Hope Is The Float In Your Toilet.

Three different families have approached us regarding the renting of our farm. One bowed out for financial reasons. They were most interested in keeping the operation going as is, but couldn't come up with the capital to buy our equipment, buy our cattle, and live. One bowed out for fear of biting off more then they could chew. The third family is waiting for the bank to send back a Yes or a No as to their loan. As are we. This third family is planning or turning the farm back into a dairy. A grassfed, organic dairy. This is wonderful for two reasons, and moderately painful for another two.

On the plus sides, a dairy is more profitable than a beef farm. The likelihood of a family succeeding financially with a herd of milk cows is far greater than with beeves. And for a more personal relief, they don't plan on getting started until the spring. I won't have to worry my pretty little head on how to keep my herds fat and sassy with my substantial hay deficit. I can sell them all. I can even sell them before I need to feed this fall at all. Added bonus: the hay and corn I do have is money in the bank. With this bad year, we can empty our barns in a flash.

The problems are (1) that there are people who like and buy our beef. It's very good and very cheap and it's about to no longer exist. We don't even know who exists around Knox county that has a similar product that we could recommend to our customers. And like that *poof* we were gone.
And this family has meticulously gone through budget after budget and decided to keep the initial capital outflow as low as they can. Which means they don't have much of an interest in the 45+ pieces of machinery that is worth about $75,000. They're mine to attempt to get as much out of as I can. That will not be any fun. Some are worth 10K and more and I need to get at least that much. Some are worth more as scrap steel than as the functioning piece of equipment that they are. And I haggle Oh-so-poorly.

That's the status. If this family gets approved. And completes the decision to sell their house, to leave their extended family, to start a farm, to sign our lease. If that, then I'm much closer to being free again. And if not any one of those things, we will be frantically placing ads in every farming magazine that makes sense. And waiting again.

Outage.

It's been complicated.
But I think I'm back.

In Other News:
I'm putting Glenn Greenwald back into my links under intarwebs. For a while he lost my interest when all he could decry were the FISA civil right implications. But recently he's been on a critical reasoning brush-burning rampage, taking to task those who have made it their life to defend the indefensible.
If you like Fox News, please avoid. I'm afraid they've proven to be consistently, inartfully, always wrong. And if you've put up with that for this long, I'm sure you can shoulder up and keep on trucking in your ignorance.

Excerpt from today:

It may very well serve our "national interests" to start a war because we want to control someone else's resources, or because we think it would be good if they had a different government, or because we want the world to fear us, or because we want to change the type of political system they have, or because they aren't complying with our dictates, or because we want to use their land as military bases, or because they are going to acquire weapons we tell them they are not allowed to have. But those who believe that war is justifiable and desirable under those circumstances are, by definition, espousing an imperial ideology.

and:

That is why war opponents on the "left" -- including bloggers -- were and still are deemed Unserious even though they proved to be correct. Their opposition was not based (at least principally) on the belief that we were using the wrong "force deployment packages," that the timing was wrong, that we should have waited a little longer (that type of "opposition" was the only permitted type). Rather, it was largely based on the notion that the war itself was illegitimate because Iraq had not attacked us and could not threaten our national security, and that going around bombing, invading and occupying other countries which haven't attacked us is both immoral and/or self-destructive.