~ Thompson Small Farm ~

Newsletter #9 – July 2009

Hello All!

I (Jon) think we had a baby yak born this month.  Andrea would know.  But I can’t remember.  Not whether it was born or not, but whether or not it was this month.  If so, this was then the month of our open-house!  Thanks to all who attended, we had a lovely time having you here, and we will do it again before the end of the season.  We all watched the baby yak (Morgan) being born.  We’ll send some pictures along with additional ones from the farm.  This is the first calf born to Brie, her mother.  It has her curly hair, and she is a good, calm mom.  It plays a lot with Wild Bill and Francois, the other calves.

This month, as you know, our delivery truck broke down.  This raised a lot of conflicting emotions, as the vehicles here always do.  (We are of the belief that if we as a society going down a tube into a pit of unsustainability, we are doing it in our cars. And they are most certainly driving us, not vice-versa.)  So many ironies, here.  First, there is the fact that alternative farmers cannot farm close to the centres they serve because cannot afford one that close.  Then, there is the fact that when you farm, you have to have a vehicle – the days when there was a town on the railway lines every nine miles so you could get there sustainably by horse and wagon are long over.  And then, you need a BIG vehicle, because you will be hauling heavy stuff.  Our farm truck is a diesel Ford, 1994 (again, doing this, you don’t buy a new $50 k rig), with a massive 7.3 litre engine – a vehicle that can go a million miles – with repairs of course.  A trailer full of heavy horses alone demands this.  So the cart is now pulling the horse – a once efficient system turned on its head.  Well, at least the thing is good on fuel, on the highway anyway, but this is a relative statement.  Fact is, using the term “efficiency” in reference to any motor vehicle – be it our truck, or a Smart Car or Prius – will always be more than less oxymoronic by definition, unless perhaps it is in speaking of the freight train.

The repair bill for our truck could be in the neighborhood of $4,000.00, which sounds like a lot (it is), but is pretty standard maintenance on such a conveyance.  (I could buy a very good team of horses for the cost of this one repair, by the way, that would serve me for 20 years.)  This bill will need to be paid for out of a business venture, which, this year, will gross less than $20,000. When you look at these sorts of numbers, you can understand the conundrum we are in not just here on our little patch, but as a society.  We must find sustainable systems.  By definition, this is not optional.  This means, usually, de-industrialization.  But to attempt to be de-industrial when surrounded by an overwhelmingly industrial world (and the word overwhelming is nowhere more apt), not only makes one intensely vulnerable, it may well prove impossible.  Once you drive a motor vehicle, that single act alone invests you heavily in the industrial economy.  And the industrial economy, it seems, demands an industrial wage.

So once again, we are trying to imagine a way to cut the motor vehicles completely out of the farm system.  We are not yet sure this can be done at this point.  We are open to your suggestions. What we are contemplating, however, is making more of our errand trips to the local towns with the horses and wagon.  This will not alter an extremely precarious small farm economy as long as we are doing distant deliveries, but it will help bring back to our towns an imagery that we believe needs to be back in peoples’ faces.  We will be stuck in a purgatory of mere gestures towards sustainability until we hit some critical mass.  One of more trains, more horses, more CSA and other alternative farms, far less personal motor vehicle use.  Each of us must contemplate if we can be leader here.  And try not to do it quietly!

Otherwise, it has mostly been a very good month here.  The gardens are really coming along, although the variety is not what we had envisioned for this year.  Lost to vagaries of Alberta climate this year are: corn, beans, cucumbers, radishes (so far), red-fife wheat, about half the potatoes, broccoli, brussel sprouts and cabbage we planted (other half doing okay), etc.   Doing well are the oriental and other greens, turnips, kohlrabi… that sort of fundamental marginal-climate stuff.  Reminds me of my great-grandparents, who homesteaded outside Lethbridge beginning around 1905.  Lost all their cattle, frozen solid, in 1906-’07 in the big historic blow that killed the last of the cattle barons.  But they had a garden.  All that grew that year was turnips.  But at least they had turnips.  That’s not to say that there aren’t those managing to grow a much broader range of produce in Alberta, today.  But look under the skin and you will find some way in which they are forcing the natural conditions to a degree that cannot be considered in keeping with sustainable goals.  Usually, they are pouring the water on every day in volumes that pool on the ground, or they keep heated greenhouses.   Neither of these practices are good for us, in the long run.  The way to do it right in our minds in this place is to use the rain and runoff water, get it to the fields economically and sparingly, (hope that the Great Mystery will help you with this!) mulch like crazy to hold it in, and be philosophical about just what it is you’ll be eating if you’re an Albertan. This is something we need to incorporate in our psyches as growers as much as anyone else.  

