Good grief, it was summer just a few minutes ago, but now we have a chill factor of 51 degrees! The wind is howling, which it seldom does right here, but it’s smoked in thick from forest fires. And the National Weather Service says it’s going to “hit” 35 tomorrow night.
What an odd situation. But then the weather has been psycho since at least 1982, in my experience. You just make the best of it. I was all bought into the global warming thing, though!
The Farmer’s Almanac and the Climate Prediction Center diverge on the forecast for this coming winter, as they often do. My mother would have endorsed the Weather Service policy; “it’s going to be a dry year”. She said that every spring, and was right more often than not. She came of age during the Depression, though, which compounds the situation, but hey, do things ever really let up?
It doesn’t seem so, but that’s OK, because I become more convinced daily that adaption to changing circumstances is beyond fundamental, and while we might think humans are uniquely gifted in that regard, the herd of deer that ran right past me today were on some kind of mission. Maybe they heard that archery season opens this weekend, but they were heading for the hills…

Or perhaps they were fleeing from a bad vibe down at Belgrade, where First Lady Laura Bush had flown in to stump for Conrad Burns. I have no way of knowing, as it was an invitation-only affair. I think they had one of those just up the road this spring, as signs appeared and mysteriously disappeared overnight on my neighbor’s fence (without his permission), announcing a Burns bash up the way. But dangit, we didn’t get invited to that one either…
You have to write a big check to make that circuit, it appears, although that modus operandi went badly awry for a fraternity brother of mine recently. I feel for him, too, because that’s not who I knew in college. Fell in with bad company, is how I rationalize it. Still, you don’t run for Governor while defrauding investors, and what has escaped mention so far is high-level business involvement with the Otter Creek coal deposits, while running for Governor on a platform of energy development.
Sorry. I am adapting to soaring energy costs, and we feel biofuels offer enormous potential. I have a real hard time anymore with the idea of politicians being that closely aligned with Big Oil (or coal. Dinosaur juice, it its various forms.) When you have that sort of egregious conflict of interest from everyone from Dick Cheney down to Pat Davison, and the rest of us are supposed to just suck it up and pay the bill… Or buy stock in… Wait a minute. A handful of investors lost millions in fraudulent investment schemes floated by a candidate for GOVERNOR, for Godsakes! And it appears most of these companies with enormous coal reserves are closely held, and someone is going to make truly staggering sums down the road.
It’s a capitalist society, although the US resembles some sort of capitalist monarchy anymore, and if those guys bought in early, well… good on ‘em. Unless they’ve also bought a Governor or President or something. Montana has a long history of that sort of thing going awry.
Somehow, I can’t conceive of sustainable, renewable fuels fostering that degree of corruption, or so I’d like to think. Most farmers just aren’t innately evil people. The manual labor aspect of it weeds that crowd out, so to speak!
Even driving combine tired me out this past week, not to mention attempts to stay abreast of bookings and such. We spent the week custom harvesting for a buddy, Brian Goldhahn. Like a notable percentage of the other people I know, I met him via the game processing operation we ran in a previous life. He’s been a ranch manager for a long time now, and recently leased the place from the owner and went organic. If you’re a typical rancher (I know, there is no such thing…) that doesn’t take much. Spreadsheets, though, and religious record keeping, and perhaps a whole different outlook but aside from that it’s no big deal!
We harvested Austrian winter peas, malting barley, camelina, and oats; all organic. The oats were particularly amazing, 70 bu/ac or so (a preliminary estimate, but those things were thick). And, they were recrop, after barley last year (freshly broke former CRP), interseeded with clover. It appears to me the clover gave quite a boost this year, although the conventional wisdom says it doesn’t really kick in until the second year.
Of course there aren’t any classes you can take to teach one how to harvest, not to mention grow, this oddball stuff. No, you’re on your own for that, which after a while becomes almost as tiring as the actual labor. And then a clever cameraman could have probably filmed an adventure series of it, as the stuff is by far the hilliest ground I’ve ever harvested. It’s very interesting; in the northern Gallatin valley, which is relatively flat or gently sloping until you get north of Reese Creek, when it rapidly turns into a puzzle of hills and ravines, apparently blowdirt that arrived from somewhere an epoch or two ago. They make “hillside” combines that hydraulically level the platform, while the wheels and header stay at the pitch of the ground. Oh, that makes my head hurt to think about! But I guess you’d get used to it, and it’s almost called for on these topographical contortions of Brian’s, but what is most striking is that there are no rocks. Virtually none at all.
Our farm is pretty much flat, but rocks…! It’s rocks, basically, with what is now unbelievably depleted individual little sand and clay particles between. But hey, organic farming actually holds promise for turning that stuff into something approaching productive soil. Crop rotations, legumes, healthy Omega-3 oilseeds and who knows what else.
One thing is certain, it will be a continuous problem solving exercise. I was kind of worn out after I plugged the combine four times finishing the last few patches of Brian’s camelina. I really think I should be able to get a grant of some sort to research harvesting that stuff in extreme hills! But then I got home and took another look at mine…
I’d harvested just an acre or two of it last weekend, enough to get my seed back like seven or eight times over, although that’s not necessarily saying all that much on a pounds/acre basis. But then hey, the stuff is worth a bundle, and doesn’t have to yield mega-bushels to pencil.
The reason I didn’t cut more initially is… I just cut out a nice clean patch, and tried a considerable number of combine settings & sort of had a handle on it. The weedier stuff, though, I was getting too much green weed material in the tank, & decided to go do something else for a week.
But today I see the prickly lettuce is still blooming <gnash teeth, flail limbs> so unless we get a freak killing frost tomorrow night, which I might not reasonably expect for a few weeks yet, it’s not going to dry down in the near term. So yeah, sure, I could have swathed it earlier, which would be easier if I still had a swather, not to mention a pickup header for the World’s Finest $1000 Combine. It’s too late for that now, and I’m getting tired of the deer traipsing about in it. That’s another grant application. Deer just love the stuff, and since Cody and I both have doe tags we’re whacking a couple of these Omega-3 research projects, as I suspect they’ll be off the scale as table fare. I also have the Bridger buck tag, but since I already have a 205 on the wall I’ll be looking for Mr. Big up high, where I learned how to hunt mule deer back in my apprenticeship. I can’t wait…
Back to today, though, I had yet another example of being inexplicably given the tools to solve a problem, potentially. It’s enough to make a fella believe in predestination, or something…
My friend and neighbor Cliff, who along with his ancestors farmed the stuff we’re operating now until he died in a plane crash, procured a seed cleaning mill at some point. At his auction last fall, I’d gotten distracted talking to someone, walked back up to the sale just in time to see the auctioneer about to drop the gavel on this seed mill, which I had no idea about but on impulse bought for ten bucks or something.
Today I discover that not only does it have a complete set of screens, including those apropos for small seeds like clovers and such (and camelina), but the company is still in business and I got a most helpful guy on the phone who told me what speed to run it, and so once I scrounge up an electric motor and build mounts, and figure out how to suspend a 2000# nylon tote bag above it and drizzle in just the right stream of camelina, and rig up augers and such to deal with the output, we should be able to go ahead and harvest the stuff, clean and bulk bag it and be sitting on literal bags of gold. The idea tires me, though, and I haven’t even implemented it yet, but am thankful for the opportunity anyway. This little cleaner is not high capacity (perhaps fifteen bushel/hour) but then neither is the Rockpile Ranch, and so we shall persevere. And if problems result, I can still get bearings for the thing!