replace the water pump on his dozer once and more than one time his truck needed new brakes or to repair a hydraulic line.  And when he got the ticket for being overweight he just sat home and fumed at Kevin the consulting logger because Kevin had talked Bill into taking one load to another mill which required him to travel along the busy highway 29.  That is where he got pulled over.

 

I am sure Bill lost money logging my farm.  When you consider what he paid for diesel fuel and repairs on his rig and the long commute he had from Fairfax, Virginia I doubt whether his income exceeded his expenses.  Rather than log the property on a contract price we logged it on shares.  I took half and Bill took half with a 10% commission paid to the consulting logger Kevin Kyle.  Each week Bill hauled about two loads of logs to the mill.  His truck held about 4,000 board feet of timber which was from anywhere from 45 to 65 logs depending of course on their diameter.  The mill paid an average of maybe $330 dollars per thousand board feet.  This meant each truck load was worth about $1,000 of which Bill collected $500 and I collected $500 of which $50 went to Kevin.  In total I made about $20,000.  This was far below what Kevin had estimated but I was pleased anyway since I used the money to pay off some debts and to buy a new tractor.  So in my mind this agriculture sale went to fund future agricultural endeavors on my farm.  For Bill I am certain had a net income loss.  He certainly complained a lot about losing money but that was part of his personality.  He said his logging business was a hedge against the taxable income of his wife.  If this agricultural endeavor had been like most he would have had some positive cash flow but no net income.  But when you add in the depreciation on his equipment and his costs for fuel I am sure it was a loss. 

 

For me there was a certain satisfaction is having my property logged.  Obviously I had wanted the money but that was not the only reason for logging my stand.  Twice over the past 15 years I had had the state forester come out and make a recommendation on my property.  They divided it into four sections.  The western-facing top of the ridge was 6 acres of chestnut oak averaging 85 years of age.  They recommended leaving this section in tact since it had little commercial value and would be difficult to log the steep terrain.  The bottom of the farm included 6 acres of forest between two pastures.  This area had formerly been pasture so was a fairly young stand of fairly young trees also of undesirable quality.  I paid Bill to bulldoze that flat so make additional pasture for my goats.  The remaining 45 acres of forestlands included 20 acres of large poplar trees that had not been logged in at least 80 years the rest of the property having been logged about 20 years ago.  When the former owners of the property logged the property they cherry-picked the forest taking the largest trees and leaving the less desirable ones.  This is called “high grading” and was the reason why my timber stand was of less that optimal quality.  But they had passed over about 15 acres of large poplar trees mainly because cattle had foraged there.

 

The highest quality trees are those that can be used to produce veneer.  Veneer is what is used to make the highest quality furniture.   I had no veneer quality timber on my farm.  Rather I had saw timber quality and pulp wood.  No one wanted the pulp wood so we told Bill just to take the saw timber.

 

The lumber mill too makes demands upon the logger.  They would grudgingly take hickory would but told Bill not to take send over any red maple.  The consulting forestor told me that Virginia is the southern most range of the red maple.  That tree needs cold weather so it produces better logs in Vermont and New Hampshire.  You can see that for yourself if you look at the red maple here.  Many of the trees are badly knotted, twisted, and grow rather crooked. 

 

Most of the trees Bill hauled from my farm were poplar followed by black, white, and chestnut oak. There were a couple of black walnut and cherry trees.  Walnut is the most valuable of hardwoods and so is cherry.  White oak is used to make wine barrels.  There is a stave mill in Culpeper, Ramoneda Brothers, who does exactly that.  But most oak is used to make flooring and of course furniture.  Poplar trees grow straight and true here but their lumber is mainly used to make pallets and not furniture.  Further it is not suitable for a load bearing beam as would be a heavy piece of oak.  Hickory is used of course to make ax handles.  All those giant hickory trees on my farm sadly did not have much commercial value.  The lumber mill did not want at all sycamore trees, known for their white bark.  They tend to grow along streams so have lots of water content.  I cut one down myself and when I tried to split a log with an axe the axe simplybounced off as if the log was rubber.  Are you beginning to see why my 45 acres of timber was not too valuable?

 

When you log a property you have to follow the forest service rules.  Several times inspectors came by to make sure that Bill was not fouling the streams and to make sure that he constructed swales so that water would not run down hill digging a furrow into the mountainside and causing soil erosion.  Bill put in temporary bridges which he hauled away when done.  He also refrained from logging along the edge of streams.

 

Mike Santucci was the area forester for my region when I made the second timber survey.  He is well-known to area environmentalists and farmers who frequent meetings on timber land, watersheds, organic farming, and so forth because Mike is usually there.  He wrote the plan for my farm that called for clear cutting the forest.  But the problem was I could find no logger willing to fell the smaller trees.  To clear cut does not mean you chop every log off down to the ground.  In such a mountainous terrain as my farm that would be impossible.  Rather you cut down everything 4 inches and larger.  Only 15 inch diameter logs can be hauled to the mill.  So the other trees would be left there to rot while new trees take their place.

 

Mike’s plan also called for something called “crop tree release”.  This means when the crown of two trees are touching you fell one thus leaving the more desirable species.  So if a red maple is crowding a white oak you cut down the red maple leaving room for the oak to crow, dominate the canopy, and shade out any trees that would complete for water and nutrients there.  Mike also called for planting loblolly and white pine in certain areas in order to improve the diversity of trees for wildlife and future timber sales.  The state of Virginia subsidizes the planting of pine forests by paying part of the cost.

 

All of these practices were meant to enhance the future forest.  If I had been able to find someone to do a proper clear cut then sunlight would have reached the forest floor and the small saplings and poles there would be able to grow into desirable forest.   As it stands now, from the distance you cannot even tell that my forest has been logged even though it was logged quite heavily in some areas.  You have to actually climb up into the forest and look around to find where trees were felled.  The canopy overhead it still covered with shade because all of the many young trees here are 15 to 20 feet tall and reaching for the sky.  And since the forest was once again high graded crooked maples, hickories, and lesser quality chestnut oak dominate the forest.  In 40 years the forest could be logged again but it would be yet another low grade timber sale.  It would have been better to follow the recommendations of the state forester to produce a high quality stand of poplar, white and black oak, and white and loblolly pine.

 

My forest is covered now with the tree tops  I tried to give this away as firewood and finally found a green house operator who is hauling this away and cutting it up as fuel to fire his boilers.  As for my forest I need to spray Garlon on the alanthus trees that have and will spring up in the areas of disturbed soil.  This is an exotic invasive species that grows along most of the roadsides here in Rappahannock County where power lines and fencing have disturbed the soil.