We continue to be blessed by a great crew of helpers.  Amongst them, a young Israeli woman who taught us much about native edibles, as well as young French woman who was not impressed when the mice took over her car.  I loaned her a live-trap.  The mice went in and died, lying there spread out on their bellies as though they expired while launching off little diving boards.  “Don’t feed these mice to any of the animals,” the woman told me.  “They got into my medication.  I think that’s why they died.” 

Some people advise you should avoid doctors at all costs.

We began cutting some hay from the road verges this month, as it looks far better than much of the field hay this year.  Normally, only a few of us small fry do this, as the big boys mostly have hayland on a scale larger than most eastern farms.  But lo-and-behold, this year most of the good verge-hay around our place got cut just before we were able to claim it.  Our new neighbor – (Mighty Joe Young we’ll call him) – whose self-built mountain range masquerading as a house now dominates our eastern horizon so he can overlook his newly purchased 20 square milesclaimed the grass.  He made a few bales of it, and is now letting 90% of it sit and spoil.  I gave him a call.  The wife, who is friendly enough, asked me what they should do with it.  Use it, I more or less told her.  “I’ll need to tell my husband,” she answered, “We know nothing!”  Another irony of our times, I thought.  The largest new farmers – some of who promise to be the largest farmers yet, in a world already dominated by giants – have utterly no idea how to farm – even less than the drive-and-spray sons and daughters who’ve inherited most of the land out here. (Hell, even less than us – HA! )  Well, of course they don’t – you don’t buy 20 square miles with farm money.  Anyway, if they don’t rake that hay soon, we will.  There’s no way we will let it rot when we could use it so badly.  Or to do so on principle.  The question remains why someone who lays claim to such an instant empire needs to cut verge hay.    But here is something again that is ominous for us on our little patch.  This man intends to purchase every farm he can.  Word on the street is that 20 square miles is not nearly enough for him.  If he gets a hold of the adjoining land we are renting, and he intends to, the odds of him honoring old agreements are nearly nil.  “Might as well sell it to me now,” he apparently told the owner.  “I’ll get it anyway.”  We would loose most of our grazing land if she craters, and men like this are emphatically not about sharing.  Theirs is the Walmart approach to survival – life is a competition, not a collaboration, best won by owning everything. We tell ourselves there is lots of verge-hay, but now Mighty Joe wants that, too.  So here’s another hurdle.  What effect will such newbie empire builders have on sustainability efforts?  Now that the global economy is collapsing, their advisors are all telling them, “Buy farms!”  And they are.  Oh well, cross that bridge we tell ourselves. 

Our old #9 MacCormack-Deering haymower, circa 1948 and rebuilt last year with help from, among others, CSA member Mat Schaeffer, is doing a skookum job when hitched to the girls, Raven and Gwyneth, or alternatively, Raven and Emma.  This model was the pinnacle of horse-powered technology, an elegant machine that was the last of its line before being replaced by unsophisticated tractor implements that substituted brute force for excellence of design.  Up and down the road we go, laying down the green grass, the “high-gear” scissor-action blade whirring gently, the gearing positioned mostly behind the axle (unlike other models) so that in tandem with my bodyweight in the seat, much weight is counterbalanced off the neck of the horse.  The horse machine spreads the grass thinner over a larger swath than the tractor machines, and it dries in one hot day because of this, ready to rake.  The verge hay cures a nice bluish colour – blue hay. Two calories back for every one expended, we’re told, in contrast to one back for at least ten expended when a tractor is your power source.  (Who said the latter was efficient?!)  We’ve got a nice pile of loose hay started, and we’re hoping to claim more.  Last winter our herd lived on it, and came through well.  Ted Andrew of Dunphy sold me 12’ wide dump rake that we hitch behind the cart.  Sebastian the wwoofer from New Brunswick who falls asleep so suddenly in the truck that he drops anything he may be holding (don’t ask him to drive!), rides on the cart beside me and gives a mighty heave of his strong arms when the rake fills as the horses continue plunging forward, dumping windrow after windrow for later forking.  The Clydesdale horse has a longer, more fluid stride than any of the other heavy breeds, and the resulting smart clip can get things done in short order.  We are honored to be working in partnership with them. 

