Rosewood Hill Farm

A History of Virginia Wines: From Grapes to Glass

2009-06-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

A History of Virginia Wines: From Grapes to Glass
ISBN: 978-1-59629-701-2 • Paperback • Summer 2009
By Walker Elliott Rowe

“A History of Virginia Wines: From Grapes to Glass” is a groundbreaking narrative of the burgeoning Virginia wine industry from an insider's point of view. Grape grower and winery investor Walker Elliott Rowe takes readers on a tour of some of the best vineyards and wineries in the state, and explores the minds of well-known winemakers like Jim Law, Stephen Barnard and grape grower Chris Hill. In addition, Mr. Rowe, who is fluent in Spanish, interviews Hispanic migrant workers who toil daily in Virginia’s vineyards. Mr. Rowe has gathered old photos and stitched together an account of the founding of the Virginia wine industry by researching and speaking directly with the founders of the trade, including an amusing look of the early days at Barboursville Vineyards. Through existing documents and new research, he uncovers proof that Charles Carter successfully planted European vines grapes at his Cleve Plantation in King George County ahead of Thomas Jefferson's failed efforts to do the same at Monticello. The book also includes 16 pages of brilliant color photographs by noted photographer Jonathan Timmes.”

Walker Elliott Rowe lives in Rappahannock County, where he farms goats and wine grapes. This is Mr. Rowe's third book on wine. To contact the author, visit his blog on local agriculture at rosewoodhillfarm.com.

If you would like to schedule an interview with the author, please contact Katie Parry at 843.577.5971, ext
113 or katie.parry@historypress.net
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Travel Guide for Chile

2009-05-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

Converting pesos to dollars----double it; divide by 1,000; then multiply times 90%. So 2,000 pesos (written "$2.000") equals $1.80 USD.

weather--it does not rain in the wine region and Santiago for 9 months of the year. Winter starts in May. Then the rain comes and the Chileans are awed by its apperance. The rain clears the contaminated air of Santiago where a system of "pica y placa" determines which automobiles can be driven on any particular day. The chileans bundle up in the day when the temperature drops to 10 degrees celcius (50 degrees farenheit) as if it was the Chilean Antartic while the gringo can go sleeveless. In July even the gringo is shivering as there is no central air heat and the hotels do not turn on the heat until 8 o'clock PM. People heat rooms with propane fired heaters and wooden stoves so one wonders whether they will die from carbon monixide poisoning. The Chileans have no natural gas of their own and are dependent on Argentina for that---to be dependant on Argentina for anything puts one in dire straits.

rodeo--In Chile cowboys do not lasso cows or ride a bucking bull until it tosses them off. Instead two cowboys ("huasos") mount horses and corral a steer into a wall gaining points depending where the horse makes contact--e.g. 4 points for the rear end. No gringo could possible understand this sport. The rules are listed here.

natural gas and hot water--if you stay in a hostal you might have to share a shower with others--well not at the same time unless that is the thrill you are seeking. If the hot water cuts off when your hair is filled with soap then the hot water heater is probably turned off. In Chile instead of heating gallons of water as we do in the states they use an on-demand type of system that heats water as it flow through the pipes. This uses natural gas for which the Chileans pay world market price so it's expensive. If you rent a house then perhaps the hot water heater is located on an outside wall and the pilot light can blow out in a really heavy wind. Propane tanks are delivered by truck or even by bicycle to the neighborhoods. You can relight the hot water heater yourself with a simple lighter and there is not much chance you will blow yourself up.

exiting a bus or an airplane--Chileans do not understand the concept of "first on last off". In gringolandia if you are sitting in, say, row 22 you let the people in row 21 get off first. Instead the Chileans--man, woman, child--push ahead comptelely oblivious of what to most would be logical.

soccer--"futbol" is more important here that what President Obama might be saying or the fact that the global economy is in free fall. The only thing that attracts more attention for the native is the soap opera ("telenovela") "Donde esta Elisa?" ("where is Elisa") which closely mirrors the comings and goings of the family who owns the nation's largest newspaper El Mercurio.

has been musicians--Where can you see Peter Frampton and The Brothers Johnson? Certainly not in the USA because they cannot earn a nickel there. So they head to the music festival at Vina del Mar where the natives do not know better. The Jonas Brothers are in Chile today? Does this portend their end?

news--television news starts at 9 o'clock at night on TVN. At the airport instead of CNN they broadcast music videos. It must be easy for the rest of the world to let the Americans alone worry about terrorism, famine, that sort of thing.

women--there are lots of single mothers ("madres soleteros") here. If they can get it they seek child support ("pension alimientos"). The gringo with $100 bills, a blue passport, and an odd accent has a decided advantage over the local womanizer ("mujer riego"). But Chileans, like Colombians, are not so poor, at least the upper tier. They glamorize themselves in the social pages of El Mercurio and have expensive houses in Las Condes and at the beach in Vina del Mar. The poor people are more comfortable in Valparaiso. As for The Spanish it is much easier to be charming if your speach is halting whatever the language. I find it charming that young girls often hold hand when they walk.

love--Chilean teenagers and young adults live with their parents so they go to "cabanas" for lovemaking which are motel rooms rented by the hour. There if you happen to have a car you can drive it behind a curtain where the adulterer can hide from the prying eyes of the detective's camera. There is a whole language for different degrees of courtship. If you female friends lets you have sex with her she is an "amiga con ventaja". If you are dating she becomes you "polola". Date her and no one else and she is your "novia". Marry and she becomes your "esposa". Divorce and--as is the case in the USA--she becomes your "ex".

school and English--the wealthier people send their children to private school ("collegios") and those most fortunate of all take private classes in order to score highly on the PSU (equivalent of the SAT) so they can go to college. Children who go to the collegios know English pretty well. Simple laborers earn about $1 per hour working in agriculture and are laid off after the grape harvest is done.

agriculture---The whole of the country from La Serena down to Concepcion is planted with grapes, onion, olives, whatever. Were it not for the irrigation which cuts across the country in aqueducts and canals it would all be dust. If you grow roses and live in the humid and wet east coast of the USA you will be envious how easily everything grows here without mildew.

coffee--Chileans export most of their agriculture it would seem keeping little of it for themselves. So they drink powdered drinks or buy cheap, watered down jugos ("juices"). Contrast this with Colombia where mango, blackberry, and other juices are drunk au natural without so much water. In the USA of course we prefer water, corn syrup, food coloring, and cancer causing concoctions which contains say 2% real fruit. Chile does not grow coffee. Instead of brewing ground beans they like it powdered. As for decaf they know not what that means.

sea food--clams ("almejas"), sea urchin, and and odd looking creature called "pico roco" are plentiful here sold by the cartful in the open air at Puerto Montt. For fish they have salmon in the South and congrio and reinata everywhere. I have never seen anything like what in the USA they call a "Chilean Bass" so presume that to be some invention of the gringo mentality.

waiting in line--if you go to the pharmacy to, say, recharge the balance on your cell phone take a number and wait. In Santiago, which is a large city, you have to wait in line for the pharmacy, the bank, to obtain service from the butcher and so forth. Chileans wait in line to pay bills at "servipago". In the USA I wait in line for nothing prefering to pay bills and buy tickets on the internet.

public telephone--it costs 100 pesos to call a land line ("linea fija") and 200 pesos to call a cell phone ("movil"). Dial 09 before each cell phone number.

la once--Chileans eat 4 times per day. breakfast ("desayuno"), lunch ("almuerzo"), dinner ("la cena"), and a light dinner at 5 o'clock (oddly enough called "la once" which means 11).

the work day--don't wake up at 5 o'clock and put on your running shows and head out to Starbucks. Shops here don't open until 10 and children go to school in shifts. For this reason you will see lots of school kids on the street at night when you would imagine they should be home fighting with their siblings.

dogs--dogs are free to wander all over Chile and no one cares. You will see them sleeping on the streets and crossing with pedestrians to the rythym of traffic lights ("semaforos"). In the USA someone seeing a stray would call the police and the dog squad would descend in great numbers perhaps with guns drawn.

cell phones--buy a prepaid cell phone in the USA and pay over the internet to have it unlocked. Make sure it is a GSM phone. Then here you can buy a SIM card and a prepaid cell phone card ("tarjeta") in order to recharge ("recarga") the balance ("saldo"). Chile under Pinochet embraced Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and free-wheeling capitalism while electing socialts to office since then. Consequently there are multiple cell phone companies vying for your business. When you call someone it is free or them which is good when you are dating a girl who has no money, honey.

paying for stuff--In Chile you pay the "cajera" (cashier) after first choosing a product from one counter, perhaps retrieving it from another, then finally paying for it at a third. The system is bureaucratic with even the smallest stores having at least two steps in this three step process. They will always give you a receipt ("boleto") which is one reason Chile is known as a country where they is little corruption, well comparated to say Ecuador or Argentina, since there is this paper trail.

swimming pools--apparently no one swims in Santiago for there is one indoor pool ("piscina techada"), the YMCA, and it costs $12 per day to swim there. As for the ocean it is too cold for lots of people unless you are used to the Pacific chill in California.

police--the national police here are called "carbineros". They are professional and courteous and will not accept bribes ("morditas"). Argentine drivers accustomed to paying bribes to avoid a traffic ticket are arrested here when they try that.

illegal immigrants---as the USA is overrun with Mexicans Chile is overun with Peruvians. That is why you will see signs “for rent” ("se arrienda") only Chileans.

Chilean wine--buy my book "Wine, Communism, and Volcanoes".

Wifi internet---buy a prepaid mobile broadband card from Falabella or Ripleys or Paris. It will cost $100 and the first two months might be free. So no contract required. The service providers are EntelPC, Movistar, and Claro. When you go back to home just give it away to someone else.

Public transport----taxis are cheap but collectivos are cheaper. A “collectivo” can mean a bus or a taxi that runs in the same loop day in and day out. On the windshield it says for example “$200”. That would be 38 cents. These cabs are shared. You can tell the driver when you pay “se paga” meaning "I am paying you now". When you want to get off say “la esquina por favor” meaning “drop me off at the corner.” The subway in Santiago is clean and efficient. Buy a BIP card and use it to board the bus and the metro. Push the button near the door to signal your descent. In order to plan your trip around santiago use http://www.transantiagoinforma.cl/deDonde.do

tips—a tip is a “propina”. For meals it is 10% or zero and there is no place on the credit card receipt to attach it. For taxis it is zero.

hookers--legal. Not much more need be said. Larger towns will have a red light district. If you are looking for the traditional burlesque show go to a "cafe con piernes" where topless women serve drinks over the bar.

petty crime--Chile is free of the kipnapping and extortion problems or Colombia and Mexico. But here there is petty and sometimes violent crimes from criminials ("delincuentes"). Watch your camera and your back pack.

Credit cards---every time you use your credit card they will ask for your “RUT”. This is like a social security number. Just make up a 7 digit number or write down your passport number. No one will ask to see your passport except maybe the Chinese restaurants whose owners are adrift between two cultures. Also know that the cashier will ask you if you would like to pay in installments ("cuotas") and whether you want to donate 100 pesos to the poor. Just say "sin cuotas".

refrigeration--my first wife came from Ecuador a country where meat is sold in the open air without refrigerationand people pile in 7 to a vehicle without seat belts. She threatened me bodily if I took our 11 year old son to the store without his child restraint system and her family all wanted their food cooked well done. When my mother-in-law and sister-in-law came over for a cookout I simply burned what they ate and they appeared pleased. As for Chile and Colombia don't look for eggs in the refrigerated section of the dairy. The are on the counter. As one who has farmed chickens I can tell you a hen lays her egg in 90 or 100 degree temperatures and it can sit there days or weeks without spoiling. One reasons eggs in the USA are refrigerated is they are sold old, months old in many cases. An egg yoke should be bright yellow. If it is grey, as they usually are at the Walmart and elsewhere, it indicates age. "Botalo"--i.e. trash it. I buy only brown or organic eggs as the conditions in which chickens are raised on factory farms are filthy and disgusting.

sex--The gringo culture is rather uptight. We have The Moral Majority, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Right to Lifers, militant Lesbian feminists all railing again what THEY consider to be immoral. In Chile--a Catholic country where divorce was only made legal a few years ago--there is little of this tyrrany of the Moral Minority. This is also the case in Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, everywhere beyond the stifling confines of USA victorian mores. Here women wear thong bathing suits while they are arrested for doing the same where I was born at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. It is 1:30 AM here now and I am watching a burlesque show on broadcast television. There is no FCC here to impose the will of the religious right on the rest of us. The telenovelas are almost soft born with steamier scenes than you would ever see on, say, Days of Our Lives. Prostitution is legal while--owing to the influence of the church---abortion usually is not but even that is changing. Which country is more free? If I could say more I would add to this burden the misery which is inflicted by the legal system in America which stifles so many aspect of our lives with "no running", "no trespassing", "no skateboarding", "no regard" for what is logical the lunacy havencompletely haven got out of hand.

A Farmers Market in Santiago

2009-05-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

I am still here in Chile having turned over the goats to a goatherd and a vineyard to a vineyard worker. So for my blog on Virginia agriculture today I write about the farmers market in Chile.

This is a four day weekend in Chile to mark the end of the War of the Pacific on May 21 which is when Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia enlarging their country and denying Bolivia access to the sea. Since the holiday is a Thursday Chileans take Friday for vacation as well. They have not pushed all their federal holidays to Monday as we have done so the kids get an extra day off school.

Here in central Santiago in a neighborhood located between Cummins and Quinta Normal subway stops peddlers line the street for a dozen blocks selling everything from clothes to seafood to vegetables. The streets are crowed on this cloudy Sunday morning as worshipers pile out of the Salvation Army church a few blocks away. The city library is crowded with students working on the free internet access provided there. The walls could use painting. Many books have their covers worn. At the entrance there is mention of a grant from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation. In the markets crowds of illegal immigrants from Peru sell pirated DVD music, candy apples, socks, or a single brassier if that is all they have for inventory. It would seem only in the USA and maybe Europe that copyright piracy laws are really enforced so the gringo pays $29 for the latest movie while on the street here it costs $2.

I head into the street to buy cilantro and peppers, kiwi, and olives, spring onions, and carrots. I am looking for a ready-made mix of spices called “verdura surtida” which is hojas de apio(celery), perejil (like cilantro), and oregano fresco(fresh oregano). Carrots are called “zanahorias”. Bell peppers are “pimentones”. Spring onions are “cebollin italiano”. Kiki of course is “kiwi” and plaintains are “platanos”.

According to today's La Tercera newspaper the latest fashion in agriculture in Chile arearellanos, which are hazelnuts, which you can have with your coffee at Starbucks. The newspaper says they can be grown here cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Fortunes have been made here and lost in olives, oranges, grapes and kiwi and now perhaps arellanos but those markets are given to wide swings in price. There is lots of kiwi planted here in Chile. One male plant is planted in the middle of a dozen or so females. The vines are trained overhead in theparron style of trellis which is used to grow table grapes and low quality wine grapes. You can readily tell a kiwi farm when you drive buy because the fruit smells strongly like kerosene.

All of this produce is of course local agriculture except no one touts “locally grown” or “organic” or any of that because Chile is one giant cultivated garden at least where the ground is not vertical (I.e. The Andes) or desert or timbered forest. So many people work in agriculture here not simply as laborers but as salesmen, agronomists, managers, and other that they don't treat it as a novelty like we do in the outer burbs of Northern Virginia. The situation here in Chile must be like, say, Fresno, California where agriculture is simply a way to earn a living for an entire communities.

Back at the market I have filled two shopping bags—you need to bring your own---for 4,000 pesos (about $8). I have some money left over so I buy oranges (naranjas) and acetunas which you might call “olivias” except they are not as salty. (Salt is to olives as vinegar and alum are to pickles)

Eldon Farms

2009-05-19T06:49:00.002-07:00

John Genho, is a 29 year Ivy League school graduate who reads the Wall Street Journal and farms 7,600 acres of pastureland and forest in Rappahannock County. His crew includes a cowboy from Florida, a former rock-n-roller who had a top 40 hit, two other farm hands, an office person, and a pack of border collies and other types of working dogs.

People who live in Rappahannock County know Eldon Farms, if only by reputation, as the local environmentalists eye what might be the largest tract of contiguous land in three counties hoping the owners never carve it up for development. Running all the way from Slate Mills Rd to Sperryville this sprawling farm cross both sides of highway 522 with 24 rental houses and 100 buildings on the property plus 65 miles of fencing. Unlike so many of the hobby horse and cattle farms in the county—whose owners sometimes say they “farm” although they produce no profit--this farm is a working farm whose revenue pays the salaries, the medical bills, the food, and the clothing for the handful of people who work there.

Eldon Farms has for 40 years belonged to the Lane Family whose founder William “Bill” N. Lane, II died in an automobile accident near the family's Bell Ranch in New Mexico some 30 years ago. The late Mr. Lane was an astute businessman who bought an interest in a Chicago book binding company acquiring other properties which continue under family ownership as Lane Hospitality, Acco Brands and others. His widow continued to spend time at the house they call “Little Eldon” and his son Nelson still knows people in the county.

