Grazing

For the last eight years my wife, through her Small Farm Institute, has been involved with the North Central Ohio Grazing Conference on the last Thursday and Friday of January.  Last year and again this year, since I was no longer fully employed, she asked me to help out with sound system issues and computers/projectors for the Powerpoint presentations.  Between 500 and 600 people attend each of the two days of the conference.  They listen to speakers on a variety of topics related to grass fed dairy cows, grass based forages, and natural, low input family farming.  It is the largest dairy grazing conference in the country.

A couple of the speakers spoke for close to two hours and kept their audiences following every word.  It was pretty amazing.

Not being a dairy farmer, though, the wisdom I took from the two day conference was a little different than most of the other folks took home.  During the wrap up panel of all the speakers for the two days each speaker was asked to answer the question, “What was the biggest mistake you have made in farming?”  One panelist, after spinning his tale of woe, made the following observation:

“An education is expensive, no matter how you get it.”

January 2009

Without complaining, I would just say that I am glad that January of 2009 is finally drawing to a close.  Last January I was still cycling on the Holmes County Trail on a more or less regular basis.  This year has been… well, it has been winter.  My records show a low temperature of -14.4 ° F.  Yesterday we got ice and several more inches of snow.  It has been too cold when 19 ° F seems pleasantly warm.

I kept hoping for a January thaw.  That evidently happened last week when the snow on the lane started to melt but then refroze into slippery ice.  The antilock brakes on the car would operate all the way down the hill if you let them.

We have been feeding more and more bird seed to more and more birds as the winter progresses.  We’ve had titmice, wrens, nuthatches, and pine siskins.  Cardinals, blue jays, juncos, downy woodpeckers, house finches, and goldfinches.  We even had an eastern towhee, formerly called a rufous sided towhee, and a pileated woodpecker.  All of the plump, well fed, little songbirds have drawn the attention of the youngster  in the photograph who has been hanging around the back yard looking for a meal for himself.   This is a juvenile Sharp-shinned or Coopers hawk.  I think I saw one of his parents in the woods last week.

I’m still hoping for a couple days above freezing to at least thaw out the lane.  If we get any more snow, I’m going to have to get more aggressive in pushing it out of the way.

Remember though, I’m not complaining.

Contradictions

One of the things that I have learned about myself in a little more than one and a half years of blogging is that no sooner than I post something to the blog I do something, say something, or am something that directly contradicts it.

Less than two weeks ago I wrote a post about having no affinity for animals.  On Wednesday we had to euthanize our old dog Cocoa.  After the vet left I cried for a couple of minutes.  Why?  I have no affinity for animals, you know.

For many years Cocoa was always ready to go for a walk.  He would fetch a stick until the human got tired of the game.  I would wind up to throw the stick, hesitate, and look down at him.  Every bit of that dog was focused on readiness to retrieve, every muscle tense, eyes determined.  He loved it even more retrieving from the pond in warm weather.

He grew old.  He developed some kind of skin disorder.  Then cysts or some kind of growths on his skin.  Then he started gimping, his hind quarters got stiff.  Some days he could hardly walk, let alone run.  Every so often he would pick up a stick and carry it around.  If I would pick up a stick to throw he would sit, focused, ready to retrieve…he still wanted to play the old game but he would gimp over, pick up the stick, and walk it back to me.  One time was all he could muster.

We always kenneled him when we went to work but the last several months we let him run free.  On all but the coldest days, he would sit on the front porch, looking down the lane, waiting for us to come home.  Then he showed some interest in sleeping in the barn with the other animals.  Soon that was his home and all the other animals seemed to accommodate him, even the cats.

On Monday evening he couldn’t get up on his feet.  We brought him into the basement and put him on some old blankets.  When we would go down to check on him, he would raise his head and start wagging his tail.  If I scratched his ears he would lay his head in my hand and lower it to the floor.  By Tuesday evening that had passed.  If you touched him he would growl and snap at you.  He barked and howled intermittently all night long.

The next morning my wife called the vet.  He came about 10 o’clock.  I told him about the snapping behavior.  He leaned over and gently touched the dog; Cocoa growled and snapped at him.  “Ahhh, the poor thing doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore.  Putting him down now is the best thing we can do for him.”  I held Cocoa’s head while the vet gave him the lethal needle…

Cocoa was a good dog.

Choking Back the Tears

We don’t have a working television so I get my news from the radio or the occasional newspaper.  I listen to the news at 5 o’clock every morning when the alarm clock goes off; I usually lay in bed and listen to 30 or 40 minutes worth of news before I get up.  That’s usually it for the day.

Today was different.  Today was one of the truly great days in the history of the United States.  I tuned in to listen to part of the inaugural address and some of the commentary afterward.  I like Barrack Obama and I think he has the potential to be a great president.  But today as I listened, I was thinking about the past, thinking about the transition from the anger of my black literature class in 1968 to the hope I detected in a hotel desk clerk’s voice in 2008, thinking about what this day means to a big part of our population that never felt they were part of this country, and listening to the stories of people picked out of the crowds.  Hearing of the story of one of the Tuskegee Airmen, who many years ago was told he would never be able to stay at a Holiday Inn, being invited to “sit down in front” at the inauguration today.  I found myself choking back tears several times.

