I Fling Poo

Flush.

2007-09-13T18:28:00.000-05:00

*franticly placing ads*

Turns out that a bank needs something available to steal in order to loan money. Usually a house. The would-be renters have one. One they plan on selling to buy milking equipment and cows. Such capital is much harder to do paperwork on than simply pulling out a mortgage. Risk too great, loan denied.
Fuck.

Hope Is The Float In Your Toilet.

2007-08-29T16:19:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-08-20T16:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Oh the Unmitigated Gall.

2007-07-26T16:24:00.000-05:00

Gall-

1. impudence; effrontery.
2. bile, esp. that of an animal.
3. something bitter or severe.
4. bitterness of spirit; rancor.

—Synonyms 1. nerve, audacity, brass, cheek.

Where's the respect for the deceased?
Whenever you are selling something having to do with death, it takes a bit of effort and skill to come off inoffensive. Our local funeral home didn't try real hard. And they were properly dressed down.

But. If you drive to my house to offer me a "cemetery memorial" to commemorate my dad, I'm going to have to say FUCK YOU. I will not want a sales pitch built around a recently deceased man, ever. Rebecca Longstreth Renock, what the hell were you thinking?!? Have some common decency. Yours is a predatory approach. You know this. Grow the fuck up.

But for your efforts today I will try and get your name out there.
If you live in Central Ohio:
Do not do business with Longstreth Memorials. They have coin-counters where their hearts ought to be.

Of Damsels and Dragons.

2007-07-19T16:15:00.001-05:00

The bulls have their own separate pasture from birthing in the early spring until mid-summer. The rest of the year it usually sits fallow. With the lack of food to eat, I moved seven of the younger calves into it to take some pressure off the main pastures. To get it ready for the calves, I removed all the corrals, clipped the weeds, and fixed the speedily deteriorating hi-tensile fence. The other afternoon I walked back and was entertained for about an hour by a trio of dragonflies. There is a artificial pond across the road and it drains through the bull pasture. Before it gets to Job Run it has dried up, but back in the pen it is still a trickle more than stagnant.
I like me some dragonflies. Flight control that puts the best trained human dancer to shame. They eat mosquitoes. Wings made of living stained glass. And they won't accidentally run into you.

male Common Whitetails

The three I watched were male common whitetails. They aren't gigantic, but are average large in size. Whitetails seem to be doing the best with the drought. Usually there are five or six crazy colored species along the creek. Wikipedia claims that they stake out an area and defend it against others, but these three were just playing, chasing each other in swoopy circles. Whenever another type of insect blundered into their space, one would buzz and jump on it's back to drive it away. For a while, one wandered away to hover a foot above a female who was laying eggs in the water, quite clearly defending her while she was helpless.
There were several insects that the Dragonflies left alone. Water skimmers were one, another was this damselfly. Damselflies look cool, but are weak imitators of the kings of the creekbed skies.

It Did Rain, However.

2007-07-19T15:19:00.001-05:00

Nine times out of the last ten, the storms have either veered suddenly north and just grazed us, or simply dissolved at our doorstep. From today's local paper:

The weather earlier this week was a bitter tease to local farmers. A large area of rain developed in Indiana Monday night, and moved into the Buckeye state during the day Tuesday, filling radar screens with a wash of rain that looked like it couldn't miss. Most of Ohio received at least a decent soaking, except for a small area centered on Knox County, where the weather system dissipated and dropped less than a tenth of an inch of rain. The dissipated line regenerated into thunderstorms just past the county line, and brought heavy rain to eastern Ohio.

Belying my disbelief, last night was the tenth time, the one time it did actually rain. Local Girl was convinced that this would break the spell and that the rains would return. But today, with its 70% chance of rain, I sit and watch the storms on the radar. Blow north and dissolve. Curl up and blow away.
It will never be enough.

Magic Kingdom, For Sale--

2007-07-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

None of my father's three children are yet farmers. We all harbored day-dream desires to perhaps come home to the farm in the far future. But that future is suddenly here. And our day-dreams don't match the reality.

The farm will be for rent. After we figure out what we want to charge, we'll look for candidates to rent.
So, who wants a functioning, populated, sustainable (excepting the diesel fuel and seed inputs), grass-fed angus beef operation? I'll even lend a hand to get you started, if needed. We'd like to rent the entire farm as is. What we don't want is to auction off all the livestock and equipment and have someone come in and plant corn and beans over it. That's a small step from covering it with McMansions.

I went the the local extension agency to ask for help. My dad never put much stock with them. And now I know why.
Google would have served me better. They just couldn't find it in themselves to give a fuck. Government salaries have a way of reducing any job's inherent usefulness and response.
The agent I talked with told me I was being unreasonable to expect to find grassfed farmers to take over. And maybe my glasses are rose-colored. If you have any suggestions as to how to get the word out, please, suggest away.

aside* During the memorial service, a local agent for the extension office recalled a time when my dad went in with a small manifesto he'd written and tried to enlist help from the extension office. The manifesto was dealing with not looking to the local, state, or federal government for help, but rather to build up and focus on doing things that needed done in and amongst ourselves in the community. Helping those who need it, relying less on gov't subsidies, and the like.
The agent proudly recounted this little story, leaving out only the part where my dad was effectively laughed out of the building. They get paid no matter what happens, what care have they?

Wet, Wet, Wet.

2007-07-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

It's dry here. Making references to historically rememberable droughts dry. Earth as a bone, grass as razor paper. As the blind melon lamented, there's been no rain.

In town, this means the occasional sprinkler ban.
Out here, this means that rather than making hay while the sun shines, we're all franticly feeding first cutting hay to staving livestock. Which is bad. After summer comes fall and winter. I will probably not be able to make winter hay this year.

My dad bought another 20 head of cattle a few years ago. Business to him was raising as many beasties a year as the farm could sustain. From my view, this was a mistake. We have never sold all our calves at our price, to people. The excess calves must be sold in their third fall, at cut-rate prices, to god-knows-who. He would have been better served to raise the price and found a way to sell to the yuppies in Columbus.
Grassfed Organic Angus. $1.75/lb hanging weight is a fucking bargain. Too much of a bargain. It appears cheap, when it was only my dad being too nice with prices. Someone needed to hit up upside the head with an economy text.

Too many cows. Too many calves. One creek is totally dry. The next is hardly anymore than a trickle now.
Bah.

Piss and Moan.

2007-07-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

I was going to ignore the reason why I'm back, let the information fall where it may. There were many reasons for thinking that way, one being that I'm not sure how my immediate family would react. But, they can do as they will.

My dad died unexpectedly two weeks ago. Victim of a faulty PTO control. Months after winning release from prison. Days after settling all the suits against him. It's been a bad couple of years here. And most of the bad ends up with me being your unlikely farmer. I'm unhappy. But I'm back.

Eulogy

2007-07-05T22:23:00.001-05:00

for David Clark McCoy (1949-2007) as written and delivered by his son Kent at his memorial service.

"To me, there are three facets of my father that, taken together define my father pretty thoroughly. First and foremost, David Clark McCoy was, of course a member of his family; a son, brother, husband and father. Second, he was the steward of this piece of land, in part as thanks to the force of family history, but primarily by his own choice. Lastly he was a member of a number of communities from the obvious ones defined by geography, politics and family ties here in Fredericktown and Knox County to the organic, sustainable and other agricultural communities, along with theater, aviation, volunteer services etc... in the terms he used in the book he was writing, he was a neighbor to many people. Unfortunately, men in general and those of us in this family in particular, have a tendency to think that we can define ourselves as distinct individuals ignoring all ties and standing alone, and although he could turn powerfully inward, still it is his relationships with people and this place that define the ragged edges of the hole his absence leaves

The son of stalwart evangelical parents, he made them proud as he went out into the world to serve as both a leader and a servant and then taught them a few lessons about that world and its people when he came home. Just a few years ago when he lost his parents, he was staggered to discover that he and not his father was now 'Mr McCoy.' There is never any question that he was indeed a McCoy, but in other ways he also carried a part of the legacy of the Clark and Knapp families. As he raised his family, I cannot say say with flowery accolades that he was the perfect parent, but he provided many things that I am grateful for. Growing up on a farm is, to put it mildly, inconvenient at times when as a kid you want to be doing anything but chasing down escaped cattle at 3AM or bringing them in to be milked in the rain for the thousandth time, but who gets trees to climb, a creek to float boats down, and rope swings over fresh hay anymore? Besides having the world of the farm to explore and conquer, he encouraged us to learn about the larger world we lived in and to pursue any part of it we chose. All in all, the most important thing he gave us was his example. He did not always succeed, but he made a sincere effort to live up to the things he believed in, and that is more than many people can say.

When he found out early in life that neither military nor business life agreed with him and he decided to come home and take over operation of the family farm, he and my mother made a decision to live simply. It wasn't an easy choice, from the very beginning the first fruit he would reap was hard, oft un-rewarded labor. Nonetheless, he revived and improved this farm on little money, a great deal of sweat and equipment that most would consider not simply inadequate, but useless. Farming methods, fortunes and especially the weather all changed continuously and he certainly did not grow rich, but to the disbelief of many he was able to not only stay afloat, but to purchase the land from his father and even to twice indulge his love of flying and purchase a small plane. The second time he was able to buy a plane he also fulfilled a longtime dream as it flew in and out of this strip. However, no matter what else he did, or the fact that his work with Hospice caused him to comment that he given life to do over he might have chosen to be a doctor, he was tied to the cycle of the weather, seasons and vagaries of this soggy little Ohio valley, its crops and its critters, in such a way that the man and the farm were in many ways hard to distinguish from one another.

As most of you know firsthand, my father was an outgoing person. More than once we tried unsuccessfully to identify who it was that he was spending an entire evening on the phone with, sure from the variety of the topics and the familiarity that it must be a good friend, only to learn that the conversation had begun as a wrong number. Of course misplaced phone calls and talking to the cows as he fed them did not make for much of a social life. Over time he found a number of ways to both find respite from the farm momentarily and to nurture other interests, particularly singing, flying and serving people. He made many friends on stage with first the local barbershop chorus and then with community theater groups as well as in the air and talking shop on the ground with other private pilots. Much as he enjoyed both singing and flying, he considered service to others to be the part of his life that gave it meaning. He did manage to put both of these hobbies to use in ways that brought light to other people's lives, but he also served more directly, first through Habitat for Humanity, and then as he realized that building houses was too similar to his day to day work to be enjoyable, he followed my mother's example and volunteered with Hospice. Serving with Hospice was a revelation for Dad as he discovered a way that his willingness to talk to anyone about anything could make a tremendous impact on those who were trying to find a way to approach the end of their lives with their eyes wide open.

What I fail to capture, in trying to make everything fit neatly in three categories is the reason he made such an impact in each part of his life; that which drove him to take on positions of leadership as a young man and later to tackle the projects he took on with varying degrees of success, from selling water by the honor system, drying watercress from the creek to try to market nationwide, designing and building several unique pieces of machinery comprising a new tillage system, smaller creations to solve practical problems or for our entertainment, and even one finished and one un-finished book, all in the end with the ever-so-humble goal of changing the world.

A number of people have told me that he is 'still here.' I know they mean well, but I don't believe that in a literal sense. However, my father made a deep impression on this family, this farm and the various communities that he was a part of and what we will continue to encounter for the rest of our lives are the are the things and people that he affected. The abundant response this evening and over the past week and a half are the beginning of that and I thank all of you who have provided food, run errands, helped in many other ways, or even had your gracious offers turned down because there have been more willing hands than there has been work to be done. If he could make one last request of you, it would be the one he was writing into every chapter if not every paragraph of his book, that if you have learned anything about how to love the people around you by his flawed example, whether it be how to be neighbor or, since, as he admits he didn't always live up to his own ideals, what mistakes to avoid, that you take that and run with it."

All in Hot Shock.

2007-06-22T15:24:00.000-05:00

I thought in the future I might come across another idea worth writing fairly often upon, a new blog idea. I didn't expect the old blog idea to come thundering back all unasked for. Poo, I did not want you.

Alas it was not mine to choose.
I am again Lord of Barnyards. I do again fling the poo. I can not help but to update this, the Wotokahan.

Goodbye.

2007-01-30T12:52:00.000-05:00

This is the final post of I Fling Poo. Today I quit.
It's not in me anymore.

If you want put on a list of being notified if I ever return to the blogging, send me ann email at kid dot twist at gmail.com. I'll try to remember.

...And You Will Know Us By The Pool Of Dead.

2007-01-19T13:39:00.000-05:00

The Mayor of Mt. Holly sent me a Myspace bulletin. Seems Donnie won the Mount Holly City Hall sponsored Deadpool 2006, slipping in at the end with the prescient choice of Leslie Lynch King, Jr. Then the mayor very personally invited me to join for the new year.

So I did. My ten:

Muhammad Ali
Margaret Thatcher
Zalmay Khalilzad
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary
Jack Kevorkian
Lindsey Lohan
Ariel Sharon
Monty Hall
George Carlin
Abigail Van Buren

Looking at it now, I do believe I have one too many a political figure. I’d probably lose Khalilzad first.
Most of the famous and larger Deadpools allow you to choose whomever you wish. Since this pool is much smaller, it is suggested that you only chose people who haven’t been chosen before you.
There two people on my list that were snatched before I posted:
Fidel Castro
Billy Graham

Them’s the breaks. And if you don’t know what a deadpool is, I’m sorry, you’ll have to figure that one out on your own.

Red Wings Have A Good Logo.

2007-01-16T13:33:00.000-05:00

Among the numerous ways that the world can be split into two groups of people, a clear divider is cars. There are car people. And there are those who just as clearly aren’t.

Soon after high school, a large number of my friends became car people. And I became a car people by default. Danny and Rusty took me to an autocross event. Kent sold me his Sentra SE-R. My dad bought a Triumph Spitfire and an ancient Prelude convertible. Cars I grew to like.

Detroit has two things. Motown and The Big Three automakers.
Detroit had two things. One has been reduced to Erykah Badu. The other was eaten by imports. I’m ok with both. I’m a white farm kid. We drove Honda Accords and beater American-made pick-ups only because Honda didn’t yet make a truck.
I do respect movements to retain American labor. But we’ve long failed at making not mind-bogglingly stupid vehicles.

Saturday was my first and last visit to the North American International Auto Show.

It was grey and cool and rainy. From Toledo to Detroit is dirty. Smokestacks, abandoned warehouses, weeds, methane burners, Wendy’s litter. It literally smelled bad. Detroit itself doesn’t do any better. Wan, faded, sad. That town is ugly.
I’m glad I went. Not because the show was good, because it wasn’t. But because now I know. I came, I saw, I puked.

There is something stultifying about seeing too many of something. When something is rare too be seen, it is good too look upon. Zoo animals are only cool cause we don’t ever see them. To the right person kitties and pigs are probably just as interesting.
To see four hundred shiny new brilliantly lit and prominently displaced cars was mind-numbing. To see a Gallardo on the freeway is neat-o. To see a Gallardo next to a Bently next to a Rolls next to a Ferrari is boring.

On top of that there were hundreds of cars I couldn’t give a hot damn about. Minivans and over-sized trucks and concept cars. Yes, concept cars are awful. Art for art’s sake. The shark has been jumped. Start building better cars, not designer’s wet dreams. This wheel makes no sense:
The coolest car there was an aging Volvo with it’s original engine and turbo. It was the first in America recognized as a 1,000,000,000 mile car. Pretty girls braying about the Camero’s MPG rating is not nearly as enthralling.

Braaaaaaaaains!

2007-01-02T13:34:00.000-05:00

Have we learned nothing from zombie movies?
Google News. Regular morning internet stop.

This morning, found under the heading of science:
BREAKHROUGH!1! Genetically engineered cows are free from mad cow! AMAZING! Science wins again! HURRAH!!

It appears that Japanese and American scientists bred 12 calves from cells that had the protein prion-making gene removed. They don’t appear (yet) to be unhealthy, nor, in theory should they be able to contract mad cow. Media feeding frenzy ensues.

"This research is a huge step forward for the use of animal biotechnology that benefits consumers," said Barbara Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization…

Oh, my god, this is infantile.
I’ll try to be brief:

Cows are bovines. Herbivores. Ruminants. Built to eat grass. Very good at eating grass.

Cows can only contract mad cow from eating another animal who has it. Cows do not willingly seek to eat each other.

There. I’ve quite calmly shown this to be moronic, but here:

Farmers everywhere have for years fed to their cows other animals. Chickens, pigs, other cows, etc. Not steaks and thighs, but the waste products from processing, brains, tendons, feathers, and the like. Utterly useless waste except that it’s high in proteins. And cheap. Even if it is wholly not what Nature intended. Along comes her reply: mad cow.

We humans, it seems, have decided one up Nature. Take out a gene, see what happens. Where are the fucking klaxons and warning lights and tornado sirens? This ain’t right. We have a very simple problem, with a very simple solution, and yet we’re spending money over here in a lab trying to bend reality so we can go along fucking things up? Why was every single article on Google News happy and crowing about this? Are we all this blind?

You want mad cow free cows? Don’t insist that the waste meat products your future steak is fed has been properly irradiated, insist that your future steak ISN’T FED MEAT!
Vote with your mouth. This is crazy.

The Loyal Divide.