And we’re reveling in the comraderie that working on a human scale with others brings to life.  Many hands not only make light work, they bring on a whole new dimension of meaning. Community is life. 

Thank-you again for your support!

-          Andrea and Jon and our many wonderful helpers.

Hello all!

Apparently this June broke records in Alberta for frosts.  We had more killing frosts this June in southern Alberta than before in recorded history.  This according to my farming associate, if you can believe him, who many claim you can’t, but in this case we do.  At any rate, we’ve lately felt this venture to be an act of desperation more often than not.  We’ve really turned ourselves inside-out trying to get things to grow at a rate faster than Alberta cares to grow them herself, and at the end of the month all we can report after going to extreme lengths involving a lot of extra infrastructure, water, soil-stirring and relentless labor from many hands is that things are progressing.  And that we are not yet sure when deliveries will start, which seems absolutely ridiculous – it is nearly July after-all.  We can honestly say we are doing all we can.  We expect a bounty, if a rather late one.  This said, we are doing better than some producers I have heard of just today, who are going to plow everything back under in a week if things don’t improve.

We have had a great month for Wwoofers – “willing workers on organic farms.”  This is a room and board and experience for farm labor program.  Without this program, we’d be dead in the water.  We’ve had some outstanding people here this spring.  Rob, for instance, was a young man from Korea with a Philippine girlfriend.  He was hard to get out of the field, putting in much longer days than expected.  “There are a lot of beautiful women in the Philippines,” he said one day over a broccoli bed.  “My girlfriend isn’t one of them,” he noted, adding, “I never think of her.”  It shortly emerged that he had fallen in love with the young German woman with whom he was traveling, who had already left for home.  “I think I love her,” he told me, “which is strange, as I’ve always found white women highly arrogant.”  “Are you going to Germany then?” I asked.  He pondered this briefly.  “No,” he said. 

Now we have as farm-mates Boris and Manu, followed by Valantin and Berengere.  They are all from the Leone region.  It’s a full and lively house.  “Where is the cheese?” they proclaim indignantly.  “We are French!”  They can eat all the cheese they want – it is difficult to get them stop working.  Of the flat of started broccoli, Boris asks - “Where should I plant these bastard?”

We have had another young yak born, this one to Rachel – her second.  He is a boy.  Boris and Manu, whom we call “Francois” and “Francois”, have christened the new baby “Francois.”  Rachel is doing well, and young Francois hangs around with Wild Bill, who is living up to his name by repeatedly trying to mount the poor thing.  “Wild Bill has a problem,” Manu said.  “He is trying to marry Francois.”  Rachel doesn’t seem to care.  She is a good yak, mind-you, well put together in classic yak fashion if a bit of a runt.  She trusts us enough to be near her babies right after birth.  That is really something with a yak.  

The animals otherwise are all doing well, with horses and buffalo really looking shiny and fit after a month on pasture.   Sarah lay down one day next to a board-fence and couldn’t get up again as it was in the way of her feet, so Andrea dismantled the fence, let her up, thwarted a stampede by the rest of the animals for the new opening, then re-built the fence. The yaks are looking dreadful as they do in June with their winter coats hanging in wooly threadbare garlands about them.  The tyranny of the gardens in a year like this one has kept us from collecting as much fibre as we’d like to, although Andrea had found a little time to round up the herd and add some to the sack.  We expect Juniper and Brie to give birth soon, by their looks and behavior.

Wild critters on the farm these days include myriad ground-squirrels, nests of both Eastern and Western kingbirds, a clutch of Pintail ducklings on the new pond, a deer-mouse that dug out one-by-one most of the newly planted squash seeds from the “three sisters” garden, badgers after the “gophers” and a chicken-stealing coyote I think we have managed to scare off for the time being.  He doesn’t give them back.

We are thinking of having a farm open-house on the weekend of the 11^th.  A pot-luck, perhaps, combined with a work-bee, which will inevitably involve (among other things), weeding and watering. We’d really like everyone to see what’s going on here first-hand!  More on this to follow before the date.  Drop us a line in the meantime if you think you might like to come.

Thank you again, for your support and your patience!

-          Andrea and Jon

“There are no national, state or county problems and no national, state, or county solutions…

the large scale solution to the large scale problem which is so dear to

governments, universities and corporations, serves mostly to distract people from the small, private problems, that they may in fact have the power to solve.”   

 - Wendell Berry

Hello all! 

 First off, please allow us to apologize for how long it’s taken to get the first newsletter together – we have a new system being implemented that we are hoping will make us more cold, heat and drought resistant.  It has been very labor-intensive getting things set-up, and not much time for being on computer!