John Genho does not deal with the family members too much since Eldon Farms is owned by the corporation and run as a business. The same environmentalists who are eager to assert an easement across the farm will be comforted by the fact that John sits on the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District board, a generally elected position, with Monira Rifaat who of course is an advocate of conservation easements. Cliff Miller was formerly on that board and has put much of his Mount Vernon Farm into the CREP and BMP cost sharing programs which pay farmers to keep cattle out of the stream. Eldon Farms is doing that too although it will take a while with so many miles of fencing to replace. The BMP cost sharing program has been boosted from 75% to 85% plus Rappahannock has a matching funds program from a donor for $50,000 for the 15% gap.

John is a Mormon who went to school at Brigham Young then Cornell where he studied animal genetics. He lives on the farm in a large house with his child ren and wife who likes to take photos and upload them to the family's blog.

Farming, of course, is hardly profitable anymore the costs of machinery, grain, and land having put profitability out of the reach of possibility for most family farms. John says Eldon Farms breaks even and has a positive cash flow in the years when he is able to cut timber, the mountainous forest here harboring some veneer quality red oak. Because of the crash in the housing market , timber prices have fallen to “65-70% of what the value was a couple of years ago” so logging is no windfall.

John says, “When you look at our accounting we make money off cattle.” But it won't make you rich adding, “It's not something you would want to take out a loan and start a business. We have 24 rental houses. If we can cut timber we have positive cash flow.”

Every day John checks the price of feeder cattle and corn on the Chicago Board of Trade. He says that for years corn traded for $2 to $4per bushel. “But last summer corn was trading over $7 dollars. Grass has all of a sudden become more valuable.” The traditional model for a cow calf operation has been to raise cattle to 500 pounds weight then sell them at the livestock auction where they would be shipped off to large feeding operations in Nebraska or small Mennonite Amish-run operations in Pennsylvania where they would be fed corn until they reach their 1,200 pound slaughter weight. Corn is now back down to $4 per bushel, still feedlots prefer calves that weight 700 to 800 pounds because it takes less time and less money to fatten up the cows for slaughter. In order to each that extra weight 200 to 300 pounds of weight the rancher needs to overwinter the cattle which is difficult to do if you have to pay for hay. Eldon Farms does not have to buy hay because they bale their own and stockpile fescue for the winter—that means they simply leave certain paddocks ungrazed and unclipped.

John has 1,400 head of cattle on the farm including 500 calves which in June will be headed to market. In January he sold those calves which weighed more than 600 pounds to the Winchester livestock market and was pleased by the price in the off season sale. October and November are, “The Absolute worst time to sell them, because no one wants to take them through the winter.”Calves kept over the winter are called “stocker cattle”.

Of other parts of the country John says, “Nebraska grasslands are prime cow calf country”. But the disadvantage there is you have to supply hay in the winter while in Virginia fescue grass can be stockpiled for the winter. He says, “The three best things about fescue are January, February, and March and the worst are June, July, and August.” By this he is referring to the endophyte infected tall fescue grass which dominates the landscape here. The fungus lives in harmony with the plant thus giving it the ability to tolerate the cold winters here. But in summer endophyte causes cattle to lose rather than gain weight as their respiration and heart rate increase. The alternative would be to try and kill all the fescue and replace it with orchard grass or something like MaxQ fescue but that takes time and costs money.

To boost protein Eldon Farms plants some summer annuals like pearl millet and small grains like barley but only on a small scale for their heifers that will become breeding stock to give them an extra boost. His focus instead is to maintain the highest quality pasture as he rotates stock from one paddock to another to both improve the grass stand there and keep the animals from overgrazing pastures, which would expose them to lethal intestinal parasites which live in the soil.

John's ideal pasture management system would be to sample 20% of the pastures each year and then apply fertilizer according to the soil sample. But prices have wrecked havoc on the ideal situation. He says, “What we are really interested in is getting the phosphorus and potassium right and for nitrogen we figure if we can clover into the field nitrogen will take care of itself. Unless we are stockpiling fescue we cannot afford to put nitrogen on the field.” But he ads, “Potassium prices went from $100 per ton to $1000 per ton so we cannot afford to buy that. I would love to put potassium and phosphorus down on our field. Nitrogen gives you a short term bloom but it leaches out pretty fast. Potassium and phosphorous give you a good healthy field.”

The two cowboys Robert Gainer and Rich Bradley and the farm manager John Genho offer to saddle up the horses and move the cattle on horseback for the visiting journalist but pick up trucks and dogs will do just fine. Ray Bennett is waiting at the other end of the pasture several miles away as the lowing herd is marshalled toward tender new ungrazed grass at the other end of the village of Woodville. The grass here is a mix or orchard grass and clover with some blue grass and fescue mixed it—it is what the farmers would call “lush”. A dozen bulls barely lift their heads as we drive by in a pickup truck in order to meet the cowboys and the herd. The bulls have long ago worked out which one is dominant and the lesser males take care to stay out of the way of the largest. John says each year a couple are injured killed fighting. He says, “This is what it means to be a male.”

We have completely blocked one of the winding lanes leaving Woodville as the herd is turned down the road. The working dogs snap at the heels of the cows as they push them along. There are so many cows one wonders for a moment whether you would be crushed if they stampede. John's border collie is meant to be at the front of the pack but is working at the back as he responds to John's verbal signals. The border collie lurks behind a few stubborn cows then nips at them as the cows briefly challenge the dog then retreat. A couple hundred heifers are in the pasture on the other side of the road and crowd the fence trying to join the larger herd. Traffic, if there were any on this almost abandoned road, would not be able to pass as the animals have taken over a ¼ mile of unpaved roadway. The cattle kick up dust on their way to the other pasture. The herd moved to the new location the cowboys return to their never ending task of maintaining the fences.

What Happened to All the Silos?

2009-05-19T06:49:00.001-07:00

Drive across the landscape in Virginia and the observant person notices that practically all of the silos here are no longer in use except on some dairy farms. Instead of being used to store silage—that is, grain that is fermented so that it will not spoil—trees are growing up through the middle of these ghosts of the landscape which have not been used for some years.

There is an old saying which is very much true for those who bale hay: “Make hay while the sun shines”. When you cut hay you have to let it dry for a couple of days in the sun before you bale it up. Otherwise if you bale it damp it will rot. Not so for what is called “bailage”. This is grass which is cut then baled straight away and wrapped in air tight plastic. The bales ferment turning into something akin to vinegar. Cattle love it, the cow hands at the 7,600 acre Eldon Farms in Rappahannock County say they even lick up the juice from the plastic and the ground.

In the past sillage was made by lifting grass or corn stalks into the anerobic (i.e. oxygen free) environment of the silo. Sillage can also be made by shoveling forage into a pit into the ground and covering it with plastic and tires. Or you can just bag up some green grass in a plastic bag and wrap it up tight.

Jim Bowen farms wheat, cattle, and hay on 3,700 acres of land in Culpeper owned by the Germans. He has been working here since 1981. His farm is well-known throughout the state having hosted the annual Virginia Ag Expo which is the largest event in the state for row crop farmers. Jim is well-positioned to explain why there are no more silos.

Standing in front of an enormous 8-tire 248 horsepower tractor in front of empty silos and functioning grain elevators Jim explains what he does here.

“I have silos and grain bins and grain elevators I don't use the silos. Mostly what we do is we use it grain for sale corn and to store [soy] beans for grain.”

For his cattle he says, “All I feed is hay but I feed sillage hay. I use ballage which is sillage wrapped in plastic. You can make the hay at 50% moisture. All I do is cut it and bail it. No need to dry it. With ballage you can bale it the next day.Wrapped it tight and it ferments. Used to be, to make a bag you would push 50 rolls into a bag and you would cut a little slit it in but now you don't have to do that because we wrap it so tight. Almost all dairy farmers use silage. It is a great feed. Pits work the same way. You put the sillage into pits and you pack it as you put it in. Cover it up and keep the air out. Uncover it as you feed it. So it won't turn into compost you need to pack it good. You don't want air to get all in it.” He says most sillage pits are made of concrete..

Jim says, “You can make hay and sillage out of winter rye. Its a real early crop its almost ready now [April]”. At this time of the year area lawns and pastures are still grey from winter but rye and wheat feels are bright green especially if they have been fed nitrogen.

Asked about fertilizer he says, “I will put nitrogen on the wheat in the fall or early spring. I just put nitrogen on it last week. Last fall I bought nitrogen. I paid $450 per ton right now it is $200 per ton that costs 70 cents per unit—I can hardly make money at that”

Jim runs about 200 Angus cows. He put has 7 frost-free Merafont watering systems that use the temperature of the soil to keep themselves ice free even when it is below freezing. He says, “ I try to limit the grazing along my farm banks. I didn't want my cattle in the streams.”

When straw prices are high Jim sells straw but otherwise leaves in on the ground as he rotates to the next crop. Because of the crash in housing prices there is not much demand for straw now as few builders are seeding new lots.

“Hay” is forage which is cut wet, allowed to dry, then baled. “Straw” is wheat which is allowed to dry then cut after the combine has taken away the grain. Jim farms and sells orchard grass to area horse and cattlemens. They prefer that over alfalfa he says, “There's not many people who buy alfalfa. They don't want something which such high protein. Because most of these horses are not working. They get fat if you feed them alfalfa. Most horse people in this area like the 2^ndcutting orchard grass which is a lot shorter and finer cut.”

Of the costs and revenue he says, “It probably cost me $70 year fertilizer on my orchard grass and I normally make 2 – 2.5 tons per acre of hay. Selling it for $45 per bale I am grossing $200 per acre and $45 for 800 an pound bale. I do some small bales too”.

Most of what Jim grows is corn and soybeans which is pretty much what most row crop farmers do and they collect a subsidy for that but Jim does not as this farm is foreign owned. Jim markets his grain to the chicken industry. I have written about two row crop farmers on this blog to date and both of them sell to Perdue. These chicken operations obviously buy a lot of area grain.

Jim says, “Everything you see here thats green here like that is wheat. Most of my wheat I sell to Perdue farms and it used for export out of Norfolk. I grow wheat corn soybeans rotation. I sell it by the bushel. 60 pounds to a bushel. I sell spot market and futures contract..”

Because of all the chicken farms in Harrisonburg and elsewhere there is a surplus of manure available for fertilizer. Jim says, “Right now chicken litter is $30 per ton just dumped on your farm. Contact Mount Pony Farm. They are brokers. Talk to Billy.”

Flying to Patagonia

2009-05-09T07:21:00.001-07:00

I am here in Puerto Montt near the bottom of Chile and consequently the bottom of the planet where the Pacific Ocean, which one normally thinks of as lying to the west, surrounds the peninsula here both in a southerly and westerly direction. The wind is howling and the rain blowing in this corner of Patagonia where rain falls some 300 days of the year.

My wife and I have left behind the dry climate of Santiago for a few days amongst what in Spanish they call “naturaleza”. Here there are not one but three volcanoes each higher than the next. The Volcan Osorno looms above the town of Puerta Varas reflected in the waters of the lake Lanquihue as if in a postcard. A postcard is in fact the only way we can see the top of the volcano today because of the cloud cover.

I've left the goat farm in the hands of a goatherd and the vineyard in the care of another farmer while I come here to both repair relations with my wife, who lives in Santiago, and look for work in the USA. Each day I answer emails from IT recruiters in the USA and talk on the phone with prospective employers using the wonderful program Skype. It's two cents per minute.

Today we are taking the ferry across to the island of Chiloe. You board a bus which for 7,000 pesos ($12) will take us to the town of Castro including the 45 minute board ride across the bay. Yesterday the ferries were shutdown because of the howling gale. So we braced against the rain and joined the legions of high school kids hanging out at the mall while I looked for a charger for the battery for my camera.

I find it amusing the the hostel where I am staying is located on the Avenue Salvador Allende and I am heading to Castro. My wife is a pinochenista or supporter of the dicator Pinochet who sacked the Marxist President Allende and took on the role of leader of the military junta. Emotions over this period of time run deep which I learned when I made the mistake of naming my second book “Wine Communism and Volcanoes”. I should have called it “The Gringo and the Harvest” because the winery owners here, who for the most part supported Pinochet, are embarrassed by their communist past and my book did not sell well here.

That does not matter now as I have written a new book with a larger publisher which I believe we will call “Virginia Wines from Grapes to Glass”. I turned in the last chapter friday—now the process of editing begins. So I have something to do to fill the days before I return to the grind of the daily corporate job.

Gricel, my wife, and I went to the office of Lan Chile airlines last week and looked for a promotion, cheap flights to wherever. We thought of the Valle del Luna in the desert to the North or Puntas Arenas which is at the bottom of the country. But both locations were too expensive so we settled on Puerto Montt which is no disappointment at all.

Two days ago we hired a van and went with a family from Valpairso and two single girls from Ecuador and Argentia to visit the volcano here and see the lake. As such things usually transpire by the end of the day we were all friends and had exchanged email addresses promising to share photos with people we will never see again.

Geography in this part of the world is large on a scale which is hard to imagine. Driving up to see the Saltos de Petrohue (Petrohue Rapids) we passed a lofty mountain that rose straight up into the horizon which the chauffer told us was the precordillera. The Andes here are called the “cordillera” and of course “ precordillera” would mean the foothills but in their towering immensity they are taller than anything we have in the well-eroded mountains of Virginia Appalachia. In Virginia we have little tiny trout swimming in the stream but in the stream here there are salmon roughly a meter in length, huge animals laying their eggs on their way back to the ocean.

After Puerto Montt we spend two days in Chiloe. The strongest earthquake from recorded history rocked this region in 1960 sinking the coastline by a meter. To get to Chiloe you take a bus which then takes a ferry across to the island. It's a pleasant location with a cloud of sadness hanging over it for 9,000 people are unemployed having lost their jobs in the salmon farming business when a virus invaded the fisheries. The fisheries are still closed after two years.

If you go to Chiloe visit Castro and there stop in and talk with the owner at Loco Tony's supermarket. He is a retired fisherman from Maine.

Virginia BMP Farm Cost Sharing Program

2009-04-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

After the drubbing I took from my last two posts—mainly on rappnet--I decided to write something cheerier and return to the agricultural theme of this web site.

Local farmers be advised there is money there for the taking if you are willing to fence your cattle and other livestock out of area streams. This essay is the tale of my participation in the BMP (best management practices) cost-sharing program.

At first glance BMP is a no-brainer proposition. The states of Virginia will pay you 75% of the cost of putting in a well, fencing, and a frost-free watering system if you agree to keep your animals from wading and defecating in the water. Plus you get a 25% state tax credit for the portion that they do not reimburse. The reason this is desirable is animal manure is high in nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Their manure flows down the stream, into the river, and into the Chesapeake Bay where it causes algae blooms, red tides, all sort of maladies.

Now the program is voluntary. One day it could become mandatory and that certainly will set local farmers howling. Some say they would be forced out of business if they are required to fence off their streams. That's not true for all but the poorest farmers. There's no reason not to participate in the program if the state will pay the lion's share of the cost. Some farmers are simply philosophically opposed to the idea. Some of these complaining cattlemen are just tax farmers who keep cattle simply to keep their farms in the land use program thus lowering—you could say “lowing”---their real estate tax bill by 75%. They are out there now buying so-called “land use cattle” driving up the prices for calves at the spring auctions.

My own reason for participating in the program was financial. All winter long I had been hauling water two times per day down to my goats as the water I gave them quickly froze. So what I needed was a frost-free system: a mirafont.

The mirafont is elegant in its simplicity. It works sort of like a toilet with a floating and a valve. A pipe driven into the ground allows warm air from the subsoil to keep the water free of ice. A plastic ball floats into the space above the water and the animals learn to push down the floating ball and get a drink of water.

I applied for the BMP (best management practices) cost sharing program through David Massie at the Soil and Water Conservation office in Culpeper. The board of directors there took a look at my farm and approved a fence and frost-free watering system for 700 feet of stream footage. They said I did not have enough goats to justify a well so Clyde Pullen, the contractor I hired for the job, simply hooked my mirafont watering system directly to my existing well. As I grow my farm I plan to apply again: next time maybe I will have enough goats to justify a well.

The whole project cost me about $7,500 for which BMP will pay approximately $4,000. It's a bit difficult to calculate what portion of the project went toward the conservation project and what portion went toward the other project I finished which was to fence in 4 acres of forest (i.e. the other side of the stream easement) and run electric and water lines 800 feet down to my pasture. (The idea is the goats will clear the forest over time and turn it into pasture.) Clyde and his crew rented a Kubota backhoe and dug a trench 30 inches deep some 700 feet down my driveway. Then my electrician, Greg Lukas, installed three electrical plugs and put lights in my greenhouse and tool shed. For the electrical work I traded two years of hunting rights on my farm. (During the Great Recession barter has supplanted cash in some cases.) Clyde installed two frost-free hydrants. This way I will have water for my garden, my green house and my other pasture where the herd sire lives and where there is no mirafont, yet. As for the fencing I did all of that myself. The state paid a subsidy for the cost of the fencing, the cost of the mirafont, the water line, and the electric charger to power the fence. And I have contributed my own, albeit modest, effort to keep the Chesapeake Bay clean.

