Embrace Manure

"So...what do you do in the Winter?"

We get this question a lot once the snow flies.

Pretty much we farmers just sit around and think about sh*@.

No,really. We do.

Here are a few gems from Gene Logsdon's recent (irreverently titled) book on the subject of manure:

*"Generally speaking, over half of the nitrogen and potassium in manure is in the urine." (Hence the need for bedding. Good for the animals, and good for the fields, soaking up and holding all that excellent nutrient content.)

*Manure contains all kinds of goodies: starch, celllulose, lignin,fat, proteins, carbohydrates of various kinds, minerals, and vestiges of the digestive juices that began the process of decompostition in the animals; intestines."

*"In Japan, Korea, and China manure (in the early 1900s) was treated like a precious gem because it was a precious gem. Every scrap of animal waste, human waste, and plant residue was scrupulously collected and reapplied to the land. So precious was manure that Chinese farmers stored it in burglarproof containers. The polite thing to do after enjoying a meal at a friends' house was to go to the bathroom before you departed."

*"What we humans must always keep in mind as we go about making sure there is enough food to go around is that this body of material we call manure, or compost, is niether a factory machine noer a barren waste, but a lovely, intertwinng jungle flock of living things to be fed and managed lovingly, much like we manage the other livestock on our farms. Our most important livestock, in fact, are invisible to the naked eye."

We've said it before, but it bears repeating: Farming is in essence the art of managing manure.

We are a poo-diddled culture. The very mention of the stuff brings distasteful expressions and repulsion. But if we are serious about sustainable agriculture, and small local farms, we've got to get serious about manure. One of the tragedies of the concentrated animal feeding operations is that the waste from those poor animals is just that: waste. It is being put to no good use in our farmland, nor can it given the condition of the animals generating it. Our local stables are sitting on piles of literal pay-dirt. For a field in regular cultivation Logsdon writes that experts agree 10 tons of manure will fertilize an acre. (Eliot Coleman advises as much as 2-3 times more for vegetable growing.) This application will not require any other fertilizers. One horse can produce near as much in one year! Joel Salatin in Virginia and Anne and Eric Nordell of Trout Run, PA have both demonstrated on their farms the beautiful work that hogs can do, in turning soiled bedding and manure and "finishing" it, by rooting around in it, and tossing it in the air as they search for hidden pockets of corn. Animals are the unpaid, unsung laborers on the farm, and it is never-endingly fascinating how they can be partners in rewarding and sucessful agricultural enterprises.

The glory of the small farm is precisely that it is small. It can become a small closed circle of fertility, regenerating itself each season through itself...a viable model of sustainability...if we include the animals. If we embrace manure.

*Many thanks to all you generous Stillwater and White Bear Lake donors of Fall leaves for our winter bedding/composting. The laying hens, goats, and sheep are all cozy for the Winter, and hard at work creating the perfect compost for the veggie acreage and hay fields next year!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now that our suppers have consisted mostly of what we have harvested from the fields...mashed and roasted and pan-fried potatoes, green beans drizzled with butter and flecked with pepper, chickens roasted whole with bits of sage and pools of gravy, sausages and seared onions on beds of our September sauerkraut, our 3 year old has taken to leaping up to the table and exclaiming "what a feast! what a feast!" as she rubs her little hands together. Her appreciation always seems to tap hidden springs of gratefulness in me. It is what we shall be murmuring to ourselves Thursday as we sit down to heavy laden tables for the big feast of Thanksgiving.
I love how thanksgiving brings out the domestic artist in all of us, from the most modern of career women to the crankiest of old men...aprons that have hung useless on hooks in foyers, in kitchen cupboards, in closets, are donned with purpose and concentration. We tackle turkeys and gravies, the glorious fruits of the earth, the sweet potatoes, beans, frozen sweet corn, and squash...Nowadays in America this November celebration is a thanksgiving for all the gifts of our present, and for all the glories of our culinary and historical past. The pies, the homemade rolls, the roasting fowl, the cider toasts...the slow savoring of good company and good food, as the scents and full-bellied sighs rise to heaven on wings of gratitude.

Little Flower Farm Chevre Dip

*4-6 oz fresh chevre
*1.5 Cups Sour Cream
*1 clove garlic, minced

*sprinklings of your favorite herbs dried or fresh

*dash of hot sauce

Mix together. Wow your Thanksgiving guests with it spread on crackers...Be grateful for goats.

"Food is the language ritual speaks when it wants to make itself understood"

-Nigella Lawson

Come to a CSA INFO MEETING this Sunday!

For those of you who live in the Bloomington/MPLS area,
You are cordially invited to an evening's Chat about Little Flower Farm and our upcoming 2012 Season.