2006-12-30T16:01:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis has a wonderful local music scene. I took it for granted while I was there and was an infrequent goer to of shows. Mark Mallman and Tapes ’N Tapes and the Soviettes and P.O.S. and Atmosphere and the Hold Steady and Ol’ Yeller and the Brass Kings and Har Mar and the Hopefuls and Mason Jennings and he Jayhawks all lived and played in the area, while I was there. I saw not even all of these once, and none more than twice.

Belying that, I like live shows; I like to support local music.
When I got back to Ohio I rediscovered how rare it was to see a good show in a good bar. The only national tours that made stops were (1) giant names demanding at least 40 a ticket, (2) washed up straggling tours that never knew when to quit, and (3) bands that get play on top 40 and “rock” stations (ie Nickelback). Independent labels and bands seemed to all know that no one here cared and it would only be a waste of time and money to stop by. Cleveland and Cincinnati were as close as I was going to get.

Not long after I got here I was in a bar with some friends when a girl came up and started talking to me. It was later explained to me that she was “flirting’ with me, but as I was unfamiliar with the concept, no numbers were exchanged. We talked about music. I pressed her to name me some bands who were worth seeing locally. She could only name one. The Loyal Divide.

They’ve played about 10-12 shows in Columbus since that night. I’ve been to seven or eight of them. I even met my girl for the first time at a Loyal show. They are good.

I’d like you to meet them. But.
They are a live band. They have but one EP and I’ve found it rarely sounds good to people who haven’t the opportunity see them perform the songs. They’ve played but twice outside city limits since I’ve known them.
This is more of a notice that in a year or three, when they’ve left this cowtown for better pastures, and they play a show near you, that you are required by me to attend.

It’s five guys. Bands formed in college. Realized the potential enough to throw away other lives to move to Columbus to pursue this band. The sound is hard to describe. They play the requisite bass and guitar and drums and trumpet and fluglehorn(?) and cowbells and keyboards. Even their own website falls quite short:

The Loyal Divide graft tight-locked grooves upon broad strokes of psychedelic pop; a style which, if derivative, will over time develop into something both accessible and fascinatingly original.

And their myspace page claims they are from the category Indie / Psychedelic / Pop. My best stab was to muse that they are ‘what I would imagine Arcade Fire would have been before they figured out exactly what was so awesome about themselves.’ My friend who saw them for the first time last night, described them as Modest Mouse and Radiohead and something else all together.

Come A'Calling.

2006-12-18T11:57:00.000-05:00

Log on Gmail. See what looks like spam. Titled link suggestion - blog banned by Google Hi. My name is Eugene Gershin. Perhaps…

It’s awkward enough that I am certain that it won’t lead to an ad for a Swedish Penis Pump or a silicone implants shill. Click.
It is an ad.

For a blog written by a pseudonymous expat of Israel. He wrote a book. He pens a blog. From a cursory glance it appears that he is their version of an extreme Neocon. Only difference is that we elected them here to fuck shit up and there he’s forced to move to Russia for safety purposes. To be fair, he might be slightly more bat-shit insane than our Wolfowitzs and Perles.

From the email:

Shoher is equally critical of Jewish and Muslim myths, and advocates political rationalism instead of moralizing.

My translation for you:

Less talking, more killing.

Somehow his PR flack found my blog. Stranger is that from that he found my email address. It’s not easily found on here, is it? He suggests that I write a post about him, maybe include a link? Check and Check. While I understand that the emails looking to garner support have done wonders for the right-wing and evangelical movements, this shotgun approach needs some reworking.

Things Done Gone On.

2006-12-18T11:47:00.000-05:00

For the last week I’ve been dismantling and shipping bits of my car. Taking a wrench and a torch to it has been fun. Agreeing on prices, and shipping the bits has been a horror. Don’t ever part out a car in mid-December. Especially when there is only one shipper within easy driving distance.
My dad and I also undertook to straighten and reattach the Quonset hut. It took three tractors, three log chains, a massive come-along, two spud bars, two sledge hammers, 18 unique steel braces, 20 concrete anchors, multiple power tools, and two men 4 days to put her mostly back into place. Though, of all that, the worst of the job was cleaning the inside walls of 7 plus years of accumulated stuff. That took a day and a half in and of itself. *muttering* dirty rusty oily gunky dead.

Christmas is coming. This will be a good Christmas. Last year, my dad was in prison. My brother was unable to join us. My mom was recovering from surgery. I had been in charge of the farm for a month and not liking it. My Aunt and Uncle were more interested in the fact they had just moved into their mostly finished house. It was hot and foggy that day. This one will be better. None of those things are true this year. It’ll be the first time in years that my entire family is together for the mas.

This barn has nothing to do with this post.

Part Out.

2006-12-08T17:27:00.000-05:00

My last car was a Nissan Sentra SE-R. If you know or care little for cars this means nil. If you *heart* cars you'll probably understand that it's a worthy and somewhat wanted sleeper beast. It has a fairly high performance engine hiding inside an entirely boring and unassuming shell. When modded properly, it becomes a killer.
Every sports car has a following. Al Gore invented the Intarwebs. These two seemingly unrelated inevitabilities birthed the automotive forum. Floyd has Celica-GTS.com. The Sentra has the SR20 forum.

I blew up my Nissan this, what is it now, this spring? And it’s been sitting around ever since. I put a classified ad in the local paper asking for $400, way more than a dead car is worth. I got one reply from some schmuck offering me $100. So yesterday I rolled out plan B. Selling it bit by bit on the SR20 forum.
I don’t know how much I’ll recoup. Not much if you factor in my grease monkey and packaging labor. But it’ll be a fun and learning experience to dismantle it. Especially since it’ll never have to be put back together and I should still be able to get most of the scrap steel worth out of it.

Of Our Fathers.

2006-12-08T17:26:00.000-05:00

Cow Bio - Charles

2006-12-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

By popular demand, here is.

Charles was the first calf I named when I arrived a year ago. There were two calves who were baldies (white headed black beefs) with an eyepatch like my man Spuds. To distinguish between the two one became Charles, the other the aforementioned Chuck.
In Minneapolis I played a game of pick-up ultimate weekly. One player was named Charles, another Charlie. That was too hard to distinguish for me so I made it one step easier.
Charles is the skinny dorky kid in the class. The one that acts out to get attention cause he doesn't seem to fit in. He's gangly and ugly, but has recently begun to grow into his bony head. Yeah, he's me in a cows body, so what?

Most of the friendly calves become friendly at the later stages of their short lives. The littler ones haven't gotten away from their wild animal backgrounds. Not so of Charles. He was little when I arrived. He was friendly then. He's still friendly. Too friendly. He's probably the most dangerous calf in the herd. He has no idea that he weighs 700 plus pounds and has a head made of bone four inches thick. If I'm found at the end of auger in bloody bits, Charles did it. But he was just trying to play.

I Need Access To The OED.

2006-11-28T22:18:00.000-05:00

Local Girl caught me by surprise when she noticed what she thought was a familial glitch in our otherwise mostly upstandingly correct use of the English. It made her cringe to hear us use it, as it was one of those ways that hill-jacks (is this hyphenated?) and toddlers abuse the language. By copying from another area of English. Inadvertently wrongly.

Boughten. Milk not derived from the cows out back is most likely boughten. This gingham dress was not boughten; I sewed it myself.
Created out of need, because “bread I did buy at the store” is clumsy as a two legged giraffe.
When she told me this was improper English, I at first did believe her, believe that we were perhaps the unsophisticated hicks we pretend so hard not to be. It’s a pretty silly word. I was worried mostly by the fact that I’d never noticed anyone use it, or be offended by its casual usage.

For days this did nag me. Tonight the usually unreliable dictionary dot com assuaged my misplaced fears. The American Heritage Dictionary has this to say:

bought·en (bôt n)
v.
A past participle of buy.

adj.
1 Commercially made; purchased, as opposed to homemade: boughten bread.
2 Artificial; false. Used of teeth.

But the interesting part was an attached regional disclaimer:

American regional dialects allow freer adjectival use of certain past participles of verbs than does Standard English. Time-honored examples are boughten (chiefly Northern U.S.) and bought (chiefly Southern U.S.) to mean “purchased rather than homemade”…The Northern form boughten (as in store boughten) features the participial ending -en, added to bought, the participial form, probably by analogy with more common participial adjectives such as frozen.

Disclaimer: I believe that Local Girl learned to speak mainly from her mother, who is a Southern Lady, and was therefore listening with a tainted ear for these parts. Her reach for correctness extends to ending sentences prepositionally.

More to read via the Wikipedia: linguistic prescription.

Stench of Give Up.

2006-11-28T21:38:00.000-05:00

*sigh* So much for my distaste of going meta (self referencing).
The farm hasn’t been mine since my Dad got out. The lack of responsibility for it has severely weakened my blogging resolve. I’m now literally just a farm hand. After a year of doing this from my perspective as a know-nothing farmer, the writing of goings on just ain’t the same.

I don’t know in what direction this blog will go. Rather than decide, I’m going to put some stuff up. See what happens.

Game Of The Century.

2006-11-15T19:01:00.000-05:00

Greatest football rivalry of all time.
Buckeyes v Wolverines.
University of Michigan v The Ohio State University.
Scarlet v Blue.
Hail to the Victors v Buckeye Battle Cry.

And for the first time ever, #1 v #2.
Saturday 3:30 EST

It’s crazy time.

Here’s the itinerary as of now:
Thursday night is jumping into Mirror Lake.
Early early Friday morning is the Breakfast Club.
Friday night is the Hate Michigan Rally featuring The Dead Schembechlers (embedded music).
Saturday, naturally, is the game.

The Village Drunkherd.

2006-11-09T19:28:00.000-05:00

This last summer was hay-poor. But quite corn-rich. The sea slug (bag of corn silage) from last winter has become three sea slugs. Silage has to sit for at least three weeks after being put in the bag, to rot properly. The calves we started feeding this week. The cows, last week.

Red was being harassed by the other cows as she tried to feed at the silage bag. She was shoved down, kicked, stuck in the mud. My dad when up with hip-lifters and pulled her out. As soon as she was on her own four feet again a larger cow ran up and butted her back down. We moved to her own pasture. Soon we added another victim of the cow bullies. This one was knocked around till she was limping.

When ever we drive up the drive, the cows go nuts. Kicking up their heels and running. Half and three-quarter ton animals don’t run real graceful. It’s more of a lunging sprint. For about 100 feet. And then they stop and pant and froth at the mouth. It’s not too good for them, they normally do it only when very excited or scared.

My Aunt took these two things, the aggressiveness and the bug-eyed nutty actions and figured out what’s been going on.
Our cows are drunk.
It’s real simple. Grain sugars in a controlled rot become alcohol. The sugar in the corn in the bag ferments as it’s supposed to. At certain points this becomes concentrated to the point that our cows would not be allowed to drive. Or operate heavy machinery.

Ed Wood.

2006-11-06T19:33:00.000-05:00

Now is the winter of my wood.

Come late October, not much needs done on the farm, farming-wise. Things need fixing, yeah, but crops don’t need cared for and no one is giving birth on purpose. The beefs just need enough sustenance to stay healthy and alive.
So we find other ways to occupy our time. Given the chance I’d probably sleep in and lounge about and play golf on the computer and read. My dad’s favorite time-eater is gathering firewood.

This is a pile of firewood.

This is a pile of firewood two days past that last pile. This picture is three days old. The pile is much bigger now.
People still heat their homes (or shop or garage as often as, now) with wood. It’s a shock, I know, but there it is. Up until this last winter, my parents home was always heated with wood. Our farm has three little woods lingering about the edges. The main woods we had logged out to finance my dad’s airplane. Loggers take logs. Loggers leave treetops. Free wood for the taking. We bought a small bit of land that adjoined ours. Mostly it was awful fields, but also included was a tiny bit of woods that had been utterly raped by other loggers. Who left the tops.

This is what we are cutting and splitting. And selling. It takes up about 4 hours of the day, six days a week, barring inclement weather.

Dead Men's Tales.

2006-10-30T20:47:00.000-05:00

St Patrick’s Day is the second best holiday of the year. Horray for Halloween. A new year is born as winter encroaches. For one night the barrier between worlds is dropped. Girls respectfully follow tradition’s demands to dress revealingly.

Believable scary stories make me cry. Or, at least, make my eyes well up uncontrollably. I love to cry to scary stories.
Kenyon College is old and established and lib’brul and rich and haunted. It’s about 14 miles from the farm. On Saturday night Dr. Shutt was to lead his renowned ghost tour of campus. I brought two friends to enjoy, but it was cancelled for fear of rain. I believe them Kenyon whelps aren’t constituted of strong enough stuff.
Sunday night was a weak sauce Halloweeny event put on yearly by the students. A candlelit scary-story “reading” (Poe. more Poe. a little more Poe.) in the old graveyard on campus. By pulling a series of levers and bells I had gained the confidence of Dr. Shutt’s daughter. Clever me. She arranged a small personal tour from the man himself to follow the funereal readings.

Kenyon has lots of ghost stories. It’s really a tremendous body of work. Dr. Shutt is the self-appointed keeper of this vein of Kenyon lore. He has heard so many. But he tells a select few. There are two types of ghost stories tellers. Those you want (at least a little) to believe. And those you can’t help but believe. He is the latter.
A couple of the stories he would tell in grand fashion, but at the end poo-poo. But the majority were true as he told them. It was good.

Some of the stories were old. In a fraternity initiation, a boy was tied up and placed on the nearby train tracks. He was hit by an unscheduled train, perhaps on it’s way to Mt Vernon for repairs. He haunts his old room. It’s possible that his dad helped tie him to the tracks.
The oldest building on campus burned down in 1949. Several kids died. The last seven trapped inside went out singing songs together. The building was rebuilt almost immediately. The ghosts appear walking where the floors would have been before it was rebuilt.

The best reported ghost of Kenyon is the ghost of Capels Hall. In 1979 a drunken boy in room 811 went down to visit his girl in 611. He was returning to his room via elevator after being rebuffed when it stopped working. He fell down the shaft in his attempt to leave. Ever since, girls who stay in rooms 611, 711, 811 and 911 report over and over again this: they wake in the night, unable to move. someone sits down next to them on the bed. and then the someone lies down next to them. It’s actually ridiculous the number of times this has been reported.
The Capels ghost was also implicated a couple of summers ago in an incident involving phone calls of screaming to the switchboard coming from those rooms. It was summer. The place was locked. Security found the lights on in those rooms. And the hot water on in the showers on those floors. But no one around. As soon as they left Caples, the switchboard operator fielded the same screaming calls. Security ran back. Found the same thing. No one there. Lights on. Hot water on. And this time the phone jacks were plugged in, but the phone cords were yanked off.

OSU should beware.

Gopher Trace.

2006-10-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

Log looks like a woodchuck.

Desmond Dekker Sings "Israelites"

2006-10-27T10:57:00.000-05:00

Three mornings ago I saw two men looking with intent at the woods across from our drive and up the hill about 30 feet. Two days ago they came in with a bulldozer. I wonder when they’ll get the house roofed, they seem pretty intent on getting this done fast. If it’s a pre-fab shit-box and the contractor has his utilities ducks in a row we could be looking at new neighbors within the month. Where we want none.

I sat in on the interview my friend gave my dad. He told her of a word that he wanted to see introduced to our lexicon. Subrualites.
Makes sense. Suburbs formed when people moved to he cities, but didn’t want to live in the cities. They clustered around the edges and then, suburbanites. But now we’ve got a strong swing coming back to kick us in the ass. People have tired of the city and the suburbs and want to make a heroic return to “country living.” They come out, buy an acre or two and set up shop. Subrualites. They drive clean trucks and commute hours and buy concrete geese from Home Depot and buy concrete geese outfits at the small town main street stores that have become little more than tourist attractors. They think they are country.

This is all very bad and irritating stuff. But that’s not why I’ve brought you here. The point is, it’s a good and useful term that didn’t exist. Now it does. Use it.

Brome Cover.

2006-10-25T19:42:00.000-05:00

Saturday was the Worst Day of the Year. The day the babies are forcibly and vociferously removed from their mothers. The day the little bulls begin the slow decline to steerhood. The one day out of the year that Cow Jail is designed for. We hired help. It was going down. …and I slept in till noon.
My friend, an art director at a shop in Chicago, won a grant to write a book in the next year. It’s about developments. Sprawl, cookie-cutter houses, Levittowns, McMansions, suburbia, WalMart, bedroom communities. The format is interviews and photographs. I am said friend’s token farmer. Our schedules (her schedule) worked out best to come out this last weekend.
Friday night and I wanted to show her a good time. So I took her to Columbus to drink a beer and see a show and smoke some shi sha and drink some awful chai. And then we both got sick. Don’t smoke lemon-flavored tobbac before vomiting.

So, I missed the awful day. I still have yet to take anyone’s masculinity.

Today I sowed wheat. Sowing wheat is real easy. Setting up the wheat-sower (it’s called a drill for some reason?) took five times the mental effort and elbow grease. In front of the grain drill rides this thing called a cultipactor. It smushes dirt. Ours is old old old. The patent date pressed into it says 1921. I managed to bend the piss out of it’s tongue (the part you attach machinery to a tractor with). Here’s how I fixed that.
Tractors are neat-o.

How Now?

2006-10-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

Brown Cow.
Here is what you all want to know, for one reason or another:
I am sticking around the farm for a second year.