 

The citizens of Rappahannock County have protested in the past when landowners have announced plans to clear cut their property.  Fortunately no permit is required for logging so we don't have to explain what we are doing to people who would not listen anyway.  If anyone wants to see what a logged forest looks like I will be glad to show them mine.  They will be surprised to see that logged or not the forest pretty much tooks the same.  Only a trained observer can tell the difference.

Continue Reading...

Logging the Farm

Sphere: Related Content

Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

This morning it was 21 degrees.  I need to wait for a few more weeks of cold weather before I start the winter vineyard pruning.  I have to prune 120 vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard, 330 vines at Castleton Lakes Vineyard, and then I am going to help Bill Gadino prune several thousand vines at Gadino Cellars.  So today I am looking back to when I planted Rosewood Hill vineyard almost 7 years ago.

Spring 2003

 

 

Last weekend two friends came to the farm to help me plant grape vines.  I had carefully planned to plant grape vines one weekend, walnut trees the weekend after that, and then Leyland cypress trees on the third weekend.  But my carefully laid out plans were waylaid when UPS brought both the Walnut trees and the grape vines at the same time.  There was no way I had time to get both planted so I took all the food out of my refrigerator and crammed 50 walnut trees inside.  My girlfriend at the time took a photograph because she considered that such an odd site.

 

The idea was I would start with a small hobby vineyard and then when I got some experience plant a commercial one.  I have since learned that I can make more money farming wine grapes for someone else.  Large vineyards and small wineries are profitable but a small vineyard usually is not.  In Virginia the rule-of-thumb is you need to plant 25 acres to have a profitable vineyard.  For that you would need probably 10 employees and maybe a $500K investment.  

 

My 65 acre farm has a couple of sites well-suited to growing grapes.  Here in Virginia where it gets cold in winter the idea is to plant your vines on a slope above the late frosts of spring or the early frosts of fall.  An early fall frost kills the leaves, which stops the grapes from ripening and a late frost in spring kills buds which have just begun to grow thus cutting in half or maybe more thar year’s yield of grapes.  

 

The top part of my farm rises to 1,000 feet while at the bottom it is 565 feet elevation.  I am grateful to Steve Critzer who talked me out of clearing off a vineyard site high up on the mountain where I had planned a commercial vineyard.  He had already brought his bulldozer to the farm when we cancelled this job.  The 15 degree slope up there would have been financially ruinous to work not to mention dangerous in the case of a tractor rollover.  There are so many rocks up there I would have had to haul dirt up from the bottom or from construction sites.  And in a drought vineyards need water, especially young vineyards.  To have piped water up that hill would have cost thousands.  And a vineyard surrounded by several thousand acres of uninhabited forest would have been devastated by deer, turkey, bear, birds, raccoon, in short every kind of predator.  It would have been better to place such a vineyard in a frost pocket in some suburb in Fauquier County surrounded by a monoculture of pasture grass and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

 

Any farm is an ongoing operation which each year requires some capital improvements.  At that time I had neither tractor nor auger so the only way to plant these vines was by hand.  The soil in Virginia is not like other parts of the nation—here it is hard as a rock.  When I augur fence posts with my tractor I wait until it rains because even with diesel power the posts won’t go into the ground.  So I dreaded the idea of digging 140 holes for grapevines by hand, so I did what Tow Sawyer would have done:  I enlisted help.

 

In California you can order live plants to plant in your vineyard but here in Virginia we order dormant root stock from nurseries in California or New York.  These are grown for a season in a vineyard there and then grafted and tossed in the refrigerator for the winter.  Then you take them out in the spring and plant them.  The nursery starts by taking a dormant shoot from a native American grapevine, sticks that in the ground, and then it sprouts roots.  This forms the bottom part of the new grape vine.  Then they take a dormant bud from a European variety like chardonnay and graft that onto the American roots.  Together this is called a “rootstock”.  The idea is the bottom part of the plant is native to North America so it can withstand the attack of phyloxxera ad nematodes that would otherwise eat the roots causing the vine to die.  Also you can obtain rootstock which tolerates high levels of sodium in the soil (as in parts of California) or rootstock which grows slowly so that your vine grows slowly developing a proper balance of fruit and foliage instead of some overgrown jungle canopy which takes much work to wrestle under control. 

 

The grafted rootstock arrived in a UPS-delivered box from American and Lake County Grapevine Nursery.  The owner, Joachim Hollerith. lives most of the year here in Madison County and had been for many years the vineyard manager at Prince Michel Vineyards.  The graft union was dipped in paraffin wax so that it would not dry out and the whole affair was packed in damp saw dust.

 

The vines I had selected to plant were cabernet franc on 3309 rootstock, traminette on 3309, and viognier on 101-14.  I didn’t know much about rootstock at the time so Joachim picked them for me.  I had picked cabernet franc because it does well here in Virginia requiring less sunshine and heat to ripen that other red grape varieties.   Viognier is the white wine grape having brought Virginia international recognition when Chrysalis Vineyards won the San Diego wine show and when a noted Napa Valley restaurant run by a former White House sommelier carried Horton’s 1993 viognier proclaiming it the best he had every had.  Traminette I planted because I liked its European cousin the perfumed, highly aromatic gewürztraminer, but gewürztraminer does not do well in the heavy, humidity, and heavy rains of Virginia. 

 

The way you plant grape vines is you dig a hole about 2 feet deep taking care to dig out all the rocks and then you position the plant where the graft union is a few inches above the soil.  One hapless farmer in Virginia had planted his vines too low and when the soil settled the vines sank to the level of the dirt.  When that happens the top part of the vine, called the “scion”, sprouted roots thus bypassing the American rootstock.  His vineyard was thus subject to destruction from root-eating pests.  The vines I planted already had had their roots neatly trimmed with scissors so I didn’t need to do that.  You don’t want to cram too many roots into one small spot.

 

I takes much labor to plant 120 grape vines in one day especially when you are doing this by hand.  I should have hired some hard-working migrant workers to help me but I resolved to do this work myself.  So my friend Paul and I dug holes all day long while my girlfriend passed us vines while Paul’s 3 year old son played around the newly-erected trellises.  Paul was overweight while I was merely out of shape.  He worked as hard or harder than me in the heat and I worried he would fall over with a heart attack.  Some holes were fairly easy to dig while in others we found rock or even hard-pan (i.e. impenetrable subsoil) that I hacked at with a heavy pike.  We planted 105 vines in one day leaving me 15 to plant the next.  I tossed them into the refrigerator with the walnut trees and reviewed my vineyard budget.  

