Wait a minute, it’s March that’s supposed to be “in like a lamb, out like a lion” (or vice versa), right?
Did I miss a month somewhere?!
Looks to me like April is definitely also going out like a lion. At least I’m sure people in Browning would agree, with four feet (!) of snow in the last few days. Yikes…
I grew up in that vicinity, and can only imagine what written reports can’t capture, and that’s the power of the wind in that area. It can be brutal beyond description, i.e. it’s blown trains off the tracks. So, four feet of snow is only part of the story, I’m sure.
As I mentioned last month, I made a quick trip to our old stomping grounds up there earlier this month. It was mostly a seed run, picking up golden flax and lentils, plus a few other odds and ends. I also scored a screaming bargain on a pull-type swather, yet another well-preserved relic from back in the day. It’ll fit right in here on the Rockpile Ranch, a perfectly functional piece of machinery that cost less than 1% of what new self-propelled swathers go for these days.
Well, it’ll fit in once I get it back here... It’s too big to fit on my trailer, so I need to do some scrounging around & see if I can rent/borrow a bigger gooseneck flatbed trailer for a day or two, or else (please…, no!) I’ll have to trail the thing back down here at 25 mph tops. Oh, well, that’ll still only make for one long day, knock wood. Still, it’d be time well spent, no doubt, as I have a feeling swathing might be quite useful on an organic farm, not to mention I need to do some mowing as part of our maintenance on the Saddle Peak Ranch subdivision.
Bargains aside, it was fun to visit with some people I don’t see very often anymore. Seems a lot of farmers are having grave misgivings about the high-input model these days, in fact one of my high school classmates said “this just isn’t any fun anymore”.
I kept my mouth shut for a change, but I dunno…
Our situation is way different anymore, but hey, what farming we’ve gotten done has been kinda fun, I have to say.
Not that it’s been much, but we do have our camelina seeded on time for a change, and it’s coming up nicely. You could count the days that were suitable for field work during April on the fingers of a careless butcher, but carpe diem, etc.
That was another common topic of conversation at that auction; the difference between farming here in the Valley of the Flowers, versus Napi’s Country. Used to be, I liked to be in the field by April 10 (although in reality many times it was more like the 20th) and be done seeding by May 10. This year, we got our first camelina seeded April 11, and I have not given up on being done by May 10, but it better quit snowing one of these days. That was another topic of conversation, how historically most of the farms in the Gallatin weren’t very big, as the window of opportunity is much narrower. We’re a thousand feet higher in elevation here, and get quite a bit more precip as a rule, so when the springtime sun does shine you’d better be ready to roll. So, a lot of the farms around here weren’t much bigger than a section (640 acres). Up north, I had a couple of neighbors that farmed more like 10,000 acres, and one or two with more than double that! Although, come to think, most of them are out of business now…
I know if I had several thousand acres to seed, I’d probably be stressing a bit. As is, though, looking outside and seeing everything white doesn’t make my blood pressure go up at all.

But then we’re not sitting around twiddling our thumbs, we’re just getting rolling on skull cleaning season, and amazingly have received well over half of last season’s buffalo robes back from the tannery already. In fact on Wednesday I made a run to pick up more recently completed ones. The historical ramifications of transporting buffalo robes around Montana always makes me grin for some reason, but our luck held and so far we have not run into a single war party! Even getting over Homestake Pass in a blizzard wasn’t all that bad, perhaps because we had excellent traction as now I know 26 buffalo robes pretty well fills up a Ford Explorer. Plus, since it’s way too wet to be in the field, I’ll get them invoiced hasta pronto and keep the till ringing. Good thing…
Other than that, the Winter Farmer’s Market is kicking up to twice a month for May, which will seem casual compared to June, when we’ll be doing two per week! That may approach “work”. Before long, our labeling and graphics will be considerably spiffed up. Several local stores have already expressed interest in carrying our items, and once we have the bugs worked out of that, we may finally be getting someplace...!
It’s ironic, not least that we find ourselves back in farming to begin with, but more than that we’re more or less forced to develop alternative marketing venues. The “status quo”, raising wheat & barley and hauling them to the elevator just isn’t really a viable plan for the Rockpile Ranch. So, anything to be different, but I have a feeling this is meant to be.
Beyond that, there’s a meeting of the Madison Elk Working Group this afternoon, which should be quite interesting. I hear we even were featured in a program on Yellowstone Public Radio recently, although recent discussions with several participants indicate they too were slightly dismayed almost no one outside FWP knew about this beforehand. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even heard about it until the meeting later today, except a couple of the participants in the working group just happened to be listening when the interview came on, which likewise left them going “what the…?!” Seems to me they could have just invited YPR’s Brian Kahn to one of our meetings so he could talk to everyone, but hey, then you can’t control the message. But then as Brian clearly informed me when I called to ask about this, he started what became the Madison Ranchlands Group, the wildlife committee of which has now kinda morphed into the Elk Working Group, so maybe he’s way beyond visiting with current (albeit long-term) participants. I guess we’ll find out…