Endings, and Beginnings

Summer ’05 must be over, as my daughter started college here at Montana State Monday, and my son headed off for his second year of high school this morning. More than that, though, we’ve been absolutely beset with endings and beginnings lately. Perhaps most significantly, my mother-in-law’s life may be drawing to an end, and we made a frantic run to the emergency room with her yesterday morning. She’s stabilized, but we all know the time is not distant. So that sort of puts everything else in perspective, but it seems to me that life is one near-continuous series of changes, and adapting to them is perhaps one of, if not the, most important life skill.
We recently completed harvest here on the Rockpile Ranch, which was simultaneously an ending, and a beginning for us. I thought my days of grain harvesting were over. If you’ve followed these columns, thanks, and you probably know that I spent (what I hope turns out to be) the first half of my life dryland farming on Montana’s Hi-Line, east of Glacier Park. A recent Billings Gazette column accurately sums up the economic state of grain farming these days.

The short version is that skyrocketing input costs completely outstrip revenues for most operations. It can be argued that has been the case since about 1980, but in recent years (and even months) the equation has become so grossly imbalanced as to defy imagination. Most Montana farmers are reporting excellent yields, but with diesel closing in on $3 per gallon, not to mention fertilizers and herbicides at record highs, and machinery costs completely off the scale; there will be little if any net revenue to report for most operations.
But this column isn’t particularly about that. It’s also about beginnings. I’ve listened to more diatribes about the unfairness of the situation than I can begin to recall, have written a few myself, and it’s pointless. It’s like the line in the Bruce Springsteen song; “Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back.”
It makes little difference if you’re a farmer, or a steel mill worker, or a software engineer, if your industry changes you either adapt or go down with the ship. Change can be painful, no doubt, and adapting a farming operation is more difficult (and perhaps impossible, in many cases) than just changing jobs. I’ve been incredibly blessed and/or lucky with our situation, and if you’ll bear with a brief history…
My folks were relative latecomers, starting farming in ’53. My mother’s family homesteaded east of Conrad. She was born in 1919, and reportedly her father liked to say she was the only crop he had that year. It can be argued the “Dirty Thirties” arrived in Montana in ’19, and things didn’t really recover until after WWII. The area around Conrad boasts some of the best agricultural land in the state, though, and particularly after irrigation systems were developed in the late teens, area homesteaders, including my Grandpa, were able to hang on through the lean years. Unlike, say, the overwhelming majority of those 50 miles further north, on the gumbo flats west of Kevin. Fortunately for them, alternative employment was close at hand with the discovery of the Kevin-Sunburst oil field, and it’s said that Cut Bank (the nearest town of any consequence) was the only town in Montana that didn’t really have a depression. On what became our place, though, there were numerous abandoned homesteads that bore mute witness of families who gave it up.

Most of those lands were abandoned for a time, and after the native sod had re-established itself, were grazed by large bands of sheep through the thirties and forties. But then the sheep industry more or less went away also, a process that continues to this day, and in the early 50’s my grandfather saw an opportunity for cheap land. Grain prices were decent after WWII, in fact comparable to what we get today, and if one factors inflation into the equation they were astronomically higher than today’s prices. Not to mention, input costs were basically zilch in comparison. My grandpa, and later my parents and an uncle purchased land for mostly around $25/acre. The first year he farmed, my Dad reported yields of nearly 50 bushels to the acre, and with prices around $2/bushel, you can see it penciled out nicely.
Of course they had their ups and downs through the rest of the 50’s and 60’s, but then the 70’s arrived and with the first big wheat export deal with Russia in ’72, prices went to over $6/bushel! With fuel in the neighborhood of $.25/gallon, and other input costs consisting of seed at perhaps $2.50 and another buck or two for aerial herbicide application, it was like a license to print money for a time! And, to my eternal gratitude, my parents resisted the temptation to spend all that income on land and machinery, which became a recipe for disaster for many in the 80’s when drought and low prices returned.