Sunday, November 20th at 6:30 pm.

Come sample our chevre and our pastured pork!

We will be giving a presentation about our CSA program and answering any questions about our farming practices, meat and veggie shares, and the upcoming growing season. Bring your whole family!

Please email Maureen for directions at: maureenanngray@gmail.com

Farming and Philippe Petit

The same man who bridged the gap between the two towers of the world trade center wire dancing on a cable 3/4 inch thick built a barn in the catskills using only 16th century tools to house his practice equipment and juggling hoops. I thought of him recently, as I walked the tow hitch between the manure laden trailer and our trusty '92 Dodge, my feet gripping the steel through the soles of my caked wellies in a mock tight rope walking routine.

No doubt he would certainly approve of the day's doings...he is a self proclaimed "conquistador of the useless" which is a scandalous way of talking about doing things for their own sake rather than capital or personal gain...facilitating balance, my fingertips traced semicircles in the October sky...my thoughts gift wrapped in irony. We were hell bent on the earthbound task of covering an acre of land with composted horse manure while heaven hung with thoughts of Philippe Petit, Man of the Air, High-wire artist, egoist, atheist, and artist. A man who sees bell towers, skyscrapers, mountain tops and marvels at and masters the space between them, while clinging to a cable, a wire, a rope with toes and sole.

Farming needs more Philippe Petit.

As Winter approaches, and Mother Nature flirts with first snows...the farmer is either ready or not. He has either put up and put away enough to last him till Spring...or he has not...and in either case his soil still needs him. Back and Forth across the tow hitch from trailer to truck bed forking out manure onto next year's veggie acreage I am conscious of the seeming insanity of it...and at the same time dead certain of its necessity. There was a time when we would have spent days at the kitchen table (you know, the proverbial one that the politicians are always talking about, where you do your worrying...) trying to figure out a way to get our hands on a bonafide labor saving manure spreader...but now we've come so far into this affair with the needs of our soil...we tend to just grab whatever's to hand and heave ho. It is a tightrope walk; fulfilling Fall farm needs of fencing and soil amendments while cash poor and winter squash rich. The lull in the frantic pace of the CSA season gives the mind time to wander and dip its proverbial toes in the tempting "solution" of off-farm careers with their salaried cushions of comfort.

" I keep attacking pyramids. Each time finding the way blocked by a portal called Mediocrity. Jealousy. Intrigue. compromise being the key. I preffered to lockpick them, climp around them. Dynamite them. Not necessarily in that order."

Philippe Petit, On the High Wire

But the needs of the farm now for the fruit of the farm later require one last push of solid devoted effort.

What commerce do a wire walker and a farmer, firmly planted on the sod have with one another you ask? The organic farming movement might do well to adopt his credo (for the same can be said of a truly sustainable agricultural endeavor:)

“The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. / That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.”

Subsitute "land" for "sky" and you have it. I thought of that quote one day when a visiting friend stood aghast at the thousands of little bak choi and broccoli transplants we were setting out last Spring. "How ever do you get all this done?" Thinking to myself that her very arrival was going to make it morepleasant and more possible that day, I thought of the long path to perfection being horizontal...accomplished eventually by a simple series of one foot in front of the other...plodding away towards something finished, and whole, and occaisonally, the stuff of good legendary lore.

"What counts is this: to stay straight and stubborn in your madness."

10 years ago my only ambition in life was to join the circus. I was enthralled by the idea of making a career out of something which was exists for no other purpose than to delight, to instill wonder, and to show forth for all to see the marvelous beautiful things the human being can do. It seemed only natural then, that eventually I would become a land locked farmer. Feet firmly planted in the pig pasture, the chicken coop, and the manure pile. Scratching out our mad wonderings in rows of veggies and fields of grass. I recognize a brother in the juggler, the mime, the wire walker. He practices the art of ordered chaos. He is disciplined in his reception of the indifference or arrogance of his neighbors, delights in the wonder of his customers, he marries responsibility to wild dreaming and walks a thin cable stretched taught between poverty and compromise.

"You must not fall. When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. you must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward. You must win. The wire trembles. The tendency is to want to calm it by force. In fact, you must move with grace and suppleness to avoid disturbing the song of the cable."

There are lots of (great) discussions going on here:
http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-myth-of-the-self-made-yeoman/about our current economic and agricultural situation here in the U.S. and in the world at large...
and here:
http://www.distributistreview.com/ibutistreview.com
about an alternative solution to the capitalism, socialism, and communism...