It was nice to choke back tears of joy for a change…

Merry Christmas Revisited

I posted previously about the seeming lack of verbal Christmas greetings during the holiday season.  The day after Christmas I got a “Merry Christmas” from an unexpected source.

We made a quick trip to my wife’s parents on the day after Christmas.  It is a three hour trip and I look forward to stopping for a break and a cup of coffee about half way.  I had a brand new Starbucks gift card, a gift from my son and daughter-in-law, which I was looking forward to using at the Starbucks near Youngstown.  By the time we got there they were pretty busy.  Someone had ordered some kind of fancy coffee drink that was evidently slowing the line so the barista had gone back the line taking orders and getting them started.  There was an older gentleman in a leather jacket in front of me.  I was at the end of the line.

I heard the door open behind me.  I turned to see another man, this one in a black leather jacket and a little younger maybe than the one in front of me, join the line right behind me.  The gentleman in front of me also turned…”Eh! How ya doin’?” 

“Eh! How ya doin’?”

“Wha d’ ya want?  I’m buyin’.”

I think, “Great!” but I know that one more cup of coffee won’t take that long.  I continue to wait for the line to move.

Suddenly, the gentleman in front of me reaches behind the counter picks up my coffee and hands it to me.  “Here.”  he says, “Ya don’ have to wait on me, I’ll buy.”

“You don’t have to do that.” I said.  “I’m fine.”

“Nah!” he said.  “I’m buyin’.  Merry Christmas!”

I took my coffee, thanked the gentleman, said “Merry Christmas!”, and left with a full cup of coffee and the full balance still on my gift card.

I hope he paid for it…

A Tale of Two Kitties

My wife grew up around animals; she grew up on a farm.  I grew up in a small town.  I have a lot of rural components in my personality, but an affinity for animals is not one of them.

We had several dogs, a parakeet and a rabbit as pets over the years as I was growing up.  I was ok with them but I never felt like I needed to have animals around me to make my life complete.  Even before we were married my wife had a dog, a couple of cats, and a few sheep.  When we got married, I got a wife plus the animals.  Over the years since then, while I haven’t developed an affinity for them, I have perhaps developed a little curiosity about animals.  I do not believe in anthropomorphism but it is easy to slip into it when you are around animals…see my comments below.

We have two cats, for instance, that live in the barn.  They came here as small kittens, house pets of a young woman going off to college.  They acclimated quickly to life on the farm, catching mice and, to my dismay, a few birds…they are cats, OK?; that is what they do.  Smudge, the white one, is typical cat.   You get the idea sometimes that he would like to be friendlier but that it is just too disgusting to watch Orion, the black one, making such a big fuss over the humans that come to the barn.  Smudge sits high up on a stack of hay bales when we feed the animals, Orion is down on the feed bin lid looking for some attention.  One or both periodically leave token mice or chipmunks in the entrance to the barn or in front of the garage.  Are they gifts or proof they are doing their job?

The most curious behavior belongs to Smudge.  He watches over the sheep.  When my wife moves them to new pasture, Smudge goes too.  He walks around out in the field with them or watches over them from his perch on top of a fence post.  One time, an old ewe got sick out on pasture.  Smudge stayed with her until we got her moved down to the barn, where she eventually died.

All of which brings up the question of the relationship between the various animals on the farm, both wild and domestic.  I have seen deer cautiously investigating the cats down at the pond.  I have seen Smudge being very curious about a mink.  We have raccoons and opossums, hawks and owls, and all manner of other wild animals here on the farm.  We have a dog, the sheep, the two cats, and some chickens.  Somehow they all coexist, usually peacefully, but sometimes not.  We have lost a couple of chickens in the night.  A couple of lambs have disappeared with out a trace; an earlier cat disappeared and was later found, dead.  We suspected that maybe an owl had killed the cat.

Anthropomorphizing aside, animals are another mystery of this world that will never really be understood and one that plays out mostly without human intervention or observation.

Automatic

Digital photography is so easy.  I used to shoot 35 mm and a little 120 black and white film.  I would shoot a few photographs at a time and finish the roll over a period of hours, maybe days, maybe longer depending on my mood and available time.  But then I would have to order fresh chemicals, mix them, get out all of the processing gear, and adjust the solution temperatures.  Then I would set up a card table in the bathroom and seal all of the doors and windows before I turned out the lights and removed the film from the cartridge and loaded it onto a spiral processing reel, all in complete darkness.  After a water pre-rinse, development, stop bath, fixing bath, and two gallons of agitated washing, and several hours of drying I was ready to print the films.   Printing is another story.  If you’ve done it you know it.  If you haven’t done it, you probably don’t want to hear about it.

