Homesteader Life

We went all week without a fire, boy that was nice. It did get a little chilly at night but I was determined to leave the fire out! Well, tonight I had light her back up. They are calling for snow on the Lord’s day, I don’t think spring will ever come to Mt Hunger. The grass just started to green a little today, the peepers started a couple nights ago. The year that I really needed an early spring and it is later than ever. We really need some warm temps to get the grass growing around here. Hay is getting mighty hard to come by. I’m convinced that one of the biggest mistakes dairy farms made was relying on purchased grains. Even in northeast as recently as when my dad was a boy, dairies grew the grain they needed. It was oats and ear corn. Now someone will say, “The cows didn’t give much milk then either.” True enough, but without overproduction they received a fair price for the milk and made more money than we do now. The American hunger for extreme production has killed any chance to make a decent living milking cows. Sure, when cows were only fed oats and ground ear corn they gave a smaller amount of milk. Who cares, if farmers had an ounce of common sense they would have seen that it was better for them and the land in the long run. It was all grown on the farm, a more self contained sustainable farm were folks paid the bills and had a profit afterwards. The problem with trying it today is the milk prices. As long as everyone else continues to make every pound of milk they can the rest of us are out of luck. As far as organic milk, you almost have to grow your own grain to make it. If conventional farmers think its bad, try paying what organic grain brings these days. Organic milk prices need to be a lot higher than they are or there won’t be any of them left in couple years either. Now is the time someone who has never milked cows for a living in northern Broome county to tell me I shouldn’t feed cows grain. Well, I haven’t been feeding any because I can’t afford to. If you think thats the answer then you ought to find something new to be a self proclaimed “expert” about. In the north east you can get by for a good part of the grazing season without any grain. You watch body condition and feed some corn when you need to. Feeding a little corn if a cow needs energy is not a sin folks. In the winter when cows eat hay, unless its really good hay they need some grain. In this part of the country our good hay is not very good. We live in an area that gets very little sunlight and grass hay that would test 18% anywhere else will only test 11 or 12% here. You see, every farm is different and every area is different. A bit of advise, never listen to anyone unless they live near you. Experts always have the answer and act like it will work everywhere. Well, enough of this. On another note, we finished the syrup up. Sap was extra sweet this year. I think it was more like 30:1 instead of the normal 40:1 to boil down. Smelling that sweet steam and watching the flames dancing away in the arch was good therapy for the long winter blues. Brought back memories of my younger days and our sugar camp. I don’t think I slept for the whole month of March back then! We kept the old girl cooking all night long in those days. We had a really nice sugarshack way back in the woods, it was like another world back there. Every night after milking we would head back there and work away until milking time the next morning. We would cook up a big pot of beans and enjoy an ice cold genny cream ale, while the sap cooked away. We sat around the fire spinning tales and joking around and sampling a little syrup now and then. We bottled many a quart jug in those days and sold them local. Even the local gunshop sold our syrup and the owner “Augy” would insist that customers bought some from us. Those were good days. I guess the only other news is that I’ve done something a bit out of character, I bought a plane ticket the other day! I’m taking a few days off and going down to visit the saints in Rayville Mo. I must admit I’m getting a little excited about the trip and can’t wait to see first hand what is going on down there. Well, time to go put another log on the fire. Till next time…..

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.