 

If you look at my actual expenses (graphic at the top of this posting, click on it so you can easily read it) for the first two year of my vineyard—not including the winemaking equipment I bought---you can get an idea of what is in store for you were you to decide to plant your own vines.  I spent $3,500 not including the chemicals I bought to spray the vineyard, the lime, the fertilizer, and other stuff I did not include in my budget.

 

If you are a hobbyist contemplating a backyard vineyard I would say, “Don’t do it”.  My work was the result of many years of going to seminars, working at vineyards in Virginia and Chile, and studying books.  I took the pesticide applicator certification test and spent countless hours pouring over the labels of pesticides and fungicides.  You cannot plant wine-quality grapes and forget about them.  Every in agricultural paradises like Chile or California that are free of mildew-inducing rain you still have to worry about maladies like botrytis and sour rot.  This is why you must spray grape vines constantly.  Even organic vineyards do this.  Because if you don’t your fruit will rot and the vines defoliate.  More than disease there is the problems of the aforementioned pests.  Twice I have lost most of my vineyard to raccoon that I have trapped and killed by the dozen and birds which of course are protected by law.  About the only thing I don’t have to worry about is nosy neighbors eating my fruit because the nearest is a couple of hundred yards away.

 

Looking at some of my purchases the first year you can see that I started with the most fundamental:  grape vines.  These were $2.95 apiece while currently ENTAV certified vines cost $3.95.  You need to buy grape vines from a reputable nursery because you don’t want them to arrive already infected with leaf roll virus or other problems.  

 

If you plan to put in a vineyard plan on buying lots of trellis wire and pressure-treated posts.  Take my advice and invest in a wire jenny.  You use this to hold the wire so you can unroll it in an orderly fashion.  When I cut the bands from the first of these very heavy rolls of wire it opened up line an accordion and tangled.  I spent countless hours cursing as I untangled this mess one misery foot at a time.  Had I to do it all over again I would have tossed out that wire and simply bought the wire jenny.  But even the landfill would not take this wire saying it would foul their equipment.

 

Any vineyard in Virginia is going to need a deer exclusion fence of some kind.  I started with an electric one with 3 zinc ground wires and a $105 electric solar powered charger.  Put an electric fence requires constant maintenance.  Now that I am farming goats maintenance is no problem.  At the time I got rid of the electric fence after a couple of years because I got frustrated that the fence kept shorting out.  I replaced it with a $400 plastic deer exclusion fence which works much better.

 

Vineyards in New Zealand put up bird netting because they have such a huge bird problem.  In Virginia large vineyards just sacrifice part of their fruit to the birds or put up noise makers or balloons that look like an enormous eye.  I bought $385 worth of bird netting which is still working after 5 years.  I read an account of one grape grower who says he and his wife almost divorce each other every year as they install and take down the bird netting.  Putting it up is tough enough.  But taking it down is worse because the vines will have grown into the netting somewhat when you take them off.  Veritas Vineyards uses netting which they install by tractor only in the fruit zone.  But for a small vineyard you need to enclose the whole canopy as those greedy little starlings will push their way into any small hole.

 

I also bought a German-built gasoline-powered backpack sprayer.  In Germany vineyards are planted on steep slopes of riverbanks to avoid frost.  It’s too steep to operate a tractor there.  I still use this $814 machine but need a tractor mounted new one because I am planning to plant 3,200 vines at Castleton Lake Vineyards and certainly cannot spray those on foot.

 

The rest of the items listed below are other equipment needed to build the trellis and prune the vines.  I have not included the cost of any fertilizer but in the acidic soils of Virginia you always want to start with putting down limestone and getting a soil report.  You can read details about the soil report here.

 

The sun is coming up here now on this frosty morning so I have to go outside and break the ice from the goats watering pale and give them a bale of hay to eat.  I am driving off the farm today so I won’t turn them loose into the forest.  Fortunately they have not bothered the vineyard yet but I have thought that setting sheep lose there would be a good idea to keep the weeds and grass under control under the vines.  You can’t do that with goats because they will stand on their hind legs to devour anything they can reach.

Continue Reading...

Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

Sphere: Related Content

Farm Fowl Fiasco

 

If anyone sells you a so-called “free range chicken” don’t believe them.  Animal activists and organic farmers have spread the notion that it is cruel to cage birds.  They say chickens should be free to roam and scratch cow pies turning them over and dining on the windfall of insects found therein.  It is cruel to confine thousands of chickens in one industrial setting where they lay eggs onto conveyors and their manure is ferried out to waiting lagoons by rotating belt.  Visit a chicken farm so described and the stench is horrible because all of the nitrogen in that manure ammonia gas escapes in volumes enough to make you run for the door.  It’s the same with turkeys.  I once worked at Berry Hill vineyard farming wine grapes.  This 40 acre vineyard was placed on the side of one of the few high ridges in Orange County, Virginia.  The hill’s one redeeming feature was its height so the state police put a tower there for their radios and Horton Vineyards planted a vineyard there high above the frost.  The owner of this property also placed a confined turkey feeding operation high above his neighbors so the nauseating stench would not bother anyone, except of course the birds who have little to say in this matter.  Think about this next time you carve into that Butterball breast for Thanksgiving turkey.

 

It was with visions of free range chickens wandering my pastures and gardens eating insects and scratching at the ground that I bought my first 40 chicks from McMurray Hatchery.  Chickens, like honey bees which I also bought, arrive by the mails.  I believe I paid $4 postage to the postman who probably burned up $6 for fuel driving up to my house to deliver the young birds.  “Peep, peep, peep”, they make this delightful little sound as they stand there neatly aligned in little rows of downy feathers.  They look like tennis balls with legs except they are much smaller.

 

When chicks arrive you are supposed to keep them warm.  The rule of thumb is to keep them in 95 degree heat by hanging a heat lamp over their bedding reducing the temperature a few degrees every week until they are ready to move outside.  If the chicks stand to far away from the heat lamp it is too hot.  If they huddle underneath it is too cold.

 

McMurray Hatchery promised me an assortment of laying hens and meat birds.  I had chicks that in 10 months or so would be laying white, brown, and even blue colored eggs.  Or so goes the theory.  Tossed into the mix was an assortment of what they called “meat birds”.  These were Cornish and White Rocks hens.  All of my new chickens were females. 