Laid off from the Day Job and Nursing two Kids by Hand

2009-04-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Problems on the Goat Farm: Unemployment and Nursing two Kids by Hand

Two disasters befell the goat farm this week. First, I got laid off from my day job from Sprint. Second, the mother of two of my day old goats died. So I am bottle feeding her two kids while I buried their mother this morning with the tractor.

In the last 20 days thirteen baby goats have been born on the farm. Two of them died—one had bite marks from some wild animal and the other perhaps got bacteria in its umbilical cord and dropped dead without warning. I had followed the textbook procedures and instructions from friends. I had vaccinated all of the mothers a month before they delivered so that the mothers would deliver immunity to their kids through their colostrum. And I dewormed the mothers the day they delivered so they would not die of anemia. Still I found myself in the veterinarian's office this week a little moist eyed as the vet put down one of my kids. Farmers are supposed to be hardened in sprit as birth and death are part of life. But I had been with this little girl since the evening before trying to force feed her milk I had drawn from her mother's teats. With no registrable temperature and despite steroids fed through a catheter the little babie die in a box on Dr. Massie's office. A little bit of me died there with that doe.

Tonight I just got back from the drug store where I bought two baby bottles to feed my orphaned day-old goats. I had been unable to get them to suck on the calf-sized nipple that I had affixed to a bottle of Goat-Savr powdered milk. They sucked on my fingers and nibbled on my shirt all the while yelling for their mother. But unless they learned to feed from the bottle they would die of starvation. I tried everything the book told me: cover their eyes to emulate the dark under their mother's udder, tickle their rectum as their mother would do. Then it dawned on me that the nipple designed for a calf was too large for a goat. So at the Walgreens I bought two nipples and voila both kids drank a whole bottle of milk. Now they are sleeping peacefully on the couch at my side and have quit crying for their mother. For the next two months I am their mother as they will require feeding 4 times per day.

This of course ties me down as I look for new work. I cannot help but be angry to yet again have been tossed out by the brutality which is capitalism where morality matters not and profit is the only goal. I once had my own company but am not much of a capitalist because I never laid off anyone even when there was no work. Of course Sprint has a fiduciary duty to its stock holders to lower costs and maximize profits but that is what is wrong with this system in which we live in the USA. Sprint was making positive cash flows and had billions of dollars in the bank so there was no crisis there. Their former CEO Gary Forsee had been singled out by some magazine as the worst offender in the malfeasance which is executive compensation and greed. He had paid himself $22 million dollars two years ago as the company shed customers unhappy with the poor customer service and dropped calls. The new CEO Dan Hesse promised to do better and I believed his every word. I was encouraged as each quarter we met our targets and my own bonus was usually equal to one month pay. But the board of directors was not happy that Sprint's operating costs were 20% of revenue and not 15% as was the case with AT&T and Verizon the primary competitors. So Dan tossed me out along with 5,000 other fathers and mothers and tax paying citizens and replaced them with people in India a dozen of which I had personally trained. Of the people left behind in the office in Reston and Kansas many were working on immigrant visas.

There is a new type of McCarthyism lurking in the halls of corporate America where you are not supposed to mention the visa status of those you work with. But having been laid off twice in the past 8 years and replaced by Indians I feel compelled to speak out. I had asked the Vice President at Sprint where I was working whether priority would be given to U.S. Citizens over workers on immigrant visas during this round of layoffs. He said “No, we're all God's children”. But the stimulus bill has required that U.S. Citizens be given preference when the decision is made to cut head count. This is a rule which is widely circumvented especially by Indian contracting firms that illegally bring workers to the USA when they have no position for them here. The corporation is able to say “this is not my doing” when they delegate work to these these H1B body shops.

For ten years now Indian immigrants have steadily replaced US Citizens in the workplace. Bill Gates is so enamored of their prowess that he declared Southern Indians the smartest workers in the world. It's made me so mad I want to leave the IT field and do what I really want to do which is farming and working in the vineyard. But I am a prisoner---tied down by the need for health care I must have full-time work. Like most farmers my day job pays for agricultural hobby and my farm losses are a hedge against the taxes I pay working for the corporations. Last year my farm had an income of minus $31,000 USD.

I have bittersweet relations with Indians as the advertising for goat meat on my web site is written in Kannada, Hindi, and Telegu. I had had the idea to direct market goat meat to Indians but are finding them too cheap to deal with. Unlike the gringo the Indian does not understand nor care for the idea of “organic”, “sustainable agriculture”, and “local farming”. They simply are interested in what does it cost. It's frustrating beyond belief as I had hoped to make them my customers. I have the same emotion as Indian headhunters phone me up as I look for work. The gringo will ask me about my experience. The Indians only concern is "what is your billing rate?"

Indian immigration is a theme I have written about before as they have so abused the systems to now outnumber US Citizens in the IT work place. Take a look at this essay which appeared in two Indian publications including this one http://mediakit.indusbusinessjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=8BC1B012FC0D4682A435C4D1B601370A

Wanted: farm intern

2009-03-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Rosewood Hill Farm in Rappahannock County is looking for a farm intern to start right away. We have 65 acres with 15 acres of pasture, 20 goats, and 1/2 acre of wine grapes. I can give you room and board and when you are working in the vineyard pay you $12 per hour (about 8 hours per week). We are clearing 11 acres of forest and planting 2 acres of merlot vines. Come and learn how to care for a working vineyard, make wine, care for boer meat goats, and tend a garden. Contact info is at the bottom of this page.

Dr. Richard Smart, The Flying Vine Doctor

2009-03-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

The Australian Dr. Richard Smart—known as the “Flying Vine Doctor”--rocked the viticultural status quo when he dismissed the notion that only the French can make world class wines. The French success, he wrote in his book “Sunlight into Wine”, is more of an accident of geography. The characteristics of the gravely, slightly alkaline soils of France can be replicated elsewhere by pruning and training the vine to have a proper balance of fruit and foliage. Science trumps tradition. New World grape growers started building trellises he designed and New World wine sales surged while French wine sales slumped. Recently Dr. Smart flew from Tasmania to Virginia by way of Georgia to explain his principles to 150 grape growers at Veritas Vineyards. There he spent some time with “Virginia Wine Lovers” magazine.

Can Virginia produce premium wines with all this rain and humidity?

Virginia is not the only place in the world where you are growing in humidity. It occurs in much of Europe. Bordeaux is an example of a place with rain and humidity. So you can do it. I like to say it’s a bit hard to do it. It’s easier to grow grapes if you have no rain fall and you irrigate. However you can get by. The high humidity has been an issue with some vintages. But then again there’s lots of places in the world that are humid. I would have to say that high summer rainfall is a problem here and some other places because we like to stop shoot growth before veraison and if you get a lot of rain before veraison that is hard.

Do you think Virginia can ripen Cabernet Sauvignon? Some growers say plant cabernet franc instead which is a Loire grape where it is cooler than Bordeaux. It requires fewer growing days to mature. There are people who grow it here and some who will not like Dennis Horton.

This is not a question you should ask me because it requires knowledge of Virginia and I am hardly an expert on that. But in Pennsylvania I have heard some people who question the suitability of cabernet sauvignon in Virginia. And I saw why bother if you gripe about it. There’s enough bloody cabernet in the world without Virginia adding to it.

I know you have worked in New York and Pennsylvania. How do Virginia wines compare with those of New York?

I’ve had some good wines here. The wine that has impressed me the most is viognier, undoubtedly. What I do find distressing here is people are hung up on the international varieties. They are slavishly planting cabernet and chardonnay. This is not healthy. They should be looking for their own varieties.

Twenty-Five or thirty years ago people in Virginia said you can only plant hybrids here. Now vinifera has had success. Do you think Virginia, given the humidity and rain, should be planting more mold and rot resistant seyval and vidal or do you think we should kept the focus on vinifera varieties?

I think keep the focus on the vinifera. That’s not to say there aren’t some good hybrids and not to say there won’t be more good hybrids in the future. Vinifera with some with some disease tolerance--that’s the ideal. Part of the problem is that people--partly your own profession is to blame--promote varietal labeling and consumers are averse to trying new varieties. And that is a shame because there is such a rich wealth of great varieties. I was just in Georgia where there are 500 indigenous varieties and they make wine only from some 10 or 20 of them and the others are not even evaluated.

You said vinifera will have greater disease resistance in the future?

Yes, that is because of breeding programs.

What can Virginia do to improve wine quality?

Keep experimenting with varieties. I suspect there is going to be a red variety as good as viognier and I suspect you haven’t tried it yet. I encouraged the group this morning to try some varieties from Eastern Europe. The weather is similar there.

Tell me about talking to Virginia grape growers today.

Tony Wolf [Virginia Tech’s viticulturist] encouraged me to put some perspective on the business here. I told the people they are making it hard on themselves with a lot of small operators and small vineyards. Not a very serious investment. The one we just went to Pollack they match up against some of the best vineyards in the world. And I think of people like Tony Wolf who I regards as one of the best grape researchers in the world. I think there is a good chance for the Virginia wine industry. You have something here that much of the rest of the world admires and that is wealthy consumers. And you have so many around here. You got to work on the reputation of Virginia wines. I think the way to do it personally is to do it in external wine shows, international wine shows. You need to keep plugging away like good old Jefferson did.

(The article originally appears in "Virginia Wine Lovers" magazine.)

Kidding

2009-03-13T06:37:00.001-07:00

The first goats were born on Rosewood Hill Farm this morning. Exactly 5 months from conception the first female I ever bought had twins. Within minutes of being born the babies were up and walking. I was hoping on this day it would be warm but we have snow. Still they have found a dry spot under a pine tree.

February Snow and the Deadline

2009-02-03T04:55:00.001-08:00

I apologize to my readers for not writing too much lately. I've been busy writing a new book on Virginia wineries which I hope to complete in just a few months. So I've taken a break from magazine writing and of course from reporting and writing updates for this blog. Rest assured rosewoodhillfarm.com will resume with a passion and soon.

Last night I rushed home from Charlottesville as fast as one can "rush" in a snow storm. The day was warm with temperature in the 50s. No one took the weatherman seriously when he said he would have snow because it was so warm. But snow is what it did and more is forecast for today.

I stayed out late at a dinner party and told my host I needed to get home to feed my guard dog Molly. My neighbor Melvin Jenkins gives Molly beef bones so I often find her laying next to his house guarding his cattle instead of on my property guarding my goats. The dog goes back and forth looking to see who will give him a better meal.

I have two dogs: a working dog and a "soup dog". Melvin gave my black lab Will this name meaning an animal that lies around waiting for food and does not do much of anything else. Will has been reduced to wearing an electric collar and sleeping in my bed and on the couch since I cannot trust him to go outside too long for he will run off. His one redeeming feature is he can retrieve geese when I shoot them down in the middle of the lake. Molly, the Great Pyrenees, on the other hand never runs off--except to Melvin's of course and that is within eyesight--and does a superb job of guarding the goats. At night she barks at whatever moves in the forest and chases raccoon up in the trees. In the day she takes a well-deserver rest.

This morning I got up and pat Molly on the head, brushed the snow from her coat, and then walked down to the pasture to snap pictures. Now I am need to stop writing before I run out of words so I can transcribe the interviews I made last night and cobble together another chapter for the new book this afternoon.

The Bulldozer

2009-01-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

They say that everyone ends up like their parents or at least one of their parents and for me I believe that is true with regards to the ideas I have had for this farm. My father had lots of business ideas, most of them did not work out and he had to pull back on several of them. He only made money with his tugboat company and regarding farming he tried everything from cattle to catfish even farming eels for the Japanese market. But the only thing from which he ever profited on his farm was hogs so he said. So it is with me as I keep shifting gears on my farm here trying to find someway to make it pay.

With this history behind me I came up with what I can now call the ridiculous idea to plant a vineyard on the mountain where I live. I say ridiculous because the only people I have found here in Virginia to profit from grapes are those who invest in a winery or who plant a lot of grapes. I’ve invested in a winery buying stock in The Winery at LaGrange an investment which has done well. But as for growing grapes I’ve decided it is better to do that for someone else and let them pay me by the hour. Then I will make money regardless of the circumstances and the owner can worry about the birds, hail, subzero-weather, raccoons, or whatever malady may befall the vineyard.

A lot of people are smitten with the idea of having their own rolling vista of grapes and aspire to have their own vineyard without realizing how difficult that can be. I can tell you it is not for the faint of heart nor for the city dweller who does not like to work outdoors in the heat nor cold. So it was with five years of experience planting grapes that I briefly thought about having my own vineyard until common sense prevailed and events overtook me changing my mind. My 65 acre farm is ideally situated for that with a southeastern exposure and elevation rising from 600 to 1,000 feet. The proposed vineyard site would have been ideal, rising above the frost, giving me three extra weeks of growing time over those vineyards down in the valleys or flat fields. But the problem with this site is it covered with trees which would need to be excavated. For that I would need a bulldozer.

I have already mentioned my investment in The Winery at LaGrange. When Chris Pearmund and his partners started to clear the land, they bought bought an International Harvester bulldozer. The partners there took turns driving it around and were as giddy as a bunch of school boys with their new machine. Chris tells the humorous story of clearing a bush or tree from near the old manor house. That obstacle had to go but there was a hot power line overhead in the way. No one wanted to drive the bulldozer, which of course is made of steel, underneath the power line thus grounding the machine and one’s self to the electric grid. So Chris powered up the dozer, pointed it in the right direction, and dove off as the machine approached the bush and electric wire then hopped right back onboard in time to steer it away from crashing into the building. I wonder how he could have done as the tracks would have been moving thus threatening to grind the bones and flesh of anyone who tried to do that into the dirt.

After the winery finished with the bulldozer I bought it for $8,000. I thought that was a steal but I didn’t realize that they had employed a full-time mechanic which a bulldozer really needs, full-time. Chris had paid more than that for the dozer and then had to replace a hydraulic pump deep inside the bowels of the monster. To split the machine apart to replace one individual pump cost $8,000. With that pump newly renovated I would not have to worry about that cost I assumed.

I had the idea that I would use the dozer to clear the trees from 8 acres of forest on the mountain above my land. I thought I could use a cable and then drive the dozer downhill using the momentum of the machine to snatch heavy stumps from the ground. The area where I wanted to plant my vineyard was a 15 degree slope which is a little steep but not too steep to operate machinery. So this seemed reasonable. I hired a logger to log the farm and thought he could cut clear cut this area. But as you can read in this other essay I could find no logger to cut each and every tree off my vineyard site. Also the money that I got from logging my farm was not enough to plant an 8 acre vineyard which had been my plan.

So now I had a bulldozer to drive around the farm and nothing to use it for having scrapped my vineyard plans. .

The statement that “you learn everything the hard way” certainly has been true for me. I learned that my bulldozer was not a bulldozer at all but a “loader”. This meant it was mainly for digging and not pushing things over or grading. I learned that when I tried to fix my driveway. I had spent $6,000 hauling gravel up onto my driveway when my insurance company threatened to cut off my coverage unless I put down a solid 1/3 mile footing for the fireman’s heavy water-laden truck. After a time the driveway formed ruts from vehicle traffic so I found that smaller cars could not climb the hill without bottoming out. A learned this when a reporterette from a local newspaper who had come to interview me walked up the hill with her photographer in tow. Of course I was eager that such pretty young women be able to drive up and see me when they wanted so I proceeded to grade the driveway with the loader.

A loader has a bucket in front that you can lift high overhead to pick up and move dirt. A dozer has a blade to smooth out the landscape which cannot be lifted in the air. The bucket on my loader had teeth instead of a smooth edge so when I went to fix the middle hump in my driveway it gouged out holes. The loader was so big it felt like navigating a boat as I proceeded to carve up my driveway. I could scarcely see in front of me so I could not tell if the bucket was smoothing out the dirt or churning up the same. The loader cut groves in the driveway and I only made it worse as I raised and lowered the bucket trying to steer a smooth course. My driveway ended up rougher than ever. My kids in the back of my pickup truck fairly bounced off the ceiling as I drove up and down the farm from that point forward. For months the ride was so rough that I soon abandoned the driveway preferring to navigate through the pasture instead.

I finally found a logger who rescued me by both logging my forest and repairing my driveway so it was again suitable for truck traffic. Then I pointed the loader at 6 acres of woods that had been pasture many years ago and proceeded to bulldoze it flat.