I am not a farmer. This is simple. But this summer I made a pact with myself in that if my dad was released within the first year of his sentence I would go through a year’s cycle with him. To learn how I was supposed to do it. To spend time on the homestead. To be able to run things more properly in the future if need be.
That wasn’t an easy decision. Part of me would really like to pack up and head out tomorrow. I don’t belong here. I have things waiting elsewhere. This is not the very first step of me never leaving again. Hell no. If you knew me elsewhere, I will be back.
So this blog will continue. I shall remain to be a poo flinger and a lord over barnyards.

Tomorrow dad teaches me how to castrate a bull. Err, how to castrate about 20 bulls.

Part Two.

2006-10-18T16:51:00.000-05:00

It seems it's been much much longer than a month.
Here are some things that happened:
The hay season ended.
My two corn fields are harvested.
My mascot, Fat Joe, became hamburger.
The weather turned.

But the only thing that really happened is
I am no longer a captive of the farm.
Three weeks ago my dad was released from prison. He is no longer a felon. We won our appeal. The case was sent back down to the local prosecutor/judge.

He is back.
I am back.

More to come.

Over, Out.

2006-09-18T18:33:00.000-05:00

I abhor meta posts. So this will be quick.

I am on hiatus. I will be back.

Sent Down.

2006-09-12T20:50:00.000-05:00

We found out yesterday. It's official today.
The appeal came back:
Reversed and Remanded.

Please send further inquires to my email, not in the comments here -
kid dot twist at gmail dot com

Things That Smell In The Night.

2006-09-11T16:03:00.000-05:00

Mowing hay last week and I about hit what appeared to be a black and white supersized weasel. It ran away. Riding a tractor is boring more than anything. So I spent some time imagining my newfound fame upon discovering the last identified Ohio mammal. Yeah, that's right, even my daydreams are boring. Towards the end of the field I found it again.
So I shut down the mower and jumped down to catch it. This turned out to be much simpler than I had thought. Between the size of a kitten and a full grown cat, my new little friend insisted on running like a weasel. Weasels hump along like inchworms. Not exactly a race-winning strategy.
It was a baby skunk. So much for fame. The next town over is currently inundated with the beasts. Baby anythings are cute. Baby anythings are also smelly. I am here to tell you that baby skunks are very cute and very smelly. I don't think he'd ever had to resort to spraying anything before and he was rather inaccurate. My boots and cell phone took the brunt of his wrath.

I like the way a skunk smells. Really. Growing up, smelling them as roadkill I thought it smelled bad, but it was only because everyone had told me that that was to be included in the bad smells category. It wasn't till I was a teenager that I noticed that rather than holding my breath when I caught a whiff, I had a tendency to inhale a giant lung-full. I like skunk. But a roadside dose is a good amount. To smell it all day does get a little old.

I was told that skunks are of the weasel family, hence the humping gait. But upon research I find that recently we've reconsidered and put them in their own grouping.

I also saw a ferret crossing the road a month past. That was exciting. Until I found out that they don't live here. And are practically extinct. Someone's pet was loose.

Number One.

2006-09-09T18:58:00.000-05:00

Go Buckeyes!

Legs is the Word of the Month!

2006-09-05T18:21:00.000-05:00

I'm only here intending to educate, but this could be considered NSFW nor prudes.

The first Saturday of every month is Gallery Hop in the Short North. A monthly art crawl. It draws out mostly the oh-so-earnestly respectable gay couples, drunk and lost Buckeyes fans, uptight Republican suburbanites, Bush-hating vegans, and kids with nothing better to do.

After half-watching the Bucks slide to a sloppy win and starting a good round of Bid-a-Trick me and a couple of friends headed down High Street to join in the festivities. Around nine thirty I found myself facing a wall of metal art. And the same question that had bothered me the last time I hopped did spring into my head.

What is the female equivalent of 'phallic'? Ever since Freud, anything even vaguely cylindrical in shape is viewed as a representation of male genitalia. Cigars are phallic. Penises pop up everywhere unbidden. More importantly, phallic became a widely known and understood and overly bandied term, understood by all but the most ignorant. How could the feminists have missed this vital equalizer? All I could think up was "vaginal." But this is clearly not a good opposite. How could I ever discuss Georgia O'Keefe again? No one in my party knew. Nor did any of the tightly packed-in art gazers who were forced to overhear my question.

When we got back to the condo, the midget pirate did her wonderful trick of getting what she wants and forced Google to tell her the secret answer.
The female counterpart to phallic is yonic. Let everyone know. You know, spread the word. Yonic. Yonic. Yonic.

Here it is in question and answer form on the Random Houses Word of the Day.
Here is a clever picture on the yonic pool on Flickr.
Here's a slightly more in depth look.

Ready and Not.

2006-09-05T18:13:00.000-05:00

Not that most of you would ever know the difference, but. These are not my cows. I have never seen this fog. It’s just a good picture of some cows in some fog, which happens often enough here to be representitive. (I stole it from these guys.)

Local girl pointed out that the seasons are turning. Leaves dying slow. The Sun failing to appear until he’s good and ready. Me no likey. I’m not ready to run the silo. I’m not ready to unload my herd to manageable feeding levels. I’m not ready to be forced into mowing down hay that still isn’t ready just because there is literally no mo time left. I’m not ready for my cousin and sister to return to their land of hire education. My fences aren’t all fixed. My roof is still askew. I’m not ready.

I am ready, however, for fall. Because Autumn is the best season. Piling blankets on the bed to sleep in a cold room. I’m ready. Trees looking their best. I’m ready. Hot cider. Bonfires. I’m ready. Halloween. Harvest moons. Long underwear. I’m ready.

Moses says to Noah "We shoulda dugga deepa one"

2006-09-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

All the water at the main farm starts at the spring. It moves laterally over to the basement of the old farmhouse. From there it is pumped and pressurized and split. One pipe for the house, one for the barns. The cows need an unfreezable water source in winter. The Watering Hole customers need their delicious watery nectar. The old dairy barn demanded gallons upon gallons of water for the cleaning of dirty animals. About three weeks ago cousin Brad noticed that we had a new little stream appearing from nowhere and running though the barnyard. One of the 30yr old pipes had failed.

“Dig down and find it and uncover both ends and replace it.” says my Dad blithely. Because it’s so easy when you say it. Pipes are laid two and a half or three feet down to keep them from freezing in the winter. The split occurred at the old barnyard entrance. Where for years and years tractors laden with hay and shit drove back and forth, requiring load upon load of gravel in place to keep from forming a giant mudhole just there. So topping off the completely sticky Ohio red clay was a four inch frosting of an exceedingly well compacted gravel and dirt mix.

It took the two of us (and we are nothing if not strapping) young lads two days of shoveling and spud-barring and mattocking and post-hole digging to unearth the twenty-one foot length of pipe-to-be-replaced. Rusty helped. It was about 2:30 pm on the second day when we had revealed it all. It was then we realized that we knew nothing about replacing a pipe. On cue, Rusty’s dad stops by and tells us. And leaves us with an entirely necessary pipe cutter. Sometimes the gods are watching.
We went to the local hardware store and were convinced of the merits of plastic. I’m sure my dad will be less than impressed if the plastic does in fact not last another thirty years. ah well.

Cow Bio - Maynard

2006-08-24T19:22:00.000-05:00

It was a mistake to remove Mackenzie from the herd. All bovines gladly follow other cud chewers who are going anywhere. But when none move, all bovines will ever more gladly stand in a pack and moo merrily at you to tell you that they are hungry or thirsty or sweaty or bored with not mooing. The problem is encouraging that original mover to move. Mackenzie was the only cow in the herd that had processed the fact that when I was in the field with her, she must move from point A which was newly nude of grass to point B which was lush with the stuff. Everyone else had only picked up on the fact that my presence meant fresh grass, the moving to getting it part had them all totally waffled.

So for the last 7 weeks I've had a hell of a time training the new leader to fill Mac's shoes. The new mover and friend of me is Maynard.
There isn't anything to tell about Maynard. She's a she. She has a white spot on her forehead. She leads the herd.
I think Maynard is an abysmal name. Local Girl thinks it divine. I associate the name with a savory character from F'town, Maynard Knuckles. She associates the with a certain lead singer from Ravenna, Maynard James Keenan. So this cow was elected to carry the name to determine which of us has drawn the correct conclusion.

For All You Homophobes Out There.

2006-08-23T16:46:00.000-05:00

Focus on the Family. Dr. James Dobson.
Bad stuff, that.

So it turns out that you can buy stuff on a page of theirs for a "donation." Here's how to donate nothing and receive such wonderful literature as The Parents Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. My personal favorite is Strength For His People: A Ministry For Families of the Mentally Ill.

I stole the following how-to from childsizedhands at sensible erection:

Here's how to do it:

1. Go to family.org and you will see their home page.

2. Once you're at the home page, look for the "Resources" link in the blue bar on the left-hand side, right above the "Search" box, and click it.

3. Under the "Resource Category" menu on the left-hand side, you'll notice categories such as "Homosexuality." Go ahead and click that for shits and giggles.

4. It's time to start shopping! Scroll down a little bit and feel the homophobia flow. How about a nice copy of A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality? Go ahead and click the "Add to Cart" button.

5. Now comes a tough decision: Do you have the book sent to yourself so you can sell it on eBay for cash (my personal favorite) or do you keep it on your mantel as a high-larious conversation piece to point at and laugh when your friends and family come over? Or do you send it to a jerk? I always opt for sending it to myself. Yes, you may end up on the Focus on the Family mailing list (though I've been doing this for some time and have never received anything beyond what I ordered), but reading Focus on the Family's junk mail is a good way to keep tabs on their activities and it will cost them even more money in postage.

Please note: Focus on the Family won't send you more than $100 worth of materials for free in any given shopping trip, so be sure to keep it reasonable and return often.

6. Select "Add New Shipping Address" and click "Proceed to Checkout." Or, hell, continue to shop and pick up a box set of The Chronicles of Narnia on CD.

7. The next screen will ask you to sign up for an account and give your information. Don't worry, they don't ask for your credit-card number. Enter whatever name and address you like, because you won't be paying.

8. Once you've filled out all the required fields (you can also create a fake e-mail account if you're super paranoid), click "Proceed to Checkout" one more time. You'll now find yourself at the "Here Is Your Cart" field. Annoying thing alert: You may have to reenter your info again after this field to actually set up your account. But just keep going until you get to the "How Much Would You Like to Donate?" page.

9. So, how much would you like to donate? Zero dollars, obviously. Don't be fooled by the field in the lower-right-hand corner that shows you the suggested donation amounts. Simply select "Enter other total amount" and enter 0.00 as the amount you would like to pay. (Don't put in a dollar sign or it will ask you for credit-card information!) Proceed to checkout.

10. You'll now be led to a screen that will try to make you feel guilty about the amount you haven't donated. But don't feel bad! Just proceed to checkout again.

11. Jesus! Here you are on the twelfth step and you still don't have your self-hatred materials! And you thought preventing homosexuality was supposed to be easy! Click "Checkout Now" and you're done.

Congratulations!

You have just removed a few dollars from the coffers of a major anti-gay organization.

Drew On A Farm.

2006-08-14T19:04:00.000-05:00

I never speak in third person. Too many Drews.
My roommate from freshman year Drake was named Drew. Still is. Came out to visit the farm a couple of weeks ago. Then he wrote the following post for you:

Stupid MapQuest. I was fairly confidant that Drew’s farm was within 15 miles of my position. But that didn’t mean I could get there. Lost on the back roads of Ohio, I finally cry “Uncle” and call Drew’s cell phone. No answer. Punk. So I drive back to Ye Olde McDonalds to wait for his return call. An hour later and I am on the farm, meeting the herd. There’s the McCoy herd and there’s the animal counterparts. McCoys: Drew, Mom, little sis. Four-legged folk: Father Abraham, Fat Joe, Darwin, etc.
I am told that Fat Joe is not named for his considerable size. Which is fairly immense. My typical interaction with such eatable creatures takes place in the chilled aisles of the local Cub Foods. Up close, one of these hulking creatures could feed me for a month. When approached, Fat Joe has a tendency to lean back. Hardy-har-har. Father Abraham managed to sire well after his supposed castration. The names provide levity to an already hilarious herding evening. Herding, as demonstrated by Drew, is a very loosely applied term. With an armful of hay, Drew enticed the herd to follow him across the pasture, over the creek (through the woods), and into the barn. Not exactly the smartest of hulking creatures. Darwin, the trusty herding dog, did far less herding than distracting, and Fat Joe decided to follow him to the right instead of trailing that tasty hay.
Eventually, Drew and I (mostly Drew) managed to get the cows to the edge of the creek. At which point there was the small matter of crossing the creek. Drew, with his long legs and nimble leaps, cleared that strip of gurgling water. I, on the other hand, grunted an attempt and managed to drag my back foot through a foot of brackish water, stumbling to a graceful 10 point landing on the opposite bank. I giggled. The cows did to. Just to prove his farmhand superiority, Drew hopped back over the creek to seduce the bovines and, once they started to mush across the creek bank, he sailed back over the water with them.
We squired the cows into the barn and Drew announced that we needed to pick out a big one. For slaughter the next morning. Awesome. This selection involved more than a little running around the shit-strewn barn floor trying to sequester a single cow in a separate pen. Mischief managed, with cow doo all over the rubber boots, I felt quite farm-y.
The next morning, I met the breeding herd. When I thought I met the big-uns the previous day, I was oh-so-wrong. Those couple a bulls are massive. The relatively small calves decided to throw hissy confusion fits and get themselves on the wrong side of an electric fence. So Drew and I participated in a little strategic boxing-in to convince the calves that they wanted to use the single access point into the pasture. Success. Later that day, Drew needed to ascertain the height of his silo. So I climbed that tall-ish iconic farm structure with a piece of twine looped through my belt.
For a change of pace, Drew and I bounded into town to buy an oil filter for my car and shop a bit at the local Goodwill for cheap, slightly used junk. Drew found an ancient American flag. The original box featured the advertisement, “Now! With 50 Stars!” I located a slightly less ancient cook book entitled, “Cooking for Two!” The inside cover featured the following catchy phrase, “ideal for the busy career girl or housewife.” I informed the dumpy but kindly checkout lady that I wasn’t sure which one I was yet. My tsunami of gayness sailed right over her coiffed head. Drew changed my oil. I stood around as the moral support and “grab the orange rubber thing” guy.
On the last night of my Ohio farm stay, the Knox County Fair beckoned any and all with its siren call of fried food goodness and mullet hunting. Together with Drew and Rusty, I toured the antique tractors, the 4H exhibition hall, and the Knox County Farm Museum. However, the real treat was the Tuff Truck competition. I’m not sure if it is technically call “Tuff” truck. But it’s “Tuff” truck to me. Suped up, or deconstructed down, trucks made their roaring ways around a dirt track to the exclamations and squeals of a crowd of hundreds…maybe even thousands. My favorite part of the course was “The Cave” – a sizable divot in the track that unwary drivers would dive into, bounce off the opposite side, and forcibly kill their engines. I purchased, and devoured, fried swiss cheese, a porkette, and a funnel cake. While munching, an extra special truck, with “I s(heart) Jesus” spray painted on the side, rolled up to the starting line, revved its engine, went careening around the track, and smacked its hot religious body smack into that Cave wall. Poor Jesus.

SoaP.

2006-08-14T19:00:00.000-05:00

No one gets it. That includes you, Sammy J.

I wandered over to Google News the other day. Under entertainment I found the Snakes on a Plane had merited enough articles to make it onto the front page. I read a couple.

These people have no idea what they’ve created.
New Line Cinema thinks that they are responsible for the hype.
So many interviews with people associated with this film telling about what they did to make it the cultural phenomenon it became. The PR people think they did it. The director thinks he did it. Sammy J even thinks he’s partially responsible because he forced them to keep the working title. This guy thinks he did it. Well, he probably did.

You’re all wankers. It’s a meme. No one knows why some things slow burn into everyone’s mind. Stop pretending you had something to do with it. It was a ridiculous idea for a shit film. Perfectly ridiculous, it made some internet types smile. Smiling internet types like to spread the love. Hence the anticipation. That is all.

Trim Your Nails.

2006-08-11T18:01:00.000-05:00

We kept one cow back after shuffling them all through cow jail. She'd been the last cow anywhere for a while because one of her hooves had spiraled upwards to form a sort of jester's boot, causing her a bit of pain. These things happen sometimes.
My dad had recommended that I secure her as well as I could and take a grinder to it. But I asked the vet while he was there and he offered me to borrow his toenail clippers:I opted for the clippers. It was still a bit discomforting. She's better now, but certainly not fixed.

Cow Jail.

2006-08-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

Today was hard. As much work was accomplished on the farm as has been on any other day since I’ve been home.

Part One.
Wherein the steers outsmart me.

Wednesdays are auction days. Seeing as I have a shortage of hay to feed my cattle, I must artificially create a remarkably similar shortage in my cattle come fall. My trailer holds about five full grown beasties. Eight trips in one day is not possible, so on any given Wednesday I’ll try to take three or four to market. Yesterday Brad and I took a good bit of time to do what I had never before done. We took the biggest four steers from the entire herd. Usually it’s get as get can. If you stand too close to the holding area, your life may be forfeit. It was effort, but worthwhile knowing that the biggest would be going.

Calves can be taken to auction the night prior to the sale, but neither water nor feed are provided. 24 hours without water is too many. So I try to take them in on that morning, have them separated out the night before. When I got to the barn at 6:30 in the AM, I saw that the separate and not at all equal calves had decided to walk through a barn wall. Allowing the rest of the herd to be in the barn, allowing the four fatties to wander free.