Each print was a work of love for the medium.  Most of them were pretty mediocre but I still loved it.

All has changed since the arrival of my shiny new DSLR a couple of years ago.  I have printed a few photographs in the wet darkroom since I got it but not recently.  I wonder if I’ll ever mix up another quart of developer or fixer.

Now I can shoot five photographs, load them into the computer, crop them, straighten the horizon a little, adjust the color and contrast a little, and print them or upload them to the web in just a few minutes.  Color or Black and White!

The camera will adjust itself to give great pictures.  Auto exposure, auto focus, auto white balance, auto ISO, auto flash, auto bracketing.  But sometimes I want a little more control.  So I set a few things to manual.  I have been shooting some infrared…they seem to do better if I override the white balance and use incandescent.  When I shoot photographs of the night sky I use long totally manual exposure, manual focus and set the ISO to 800 or 1600.   The camera is quite powerful in its flexibility.

The problem comes when I return to ordinary, visible, daylight photography.  It should be automatic but I have changed so many settings and forgotten them.  I press the shutter release and hear the shutter open…but it doesn’t close.  I take the camera down from my eye.  Yep it is making the same 25 second exposure that I used last night…in the dark.  Shoot!  Later I take a series of photographs of my cycling companions riding down the foggy trail.  I better check to see if they are exposing properly…they are blue!  Drat…still shooting with incandescent white balance.  Twelve pictures later I move in for a close-up of a milkweed pod.  Why won’t it focus!@$%?  Because I left at least one of the two switches set to manual focus.  Finally after 20 photographs every thing is set back to automatic and the light is fading.

When I started in photography I forced myself to use manual everything and to think about all of the settings.  I shot a few rolls set to the wrong ISO but that was about it.

To much automatic will spoil a person…

Quadrantids 2009

Last year my wife and I “discovered” the Quadrantid meteor shower.  This year we were looking forward to it.  As the day drew nearer, I started watching the weather forecast…it looked as if it might be clear!  Just in case, I went out last evening to look for a few early samples of these quick little meteors.  I didn’t see any.

I was sleeping soundly when my wife shook me and asked if I was coming outside; she had already seen two.  I jumped out of bed and stumbled around in the dark looking for my outdoor clothing.  The time was 3:58 am.

It was cold outside, although not as cold as last year.  The sky was clear overhead and to the south but obscured to the northeast by a swath of clouds illuminated by the lights of Mt. Hope, Massillon, and Canton.  My wife was lying on the sidewalk wrapped in a wool comforter.  She recited the numbers and descriptions of the meteors she had seen.  I stood, wishing I had thought about a chair last night.  I saw a few meteors but not the numbers that I recalled from last year.

My wife got cold and decided to call it quits.  She left me the comforter…a welcome gift by this time.  I stayed out a little while and saw another meteor or two.  Finally I went inside too.  But I didn’t go back to bed.  I took a nap on the couch until around 6:00 am.  It was still dark outside…and cold, but the cloudiness in the northeast had mostly disappeared.  I saw a nice meteor almost immediately.  Then another.  There were a lot more now, more like I remembered from last year.  I don’t know if this is the “peakiness” that Dave referred to in his comment last year, a clearer sky, or maybe just my imagination but it seems like there are more meteors now than just two hours earlier.  My wife came to the door and then joined me outside after hearing my report.  We saw a couple with persistent blue-green trains and lots of shorter meteors all over the sky, yet all seeming to come from the same radiant directly overhead.

We like meteors…

Human Spirit

After I wrote my post on the government bailout of the banking system compared to the entire NASA budget for 50 years over at Murmurs from the Earth…Whispers from the Sky, I started thinking about the motivation behind the two expenditures.

I don’t know what motivates big business and big investment bankers; I suspect maybe it is not what motivates the small businessmen and small town bankers that I know.  I am thinking the big guys are driven by greed, power, and influence.  The small town people are too but on a smaller scale.  But the small town folks also know their employees and the people with whom they do business and most of them take pride in helping to build a strong local community.  I don’t have that same feeling about the big outfits that are getting the big money.  I think it is just greed, power, and influence and it is on a grand scale.

What drives an organization like NASA?  I am sure that there is some greed, power, and influence there too.  But I suspect something more.  Maybe it is a sense of pushing the envelope, of exploring the limits of human ingenuity and courage, of curiosity and creativity.  Of going “where no man has gone before”.  It is what drove human beings over the land bridge between Russia and Alaska and down to the southern most tip of South America.  It is what drove the Vikings to North America and the southern Europeans to America centuries later.  It is the striving of the human spirit and it seems a purer and a higher ideal than the mere pursuit of money and influence.

We need bankers and business men and women to move the economy along but there is more to human existence than business.  We need artists, musicians, engineers, and scientists to create and explore new ideas and new ways to express the higher ideals of the human spirit. 

And to encourage us all in those pursuits…