I attended MSU from ’75-’80, and worked in the Extension Economics department for a couple of winters thereafter. I distinctly remember one staff meeting when an Ag Econ professor waxed near-ecstatic about the mind-bogglingly rosy outlook for Montana agriculture in coming years. He’s since retired, and I still run into him from time to time. He’s a nice guy, and I just don’t see any point in rubbing his nose in his erroneous prediction. But, he couldn’t have been more wrong. By the mid to late ‘80’s, a lot of farmers were in dire financial straits. So when the Conservation Reserve Program came along, which basically pays farmers not to farm, most of my neighbors signed up en masse. In fact, in our immediate neighborhood just about the only ones who didn’t enroll were a couple of big operators who were up against payment limitations and couldn’t sign up all their acres, myself, and my neighbor Jack.
Jack and I were polar opposites in many ways, although we got along well enough. He could be described as a curmudgeon, who hated the direction industrialized agriculture was going, not to mention chemical usage, and so he went organic. I was fresh out of college, still thought I was smart, and wholeheartedly embraced no-till farming, which is largely based on using herbicides for weed control instead of tillage. Every time you till the ground in that country, depending on temperature and the degree of ever-present wind, you lose between a half inch and an inch of moisture. In an area that only gets 12 inches of precipitation in a good year, if you can save two or three inches of moisture, that could make a heck of a difference. Perhaps even more significantly, if you’re not continually turning the soil, exposing root matter to desiccating winds, you’ll build organic matter. In a native sod situation, roughly 80% of the plant matter is subsurface. When you break up the sod and put it into small grain production, though, that ratio is reversed, and if you take 80% of the plant matter away every year with no fertilizer or crop rotations to rebuild organic matter, after a decade or three you don’t have anything left.
That was the case when I took over our operation in ’82, and in no small irony is the case right now with the Rockpile Ranch, which to my knowledge has never been fertilized in perhaps 70 years of operation. When I first ran soil tests on our place up north, the organic matter barely even registered, in the .2% range. By the mid-90’s, I’d managed to rebuild it to around 2.5%, which is approaching native sod organic matter levels. And, through moisture conservation we’d raised some pretty outstanding crops for that Godforsaken gumbo flat, including some 80 bu/acre winter wheat (the county average is about 25), and some near-State record dryland canola. But, we also had some fifteen bushel crops in the dry years, and with input costs skyrocketing and grain prices… OK, I said I wouldn’t go on about that.
When a new round of CRP sign-ups became available in the late 90’s, both Jack and I packed it in and signed up also, which tells you something about farming in that neighborhood. Actually, I initially signed up half our place, and distinctly remember the day I decided to put the rest in. I was working on our swather, and my friend and neighbor Curt had stopped by. We were discussing the situation, as usual, when it struck me that my plan of continuing to farm half the place was nuts! And then, in a truly bizarre happenstance he looked down at the corner of our shelterbelt and said “what’s that, a mule?!” It turned out to be a moose!! Rest assured, our place is anything but conventional moose habitat, but peering out of the end of our chokecherry grove was a yearling moose. He crossed the ravine to another shelterbelt, where he took up residence for a few hours, and then left for parts unknown (actually, we heard reports of sightings clear to the Marias river). In retrospect, perhaps there was a message in that most unusual occurrence…
By that time, the CRP Program had evolved to emphasize re-establishment of native grasses. The amount of CRP in any given county is limited to 25% of the cropland acres, and our county was very near that point. Producers had to submit bids, with successful applicants chosen on not only their bid-upon payment amount, but an “Environmental Benefits Index” score. I pulled out the stops, scored what is to my knowledge still the record EBI score for Toole County, and we squeaked the rest of our place in right under the wire.
So that September we completed what I thought was our last harvest. During my Dad’s tenure, and the first part of mine, we utilized a couple of custom harvesters. The last one, Floyd, eventually retired. These skyrocketing costs I keep trying to not dwell on basically pushed him out, and rather than try to line up another custom cutter we developed a much better situation with two friends who had combines and trucks. My buddy Ken’s place was higher elevation ground north of Cut Bank, nearly in Canada, and his harvest was always later than ours. He had a newish International combine, and cutting for us went a long way toward his combine payment, and so it was a mutually beneficial situation. The other pal Curt I mentioned previously had his place mostly in the CRP, but had a large White rotary combine, and so we not only were able to substantially reduce our harvest costs, but I didn’t have to sweat our cutters running off to another job (with sometimes questionable return prospects) every time we got shut down by a shower or grain that wasn’t quite ripe.