Bah. I was not happy.

Part Two.
All you Global Warming naysayers can kiss my sweaty knee butter.

Thursdayish, I noticed that I had a momma cow with a bleary eye. About twenty minutes later I had discovered that a couple of calves were quite blind of eye infections too. I heaved a sigh. Pinkeye has an ugly head. It was rearing. I pretended that it would go away and didn’t do anything till Monday.

Called the Vet and said, “Hey, we’ve got pinkeye in the herd. One momma and maybe six or eight calves.” And he said, “Yeah? So does everybody, whatcha want me to do about it?” I said, “Fix it.”

So we set a date. Wednesday afternoon he would come and help me shoot my pinkeye’s beauts. This sounds simple. But, my herd is about 95ish head large now, Mommies and Toddlers. They live in the outsides. They are wild animals. You can’t walk up and stick a needle in their neck. They won’t allow it.

So, cow jail.
My dad built this beefy mother of a corral into the ground floor of the bank barn at my Aunts. Ten hinged gates made of actual 2x4s (actual in this sense meaning that the one dimension measures 2 inches and the other measures 4 inches) bolted together for separating and a chute that leads to two holding pens and a headgate that is approached only through a series of four vertically opening gates. Cow jail. It’s badass. But it’s also a hellish day to send 100 unwilling participants through it. Twice.

The little calves weigh now as much as me. The mothers are all over one thousand pounds. None of them is much smarter than your average smart oak tree.

Oh, and also, it turned out I didn’t have six or eight and one mother that was infected. It was more like FOURTY-ONE cows and calves (and one bull) that had become infected.

Everyone came out bruised. But it’s done. They’re shot. And now I owe a vet somewhere nears to a cool grand.

You’re all like, yeah, but what did global warming have to do with anything? Heat, humidity, flies, pinkeye. That is all.

.

2006-08-07T18:45:00.000-05:00

Today Darwin died. It was my fault and all I have are excuses. No, I don't want to talk about it.

Lost Forever.

2006-08-04T11:17:00.000-05:00

Our house receives many a farm publication. We have not looked for magazines that actually pertain to what we do. Instead we get crap like FarmJournal, which runs with the byline “production policy technology.”
In boredom, I sometimes flip through. The other day I ran across an article about long-term weather forecasting. The opening paragraph:

Farmers 100 years ago watched animal behavior as a sign of what was to come weatherwise, and for years, agriculturalists have trusted the Farmer’s Almanac which uses mathematical and astronomical formulas to make forecasts as far as two years in advance. Now, the science of predicting weather has undergone revolutionary changes, with advances in computer technology helping meteorologists fine-tune the probabilities of longer range forecasts.

Technology will save us all. <---sarcasm
What I wouldn’t give to have the pre-industrial knowledge of generational farming communities when it comes to things like the weather. The author compares this knowledge with that found in the estimable Farmer’s Almanac, that treasure trove of unadulterated made-up rube-colored bull shit. No no no no. People, when they live a certain way for a long time, learn things. Wisdom is gained. Not bits that can be fed into a database, not information, but wisdom. They could see things we don’t know to even look for. There was at one time known more about farming than there is now.

We only have the tiniest glimmers of what was known, mostly in the form of questionable at best wive’s tales and rural lore. The thickness of the band on a wolly-worm to predict the severity of the winter to come. Red sky at night. Knee high.

Steve Talbott was once my hero. He’s on my sidebar under goodness. He used to edit a (now defunct) newsletter. He opened my eyes to many a thing I had previously blissfully left unthunk. He started with contextual science and expanded from there. Here is one article that deals with the Bushmen and what and why they know it. Here is a second article from the same publication. Lowell Monk is the author. It’s less directly related to this issue, but is more generally a critical view of our unadulterated love of improving efficiencies through tweaking technology to serve our needs.

I want the Bushman’s understanding. I want a blind man’s sense of perception. I want to know what other before me took thousands of years to know. But those things are lost. We didn’t want them. Traded them in for shiny trinkets. Beads for Manhattan and all that. We’re the world-uninformed Indians in this trade.

What Is An Entendre Anyway?

2006-08-01T20:31:00.000-05:00

Farming goes on. The heat makes things wither. But not dry out.

In the face of not having anything to say, here is an article making some commentary on advertising, for those of you my origional intended readers. I understand it's common to supply a small quote to intice you to read further, to click my link, so here:

To quote Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there." The ad requires all the cultural competence of a horny ninth grader.

That should do the trick.
Click This Link to Find the Above Quote in Context.

Redneck Fun.

2006-07-28T14:05:00.000-05:00

It’s fair week. The county shuts down and everyone piles into a car and they go to the fairgrounds to eat Porkettes and elephant ears and to mingle with their neighbors and to show off 12 year old ass and to look at antique tractors and to smell the livestock barns and to watch the tractor pulls and to dunk the 4H kids and to listen to 2nd string country singers croon and to get generally dirty.
My college roommate was visiting me so we and Rusty headed in on Wednesday night to catch the Tough Truck competition. And to eat Porkettes. And to mingle…

Tough Truck was at one time regulated to a far corner of the fairgrounds and only a couple twenty trucks ran. But it became too popular and is now in contention with the demolition derby for most mullets in attendance. Tough Truck is now a grandstand event. It’s a dirt course that has 5-6 main obstacles on it. A giant hole that must be driven through, some jumps in succession, offset bumps, and a giant ramp.Your truck is judged on two things, time through and distance launched off the end ramp. This year there were about 80 trucks running. Most were beaters, slapped together just to run the thing. Broncos, Jeeps, Toyotas and Fords. There were about 6 trucks that had serious money and know-how in putting them together. They were no longer recognizable as any brand. Just a fabricated frame with a lightweight body slapped on top. And serious suspension systems. Then there were a couple less likely vehicles. A Ford Explorer. A tuck with the frame on body backwards. A hot rod. A flatbed duelly with two kegs strapped onto the back. And this beauty.

Bet my Wednesday night was more fun than yours.

Unsettled.

2006-07-28T12:53:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long strange week.
Various emotionally laced relationships disrupted. It’s hot. People losing their jobs. People failing out of school. Dad was sent to the hole, briefly. People breaking up. It’s been humid and hot. It’s hard to sleep well. It had been a long time since I’d been in any real relationship. Recently I met a local girl. My farm responsibilities are piling up. Fences to mend. Barns to re-roof. Hooves to trim. Storm-felled trees to clean up. Hay to move. A house to paint. Another house the needs to be renter-ready soon. And it’s hot.
Gnarls Barkley tell me there’s a storm coming. But it seems to just be boiling on the horizon. Not coming any closer, just sitting.

Up till now I had been pretty secure in the fact that I’ve been doing well for myself as a farmer. Things are breaking, but I’m not too far behind. The first cutting of hay was completed. I found a car. My beef brought in more money than expected. Less baby calves died this year, than in the previous ones. No hunters had harassed me in the woods. I could do this shit.
Up till now.
My dad called on Monday night. In his last letter he asked how many bales I got out of first cutting. But I had told him in the last letter I wrote. 166.
He had thought that that number was the number of bales I got out of the wheat hay fields. Three of eight fields. This was bad.
I need about 800 - 900 bales of hay entering winter, it turns out. Five to six of those need to come out of first cutting. I don’t even have a third of that. No one knows why.
So here’s my first real problem. And it’s been roiling in my stomach all week on top of all this. My mom tells me that I shouldn’t worry, that it’s not my fault. Firstly, I don’t know that this isn’t my fault. Even if it isn’t, it’s my fucking responsibility. Somehow things went wrong.

Cow Bio - Crazy

2006-07-24T17:17:00.000-05:00

We have two cows which look quite similar. One gave birth over a month ago. The other was more recent. The day she did give birth, she did it just minutes before I had shown up to move them to the next paddock. The wet, and none too aware calf was sitting at her feet. When I managed to encourage the rest of the herd to move on, the mother had a visible war going on in her head. Newly found maternal instincts waged on against herd mentality. The herd initially won out and she scampered to follow everyone else.
Which left her little calf. He was unaware enough and small enough that I was going to pick him up and carry him over to her in the next pasture. An easy enough fix. I carried him like a puppy, upside down and legs all aflail. When I got him over to the creek and fence he started to realized that being carried was not natural and started bawling his head off. This brought his mother and twenty other concerned bovines running my way, with the full intent to dismember me and feed me to the crickets. Point being, I saw this calf. I carried this calf. I knew this calf.

The next day, I didn’t notice him with the herd, but I wasn’t concerned, as calves scampering in amongst 45 times four cow legs are easy to miss. The next day, I also did not notice him. And the next. But four days after he was born my cousin calls me up to tell me that one of the two identifiable cows has just had a calf.
But that can’t be. The one had one ages ago. The other gave birth four days earlier. A newborn and a four-day old are very discernable. So, I told him as much. But he stuck by his story, that it was fresh and wet all wobbly-legged.
Indeed the calf was back with the herd. My only guess is that he didn’t like being born and went back inside his mother for a few more days. After she birthed him again she wouldn’t let him back in. This is my theory.
His name is Crazy.

Barn Storm.

2006-07-22T17:02:00.000-05:00

More abuses of weather. This summer has been rife with crazed weather. A second, mid-Ohio, grassfed farming blogger has been noticing too.
On Thursday yet another violent storm passed through. Lightning struck the main bank barn up at my Aunt's end of the farm. Hit the disconnected lightning rod, arced across to a 4x6 support beam and exploded. Blew out a sizable chunk of siding. The barn didn't burn down only due to the fact that it was raining buckets at the moment.
Some of you may be wondering why we wouldn't have the lightning rod connected to the ground, you know, to make it work properly. Well, our insurance adjustor wouldn't insure a barn with a properly connected lightning rod, because "lightning rods attract lightning."
Takes all kinds.

Vote With Your Mouth.

2006-07-20T14:01:00.000-05:00

One reason we sell our meat as grass-fed organic freezer-beef to people around here who want such things, is that they’re worth more that way. Money. Now, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have high prices, in fact we came up with our prices by going to the local meat-store and fixing them to be the same as other local (but not-grassfed and not-organic) beef. You can have theirs. Or you can have ours which is better for you and safer and tastier. Not that this argument convinces enough people.
See, we have only so much pasture, only so many bales of hay. We must sell as many calves (approximately) as we have born in a year. And currently demand is not such that this is the result. So occasionally I must cull my herd to a more reasonable and manageable size.
There is a weekly livestock auction the next town over. I load my trailer and haul them down. No questions are asked. The auction is purely: what you see is what you get. About noon that same day all the livestock is walked through one at a time and bid upon. Our cows, being healthy and well fed, look very skinny and old when placed next to the grain-finished steroid-huffing beefs from around the county. It’s exactly like those shiny swollen softballs that grocery stores insist are a variety of apple call Red Delicious. I’ve had a Red Delicious. They are small, not all that red, really, and, uh, delicious. Those softballs have a thick wax skin covering some sort of appleish flavored foam. In among this foam are brown deposits of flavorless sugar-water. Mmm. The beef surrounding my beefs at auction are the same way. They are Barry Bond’s turgid biceps. Their heads are shrunken because they are so much younger and practically force-fed, which, as any economics major could tell you, makes perfect sense. The faster you get them big, the less time it takes before they’re marketable.
This is my round-about way of explaining why my cows go for very little on an auction block. They look like slow-growers. They are. They look like they aren’t loaded with fat. They aren’t. No one wants that crap. Or, at least, no one who processes your food for you wants that crap.

Which is why we sell them directly to the public as much as possible. It’s only the informed denizens who deserve our meat. And we can’t make a profit selling them to the meat-purchasers of Knox County.

Lit Dervish.

2006-07-19T09:58:00.000-05:00

The last two books I read.
Purple America. One eventful weekend of a family in Connecticut.
The Accidental. One eventful summer of a family in the UK.
Both are recommendable. Both are critically acclaimed beyond what I would say. Which is that they were both somewhere in the range of Middling-Good trending towards Good-Good on my newly invented scale of book.
Strangely, they were both written from multiple perspectives, one per chapter. I hadn’t come across a book capable of handling such a gimmick since Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Sometimes the world throws coincidences at you. Sometimes the coincides are so utterly mundane that you’re wondering why I’d even bring up such a point.

WTF Volume Three

2006-07-14T17:47:00.000-05:00

For those of you who missed the first instructions:
This is a Thing Found on the Wotokahan farm. If you are the first, or just eventually the nearest in your guess, you get a prize. If your guess is wrong, but I like it, you get points. Now get you WTF on, mate.

Update
We have a winner. See inside for details.

Learnsings.

2006-07-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

My dad holds a low opinion of my ability to wield tools and fix machinery. He came by his opinion quite appropriately, for as a child I would avoid work as much as was possible; on a farm, half the work is wielding wrenches. Of course, now I must get things done. And wrenches I do wield.
Mechanical ability is one part the logical ability to figure out how things come apart and go together in space, one part deciding on and finding the correctest tool to do it, and one tiny part the ability to use the tools. The coming apart and going back together part seems to me to be mostly experience. I usually stop one step short or go too far in my dismantling, both ending with frustration. The tool choosing part is also mostly experience, with a small bit of creativity. If you can imagine a specific tool, someone somewhere makes it. And if you don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it, it’s usually possible to create a crude facsimile from others tools in any well stocked shop. Tools are neat. And, most any monkey could use most of the tools we do.
So if you boil that all down, yeah, I’m of the opinion that mechanical ability is mostly knowledge and experience. Of which I have only so far a little of. But anyone could create their own, given the time, effort and necessity/want. It’s a great skill to have, and anyone could have it, really.

There are two skills I should have as a farmer. The ability to weld and the ability to use a cutting torch. I have neither. Yesterday my friend’s dad introduced me to MIG welding. MIG I like. Which is too bad, because all I have is a stick welding system.

Your Mom.

2006-07-11T14:56:00.000-05:00

In high school I had a smart friend. One of those summers Karl was sent to smart-kid camp. The most rewarding of the smart kids to dos was the creation of a game. Each camper came up with their own and then they tested it out.. Karl’s game never made it home. It was probably an uninspired and hokey thing. But he was a smart kid, like I said, so he brought home the best game created by a fellow camper. This fellow camper, it is rumored, was even smarters than the Karl. She called the game was Shingles. We call it Your Mom.

Your Mom is mostly derived from the categories card of King’s Cup.
Three (four is better) or more players sit in a circle. All the cards from a deck are dealt evenly. Use two decks if there is an excessively large number of players.
Every player chooses a category. Every other player at the table has absolute veto power over every other players choice.
Category examples: Teams. Shoe brands. Things found in the bush. Things found in a truck-stop bathroom. STDs. Curse words. Racial slurs. Animal noises. Parts of a plane. Things Rusty has groped. Smells. 80s Bands. Catchphrases. Hairstyles. Things that land soft. Sexual positions. Assassins. Wars. Nations. States. Places to pierce your body. Famous gays. Names for a penis. Drugs. Things that melt. Night sounds. People who have made the world worse. Famous horses. Show tunes. Russian authors. World leaders. Things you pet.

Once everyone has settled on a category, You go around the circle twice and clearly state your category. Here play starts and you are no longer allowed to mention anyone’s (or your own) category aloud. Someone plays a card in front of themselves, from their facedown deck. The next person plays their card in front of themselves. And so on. You play your next card on top of your last, making a pile of face-up cards in front of yourself.
When a face-up card is paired, the two players with matching cards must name something from the other person’s category. Whoever is first with a correct and yet unused answer is the winner of the match and gives his/her face-up pile to the loser, who places these new cards at the bottom of his/her facedown deck. Once you have played your last card on your face-up pile, you leave it down and wait for a match to appear. Whoever is completely out of cards first is the winner of the game.

Extra rule: When a player at the table plays a match on themselves (they play an 8 and their last card showing was an 8) it is everyone at the table versus the person with the pair. The category for both sides is the paired person’s. If the person with the pair wins, they give their played cards to whomever they wish. If anyone else wins, they must pick up their own cards. In both instances the pair is broken up within the deck.

I wanted these rules online. Now they are.
If you have played and remember some awesomtastic categories, please put them in the comments. If you’ve never played and think you have a genius category contribution, do the same.

Fin.

2006-07-11T12:47:00.000-05:00

First cutting hay two thousand six is in the ~~books~~ barn.
I’m on someone’s good list, as everything that broke waited until the very last bale to do so.
Big Johnny cut through her battery wire and shorted out a pair of mind-bogglingly expensive batteries. And her starter kicked it.
The baler snapped it’s PTO shaft and I’m not too certain if it’s going to be possible to weld it back together.
Little Johnny has been running exceedingly hot and I need to find out why. I usually have a water bottle with me on the tractors and the only place available to store stuff on LJ is in the battery compartment. If you combine a hot day with running LJ hard your water comes close to boiling. Quaffing unflavored hot tea does not quench one’s thirst. Yesterday morning as I was tedding the last field I could smell rubber burning, but I couldn’t see any neighbor’s burning their tires. A minute later a giant plume of white smoke came pouring from the battery compartment. I killed the tractor and threw open the cover to see that the grease gun that I had stuck in had passed it’s combustion point.

But nothing real exciting in farming has happened. Just a small grease fire. So here’s a rant.

