What to do with the back 40

Bluestem Farm back 40

I mentioned in a previous post that we lease our back 40 to neighbors for conventional farming.  I've never been excited about the chemicals and bare ground, but we haven't yet decided what else to do there.  Besides, it currently provides the "seed" money for Katherine's college fund!  Check out the aerial view of our farm at this LINK.



In the running are a few (expensive) ideas.


1.  I've always dreamed of a prairie restoration here.  The cost of seed, and rented equipment to get it started is significant, not to mention the lost income.  The prairie could be grazed as part of my beef operation, but that would mean replacing 4,000 feet of decrepit, overgrown fence.  I'm looking into grants or assistance for this sort of work.  A partnership with KU or the Kansas Biological Survey might make for a good options, too.

2.  Scott's dream is to convert the land to organic grain production.  It takes seven years chemical-free to certify crop ground as organic.  (We're not likely to pay for the certification, but we'd still follow this guideline.)  Our lawn tractor is severely under-sized for a job like this, not to mention the many farm implements that it would take to plant, harvest, clean seed, and mill into flour.  That said, I think Scott's right about a market for local, organic flour.

Strip Cropping Photo credit

3.  Possibly the wisest use of the crop land would be some kind of strip cropping polyculture.  Grazing crops like grass and alfalfa could be grown in a mosaic with fruit and nut trees, grains, and veggies.  This too requires quite an investment, but may offer the best long-range return while still providing a diverse habitat for native wildlife.

Clearly I have some reading to do.  The neighbors have already fertilized and tilled the ground for next year's crop, so any major decisions will wait a year or two.  In the mean time, I think I'll beg back an acre for some experimental wheat and oat crops.  This will let us get our feet wet without disrupting our income.

Lasagna gardening

In grad school I grew the most tasty, prolific, heirloom tomatoes in my rental house yard.  Of course, I thought this was due to some skill of mine.  When I married Scott and moved to our first home in the county on 5 acres of degraded farm ground, I was shocked that not only did my heirlooms shrivel up and die, but even the commercial hybrids refused to thrive.  With next to no organic matter in any bit of our yard, the plants had to weather rounds of flood and drought stress.  I grew a fine crop of weeds and cucumbers each year we lived there.

Karen and baby Katherine in the weedy tree garden

Though our new farm had deep topsoil, I'd been burned often enough that I was content to snuggle a few lettuce plants into our tree garden and call it good.  Still, the weeding was overwhelming.  I wanted to be less reliant on grocery store produce and commercial animal feed, but I needed a new way of doing things.  Last winter I started to research alternatives to the traditional tilled garden.

The idea I decided to try is called "Lasagna Gardening," based on a book by Patricia Lanza.  The upshot is that instead of tilling to remove weeds, you smother them with layers of wet newspaper and mulch.  As a soil scientist, I always had trouble with the idea of tilling, and as a wife I always had trouble my tiller, so I was ready and willing to replace this part of gardening.  I also am blessed with an abundance of multi-species manure that was perfect for the job.  I moved spoiled hay from the cow lot, and the contents of all my animal housing, onto an area of the yard 16 x 32 feet to a depth of about 12 inches.  I never once touched the tiller or any chemicals; this all happened on top of a thick stand of yard grass.

Plants are nestled down in the mulch where their roots can spread out or down through the newspaper to the topsoil below.  Plants below the newspaper can't push up through it, so any weeds that grow in the garden have shallow roots and pull out easily.  In 20 minutes I could pull every weed in the garden any time of year!

New, expanded Lasagna garden

Allowing for experimentation, the garden produced very well and I expanded it to 30 x 40 this fall.  Never again will you see soil exposed to the sun here.  I even moved 10 loader buckets of mulch into the old hog pen this winter.  When this composts down a little in the spring or summer, I intend to plant a feed crop of beets and oats for the livestock.  I have high hopes for an edible flower and berry garden in front of the house some day, too.  Lasagna gardens everywhere!

Cattle voyeur

Agnes, you may remember, has been slated for the freezer this coming June. With the recent departures of Nellie and Molly, though, it's starting to get lonely in the pasture.  Agnes, a little wild for my herd, is still pretty gentle by cattle standards, so I'm reconsidering.  The trigger for this reversal is the attention Agnes was seen enjoying yesterday from Abe, our growing steer calf. 

Cows in heat will mount and be mounted by one another (yes, including females and steers).  The cow that stands still while others mount her is the one in heat.  Without this behavior, it's close to impossible to know when to breed a cow by artificial insemination. Twelve hours after a cow is seen in "standing heat" is the time to breed her.

Agnes, though, has always had a more reserved relationship with the females of the herd; she mounts no one and no one mounts her.  Instead, when she's in heat she gets antsy and bellows across the road at the neighbor's bull.  All fine, but it leaves us guessing about that magical window of time for precise breeding.  I just gave it a guess and had my AI tech neighbor breed her anyway.  Of course, she didn't "settle" that way, and by the time the vet confirmed her to be "open" she had developed an ovarian cyst that had kept her from coming back into heat.  He took care of the problem, but that's when I thought about beefing her.