 

Out in the pasture meanwhile I had had 4 hens and 1 rooster that had been laying eggs for some time.  These chickens I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars.  Chris Pearmund had moved off the property to a newly-built house so no one was taking care of them so he said I could take all 5 and a couple of bags of food too.  So one morning before daylight I snuck into the hen house and plucked the hens from their roost and tossed them into pillow cases.  I had read that this was the easiest way to capture chickens—i.e., get them while they are sleeping so I bundled them off blindfolded as it were like some kidnapping victims ala Secuestro Express.  They clucked quietly inside the pillows as if this is something that happened every day.

 

I was not completely new to chickens because my father had had them on his 500 acre farm when I was a boy and his second wife’s parents had them too.  But I only spent the summer with my dad and his new bride so responsibility for the taking care of the chickens rest with someone else, certainly not me.  I think two of the sharecropper’s sons who lived on the farm took care of our flock because I don’t recall my dad doing the same.  So I was a debutante chicken farmer and consulted a book.

 

My son loved playing with the 5 chickens that I spirited away from Pearmund Cellars. He did what we called “chicken tipping” whose name we borrowed from the sport called “cow tipping” which is what I imagine they do in places like Kansas where tipping over sleeping cows is the only game in town.  The thing about chickens is no matter how you rotate them they keep their head pointed straight up.  There have sort of an onboard gyroscope.  So Nathaniel did not knock over sleepy chickens he just picked them up and rotated them.

 

I bought a book on chicken coop construction and built a cheap mobile one from some galvanized tin, chicken wire, and 1x1 lumber, staples, and an extra large pallet.  The idea was to drag the chickens from one place to another so they would scratch at the ground improving the soil and put down fertilizer with their manure before I moved them to another spot.  Chicken manure, also called “litter”, is higher is nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that manure from cows or horses.  That is one reason so many local farmers here in Virginia buy chicken manure to spread on their pastures.  It is cheaper than fertilizer.  If it is composted then it adds carbon to the soil.  If not then it decomposes in place in what is called “compost sheeting”.

 

Everything was going swimmingly out in the pasture.  The chickens were happy in their mobile chicken coop.  I installed an electric polywire fence that was also moveable around their hen house.  This kept the Labrador retriever out.  The chickens did not stay inside since they could all fly, but this did not bother me because they flew up in to the trees where I assumed they would be safe from predators.  The chickens no longer trusted my hen house because I constructed it too light.  I wanted it to be light enough so that I could easily move it around but it had the density of a lightweight, hobby aircraft.  So it did what most airplanes do when the wind blows:  it took off.  More than once I came home in the afternoon to find my chicken coop upside down with a handful of angry birds standing on top staring at me.  I learned to fix that problem by pounding stakes into the ground and attaching a heavy chain.

 

Back inside my kitchen problems were starting to develop.   My house sounded like some kind of petting zoo as the chicks went “peep, peep, peep” whenever they were hungry which was pretty much all day long.  I filled a plastic tub with oak sawdust shavings of which I had plenty since I had bought a whole dump truck full to make compost for the pasture.  Then I set out some watering cans.  But the meat birds quickly started growing faster than they laying varieties so I then divided the flock into two.

 

Most Sundays I would go to the grocery store and buy one of those roasting hens that have a thermometer inside.  They mainly come from Perdue which has most of their farms east of me on the Eastern Shore of Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay and west of my across the Shenandoah Valley in Harrisburg.  But now that I know what I do about meat birds I have pretty much lost appetite for the same.

 

White Rocks hens are bred to grow quickly.  But the problem is they grow too quickly often ballooning to a weight for which their legs cannot carry them.  The McMurry catalogue advised that the birds should be slaughtered at only a few months before they developed problems walking.  To breed them with a deficiency seemed sort of cruel to me.  Worse they got to this weight rapidly by eating.  One would not say they ate “voraciously” they ate “compulsively” like mad men.  Had they been humans they would have been confined to a hospital bed rising only to join one of those hotdog eating contests you see on the news.

 

The laying hens were happy now that I had moved them away from the White Rocks who fairly stepped on them as they clamored for move food.  Soon the Rocks learned to hop since flying was not something they would ever be able to do with their heavy weight.  They knocked over the watering cans and made quite a noise.  I found it hard to talk on the telephone doing my day job.  My house was beginning to smell.  It was still winter but on sunny days I put them out for a little exercise and to air out my house.

 

I was glad when the icy winds of March gave way to the halcyon days of April and I could move my chicks outside.  The laying chicks were still tiny so I put them in my unheated greenhouse to keep them out of the wind.  The Rocks were waddling now and quite fat and smelly.  I put them into the mobile hen house inside the polywire fence.  The problem with the fencing was it was made to contain goats.  The mesh was quite small and the fat little Rocks were able to push themselves out a jolt of 4,000 volts of electricity not withstanding.  I dreaded walking down to the hen house because the Rocks would come racing out to meet me outside the safety of the electric fence when they thought I was bringing them corn.  The dogs would not go outside and the cat had cut a back flip when she first encountered the wire.  But outside the fence there was nothing I could do to protect them.

 

By this time my rooster had disappeared leaving only a pile of feathers below the spot where he had been roosting in the tree.  All kinds of predators like chickens:  fox, raccoon, skunk, possum, and of course my Labrador retriever.  There was not much I could do to protect the chickens if my retriever was going to eat them and if they pushed their fat little bodies through the fence netting.  Soon they were disappearing at the rate of 1 per day.  In the day it was the dog and at night other predators.  Worse Will my black lab taught Molly my livestock guard dog to chase and kill chickens.  Molly is a Great Pyrenees which is a breed that is bred to live and care for animals.  It was supposed to guard and not east chickens but will changed all of that.  Soon they ganged up and hunted like a pack in their murderous charge across the farm

 

My herd of chicks dwindled to only a few and all that remained were a couple of Rocks and the adult birds I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars.  So I slaughtered and cooked one of the White Rocks.  It was so tough that I could not finish it.  This is where I learned what others had told me.  The only birds worth eating are those industrially-raised chickens whose feet scarcely touch the ground.  So called-free range chickens might be good for eggs but their meat gets too tough if they get any exercise at all.  Of course all my birds had muscles from running for their lives.  This was no Kobe beef like meat.