<>
Anger issues run in my genes. Mostly I just simmer. Recently I’ve discerned one particular thing that rankles me to no end. It’s insincere commiseration. Or maybe not even insincere, but more when the person can’t, whether they’d like to or not, understand.
My mom likes to know how my day went. I don’t like to tell her. She wants to know if thing went as planned, or if I broke down. My answers are as monosyllabic as I can manage. If it did go well, I don’t need her small noises of happiness to cheer me on. If it didn’t go well, there is no way she could understand what that means, and there’s no way to explain it to her. She cares, but not enough to pay attention to that. It would be easier if it was just me getting frustrated with problems or being thrilled when I get something fixed or finished.
The other night my mom told the rest of the fam that I had successfully gone through two heavy hay days with zero problems. Everyone made little murmurs of congratulations(?). Not that I outwardly reacted, but it burned me.
Maybe it’s wrong of me to feel this way. But I don’t think it’s to be helped.
<>

How a Bill Becomes a Law.

2006-07-06T20:59:00.000-05:00

The oral arguments of my fathers appeal were heard today by the panel of three appeals judges.

Here’s how an appeal works, from my understanding. The lawyer for the losing side finds legal minutiae from the trial itself which could possibly have swayed the outcome of the trial. He sweeps all these tiddly bits into a little pile and writes a paper proclaiming “My client deserves a hearing!” The winning lawyer write a paper that says “Naw he doesn’t, and shaddup you.”
The god of Justice comes down and disapproves less to one of these lawyers. In our case, the lawyer and his “shaddup you”ings was the more disapproved of.
At that point the onus is upon the losing side’s lawyer to write many a paper asking and begging for more time. And when whoever he is writing is finally fed up with the procrastinating, the lawyer must finally produce a brief. In this brief he a) regales the reader with the “facts of the trial” in the most ridiculously biased a way possible b) argues the main points of improper or flawed legal maneuverings from the trial and c) includes a bibliography of cases which agree with him.
Now is the time for the winning lawyer to dream up reasons for postponing his rebuttal. Months go by. After the increasingly shrill requests for more time have been denied, he too must produce a brief which includes mostly the same stuff. a) But his facts don’t bear even a passing resemblance to the loser’s facts. In fact, passers-by may be forgiven for not recognizing them as originating from the same trial. b) His central thrust will be that everything, even if not exactly properly done, was fine. c) He will include also a bibliography of cases which agree with him.
These two briefs are sent to the appellate court system, more specifically, to the three judge panel (Ohio) which will oversee said case.
And then we all sit and wait and wait and wait for the judges to come around the circuit to hear the oral arguments. More lawyers request even more postponements. The purpose of the oral arguments is beyond me. Those same two lawyers who have taken the time and effort to write down their arguments are asked to stand in front of the panel to, uh, state their argument.
Then the panel has up to six months to decide anything.

Up until today, my entire courtroom experience had been sitting in the visitors section watching my dad’s (badly mangled) trial. Today I went back for the cliff notes version of the same damn thing. It was a good thing that it lasted far less than an hours time, for my body didn’t handle it well. My heart was k-thuddering and my hands were shaking. The whole ordeal just pisses me off without providing anything to lash out at. Watching the prosecutor lie, baldly and calmly is not something I can just sit and watch. Unless of course I’m in a position where all I can do is sit and watch.

Good news is, it went quite well. The judges had some snarky questions for the prosecutor and he fumbled them badly. Our new lawyer hit all the points he needed to hit was smooth, and made sense. My family left the courthouse with small hopes of a re-trial rekindled.

Viruses Cultivated in Brain Tissue.

2006-07-04T19:58:00.000-05:00

This is why I need access to The O.E.D.

The entirely too puny dictionary.com’s feeble offerings paired with the estimable Synonym Finder does not yield me enough meat with which to make a clever start to this post. I wanted to compare your ability, oft used, to enhance the bounds of your mind with my recent acts of clearing the corn fields of weeds by working the ground.
Etymology is a terrific beast, yielding much knowledge. The word cultivate comes from the past participle of the Latin word to till. Or at least, so says the American Heritage Dictionary, which is a pile of poop. It’s probably right, yes, but still.
English is a terrible language. But it is also awesome. It’s a ~~beautiful~~ kinda pretty if you look at her from the right angle thing to be able to twist ‘the act of clearing croplands to produce a better yield’ to mean to better your mental discrimination. That’s a solid leap of language logic.

To sum up. You improved yourself in some way. I did but drag some metal through the dirt. Yet we were both cultivating.

My corn crops require many passes of my tractor to allow the corn to grow without too much competition from everything else that would be growing there. Once with the plow, twice with the harrow, and hopefully multiple times with both the spider-hoe and cultivator. Most farmers nowadays prefer the no-till variety of row crop growth. Which cuts out most all of that [effort, labor, work, machinery] and replaces much of the weed destruction with chemical applications. But being organic and no-till is almost unheard of. Once again we do it the ~~old~~ tried and tested way.
A couple weeks after planting is the time for the spider-hoe. This machine sits on the back of the largest tractor and numerous groupings of metal wheels ride on the very top of the soil in-between the corn rows. If turning at a fast enough rate, the wheels rip up all the tiny plant roots and strew them across the surface where the sun dehydrates them to death before nightfall. The tractor is put into road-speed gear and I fly across the field at 25 mph trying my damndest to keep the wheels from hitting the corn. It’s a white-knuckle ride on a rickety wooden roller-coaster that only lacks up and downs and turns. Because the corn is hardly visible when I’m doing this, I look like a crazy hell-bent for speed hick joy riding his tractor back and forth across the fields.

Cultivating is similar in that I’m driving a tractor with a machine behind it trying desperately to keep from killing the corn. But this is done at the silly-slowest speeds imaginable because the tolerance between hitting corn and not is about two inches in either direction. And I’m digging up far more established plants with tiny little plows.
After cultivating you have improved your judgment and end up with superior taste and motives. The post-cultivating me has a field that look brown in-between the green.

Dillinger's Eyes.

2006-07-01T18:05:00.000-05:00

For the first time in my life, I own my car. For the first time in my life, I chose my car. Floyd is my 1984 Celica GT-S RA65L.

Meet the sexy sexy Floyd.

Cow Bio - Leon

2006-06-27T20:29:00.000-05:00

R.I.P.

My favorite calf goes to auction tomorrow morning.
When the calves were put out to pasture this spring Leon decided to befriend me. He's got a small problem with his hips that makes his back leg steps about half what the average cow steps. Rather than take more steps or speed his pace, Leon is just the last calf anywhere. He takes his sweet time. So I wait at the gate for him to saunter up. If he's hungry he'll walk on by. But more likely than not, he'll come up to me to wrestle. He usually wins. I pet him. He's my pet.

The present tense part of all that is a lie.

.

Abortion is Murder and Other Facts From the Midwest.

2006-06-26T13:38:00.000-05:00

The next storm on the 22nd didn’t miss us.

The previously sunny afternoon turned chill when a grey wall swung in from the west. It only lasted about twenty minutes, but they were a ferocious twenty. Eighty-ninety mile an hour winds destroyed the hay wagon and parts of two roofs on barns. The Quonset has destroyed all her moorings and has taken to walking around when the wind picks up. The power was out for 30+ hours.

Sitting on the front porch watching it, my mom asks, “What is going on?” The answer is us. After having a brief but frustrating conversation with a fellow farmer a couple of weeks ago on the topic, I had a half-formed idea to write a farmers review of An Inconvenient Truth. Put it in the local paper. Make the world a little less stupid. The next night I set out to see Al’s movie.
The movie only came out two weekends ago in Ohio. So it was rather disappointing to see only 15-20 people attending on a Friday night at 9pm. And a good half of those were the wierdos who last went to a cinemaplex to see Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s not a bad film, considering. But I could not in good conscience tell my rural neighbors that they will enjoy it. They won’t.
For those who really haven’t been paying attention, the movie is based on Al Gore’s slide show about global warming that he’s been giving for years upon years. It’s focus group polished which means it’s clean and shiny and dumb. Al gets hyper about things that, while the effects will impact us, we can’t see. Glacial ice melt will raise the water level. Whoopity fuck. I live in Ohio. We farmers need predictable rainfalls. Thaws and freezes at certain moments. Snow in winter as much as we need showers in April. It’s a complete ecosystem out here. For the most part, we get that. But it’s not what he talked about. Typhoons off the coast of Japan. Drought in china. Global CO2 charts.
My friend Chad had suggested that Inconvenient was preaching to the choir. I had kinda brushed that off, because, shit, this really affects us all. The naysayers need to be told to stop it with the sayings of nay. If there was ever an issue that should even need a larger choir, I can’t think of one. But, alas, he was right. Al went and made a movie that really tugs on the heartstrings of the people who were already the ones to care. All the Amnesty folks, greenpeacers, and adopters of AIDs orphans.

In the same way I can’t prove to my neighbors that gay people are ok by dragging them to a pride parade, I cannot ask them to see this movie to save their futures.
But you should.

Thunderstorms Are Swell.

2006-06-21T23:10:00.000-05:00

The fireflies aren’t getting any tonight. Their feeble butts just can’t compete with the sodium glare of Zeus arc welder. We mid-Ohioians take our celebration of the Fourth very seriously. But I’m sorry Columbus, the Red, White and Boom will appear stunted and fake and oh so human. Hot Karl! The gods put on their dancing shoes tonight.

Have you ever seen the lightening storms that have strikes six and seven times a second? Have you ever seen that last for an hour plus, unabated? It’s far enough away that the only noise is local traffic and a distant muted timpani roll. Nothing but hazy clear in the twenty mile from the front to my fields. Nothing to obscure the view of towering stacks of clouds fighting frantic with their glowing spider arms.

No laser shows. No fireworks displays. No televised Shock and Awe can compare with Nature when she’s feeling frisky.

Brown Is The New Green.

2006-06-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

Cows eat grass. Keep them out of certain fields. Once the fields have grown to a reasonable size, man goes in and hacks everything off a couple inches off the ground. Puts the grass in nature’s own food dehydrator. And takes the result. How cows ever found enough to eat in winter without us is beyond me.

Eight hay fields. Two corn fields. The calf pastures. The cow pastures. The bull field. A sliver of woods. With houses and outbuildings, that is Wotokahan Farm. As of Sunday four of the eight hay fields have been cut, baled and put away. Yay me.

Hay is time intensive. How all these hobby farmers manage to get it done is beyond me. We do our hay mostly old school. We wait for it to get really dry and then put it in round bales tied with twine and put those in the barn. Only mostly because the old school way is to do square bales that all need man-handled and stacked in the mow [pronounced like Mao. also a verb referring to the act of stacking in the mow.]. And the real old school haymakers use horses to do some of the tractor labor. And then even further thrown back are the Amish who don’t even make bales, but sheaves tied up with string. Don’t laugh, it’s still done.
There are ways to do it beyond how we do. Belt, not chain, balers wrap bales up super tight. There are various wraps and plastic bags that the bales can be put in, essentially weather-proofing them. No barns needed. When you’re wrapping them it’s not as important that you get the hay totally dry. Wet bales in a barn will produce enough heat to self combust and burn it all down. Wet bales in a wrap will mold.

Of the four fields, only one ended up being made properly. One was rained on and sat out far too long before it was baled. Most of the leaves were lost. The second field was not quite dry enough, but I didn’t catch it till Haley had already tedded and raked it for that day. So it was tedded back out and raked back up the next day. More lost leaves. The third field buggered the baler. So I only got it half done the day I first tried to bale it and it had to be turned over again the next day. The fourth field was done perfect excepting that I let it dry an extra day. But I had the forecast to allow for that.

WTF Volume Two

2006-06-19T18:32:00.000-05:00

Bambi's Mother Does Not Die.

2006-06-13T20:33:00.000-05:00

I was going to write a headline about hay fever, maybe include a reference to Peggy Lee, but I was looking at the word “fever” and I realized there is something not right about it. I don’t like it when words I had no beef with suddenly decide to look suspiciously spelled. f e v e r ? With the ver following the fe all casual like that? Not in my title.

And now for your regularly scheduled programming.
It’s hay time. Time for mowing. And tedding. And raking. And baling. And picking up bales. Oh, and cultivating the corn. Almost every machine has broken at least once. For instance: today the tire fell off the tedder and then the front wheel on the little tractor tried it’s damndest to wobble off and then the second of seven chains along the bottom of the round baler chewed it self up. To say anything more about these inconveniences would be boring, they don’t really matter. It’s just how it is.
Haley was driving the wobble-wheeled tractor when the tedder wheel came off. These things happen. Not her fault. This time. But, one of the great things about working with and for only yourself is that things only break in your presence, or when you notice them. When other people are there things will invariably keep on breaking, but it comes off completely different. Not only am I dealing with my problems, but with also with her incurred problems. I am not a team player. I hate teamwork. When carrying heavy furniture out of the house, I would rather lug something by myself then try to work with someone to get it out. Leave me alone. I’ll get it done. Remember group projects in high school? Yeah, I was that guy. On the day I was to start baling hay for the first time, my mom offered to call a neighbor friend to have his farm-smart and mechanically talented kids come help . I said hell no. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to do everything with the hay. So I have help. Brad comes back in a couple weeks. It’ll be nice to have the help, but he’s unintentionally going to be another creator of problems. And I have enough of my own to keep me content.

Mowing hay is satisfying. There are basically three machines for mowing hay (yeah, four if you count bush hogs). The newest, best designed way is to have a row of “turtles,” basically beefed-up lawn mower blades in a row. Mechanically simple. The next mower type has a long thin strip of toothed blades that move just a couple of inches back and forth real fast. These are sickle mowers. Our mower is the older, mostly ignored design for mowing. The flail. The cutditioner. The rotary scythe. No matter how you say it, it sounds badass. The PTO shaft spins a belt that spins a nine foot cylinder that is covered with swinging blades. It’s mostly unstoppable, but takes much more horsepower than the other two.
Now for the sad part, cover your inner child’s ears. There are too many deer in our county. Most of the natural predators have been driven off. The number of avid hunters is dwindling, as are the available spaces to hunt (see, for example, my dad). It’s an infestation. And around now, all the does drop their little Bambis. And, not to argue with the man, but this might be the cutest infestation ever. The little baby deers like to hide in the hay fields. I watched a couple do their little wobbly sprint away from the methodical advance of the scythe. And then I watched one not wobble away in time. It bogged down the mower for a couple of seconds.

What Utter Bull-Trap.

2006-06-13T20:32:00.000-05:00

Bulls are supposed to be returned to the breeding herd around June 7th. June plus nine is equals to calving on time. It’s a shame that those two words rhyme. Franz and Ferdinand had been hanging out in the swank and exclusive bull pen all spring. Out of sight and out of mind. They liked it that way. My dad has always rounded them up all on his lonesome. Years of working cattle and a complete lack of fear made it a simple task. For him.

The first night Rusty, Haley, my mom and the helpful neighbor lady spent about an hour and a half alternating between herding them to the corner of the lot where the livestock trailer sat and jumping out of their way when they ran at us. It was a complete failure. I might have mentioned aloud something along the lines of the bull being wholly unable to make it through the high-tensile fence. My bad.

The second night I recruited some manly, testosterone-filled men to help with the chasing and to have a lesser occurrence of all that ‘jumping out of the way’ nonsense. After an hour of the futile yammering and running after them Ferdinand had had enough. And calmly walked through the fence. Turns out, two thousand pounds of bull flesh goes where it wants. With Ferdinand out of the field it was a cinch getting Franz loaded.

Much more running and chasing of calves and bull ensued. Hours worth. Finally a neighbor with experience showed up and helped me direct Ferdinand into a barnyard. That was days and days ago. He’s still out in the same barnyard. I’ve made a bull trap out of some rope and the aforementioned trailer. I’ve also repeatedly flubbed the capturing my bull. All I can say I’ve accomplished is that I can get him to eat hay out of my hand while I pet his head (it’s covered in thick curly hair). I give him two more days before he walks through one of the fences currently holding him and goes a-rampaging and raping and pillaging the around countryside.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Centaur.

2006-06-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

So I sez to the guy, "Guy," I sez.

I don't really know this so-called William Ambrose. We have a number of mutual friends. His brother attended Drake. His living in Murderapolis overlapped a bit the my living in Murderapolis. I shook his hand twice.
His latest endeavor is to draw. He has found success. In spades. *

Click on one of the drawrings to take you to more drawrings.

*I'm told that the term 'in spades' refers to that fact that spades are the highest ranked suit in bridge. But this page tells me that might well be a load of hooey.

Six Six Oh Shit.

2006-06-06T21:36:00.000-05:00

Up until I picked up the paper this evening, I had completely forgotten the date. *sigh* Now I understand. I had perhaps the worst day of my life today. I blame Satan.

The badness actually started last night, but I didn’t know it yet.
I had decided that since only one out of four forecasts for the next three days called for even a 20% chance of rain, it would be wise to cut down a second field of hay. Halfway through, my foot slipped off the clutch and KRRRPACK! the PTO spun the mower drive shaft in two. Took that in stride. I’ve broken my share of farm equipment and this could have happened to anyone. Called a friend with welding skills and called it a night.

The sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year started off auspiciously. Sunny. Warm. But then I disassembled the PTO shaft and realized that welding it would be nigh impossible. I called my weldy friend to tell him to not come. Drove the shaft over to my local farm implement salvage yard to find a replacement. Under their advice, I cut my shaft in half to try to mate it to the one we had found. That didn’t work. So they sent me to find this Amish welder. All Amish live in BFE. The directions included finding a town called Nunda. It’s a mere eleven miles from my house yet I’ve never heard of it. That’s because Nunda consists of the following: an Amish horse farm, an intersection, and an Amish school (any Amish school you may be forgiven for mistaking for a dilapidated shed). After somehow missing the city limits I obtained new directions from a friendly young woman into whose van I had just driven my car. Her van was fine. My car was one half point (on the rusty’s uncle’s scale of junk car) away from becoming a beater Honda. Her split bumper grin hauls her across that line. It was my fault. I have excuses, but they are excuses. She drove away. My car didn’t even think about starting. As soon as I pop the hood to see just how screwed up she is a dirty pickup with two farm rednecks pulls up and asks, “car trouble?” After ten minutes and one pinched-in beer bottle cap I was on my way. I must admit, them rednecks have them some smarts. The girl with van’s directions were even worse. When I finally do find the Amish welder all he can do is grin helplessly and shrug. He didn’t have the collar I would need. Back to the salvage yard. The guy helping me had left to ted his hay. The owner told me that I was stupid to cut my shaft in half and showed me how I could have fixed it if’n I hadn’t. By now it’s getting late. I gave up on having a mower anytime soon and headed home.

Haley (sister, home from college, we’ll get to her later) had been waiting for an hour for me to come home to set my tractor and tedder up so she could ted while I plant corn. It’s been a while since she’s been shown how to drive a tractor. I set her up and sent her off with the warning, “Don’t hit anything.” She thought I was kidding and drove it straight KKKTHUNKKKK into a tree. I hadn’t even left the field. I stormed over and she says that she should probably learn to drive a tractor before being expected to do things on one. She’s probably right. I give her an hour to drive the tractor around.

And I go to plant my corn. The planter is all fixed. I’m proud of my handiwork, ready to get something accomplished. Drove it the half-mile back to the field. Noticed that the fuel gauge says I’m almost out. And then the chain slips off the drive. So I put it back. And then it slips off again. So I put it back. And then I drive the tractor and planter back to the fuel tank. I forgot the key to the diesel tank so I just chisel the lock off. Fuck it. I put the pump in the tank and walk down to get some water. I takes about 6-7 minutes for a tractor tank to fill by gravity. When I walk back three minutes later there is about $10 worth of diesel fuel spilling off the tractor. The gauge has busted. This is wonderful. I drove back to the field. The chain falls off. Again. Again. I drove back to the farm, fuming. I severely reinforced the piece that kept slipping and pile a bunch of tools on the tractor. As I walked into the shop to grind some rust off a bolt I think to myself, how could this day possibly get worse? Ten minutes later I heard a Thud and the grinder dies. I wandered outside to see if I could see the Thud. I could not.

My mom flags me down as I once again drive back to the field. Asks if I heard the explosion. Wha?? She was going on, something about blue smoke and the power going off and Haley walks up and says the electric line in the cow pasture fell into the swamp. The pole? No, just one strand of one line. Fell off the pole and went boom. Sure enough, my creek and the pasture the calves are supposed to be going to now are fully powered.Not my problem. Corn is my problem. Again I drive back to my field. The thoroughly reinforced piece lasted about ten minutes. I dismantled the gearing and rearranged the pieces. The chain only comes off one more time. My three hour job lasted seven. I will have nightmares of chains no longer moving.
When I got in to take my shower, my mom tells me that they changed the forecast to a 60% chance of rain tomorrow. So much for the hay.

For those of you who didn’t read the whole thing:

Broke my mower.
My idea to weld it doesn’t work.
Guy’s idea to cut it doesn’t work.
But now I’ve got to fix that.
Look for an Amishman who might help.
Get lost.
Crash my car.
Fix it with beer.
Find Amishman.
He’s no help.
Give up.
Show sister how to ted.
She runs the tedder into a tree.
I try to plant corn.
Repeatedly fix the same damn chain.
Pour fuel all over the ground.
Powerline falls down.
The hay will be wet.

As bad as my day was, it was nothing compared with Chucks day. He had his last testicle removed this afternoon. For ~~him~~ it, the music truly died today.

Man Up!

2006-06-02T15:54:00.000-05:00

Father Abraham bore unto us a dead Jesus. (I just wanted to say that again, cause it’s fun. Go ahead, try it.) But she presented a quandary, because, as I believe in no God, I couldn’t really put much weight behind theory that the Holy Ghost was responsible for impregnating my heifer. And as of yet, no human-bovine cross has been carried to term, so I can hardly ask that the local wandering minstrels be held in custody.
The first thought was that we had a bull in among the herd, one that somehow slipped his nut free of his circumcising band, all Houdiniesque. The next day I had the herd run by me as single file as I could manage. The steers have a tuft of hair in the center of their stomach, whereas the heifers have a more smooth lump. The heifers have tiny little udders and the steers are strangely smooth and void where their testicles should be all a-dangle. And then there was one steer who didn’t have an obvious package, but was sporting more equipment than I found necessary. Ah ha! It was Chuck. Chuck was my bull survivor who may have compromised as many as 40 heifers. I could almost taste him then. Delicious chuck of Chuck.
But I did the math in my head; Chuck was the same age as Father Abraham. Nine months ago, while Father should have been too young to be fertile, there was absolutely no way that Chuck was virile at five months of age. This was not Jesus’ father.
He still needed taken out of the herd. And have his manhood taken. Again. Rusty and I managed to get him separated. Called a neighbor with more experience than I have (absolutely none) with circumcision. I held up Chuck’s tail while Mark checked to see if there was enough dangle to allow us to band his remaining nut. There wasn’t. The vet had told me that that if that were the case I could take a razor and slit the sack, pull out the nut and cut it off. Mark warned me that it would bleed in a way I probably wouldn’t be comfortable with. I wasn’t. The vet will be out next week to do the deed. It takes more than a man than I yet am to take someone else’s manhood so brutally. I think I’m ok with that.

Doing the math again at a later date, we decided that Father Abraham was bred by Franz or Ferdinand, the breeding herd bulls. She was still with her mother and the bulls until late October. So hopefully she’s just a freak of nature who matured too fast and was lucky to not be crushed under the massive weight of the bull.

Having my heifers preggo is bad. Everyone wants to know why having a bull in among the girls is a bad thing. So here you go.
1- They are beef. I can not send a pregnant cow in to be slaughtered. That’s a wee bit inhumane. Half of them, while being physically of an age where they are in heat, they are not big enough to pass a calf without help. Just think about the girls who get their periods at ages 10, 11, 12. Yeah. First time births usually need help without that added bonus.
2 - If they were impregnated by Chuck, it was within the last couple months. So the calves would be born in November, December, and January. It’s cold then. I will have enough food for everyone, but not enough for everyone plus their calves.
3 - Pregnant heifers eat to provide growth and sustenance for their baby, they stop growing. The point of calves is simply that, to grow.

Cow Bio - Mackenzie

2006-06-02T14:53:00.000-05:00

ohio-made cohiba

The fine looking animal you see here is Mackenzie. Named for obvious enough reasons. If I could find a pair of giant 80's sunglasses, I would insist she wear them. Like her namesake, Honey Tree Evil Eye (Spuds was a stage name), she's a she. And she takes a damn fine picture.

Mackenzie would be a face lost among the herd if it weren't for her one difference. Even though she doesn't deign to being pet she is usually the first calf into the next pasture. The dairy herd I grew up with needed herded from place to place. You stood opposite where you wanted them to go and hollered your head off. They would slowly move directly away from you. My beefs will do no such thing. If you stand near them and threaten them with shouted soliloquies they will walk in circles. But if you don't do that, sometimes they will follow you. They have discovered that a human must appear for a new pasture to magically open itself to them. There are limits to things they will cross to get to a person. Creeks baffle them. Mackenzie, more than any other calf will cross these obsticles to come to me. And until I find a real working dog, I need her. Three cheers.

There is a rumor that Spot, the Target brand bull-terrier is one of Spuds Mackenzie's offspring.

New Life Sprang all Weak-like.

2006-05-30T19:23:00.000-05:00

Sunday was a day of burning all the skin off my back while spider harrowing the two corn fields. I going to not give you a picture of a spider harrow in this space just so you can imagine it. Skittering across the field on it’s hairy legs, eyes aglow.
Memorial day was supposed to be a repeat of Sunday excepting that I was to be planting the corn while burning my skin. By two I had one field done. By two thirty I had broken the planter. I broke her hard. When the machine is lowered to the ground, the two wheels engage a series of chains not unlike on a bike. The gears engaged feed the soil it’s breakfast of seed from each of the four planter boxes. A single hydraulic control picks the marker arms: (really, they’re wings. planters like to fly to Florida in the off season.) left right left right left. Simple simple simple.
I didna see the zerks on the clutch (mechanical device that sit on the wheel driven shaft to engage and disengage the planting action) assembly in my preplanting greasing. [As they tell it, the squeaky wheel gets all that cool delicious lubricating oil. They’re wrong. the squeaky wheel gets ignored and explodes. I’ve seen it happen. Take notice you whiners.] The clutch assembly on John Deere planters is hands down the most difficult part to replace.
John Deere engineers planter clutch assembly - F
John Deere engineers front loader removal - A+
Day one. Locate a replacement clutch. Loosen all chains, gears, clutches, sprockets and bearing collars from the shaft. Cut off unyielding bearing with torch. Call it a day.

I have never been a motivated individual. I’ve only ever daydreamed about having my priorities set straight. But here, things need done. Corn needs planted by a certain date (yesterday, actually). Hay needs started by a certain date (soon). Cows need to not run out of food. I have found some priorities now only because, unlike ever before, there exist things which I simply can not fail to do.
When asked what farming is like, I usually tell people it’s confining. Probably not unlike having a child.

Witches In Nature's Colors.

2006-05-30T19:12:00.000-05:00

Them were some vicious storms that night. Rain sideways. Lightening so often you could almost take a picture of it. Jesus was born dead the same night God mistook our Quonset hut for an accordion.

before

afters

Mr. Mike Sends Warning.

2006-05-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

Cow abductions are a serious problem. Like genital herpes.

Her name was Jesus.

2006-05-27T07:45:00.000-05:00

It’s been a strange couple of days. Let’s all recover by singing a little Christian campfire song. It goes.

Father Abraham, had many sons;
and many sons, had Father Abraham.

Cows walking on slick, wet, manure coated concrete have a tendency to slip and bruise and strain their appendages. So when a particular young calf came up with a limp, I paid her no mind. At first. But then I saw she didn’t just have a swollen knee, she had A GIANT OPEN WOUND on the back of her leg. And, naturally, the chances of a GIANT OPEN WOUND becoming infected are gently increased when you soak it in a poultice of stagnant urine and poop.
The vet advised drugs. Who am I kidding, the vet always advises drugs. But, seeing as this one was gonna die without, I might as well. She learned me good. Now I know that giving a calf a shot is the absolute worst job on the farm. *shudder* I didn’t really believe she’d make it, so I named her Father Abraham, as a sort of good luck charm every time you’d say her name.

Fast forward three months to last Thursday. When I look back at the pastures I can see a calf off by itself, away from the herd. Sometimes they get stuck on the wrong side of the fence. It happens. Evening rolls around and I rouse myself to move the calves to the next paddock before the rains come. When I get back to the field I see the separate calf sprawled on the ground with what looks from a distance suspiciously like a calf dangling from her rear. But that’s unpossible! All my boys, uh, aren’t boys anymore. All my girls only live for their first three to five months near anything with working testicles. Which makes them a mite on the small side. So I decide that can’t be it.
But, it is. It is in fact Father Abraham lying on the ground with her fully developed and newly dead daughter stuck halfway out. But. But. But. Try as I might, I can’t argue reality with the facts. The facts clearly lose. I do the math. Nine months gestation. Father is about a year and a month old. Holy crap!

Rusty and my Aunt help me to pull the baby. And try to keep Father Abraham from falling into the creek. We fail at the creek bit. After 45 minutes trying to get her out of the creek, I give up and hope she doesn’t drown. Yesterday morning she’s up and out, but she’s suffered some nerve damage. And rightly so, for things that large simply cannot come out of things that small without breaking, well, something. So once again, Father Abraham is separate from the herd and starting a regime of shots. She’s putting into action her plan to take over Dingo’s mantle as the most unkillable animal on the farm. She’s still got a ways to go, but she appears fully up to the task.

Use the word Jesus (n.) in a sentence:
I got nettles dragging dead baby Jesus back into the woods.

See You Next Fall.

2006-05-23T10:23:00.000-05:00

Had a nice trip. Minneapolis is still there. I needed to get away from the farm. Not because it’s been too tough. But because I forget.
And because starting sometime in the very near future comes the time of year in which the farm and I become a bit too intimate. If farms had fathers, Wotokahan’s would not be happy with the things we do to each other.
End of May, start of June. Most farmers have had their corn planted for weeks. And sprayed with chemicals so they don’t have to drive tractors over their fields to keep the weeds manageable. On Wotokahan we plant our corn late. Sometimes very very late. We don’t need to keep up with the Farmer Joneses. Our corn doesn’t produce any corn. Just stalk. For the last month I’ve been plowing and discing the to-be-corn fields. Right before I plant I need to harrow them. Then plant them. And then rotary hoe them. Again. And then cultivate them. Again. Again.
Oh, and also during this same exact stretch of time, I will be doing the first (heaviest) cutting of hay. You remember, mow, ted, ted, rake, bale. On the other eight fields that aren’t corn.
Have fun in Cali.

I took my camera on my little trip. But I never even took it out of my bag. Ever since Up With People, I’ve had this incurable distaste for taking pictures with other people watching me. Partly it’s the feeling like a tourist that rubs me wrong. …I joined Carla and Ian on their Hefty shoot. And it was only twelve-ish people in a rather large and airy rooms, but I was uncomfortable with having to deal at all with that many people. “I don’t like people.” I used to say that all the time, growing up on the farm. You may be more anonymous in a larger city environment, but, shit, the people are still there. Sitting on a tractor has been described as lonely. But it’s also just away from people.

New links on the sidebar. Todd. 1001. 1001. 1001.

WTF Volume One.

2006-05-19T18:48:00.000-05:00

Wotokahan Things Found. Wherein I find something on the farm and post a picture of it. You, guess as to what it could possibly be/do.

the WTF in question here are the red bits

Pretend Hipster.

2006-05-12T11:10:00.000-05:00

Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago. When people with blogs go away to other places they seem to often advise (warn?) their readers that upon their return, pictures will forth come. There will be no pictures posted here to show you what a swell time was had by me. You are welcome.

In the while, buy this shirt. <via>

Poppa's Got A Brand New Rake.

2006-05-10T18:50:00.000-05:00

The last old one looks like this. It has three notable failures. It’s missing most of its wheels. It rakes one row at a time. It’s older than Dingo.
The one that today became the most recent old one look like this. Minus the drowning in, sea of grass. It has two notable failures. The design was based upon the best designed V rakes of the day. Which means it was mortally flawed by having the swinging hinge in the center of the row of wheels. The other failure of this rake is me. I’m not weld-ability enough to keep it from falling to pieces. It will break. I canna fix it.
Aaaaand, this is my [dad’s] spiffy! shiny! much gooderly designed (four wheel)! hydraulically controlled! fully adjustable! factory built! Hesston 8 wheel V rake!! The guy who showed me how to operate it tells me that it will teach me how to rake if I let it. I’m looking forward to that machine-man conversation. Shaping up to be a good one. It too has a notable failure. It cost a friggin’ boatload of cash. Sixty-two hundred. It's just eight spinner wheels on bearings on spring controlled arms, four on a side hinged at the rear expandable under hydraulic control mounted on a frame. With a hitch. That better be one crazy amazing hitch, bub.

What Is A Rake? a tutorial.
Hay is grass. It grows in my fields. I hook my tractor up to a mower (flail, scythe, cutditioner, whathaveyou). Mow 9’ swaths all across the field. The top of the hay dries. I flip the hay over with a tedder. The top of the hay dries. Repeat till it’s all dry. I rake the hay with a rake. Pull it from scattered all over the field into windrows. Over these windrows I will drive the baler.

This Is Gross, Don't Look.

2006-05-10T18:47:00.000-05:00

There was once a parable that my mother cross-stitched and hung on our walls for years. It went like this.

IF YOU ARE UNHAPPY

Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow that decided not to fly south for the winter.
However, soon the weather turned so cold that he reluctantly started to fly south. In a short time, ice began to form on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard, almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on the little sparrow. The sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy, able to breathe, he started to sing. Just then a cat came by, and hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds.
The cat cleared away the manure, found the chirping bird, and promptly ate him.

The moral of the story:
1. Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
2. Everyone who gets you out of the shit is not necessarily your friend.
3. And, if you're warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.

If you thought, “birds aren’t dumb enough to be made parabally example of,” you have funny trains in your thoughts. And you are wrong. I was walking through the barn and saw a feathery grey bundle where the wasn’t one before.
I looked closer and saw that a bird had gotten its bird-brain filled head neatly fitted into the space between some old loose siding and some cabling. And there it would stay. Something with funny eating habits denuded the head of its feathers. But by then the bird shouldn’t have minded too much. Some things are just literally too stupid to live.

Well Written.