An off-the-road bulldozer has a track with a metal blade perpendicular to the same. So as the track moves the dozer hugs the ground and digs itself in. But my dozer had street tracks with no perpendicular blade. With its 60 horse power diesel engine it could push down small trees but not big ones because instead of digging down into the earth the tracks just spun. I pushed over 6 acres of hard woods and pine trees—including one which bounced off the roof of the dozer careening above my head—but could not move the biggest trees nor grade the soil to my satisfaction. Unlike Bill who had logged my farm I did not have much patience so I just drove the heavy noisy machine all over the place rolling over sapling and bush alike. I pried the front grill lose from the machine and knocked the smokestack off. When I was done the pasture looked more like a moonscape littered with piles of trees than a smooth landscape ready to plant to grass. So Bill the logger rescued me again when I paid him $2,000 to clean up the huge mess I had made.

The left clutch on the dozer failed so I could only make right-hand turns which was OK since I could still get where I wanted to go as long as I went there in a circle. A couple of water hoses wore out and the air cleaner needing replacing for which I paid the winery mechanic $900. So with my pasture where I wanted I gave the dozer away free to someone simply if them agreed to haul it away. In all I don’t consider this adventure a waste of time as I did get the land I needed cleared for $8,000 + $2,000 + $900 = $10,900 which after all was a reasonable price.

Cliff Miller's Mount Vernon Farm

2008-12-31T02:56:00.000-08:00

As county administrator he had responsibility for the maintenance of the roads. As a poet he was less inclined to do so.----paraphrased from Julian Barnes

Scene: A young suburban couple shopping at a grocery store

Shopper A: Look. This tea is on sale.

Shopper B: Let’s buy it. It’s organic.

Shopper A: Yes, it must be better than that one.

Shopper B: That’s right, because it’s organic.

For Cliff Miller “grass” is a metaphor for all that is good about ranching. While farmers around him break even or lose money selling cattle to grain-finishing feedlots, Cliff’s revenues are up over 20% from last year from the sale of grass-finished beef and lamb and pastured pork that he sells directly to retail customers from his Mount Vernon Farm in Sperryville, Virginia. His secret lies beneath his feet saying, “This is a grass farm. What we are really about is growing grass.”

What is wrong with feeding cows grain (corn, oats) instead of grass? Michael Pollen in “Omnivores Delight” put into print what followers of Alan Nation, editor of “The Stockman Grass Farmer”, and other grass-farming profits like Jo Robinson, author of “Pasture Perfect” have known for years. Cows, lamb, goats are ruminants designed to eat grass and not corn. Ruminants have a special 4-chambered stomach which is designed to break down the cellulose fiber found in grass and leaves. They can consume and in fact thrive from vegetation that other animals would hardly find palatable. Having digested a meal for the first time ruminants regurgitate it, chew it some more, and then digests it again. This is where they old expression “chewing the cud” comes from.

But man, or rather corporations, in their quest for quick profits are impatient with nature. As the documentary film “The Corporation” makes clear their only interest is “the bottom line” so the morals of what they are doing are not a factor in their design. So rather than wait two years as Cliff does to grow cattle to slaughter weight—that is, to “finish them off”—90% of farmers pack them off to the misery of the confined feed lot where they are fed grain, a diet which will kill them as it lowers the pH in their stomach and eventually causes their liver to fail. The feedlot is a downward spiral of discomfort from which they are given antibiotic shots just to keep them alive.

Jo Robinson in her book writes, “Most of our animals today, including cattle, are being ‘finished’ in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, of CAFOs—corporate owned, highly mechanized, fuel-intensive factory farms where large numbers of animals are confined in a small amount of space.” Gauchos in the pampas of Argentina--whose vast corn, soybean, and of course cattle production rivals that of the United States—believe the white colored fat of an American grain-fed cow indicates an unhealthy animal preferring their own leaner grass-finished animals. All of these concerns have been shunted aside in the decades head-long rush toward profits that is the corporate farming model.

Here in rolling bucolic Rappahannock County the mountains of Cliff Miller’s 850 acre Mount Vernon loom above the village of Sperryville surrounding it on three sides. In addition to owning a forested mountain Cliff is in the enviable position of having over a hundreds acres of flat river bottom land through with the Thornton River glides having tumbled from the rapids of the Shenandoah National Park which lies just beyond the town. Cliff and his family have been farming this same land for 181 years. For generations they disked the soil, spread fertilizers, and raised orchards, livestock, and row crops. But in the 1970s this once profitable local farm, like so many across the nation, began to lose money as the model of local sustainable agriculture was cast aside in favor of much larger farms where profits could be managed only by planting thousands of acres of corn and soybeans instead of hundreds and where one needs thousands of cattle instead of dozens in order to turn a profit. So Cliff began to look around for a way to make his farm profitable so that his heirs would not have to sell it off to others would could potentially carve it up into smaller lots.

Cliff’s full-time live stock manager, Darren Busét, is a pig farmer from Warren County with years of experience. With a heavy canvas jacket, range hat, and a pony tail mane, Darren is an experienced veteran rancher to whom Cliff has turned mainly for his knowledge of raising hogs. Darren’s dawn to dusk job is to maintain the electric fences, keep the water lines drained at night, and most importantly move the herd. Cliff says, “Darren is a great addition to the farm. He is the point man as far as the animals are concerned on the farm.”

Mount Vernon Farm practices what is called “management intensive grazing". This basically means Darren sets up and tears down portable electric fencing to move the cattle from one paddock to another every couple of days or more frequently. For example in one 40 acre field, 50 cattle are herded together in one small 1/3 acre moveable paddock. When Darren tears down the paddock the cattle go willingly into the next 1/3 acre enclosure which Darren puts together in about 30 minutes. What they leave behind is a sheen of cattle manure that fertilizes the field. Darren will march the animals across the pasture in this fashion all winter.

Most cattle farmers simply turn their cattle loose into large fields and then feed them hay all winter. Such a wide dispersal of animals does little to fertilize the pasture as their manure is placed haphazardly as they cherry pick the most succulent forage leaving thistles, Johnson grass, and other undesirable weeds in their wake. If you herd the animals together tightly it not only controls the weeds it also lays down manure fertilizer in proper amounts. This improves the pasture and lowers the farmers cost of production as well. Cliff says, “For years this was a traditional farm and we put down whatever [fertilizer] we were told to put down. And we have not put down chemical fertilizer for 8 years.” He doesn’t bale hay either saving the cost of diesel fuel and avoiding a practice which he says takes nutrients away from the soil. He says, “We’re not having to make the hay. We’re not having to feed the hay. We’re not having to spread the manure. That is being done by the cows.” Asked how all this dormant tall fescue grass compares with baled hay he says, “It [the dormant grass] is full of sugar. It tests better even than the best hay, even in February.”

Cliff does not give his animals growth hormones, vaccinations, or dewormers either. He says, “Everything fits together here”. The sheep are rotated behind the cattle. They also naturally kill each other’s worms. We never deworm our cows. And for the last 8 years haven’t vaccinated any animals.” As for the pasture Cliff explains, “The sheep and the cows only compete for about 30% of the grasses. “ In other words, “They don’t eat the same thing.”

Cliff says when you rotate the heard the grass is eaten in what he calls its “adolescent” stage where it is neither too young—so that grazing it would damager the plant--nor too old—in which case it could damage the cow especially if it is so-called endophyte infected fescue which is what dominates the landscape here in Virginia. The result is twofold: the cattle graze the highest quality forage and the field is fertilized with a large dose of manure which causes a flush of growth in the spring. The cattle are then moved on the next spot and the cycle repeats itself.

One problem with all the boutique farms that dot the Virginia landscape is they don’t always have enough inventory on hand. This is why the big grocery stores prefer to deal with Cisco and other mega distributors who buy their meat from Midwestern cattle producers and produce from California growers. This is the biggest problem for the local food movement and proponents of local sustainable agriculture. Cliff wants to avoid these inventory problems so he is expanding into poultry and has tasked Darren with growing the herd of swine. Cliff says, “It also helps with our sales to have three different meats”.

In prior years Cliff bought 65 pound piglets from a breeder in Gordonsville and finished them off here. He raised them for about 5 months and then butchered them at 180 pounds. Now he and Darren plan to breed pigs themselves and raise them year round. Pigs are profitable. Darren says old time farmers called pigs “mortgage lifters”. (Note from author: My father raised everything from cattle to tobacco to catfish and eels making money only on hogs he said.) Breeding as prolific as rabbits, pigs can have three litters per year but Darren plans to breed them twice saying it takes “3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days” for a sow to produce a litter.

Darren explains that the Tamworth hogs farmed here are a heritage breed that are known for their ability to thrive on grass pastures. Pigs are not ruminants like cattle or sheep so Darren says, “You need to supplement with grain.” He says they get, “Cracked corn and soy meal. My grandfather added a little bit of wood ash for the potassium”. Cliff says they also feed them vegetables and fruit from neighboring Roy’s Orchard. “We get a lot of his stuff that he would normally send to the dump.”

The pigs here are working animals. Darren explains that, “Every animal on the farm has a job”. The pig’s job is to reclaim the 4 acres of vines and weeds where they are currently living and turn it into pasture. With their firm snout and keen sense of smell pigs root in the dirt turning it over as they look for grubs. Cliff says, “They not only eat grass, like a goat they will east honey suckle, poison ivy, and everything else, which is what we have them doing which is denude the soil.” When they finish cleaning out this area Darren will move them to another and turn their pen into pasture.

As we talk a dozen or so eager reddish brown piglets are munching on grass at our feet and one light colored fellow reaches out so Cliff can pat him on the head. The little pigs are supposed to stay inside the electric fence that contains the boar who is their father and one of the three sows who suckles 10 of them at a time with her two rows of teats. One little fellow is not paying attention and he backs up to the fence with his hind end. The electric fence cracks audibly and the piglet squeals having learned the lesson to respect the hot wire. (The fence is not dangerous. On my farm I am constantly being shocked by the same.)

One reason Cliff’s farm is more profitable while so many area farms are less so is he sells everything retail. He says, “Primarily we sell by the cut. We have buyers clubs at 8 different cities. On the web site in an order form. This past year we did 18 hogs and planning on 30 next year. We did 163 [lamb] last year and probably [will do] 200 for the coming year. For the beef we could have sold twice and we did 18 [will grow to 30].” Asked whether grass-fed beef is tougher than their grain-fed counter parts he says, “ If our meat was tough we wouldn’t sell our filet for $25 per pound. If our lamb was tough we wouldn’t sell 200 of them per year to 500 to 600 people.”

Adams Custom Slaughter

2008-12-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

I went to Gene Adam’s slaughterhouse early one morning this week to talk to Gene Adams about his business and watch him slaughter a cow. The state inspector Sean O’Brien and I ducked behind a door as Gene dispatched the first animal with a .22 rifle. I was worried that the bullet might ricochet. Mr. Brien told me he was crouching there, “Just in case”. In the next room Gene’s mother Shirley and his brother David were grounding up patties while his Uncle Warren was sawing a carcass into t-bones.

It took Gene and his assistant Ernie Holbrook only 35 minutes to slaughter and clean a Charolais Angus crossbred steer and move it into the cooler where the carcass would hang for 10 to 14 days for aging. Mr. O’Brien, moving with the deliberate speed of a government employee, poked his knife blade into the cows liver and lungs checking for any discoloration which might indicate an unhealthy animal. He was also on hand to make sure that the animal was handled humanely and killed without pain. Ernie cleaned up the offal which would be shipped off to Valley Proteins to make dog and cat food, oil for biodiesel, and leather for which they pay $10 per hide.

Gene feeds about 80 cattle per year himself and slaughters many more buying cows and pigs from area farmers and both local livestock auctions: Front Royal and Marshall. He buys grain-finished cattle from Dale Welch who formerly managed the Fauquier Livestock Exchange and he buys hogs and cattle from Lindsay Eastham who is the current manager of that exchange. Gene says there is “strong demand” in Rappahannock County for his beef and pork yet he only wholesales his meats at two area stores which are not much more than gasoline stations: Mayhugh’s and Settle’s Garage. Gene’s retail customers drive all the way from Richmond and from across I-95 to his on-site meat market which has no web site, is only open on Saturday’s, and is so far back in the woods you need to know where it is before you go looking for it.

Gene is sort of a burley country fellow who looked askance at this arm-chair intellectual carrying a camera and digital voice recorder when he gave me a tour of his facility. Gene looks a little like a Black Angus bull standing there in the cooler with his dark hair and steely black eyes without a hint of a smile as I snapped his picture. Perhaps he has taken on the countenance of the big creatures that he faces down each day.

One of Gene’s customers who I managed to track down is Chancellor’s Rock Farm. They told me they give their meat to charity. Let me repeat that: they GIVE IT AWAY. This is hardly the model of sustainable agriculture about which people in the local conservation movement are talking. The environmentalists here worry that the county will turn into one large country club where people keep cattle simply as a way to lower their real estate taxes.

To be fair I did talk to the farm manager there at the 446 acre Chancellor’s Rock farm which, by the way, is for sale. Karl Hoyle spoke highly of Gene Adam’s slaughterhouse and explained to me that their farm is a “cow-calf operation”. That means they make money selling calves that have been weaned to feedlot operators. He said, “That’s the one place that we allow our animals to be slaughtered. We used to retail ourselves. The owners of the farm give it to charity or we give it to the staff or themselves. The owners are very concerned how their animals are going to be treated even after they are slaughtered.” They gave up on the retail beef business not finding it profitable or worth their time. Karl also says that the design of the cooler at Adams Customer Slaughter is ideal for aging meat. He says, “When the beef is hung and aging if the air is not properly circulating around it gets a bad taste. It’s aged perfect.”

Bill Havlik has a farm in Loudoun County where he farms a handful of cattle which he butchers at Adams Customer Slaughter. He too is not farming for profit. (Good grief. Another one.). Bill says, “I am a tax farmer. ” Bill is well-positioned to comment on Gene Adam’s because Bill is a retired veterinarian with the USDA. He oversaw a team of 20 scientists who flew to export markets around the world inspecting their slaughterhouse facilities and adherence to the strict standards of USDA import law. Of Gene’s operation he says, “As far as I am concerned it is a fairly decent slaughterhouse. They know what they are doing about slaughtering. He does a good job. He has a good cooler.”

I phoned up Kenner Love of the Agricultural Extension Service. I told Kenner that I had gone to Gene’s slaughterhouse but had not come away with a story of any local cattle producer who was having Gene slaughter his beef then retailing their meat at Marshall’s IGA Grocer (they carry products from lots of local farms) or area farmers markets. This is the whole vision of what community based food systems are all about and what Kenner spends so much time trying to champion.

Several folks have told me that raising cattle is hardly profitable. Gene sells sides of beef--slaughtered, wrapped, and packed--for about $2.35 per pound. He is currently paying about $0.95 per pound for finished cattle. (Five months ago the price paid to the farmer was $1.20 per pound). This is called “hoof weight”. That would mean a 1,110 pound grain-finished steer would bring $1,045 if the farmer sold the whole animal or $912 for the 645 pounds of meat produced by the carcass of an animal of this size. So it might be profitable on a cash-flow basis but with corn, taxes, fuel, that sort of thing there is not much if any income for the farmer.

His packaged pork and beef patties are much less expensive than what you would find in the grocery store. His current price for ground beef is $3.99 per pound and pork sausage is $2.99 per pound.

Gene currently sells patties to the Rappahannock school sports association and is looking to sell to the school system itself. Of Gene’s business Kenner says, “He is proud of what he has done and we need to keep working with him to help him do more. All the farmers need additional help with marketing. The primary reason they need help is they don’t have the resources to go out and market. They need all the help they can to market outside the commodity channels. We don’t want to depend on those commodity markets because they are not sustainable long term. It’s very efficient for large farms but we don’t have those large farms in this area.”

Farms that sell livestock for breeding stock instead of for meat are not contributing to local sustainable agriculture if you measure that by the amount food that they produce themselves. Two other farmers I have talked to recently have found selling breeding stock more profitable. That is true with Steve Shippa, who is the largest goat producer I know, and Alan Zuschlag who retails lamb and sells breeding stock from his Touchstone Farm. While both of these guys say they make profits selling meat to consumers (Alan) or wholesalers (Steve) they suggest more money is to be made selling breeding stock. I find this highly frustrating as I look about for ways to make my goat operation profitable. The lack of profitability in the livestock business is exactly why Gene’s family started this slaughterhouse in 1994. Gene’s family had a 1,600 acre cattle farm but “lost it” he says over the years to a subdivision covered in houses. Of course Gene and his family have figured out how to make a living raising cows but not every farm can set up a slaughter house. There are a lot of rules and regulations around that and of course you need a government inspector on the premise, gratis of course, paid for by the US taxpayer.

There are two other slaughter houses in the area: Faquier’s Finest and Blue Ridge Meats. They do cater to farmers who wish to resell under their own label even producing halaal meats. (Halaal is to Muslims what kosher is to Jews.). Of course packaging meat for others to sell is not Gene’s business model and for him business is good.