 

Most everyone I know here in Rappahannock County has had the same experience with chickens.  Too many predators are after them so the only people who successfully keep  chickens here pen up their birds.  This defeats the whole notion of “free range chickens” since chickens confined to one place are not really living in the wild.  So I put my last birds in a small pen but then let them loose because my wife at the time, Gricel (long story), told me it was cruel.  I let them all out and the next day found nothing but features.

 

 

 

 

Continue Reading...

Farm Fowl Fiasco

Sphere: Related Content

Showdown with the Buck

Tomorrow I am going to buy one more doe.  This will bring my herd to 11 does and 1 buck from which I plan to grow the herd to 40 animals and sell meat to immigrant buyers.  (Gringo’s don’t understand goat meat so why bother trying to explain it to them.)  Probably 8 of the does I have now have been bred by the buck and when I buy 1 more this should give me perhaps 10 kids (offspring) born in the spring.  It’s difficult to predict the number of offspring this year because the buck has also been breeding with the yearling does which might or might not be able get pregnant and does which have never kidded usually have less offspring that those who have been bred before.  Two of the does that I started my herd with have never been bred while three more that I bought from Steve Shippa have kidded before.  A young doe or one that has never kidded before will deliver a single kid while a doe which has kidded before can have doubles or even triples.  I wouldn’t call them “twins” or “triplets” because it’s not the same as people.  I mean there are not going to all have the same freckles or the same propensity for mathematics or ballet.  It’s just an ordinal number we are talking about here.

 

I had read in the goat instruction manuals—it makes sense to call them that since regardless of their title or whether they are books, web sites, or newspapers they all aspire to the same goal---to never turn your back on a buck for sure one is in the “rut”.  Now this concept of “rut” has me a little confused.  The old joke for humans—to wit, women need a reason to make love and men only need a place--applies to goats as well.  Males the two-legged and four-legged kind are as Maureen Dowd says, “as predictable as a pile of wood”.  We are ready to fornicate regardless of the calendar.  Given that what exactly does the rut mean?  The does come into heat ever 21 days so it would make no sense that the male only wants to breed in the fall which is when the rut occurs.  There is a reason that deer hunters pile into the woods in November: this is the beginning of the rut.  Any motorist can see this as well as the normally aloof and careful deer male looses his tendency to stay hidden from view and bumbles around the countryside crossing highway and byway completely oblivious to oncoming traffic.  When he is looking for love he loses all sense of reason and this is when he is most vulnerable to the hunter’s weapons.  The same thing happens to men of course.  They lose the ability to think clearly when confronted with décolletage, the sight of a woman’s ankle, an hourglass figure, or the mane of her hair.  Plato in “Phaedrus” says love is an illness that heightens one’s sensitivity.  Otherwise stoic men become silly putty around women when they fall in love.  Their pride is easily wounded and they are prone to sulk.  So the “rut” must be the season when the otherwise easily aroused male is aroused all the time.

 

Maybe this was what was wrong with my buck one brisk day in November when this otherwise docile creature reared up on his hind legs and showed some aggression.  The buck had been quite rough with the females knocking them about as he mated with them and lowing loudly but had never shown aggression toward me.  But this day he started to rub his horns on the temporary shelter I had built for them and threatened to knock one side down so I moved in to put it back up and then he turned on me.  He came at me with his 260 pound girth and shoved me to the ground as if I was an afterthought.  I was still unaware what was happening when confusion turned to fright as he pushed me toward the electric fence.  I pulled myself out of there unscathed and pondered what to do as he stood between me and the exit.

 

 

 I don’t think I panicked but I forgot what I had read which is when the bucks starts coming for you grab his beard and hang on tightly.  That was sort of difficult to remember as has shoved me around in the dirt.  

 

The more I thought about this the more I realized I could have been seriously hurt.  Farming can be dangerous.  This same week I had gone to the doctor because I thought I had gotten some fertilizer in my eye.  The nurse put die in my eye and found no scratches or dust and then cleaned out my eyes.  A couple of years ago I almost killed myself when a tree I was cutting down with my chainsaw fell on me, breaking my jaw on both sides, and pinning me to the ground in below freezing weather.   When I had my bulldozer a pine tree I pushed over bounced off the roof of the cab.  And finally I had quit climbing trees in a deer stand because I could imagine falling and hanging there in the wind, snow, and rain for weeks until someone came looking for me.  So I phoned up Steve Shippa who sold me the buck and told him my problem.

 

Steve as I have already written is the one who sold me the buck.  I admire him for his dexterity with goats.  He showed me how to catch the females by squatting down and stretching your arms out wide thus making yourself look larger.  Catching the animals is always a problem when you need to deworm them or give them vaccinations.  Goats that you milk are generally tame.  But meat goats do not get handled by people each do so they are more skittish.  So I paid the neighbor’s kid $10 to help me the last time I did this but he just stood there without a clue what to do as he watched me dive to the ground trying to catch all the goats.  Steve knows better what to do.  He is sort of a wide fellow anyway.  So when he stretches out his arms and squats down how he looks like Barney Rubble as he corners and cows the hapless creature.  Animals are rather dumb. So the goal is to just make yourself look like a bigger animal.  They don’t realize we are humans with all of our doubts, our fears, and our failings.  They just look at us as either one of their herd, a passerby, or possible a threat.

 

This was made clear to one of Steve’s friends when he made the mistake of leaning over and showing his backside to a buck when does I heat were nearby.  This fellow was a big man but his buck was even bigger.  The buck charged him from behind knocking him to the ground and giving him a concussion.  The only bit of luck here was he was farming goats and not some 2,000 pound cow.

 

Every American kid has seen those television cartoon depictions of the nativity scene where the wise men come to the baby Jesus with frankincense and mur (whatever those might be) wearing shepherd’s clothes and carrying a long hook.  It turns out this 2,000 year biblical device actually exists.  It’s sort of like the ancient basket wine press: elegant in its simplicity there is no need to change its design over the years however primitive. Steve has a goat hook and I am looking to purchase one.  You can use it to reach out and snare the goat by the neck.  So you corner them with outstretched arms and then snare them by the neck.  In other words a six foot tall human gives himself another 6 feet of reach.  Quite effective.  This is how you catch a goat.

 

So Steve I knew would know what to do about my buck which had turned on me.  He said none of his bucks had ever gotten out of hand because he had learned rather quickly to grab them on their smelly beard, jerk their head up, and look them in the eye.  Goats, he said, are like dogs where pecking order is important.  Either you dominate or you will be dominated.  I needed to reestablish dominion over the herd.  He told me to get a bucket of water and pour it right into the bucks face as they hate that.