But one of the most satisfying things I've read lately attempting to get at some solution for our current agricultural crisis is here:
http://portraitofafarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/sisters-oregon-lynn-miller-editor-small.html

Towards the end of the interview, Lynn Miller takes off on a seeming tangent, drawing out a story of a memory he had as a child standing watch over a buried pig, roasting beneath the soil, a right of passage as he braves the "terrors of the night" and heckling miscreants....in the end, he concludes, Supporting boutique agriculture is not the long-term solution. Reading a whole, real, book front to back is. In other words: there is no agriculture without true culture and vise versa

I would add to this, that delight in things for their own sake spurs responsible stewardship of the land. A fire to warm yourself by, and fed with wood from a managed woodlot, a landscape rimmed with windbreaks, patchworked with rotated crops, soil struggled over, with a relentless appreciation for the micro world that is dirt...these things spring from the playful heart that delights in things as they are, dreams of them as they can be, and fights for them as they should be...

Which is why I walk my tow hitch tightrope with a pitchfork in my hands and Philippe Petit in my head...

"Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. "

Grass Poetry

Wondering why in this country we so heavily subsidize corn and soybeans...when we could be putting our money into this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mtvKzB8gbc&feature=related

What 8 year old wouldn't aspire to the adventure of farming if we did it this way?

Hallows Eve

30 years ago a couple of harrows were left leaning against the old Elm that grows on the little knoll where the quonset barn stands. They were set there by the man who as a boy grew up on this farm, who hauled potatoes down stairs to store in the cellar, who wouldn't stay inside to learn the organ as his Mother wished because he was out with his Father planting the towering stands of Swedish Black Forest and Red pine that flank the farmland to the Northwest and the South. They were set there half as if to be near at hand for another go around the field some Spring and half as a symbolic ornament of a rich and storied past. Over the years the Elm grew straighter, taller...but where the harrow leaned into it's flanks it widened and engulfed the iron as if it had opened a wide swallowing mouth and began to devour it whole...but finding the metal tough and perhaps too lightly salted, sits with it half eaten with a kind of grimace.

I had been looking for a harrow...and when I spied this one through the overgrowth I made towards it with the glee of a long at sea sailor making for hidden treasure. I rebuked the tree for its inconsiderate gluttony when I found the implement wedged fast. Halted as I was in my desire for field cultivation by my respect for the life of the Old Elm, I put away thoughts of ax and saw and stood marveling at the way life has of swallowing whole the past...

We have begun gathering up old horse-drawn field equipment: walking plows, cultivators, a potato plow...unearthing old ruins of past agriculture from back yards and overgrown pastures...our aim is to turn Little Flower Farm into a Draft-Powered Farm...our good faith effort for a smaller ecological footprint, and fossil-fuel-less farming. As I stood there chagrinned at the tree-gobbled harrow it occurred to me that the image I was beholding might have less to do with a chewing of the past...than with a preserving of it. Here this implement was: held fast. I was looking at an image of King Arthur's sword in the stone if ever there was one! A farm that has been labored over, cultivated, sworn at...a farm like that stays a farm, if even dormant...waiting for a new flock to bring back neglected pasturelands, and new blood to wed itself to the increasing of the fertility of the soil. I am amazed at what woody weeds and overgrown pasture becomes beneath the browsing noses of 9 sheep. The hill that sweeps up to the cozy old farmhouse has shed its fuzzy growth of invasive buckthorn and bends and rolls gracefully as the goats meander over it in contented and adventurous grazing. And all this is happening now! Now when all the rims of woods are a riot with color and beauty...now when the photographer grows frenzied and frantic to capture on film what he experiences as he stands on the high hill of the sheep pasture and looks down on the field....impossible to achieve. Next Spring that field will grow green with new grass and clover. A quilt of CSA veggies will be painstakingly and meticulously worked at every April day onward....but for now the plain contours of the land and the final hurrah of all the leaves of all the trees drive far from the heart desire for green things....only reveling in the dying of the year.

Halloween's time honored (and child-worshiped) custom of trick or treating harkens back to an Old English tradition of begging "soul cakes" at neighbors' doors...chanting and promising prayers for the departed of the family in return for the sweets...
"soul, soul, an apple or two,
if you haven't got an apple, a pear will do,
one for Peter, two for Paul
and three for the Man who made us all"

As all the trees drop their leaves...and all the fields are being put to bed for their well earned rests...it is hard not to remember all the dead...and the past lives of all the animals and plants and people that held their sway and had their day on this farm...

I went begging for a harrow of an old Elm today. I found myself promising to remember the dead...long after the last cow here was milked, the last post pounded, the last ground tilled...that harrow was set to rest, put to wait in the waiting arms of tree-bark....until the time when someone would bend near, up on the knoll, just past the old rusting Oliver tractor, and whisper a promise to trade life for life:

soul, soul, a harrow or two,
if you haven't got a harrow, a seed will do,

one for the farmer who went before, two for the farmer now,

and three for the families who in Summer will eat the fruit of the old drawn plow.