Addendum

Definition: To "finish" a cow means to grow it to slaughter weight. Most cattle are grazed on pasture grass until they are sold at auction as "feeder" cows at around 700 pounds of weight. Then they are fed a grain diet which causes them to gain about 5 pounds per weight until they are slaughtered at around 1,100 pounds at which point they become "slaughter" cattle. A "grass fed" beef is one that has only been fed pasture forage.

Here is how to get in touch with Adams Customer Slaughter:

Adams Custom Slaughter

27 Shurgen Lane

Amissville, Virginia 20106

540.937.7497

Logging the Farm

2008-12-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

People who attack logging as being unfriendly to the environment have no idea what they are talking about. The unenlightened believe to “clear cut” a tract of timber is morally equivalent to committing a crime. The land will be defoliated, they say, the soil will erode into the watershed. The trees which wick up the CO2 we exhale will be replaced by a barren and scarred landscape. Even Wendell Berry, the poet who writes philosophically about farming, attacks clear cutting in one short sentence in “The Unsettling of America”. He does so without explaining what clear cutting means, simply tossing out those two menacing words “clear” and “cut” as if that were enough to convey his message of evil run amok. For the shallower thinker those two words would be enough because they are so firmly etched into our psyche that they need no elaboration. But when I asked the Virginia Department of Forestry to survey my farm, clear cutting is exactly what they recommended. That will probably surprise the laymen but it makes for the best possible forest.

Bill Twarkin is as humble and honest a fellow as you are likely to ever meet. He hails from Upstate New York and has felled timber in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, and most recently in Madison County, Virginia and on my farm. My consulting forester, Kevin Lyle, had surveyed the timber and put out a request for bids but no one had even placed a bid finding my forest of rather low quality. The bigger local loggers were busy felling trees at The Marriott Ranch and the 8,500 acre Lane farm in Woodville. So Kevin talked to local lumber mill operators and they recommended Bill.

Bill owns his own logging equipment: a John Deere bulldozer and a single axle logging truck complete with a hydraulic lift and boom. Like the average working class fellow none of this was paid for in full so Bill owed the bank money on both. His equipment now sits for sale at a local trucking company Bill having completed the job and deciding that logging is no longer profitable for him. He says his 1995 model bulldozer is worth perhaps $35,000. I am not sure what the value of his logging truck is. The problem with it is its one axle design. Bill got pulled over by the cops last spring and given a ticket for $5,000 when his rig was found to be many tons overweight. To haul such a heavy cargo as logs one needs multiple axles to distribute the load and satisfied the policeman’s truck scale when it measures the weight on each tire.

Bill started working on my farm in the fall on 2007 and fell the last tree in the summer of 2008. He had worked for almost 9 months logging the property but it was not a continuous ordeal. He designed his schedule to get two loads per week hauled to the lumber Augusta Lumber mill near Amissville by Wednesday because that is when they made their tally for the week and cut their checks . Bill’s wife had a government job in Washington, D.C. and this was the reason he and his rig had relocated from New York State. She took lots of vacation time and Bill went with her. Some times it was too wet to log. Other days Bill had mechanical trouble. He needed to replace the water pump on his dozer once and more than one time his truck needed new brakes or to repair a hydraulic line. And when he got the ticket for being overweight he just sat home and fumed at Kevin the consulting logger because Kevin had talked Bill into taking one load to another mill which required him to travel along the busy highway 29. That is where he got pulled over.

I am sure Bill lost money logging my farm. When you consider what he paid for diesel fuel and repairs on his rig and the long commute he had from Fairfax, Virginia I doubt whether his income exceeded his expenses. Rather than log the property on a contract price we logged it on shares. I took half and Bill took half with a 10% commission paid to the consulting logger Kevin Kyle. Each week Bill hauled about two loads of logs to the mill. His truck held about 4,000 board feet of timber which was from anywhere from 45 to 65 logs depending of course on their diameter. The mill paid an average of maybe $330 dollars per thousand board feet. This meant each truck load was worth about $1,000 of which Bill collected $500 and I collected $500 of which $50 went to Kevin. In total I made about $20,000. This was far below what Kevin had estimated but I was pleased anyway since I used the money to pay off some debts and to buy a new tractor. So in my mind this agriculture sale went to fund future agricultural endeavors on my farm. For Bill I am certain had a net income loss. He certainly complained a lot about losing money but that was part of his personality. He said his logging business was a hedge against the taxable income of his wife. If this agricultural endeavor had been like most he would have had some positive cash flow but no net income. But when you add in the depreciation on his equipment and his costs for fuel I am sure it was a loss.

For me there was a certain satisfaction is having my property logged. Obviously I had wanted the money but that was not the only reason for logging my stand. Twice over the past 15 years I had had the state forester come out and make a recommendation on my property. They divided it into four sections. The western-facing top of the ridge was 6 acres of chestnut oak averaging 85 years of age. They recommended leaving this section in tact since it had little commercial value and would be difficult to log the steep terrain. The bottom of the farm included 6 acres of forest between two pastures. This area had formerly been pasture so was a fairly young stand of fairly young trees also of undesirable quality. I paid Bill to bulldoze that flat so make additional pasture for my goats. The remaining 45 acres of forestlands included 20 acres of large poplar trees that had not been logged in at least 80 years the rest of the property having been logged about 20 years ago. When the former owners of the property logged the property they cherry-picked the forest taking the largest trees and leaving the less desirable ones. This is called “high grading” and was the reason why my timber stand was of less that optimal quality. But they had passed over about 15 acres of large poplar trees mainly because cattle had foraged there.

The highest quality trees are those that can be used to produce veneer. Veneer is what is used to make the highest quality furniture. I had no veneer quality timber on my farm. Rather I had saw timber quality and pulp wood. No one wanted the pulp wood so we told Bill just to take the saw timber.

The lumber mill too makes demands upon the logger. They would grudgingly take hickory would but told Bill not to take send over any red maple. The consulting forestor told me that Virginia is the southern most range of the red maple. That tree needs cold weather so it produces better logs in Vermont and New Hampshire. You can see that for yourself if you look at the red maple here. Many of the trees are badly knotted, twisted, and grow rather crooked.

Most of the trees Bill hauled from my farm were poplar followed by black, white, and chestnut oak. There were a couple of black walnut and cherry trees. Walnut is the most valuable of hardwoods and so is cherry. White oak is used to make wine barrels. There is a stave mill in Culpeper, Ramoneda Brothers, who does exactly that. But most oak is used to make flooring and of course furniture. Poplar trees grow straight and true here but their lumber is mainly used to make pallets and not furniture. Further it is not suitable for a load bearing beam as would be a heavy piece of oak. Hickory is used of course to make ax handles. All those giant hickory trees on my farm sadly did not have much commercial value. The lumber mill did not want at all sycamore trees, known for their white bark. They tend to grow along streams so have lots of water content. I cut one down myself and when I tried to split a log with an axe the axe simplybounced off as if the log was rubber. Are you beginning to see why my 45 acres of timber was not too valuable?

When you log a property you have to follow the forest service rules. Several times inspectors came by to make sure that Bill was not fouling the streams and to make sure that he constructed swales so that water would not run down hill digging a furrow into the mountainside and causing soil erosion. Bill put in temporary bridges which he hauled away when done. He also refrained from logging along the edge of streams.

Mike Santucci was the area forester for my region when I made the second timber survey. He is well-known to area environmentalists and farmers who frequent meetings on timber land, watersheds, organic farming, and so forth because Mike is usually there. He wrote the plan for my farm that called for clear cutting the forest. But the problem was I could find no logger willing to fell the smaller trees. To clear cut does not mean you chop every log off down to the ground. In such a mountainous terrain as my farm that would be impossible. Rather you cut down everything 4 inches and larger. Only 15 inch diameter logs can be hauled to the mill. So the other trees would be left there to rot while new trees take their place.

Mike’s plan also called for something called “crop tree release”. This means when the crown of two trees are touching you fell one thus leaving the more desirable species. So if a red maple is crowding a white oak you cut down the red maple leaving room for the oak to crow, dominate the canopy, and shade out any trees that would complete for water and nutrients there. Mike also called for planting loblolly and white pine in certain areas in order to improve the diversity of trees for wildlife and future timber sales. The state of Virginia subsidizes the planting of pine forests by paying part of the cost.

All of these practices were meant to enhance the future forest. If I had been able to find someone to do a proper clear cut then sunlight would have reached the forest floor and the small saplings and poles there would be able to grow into desirable forest. As it stands now, from the distance you cannot even tell that my forest has been logged even though it was logged quite heavily in some areas. You have to actually climb up into the forest and look around to find where trees were felled. The canopy overhead it still covered with shade because all of the many young trees here are 15 to 20 feet tall and reaching for the sky. And since the forest was once again high graded crooked maples, hickories, and lesser quality chestnut oak dominate the forest. In 40 years the forest could be logged again but it would be yet another low grade timber sale. It would have been better to follow the recommendations of the state forester to produce a high quality stand of poplar, white and black oak, and white and loblolly pine.

My forest is covered now with the tree tops I tried to give this away as firewood and finally found a green house operator who is hauling this away and cutting it up as fuel to fire his boilers. As for my forest I need to spray Garlon on the alanthus trees that have and will spring up in the areas of disturbed soil. This is an exotic invasive species that grows along most of the roadsides here in Rappahannock County where power lines and fencing have disturbed the soil.

The citizens of Rappahannock County have protested in the past when landowners have announced plans to clear cut their property. Fortunately no permit is required for logging so we don't have to explain what we are doing to people who would not listen anyway. If anyone wants to see what a logged forest looks like I will be glad to show them mine. They will be surprised to see that logged or not the forest pretty much tooks the same. Only a trained observer can tell the difference.

Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

2008-12-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

This morning it was 21 degrees. I need to wait for a few more weeks of cold weather before I start the winter vineyard pruning. I have to prune 120 vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard, 330 vines at Castleton Lakes Vineyard, and then I am going to help Bill Gadino prune several thousand vines at Gadino Cellars. So today I am looking back to when I planted Rosewood Hill vineyard almost 7 years ago.

Spring 2003

Last weekend two friends came to the farm to help me plant grape vines. I had carefully planned to plant grape vines one weekend, walnut trees the weekend after that, and then Leyland cypress trees on the third weekend. But my carefully laid out plans were waylaid when UPS brought both the Walnut trees and the grape vines at the same time. There was no way I had time to get both planted so I took all the food out of my refrigerator and crammed 50 walnut trees inside. My girlfriend at the time took a photograph because she considered that such an odd site.

The idea was I would start with a small hobby vineyard and then when I got some experience plant a commercial one. I have since learned that I can make more money farming wine grapes for someone else. Large vineyards and small wineries are profitable but a small vineyard usually is not. In Virginia the rule-of-thumb is you need to plant 25 acres to have a profitable vineyard. For that you would need probably 10 employees and maybe a $500K investment.

My 65 acre farm has a couple of sites well-suited to growing grapes. Here in Virginia where it gets cold in winter the idea is to plant your vines on a slope above the late frosts of spring or the early frosts of fall. An early fall frost kills the leaves, which stops the grapes from ripening and a late frost in spring kills buds which have just begun to grow thus cutting in half or maybe more thar year’s yield of grapes.

The top part of my farm rises to 1,000 feet while at the bottom it is 565 feet elevation. I am grateful to Steve Critzer who talked me out of clearing off a vineyard site high up on the mountain where I had planned a commercial vineyard. He had already brought his bulldozer to the farm when we cancelled this job. The 15 degree slope up there would have been financially ruinous to work not to mention dangerous in the case of a tractor rollover. There are so many rocks up there I would have had to haul dirt up from the bottom or from construction sites. And in a drought vineyards need water, especially young vineyards. To have piped water up that hill would have cost thousands. And a vineyard surrounded by several thousand acres of uninhabited forest would have been devastated by deer, turkey, bear, birds, raccoon, in short every kind of predator. It would have been better to place such a vineyard in a frost pocket in some suburb in Fauquier County surrounded by a monoculture of pasture grass and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Any farm is an ongoing operation which each year requires some capital improvements. At that time I had neither tractor nor auger so the only way to plant these vines was by hand. The soil in Virginia is not like other parts of the nation—here it is hard as a rock. When I augur fence posts with my tractor I wait until it rains because even with diesel power the posts won’t go into the ground. So I dreaded the idea of digging 140 holes for grapevines by hand, so I did what Tow Sawyer would have done: I enlisted help.

In California you can order live plants to plant in your vineyard but here in Virginia we order dormant root stock from nurseries in California or New York. These are grown for a season in a vineyard there and then grafted and tossed in the refrigerator for the winter. Then you take them out in the spring and plant them. The nursery starts by taking a dormant shoot from a native American grapevine, sticks that in the ground, and then it sprouts roots. This forms the bottom part of the new grape vine. Then they take a dormant bud from a European variety like chardonnay and graft that onto the American roots. Together this is called a “rootstock”. The idea is the bottom part of the plant is native to North America so it can withstand the attack of phyloxxera ad nematodes that would otherwise eat the roots causing the vine to die. Also you can obtain rootstock which tolerates high levels of sodium in the soil (as in parts of California) or rootstock which grows slowly so that your vine grows slowly developing a proper balance of fruit and foliage instead of some overgrown jungle canopy which takes much work to wrestle under control.

The grafted rootstock arrived in a UPS-delivered box from American and Lake County Grapevine Nursery. The owner, Joachim Hollerith. lives most of the year here in Madison County and had been for many years the vineyard manager at Prince Michel Vineyards. The graft union was dipped in paraffin wax so that it would not dry out and the whole affair was packed in damp saw dust.

The vines I had selected to plant were cabernet franc on 3309 rootstock, traminette on 3309, and viognier on 101-14. I didn’t know much about rootstock at the time so Joachim picked them for me. I had picked cabernet franc because it does well here in Virginia requiring less sunshine and heat to ripen that other red grape varieties. Viognier is the white wine grape having brought Virginia international recognition when Chrysalis Vineyards won the San Diego wine show and when a noted Napa Valley restaurant run by a former White House sommelier carried Horton’s 1993 viognier proclaiming it the best he had every had. Traminette I planted because I liked its European cousin the perfumed, highly aromatic gewürztraminer, but gewürztraminer does not do well in the heavy, humidity, and heavy rains of Virginia.

The way you plant grape vines is you dig a hole about 2 feet deep taking care to dig out all the rocks and then you position the plant where the graft union is a few inches above the soil. One hapless farmer in Virginia had planted his vines too low and when the soil settled the vines sank to the level of the dirt. When that happens the top part of the vine, called the “scion”, sprouted roots thus bypassing the American rootstock. His vineyard was thus subject to destruction from root-eating pests. The vines I planted already had had their roots neatly trimmed with scissors so I didn’t need to do that. You don’t want to cram too many roots into one small spot.

I takes much labor to plant 120 grape vines in one day especially when you are doing this by hand. I should have hired some hard-working migrant workers to help me but I resolved to do this work myself. So my friend Paul and I dug holes all day long while my girlfriend passed us vines while Paul’s 3 year old son played around the newly-erected trellises. Paul was overweight while I was merely out of shape. He worked as hard or harder than me in the heat and I worried he would fall over with a heart attack. Some holes were fairly easy to dig while in others we found rock or even hard-pan (i.e. impenetrable subsoil) that I hacked at with a heavy pike. We planted 105 vines in one day leaving me 15 to plant the next. I tossed them into the refrigerator with the walnut trees and reviewed my vineyard budget.

If you look at my actual expenses (graphic at the top of this posting, click on it so you can easily read it) for the first two year of my vineyard—not including the winemaking equipment I bought---you can get an idea of what is in store for you were you to decide to plant your own vines. I spent $3,500 not including the chemicals I bought to spray the vineyard, the lime, the fertilizer, and other stuff I did not include in my budget.

If you are a hobbyist contemplating a backyard vineyard I would say, “Don’t do it”. My work was the result of many years of going to seminars, working at vineyards in Virginia and Chile, and studying books. I took the pesticide applicator certification test and spent countless hours pouring over the labels of pesticides and fungicides. You cannot plant wine-quality grapes and forget about them. Every in agricultural paradises like Chile or California that are free of mildew-inducing rain you still have to worry about maladies like botrytis and sour rot. This is why you must spray grape vines constantly. Even organic vineyards do this. Because if you don’t your fruit will rot and the vines defoliate. More than disease there is the problems of the aforementioned pests. Twice I have lost most of my vineyard to raccoon that I have trapped and killed by the dozen and birds which of course are protected by law. About the only thing I don’t have to worry about is nosy neighbors eating my fruit because the nearest is a couple of hundred yards away.

Looking at some of my purchases the first year you can see that I started with the most fundamental: grape vines. These were $2.95 apiece while currently ENTAV certified vines cost $3.95. You need to buy grape vines from a reputable nursery because you don’t want them to arrive already infected with leaf roll virus or other problems.