 

This is what I did.  I poured two buckets of freezing water into the buck’s face and he backed down.  I would say he went running his tail between his legs except the goats tail always sticks up and not down.  So this ruse is working and the gently giant has not challenged me since.  But I have learned not to turn my back on him.  Water works because goats hate water (rain).  What is odd is they do not mind snow.  One farmer from the Northern Plain states had written that he would look out across his pasture for his goats after a heavy snow and only see little humps on the horizon.  He called his goats and up would pop up their heads.  Still goats hate rain.  Whenever it rains on my farm I can always find my goats in any of the small sheds I have built on the property.  The stand together patiently waiting for it to quit raining.

 

That same week I had to confront the other danger on the farm: ticks.  I had read in the newspaper that 20% of the ticks here in Rappahannock County were infected with lime disease.  Lime disease causes arthritis-like symptoms in people and is a serious illness.  A dozen years ago I had the human vaccine but they quit making it I believe because it was either not affective or it gave people the very problem it was designed to prevent.

 

It had never occurred to me that dogs could get lime disease.  I spent all my time worrying about my kids when the same week I had fought with the goat my Labrador Retriever Will suddenly went lame.  I thought he had broken one leg.  He hopped around on three legs and climbed into my bed and lay there no even getting up to eat or drink water.  So I took him to the vet and was surprised when he told me the dog had gotten lime disease.  He gave me 21 days of antibiotics and some pain medicine.  I find it quite remarkable that these bacteria could actually cause an animal to go lame.  People I understand have a much harder time getting over this problem.

 

Continue Reading...

Showdown with the Buck

Sphere: Related Content

The Vineyard Gets Defoliated

He who loves not wine women and song remains a fool his whole life long.—Martin Luther

Last night I was reading Saint Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” in French.  I read it every year so that I won’t forget the language of Voltaire which I spent so much time trying to learn.  This book is elegant in its simplicity.  The boy in this book is bothered that adults because, being adults, their thinking is muddled and cannot see what is clear to children.  The boy draws a picture of a boa constrictor snake that has swallowed an elephant.  From the side an obtuse adult would imagine it looks like a chapeau.   He shows it to an adult who without hesitating pronounces, “This is a chapeau”.  Bothered by the adult’s ignorance he then shows it to Le Petite Prince, the benevolent child-like creature who has dropped out of the sky.  The Prince with child child-like innocence says, “It’s a boa that has swallowed an elephant.”  This proves the point that adults are dense.

This year in the vineyard I learned an important lesson.  Like most dimwitted adults I had to learn from experience.  Emmanuel Kant would call this experience “a priori” which means I had learned from doing rather than thinking.  Perhaps a clever child would have grasped this before me. 

I had been on top of my spray program spraying the vineyard every couple of weeks and even every few days depending on the weather.  Still both Rosewood Hill and Castleton Lakes Vineyards were defoliated.  The leaves fell off so I had to pick the grapes too early.  The white grapes were ripe enough to make wine but the red grapes had not yet ripened.  There was enough sugar in the red grapes to make wine but with red grapes you need the seeds and stems to ripen otherwise the wine will be bitter.  So instead of making red wine this year I made rosé.

The rosé that I made was fine.  It was pink and sparkling clear.  In the past I had made rosé which had turned orange like a California mass-market zinfandel rosé.  Orange does not denote a flaw, but aesthetically it is not as pleasant as pink.  So I would not repeat my mistake I took my grape juice over to Bill Gadino at Gadino Cellars and he checked the PH of the wine and it was 3.4 which is just right so I did not need to add acid.  Bill told me to inoculate the wine and let it ferment overnight before pressing it off.  This would give the wine more skin contact and thus more color and of course more tannins.  (Tannins are a color preservative).  The last time I had made rosé I had pressed the red grapes right away and then inoculated the juice.  The resulting wine was not color fast.

I am one who is generally not able to keep secrets so I went around telling everyone I knew in the Virginia wine business of my troubles this year with the grape vine canopy due to all the rain.  Plus I like to remind these guys that I am farming commercially so one of them will give me a job.  I told Chris Pearmund of Pearmund Cellars, John Delmare of Rappahannock Cellars, and of course Bill Gadino.  They all told me the say thing:  for the 470 grape vines that I am farming I need to apply 30 gallons or more of water if I am using captan to control downy mildew.  These men farm large vineyards with thousands of vines.  So they have tractor mounted air blast sprayers.  I was still using a backpack sprayer which looks like a gasoline powered leaf blower except it has a 2 gallon water tank mounted on the top.  There is no way I could haul so much water.  I would have had to pass through the vineyard 15 times in order to spray 30 gallons of water.  I would have looked like Jean Cadoret the hunchback of Pagnol’s “Jeane de Florette” who kills himself trying to haul water to his parched farm.  I needed to use much more captan but it was not possible until I bought a tractor mounted sprayer.  That would be possible for Castleton Lakes Vineyards but at Rosewood Hill the rows were too closely place for a tractor to navigate.  Merde.  A priori once again.

I had been farming wine grapes for 6 years successfully without a problem but the weakness in my program manifested itself this year because in May and June we had torrents of rains, which infected the vineyard with downy mildew.  All of this rain caused powdery mildew too which killed the yellow squash in my garden.

I felt not so bad when my vineyard friends told me of some other vineyards they knew of that had been similarly been defoliated.  But I walked away from talking with the managers of one of those defoliated vineyards confused because he told me had had lost his leaves because of powdery mildew and not downy mildew.  Now I was not sure which disease had overtaken the vineyard.  It should be easy to tell the difference.  Downy mildew causes the leaves to get oily looking and turn yellow.  Powdery mildew causes the leaves to get covered with powdery looking spider-web-like growth.  But now that the leaves had all fallen off I began to doubt my prognosis.  This was a problem because one disease you treat with sulfur or hydrogen peroxide.  For the other you use captan and other chemicals.  The only good news was that the fruit had not been infected so I had at least maintained adequate control for that.

Continue Reading...

The Vineyard Gets Defoliated

Sphere: Related Content

The Rutting Buck

My kids joked that my goat farm has gotten off to a slow start because the first few goats I bought were gay. This is not entirely true.

  

I bought my first two females, Allison and Michelle, from Larry Grove a goat farmer in Rappahannock County.  They were 4 months of age.  Both were Boer and Spanish crossbreds—they are by temperament and milk producing ability designed to be meat and not dairy goats. Dairy goats produce enough milk to share with humans.  Meat goats produce enough only for their offspring.