2006-05-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve seen one good movie (hard candy) SIBH. I’ve seen one good show (the loyal divide) SIBH. I’ve seen no good theater SIBH. I have, however, read a few good books SIBH. I’d tell you about them, but instead did this:

I made a book list a couple of years ago at the askance of a couple of friends. I do not consider myself well read. I consider JowLew well read. And maybe the Belligerent Intellectual. Kent is on his way towards well read. I’m more pink in the middle, maybe medium red. But, dammit, this is none of their blog, so here are my new (and very poorly entitled) categories filled with their respectively remarkable books.

book list

books of the highly recommended variety (top three in a top five type way, but in no particular order)

executioners song - norman mailer

I stayed up to finish this book. I closed it at 6am. I had cried for an hour straight. But Adrienne read it better.

decline and fall of the roman empire - Edward gibbons

History at it’s absolute finest. He wrote this at the same time the constitution was written for crissakes! But it’s erudite, funny and true.

house of leaves - mark z danielewski

Meta. Dark. Pretty.

not quite as splendericious, but really, quite on the higher end of scales that rate the goodness of books

sound and the fury - William Faulkner
lolita - Vladimir nabokov
demian -hermann hesse
the tesseract - alex garland
the ginger man - j p donleavy
Middlesex - jeffery eugenides
my loose thread - dennis cooper
if on a winter’s night a traveler - italo calvino
lord of the barnyard - tristan egolf
crime and punnishment - fyodor dostoevsky

same thing as books under the last headers, but science fiction so you can write them off all at the same time

dune - frank Herbert
chasm city - Alistair Reynolds
neuromancer - William gibson
ender’s game - orson scott card

other books, seventy percent classic, twenty five percent unheard of, recommendable but only moderately terrific

in cold blood - truman capote
the fountainhead - ayn rand
we the living - ayn rand
watership down - Richard adams
something wicked this way comes - ray Bradbury
catch 22 - joseph heller
a short history of nearly everything - bill Bryson
hyperion - dan simmons
Eunoia - christian bok
period - dennis cooper
johnny got his gun - Dalton trumbo
the great Gatsby - f scott Fitzgerald
starship troopers - robert heinlein
beneath the wheel - hermann hesse
heart of darkness - joseph conrad
american psycho - brett Easton ellis
main street - Sinclair lewis
coma - alex garland
the beach - alex garland
jarhead - Anthony swofford
red mars - kim Stanley robinson
cryptomnicon - neal Stevenson
a brief history of time - steven hawkins
welcome to the monkey house - kurt vonnegut jr
sophie’s world - jostein gaarder
pilgrim at tinker creek - annie dillard
the redneck manifesto - jim goad
where the suckers moon - randall rothenburg
invisible cities- italo calvino
kornwolf - tristan egolf
paul - a n Wilson
crying of lot 49 - Thomas pychon

critically acclaimed, crap

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius - dave eggers
confederacy of dunces- john kennedy toole
catcher in the rye - j d salinger
the plague - albert camus
siddhartha - hermann hesse
naked lunch - William s burroughs
on the road - jack kerouac
bonfire of the vanities - tom wolfe

books that will hopefully soon be read by me if the mount Vernon library can figure out how amazon works

the long ships - frans gunnar bengtsson
this organic life - joan dye gussow
sexual behavior in the human male - Alfred Kinsey
sexual behavior in the human female - Alfred kinsey
the naked and the dead - norman mailer
hell’s angels - hunter s Thompson
rules of attraction - brett Easton ellis
the closing of the american mind- allan bloom
the nimrod flip-out - etgar keret
foolishness of god - siegbert w becker
satanic verses - slaman rushdie

clouds

SIBH - since I've been home
RTFM - read the fucking manual

Alphabetic interruptions.

2006-05-09T11:53:00.000-05:00

The local chucklehead signmaker seems to have problems with the letter N. And kerning. And straight lines. But mostly, N.

Cow Bio - Spike

2006-05-03T20:14:00.000-05:00

spike in his blue period

So my cousin's cousin is a middle school teacher in Chicago. Hates it. Likes to sail. She decided that her best option for spring break was to come visit her Aunt and Uncle at the farm. Thems my Aunts and Uncle too, but they were hers first.
One of her stated goals was to see a calf born. And barring that, she wanted to pet one. Petting newborn baby Angus calves is a very difficult thing to do. The mother cows protection instincts make them as dangerous as bulls. This was explained to her before she was let loose on the herd.
She calls me one afternoon from the pasture to tell me that she had been sitting and petting a calf for over half an hour. She says she's worried that it has no mother because no one had come over to bother her.
I rolled my eyes (through the phone, special trick) and assured her that the mother was just off being entertained by a bale of hay. Three quarters of an hour later and I've finally made it out to where she is.
The calf is still lounging about. Doesn't seem to care much for moving anything other than it's big brown eyes. Because she's concerned, I am very unconcerned. I shall show her my masterful farmer touch with the bovine line. I scare it to its feet and it scampers towards the herd. Ha ha, Farmer Drew is farmerly!
We watch it run to the nearest cow. She kicks it. It runs to the next cow. She bowls it over with her head. It runs to the next cow. She kicks it down and swings her head around to snort at it. After 20 minutes of watching the thing get rejected from every udder it tries, I admit we have a problem. She gives him a name. Spike. Then I shrug my shoulders and climb back into my car.
Every couple of hours I go back up and make sure he's alive. I try to pick a mother for him out of the crowd, but my choices don't fare any better than his own. Chad and Rusty join me on one such venture. We walk back. We find Spike sitting alone. We watch him sit there. Chad asks me what exactly we're back in the field to do. I shrug. Don't know. Never had a mother not bond with it's child. Rusty posits the only theory I've heard that makes any sense. Twins. One the mother accepted, one not so much.
I never did find Spike a mother. I don't know where he finds sustenance actually. I guess he steals his drinks from the more forgiving cows. Skipping from teat to teat, trying all the flavors the milk bags have to offer. Have to hand it to him, he's a smart one, that Spike. He came real close to dying around the time he was noticed. Now he's just as active as any other. Though he probably won't grow as fast having missed out on the cholostrum days.

She never did get to see a calf born. Pity that.

SOLO II

2006-05-02T09:10:00.000-05:00

When I say ‘car racing,’ do you picture Dale Earnhardt, Tide logos, and perpetual left turns? If yes, I personally apologize for the damage NASCAR has done to America. But even NASCAR was born of stock car racing. Stock car racing was equalizing, democratic, plebian. It was cheap, it was everyman. Today that has been bought up and sold back to us complete with multi-million dollar cars and even more expensive egos.
But then again, I don’t think I’d ever actually utter the words ‘car racing.’ That’s a far too clunky way to word what we do. Most of my local friends are fans of car go fast. But not so much fans of the watching of other people driving, because, what’s the point? There is a school of thought that says driving cars fast is a right of all true Americans and that it wasn’t ever taken away from us. That school is SCCA.

For us amateur beginner younglings, this means autocross. Take a parking lot, an airport landing strip, any reasonably flat strip of asphalt, and set upon it a course marked with pylons. Drive through said course. Next time, try and do it faster. This is autocross. The land of Miatas and Minis. FDs and Z06s. Karts and dirt-track racers.
Sunday was the first event of the season. Chris and Allie came to drive his Miata. Rusty and I showed up in his 8 hour old Z. Chad and his Maxima didn’t make the drive. (I would have brought my Nissan [which would be a middling to good car to drive autocross] for my first time autocrossing if I hadn’t taken a culvert too fast and lost oil pressure and spun a bearing and effectively toasted the engine two weeks ago.) As I was, I just rode along.
Autocross separates drivers first, cars second. There is usually a wide range of cars at an event, from daily drivers to go-carts to trailered-in race only vehicles. The skill with which you set a line, shift, brake, and recover from mistakes sets your time far more than the horsepower to can put to pavement. This is no quarter mile drag. For most cars 2nd gear is used almost exclusively. No one will go above 40mph. Which sounds incredibly boring, I know. It took some cajoling to get me to go to my first. But one ride in a well driven car will convince you otherwise. You experience Gs that you can only find legally on roller coasters. But the car you’re in isn’t riding along a predetermined path at premeditated speed. How fast, how in control, how smooth a ride will be entirely up to the driver.
We left before the event was over, but up till then, the fastest car through the course wasn’t one of the heavily modded Mustangs, wasn’t a Z06 Vette, wasn’t any of the Acuras, Audis, or Minis. It was this old Honda civic.

An extra link for you gear heads. The Real Acme, by that blathering idiot, Iowahawk. Old old drag car mods from NASA.

Swinging Wild.

2006-04-29T09:51:00.000-05:00

Obvious injustice. Legally arrived at. Seems somehow familiar. Welcome to America, Kiddies.

Judge Dean, a widely respected 20-year veteran of the Dallas criminal bench, said he wouldn't discuss the two cases because he might have to rule on them again someday. In general, he said, he tries to evaluate "the potential danger to the community" when someone violates probation "and what, in the long run, is going to be in the best interest of the community and the person themselves."

Article in the Dallas Morning News.

Hard Candy.

2006-04-29T02:28:00.000-05:00

“I f*cking hate Goldfrappe.”

I’m exhausted, but not sleepy. Just watched one of the most intense movies of my life. Irreversible included. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie before it leaves the theaters. My muscles were wobbly as I walked out from being held clentched for too long.

The Cockpit Ain't A Bar.

2006-04-28T17:58:00.000-05:00

Wagering on cock fighting and on dog fighting, two of the most honorable small town pastimes of past *cough* eras. Years ago there was a well known dog fighting pit in the eastern part of the county. I think that after some bad PR (perhaps it was the cy-dog breeding) in the late 70s the cops finally were forced by the public to shut it down. I don’t know if that really stopped the fights or just drove them further underground. Less a question, and more an open secret would be the profusion trailers with yards filled with blue barrels, each chaining it’s own rooster. Now, I’ve never been invited to a cock fight. Wrong circles. I don’t know they happen too often. But I do suspect that Knox County isn’t know nationwide for breeding amazing chickens. Thicker thighs, meatier breasts, redder combs, don't come knocking around here. The houses that most usually sport the blue barrel infestation are the same ones that are later pictured in the paper for their propensity to chemically abuse cough medicines.

They shore is priddy though.

The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs The Dough.

2006-04-26T19:38:00.000-05:00

When it was found that corn was required this year I had about a week’s window for getting the ground plowed so that I could disc it twice before planting and get the planting done before the first cutting of hay was to be mowed down. My dad had written me a two page letter attempting to explain plowing to a farming n00b. I solicited extra plowing advice from some guy named Jeff.

It took me from last Thursday till tonight to finish plowing two smallish fields. I was held up by the rain, by playing ultimate, by dismantling my car, by women’s pro football, by breaking the plow (and minorly, the tractor), and by moving cows. But it’s done.

I broke the plow Monday evening but my Uncle’s hunting buddy, down to hunts the wild turkey was willing and able to weld me back together on Tuesday. Someday I won’t be so lucky and will be forced to learn the clever arts of cutting torch and stick welding myself.

Plows are badass pieces of machinery. I take my farmer hand and make the earth to do my bidding. "Flip over, Earth, flip over."
Each share (blade) cuts and flips over a 7inchish thick piece of sod. My plow has five blades. They are shiny. And pretty. My tractor has somewhere around 50 horsies* available. My tractor struggled at times pulling my plow through my soils. How ancient (pre-internal combustion engine) peoples with only a couple of horses available to pull a plow ever got anything done is beyond me.

* you car people have a stilted view of what a horsepower is and does.

Turkey's Don't Moo.

2006-04-20T17:58:00.000-05:00

This morning I got up early to move the calves and the cows and the calves to their next pasture. So I could go to prison. The turkeys are gobbling back in the woods at 6:15 in the morning. The wild turkey population, like the coyote population, has been recently booming in the county of Knox. What I noticed this morning is that gobbling turkeys make a noise remarkably like the word gobble. Cows do not moo. They make a noise that sounds exactly like a phone on vibrate that at the end tilts sharply up in pitch. Try spelling that.

Prison is far away. Almost two hours. Plus any additional time you may spend sitting behind the school busses. I had to go today because while two weeks ago I was sure I would have a whole bunch of excess hay and that therefore I could get away with growing only hay his next year and not any corn, the weather conspired against me with a fistful of 32 degree nights artfully placed to reach maximum lack of grass growth, and that made me use up all my excess hay and suddenly it was back to the place where I would need to grow the corn and the hay to be able to survive the next winter but I had only found this out the day before… *breathe in* and I needed to talk this over with my dad. Who is in prison.

Corn is far more complicated than hay. But I think I might grow to like it better if all my machines don’t break down on the same day. Prison is strange. Prisoners, felons especially, are given no consideration for anything. Even your normal gov’t bureaucracy slows down to the most plodding of paces. Because, naturally, who gives a fuck about a convicted felon? Having been found guilty of whatever the charge, they deserve no rights. Before having a dad in prison, this made sense.
Thing about it is, you know, he’s not guilty. Those of you who knew me and saw me when this thing first went down might have heard me confess that I didn’t know if he had flown out of control and done something against the law. I didn’t know, and it was certainly within his power. I did claim that if his side of the story was true, he would be absolved. Turns out, and it came out during the trial, he was telling the truth. I could believe it after I saw it played out. The flaw with my thinking was that a jury of peers and shit would settle things then and there.
But the verdict came back wrong. And now my dad is friends with some strange men. Embezzlers. Rapists. Drug Dealers. Murderers. Sex Offenders. Lots of Sex Offenders. We go and chat and liven up his day a bit. He tells me what all I’ve been doing wrong on the farm. What all I need to do in the near future to fix all that. He tells us little stories about what goes on, on the inside. Funny vignettes with funny little characters. I try to picture these stories taking place and pretend while I’m there that I can. Then I walk outside and see the real prisoners taking a smoke break and it crashes down. I don’t know. I can’t know.

A Hole Large Enough You Could Drive.

2006-04-20T17:48:00.000-05:00

Uncle Doug bought a backhoe.
Construction grade, John Deere.
Some years ago.
Probably doesn't need it, but.
Dug some ditches.
Straightened some rivers.

Fell through a barn floor once.
It's been parked in the main bank barn at my Uncle's place most the winter.
A storm rolled up Friday morning.
Doug decided it was good day to wash the behemoth off.
He got halfway to the door.
Fell through a barn floor twice. This is a picture of halfaways through extraction.
Tempers were hot when I arrived and the beast was still stuck.
A photojournalist in Iraq I am not.
But here's the gaping hole she left.

_NOTICE_

2006-04-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

This property is an agricultural district.
At times dust, noises, spraying, insects,
and odors occur due to normal farming
activities. Anyone interested in locating
near this property should take it’s current
use into consideration.
___FARM BUREAU___

Rural Sprawl.

2006-04-16T11:08:00.000-05:00

Guest Post - Bradley Hull

‘Go West young man’- Manifest Destiny, the idea that there is more/better land just over the horizon is a cultural tradition in America. Unfortunately that ‘destiny’ was achieved generations ago, but the idea is still ingrained in the American psyche. We hear about hundreds of thousand of acres of rain forest lost each year (the size of the state of Delaware annually), and are outrage by this misuse of resources/environmental injustice. But no one pays much attention when this type of destruction occurs right in front of them- because it is masked with the term ‘development’. We live in a system where growth is necessary. Who ever talks about equilibrium anymore?

Knox County was a quiet little rural county for generations. People grew sheep. Then cows and corn. Now soybeans. Land was cheap because farmers are poor. In the 1960’s farming families started to ‘move into town’- for some of our family that meant Fredericktown or Mount Vernon. It was unheard of to own a house in a field that was not a farm. This meant that rural areas were rural. Sometime between then and now something changed. People from the cities and the towns decided they wanted to live in the ‘country’. And thus the suburbanisation/gentrification of the farming landscape began.

Our valley contained 6 ‘farms’, or the amount of land one man could work a year successfully- as defined in the 1830’s. Our families own three of them, and in the early 1980’s the other three were purchased from the old families by a guy named Buster K. Lychan*. Now this Lychan was a farmer after a sort- actually he was a little unhinged, but he worked the land. So one day in 2002, we hear from one of the neighbours that Lychan is planning on selling up. The neighbours on three sides get together and make Buster K. an offer for the farms- with each of the families taking the acreage closest to them.

The reason we were so keen to do this is that there is about 20 acres separating the two main farms and with increasing amount of traffic on the Old Mansfield Road, it is not unheard of to be overtaken on a hill by some moron who can not wait 30 seconds while you have a load of hay on the tractor/wagon. This is obviously very dangerous for whoever is on the tractor- and there have been many close calls. (I always find it ironic that 180 years ago it was members of my family who helped cut that road through the forest.)

Well Buster K. turned down the offer because he said he wanted more money. We found out later that he had more than 2.8 million dollars worth of loans out on a little over 200 acres- that’s just insane. So the next thing we know the farms are split up and are to be auctioned off piece by piece. Initially things go well at the auction. The neighbours all get the acreage they want. But then the auctioneer pulls a fast one- because his commission is determined by percentage. Instead of accepting the bids from several families, he re-offers the whole farm as a single unit. A phone call comes in from an outside bidder and they raise the bid by $75,000. Lychan realises that something is up, and tries to make a side deal with us, but the auctioneer call the auction closed, and the sale final. Little did we know then, but the valley was well and truly lost.