If you plan to put in a vineyard plan on buying lots of trellis wire and pressure-treated posts. Take my advice and invest in a wire jenny. You use this to hold the wire so you can unroll it in an orderly fashion. When I cut the bands from the first of these very heavy rolls of wire it opened up line an accordion and tangled. I spent countless hours cursing as I untangled this mess one misery foot at a time. Had I to do it all over again I would have tossed out that wire and simply bought the wire jenny. But even the landfill would not take this wire saying it would foul their equipment.

Any vineyard in Virginia is going to need a deer exclusion fence of some kind. I started with an electric one with 3 zinc ground wires and a $105 electric solar powered charger. Put an electric fence requires constant maintenance. Now that I am farming goats maintenance is no problem. At the time I got rid of the electric fence after a couple of years because I got frustrated that the fence kept shorting out. I replaced it with a $400 plastic deer exclusion fence which works much better.

Vineyards in New Zealand put up bird netting because they have such a huge bird problem. In Virginia large vineyards just sacrifice part of their fruit to the birds or put up noise makers or balloons that look like an enormous eye. I bought $385 worth of bird netting which is still working after 5 years. I read an account of one grape grower who says he and his wife almost divorce each other every year as they install and take down the bird netting. Putting it up is tough enough. But taking it down is worse because the vines will have grown into the netting somewhat when you take them off. Veritas Vineyards uses netting which they install by tractor only in the fruit zone. But for a small vineyard you need to enclose the whole canopy as those greedy little starlings will push their way into any small hole.

I also bought a German-built gasoline-powered backpack sprayer. In Germany vineyards are planted on steep slopes of riverbanks to avoid frost. It’s too steep to operate a tractor there. I still use this $814 machine but need a tractor mounted new one because I am planning to plant 3,200 vines at Castleton Lake Vineyards and certainly cannot spray those on foot.

The rest of the items listed below are other equipment needed to build the trellis and prune the vines. I have not included the cost of any fertilizer but in the acidic soils of Virginia you always want to start with putting down limestone and getting a soil report. You can read details about the soil report here.

The sun is coming up here now on this frosty morning so I have to go outside and break the ice from the goats watering pale and give them a bale of hay to eat. I am driving off the farm today so I won’t turn them loose into the forest. Fortunately they have not bothered the vineyard yet but I have thought that setting sheep lose there would be a good idea to keep the weeds and grass under control under the vines. You can’t do that with goats because they will stand on their hind legs to devour anything they can reach.

Grass-Fed Sheep at Touchstone Farm

2008-12-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Alan Zuschlag, owner of Touchstone Farm in Rappahannock County, doesn’t specifically target kabob-eating, halaal-consuming immigrant customers for his grass-fed lamb saying, “Most of my customers are yuppies from the D.C. metro area, double income sort of gourmet type people.” Urban yuppie is the sort of person Alan was himself before he rolled up his sleeves and turned his weekend retreat into a working sheep farm. He says before he got into farming sheep, “[All] I wanted was a nice lawn that I wouldn’t have to mow.” His initial “lawn” of 25 acres has blossomed into a 108 acre farm that he purchased in sections from his neighbors and carved from a tangle of brambles, vines, and assorted brush that he brush hogged back to civility, fenced, and then grazed.

Alan says, “I had 25 acres and this was going to be a weekend place. I had no intention to farm at all.” But Alan is not the sort of fellow to sit idly around gazing at this rolling pastoral vista of fields and forest. In addition to serving on the board of directors of a local environmental group he is brimming with ideas for how to grow his farm and local sustainable farming in general by creating cooperatives of farmers and getting others to raise sheep. His business is such that he has grown from a one man operation to having recently hired a farm manager Jeremy Christopher who is well-know to area farmers having formerly worked at the Rappahannock Farmers Cooperative.

Alan makes money from his sheep farm selling breeding stock to farmers from as far away as Canada and selling frozen, packaged portions of lamb to buyers in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. He explains, “I sell to anyone who wants to try it. We sell whole and half lambs cut to their specifications.” Taking orders by web site, telephone, and returning customers he arranges processing of the animals at the slaughterhouse and pick up on the farm or delivery to the customers.

Standing in a pasture with a farm cat tagging along and a wild turkey walking along the edge of the woods Alan explains how he has turned beaten down, overgrown old pastures into newly rehabilitated grassland. He explains that, ‘Orchard grass is our workhorse grass here.” In this particular field he disked the soil to rip out roots which had grown up in this formerly neglected pasture whose former owner had grown too old to care for it. He adds lime to correct the acidity of the soil and then drills in a custom mixture of orchard grass, perennial rye grass, and white clover. Alan says, “Overseeding is going to change the composition of the grass. It will help thicken the grass. “

The experts would say that Alan practices “grass-based rotational grazing”. Basically this means his sheep are fed nothing but grass and they are moved from one paddock to another so that the pastures are not overgrazed and the forage quality is kept at its highest level. Using a cleverly constructed system of permanent fences with a moveable electric fence cutting the pasture into sections he moves his sheep from one square to another where they, “Graze 4 days at a time and only 4 days. Then they get moved to the next paddock over. After 4 days you start to get regrowth and they go back to the regrowth. They don’t come back to where they grazed until another 30 days. And that’s the rule.”

You can see this as you stand on the gravel driveway above one of the pastures where the ewes (females) are fenced in a square area guarded by a loud and somewhat pushy donkey. The grass to their left is several inches taller that the grass in the paddock on the right. When they graze this down Alan moves them to the next paddock rotating the whole affair through the grazing season and winter until they end up next to the barn when they are ready for lambing (i.e. giving birth to the little ones).

To say that your farm animals are grass-fed and naturally raised is very much in vogue today with all this talk of local sustainable agriculture. Alan explains what this means while touting the merits of his lamb. He says, “It’s not organic because my hay field has been fertilized. They get nothing but good old Rappahannock County grass and spring fed water and that it is. They are all natural. We are a member of the American grass fed association.”

With a hint of irritation at the uninitiated who don’t understand he says his sheep are, “Not organic because they have been wormed. That automatically disqualifies them because they have been fed medicine.” Of the rigid organic standards that cause many farmers to not even consider the government-monitored program he says, “I think it’s inhumane. It doesn’t make any sense but that is how strict the organic people are. It’s one thing to pick bugs off vegetables it’s another to let you sheep get full of insects or worms.” With one effective sound byte he sums up saying, “Do you raise your kids organically?”

Always thinking of ways to grow and improve his business Alan says he is ready to give up on delivery lamb to his customers and have them come to him instead. He says, “There is an organic market in Alexandria, for example, which wants me to have a drop off point there. It works for them because it gets customers into their shop. What we are looking to do is to have a place like Sunnyside Farms or E-Cow [local grocer] have the customer come in and pick it up there. Sunnyside is interested. Our customer can pick up their lamb while they are there.” Echoing Kenner Love, the local Department of Agriculture cooperative extension agent, Alan says the county needs a place for farmers to store their meat and produce for sale. If the county had that he says, “We would be all over that.” Industrial freezer space is USDA regulated and a significant cost for small farmers. Cliff Miller of Mount Vernon Farms, another local sheep farmer, has that, but his business is different. He sells individual cuts of lamb instead of whole, half, or quarter sections.

Turning to chase after a skunk who is threatening his penned-up chickens Alan says, “I am an economist by training and I do I cost/benefit analyst of everything. And basically this farm is run in a way that input costs are as low as possible. We retail directly to the end customer. It is the only way you can make any money. The farm pays for itself. I have to prime the pump by buying additional land but any farm improvements come out of the farm checking account. So any new fencing that comes out of farm profits. The farm pays for everything.” It’s a model that appears to be working for this thriving little business.

Farm Fowl Fiasco

2008-11-28T06:33:00.000-08:00

If anyone sells you a so-called “free range chicken” don’t believe them. Animal activists and organic farmers have spread the notion that it is cruel to cage birds. They say chickens should be free to roam and scratch cow pies turning them over and dining on the windfall of insects found therein. It is cruel to confine thousands of chickens in one industrial setting where they lay eggs onto conveyors and their manure is ferried out to waiting lagoons by rotating belt. Visit a chicken farm so described and the stench is horrible because all of the nitrogen in that manure ammonia gas escapes in volumes enough to make you run for the door. It’s the same with turkeys. I once worked at Berry Hill vineyard farming wine grapes. This 40 acre vineyard was placed on the side of one of the few high ridges in Orange County, Virginia. The hill’s one redeeming feature was its height so the state police put a tower there for their radios and Horton Vineyards planted a vineyard there high above the frost. The owner of this property also placed a confined turkey feeding operation high above his neighbors so the nauseating stench would not bother anyone, except of course the birds who have little to say in this matter. Think about this next time you carve into that Butterball breast for Thanksgiving turkey.

It was with visions of free range chickens wandering my pastures and gardens eating insects and scratching at the ground that I bought my first 40 chicks from McMurray Hatchery. Chickens, like honey bees which I also bought, arrive by the mails. I believe I paid $4 postage to the postman who probably burned up $6 for fuel driving up to my house to deliver the young birds. “Peep, peep, peep”, they make this delightful little sound as they stand there neatly aligned in little rows of downy feathers. They look like tennis balls with legs except they are much smaller.

When chicks arrive you are supposed to keep them warm. The rule of thumb is to keep them in 95 degree heat by hanging a heat lamp over their bedding reducing the temperature a few degrees every week until they are ready to move outside. If the chicks stand to far away from the heat lamp it is too hot. If they huddle underneath it is too cold.

McMurray Hatchery promised me an assortment of laying hens and meat birds. I had chicks that in 10 months or so would be laying white, brown, and even blue colored eggs. Or so goes the theory. Tossed into the mix was an assortment of what they called “meat birds”. These were Cornish and White Rocks hens. All of my new chickens were females.

Out in the pasture meanwhile I had had 4 hens and 1 rooster that had been laying eggs for some time. These chickens I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars. Chris Pearmund had moved off the property to a newly-built house so no one was taking care of them so he said I could take all 5 and a couple of bags of food too. So one morning before daylight I snuck into the hen house and plucked the hens from their roost and tossed them into pillow cases. I had read that this was the easiest way to capture chickens—i.e., get them while they are sleeping so I bundled them off blindfolded as it were like some kidnapping victims ala Secuestro Express. They clucked quietly inside the pillows as if this is something that happened every day.

I was not completely new to chickens because my father had had them on his 500 acre farm when I was a boy and his second wife’s parents had them too. But I only spent the summer with my dad and his new bride so responsibility for the taking care of the chickens rest with someone else, certainly not me. I think two of the sharecropper’s sons who lived on the farm took care of our flock because I don’t recall my dad doing the same. So I was a debutante chicken farmer and consulted a book.

My son loved playing with the 5 chickens that I spirited away from Pearmund Cellars. He did what we called “chicken tipping” whose name we borrowed from the sport called “cow tipping” which is what I imagine they do in places like Kansas where tipping over sleeping cows is the only game in town. The thing about chickens is no matter how you rotate them they keep their head pointed straight up. There have sort of an onboard gyroscope. So Nathaniel did not knock over sleepy chickens he just picked them up and rotated them.

I bought a book on chicken coop construction and built a cheap mobile one from some galvanized tin, chicken wire, and 1x1 lumber, staples, and an extra large pallet. The idea was to drag the chickens from one place to another so they would scratch at the ground improving the soil and put down fertilizer with their manure before I moved them to another spot. Chicken manure, also called “litter”, is higher is nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that manure from cows or horses. That is one reason so many local farmers here in Virginia buy chicken manure to spread on their pastures. It is cheaper than fertilizer. If it is composted then it adds carbon to the soil. If not then it decomposes in place in what is called “compost sheeting”.

Everything was going swimmingly out in the pasture. The chickens were happy in their mobile chicken coop. I installed an electric polywire fence that was also moveable around their hen house. This kept the Labrador retriever out. The chickens did not stay inside since they could all fly, but this did not bother me because they flew up in to the trees where I assumed they would be safe from predators. The chickens no longer trusted my hen house because I constructed it too light. I wanted it to be light enough so that I could easily move it around but it had the density of a lightweight, hobby aircraft. So it did what most airplanes do when the wind blows: it took off. More than once I came home in the afternoon to find my chicken coop upside down with a handful of angry birds standing on top staring at me. I learned to fix that problem by pounding stakes into the ground and attaching a heavy chain.

Back inside my kitchen problems were starting to develop. My house sounded like some kind of petting zoo as the chicks went “peep, peep, peep” whenever they were hungry which was pretty much all day long. I filled a plastic tub with oak sawdust shavings of which I had plenty since I had bought a whole dump truck full to make compost for the pasture. Then I set out some watering cans. But the meat birds quickly started growing faster than they laying varieties so I then divided the flock into two.

Most Sundays I would go to the grocery store and buy one of those roasting hens that have a thermometer inside. They mainly come from Perdue which has most of their farms east of me on the Eastern Shore of Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay and west of my across the Shenandoah Valley in Harrisburg. But now that I know what I do about meat birds I have pretty much lost appetite for the same.

White Rocks hens are bred to grow quickly. But the problem is they grow too quickly often ballooning to a weight for which their legs cannot carry them. The McMurry catalogue advised that the birds should be slaughtered at only a few months before they developed problems walking. To breed them with a deficiency seemed sort of cruel to me. Worse they got to this weight rapidly by eating. One would not say they ate “voraciously” they ate “compulsively” like mad men. Had they been humans they would have been confined to a hospital bed rising only to join one of those hotdog eating contests you see on the news.

The laying hens were happy now that I had moved them away from the White Rocks who fairly stepped on them as they clamored for move food. Soon the Rocks learned to hop since flying was not something they would ever be able to do with their heavy weight. They knocked over the watering cans and made quite a noise. I found it hard to talk on the telephone doing my day job. My house was beginning to smell. It was still winter but on sunny days I put them out for a little exercise and to air out my house.

I was glad when the icy winds of March gave way to the halcyon days of April and I could move my chicks outside. The laying chicks were still tiny so I put them in my unheated greenhouse to keep them out of the wind. The Rocks were waddling now and quite fat and smelly. I put them into the mobile hen house inside the polywire fence. The problem with the fencing was it was made to contain goats. The mesh was quite small and the fat little Rocks were able to push themselves out a jolt of 4,000 volts of electricity not withstanding. I dreaded walking down to the hen house because the Rocks would come racing out to meet me outside the safety of the electric fence when they thought I was bringing them corn. The dogs would not go outside and the cat had cut a back flip when she first encountered the wire. But outside the fence there was nothing I could do to protect them.

By this time my rooster had disappeared leaving only a pile of feathers below the spot where he had been roosting in the tree. All kinds of predators like chickens: fox, raccoon, skunk, possum, and of course my Labrador retriever. There was not much I could do to protect the chickens if my retriever was going to eat them and if they pushed their fat little bodies through the fence netting. Soon they were disappearing at the rate of 1 per day. In the day it was the dog and at night other predators. Worse Will my black lab taught Molly my livestock guard dog to chase and kill chickens. Molly is a Great Pyrenees which is a breed that is bred to live and care for animals. It was supposed to guard and not east chickens but will changed all of that. Soon they ganged up and hunted like a pack in their murderous charge across the farm

My herd of chicks dwindled to only a few and all that remained were a couple of Rocks and the adult birds I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars. So I slaughtered and cooked one of the White Rocks. It was so tough that I could not finish it. This is where I learned what others had told me. The only birds worth eating are those industrially-raised chickens whose feet scarcely touch the ground. So called-free range chickens might be good for eggs but their meat gets too tough if they get any exercise at all. Of course all my birds had muscles from running for their lives. This was no Kobe beef like meat.

Most everyone I know here in Rappahannock County has had the same experience with chickens. Too many predators are after them so the only people who successfully keep chickens here pen up their birds. This defeats the whole notion of “free range chickens” since chickens confined to one place are not really living in the wild. So I put my last birds in a small pen but then let them loose because my wife at the time, Gricel (long story), told me it was cruel. I let them all out and the next day found nothing but features.

Showdown with the Buck

2008-11-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I am going to buy one more doe. This will bring my herd to 11 does and 1 buck from which I plan to grow the herd to 40 animals and sell meat to immigrant buyers. (Gringo’s don’t understand goat meat so why bother trying to explain it to them.) Probably 8 of the does I have now have been bred by the buck and when I buy 1 more this should give me perhaps 10 kids (offspring) born in the spring. It’s difficult to predict the number of offspring this year because the buck has also been breeding with the yearling does which might or might not be able get pregnant and does which have never kidded usually have less offspring that those who have been bred before. Two of the does that I started my herd with have never been bred while three more that I bought from Steve Shippa have kidded before. A young doe or one that has never kidded before will deliver a single kid while a doe which has kidded before can have doubles or even triples. I wouldn’t call them “twins” or “triplets” because it’s not the same as people. I mean there are not going to all have the same freckles or the same propensity for mathematics or ballet. It’s just an ordinal number we are talking about here.