When my does reached 8 months of age I went to Bill Segrest, another Rappahannock County farmer, and bought a young buck named David.  Bill told me David had one flaw: he was born on the coldest day in February so his right hoof froze and fell off.  Nature is indeed cruel to animals. Still in my naïveté I thought David would make a fine sire.  Little did I know that a goat needs to be large enough and have enough strength to mount and copulate with does so by definition he should be bigger than they.  So for goats, size does matter.

After 5 months when gestation should have been complete my does were still not bred.  I phoned up Mr. Segrest and he exchanged David for a larger male.  With ranching one cannot be shy about sex.  So I took a look at his testicles and notice that he had only one.  Bill’s son-in-law told me he should still be able to do the job.  Five months went by and my does had grown to huge proportions so I assumed they were finally pregnant.  The veterinarian came around and inspected them with his sonogram and pronounced them, merde, without kids—they were simply fat from gorging on the spring flush of pasture grass.  It turns out that Mr. Segrest had tried to castrate his goat—to make what goat farmers call a “wether”—but botched the job.  He had not properly fastened the rubber bands used to castrate farm animals around both balls, so only one fell off leaving an impotent male.  

So I exchanged this second sterile buck for two does and one buck only a few months old.  Then I bought another very young buck from another farmer.  Bad luck prevailed.  I backed over with the first buck my pickup truck and the second one died when all the goats climbed atop a mobile pasture chicken coop which then collapsed on top of the hapless little fellow.  This is where I made my second mistake: if you are looking for a herd sire start with a proven performer, an adult.  I thought I could raise my young bucks to adulthood and then they would breed.  After all they reach puberty at 2 months and at that age are air humping like a couple of teenage boys watching Penelope Cruz.

Now I was really mad.  I had begun to receive phone calls and emails from customers who wanted to buy goats but I still had none to sell.  My does were anxious to get going too.  Their tails were twitching and they were mounting each other—an obvious sign they were in heat.  This is when I met Steve Shippa who runs boergoatblog.com.

Steve is one of those upper middle class people who also farms.  In California and Kansas people farm to make money and go to the bank for loans.  In Virginia farming seems to be a past-time for those who have made their money elsewhere.  Still Steve is a heck of a nice fellow and extremely knowledgeable about his 100-head herd of Boer goats.

Steve said I could buy his herd sire for $300 which was $50 less than I had budgeted so I said “OK”.  I drove over to his farm in Berryville and came head-to-head with a raging, snorting, 260 pound buck in full rut.  This goat like most males smelled terrible.  A buck in the rut urinates all over himself and secretes must from his glands to woo the female.  This foul odor for goats is some kind of cologne.  Steve had locked up his love struck buck alone but within eye sight and downwind of a herd of does who too were primed for romance.  The buck was as horny as an aircraft carrier full of sailors on furlough and just as dangerous.  He pounded his massive head against the fence which strained to contain him and bent the steel latch which held the gate shut.

Steve and I wrested this animal into a cage in the back of my truck and I drove back to Rappahannock drawing stares from motorists on the highway.  At a gas station a couple of men walked over to look for they had never seen an animal so large.  I explained that the Boer goat breed had been imported from South African some years ago for their large size and docile demeanor except of course when the un-castrated male is within the vicinity of does in heat.  I told these men that this goat was the grandson of a goat which had sold for $45,000.  Boer goats until a few years ago were hard to come by in the USA so had sold for a premium.  Now instead of being ridiculously expensive they are just downright expensive.

I took my buck home and turned him loose with my 6 does.  Goats normally make a soft bleating sound something like the familiar “bah-bah-bah” of sheep.  This was how my 50 to 80 pound females had behaved.  They were gentle to the point that I let my friend’s 7 year old daughter feed them from the palm of their hand.

But the rutting buck snorted and sniffed and howled like some kind of small dinosaur “oooh—aaaargh--woooo”.  My neighbors were ½ mile away at the closest point and I am sure they thought I must have been conducting some kind of mass slaughter for he howled as he circled the does and thoroughly cowed my otherwise large and frightening 120 pound Great Pyrenees livestock guard dog.

The frightened does scattered but the buck was relentless in his pursuit.  He went first for Allison, the dominant doe in the pack, and had soon mounted her after knocking her around a bit.  I was fairly frightened and fascinated at the same time as he went for my timid little doe with his tongue hanging out and mounted her with such force he pushed her to the ground.   It reminded me of high school and college.  Back then if you wanted your date to put out you fairly wrestled her to the ground.

The doe put up a fight for a while then relented.  Soon after that she began to nuzzle up to the foul smelling beast.  Within an hour the buck had moved onto the second largest doe in the herd and she too became part of his love circle.  The two does fell into his harem as sycophantic groupies and the embraced each other in an agrarian ménage a trois.  As I write this essay the buck had already bred a third doe and three more remain.

Breeders have told me I can breed my does three times in two years.  I hope to buy three more does next week to jump start my late developing herd so by next year I do not have to turn away so many customers.

Continue Reading...

The Rutting Buck

Sphere: Related Content

Fall Planting at the Goat Farm

A few weeks ago my son asked me to help him with his high school algebra.  The time could not be better for I had recently begun to study again the calculus text that I waded through in college.  (When winter rolls around and farming slows down in the vineyard I need something else to pour my energy into so I study.)  Still I was not able to explain to him—to my satisfaction—how to use Newton’s iterative method for approximating square roots.  Newton’s theory is based upon a series that converges i.e. a sum ∑ that sums to some number.

It was with this puzzle in mind that I went to Borders bookstore as I do practically ever Wednesday with my children.  There I went looking for something written by David Foster Wallace.  I had just read in The New York Times that this genius, who was characterized as the most important writer of my age group, had died.

So I picked up Mr. Wallace’s book on mathematics called “A Brief History of ∞”.  It is a fascinating read.  With his vast knowledge of ancient philosophy, Greek, an of course mathematics he walks the reader through the theories of Pythagoras, Zeon,  and Euclid.  He writes that it totally upended the well-ordered world of the followers of Pythagoras when they found that not all numbers could be expressed as a ratio of two integers the most famous of these of course being the length of the hypotenuse in an right triangle whose measurement could be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem.  Peering into the boundless world of mathematics was too much for some people as the boundary between genius and madness is slight.  Mr. Wallace writes that some of these scholars lost their minds and went insane.  After he wrote that David Foster Wallace lost his own mind then hanged himself.  Reading that I needed to go back outside and work on the goat farm before I too became unhinged.

