I spent (what hopefully will turn out to be) the first half of my life farming, having descended from homesteaders on Montana’s Hi-Line. Thankfully, they settled within sight of Glacier Park, although our immediate farm neighborhood was in a particularly amenity-challenged area. My folks always headed to their winter place 50 miles south in Conrad whenever we were caught up on work. I extended the semi-nomadic routine another 240 miles to Bozeman starting about ‘75, which became a year-round proposition when we went all dot-com in the late 90’s.

Now I discover that in addition to our more modern gigs, we’re farming again! As I mentioned in my previous column, we’ve assumed stewardship of a friend and neighbor’s 320 acre place. He was tragically killed in a December plane crash, and the events that have transpired since are a whole epic and ongoing story in themselves, to be related after all this shakes out.

Anyway, even though I wasn’t actively involved in agriculture for five or six years there, I never got out of the habit of keeping a close eye on the weather conditions. When we woke up to a few inches of snow last week, my son joked that we’d had spring in January and February, and now it was time for winter! Meteorological schizophrenia aside, most of Montana has been blessed with some very timely, substantial, and more-than-welcome precipitation lately, with reports of three plus inches of moisture in parts of central MT. Here in the Gallatin Valley, we got about half that, and as I mentioned; the plant growth is phenomenal for this stage of the season. In fact, we’ve mowed our lawn already, which I’d guess to be fully a month ahead of normal. I take no joy in that, should add that I have an extreme aversion to "yard farming", and you’ll never see our place featured in any Home and Garden magazines.

So it’s with a mixture of pleasure and dismay that I find myself going round and round again, doing some actual farming. The dismay part has to do with my available equipment. While this situation wasn’t quite sprung on us overnight, we only had about a month to get squared away on machinery. Now perhaps most dot-com types who found themselves with a 320 acre farm would head for the implement dealership and stock up on shiny new equipment. I suspect the price of machinery these days would give most anyone pause, though, at least if you’re hoping to break even on the deal. With even a modestly adequate new tractor running, say, sixty grand or more… Well, I’m going to be on the farm auction circuit again over the next couple of years. That didn’t do us any good for this spring, though. Fortunately, when we got out of farming we kept a handful of items, coincidentally a matching set of red 1952’s; our family heirloom Ford F-5 grain truck, and an International 300 Utility tractor. I also scrounged up what may well be the best-preserved pre-1960 grain drill in Montana (and judging by eBay, perhaps globally), a cherry John Deere-Van Brunt double disc drill with not only a full complement of the original parts but spares for many items. We’d also kept our weed sprayer, a one-of-a-kind sixty foot high-capacity unit that I built myself back in the day. In fact, that’s the only largish and at least nominally modern unit on the place.

Even though I’m leaning toward going organic, the immediate weed situation mandates some chemical control. As mentioned earlier, the grasses are taking off just phenomenally, but alas, so are the weeds. In this case, the predominate species seems to be fanweed, aka field pennycress. It’s a winter annual, meaning it germinated last fall, and now with good moisture and some sun the doggone stuff is eight inches high and flowering! Confound it!! I’d like to have a word with Eve about that whole apple business in the Garden of Eden, and the subsequent mandate that we shall fight weeds with the sweat of our brow forever. I don’t see her coming around to offer any assistance, fig leaves or otherwise!

When weeds get that big, that fast, herbicides just don’t do the trick, and some plain old cultivation is called for. Unfortunately, I am conspicuously short on a decent cultivator and the horsepower to pull it. The 300 Utility allegedly produces about 35 horses, and while that’s fine for general utility work, it’s not going to pull much of a plow. A quick tour of local implement dealers confirmed my suspicion that there isn’t much call for cultivators larger than your typical yard farming apparatus, but smaller than what a "real" farmer might use. Fortunately, I met most of the local folks back in our wild game processing days, and my son spent last summer haying for one of them (whose 97 year old father was the first person I custom butchered beef for. Gads, that’s also a whole story in itself…). Sure enough, a phone call to Leonard solved my dilemma. He had a ten foot chisel plow, that’d been abandoned in a coulee for the last thirty years or so. Miraculously, the tires still held air! A new hydraulic cylinder, and we were tilling the soil. And I tell you what; about three rounds into an 86 acre field; I was really missing my big four-wheel-drive tractor and air seeder!

A fellow running that size machinery in a fairly large field has time to think about stuff, and if you have a GPS and a pocket calculator you can figure out all sorts of information, including the knowledge that you’re covering about 3.6 acres per hour, so if you’re not going to completely neglect your other (more profitable) ventures you’re going to be doing pretty good to get much over 25 acres per day done. That’s a mildly discouraging prospect, as I used to knock out better than 200 acres a day! But, we got ‘er done, and now that the snow has melted, we’re putting seed in the ground.

The plan is to put the place mainly into forage and hay, although I’ll probably rotate some acres into various alternative crops, just to generate conversation around the neighborhood if nothing else. We took a look at planting some flax, as it’s trading in the $15/bushel range. Alas, seed is difficult if not impossible to come by anywhere even reasonably close at hand, and near as I’ve been able to ascertain nobody’s grown flax in the Gallatin Valley since the 40’s, and even then it was extremely limited. So we’re clearly overdue, and since there’s a Bozeman company marketing flax as a health supplement… maybe next year.

In the meanwhile, we’re doing the usual thing and planting wheat on the summerfallow ground. I know, it’s not real imaginative, but it’s also pretty much foolproof (given my range of experience with it, anyway) and since it takes a bit to get the feel for a place… Still, it’s kind of appropriate that I’m farming mainly with pre-1960 equipment, since the price of wheat seems to hover at about those historical levels. Last year, spring wheat was bumping $4/bushel, but now we’re back down to that $3.30 range. I saw that price described as "tragic" in a recent article bemoaning the depopulating of the Great Plains.

For Montana; our home of Gallatin County led the state in population growth for the previous year, with an astounding 11.5% growth in one year! That’s over 7800 people moving here. Compare that to the other end of the spectrum, Treasure County, with a 13.5% decline. What’s more shocking is that number consists of a drop from 861 residents to 745. Gads, 116 people up and left in one year! Now that is tragic!!

This contrast was brought to mind recently, during a meeting with the regional Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Region 3 brass regarding our continued efforts for an expanded public hunt for wild bison in Montana next fall. We were proposing that since they’re capturing and testing bison for brucellosis, transporting sero-negative calves to a quarantine facility nearly 200 miles away, and releasing sero-negative adults next door on Horse Butte (where we can likely repeat the process with them again next winter!) why not release a truckload or two of those tested adults in the upper Gallatin. The area we suggested has no livestock conflict, is public land, and includes a State-owned wildlife management area that’s historic elk winter range. Our bison management proposals have met a mixed reception from the involved agency types, so we were enormously encouraged and grateful that the area wildlife biologists have offered to prepare a bison habitat assessment for the Taylor Fork area. As always, though, there’s concern we might upset the ag community.

It seems to me the "ag community" (which I am not part of?) has bigger things to worry about than a few dozen buffalo in the upper Gallatin. I’d like to think it behooves everyone in Montana to embrace new revenue-producing assets.

And yes, I have thought about putting buffalo on our place. I believe I’ll just keep selling the Flying D buffalo, though! Horses require less in the way of fencing, and Cliff’s fences are definitely fully depreciated…