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.

 

 

 

 

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Farm Fowl Fiasco

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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.

 

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Showdown with the Buck

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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.

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The Vineyard Gets Defoliated

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Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

Dr. Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, is a frustrated man.  He is frustrated that his organization, focusing on organic farming, is outspent by Monsanto, that evil agribusiness whose Roundup glysophate herbicide, he says, is poisoning the soil and whose genetically engineered, patented seeds cannot be reused.  He is frustrated that while small and local farmers have embraced the organic movement the vast majority of commodity corn and soybean row crop farmers and the vast majority of acreage have not and probably will not.  For they have no incentive to change as they are propped up by a system of subsidies that encourage what he calls a monoculture of agriculture that fattens our children with sugar they do not need while delivering food which is low in nutrition—the ideal here being what organic producers call “nutrient dense” food.  He is frustrated that the price of gasoline is “only $4 per gallon” thus delaying the great upheaval in the culture that would cause policy makers to finally embrace his idea of paying farmers not by the number of acres they plant but by the tons of carbon they return to the soil.  This idea is called “carbon sequestration” and was the topic upon which he spoke at the RCCA (Rappahannock County Conversation Alliance) annual meeting at the Link yesterday.

Perhaps one reason he cannot sell his ideas to the great unwashed masses is Dr. LaSalle runs with an elite crowd.  Instead of delivering his stump speech at county fairs and agriculture conventions to people who actually farm for a living, this PhD arm-chair agronomist puts forth his ideas to people who with visions of Wendell Berry hold up farming as some kind of ideal way to slow development and preserve open space without having actually to make a living trying to do so.  In front of a well-heeled crowd in Rappahannock County—the whole county of course can be called that---he spoke yesterday of sharing his ideas with fellow elitists Al Gore, a part-time farmer who made his fortune with Google stock and Leon Paneta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.  Dr. LaSalle zips around in his rented Toyota Prius from one model farm owned by a Carnegie to that of a Rockefeller.  This is farming not as a livelihood but as prototype where profits do not matter and where produce is held up as some kind of artifact to be photographed for the magazines.  Dr. LaSalle knows this and for this reason he is frustrated.

The Rodale Institute for many years been researching and writing about organic farming to conventional farmers who mock them as a bunch of granola crunching hippies.  As if to make that point exactly at the end of Dr. LaSalle’s speech a woman who in her youth probably was a granola crunching hippy stood up and delivered a 5 minute impassioned, somewhat awkward diatribe of her definition of “organic”.  Dr. Salle addresses that head on when he said that, “This is not a bunch of granola crunching hippies. It is science.”

Rodale is trying to cast wider its net of influence by speaking of organic farming as a way to reduce green house gases and return carbon to the soil.  His timing is good because global warming of course is in the news and that crisis which he longs for is perhaps upon us.  The Kyoto accord (which he would like to see renegotiated) is affecting policy in Europe and Japan.  But it’s difficult to see Iowa corn farmers or California growers, who of course farm everything, stop using fertilizers simply because Dr. LaSalle wants them too.

Dr. LaSalle laid out his ideas in a presentation and in his paper “Regenerative Organic Farming: A Solution to Global Warming”.   At the Robert Rodale Reserve in Pennsylvania 29 years ago they laid out side by side test plots of conventional chemical farming plots next to those that were organically farmed.  The chemically farmed plots are no-till drilled with corn and soybeans using paraquat, glysophate, atrazine, and presumably some cultivation to burn down, rip out, or suppress weeds before sowing seeds in the soil.  The conventionally farmed fields are then treated with postemergence herbicides to control weeds.  In the organic fields there is no tillage nor chemicals.  Instead a roller crimper is used to kill the cover crop of rye or the legume hairy vetch.  Vetch adds nitrogen to the soil and rye and vetch both create a dense matt through which weeds cannot easily grow.  Corn or soybeans are then drilled into the mulch and grow relatively weed free. 

A byproduct of all of this 29 years of research, much to Dr. LaSalle’s satisfaction, is that the organically farmed soils over time have seen their organic matter increase.  “Organic matter” is of course carbon.  This is the carbon sequestration of which he talks so passionately.  Soils that are high in organic matter are better able to tolerate both drought and flood because the humus--which acts as a sink to soak up all of this carbon dioxide which is causing global warming--also soaks up and retain water.  If only he could convince the US Army Corp of Engineers, he says, there would be no more Mississippi River floods.

Rodale’s idea is that farmers can forgo fertilizer if they build up the soil using no-till organic practices.  Row crop farmers in Virginia would tell you they already use no-till practices and have been doing so for a generation.  Deep tillage of course is the culprit that destroys organic matter in the soil and releases it into the air in the form of carbon dioxide.  But they still use too much nitrogen.  When they grow corn they inject liquid nitrogen right into the soil.  It would be better to plant legumes like clover which naturally add nitrogen to the soil.  Manufactured nitrogen is problematic in two ways.  It takes lots of natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air.  (Chemically air + natural gas = anhydrous ammonia.  Ammonia is basically nitrogen.  You then take this ammonia and add carbon dioxide to create urea which is another form of nitrogen).  And nitrogen destroys soil microbes and burns roots.  These soil microbes help break down compost thus adding carbon to the soil.  But it is unfair of Dr. LaSalle to characterize all fertilizers as “chemical fertilizers”.  Plants need large amounts of phosphorous and potassium too.   Those are made without petroleum.  Phosphorous is made by using strong acids to release phosphates from rock phosphate which is mined from the soil.  Potassium is also made from mined materials using acid to release them.  Nitrogen is just one component of the fertilizer troika “N,P,K” which is respectively nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium.