The land was purchased by a company called Country Tyme. Now, let’s be clear from the outset: all realtors/developers are the lowest form of human life. But the nice folks at Country Tyme make your average Bank One/ReMax realtor look like they belong on the right hand of God. Imagine Quasimodo with a briefcase and an evil disposition. Several of our neighbours will not even speak to anyone associated with this company. In an effort to preserve as much of the valley as possible, we had a meeting with some Country Tyme representatives. We made a good offer, but they wanted 3 times more- to cover expenses they claimed. When we said it was ridiculous they effectively threatened us with whole suburban developments- up to 400 homes they smirked.

The Knox County version of Wisteria lane has not appeared yet. But the land was broken up into various lots- each sold at 15 times its actual agricultural value. More than 30 available ‘lots’. And morons from the cities have bought them up. So far we have 1 McMansion, 2 Crapshacks, and a Modular home. In place of fields that produced food, we have ramps for fourwheelers, drive ways for boats, and people, more and more people. People who will eventually have a problem with they way a cow looks at them, then sue us for having animals on a farm we’ve had since before Ohio was a state. Ah, development.

So you asked, is this just a case of NIMBY? (Not in my back yard) No- it is a single example of a growing and frankly terrifying trend in the ‘breadbasket’ of the US. The loss of agricultural land. Save your crocodile tears. Take a minute to think about food. Where did the ingredients for your frozen pizza come from? How bout that delicious frappachino? You never think about it, really. We take for it all for granted. Ask a kid where a hamburger comes from and he’ll tell you McDonald’- not a cow. Take a look at one state- Ohio:

Since 1995, more than a million acres of farmland have been converted into housing developments, strip malls, condos, etc. Almost as much land loss as rainforest loss in Brazil. The land no longer produces anything. And if you’ve ever visited one of these great new ‘communities’, I’m sure you’ll agree we need more condominiums and Wal-Marts. A day will eventually come when we won’t have enough land left to produce the ingredients for our ever increasing waistlines. Don’t worry, I sure soilent green will be available by then.

Lord of the Barnyard - *name changed so if anyone trys to google his real name they don't find this. The county of Knox is the one directly above where the word Columbus is on the map (centerish).

The Confederacy's National Anthem.

2006-04-12T11:48:00.000-05:00

It was warm last Friday. Rusty called me after work and told me to get ready to go to Kenyon College.
We had previously discussed driving to Kenyon in our work clothes, in my farm truck. The plan also included buying a six pack and sitting on lawn chairs in the bed and gawking at the coeds. But my truck is currently fuel-tankless. Cars aren't made for gawking. So we took showers and put on not poopy clothes. Which was okay too, cause Gambier is the only place within 50 miles with a decent art gallery, decent coffee shop, decent bookstore, and decent girls.
Dan Emmett is from Mount Vernon, Ohio. And you ask, "Who the hell is Dan Emmett?" because you are no patriot. He was the first blackface minstrel. He fell into the ashes of a cork tree fire and was stuck with a beautiful thought. And he wrote Dixie. You know, "Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land." Every year we commemorate his wonderfully productive life and forward thinkingness with the Dan Emmett Music & Arts Festival. Complete with little silhouette minstrel logo. Mount Vernonians are really known to class a joint up.

Ben and Lou

Several years ago the Snowden Family claimed that they were in fact the authors of Dixie and that Emmett was a sham. So a professor at Kenyon looked into it. Wrote a book entitled Way Up North In Dixie. The book describes Knox County in the late 1850s. The author came to the conclusion that, while there is no proof, it is more than likely the Snowdens (who were quite black and very recently not slaves) penned Dixie. Which makes sense if you note that the song tells the satirical tale of an ex-slave living up north and pining for his previous life living it up on a plantation.

Rusty picked up the book and started leafing through it, giggling, as he is wont to do. Showed it to me. I flipped through it and noticed that there was a town on the map that no longer exists. Then I saw a passage that claimed that there was a marker on the grave of the two Snowden brothers who were reputedly the ones to teach the song to Dan. And that the grave was located in a graveyard next to a clapboard church, three miles north of Dan Emmett's own grave. Now, everyone in Mount Vernon knows where Emmett's gave is. And five miles north of Emmett's gave is, my farm. But I couldn't think of any graveyards or churches between town and my place.

We, of course, had to see the gravestone, because it purported to claim ownership of Dixie on the stone itself. We drove the three miles north from Emmett. And came to the middle of no graveyard. I pulled into the nearest neighbor's drive and asked there if there were any old graveyards in the vicinty. And there was indeed. Right next to an old church. One turn and mile later we found it. After twnety minutes of trying to dicipher age old gravestones we found it.
The proof was ours. Everybody knows graves don't lie.

Rock is my make-believe Dracula.

2006-04-10T20:41:00.000-05:00

Neko Case has a new album. And a fancy new website.

I have a terrible taste in music. I know it, I'm ok with it. Peaches, t.A.T.u., Gold Chains, Th' Legendary Shack-Shakers. I enjoy to listen to these bands. I can wholly understand why other people would be well inclined to stay away.

But, to the same extent, I know when what I enjoy is quality. When other people should be introduced. Drive By Truckers, Arcade Fire, Subset*, Loretta Lynn. I understand why critics like them.

Neko has pipes.
Neko has red hair.
Neko writes better than you.
Neko is smoking hot.
Blacklisted.
Neko has a phenomenal band backing her.
Neko is country in every way that NASCAR isn't.
Maow.
Corn Sisters.
New Pornographers. Even if,
The New Pornographers are wasted on Neko.

The new album is fox confessor brings the flood.
Don't buy it at a record store. Drive to Virginia on the 11th and buy it from her.

"Hanging the Livestock, Burning..."

2006-04-10T20:03:00.000-05:00

Barns. The farm has three barn barns.
And many many other outbuildings like quonset huts and corn cribs and garages and sea shipping containers and hangers and milking parlors and spring houses and pole barns and chicken coops.
Dingo's doghouse was the springhouse. Darwin's doghouse is this ratty looking corncrib.The barn barns are old. Old old.
I'm not real good with the emphasis part of writing.
The barn at the Merrin place marks the date it was erected. And the start of the Civil War. No slaves were used to build her. The other two I don't know the exact date for. The only one with the required barn-red red is the newest one. All three houses are also as old as their respective barns, but because we live in them they are repaired and rebuilt and added onto much more extensively, effectively hiding the original appearance. The barns however were built with lumber cleared from the land here, rough-hewed with hand axes to create the poles, and fitted together with wooden pegs instead of nails.
It's amazing what some people can do. Especially those dead ones.
An untreated wooden structure exposed to year-round sun, innumerable violent storms, freezing and thawing a thousand times, will fall apart. The surrounding county is littered with half-collapsed and dead pool worthy barn carcasses. Tempting to us hicks with 4wd trucks and log chains at our bored disposal.
My main hay barn has issues. Less the regular rot and collapse issues and more the "not designed with tractors in mind" type issues. When I first got home my tractor stuck a hole in the floor. When we stopped pulling up rotting floor, we were left with a hole 8'x12'. That was patched. Now my roof on the main addition is falling in. Mostly from being very gently tapped by a cotton-candy tractor lugging a hovercraft of a haybale.
So this week my cousin's cousin Becky and my uncle and I shall try to return one more barn to usability. Sometimes it's nice to have a life that is measured almost exclusively very measurable things. I have 36 calves. I have 75 bales of hay. I do not have an 8x12 foot hole.

Cow Bio - Scarf

2006-04-04T19:24:00.000-05:00

Scarf is that funny looking calf. Scarf has mittens. Mittens belong on kittens, not calveses. Nevertheless.

Beyond that. People have asked how the farming goes. How I'm handling it. I'm not. By that I don't mean I'm not coping, but that up till and including now, no farmer would call what I've done "farming." I've taken the corn silage and hay that my dad grew and harvested from their respective containers and fed them to his cows. That is all.
Come May I must start to harvest my own foodstuffs to keep my cattles alive through the next turning of the earth. My Dad and I decided to not grow any corn this year. This makes things a little easier on me, but it also will mean that from May till August I will be fighting the weather and the machines nonstop. Every available field will be turned to hay. Anyone have a free week to volunteer to help out?

I saw Inside Man and it was surprisingly good.
I saw V for Vendetta and it was disappointingly bad. Kudos to Alan Moore for disowning it.

Braincoians, Hope Me.

2006-04-04T18:40:00.000-05:00

I need to write an ad for my beef. But I’ve been having problems kick starting my inner copywriter. That’s where all you graduates and drop outs come in handy.

My first problem is the problem all clients have. I want to say too much. I was thinking of running ads about the size of a City Pages quarter-page. I need to sell what is called "freezer beef." All the cuts you’d get from the butcher, but all of them at once. Most people have never bought beef this way. It needs to be explained in the ad. I don’t really think I want it to have too much concept, this ad will never ever appear in anyone’s book.

My second problem is the idea of grass-fed organic beef. There is absolutely nothing special about this beef. This is just beef as it has always been raised since we domesticated cattle, what, 10,000 years ago. The only reason it is better than everything else on the market is that in the last couple decades we started feeding our cows unhealthy shit like cow brains and keeping them penned up in standing room only feedlots. It’s not any innovative improvement on how beef is raised.
I’m having problems selling what appears to me to be something so stunningly obvious that it hardly needs saying. My only luck comes when I talk about how crap the feedlot process is, but that’s not a good way to sell quality beef.

Here’s my mom’s email she sends to people who request info:

We charge $1.75/# hanging weight for the meat (average comes to $260-300/ quarter depending on the individual critter) and have it processed at Dee Jay's Processing here in Fredericktown, OH. The cost is about $75-85 /qtr depending on how you have it done (888-DJS-MEAT or 740-694-7492). You tell the processor what type of cuts you want, how many to a package, how thick, etc. They walk you through it. These costs are competitive with grain-fed, non-organic, lord-knows-where-it-came-from meat. Our meat is very tasty and tender and lean (thus we think you get more actual meat for your dollar). If you want to place an order either e-mail or call us (740-397-4664) and we will put you on our list.

Here’s what my dad would want in an ad:

That the price is competitive with grain fed beasties.
That they are being raised on a farm which has been organic for over 25 years.
That they are 100% grassfed Angus which means the meat is incredibly lean.
and possibly, That they have more good proteins.

Here’s the poo I’ve excremented on a page so far:

local organic grass-fed Angus beef
sold by the quarter 1.75 per pound

Grass fed beef is different from grain fed. Most of the meat you will find out there is grain fed.
The reason we feed grass is that cows are ruminates, built to eat grass.
Grass fed is the alternative to feedlot beef.

beef raised the old-world way.
without pesticides.
without grain finishing
without overcrowding.

it’s not healthy to feed a cow grain. cows are ruminates, grass eaters.
when you feed grain, you don’t need to provide the land for them to forage on, why not keep them in the barn?

somewhere along the line of raising beef we Americans stopped thinking right. stopped feeding them the foods they needed. start

raised the way nature intended a cow to be raised. On open pasture land, under the sun, and without unnatural foods and chemicals.

ask a kid to draw a cow.
you get a black and white beastie with horns in a field.

cows eat grass. any five year old could tell you that.
most beef farmers today would tell you that a cow ain’t “finished” till it’s
but as farms became run more and more like factories, scaling up in size and eking out profit from every area, certain things were ignored.
Cows are designed to eat grass.

it is a very rare thing when humans improve on mother nature. feedlots to put grain into cows to fatten them up at the end of their life, is not one of those rare times.

we didn’t figure out how to do it better than mother nature.

10,000 years ago cows ate grass.
1,000 years ago cows ate grass.
40 years ago cows ate grass.
Most of the beef you can buy out there is now grain fed. The people responsible for selling this feedlot variety of beef will tell you that it’s fatty marbled-ness makes it taste better.
Living in a feedlot is not healthy.
Eating something your body isn’t designed to eat is not healthy.

If you ask a child to draw a cow he will put the cow in a pasture. Because that’s where cows go. Even he can tell you that a cow eats grass.
That we have to special-raise cows now to be “grass fed” is silly.

Grass fed beef is better than grain fed. Most meat out there is grain fed.
The reason we feed grass is simple, cows are ruminates, built to consume grass.

It’s sad that our beef needs so many descriptors, but if your package just says ‘beef’ you can probably count on it being shipped, full of pesticides, and finished on grain.

Organic is natural. Nature has done a good enough job so far, we’ll let her keep going.
Cows are ruminates, built to consume grass.
So we feed them grass. The cows are healthier and so is the meat.
Angus is tasty.

Angus is tasty. Grass-fed angus is tasty and healthy and happy. Organic grass fed angus is tasty and heathly and happy and safe.

organic most people know about. free from man made chemicals

Grass fed beef is different from grain fed. Most meat out there is grain fed.
The reason we feed grass is that cows are ruminates, built to consume grass.
Grass fed isn’t new and different and trendy, it’s the old and natural way to raise beef. Grain fed is the “new and different” way to raise a cow, and now we’re beginning to see that it doesn’t work so well.
feedlots are stuffy and overcrowded.
pastures are wide and in the open air.
grain is digested too quickly, resulting in physical ailments and oversized fatty muscles.
grass is digested slowly, resulting in even growth, though slower.
grain fed meat is unhealthy to eat. that’s the red meat your doctor warned you about.
grass fed beef is entirely different. it’s lower in fat and calories. extra omega 3s.

grass fed beef does taste different.

it’s the differnece between a body bulider and a hard working man.
It’s sad, but a list of the reasons to eat grass fed beef is really a list of the reasons not to eat grain fed beef.
Grass fed beef are healthier. Grain fed beef have physical problems resulting from their diet. For example, they can have acid build up from digesting the grain too fast.
Grass fed beef are lower in stress. They live in their natural environment, the pasture. Grain fed beef don’t need to forage and so they are kept in feedlots.

Most all the reasons that exist for feed

A grass fed animal is happier. That may sound trite, but it’s true.
They are out running around in the fields rather than cooped up in a barn or feed lot. This does a lot for their psyche.

Natural
Nutritious
Safe
Healthy

Our cows are born and raised

on a generation-spanning family farm. a closed system which uses no pesticides and as little off-farm input as possible. Cows are ruminates, built to consume grass. Grass-fed cows are healthier while living and healthier for you.
Angus is the breed.

Cows are ruminates, built to consume grass.

All cows are built to eat grasses.
Most beef cows are fed grain.

Cows that eat only grass will be healthier.

Compared with grass-fed meat, grain-fed meat contains more total fat, saturated fat, and calories.

Cows that spend their entire lives eating grasses are healthier than those whose diet has been switched to grains.

Here is my small-type explanation of how freezer beef works:

If you’ve never bought beef directly from the farmer, here’s how it works.

The minimum amount we sell is a quarter of a cow. You don’t get to choose which quarter, it’s an average quarter of the available meat on the animal. If you want a half or even a whole, that’s fine too. To hold a quarter of a beef you will need freezer space. The one attached to your refrigerator will not be enough. You will need…
You call us at 740 397 4664 and tell us what amount you’d like. When an entire cow is accounted for, we take the animal in to DeeJay’s to be processed. They weigh the animal. We bill you $1.75 per pound of hanging weight. The average is between $260 and $300 per quarter.
They call you to find out how you would like your meat cut (how thick your steaks, what cuts, etc.) They walk you through this part. They charge you for the cuts separate from what you pay us for the meat itself. The cost is about $80 per quarter, depending on what you have done. They will tell you when the processing will be complete.
You drive to Fredericktown to pick up your beef.

And here is the website explaining grassfed to the uninitiated:

Eat Wild

So there is your assignment from me. Send me an email. Reply in the comments. Make it funny. Make it serious. Make it sell. These ads will be running in the Columbus alt newsweekly, The Other Paper. If I use an idea someone else comes up with, all credit will be yours, and a steak will be brought when I come to visit Chi-town and Murderapolis, sometime in mid-May. Thanks.

The Oil We Eat.

2006-03-29T08:53:00.000-05:00

I usually try to post original material. Stuff I wrote, to entertain you.
But I read an article this morning. Wow.
If you've ever read and appreciated the science book A Brief History of Everything, you know how writing things you (for the most part) already know in an easy to read way makes them many times easier to understand.
That is this article. This guy can write.

I could go on, but I don't really want to try to tell you what it's about. Just that you will learn something, if you read it. It's a little on the longish side, but well worth it. Copy and paste into your Word equivalent if the narrow format bothers you.

The Oil We Eat. - By Richard Manning

Cow Bio - Cassanova Frankenstein

2006-03-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

Cassanova Frankenstein is five days old. His (he is a he, or so the pee origins do suggest) poop smells like all new calf poop. Worse than awful. That brown spot on the blanket under his chin is not chocolate. He has a fu manchu made out of stringy black whiskers. His color is purple brown. He is a giant pain in my ass.
He was less lively than the other (now 13 other) calves by far. A day after Cassanova Frankenstein was born I found him sprawled in the pasture back by the woods, no mother in attendance. So I went and found her, which was easy because she's the only brown cow and he's the only brown calf. But she didn't magically fix anything so I had to pick him up and carry him down to the barn, distressed mother in tow.
Ever since, I have been his source of nutrition, as opposed to his bug-eyed mom. He's been too weak/disinterested to find her udder himself. She'll be dry from disuse in another couple of days and feeding him will become my forever project. Pain in ass. Cassanova Frankenstein is a sickly weak runt of a calf. But he's also cute, he does have that going for him. That and his name. Thanks noodle.