Now harvest is often a stressful situation. In fact, in the extraordinarily wet year of ’93 I lost fifteen pounds just from stress during harvest. I am in no sense overweight, and that was downright unhealthy! Still, we had a good time at it, also. We look back fondly on my wife’s in-field harvest dinners, complete with checked tablecloths, and so it was with definite mixed emotions that I took the photo of Curt harvesting the last few yards of our last crop. It wasn’t a heartbreaker; on the one hand I was relieved that the CRP had saved us from the financial abyss (and in another year or so our accumulated debt load from those years will be erased, unless it starts growing again!). But still, you don’t pass that sort of milestone without some emotional turmoil, even it’s abundantly clear that change is necessary. If anything, it was harder on my son, who loved playing in the grain at harvest, not to mention the freedom of being a farm kid. I tried to not let it get to me, but have to admit I could never listen to John Mellencamp’s “Blood on the Scarecrow” without choking up a bit. “Son, I’m just sorry they’re just memories for you now, rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow…”
So we embarked on a new life of internet publishing, website design, and tourism bookings. These things work in mysterious ways, though, and six years later we find we’re not only still pursuing those gigs, but have come full circle and are farming and to some extent back in the meat business (skinning buffalo, anyway). Some of the details of how we find ourselves farming again are contained in previous columns from this spring and summer, so I won’t cover that ground again, so to speak, but it was with profoundly complex emotions that we embarked on harvest this year. As my son put it; that was the end, and this is the beginning. And, we’re going about it a little different this time around.
First, with only 320 acres, and other revenue streams developed, we have the flexibility to explore alternative (read that unconventional and risky) production and marketing techniques. Being frugal by nature, we’re keeping expenses at a minimum. That was reinforced when I came home with a (quite small) box of parts costing nearly $300 for my $1000 combine. And then, we blew one of the big combine tires, which set us back another $525, but still… When a custom cutting crew pulled in on the neighboring Running Elk Ranch with two shiny new John Deere combines and a couple of big tandem trucks and sundry other equipment probably totaling close to a million dollars altogether, well… There was a time when I might have been jealous, with me running a smallish 1986 combine and a ’52 truck. Not now! I felt way ahead of the deal… Not to mention, we had outstanding if not downright uncanny yields. The winter wheat my friend and neighbor Cliff seeded last fall, with no fertilizer or nothin’, yielded an astounding 60 bushel to the acre. His yields the last few years were in the eight to fifteen bushel range. One little chunk behind his barn yielded nearly 100 bushel to the acre! I’m calling it his last gift to me. The spring wheat I planted this spring, with a decent shot of fertilizer went about 30 bushel/acre, which is certainly no bin-buster, but with good protein levels, if we market a portion of it direct to consumers in small quantities for home milling and baking, a fella might actually make decent money at it. And next year, besides wheat we’re planting golden flax and camelina, both oilseeds suitable for human dietary supplements, high in Omega 3 essential fatty acids. Plus we plan on planting green manure crops on the fallow ground to build nitrogen and organic matter, and a cattle research center up the road with a basically unlimited supply of (brown!) manure will spreading that by-product as an organic supplement also, and we’re plumb enthused about the prospects!
If you’ve stuck with the farming bent of these columns in recent months, again, thanks. Next time we’ll try to get back to the “Gossip, News, and Hot Tips” theme I normally maintain. That’s right, we’ll end the agricultural diatribes, and begin anew on more fun stuff. Personally, though, we’ve found recent months intensely interesting, even if they’ve been conspicuously short of recreation time, and hopefully you may find our perspectives interesting also. Invariably, it seems, the end of one thing is the beginning of another, and so it’s been for eternity.