Wotokahan Farm.

This is the third time I have written this post.
All computers must die.

I farm Wotokahan Farm. On it I will be raising grass-fed organic Angus and the crop necessary to keep them fed. The idea behind organic grass-fed is to emulate Nature as closely as possible.

Humans have been farming for some 26,000 years. Only in the last sixty have we set out to improve in Nature’s designs. For the most part, our improvements have held consequences that severely negatively outweigh the positive. America has no more small farms. Monoculture corporate and factory. These are the words that have replaced the “family” that once belonged in front of farming. Monoculture is a close second to Global Warming on my end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scale.
Howard Kunstler is a dick. But he is good at pointing out the evil in things that seem mostly good. His point was that highways, and the resulting suburbs, killed community as we knew it. The problems inherent in modern farming doesn’t yet have it’s Kunstler. Some people care, and they are willing to try to make a difference by paying for our meat, but there is no rallying cry [in America] and it may kill us all.
*end of tirade*

We farm two herds. The brood herd and the to-be-eaten herd. The brood herd is the mother cows and the bulls. The calves spend their first summer as a part of this herd. In the fall we bring this years calves down to live with the eating herd, from which we cull the largest animals.

In the summer, all the beefs eat grass.
In the winter I feed them hay, which is 700-800lb round bales of grass, and silage, which is fermented pulverized corn (think sour-mash).
This is what I do.

post script:
My dad claimed that Wotokahan was the Indian phrase for “Follower of God, Leader of Men.” He found it at a camp. The camp played pretty fast and loose with the definitions it handed out though. Some Indians had as a concept a “great spirit” which bible-study leaders will tell you is the same thing as god, but it isn’t. The great spirit wasn’t as thing you would follow. So the name is bullshit. Which is probably good because I am going to fail at both attempts, god and man.