Racing the Rain

First, please take a look at this photo mashup of former and current Chicago Cubs managers. It was created by Cam Anhalt and Len Perez, inspired by the character Quato from Total Recall, whose name sounds kinda like Quade, the new skipper.

Now to farming. After several weeks of summery weather we are finally getting some rain, starting with a light shower this evening. The heavy stuff is forecasted to come on Saturday. Do you know what they say in Oregon when it rains hard? They say, "It's raining so hard it sounds like a cow pissing on a flat rock."

So, there are many tasks to do before the rain, more than I can accomplish in the short time left. The highest priorities are, in my view, rototilling my garden plot, splitting and stacking firewood, and replacing some tarps that go over the hay. Today's work on these projects was productive and satisfying and I get another crack (like the sound of the axe hitting the bucked logs) tomorrow.

Last night I had dinner with two good friends at Montage underneath the Morrison Bridge in Portland. One companion was curious about where they source their alligator meat. The waiter told us that it comes from Louisiana, and when queried further he said, "A gator farm is like a cattle ranch, but with more ponds."

Farmhouse Dialouge

Sage: Tomas, would you like to register for the composting class with Brian and I?

Tomas: No, if you are both going, just give me the notes.

Brian: Maybe we should send funds for Roger to register [Roger is an adorable black lamb who suffered from rickets in his first days and so is being cuddled and raised in the house.]

Sage: They would have to pay to have Roger come.

Tomas: Roger's goal is to avoid being composted.

Sage: [laughs] Right. Roger wants to keep from being composted for as long as he can!

Brian: Tomas has a clear view of reality.

Tomas: Well, I guess that's all of our goal, to delay the compost process for as long as possible.

Shipments and packages

Sage arrived back from her friend's with a shipment of meat last night, and Brian and I put it away in the freezers. This was the first time that I have seen a group of animals walk onto a truck and return a few weeks later cut up in neat little packages. Seeing so much world class meat made me giddy. Mostly lamb, leg steaks, sirloin chops, ground, stew and kabob meat. And a bunch of little hearts and kidneys that got stacked in the door of our freezer.

Country Dining

Yesterday was fruit and vegetable picking day here at Meadow Harvest organic meats. A meager but nevertheless blessed bounty: four squarish apples and for ears of half-kerneled corn cobs. According to Brian the rest of the corn was gobbled by Bernie the ram and his cohort. As Prince Hamlet says, "'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross possess it merely." Hopefully we can do something about that next year.

In any case, I used the corn in a dish that I am calling Tillamook Taco Salad, prepared as follows

100% Grassfed ground beef in various states of freshness from fridge

Remains of pint of random supermarket aritichoke dip, 2 days past dated

Grated cheddar cheese

Four ears of corn

Corn tortillas

Vegetable oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Brown ground beef in skillet. Add artichoke dip, cheese, and corn kernels shaved from cobs. Slice tortillas into wedges and fry in a separate pan with salt until crispy and delicious. Add chips to beef mix. If you are a baller fry an egg or two onto this mix and serve to your friends with cerveza.

Roots and Ruts

I spent the weekend on and around the ranch, and it was minimally eventful. Cara, Lindsay, and I went out and hunted Chanterelle mushrooms without success. Later on they were the first guests on my hillbilly golf course. Shagging balls out of the cedars, Cara found a King Bolete, aka Porcini, aka Boletus edulus. They went home to key it and eat it.

The weather here is eerily nice. Bernie the ram reopened the gash on his head while scratching it on his wire mesh enclosure, so we figured what the hell, just let him out and he can get on with his work of sniffing ewes. The bull Ulysses is bellowing tonight because a cow is in heat across the electric fence. So the animals are in sexual frenzy and yours truly is working out his energy by splitting wood for the fire.

Stretchin' it out

Sage took off this morning to help a friend in Madras, so Brian and I are two hombres lookin' after the ranch. I made potato lentil curry for supper. Living with so much meat manifests decadence when trying to stretch out various dishes that one prepares. Under normal conditions, I would add beans or spuds to a leftover bit of steak to make it last longer. Here, we plan to simmer a london broil in what's left of my stew for tomorrow's tasty lunch

Leagues, Hectares, & Feeds

A friend said to me recently, "I am more interested in wild animals than farm animals." I have a lot of sympathy for this position. Wild animals are, after all, more resourceful, unpredictable, less uniform, less domestic." On the other hand, someone I read said, "think of domesticated animals as kin to their wild brothers and sisters, rather than what you own." That way you think more critically about what the critter's needs are and ultimately treat her with more respect.

Brian and I are trying to implement Intensively Managed Rotational Grazing (IMRG) on this ranch. This is the simple idea that the natural tendency for grazing animals is to move, on a daily basis, away from browsed forage and waste and towards fresh pasture. So the manager's goal is to make the pasture size equal to one day's eating capacity of the herd. Yesterday morning we put about 44 cows on 1.5 acres of 5"-7" grass. By this afternoon they had chewed through all this and were dry humping each other out of boredom. So while we had predicted the field would last three days, in fact they were eating faster, and my rough cut grazing coefficient is that 10 cows of mixed age can eat 1/3 of an acre of 5"-7" grass in one day.

As I draw this post to a close I am struck by how much I enjoy this simple exercise of mathematics applied to the agricultural system in which I am living. Now I am thinking about an experiment that would query for a similar grazing coefficient for wild elk, and I'll be danged if I don't recall a former field partner saying that he actually did something like that in Washington State. So the western empirical mind of science is being applied to both wild and domestic animals. But this is reductive, and I have now converted both from grunting foragers to abstract mental concepts. Since I can recognize the false logic employed therein, I have the opportunity to pause and see the creatures for what they are, whatever that is.