Swimming Pigs

Starting at about 6:15 yesterday evening, and ending about thirty or forty minutes later, we had torrential rain, and when I say torrential, I mean torrential. There was a torrent running down every inch of the slightest slopes and pools in every depression or hole. About twenty minutes into it, I realized that it was bad enough that the pig shelters would be flooded. So, after having changed my wet clothes for the third time already, I put on another dry pair of pants and shirt, slipped on my rain gear and knee boots and headed back out into the rain.

I stopped at the barn and loaded four bales of hay onto the forks of the tractor. I checked the middle-sized pigs first. Half of them were laying in wet, half of them were standing in an inch or more of water in their shelter. I looked around the paddock for a dryer spot to move the shelter to, but there wasn’t one. There were rivers running through the paddock in some places. My only option was to spread out two bales of hay in their shelter, which I hoped would be enough to keep them dry. As soon as I was finished spreading the hay, the pigs all went running back into the shelter. I realized just how hard it was raining when I stepped out of the shelter. It was like I had been whacked with a board. It just slammed right into me. I put my head down and trudged over to the tractor.

I checked the big pigs next. As I passed through the hedge row, I turned onto the pig field road. If I were driving a car and not a tractor, and even if the road were paved, I would have had to turn back. The water was probably eight inches deep in some spots, and rushing past me. There was about four inches of water in the big pig’s shelter, much too much to manage with a little bit of hay. I decided that I would need to move the shelter, but I hadn’t brought the chain with me, so I would have to come back.

On my way to check on the little pigs, I had to cross a narrow stream, over a foot and a half diameter culvert. The water had overwhelmed the culvert and jumped the stream banks. If I hadn’t known the road so well and where the edges of the culvert were, I might have ended up off the road with a wheel buried in the stream. As I crossed, it looked to me that the water was more than a third up the back wheels of the tractor. I could see the water through the holes in the floor of the steel operators platform, rushing past just a few inches beneath it.

My brother Pete and I had moved the pigs to a new section of the field earlier in the day, a bit higher up the hill, so the flooding in the shelter wasn’t as bad as it would have been. The spot where they had been was pretty well under water. As it was, the water had seeped into the shelter in the new spot, but it wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of wet spots, but since the pigs are still so small there is still a lot of space inside the shelter for them. Nevertheless, I didn’t know for how long it would continue to rain, and I did not want the pigs to get chilled, so I spread out two bales of hay in the shelter, concentrating it along the length of the driest side.

Mercifully, as I was finishing bedding down the little pigs’ shelter, the rain stopped, just like that, literally as if someone had turned off the tap. One second a torrential down pour, the next, nothing. When a rain like that stops just like that you realize just how incredibly overwhelming it had been. I hadn’t realized it, but while it was raining there had been a constant great roar that drowned (literally) everything else out. In its place, an eerie silence and utter stillness, broken only by the quiet grunts of the little pigs settling into their bedding. Within moments, however, the birds started to chirp, slowly inching back out from deep in the crooks of the tree boughs into the open air. I looked around and listened and took it in for a second, but then I got back to work because the big pigs were still under water.

As I drove from the little pigs’ field back to the barn, it started to spit a bit, but the rain had finished. The middle pigs were out, playing and rooting around in the wet ground. I stopped and checked their shelter. The bedding was still reasonably dry in most places, but I was worried that the moisture would wick up through the hay over night, so I decided to add one more bale of hay. Back at the barn,  I loaded three more bales of hay onto the forks and grabbed the chain.

I distracted the big pigs by putting some food in their trough and then drove the tractor into the paddock and hooked up to the shelter. I had scouted the paddock after I filled the trough and there weren’t any really dry spots, but I did find one spot that would do. I dragged the shelter slowly into place and then unhooked the tractor and then spread two bales of hay inside the shelter. By the time I was finished, the pigs had finished their food, so I had to put some more in the trough so that I could get the tractor out of the paddock.

On my way back to the barn, I stopped and spread the last bale of hay in the middle pigs’ shelter, and then finally parked the tractor at the barn and walked up to the house where I announced that I would most definitely not be cooking dinner. Pete, Jen, and I went down to Middleburgh to Hubie’s, where I nodded in and out of sleep between bites.

 

Unnatural

No matter how hard we try, the reality of any farm is that it is an “unnatural” system. Through breeding, forage selection, grazing management, fencing, reproduction and growth goals, necessary survival rates, and a whole host of other human manipulations the gap between natural animals and unnatural farm animals is quite large.

Yesterday I wrote about saving a lamb who was unable to get a drink from its mother. The reason it was unable to get a drink was because the ewe makes so much milk that her udder was so full that it was too low to the ground, the teats were pointing straight down, and the teats were so engorged that they were too fat and too firm for the lamb to get his mouth comfortably around on the rare occasion that he was able to find the end of a teat. Had I not been there to intervene, it is likely that the lamb would have starved, although it is possible that he might have worked it out.

