Piles, Pasture, and What the Farm Looks Like

I've thought a little about what to write next. It feels rather self-indulgent writing about my work everyday on the farm and there's no way I'd be able to report ever'thing that happens. I'd like to be able to frame this in a perspective that is unique like a news story, but I can't help but fall a little short determining what's even newsworthy. I'd like to write about what I do everyday but there are times when I can't remember that, or I'm just too darn tired to think about enjoying writing what I just done did, y'know?

What does the farm look like?

That seems like an intriguing question a lot of y'all might have and it may lead to an interesting answer.


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"The farm is seventeen acres and eleven are devoted to pasture" answered my boss, Dan, when I relayed a question my roommate had asked me regarding the size of the farm. The other six acres are devoted to buildings (house, shop, old barn, barn, greenhouse barn, office), a driveway, lawn, creek, and piles of junk. The farm is little more than a place where junk piles are easily accessed use in repairs, maintenance, or upkeep of various farm implements.



There is the fence-post pile, the scrapwood pile, and the sawdust pile (something used with chickens and their pasture shelters). Piles of palettes, scrap metal, poultry and small animal cages, and about four cast iron bathtubs (for washing and dying wool) also lay about in the barnyard. The "old barn", as I've come to refer to it, has its own piles within it, most notably the neatly stacked hay in the loft that has a particularly sweet smell. Since this is a sheep farm there are piles of sheep pelts ready to be shipped to a tanner (The tanner had a fire in his facility and has since moved from Sheboygan Falls to Milwaukie, which is why the pelts are piled up), and those take up most of the room in the bottom of the barn.

The "old barn" is being eaten from the bottom timbers up by termites. It was built in 1917, or so, and, in my boss's mind, its time has come.



I remain hopeful and envision a barn elevating, like during the renovation of the house I grew up in, where the barn would be raised from the ground and all necessary wood would be replaced and a foundation would be put in. There is a barn, called the Gribble Barn up the road which has a sign "Save the Gribble Barn" that has inspired me to imagine a similar fate. If only to save timbers upstairs are beautiful and when you walk up the stairs to the hayloft the sounds underfoot echo and evoke a beautiful feeling that walking on wood only has.



The pasture is also something to take in. On the south and western sides it is bordered by a creek and forest thick with blackberry bushes.



The slope going down is gentle and amounts to a nice view from the bottom where all you can see back towards the barn is grass and the outermost greenhouse barn.



Groundhogs also inhabit the pasture, bringing up soil from below and slowly turning it over in their own time. I remember Ralph, a SW MN grass farmer, stating how these small dirt piles are just as important as cowpies in their bringing up of nutrients otherwise not easily accessible to the pasture ecosystem and their slow shifting of root systems that grow with the constantly changing tunnels. With each little pile is fresh soil for pasture plant species to grow on and offer succulent food for grazing animals. These vole hills also off set the steady timeline of linear growth and breakup the pasture with a diversity of growth. I found out today that the neighbor kid, who helps rebed the greenhouse barn and feed the chickens with his brother, once trapped forty groundhogs one summer. So far he hasn't caught any this year.

The pasture also has irrigation apparatus set up to deal with the dry summers. Perennial ryegrass and clover are the main foraging grasses planted in this pasture and, the perennial ryegrass especially, doesn't do well during the dry spells. I've asked about alternatives and, due to my boss's background in Agricultural Engineering in higher education that focuses on irrigation, past management of irrigation districts, and being a irrigation system sales representative, I was hardpressed to hear a clear response. Annual ryegrass, purportedly, handles the drier conditions well but the cost may be just the same as running a water pump during those months of the year. Sudan grass, part of the Sudan farm's namesake, grown in the southern climates of California, and other arid regions, does very well, yet even better with irrigation. Even so, I'd like to see a diversity that would sustain the pasture through the changing weather like the grasses of the prairie (Interestingly there is a whole species that grows fast enough to seed before the dryness hits and then another grows to take advantage of its space and seed by the end of late summer relaying on its far-reaching roots, sometimes as much as thirty feet! This extensive root system allows the later grass to endure through the driest time spans.) A diverse succession of grass species is far batter, in my mind, than wasting electricity to pull up water a deep rooted grass would get at anyway.