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Stepping Back in Time: An Old-Fashioned Threshing Bee

September 12, 2012 by 1 Comment

History fascinates me. When I’m not geeking out over agriculture and photography, I’m a total nerd about things that happened decades and centuries ago.

Each Labor Day, there is an old-fashioned threshing bee held near Colfax, WA. A threshing machine run by a steam engine is set up, and teams of mules and horses cut and haul the grain to be threshed. It was fascinating to watch, and there was a great crowd in attendance. (Here’s a pretty neat animation on how a threshing machine works.

Old-Fashioned Threshing Bee - Harvesting with Mules

The neat thing about history is how much importance it plays in your present life. You are where you are because of what has happened before today. If you don’t know it used to take 15 men, horses and slow progress to harvest a field of wheat or barley, then it’s harder to understand the significance of how farmers are able to harvest grain today.

Old-Fashioned Threshing Bee - Mule Team

I suspect a lot of the people watching this year’s threshing bee had never seen draft horses or mules work. Some of them probably haven’t had a chance to experience modern agriculture. Each piece of information and each experience a person has helps shape their opinions. Events like old-fashioned threshing bees provide a base for understanding agriculture’s history and where it is coming from.

Transferring the grain from one wagon to the other for threshing

Check out the entire album of photos on Facebook!

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The Real Side of Social Media

September 4, 2012 by 4 Comments

Dairy farmer @FarmerHeins rides a cowhorse for the first time.

Dairy farmer rides a cowhorse for the first time.

I had friends in college who played that ridiculous Sims game. My over-simplified idea of it ran along the lines of a fake world that real people orchestrated from the computer. I think sometimes people view social media the same way. That the people we talk to on Twitter and Facebook aren’t “real” people or “real” friends.

They are.

I had the privilige of hosting Chris Heins of @FarmerHeins Twitter fame this weekend. He’s a dairy farmer from Missouri, and I’m pretty sure we’re friends.

I learned all about things like days in milk, the fresh pen, milk tanks and calf huts. I feel like I can hang with the dairy boys a bit better now that I’ve got a handle on the lingo. And I wish I had a picture of him describing the barn set-up and flushing system using my kitchen table placemat.

He learned about beef cattle, border collies and riding horses. He got to see garbanzo bean fields, wheat harvest and an old-time threshing bee. I love where I live, and showing it to a friend this weekend helped me see it with fresh eyes.

It’s not just avatars and 140 characters. Social media people are real. The friendships are real. The conversations are meaningful, and the opportunities to learn are boundless.

Thanks to Chris, I now have a broader agricultural knowledge base. That’s awesome, and it wouldn’t have happened without social media. It’s a small world, but I doubt I would have bumped into him in the grocery store or on the airplane.

Social media is a powerful landscape for learning more about agriculture. Embrace it; there’s always something more to learn.

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Resources for Artificial Insemination in Beef Cattle

June 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

black Angus heifer in pastureEarlier this week, I shared photos of artificial insemination of beef cattle. There are multiple reasons to implement artificial insemination in your beef herd. Two major ones are advancing the quality of your herd and uniformity of the calf crop. Artificial insemination allows ranchers access to high-quality bull semen they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford (i.e. buying the bull for natural service).

Resources

I enjoyed this video as well – also from Oklahoma State – on artificial insemination:

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Tomato Troopers

May 7, 2012 by 1 Comment

Tomato seedling started in an egg cartonI AM A FARMER! Okay. I’m not. Starting 12 tomato plants indoors is not farming (though the definition of what a real farmer is can be many different things), but I am growing things. There is something so darn cool about putting a tiny seed in some dirt, splashing water on it and watching it grow into something green and fruitful.

My tomato babies are not ready to be released into the harsh mountain wilderness yet. There was a hard frost clinging to the north Idaho pastures surrounding my house this morning. I refuse to let all these mornings of remembering to water my egg carton and placing it in the living room window’s sun die at 32 degrees.

I’ve never started tomato plants in an egg carton before, so I’m anxious to see how they weather the transplant process when temperatures allow it. I’m hoping they thrive, but I’ll be happy as a June bug in May if they simply survive.

Tomato seedlings growing in an egg cartonYou see, I’m a notorious plant killer. The past five years anyway. I grew up in Iowa where God took care of all the watering. Out here? God expects me to do my own watering, and I’ve been known to forget on occasion. Unfortunately for the plants, those occasions often come one right after the other.

I’m hoping this year is different for my dozen tomato babies. They’ve already survived the dog stepping on them when I set them out for a little afternoon sunbathing session. They’ve survived the one or three times I missed showering them with love and H2O.

They can survive, I’m sure of it. These 12 little guys are troopers. Tomato troopers. And if one dies, I’m really hoping the rest will pick up his sword and carry on with the battle instead of diving in after him until no man is left alive.

Filed Under: Blog, Food Tagged With: ,

What is a real farmer?

April 2, 2012 by 6 Comments

Quick, shoot from the hip: what is your definition of a real farmer?

If you said a 60-year-old white guy with 20,000 acres and a wrap-around porch, I agree with you. That is a definition of a real farmer, but it’s not the only definition of a real farmer.

“The people selling produce at farmers’ markets aren’t real farmers,” is the statement that got me to thinking about this question.

Not so very long ago, I would have firmly stated that to be considered a “real” farmer or rancher, you had to be growing crops or raising livestock as your living. That part-timers didn’t really count. That if you weren’t farming or ranching on a big scale, then it wasn’t really farming or ranching.

What a bunch of hooey.

I will always have a special connection to the big cow-calf ranching way of life. I was lucky enough to have parents who did raise cattle for their full-time jobs, and it is the dream I aspire to. But it’s not the only way, and all the other ways that don’t fall in the realm of traditional agriculture are important as well.

Starting tomato plants in an egg carton, gardening

Starting my tomato plants from seeds in an egg carton.

Why can’t a real farmer be a person who has a job in town and works his land in the evenings and on the weekends? Why can’t a real rancher be a person who takes vacation days to tend to her cattle when they get sick? In what way is a lady who raises a small herd of grass-fed beef or a man who sells vegetables at the farmers’ market not a part of our food system? Isn’t that what farming and ranching is all about? The business of growing food for others as well as ourselves?

I still have so much to learn about agriculture. I have a lot of experience with beef cattle, but I know very little about dairies. We had a great big garden when I was growing up, but I don’t know what it’s like growing potatoes, almonds or apples on a larger scale.

But if there is one thing I have learned, it’s this: Don’t put agriculture in a box. It won’t fit, and you’ll wear yourself out trying to do so.

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