I had read in the goat instruction manuals—it makes sense to call them that since regardless of their title or whether they are books, web sites, or newspapers they all aspire to the same goal---to never turn your back on a buck for sure one is in the “rut”. Now this concept of “rut” has me a little confused. The old joke for humans—to wit, women need a reason to make love and men only need a place--applies to goats as well. Males the two-legged and four-legged kind are as Maureen Dowd says, “as predictable as a pile of wood”. We are ready to fornicate regardless of the calendar. Given that what exactly does the rut mean? The does come into heat ever 21 days so it would make no sense that the male only wants to breed in the fall which is when the rut occurs. There is a reason that deer hunters pile into the woods in November: this is the beginning of the rut. Any motorist can see this as well as the normally aloof and careful deer male looses his tendency to stay hidden from view and bumbles around the countryside crossing highway and byway completely oblivious to oncoming traffic. When he is looking for love he loses all sense of reason and this is when he is most vulnerable to the hunter’s weapons. The same thing happens to men of course. They lose the ability to think clearly when confronted with décolletage, the sight of a woman’s ankle, an hourglass figure, or the mane of her hair. Plato in “Phaedrus” says love is an illness that heightens one’s sensitivity. Otherwise stoic men become silly putty around women when they fall in love. Their pride is easily wounded and they are prone to sulk. So the “rut” must be the season when the otherwise easily aroused male is aroused all the time.

Maybe this was what was wrong with my buck one brisk day in November when this otherwise docile creature reared up on his hind legs and showed some aggression. The buck had been quite rough with the females knocking them about as he mated with them and lowing loudly but had never shown aggression toward me. But this day he started to rub his horns on the temporary shelter I had built for them and threatened to knock one side down so I moved in to put it back up and then he turned on me. He came at me with his 260 pound girth and shoved me to the ground as if I was an afterthought. I was still unaware what was happening when confusion turned to fright as he pushed me toward the electric fence. I pulled myself out of there unscathed and pondered what to do as he stood between me and the exit.

I don’t think I panicked but I forgot what I had read which is when the bucks starts coming for you grab his beard and hang on tightly. That was sort of difficult to remember as has shoved me around in the dirt.

The more I thought about this the more I realized I could have been seriously hurt. Farming can be dangerous. This same week I had gone to the doctor because I thought I had gotten some fertilizer in my eye. The nurse put die in my eye and found no scratches or dust and then cleaned out my eyes. A couple of years ago I almost killed myself when a tree I was cutting down with my chainsaw fell on me, breaking my jaw on both sides, and pinning me to the ground in below freezing weather. When I had my bulldozer a pine tree I pushed over bounced off the roof of the cab. And finally I had quit climbing trees in a deer stand because I could imagine falling and hanging there in the wind, snow, and rain for weeks until someone came looking for me. So I phoned up Steve Shippa who sold me the buck and told him my problem.

Steve as I have already written is the one who sold me the buck. I admire him for his dexterity with goats. He showed me how to catch the females by squatting down and stretching your arms out wide thus making yourself look larger. Catching the animals is always a problem when you need to deworm them or give them vaccinations. Goats that you milk are generally tame. But meat goats do not get handled by people each do so they are more skittish. So I paid the neighbor’s kid $10 to help me the last time I did this but he just stood there without a clue what to do as he watched me dive to the ground trying to catch all the goats. Steve knows better what to do. He is sort of a wide fellow anyway. So when he stretches out his arms and squats down how he looks like Barney Rubble as he corners and cows the hapless creature. Animals are rather dumb. So the goal is to just make yourself look like a bigger animal. They don’t realize we are humans with all of our doubts, our fears, and our failings. They just look at us as either one of their herd, a passerby, or possible a threat.

This was made clear to one of Steve’s friends when he made the mistake of leaning over and showing his backside to a buck when does I heat were nearby. This fellow was a big man but his buck was even bigger. The buck charged him from behind knocking him to the ground and giving him a concussion. The only bit of luck here was he was farming goats and not some 2,000 pound cow.

Every American kid has seen those television cartoon depictions of the nativity scene where the wise men come to the baby Jesus with frankincense and mur (whatever those might be) wearing shepherd’s clothes and carrying a long hook. It turns out this 2,000 year biblical device actually exists. It’s sort of like the ancient basket wine press: elegant in its simplicity there is no need to change its design over the years however primitive. Steve has a goat hook and I am looking to purchase one. You can use it to reach out and snare the goat by the neck. So you corner them with outstretched arms and then snare them by the neck. In other words a six foot tall human gives himself another 6 feet of reach. Quite effective. This is how you catch a goat.

So Steve I knew would know what to do about my buck which had turned on me. He said none of his bucks had ever gotten out of hand because he had learned rather quickly to grab them on their smelly beard, jerk their head up, and look them in the eye. Goats, he said, are like dogs where pecking order is important. Either you dominate or you will be dominated. I needed to reestablish dominion over the herd. He told me to get a bucket of water and pour it right into the bucks face as they hate that.

This is what I did. I poured two buckets of freezing water into the buck’s face and he backed down. I would say he went running his tail between his legs except the goats tail always sticks up and not down. So this ruse is working and the gently giant has not challenged me since. But I have learned not to turn my back on him. Water works because goats hate water (rain). What is odd is they do not mind snow. One farmer from the Northern Plain states had written that he would look out across his pasture for his goats after a heavy snow and only see little humps on the horizon. He called his goats and up would pop up their heads. Still goats hate rain. Whenever it rains on my farm I can always find my goats in any of the small sheds I have built on the property. The stand together patiently waiting for it to quit raining.

That same week I had to confront the other danger on the farm: ticks. I had read in the newspaper that 20% of the ticks here in Rappahannock County were infected with lime disease. Lime disease causes arthritis-like symptoms in people and is a serious illness. A dozen years ago I had the human vaccine but they quit making it I believe because it was either not affective or it gave people the very problem it was designed to prevent.

It had never occurred to me that dogs could get lime disease. I spent all my time worrying about my kids when the same week I had fought with the goat my Labrador Retriever Will suddenly went lame. I thought he had broken one leg. He hopped around on three legs and climbed into my bed and lay there no even getting up to eat or drink water. So I took him to the vet and was surprised when he told me the dog had gotten lime disease. He gave me 21 days of antibiotics and some pain medicine. I find it quite remarkable that these bacteria could actually cause an animal to go lame. People I understand have a much harder time getting over this problem.

The Vineyard Gets Defoliated

2008-11-21T13:09:00.000-08:00

He who loves not wine women and song remains a fool his whole life long.—Martin Luther

Last night I was reading Saint Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” in French. I read it every year so that I won’t forget the language of Voltaire which I spent so much time trying to learn. This book is elegant in its simplicity. The boy in this book is bothered that adults because, being adults, their thinking is muddled and cannot see what is clear to children. The boy draws a picture of a boa constrictor snake that has swallowed an elephant. From the side an obtuse adult would imagine it looks like a chapeau. He shows it to an adult who without hesitating pronounces, “This is a chapeau”. Bothered by the adult’s ignorance he then shows it to Le Petite Prince, the benevolent child-like creature who has dropped out of the sky. The Prince with child child-like innocence says, “It’s a boa that has swallowed an elephant.” This proves the point that adults are dense.

This year in the vineyard I learned an important lesson. Like most dimwitted adults I had to learn from experience. Emmanuel Kant would call this experience “a priori” which means I had learned from doing rather than thinking. Perhaps a clever child would have grasped this before me.

I had been on top of my spray program spraying the vineyard every couple of weeks and even every few days depending on the weather. Still both Rosewood Hill and Castleton Lakes Vineyards were defoliated. The leaves fell off so I had to pick the grapes too early. The white grapes were ripe enough to make wine but the red grapes had not yet ripened. There was enough sugar in the red grapes to make wine but with red grapes you need the seeds and stems to ripen otherwise the wine will be bitter. So instead of making red wine this year I made rosé.

The rosé that I made was fine. It was pink and sparkling clear. In the past I had made rosé which had turned orange like a California mass-market zinfandel rosé. Orange does not denote a flaw, but aesthetically it is not as pleasant as pink. So I would not repeat my mistake I took my grape juice over to Bill Gadino at Gadino Cellars and he checked the PH of the wine and it was 3.4 which is just right so I did not need to add acid. Bill told me to inoculate the wine and let it ferment overnight before pressing it off. This would give the wine more skin contact and thus more color and of course more tannins. (Tannins are a color preservative). The last time I had made rosé I had pressed the red grapes right away and then inoculated the juice. The resulting wine was not color fast.

I am one who is generally not able to keep secrets so I went around telling everyone I knew in the Virginia wine business of my troubles this year with the grape vine canopy due to all the rain. Plus I like to remind these guys that I am farming commercially so one of them will give me a job. I told Chris Pearmund of Pearmund Cellars, John Delmare of Rappahannock Cellars, and of course Bill Gadino. They all told me the say thing: for the 470 grape vines that I am farming I need to apply 30 gallons or more of water if I am using captan to control downy mildew. These men farm large vineyards with thousands of vines. So they have tractor mounted air blast sprayers. I was still using a backpack sprayer which looks like a gasoline powered leaf blower except it has a 2 gallon water tank mounted on the top. There is no way I could haul so much water. I would have had to pass through the vineyard 15 times in order to spray 30 gallons of water. I would have looked like Jean Cadoret the hunchback of Pagnol’s “Jeane de Florette” who kills himself trying to haul water to his parched farm. I needed to use much more captan but it was not possible until I bought a tractor mounted sprayer. That would be possible for Castleton Lakes Vineyards but at Rosewood Hill the rows were too closely place for a tractor to navigate. Merde. A priori once again.

I had been farming wine grapes for 6 years successfully without a problem but the weakness in my program manifested itself this year because in May and June we had torrents of rains, which infected the vineyard with downy mildew. All of this rain caused powdery mildew too which killed the yellow squash in my garden.

I felt not so bad when my vineyard friends told me of some other vineyards they knew of that had been similarly been defoliated. But I walked away from talking with the managers of one of those defoliated vineyards confused because he told me had had lost his leaves because of powdery mildew and not downy mildew. Now I was not sure which disease had overtaken the vineyard. It should be easy to tell the difference. Downy mildew causes the leaves to get oily looking and turn yellow. Powdery mildew causes the leaves to get covered with powdery looking spider-web-like growth. But now that the leaves had all fallen off I began to doubt my prognosis. This was a problem because one disease you treat with sulfur or hydrogen peroxide. For the other you use captan and other chemicals. The only good news was that the fruit had not been infected so I had at least maintained adequate control for that.

Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

2008-11-10T03:14:00.000-08:00

Dr. Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, is a frustrated man. He is frustrated that his organization, focusing on organic farming, is outspent by Monsanto, that evil agribusiness whose Roundup glysophate herbicide, he says, is poisoning the soil and whose genetically engineered, patented seeds cannot be reused. He is frustrated that while small and local farmers have embraced the organic movement the vast majority of commodity corn and soybean row crop farmers and the vast majority of acreage have not and probably will not. For they have no incentive to change as they are propped up by a system of subsidies that encourage what he calls a monoculture of agriculture that fattens our children with sugar they do not need while delivering food which is low in nutrition—the ideal here being what organic producers call “nutrient dense” food. He is frustrated that the price of gasoline is “only $4 per gallon” thus delaying the great upheaval in the culture that would cause policy makers to finally embrace his idea of paying farmers not by the number of acres they plant but by the tons of carbon they return to the soil. This idea is called “carbon sequestration” and was the topic upon which he spoke at the RCCA (Rappahannock County Conversation Alliance) annual meeting at the Link yesterday.

Perhaps one reason he cannot sell his ideas to the great unwashed masses is Dr. LaSalle runs with an elite crowd. Instead of delivering his stump speech at county fairs and agriculture conventions to people who actually farm for a living, this PhD arm-chair agronomist puts forth his ideas to people who with visions of Wendell Berry hold up farming as some kind of ideal way to slow development and preserve open space without having actually to make a living trying to do so. In front of a well-heeled crowd in Rappahannock County—the whole county of course can be called that---he spoke yesterday of sharing his ideas with fellow elitists Al Gore, a part-time farmer who made his fortune with Google stock and Leon Paneta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Dr. LaSalle zips around in his rented Toyota Prius from one model farm owned by a Carnegie to that of a Rockefeller. This is farming not as a livelihood but as prototype where profits do not matter and where produce is held up as some kind of artifact to be photographed for the magazines. Dr. LaSalle knows this and for this reason he is frustrated.

The Rodale Institute for many years been researching and writing about organic farming to conventional farmers who mock them as a bunch of granola crunching hippies. As if to make that point exactly at the end of Dr. LaSalle’s speech a woman who in her youth probably was a granola crunching hippy stood up and delivered a 5 minute impassioned, somewhat awkward diatribe of her definition of “organic”. Dr. Salle addresses that head on when he said that, “This is not a bunch of granola crunching hippies. It is science.”

Rodale is trying to cast wider its net of influence by speaking of organic farming as a way to reduce green house gases and return carbon to the soil. His timing is good because global warming of course is in the news and that crisis which he longs for is perhaps upon us. The Kyoto accord (which he would like to see renegotiated) is affecting policy in Europe and Japan. But it’s difficult to see Iowa corn farmers or California growers, who of course farm everything, stop using fertilizers simply because Dr. LaSalle wants them too.

Dr. LaSalle laid out his ideas in a presentation and in his paper “Regenerative Organic Farming: A Solution to Global Warming”. At the Robert Rodale Reserve in Pennsylvania 29 years ago they laid out side by side test plots of conventional chemical farming plots next to those that were organically farmed. The chemically farmed plots are no-till drilled with corn and soybeans using paraquat, glysophate, atrazine, and presumably some cultivation to burn down, rip out, or suppress weeds before sowing seeds in the soil. The conventionally farmed fields are then treated with postemergence herbicides to control weeds. In the organic fields there is no tillage nor chemicals. Instead a roller crimper is used to kill the cover crop of rye or the legume hairy vetch. Vetch adds nitrogen to the soil and rye and vetch both create a dense matt through which weeds cannot easily grow. Corn or soybeans are then drilled into the mulch and grow relatively weed free.

A byproduct of all of this 29 years of research, much to Dr. LaSalle’s satisfaction, is that the organically farmed soils over time have seen their organic matter increase. “Organic matter” is of course carbon. This is the carbon sequestration of which he talks so passionately. Soils that are high in organic matter are better able to tolerate both drought and flood because the humus--which acts as a sink to soak up all of this carbon dioxide which is causing global warming--also soaks up and retain water. If only he could convince the US Army Corp of Engineers, he says, there would be no more Mississippi River floods.

Rodale’s idea is that farmers can forgo fertilizer if they build up the soil using no-till organic practices. Row crop farmers in Virginia would tell you they already use no-till practices and have been doing so for a generation. Deep tillage of course is the culprit that destroys organic matter in the soil and releases it into the air in the form of carbon dioxide. But they still use too much nitrogen. When they grow corn they inject liquid nitrogen right into the soil. It would be better to plant legumes like clover which naturally add nitrogen to the soil. Manufactured nitrogen is problematic in two ways. It takes lots of natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air. (Chemically air + natural gas = anhydrous ammonia. Ammonia is basically nitrogen. You then take this ammonia and add carbon dioxide to create urea which is another form of nitrogen). And nitrogen destroys soil microbes and burns roots. These soil microbes help break down compost thus adding carbon to the soil. But it is unfair of Dr. LaSalle to characterize all fertilizers as “chemical fertilizers”. Plants need large amounts of phosphorous and potassium too. Those are made without petroleum. Phosphorous is made by using strong acids to release phosphates from rock phosphate which is mined from the soil. Potassium is also made from mined materials using acid to release them. Nitrogen is just one component of the fertilizer troika “N,P,K” which is respectively nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium.

Dr. LaSalle says that much of his research is not relevant for the rolling pastures that dominate Rappahannock County for we don’t grow corn here except for those few farmers who feed it to their own cattle. Here our cover crop, grass, is basically our only crop so it would not make too much sense to kill it with a roller crimper and try to drill seeds into the resulting mulch matt. Those seeds would not even germinate since they require soil contact not to mention that is would be cost prohibitive to tear up your pastures every year. Instead Dr. LaSalle says the way for Rappahannock farmers to return carbon to the soil is loosen up the compacted soils—compacted by the heavy hoof of the cow--with a yeoman’s plow and practice rotational high density grazing. This is a practice where cows are shepherded from one plot to the next for often only hours at a time where their manure drops onto the soil in high enough quantities to form a layer of compost which improves the soil by adding organic matter and of course sequestering carbon. Lots of farmers here read about and believe in such practices but maybe only Cliff Miller is actually doing this since it requires lots of fences and lots of time spent moving the herd.

