Brooder Clean Out, Spring Rain
It’s hard to believe March has come and gone. Thankful for Monday’s rain. I haven’t been tracking rainfall, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve gotten as much rain compared to most March months in the past. Just a few rolls of hay were fed to the cows this week as the grass greens and grows.
We filled pork herd shares while it rained on Monday. The kids went out “exploring” in the rain, soaked to the bone by the end of the day. On Tuesday after chores and making the rounds, we filled this month’s beef shares. Wednesday’s project was cleaning out the brooder to get ready for next week’s first batch of chicks. Our egg layers had been occupying the brooder through the winter. We sold most of the egg laying hens except for a few that Hallie wanted to keep in her coop in the backyard.
Yesterday was the quarterly delivery to Farmville. Usually Amy makes this trip, but with a lot on her plate for the day, it turned into a good chance for me to get some windshield time in and meet some fine Farmville folks.
Lots of farm work to catch up on today. Tomorrow kicks off the beginning of the regular Abingdon Farmers Market season, so we’ll be getting coolers ready and filling orders this afternoon. She’ll be there 8:00-noon on Saturdays. As we’ve said in the past, with lots of beef, chicken, and pork options, it’s hard to know how much of what all to take. If you pre-order online, she’ll have your order ready with your name on it for an easy pick up.
On the road to and from Farmville, I finished listening to COLLASPE by Jared Diamond as he, in many cases, links the falling of past societies to their unsustainable agricultural practices, often detrimentally abusing the natural resources that those societies were built on to begin with.
“It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems, people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended.”
“That deforestation may have begun to cause a manmade drought in the valley bottom because forests play a major role in water cycling, such that massive deforestation tends to result in lowered rainfall.”
“Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10-40 times the rates of soil formation… Like deforestation, soil problems contributed to the collapse of all past societies discussed in this book.”
Quoting a Montana farmer, “One thing that lets us succeed is that we all share a common religious faith. Most of us go to the same community church… Sure we do have family conflicts, but we can have a good fight and still be best friends at night. Our parents fought too, but they always talked about it before sundown. We have figured out which hills are worth dying on and which are not.”
Have a good week.
Will