Gone West

An update: One week before we began our journey to Marine on St. Croix, and our new farm, we slaughtered our 100 broiler chickens in the morning mist. All animals look sleek and epic, as if accompanied by their own motion picture soundtrack when photographed in the gloaming.

Stretching necks, beheading, scalding, plucking and eviscerating are not often poetic tasks...but in the morning, with little between you and pastured chicken dinner besides a little perseverance and the sublime quiet, it becomes meditative.

On Friday we began to take down all of our fence panels. For us, fencing is our farm. It's our life savings. It means managed grassland, pastured meat, milk, and cheese. It is everything. So there was no question in our minds that we would baffle the neighbors and proceed to take down every last t-post and panel that we had erected only months before, and load them into the U-haul. Shane and I were about 1/3 of the way through when I began to doubt my matter, so to speak. Pastor Mark from down the road suddenly appeared before me and I let out a cry of unbridled relief. "Are you okay?" He asked, startled by my unrestrained emotion, "Yes!" I replied, gesturing to the hundreds of feet of fencing, " it's just that I've discovered that I'm not God after all!"

With his help every last panel and post was resting sedately in the moving truck by nightfall.

Sunday night we stuffed all our sheep and goats and chickens and kittens into a trailer and prepared for an early morning start...
In the hours before our departure it had begun to rain steadily. The yard and gullies were awash in rainwater at 3:30 in the morning when we slowly rolled out of the driveway and yard. I watched and honked in dismay as the caravan drove off in the darkness and I was left stuck in the mud, my front tires half covered in slosh. I stood outside in the pouring rain and tried to figure out what a decent farm wife was to do in a situation such as this. In past experiences it always seemed that the kitchen always held the answer to any tragedy...so I reached back into the car and pulled out one of my solid bamboo cutting boards to wedge underneath the wheels...to no avail. Mud spattered and desperate, lacking only widowhood, starvation, and a sick baby in my arms, I proceeded to pound at neighbors' doors for help....finally the valiant and gallant Mr. Bailey and kind Mrs came to my rescue and managed to get me out of the mire....and we were off.....

Our next adventure came at breakfast time. For the first time in our lives we stopped at an Arby's. We ordered chicken sandwiches to give us new vigour for Chicago and the journey ahead....Perhaps there is something to all that gibberish you hear talk of about "balance in the Universe" because one of our laying hens escaped from the trailer, vented for airflow, and proceed to squawk madly and run about the parking lot...apparently when organic pasture farmers go in for fast food chicken...somewhere, somehow, a Free-Range laying hen wages all out protest....we nearly lost her because we could hardly run we were so doubled over in laughter. I was literally chasing a chicken around an Arby's parking lot with a half-eaten chicken sandwich in my hand....it seemed too absurd to be happening...and yet there we were. Eventually we cornered her as she made last desperate and futile attempts to pass through the glass door and into Arby's...presumably to state her outrage...

Touch and go traffic in Chicago hours later provided ample entertainment to our fellow commuters....as a few more of the hens escaped through the vented door and commenced with a balancing act on the rear fender...the sign language for chickens coming out your back end is universal. I watched driver after driver zoom up alongside Shane and frantically pantomime "Hey there! birds back there! Coming out of your trailer, yo!"

Eventually we made it to Marine on St. Croix, and our new farm, with the big red barns, and where the Little Flower Farm menagerie experience woods and fields and pastures to their hearts' content...

Last week was spent putting up hundreds and hundreds of feet of that fencing...a new paddock for the goats, with woods and pasture, and all the buckthorn they can eat...and a huge space for the icelandic sheep, and a hay field. Yesterday we made our first batch of fresh chevre since the move. Today two dump truck loads of composted manure were delivered to the site of next year's CSA veggie field, and we will be preparing the fields in a few weeks. Frost sowings of clover and grasses in the pastures are in the works, and a historic landmark is once again beginning to breathe with new life.
I marvel at a landscape so beautiful largely because of the efforts of the farmer who built this farm before us... years ago in the 30s and 40s. His son planted the pines that tower above us, sway and rush in the wind, and create such a visually stunning landscape...

We hope to also change the face of this land...with responsible and loving management and cultivation. I have already seen our farm in the contours of these 25 acres, and I am watching it take shape before me, smoothly becoming what we envisioned when we first laid eyes upon it...every October, and especially this one, brings such wells of gratitude within the heart. And Gratitude is what grows things.