The year of course is late, by perhaps three weeks or so.  We are anticipating starting deliveries in July, and fulfilling the full 16 weeks by extending things into the fall.  Our new system of extensive covered-beds, to be augmented by more hoop-houses, should allow for production later than would normally be possible in this climate. We have started plenty of produce in the field at this stage, including beets, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, salad greens, onions, corn, potatoes, peas and cauliflower.  Pretty soon here the heat loving stuff started indoors will be going out – beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, etc.

The big challenge right now is water – there has been no significant rainfall yet this spring at the farm.  Thankfully we had plenty of snowmelt, and lots of water in the ground so far.  The animals have just gone out on grass, but the grazing is patchy – good grass is limited to those areas where snow drifted and melted, and on the native grass uplands the land is cracked open and the grass is scorched and crunchy.  We will likely be bringing in more hay, something we have never had to do before winter in previous years.  Things may turn around, however. We have seen many springs start very dry here on the plains with rains coming in June nonetheless.  In the meantime, we have purchased a gas-powered pump to augment our hand-pumps, and it is seeing daily duty getting water to the new transplants.  We are not of course “hydrocarbon-free” on the farm as some have dubbed us in good faith – no one is in our culture.  We are working towards sustainable alternatives with animal and human power wherever possible, however.  We have no tractor, choosing the horse instead.  We think ultimately the Amish may have the best attitude towards technology – accept that which enhances daily life short of running the risk of building dependency and/or causing fundamentally damaging cultural change.  We can do this on our little place.  Off-farm, however, we have less leeway than they do!  

We have a new pond dug, so now we have two.  The runoff here was tremendous this year – a river!  It partially destroyed the spillway on the new pond, but a “lip” remained and held back an appreciable amount of water, and there are springs in the bottom.  Ducks and geese are fond of it already, and muskrats have taken up residence.  We have stocked it with local lake chub, blunt-nosed minnow, white sucker and brook stickleback for mosquito control, and broadcast cattail seeds in the hopes of establishing this very useful plant – a veritable grocery store in and of itself and a purifier of water.  The spillway will be repaired this summer, ready for next year.  Our existing pond is well patronized by a number of duck species, swallows, eastern and western kingbirds, muskrats, tiger salamanders, chorus and wood frogs, and many other species.  Where there is water, there is life!

The horses are well, and Gwyn and Emma (Clydesdales) hitched three-abreast with Raven (Clydesdale/Percheron) did a lot of work on plow, disc harrow and spring-tooth harrow this spring, muscling up noticeably!  Sarah (Emma’s filly) watched from the sidelines – she will be ready for some work next season at three.

We have had one new yak born so far this year, a bull-calf.  He is now being bottle-fed, as his mother, Lillith, died due to complications despite treatments – something rare for yaks, which are usually fool-proof calvers.  We think she may have had genetic issues – last year she miscarried.  We will miss her.  At any rate, her calf – “Wild Bill” – is doing very well, a cute little devil full of life, and we may make him into a steer and use him for packing and winter work. 

We are looking forward to a good season, and hope to get you all involved here to the degree of your interest.  We see this enterprise as a community venture, and hope to find more ways to celebrate this fact this season.  We are open to suggestions and ideas, and look forward to meeting you all.   

Thank you!

-          Andrea and Jon

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living

on a small piece of land…”   

 - Abraham Lincoln

~ Thompson Small Farm ~ 

Newsletter #6 – September 2008

Hello all! 

We simply can’t believe how quickly the summer has gone.  Thank-you everyone so much again for your support.  We very much enjoyed being involved with you in this venture, and getting to know a little so many wonderful folks.  The summer was a great learning experience for us, not just in terms of CSA farming but in terms of giving us real perspective on how the CSA model fits, or might fit, into our culture and into Calgary specifically.

Here’s a summary of our thoughts based on the CSA experience in retrospect, a sort of “year end report” and then some.

Our Goal – Did We Achieve It?

Our primary goal this summer was to provide our members with a market share of fresh produce grown locally in a manner representing an alternative to industrial agriculture.  We had no illusions of sustaining ourselves solely on the proceeds, but we did hope to gain insight into whether this would be feasible in the future.

Certainly, we provided fresh produce to our customers, grown in a fashion that even the vast majority of organic farms don’t attempt[1], and that is largely without industrial machinery as a power source.  We believe we came up short, largely due to conditions this summer, in providing members with the volumes they’d have been getting from the market for the same money.  Does that mean our produce was therefore over-priced? 