It seems, therefore, that the farmer was the solution, the savior. If, however, we look a step or two back, we see that the farmer was in fact the source of the trouble. Production minded farmers are constantly breeding their sheep up to produce more milk, while at the same time they are generally also breeding their sheep up to be more prolific, shooting for an average lambing rate of about 200% (two lambs per ewe), which would require a significant percentage of ewes to have triplets, while a good number will also have singles. The more milk, the more lambs that can be fed. The more milk, the faster and bigger the lambs will grow. The goal is to strike a balance between high milk production, high prolificacy, and high growth rates and potential. Within this balance, however, much will be out of balance, and problems will arise. Milky ewes will make too much milk, requiring an intervention. Prolific ewes will have too many lambs, requiring an intervention (bottle feeding). Etc. In other words, in creating unnatural critters that live in unnatural environments, we create problems for ourselves.

Nature kills its problems and nothing notices. On an unnatural farm, every death constitutes a substantial financial loss. It takes anywhere from two to five (depending on one’s per lamb profit) lambs from other ewes to pay the cost of a single ewe that doesn’t have or loses her lamb or lambs in any given year. In nature, a sick animal wanders away and dies, and nothing notices but the buzzards and flies. On an unnatural farm, there is a mad scramble to keep animals alive, if only to kill them later.

Any horse person has heard the non-horse person argument about bringing the horses in out of the rain or the cold, “It’s a horse! Just leave it outside.” The idea is that horses are big natural critters with thick fur coats that could get along just fine outside. The reality is, however, that domesticated horses are not natural critters and farms are not natural places. First, many performance horse breeds, because they have been bred up to perform at the levels they do, have high energy needs and cannot spare very much energy for warmth. Second, farm landscapes often do not permit shelter from the wind or rain or snow. On my farm, our pastures are wide open and are pitched directly into the prevailing wind, which blows pretty steadily all winter long at ten to twenty miles per hour. Also, our pastures are fenced. The movement of the horses is unnaturally limited. A natural horse in a natural environment in dangerous weather would walk until it found a sheltered spot. And, third, natural horses in natural environments that don’t find shelter in dangerous weather die. Just because the species deer still exists in spring doesn’t mean that a substantial number, and perhaps even a substantial percentage in a particularly hard winter, didn’t die. They did die. The goal on an unnatural farm is zero percent death loss due to environmental conditions, an unnatural goal.

If you ask them, you will find that most pasture-based farmers attempt to recreate as much as possible natural (environmental) conditions for their animals. They fall, however, far far short. Nature is inimical to farming. The true goal of every farmer is at the very least to mitigate nature; it is most often, even on the pasture based farm of a natural minded farmer, to overcome nature, to dominate nature, to control nature. Nature is a false aspiration. I am always at every instant on the farm at odds with it, even when I feel closest to it.

 

Racing the Rain That Never Came

Yesterday I felt like a “real” farmer. We haven’t gotten any real rain in weeks, and finally, rain was coming yesterday, for sure. We would have a few good showers late in the afternoon and then the next day (today), it would rain all day. My hog pasture mix arrived the other day, so if I was going to sow it, yesterday was the day. The rain would water the seeds in and get them interested in germinating, and if I didn’t get the field planted before the rain I would have to wait at least another three days, maybe even a week or more depending on how much rain we got and what the weather was like in the days following.

The rain wasn’t going to arrive until mid-to late afternoon, but I still had a lot of work to do in the field. I still needed to drag up half of it with the s-tine cultivator and then run over it again with the discs. I also needed to run to Cobleskill to pick up a few bags of oats to mix into the pasture mix. I was going to have to race the rain.

As things usually go, I wasn’t ready to start working in the field until noon, but at that point, I realized that I likely wouldn’t be back inside until dusk, so I had a quick lunch. After lunch I fed and/or checked on the animals and then headed over to the field on the tractor.

A couple of hours later, I had dragged up the field with the s-tine cultivator and run over it once more with the discs. The west end of the field was in good shape with a reasonably fine seed bed. The east end, however, which is up near the woods was still pretty chunky and could have used another pass with the discs, but I was worried about running out of time.

A while back, my neighbor purchased a tow-behind spin spreader, and I had asked earlier in the day if I could use it, and he said yes, so after I was finished preparing the field, I drove over to his place, stopping on the way to put Monk the Dog inside my house. When I got to my neighbor’s, I was surprised to discover that the spreader was for a lawn tractor. Feeling like I was running out of time, I was undettered. We just tied the spreader to the tractor draw bar with baling twine and off I went.

While driving back to the field, I realized that the temperature had dropped a few degrees. I looked down the valley toward where the rain would be coming from, but the sky was just a dull grey. The easiest thing for me to have done would have been to just stop in the house and check the radar on-line, but I was kind of on a roll, and when I had checked the radar at lunch, the rain was definitely on the way.

Once back in the field, I mixed the pasture mix with the oats at the proper ratio and poured it into the seeder. Then, satisfied that all was well, I started off. Once moving, I reached down for the end of the baling twine that I had strung from the seeder and looped around the three point hitch lever and pulled it, which pulled the handle on the seeder forward, opening the seeder hopper to the width I had set it at for what I hoped would be the proper spreading rate. That little lawn seeder, even though it was a bigger model that can hold up to 200 pounds of seed just bounced all over the place, and the handle that controlled the seed hopper opening was loose, so it kept sliding back to the closed position with every bump. I had to hold the rope to keep the hopper open.