Yesterday I took delivery of 20 cubic yards of grape skins from D & M container company.  They haul away the grape skins at The Winery at LaGrange and Pearmund cellars after the wineries are done pressing them into juice.  I had the truck drop this next to the dump truck load of sawdust that I got from Ramoneda Brothers, a local company that cuts oak trees into staves used to make wine barrels.  I plan to use these two steaming mountains of raw material to make compost.  Compost is humus or carbon in its most basic form which I will use to apply to my pastures to boost the organic material in the soil.  The grape skins are steaming now because fungus, yeast, bacteria are doing the work of breaking this down to compost--as they do so it generates heat.  The sawdust is not steaming anymore but if you plunge your hand into the middle of it the temperature is well above 150 degrees and steam gushes forth and the air fills with the smell of ammonia letting you know it is still breaking down. You are supposed to let it keep decomposing until the smell of ammonia is gone.  At this point the compost can decay no more and it will smell like earth, dirt, potting soil.

I will use the sawdust on my existing pastures.  The grape skins are for the new pastures and for spring application to the others.  Last year I bought a bulldozer and used it to clear away 6 acres of ragged forest.  I say it is “ragged” because there was no merchantable timber there—a logger working on my farm this year completely passed it over.  I wanted to expand the 5 acres of pasture I had to 11 to provide more room to plant more forage for my goat herd.

The pastures that I currently have were used for many years to produce hay and I am still producing hay there for my animals and for my neighbor's cows.  Each year the grass that grew there is hauled away thus taking with it all of the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace materials that were taken up by the plant.  Since I had not been adding fertilizer to the soil the soils were severely depleted.  So this year as I started to contemplate how to turn those 6 acres of forest into pasture I started looking at how to improve the health of the soil of the overall farm. 

I started where you are supposed to start and that is with a soil report.  The PH of the soils in my pasture was 7 which is fine since I had been putting on lots of lime.  But the PH in the new pasture which had been woods was 4.8.  I scarcely has 4 pounds per acre of usable phosphorous and not much potash at all.  I broadcast some buckwheat seed after I finished cleaning the trees off the new pasture but it would not grow in soil that was 100 times as acidic as the existing pastures.  So I called the farmers cooperative who came out and spread 2 tons of lime per acre with their truckers and then waited for cool weather to seed grass.

When the weather cooled I used a land rake to smooth out the soil and then broadcast 3 bags of MaxQ fescue grass seed along with 150 pounds of MAP (10-52-0) monoammonium phosphate which is phosphorous with a little nitrogen.  I wanted to put down rock phosphate too but I had already spent too much money so put that into the budget for next year.

Then I went over to Farfelu Vineyard to see about buying their manure spreader.  A manure slinger spreader is a wagon with a chain that is pulled along as the tractor pulls the spreader. The chains push the manure or compost onto sprockets which then fling the compose up and out in an even shower of fertilizer.  It’s a costly machine, $3,600 new, but I bought theirs used for $2,500.  Fareflu had been one of the very first wineries in Virginia but had recently gone out of business finding no buyer for their operation and no winery interested in their crops of baco noir and other old fashioned grape varieties.

My new pasture planted with fescue, the next project at the goat farm was to build an electric fence to keep in my does and buy a new buck to grow the herd.  A goat fence—any goat farmer will tell you---is only a rough approximation of where the goats might be at any given time.  My goats for the most part had become tame and had gotten used to roaming around my farm.   They were happy climbing on top of my pickup truck, sleeping under the tractor, and following my great Pyrenees guard dog around the farm and on occasion off the farm.  If it were not for the dog suffering from wanderlust I could have let the goats roam indefinitely on my 65 acres since they stayed on the property.  I soon grew weary of having my neighbors call the animal control officer who in turn would call me and show up with his flashing blue lights to help me shepherd the herd back onto my property.  I was particularly annoyed that Mrs. Coughlin, who owns the farm next to me, didn’t just call me because everyone in the neighborhood, including her, knew who owned the goats.  So I finally decided to fence them in.

Goats, given a choice, prefer to eat tree leaves and vines than graze grass.  They will stand on their hind legs and nibble leaves.  This is why goats are used to clear brush.  Leave enough of them in a small area and what had been jungle will soon look like a city park except of course  the leaves they cannot reach will still be hanging.  It makes the woods look like you cleared them out with a landscaping service that only employees midgets.  But if I was to grow my herd to 40 or 50 animals I needed to fence them in especially since I wanted to practice rotational grazing techniques meaning move them from paddock to paddock as different varieties of forage were ready to be grazed or grasses at different stages of growth.  That is the best way to improve the health of the farm and the animals at the same time and the practice followed by the best of the grass fed farmers, especially those calling themselves "organic".  

So I strung electric wire around 2 acres of land which I had cleared with the dozer.  Half of it was cleared well enough where I could plant winter rye, Austrian peas, rape seed, triticale, and turnips which would grow into the looming cold weather.  But the other half was a tangle of trees which I had pushed over with the dozer which broke down for the last time before I finished the job.  So I left that side to the goats to clear out and got rid of the dozer.

Winter rye is for me a green colored cure for the misery of winter.  In the winter the ground and the sky take on the same grey colored hue when the sky is cloudy.  This misery can last for a few weeks and one can understand why people in places like Finland, Toledo, Siberia either drink heavily in the darkened days of winter or sun themselves under sunlamps.  A better cure might be to plant something that stays green for much of the year.  In Finland I think they grow pot indoors to provide some color.  In Virginia I wanted to grow winter rye especially as the police here in Virginia frown on growing marijuana.

In Virginia fescue goes dormant when the north wind turns icy.  It does not turn green again until 4 months later.  But winter rye as the name implies grows later in the year and comes out of dormancy earlier.   So it’s bright green in December which is a cheery hue compares with the monochrome of the rest of the landscape.

My new pasture is now green with 4 acres of young fescue growth and I have 2 acres of winter cover crops growing.  The goats after much effort have learned for the most part to respect the electric fence while the goat dog still goes in and out as she pleases.  The next activity for me after I pick up my new buck next week will be in April when I use the rotavator plow to till in the cover crops and plant summer annual perl millet.  I see so many goat farmers feeding their animals grain and buying expensive hay.  Rotational grazing and planting the highest quality forage is the way I plan to build up my herd and goat business.

 

  

Continue Reading...

Fall Planting at the Goat Farm

Sphere: Related Content