Dr. LaSalle says that much of his research is not relevant for the rolling pastures that dominate Rappahannock County for we don’t grow corn here except for those few farmers who feed it to their own cattle.  Here our cover crop, grass, is basically our only crop so it would not make too much sense to kill it with a roller crimper and try to drill seeds into the resulting mulch matt.  Those seeds would not even germinate since they require soil contact not to mention that is would be cost prohibitive to tear up your pastures every year.  Instead Dr. LaSalle says the way for Rappahannock farmers to return carbon to the soil is loosen up the compacted soils—compacted by the heavy hoof of the cow--with a yeoman’s plow and practice rotational high density grazing.  This is a practice where cows are shepherded from one plot to the next for often only hours at a time where their manure drops onto the soil in high enough quantities to form a layer of compost which improves the soil by adding organic matter and of course sequestering carbon.  Lots of farmers here read about and believe in such practices but maybe only Cliff Miller is actually doing this since it requires lots of fences and lots of time spent moving the herd.

As for logging Dr. LaSalle simply says we cannot have any of that.  He says the forest holds twice the amount of carbon below the soil as above it and felling a tree releases much CO2 into the air.  Anyone who owns timber land in Virginia knows if you simply forget about your forest eventually your trees will fall over dead.  Not all of us are so rich with university grants that we can simply let our most valuable agriculture product just lie there for others to marvel at.  All of what Dr. LaSalle says makes sense.  He just needs to find a way to communicate his ideas to those who wear overalls instead of pullover sweaters.

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Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

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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.

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The Rutting Buck

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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.

 

  

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Fall Planting at the Goat Farm

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Virginia Barley for Ethanol

Farmers have found a new use for barley beside making beer.  Barley, in particular hull-less barley, can be used to make ethanol.

The Chesapeake Bay foundation has prepared a report which they handed out at the August Virginia Biofuels Seminar.  In it they worry than the increase in prices paid for corn will cause farmers to plant more.  Corn they point our requires lots of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer when it is applied to the soil turns into ammonium which drifts off into the air and nitrates which can infiltrate the ground water if they are not taken up by plants.  Phosphates have a triple negative electrical charge so they bind to positively charged clay colloids found in the soil.  So phosphates by themselves do not leach into the groundwater and run off into streams.  What causes phosphate buildup in the Chesapeake bay is soil erosion.  Phosphates in the bay cause algae blooms which snuff out oxygen and thus fish and can cause entire dead areas in the ocean as it had done at the mouth of the Mississippi.

The answer to this says the Foundation is to plant winter cover crops and of course something besides corn.  These cover crops will take up unused nitrogen from the soil and curtail soil erosion.  They further say that grassland is preferred to corn and for this reason are endorsing biodiesel from warm season grasses and ethanol production from barley.

No ethanol plant is yet opened in Virginia while one is planned for Norfolk and two for Baltimore. These of course will be on the water where barges and ships from the Midwest can ferry their corn.  Pointing toward the sea they have their backs turned on Virginia agriculture.  How does this help the Virginia farmer?  It does not.

Instead it would be better to source biomass needed for fuel from local sources.  Virginia farm land is expensive and while we have wide open spaces nothing is as wide open as the plains of Kansans and Iowa.  Plus their soils are superior for growing corn because of their water and nutrient holding capacity.  Another alternative to corn is proposed for Virginia:  barley.

I always find it fascinating that for every aspect of agriculture you can think of you can be certain you can find a scientist somewhere in the Cooperative Extension Service somewhere who is expert on this topic.  In these bad economic times where people are wondering how government can help even libertarians would agree that the USDA agriculture extension is helpful to the average citizen, especially to farmers.

So it is with Wade Thomason who has found a market for prospective Virginia barley farmers and offers advice.  He says “Most people associated barely with beer.  Not Virginia barley.”  The challenge for the biofuels market is, “How can we increase ethanol production without depleting corn?”  Barley is excellent for, “The cost of growing barely is significantly less than for corn.”  Barley grows in cold weather which is why it used for a cover crop which has already mentioned as a way to reduce soils erosion.  Further Dr. Thomason says barley improves compacted soils because their roots break find and open up fissures in the soil.

Hulless Barley is better than other varieties of barley because, as Dr. Thomason says, it has “Higher Starch, Higher Protein, Lower Ash, and Lower Fiber”.  There is increased interest in Virginia barley with recently newspaper articles entitled “Virginia barley could find its way to your gas tank”, “Virginia Farmers Hope Hull-less Barley Grows into a Moneymaker” appearing in “The Virginia-Pilot’ and “Farm Bureau News”.  Thus USDA is pushing barley with a Maryland Cover Crop program that pays a $10 to $15 per acre for growing hull-less barley.

The use of corn for ethanol has of course come under criticism because of recent food riots in Asia and because higher corn prices cause higher food prices because cattle and pork are fed corn in confined feeding operation to fatten them up.  Still barley is not without some cost disadvantage.  Dr. Thomason says,  “Wheat or hull-less plant would cost 5-10% more to build than a corn plant and 2 to 3 cents more per gallon in production.  Hulled barley plant would cost 20-30% more to build and adds about 5 cents more per gallon to the cost of production.”  With gas costing $4 per gallon, 5 cents does not seem like much of an issue.

Dr. Thomason wraps up saying that hulless barley is superior to hulled barley because it can produce 2.27 gallons of ethanol per bushel versus 1.64 gallons.  He also says, “Osage Bioenergy plans to open a multigrain ethanol facility near Hopewell.  It’s not done yet, but they are having a groundbreaking ceremony on Friday so it’s closer than anything else at this time.  They can use almost any grain, but they hope to run on mostly barley, both hulled and hulless.”

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Virginia Barley for Ethanol

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