After about two hundred feet, the baling twine that was holding the seeder to the tractor broke. The seeder nosed down to the ground behind me, and as I set the parking brake and hopped off the tractor, seed just kept pouring out of it onto the ground because the hopper slide handle was in the open position.  just pushed the handle back to close the hopper and then picked up and threw the pile of seeds around. I retied the spreader to the tractor and started up again. After about fifty feet, it happened again, and that was that. I only had two acres to do. I wasn’t going to screw around with that stupid spreader anymore. What I really needed was a three-point hitch mounted spin spreader, but, again, with only two acres to do, neither buying nor renting such a thing made any sense.

I left the silly spreader sitting in the field and roared off on my tractor to my garage to pick up my hand-cranked spreader that you sling over your shoulder. It appeared I was in for a bit of a walk. I was getting nervous because with me broadcasting the seed on foot, I still had a couple of hours of work. After I broadcast the seed, I needed to run over the whole field with the drag to bury and pack down the seed a bit.

I roared back to the field, noting that the temperature felt a few degrees colder, but the sky still hadn’t changed. I parked the tractor along the hedgerow and walked over to the spreader with the hand-cranked seeder slung over my shoulder. I used a coffee can to scoop the seeds into the seeder. Completely full, it held only about twenty pounds. Oats are bulky.  I am always nervous about overspreading the seed. You can always go over the ground twice. If you overspread and run out, however, you’re screwed, so I usually set the discharge rate conservatively. As it turns out, I had it set at exactly half the rate that it should have been. I would need to go over the field twice. I wasn’t annoyed, however, because if I had set the spreader at the proper rate, I would have had only enough seed in the spreader for one length of the field, which would have meant that I would have needed to go over the field twice anyway, except one whole length would have been walking back to with an empty spreader to get more seed. At half the proper rate I had enough seed for a whole round trip. The distance might be the same, but walking with seed spinning out of the spreader the whole time is much more satisfying than walking with the seeder empty.

Twelve round trips later, I was finished. A nice 3.2 mile walk.

I still had to drag the field, but at least I was finished walking! Or, so I thought. All day, every time I had seen them in my travels here and there, the sheep were kind of just lounging around, when they should have been grazing. I chalked most of it up to coincidence — they will graze and then sit and chew their cud. However, seeing them just sitting around every time that I had seen them was too often to be coincidence. So, after spreading the seed I drove the tractor back over to my place and hooked up the drag, but before going back over to drag the field, I walked out to the sheep pasture (another half mile, round trip!). Sure enough, the grass was getting low. I had figured they would get one more day out of the paddock, but I figured wrong.

While standing on rubbery legs, I debated for a minute or two just leaving them in that paddock until the morning, but, it was only 5:30pm. There were still three hours of daylight left. Lambs don’t grow and ewes don’t make a whole lot of milk when they are just lazing about, so I set to work moving the sheep into a new paddock. As I set up the corral, which is a single section of electronet, the whole flock of sheep stood in the corner. The ewes were bawling at me. Once I had the corral set up, I opened the old paddock and the whole flock barreled into the corral and started chowing down on the new grass. Over the next twenty minutes or so, I moved the four sections of electronet that had formed the old paddock to the new one. The corral, which had been just outside the old paddock was now enclosed inside the new paddock. Once the netting of the new paddock was all set up, I took down the corral, giving the sheep access to the whole paddock. Even though the grass in the corral was just as fresh and new as the grass in the rest of the paddock, as soon as the sheep saw me starting to take down the corral, they rushed over the opening and sprinted en masse into the new paddock. I put some water in the new paddock, hooked the paddock fence up to the electrified perimeter fence, checked the charge on the paddock fence with a blade of grass (starting to feel a shock at four inches from the fence is about 5000 volts, starting to feel it about one inch from the fence is about 2000 volts). Satisifed, I left the sheep to go finish planting the field.

On my way to the tractor, I stopped at the house to get Monk. As I crossed the hedgerow and turned into the field, I saw that the turkeys had already discovered the seed. There was a group of five of them down at the east end near the woods happily scratching away. As soon as they saw me, even though I was over 800 feet away, they scurried into the woods. I have seen as many as twenty-five turkeys in that field. That many turkeys might eat half the oats and all of the field peas I sowed before they even have  a chance to germinate.

I had beaten the rain, but it was getting late, so I dragged the field in third gear, while I bounced all over, and was finished in about half an hour.

On my way home, I fed the two groups of pigs and the Icelandics, who are still behind the barn.

Once back inside, I emptied the dishwasher, washed the pots and pans from the night before, and made dinner. Jennifer got home, we ate, and I went to sleep.

This morning I woke up to discover that the rain had never come, and even though it was predicted that it would rain all day today, it might not even shower. It looks like the band of rain tracked further east and less north than they expected. Those turkeys are going to have a feast while those seeds just sit there waiting to germinate. By the time we get some rain, there might be no seeds left.