Making Steers, Brotherly Help, The Mandibles
A beautiful week. I’m never “caught up on my work,” but it feels good to at least put a dent in it. I’m always grateful for the seasonal changes that farm work entails, but I especially love working this time of year.
Over the weekend I over seeded some clover seeds across some of our pastures. On Monday I took a load of cows and pigs to the processor, which meant rounding up and sorting cows on Sunday afternoon.
On Tuesday my brother John helped us work and tag our momma cows and baby calves that were born last fall. We separated out the bull from the cows to prevent baby calves from being born in the dead of winter. Speaking of bulls, we banded the bull calves to castrate them to steers. Hallie got in there and banded a couple of the younger ones. Of course that led to dinnertime questions from the kids as it should. We pointed out why we put the bull in to breed the cows and why we take the bull out to prevent calving in certain seasons. They were intimidated and fearful of the over 2,000 pound bull, as they should be. Bulls can do a lot of damage. A couple bulls is one thing. A field full of bulls is quite another. If we were to allow all our bull calves to grow into mature bulls, managing the cow herd would be not only a lot more challenging, it would be a lot more dangerous. I’m glad the kids ask questions. We try to answer honestly. Sometimes it makes me revisit those questions myself.
On Wednesday we welcomed help from Amy’s brother and his family who came up for a visit from Tennessee. We fenced off more spots in the fields to plant trees next week. The saplings will need to be protected from livestock in order to have a chance to make it.
On Thursday while they all went for a hike, I cut more trees out of fence lines and pulled logs up the hill to pile for future firewood cutting. There still so many downed trees and fences to repair. With miles and miles of fences to maintain, I still haven’t caught back up from Helene.
Amy kept the on farm kitchen cooking all week with multiple batches of chicken bone broth and beef broth. Lots on the agenda for today. Aside from the long list of farm work, we have several hours of work in the freezers filling coolers and prepping for tomorrow’s herd share deliveries to Marion and the Abingdon Farmer’s Market.
While feeding cows on the tractor, I’ve been listening to The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, a futuristic novel set from 2029-2047 with economic warnings of inflation, technology, growing government, and a new world currency. Though it’s a fictional novel, it’s not at all unrealistic.
“The American dollar is worthless now, not because of the rate spike… It is worthless now because it was worthless before. (Talking about going off the gold standard)… When you’ve debased your currency that utterly, there’s not much further left for it to fall… The world is drowning in worthless paper.”
“With 3% inflation, the dollar halves in value every 23 years. That’s from fed money printing.”
“Later there’s going to be a different problem. The government will have lots of money, but it won’t be worth anything, which is the same as having no money.”
“Complexity theory isn’t itself all that complex… As systems become more complex, they grow exponentially more unstable. They can keep puttering along getting messier and messier until one tiny disturbance sends the whole shebang into meltdown. Like those towers of playing cards where you add a single queen of hearts, and suddenly it’s 52 pick-up.”
“The dollars history is becoming systematically worthless.”
“It was hardly comforting to be all in the same boat when the boat was sinking.”
“Those warning signs you’re supposed to look out for, they only seem obvious in retrospect.”
Have a good week.
Will