But yesterday... I spied Agnes responding to the attentions of young Abe.  If I can predict her breeding time, she may yet have a place in the herd.  Way to go, Abe!  I have 19-21 days to consider her fate before she comes into heat again.

Biochar as fertilizer

We generate a wealth of ash and charcoal by heating our house with wood.  Up until now, we've just scattered the ashes in the yard as a way to get rid of them, but now that I'm more committed to gardening it's time to put them to use. 

Wood ash is a great source of potassium and other trace elements that can be lacking in a vegetable garden, but use it with caution!  The pH of ash is quite high; too much can burn plants.  Used wisely, it can treat unwanted acidity in the soil (a potential problem in my "Lasagna" method of gardening).  Aviod using it on blueberries, roses, rhododendrons, and other acid-loving plants.  I have yet to start testing the pH of my garden, but it was time to deal with the full ash can, so I sprinkled a bit of ash on areas where I plan to plant low-pH-favoring plants, and then enlisted Katherine and Scott in filtering out the biochar. 

Biochar (charcoal used as fertilizer) has all the benefits of ash, with less pH action, and a heap of slow-release carbon.  To separate it out, we passed about 15 gallons of ash through hardware cloth and ended up with about 3 gallons of biochar.  We have a few more months of wood stove weather left for me to determine how much ash I still need. 

Research using biochar on a larger scale in tropical soils is helping boost crop production and reduce deforestation.  Check out more about it here: www.biochar-international.org/biochar/soils

And then there were five

Another sad day on the farm with Molly taking a new job north of Lawrence as nanny and nurse to a set of twin calves.  Jake was sorry to see her leave, but I think he'll do well without her kicking him in the head daily.  There's got to be a better way for Molly to tell him he's too old to be nursing.  She had a good life here, and if she had been nicer to me I would have kept her.

Now I can finally admit that I really don't like milking.  Someday I'll probably try it again, but for now I don't need a dedicated milk cow.  It gets too complicated trying to keep her and her calves on good grass, but still close to the barn.

Beef cows and calves...
Breeding guinea hogs...
Laying chickens...
Broiler chickens...
Ducks...

That's enough for now.

Coming soon- Guinea hogs!

Guinea hogs on pasture in SW Missouri

It's been a while since I wrote about hogs, but they've been at the forefront of my farm planning this month.  I mentioned in a previous post that my goal is to raise meat animals that can maximize their use of grass and forage.  My previous three years raising standard breed (Hampshire and Hamp/York cross) feeder pigs has come nowhere close to this goal.  I thought about abandoning hogs for that reason, but we do like the pork and they're a great outlet for garden waste and leftovers.  (We don't have trash pick up here, so nearly every scrap of food waste finds a home in compost or animal feed)

Guinea boar, "Buttercup"

Modern hog breeds need free-choice access to a mixture of grain and soybean oil meal ground to 16% protein.  Organic substitutes are hard to find around here and prohibitively expensive.  The alternative is to raise a heritage breed of hog that was bred to scavenge most of its nutrition.  Guinea hogs were once the most common yard pig in the South where they lived on grass, clover, acorns, food scraps, and their favorite... snakes.  When it fell out of fashion to keep just a few hogs for the family, this breed spiraled toward extinction. 

Guinea sow

 About 20 years ago a small group of breeders, in concert with the American Livestock Breeds Association (ALBA), rounded up all the breeding stock they could find (about 20 animals), to save these unique genetics. 

Guineas are quite a bit smaller than standard hog breeds, with the maximum weight of boars reaching 300 lbs rather than 800 lbs or more.  The pigs are born at just 1 lb and take quite a while to reach their mature size, but since they require so little supplemental feed they shouldn't be overly expensive to raise.

Four-year-old, Buttercup, the boar and the sow at left will be joining us here on Bluestem Farm any day now.  Pigs are expected in April!

First snow at Bluestem Farm

Agnes, Mary, and Abe back in the corral at Bluestem Farm

The herd celebrated the first snow of the winter with a nocturnal jaunt through the yard.

With Molly and Jake locked in the barn for forced family therapy, I'm making regular trips to the round bale to pull off their hand- delivered rations.  More than once when I have pulled the gate shut, it hasn't latched, but last night is the first time anyone has gotten out.  I think the north wind blew the gate open and invited them to explore.

Young oak tree in our back yard

Scott noticed the tracks before sun-up this morning and followed them all around the yard by flashlight.  When he traced them back to the herd, they were contentedly munching hay at the feeder, having determined that there is indeed, NO grass on the other side.  Had there been grass showing, they may have lingered, but with a thick coat of snow, the yard was no more interesting than their own pastures. 

The birds are active and more visible with the snow.  They've found my suet feeder in the oak tree, and something of interest in the compost pile.

I'm truly grateful for all the dry, 50 degree days we've had this winter, but now with a little snow, I can finally stop watering my fruit trees!

Male cardinal sheltering in the oak