As for logging Dr. LaSalle simply says we cannot have any of that. He says the forest holds twice the amount of carbon below the soil as above it and felling a tree releases much CO2 into the air. Anyone who owns timber land in Virginia knows if you simply forget about your forest eventually your trees will fall over dead. Not all of us are so rich with university grants that we can simply let our most valuable agriculture product just lie there for others to marvel at. All of what Dr. LaSalle says makes sense. He just needs to find a way to communicate his ideas to those who wear overalls instead of pullover sweaters.

The Rutting Buck

2008-10-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

My kids joked that my goat farm has gotten off to a slow start because the first few goats I bought were gay. This is not entirely true.

I bought my first two females, Allison and Michelle, from Larry Grove a goat farmer in Rappahannock County. They were 4 months of age. Both were Boer and Spanish crossbreds—they are by temperament and milk producing ability designed to be meat and not dairy goats. Dairy goats produce enough milk to share with humans. Meat goats produce enough only for their offspring.

When my does reached 8 months of age I went to Bill Segrest, another Rappahannock County farmer, and bought a young buck named David. Bill told me David had one flaw: he was born on the coldest day in February so his right hoof froze and fell off. Nature is indeed cruel to animals. Still in my naïveté I thought David would make a fine sire. Little did I know that a goat needs to be large enough and have enough strength to mount and copulate with does so by definition he should be bigger than they. So for goats, size does matter.

After 5 months when gestation should have been complete my does were still not bred. I phoned up Mr. Segrest and he exchanged David for a larger male. With ranching one cannot be shy about sex. So I took a look at his testicles and notice that he had only one. Bill’s son-in-law told me he should still be able to do the job. Five months went by and my does had grown to huge proportions so I assumed they were finally pregnant. The veterinarian came around and inspected them with his sonogram and pronounced them, merde, without kids—they were simply fat from gorging on the spring flush of pasture grass. It turns out that Mr. Segrest had tried to castrate his goat—to make what goat farmers call a “wether”—but botched the job. He had not properly fastened the rubber bands used to castrate farm animals around both balls, so only one fell off leaving an impotent male.

So I exchanged this second sterile buck for two does and one buck only a few months old. Then I bought another very young buck from another farmer. Bad luck prevailed. I backed over with the first buck my pickup truck and the second one died when all the goats climbed atop a mobile pasture chicken coop which then collapsed on top of the hapless little fellow. This is where I made my second mistake: if you are looking for a herd sire start with a proven performer, an adult. I thought I could raise my young bucks to adulthood and then they would breed. After all they reach puberty at 2 months and at that age are air humping like a couple of teenage boys watching Penelope Cruz.

Now I was really mad. I had begun to receive phone calls and emails from customers who wanted to buy goats but I still had none to sell. My does were anxious to get going too. Their tails were twitching and they were mounting each other—an obvious sign they were in heat. This is when I met Steve Shippa who runs boergoatblog.com.

Steve is one of those upper middle class people who also farms. In California and Kansas people farm to make money and go to the bank for loans. In Virginia farming seems to be a past-time for those who have made their money elsewhere. Still Steve is a heck of a nice fellow and extremely knowledgeable about his 100-head herd of Boer goats.

Steve said I could buy his herd sire for $300 which was $50 less than I had budgeted so I said “OK”. I drove over to his farm in Berryville and came head-to-head with a raging, snorting, 260 pound buck in full rut. This goat like most males smelled terrible. A buck in the rut urinates all over himself and secretes must from his glands to woo the female. This foul odor for goats is some kind of cologne. Steve had locked up his love struck buck alone but within eye sight and downwind of a herd of does who too were primed for romance. The buck was as horny as an aircraft carrier full of sailors on furlough and just as dangerous. He pounded his massive head against the fence which strained to contain him and bent the steel latch which held the gate shut.

Steve and I wrested this animal into a cage in the back of my truck and I drove back to Rappahannock drawing stares from motorists on the highway. At a gas station a couple of men walked over to look for they had never seen an animal so large. I explained that the Boer goat breed had been imported from South African some years ago for their large size and docile demeanor except of course when the un-castrated male is within the vicinity of does in heat. I told these men that this goat was the grandson of a goat which had sold for $45,000. Boer goats until a few years ago were hard to come by in the USA so had sold for a premium. Now instead of being ridiculously expensive they are just downright expensive.

I took my buck home and turned him loose with my 6 does. Goats normally make a soft bleating sound something like the familiar “bah-bah-bah” of sheep. This was how my 50 to 80 pound females had behaved. They were gentle to the point that I let my friend’s 7 year old daughter feed them from the palm of their hand.

But the rutting buck snorted and sniffed and howled like some kind of small dinosaur “oooh—aaaargh--woooo”. My neighbors were ½ mile away at the closest point and I am sure they thought I must have been conducting some kind of mass slaughter for he howled as he circled the does and thoroughly cowed my otherwise large and frightening 120 pound Great Pyrenees livestock guard dog.

The frightened does scattered but the buck was relentless in his pursuit. He went first for Allison, the dominant doe in the pack, and had soon mounted her after knocking her around a bit. I was fairly frightened and fascinated at the same time as he went for my timid little doe with his tongue hanging out and mounted her with such force he pushed her to the ground. It reminded me of high school and college. Back then if you wanted your date to put out you fairly wrestled her to the ground.

The doe put up a fight for a while then relented. Soon after that she began to nuzzle up to the foul smelling beast. Within an hour the buck had moved onto the second largest doe in the herd and she too became part of his love circle. The two does fell into his harem as sycophantic groupies and the embraced each other in an agrarian ménage a trois. As I write this essay the buck had already bred a third doe and three more remain.

Breeders have told me I can breed my does three times in two years. I hope to buy three more does next week to jump start my late developing herd so by next year I do not have to turn away so many customers.

Fall Planting at the Goat Farm

2008-10-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago my son asked me to help him with his high school algebra. The time could not be better for I had recently begun to study again the calculus text that I waded through in college. (When winter rolls around and farming slows down in the vineyard I need something else to pour my energy into so I study.) Still I was not able to explain to him—to my satisfaction—how to use Newton’s iterative method for approximating square roots. Newton’s theory is based upon a series that converges i.e. a sum ∑ that sums to some number.

It was with this puzzle in mind that I went to Borders bookstore as I do practically ever Wednesday with my children. There I went looking for something written by David Foster Wallace. I had just read in The New York Times that this genius, who was characterized as the most important writer of my age group, had died.

So I picked up Mr. Wallace’s book on mathematics called “A Brief History of ∞”. It is a fascinating read. With his vast knowledge of ancient philosophy, Greek, an of course mathematics he walks the reader through the theories of Pythagoras, Zeon, and Euclid. He writes that it totally upended the well-ordered world of the followers of Pythagoras when they found that not all numbers could be expressed as a ratio of two integers the most famous of these of course being the length of the hypotenuse in an right triangle whose measurement could be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem. Peering into the boundless world of mathematics was too much for some people as the boundary between genius and madness is slight. Mr. Wallace writes that some of these scholars lost their minds and went insane. After he wrote that David Foster Wallace lost his own mind then hanged himself. Reading that I needed to go back outside and work on the goat farm before I too became unhinged.

Yesterday I took delivery of 20 cubic yards of grape skins from D & M container company. They haul away the grape skins at The Winery at LaGrange and Pearmund cellars after the wineries are done pressing them into juice. I had the truck drop this next to the dump truck load of sawdust that I got from Ramoneda Brothers, a local company that cuts oak trees into staves used to make wine barrels. I plan to use these two steaming mountains of raw material to make compost. Compost is humus or carbon in its most basic form which I will use to apply to my pastures to boost the organic material in the soil. The grape skins are steaming now because fungus, yeast, bacteria are doing the work of breaking this down to compost--as they do so it generates heat. The sawdust is not steaming anymore but if you plunge your hand into the middle of it the temperature is well above 150 degrees and steam gushes forth and the air fills with the smell of ammonia letting you know it is still breaking down. You are supposed to let it keep decomposing until the smell of ammonia is gone. At this point the compost can decay no more and it will smell like earth, dirt, potting soil.

I will use the sawdust on my existing pastures. The grape skins are for the new pastures and for spring application to the others. Last year I bought a bulldozer and used it to clear away 6 acres of ragged forest. I say it is “ragged” because there was no merchantable timber there—a logger working on my farm this year completely passed it over. I wanted to expand the 5 acres of pasture I had to 11 to provide more room to plant more forage for my goat herd.

The pastures that I currently have were used for many years to produce hay and I am still producing hay there for my animals and for my neighbor's cows. Each year the grass that grew there is hauled away thus taking with it all of the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace materials that were taken up by the plant. Since I had not been adding fertilizer to the soil the soils were severely depleted. So this year as I started to contemplate how to turn those 6 acres of forest into pasture I started looking at how to improve the health of the soil of the overall farm.

I started where you are supposed to start and that is with a soil report. The PH of the soils in my pasture was 7 which is fine since I had been putting on lots of lime. But the PH in the new pasture which had been woods was 4.8. I scarcely has 4 pounds per acre of usable phosphorous and not much potash at all. I broadcast some buckwheat seed after I finished cleaning the trees off the new pasture but it would not grow in soil that was 100 times as acidic as the existing pastures. So I called the farmers cooperative who came out and spread 2 tons of lime per acre with their truckers and then waited for cool weather to seed grass.

When the weather cooled I used a land rake to smooth out the soil and then broadcast 3 bags of MaxQ fescue grass seed along with 150 pounds of MAP (10-52-0) monoammonium phosphate which is phosphorous with a little nitrogen. I wanted to put down rock phosphate too but I had already spent too much money so put that into the budget for next year.

Then I went over to Farfelu Vineyard to see about buying their manure spreader. A manure slinger spreader is a wagon with a chain that is pulled along as the tractor pulls the spreader. The chains push the manure or compost onto sprockets which then fling the compose up and out in an even shower of fertilizer. It’s a costly machine, $3,600 new, but I bought theirs used for $2,500. Fareflu had been one of the very first wineries in Virginia but had recently gone out of business finding no buyer for their operation and no winery interested in their crops of baco noir and other old fashioned grape varieties.

My new pasture planted with fescue, the next project at the goat farm was to build an electric fence to keep in my does and buy a new buck to grow the herd. A goat fence—any goat farmer will tell you---is only a rough approximation of where the goats might be at any given time. My goats for the most part had become tame and had gotten used to roaming around my farm. They were happy climbing on top of my pickup truck, sleeping under the tractor, and following my great Pyrenees guard dog around the farm and on occasion off the farm. If it were not for the dog suffering from wanderlust I could have let the goats roam indefinitely on my 65 acres since they stayed on the property. I soon grew weary of having my neighbors call the animal control officer who in turn would call me and show up with his flashing blue lights to help me shepherd the herd back onto my property. I was particularly annoyed that Mrs. Coughlin, who owns the farm next to me, didn’t just call me because everyone in the neighborhood, including her, knew who owned the goats. So I finally decided to fence them in.

Goats, given a choice, prefer to eat tree leaves and vines than graze grass. They will stand on their hind legs and nibble leaves. This is why goats are used to clear brush. Leave enough of them in a small area and what had been jungle will soon look like a city park except of course the leaves they cannot reach will still be hanging. It makes the woods look like you cleared them out with a landscaping service that only employees midgets. But if I was to grow my herd to 40 or 50 animals I needed to fence them in especially since I wanted to practice rotational grazing techniques meaning move them from paddock to paddock as different varieties of forage were ready to be grazed or grasses at different stages of growth. That is the best way to improve the health of the farm and the animals at the same time and the practice followed by the best of the grass fed farmers, especially those calling themselves "organic".

So I strung electric wire around 2 acres of land which I had cleared with the dozer. Half of it was cleared well enough where I could plant winter rye, Austrian peas, rape seed, triticale, and turnips which would grow into the looming cold weather. But the other half was a tangle of trees which I had pushed over with the dozer which broke down for the last time before I finished the job. So I left that side to the goats to clear out and got rid of the dozer.

Winter rye is for me a green colored cure for the misery of winter. In the winter the ground and the sky take on the same grey colored hue when the sky is cloudy. This misery can last for a few weeks and one can understand why people in places like Finland, Toledo, Siberia either drink heavily in the darkened days of winter or sun themselves under sunlamps. A better cure might be to plant something that stays green for much of the year. In Finland I think they grow pot indoors to provide some color. In Virginia I wanted to grow winter rye especially as the police here in Virginia frown on growing marijuana.

In Virginia fescue goes dormant when the north wind turns icy. It does not turn green again until 4 months later. But winter rye as the name implies grows later in the year and comes out of dormancy earlier. So it’s bright green in December which is a cheery hue compares with the monochrome of the rest of the landscape.

My new pasture is now green with 4 acres of young fescue growth and I have 2 acres of winter cover crops growing. The goats after much effort have learned for the most part to respect the electric fence while the goat dog still goes in and out as she pleases. The next activity for me after I pick up my new buck next week will be in April when I use the rotavator plow to till in the cover crops and plant summer annual perl millet. I see so many goat farmers feeding their animals grain and buying expensive hay. Rotational grazing and planting the highest quality forage is the way I plan to build up my herd and goat business.

Virginia Barley for Ethanol

2008-10-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

Farmers have found a new use for barley beside making beer. Barley, in particular hull-less barley, can be used to make ethanol.

The Chesapeake Bay foundation has prepared a report which they handed out at the August Virginia Biofuels Seminar. In it they worry than the increase in prices paid for corn will cause farmers to plant more. Corn they point our requires lots of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer when it is applied to the soil turns into ammonium which drifts off into the air and nitrates which can infiltrate the ground water if they are not taken up by plants. Phosphates have a triple negative electrical charge so they bind to positively charged clay colloids found in the soil. So phosphates by themselves do not leach into the groundwater and run off into streams. What causes phosphate buildup in the Chesapeake bay is soil erosion. Phosphates in the bay cause algae blooms which snuff out oxygen and thus fish and can cause entire dead areas in the ocean as it had done at the mouth of the Mississippi.

The answer to this says the Foundation is to plant winter cover crops and of course something besides corn. These cover crops will take up unused nitrogen from the soil and curtail soil erosion. They further say that grassland is preferred to corn and for this reason are endorsing biodiesel from warm season grasses and ethanol production from barley.

No ethanol plant is yet opened in Virginia while one is planned for Norfolk and two for Baltimore. These of course will be on the water where barges and ships from the Midwest can ferry their corn. Pointing toward the sea they have their backs turned on Virginia agriculture. How does this help the Virginia farmer? It does not.

Instead it would be better to source biomass needed for fuel from local sources. Virginia farm land is expensive and while we have wide open spaces nothing is as wide open as the plains of Kansans and Iowa. Plus their soils are superior for growing corn because of their water and nutrient holding capacity. Another alternative to corn is proposed for Virginia: barley.

I always find it fascinating that for every aspect of agriculture you can think of you can be certain you can find a scientist somewhere in the Cooperative Extension Service somewhere who is expert on this topic. In these bad economic times where people are wondering how government can help even libertarians would agree that the USDA agriculture extension is helpful to the average citizen, especially to farmers.

So it is with Wade Thomason who has found a market for prospective Virginia barley farmers and offers advice. He says “Most people associated barely with beer. Not Virginia barley.” The challenge for the biofuels market is, “How can we increase ethanol production without depleting corn?” Barley is excellent for, “The cost of growing barely is significantly less than for corn.” Barley grows in cold weather which is why it used for a cover crop which has already mentioned as a way to reduce soils erosion. Further Dr. Thomason says barley improves compacted soils because their roots break find and open up fissures in the soil.

Hulless Barley is better than other varieties of barley because, as Dr. Thomason says, it has “Higher Starch, Higher Protein, Lower Ash, and Lower Fiber”. There is increased interest in Virginia barley with recently newspaper articles entitled “Virginia barley could find its way to your gas tank”, “Virginia Farmers Hope Hull-less Barley Grows into a Moneymaker” appearing in “The Virginia-Pilot’ and “Farm Bureau News”. Thus USDA is pushing barley with a Maryland Cover Crop program that pays a $10 to $15 per acre for growing hull-less barley.

The use of corn for ethanol has of course come under criticism because of recent food riots in Asia and because higher corn prices cause higher food prices because cattle and pork are fed corn in confined feeding operation to fatten them up. Still barley is not without some cost disadvantage. Dr. Thomason says, “Wheat or hull-less plant would cost 5-10% more to build than a corn plant and 2 to 3 cents more per gallon in production. Hulled barley plant would cost 20-30% more to build and adds about 5 cents more per gallon to the cost of production.” With gas costing $4 per gallon, 5 cents does not seem like much of an issue.

Dr. Thomason wraps up saying that hulless barley is superior to hulled barley because it can produce 2.27 gallons of ethanol per bushel versus 1.64 gallons. He also says, “Osage Bioenergy plans to open a multigrain ethanol facility near Hopewell. It’s not done yet, but they are having a groundbreaking ceremony on Friday so it’s closer than anything else at this time. They can use almost any grain, but they hope to run on mostly barley, both hulled and hulless.”