The Real Value of Food

In the CSA model, the customer of course shares risk with the farmer.  One of the things this means is that in a year like this one, it is not really pertinent to say one was overcharged.  If you get less food in a given year, it simply means the price of local food from your supplier was higher that year.  You got less for more.  This may seem like a handy excuse for the farmer, but many times we reflected that we would rather, in a “bad” growing year, have brought what we did manage to a farmer’s market and simply get recompense for what we brought.  Fair market value for what we provided and no more.

Or is it?

CSA Farming and Calgary

We believe in the CSA model and believe it offers value for money for Calgarians, and is important culturally.  The value in our minds lies goes beyond the alternative produce provided.  We believe that CSA’s serving Calgary – especially ones using alternative power sources to hydrocarbons and electricity – would still be of great value to that community in keeping alive and running – not to mention relearning – the models we will need in the future when the realization is forced upon us by dwindling resources that we don’t really have the luxury of unsustainable living for more than the few generations it takes us to exhaust our natural endowments – this luxury is an illusion, or perhaps better a de-lusion.  Recognition of this need is why we would be CSA members were we not CSA farmers. 

Farming Must Sustain the Farmer As Well to be Truly “Sustainable”

For sustainable farming to work then it must also sustain the farm, it must pay the family unit to be there full-time, farming, no outside job. This may seem intuitive, and certainly was how things more often worked before consumerism, fueled by industrial money, kicked into high gear following WWII.  In fact, farming more often than not does not sustain the farm family today.  The fact that farming no longer sustains farmers (and fewer all the time, even, of the new breed of “agribusiness” industrialists) is a global crisis.  Ideally, deeded landowners immediately surrounding a city are the ones to be running CSA’s.  The problem is that these areas are viewed as future housing developments or acreage potential for industrial elites, not as land that could potentially sustain us, and it’s way too expensive for farmers to make “a go of it”. Nowhere is this more true right now than around Calgary.  This is why our little place was located a full hour from town[2].  “Nevermind, the interest is not there amongst these landowners anyway”, you could argue, but even if it was, it is doubtful they could support a place of such land-values running a sustainable, biodynamic CSA.  We certainly couldn’t, and believe me we’d have loved to have been close enough to have delivered to drop-off points under Clydesdale-power!

What Should be the Real Cost of Locally Grown Food in Calgary?

What then would a biodynamic CSA, horse or ox powered and with a mix of animals and crops, on the outskirts of Calgary need to charge to sustain itself?  Members would likely need to paythousands of dollars for their seasonal membership, in order to support the farm that feeds them.  This sounds outrageous, but it would actually then represent the true, unadulterated fair market-value of local food in Calgary.  But is this so outrageous taken in objective context?  Many Calgarians have few qualms, for instance, about paying a half million dollars and even far, far more than this for that other basic requirement - shelter.  Food, of course, should not and cannot cost that much.  But neither then should any basic need perhaps, and if we are willing to afford so much for one, perhaps we should be paying a commensurate amount for the other.  Perhaps the price of a CSA membership should be on a scale with the cost of living in general in the location in which it is based. We doubt that anyone in Calgary would be willing to pay so much for their food, today.  

So here we may gain some insight into how unrealistic our food (and housing) prices are now, how unrealistic our current living model is for the future of human beings, and why farms have mostly all failed or are failing.  It is also why running a CSA serving Calgary devoid of the large-scale industrial inputs and cheap (exploited) farm labor – the very things CSA customers are trying to avoid supporting – will, until things change entirely, be on a significant level an act of self-sacrifice for the farmer.

An Unfortunate Situation

This situation is unfortunate – there is nothing Alberta needs more than alternative models.  At the time we were doing our CSA this summer, there was one other such initiative in the entire province that we knew of.  

 
If unsustainable living is a delusion, so then, really, is the city of Calgary[3], and others like it or that aspire to being like it.  And of course, the influence of Calgary is not limited to the city “limits”.  The same issues we became so clearly aware of this summer are now rearing their heads throughout the entire landbase of Canada where conditions are best for farming – and well beyond.  ”Calgary” now includes to a significant degree almost all of southern B.C., and increasingly Saskatchewan.  We have a very serious crisis here (or more aptly a symptom of an even larger one) that few seem to acknowledge as such.  As a result of this situation, and for as long as we can continue to string this current goal of bigger-is-better and more-is-more out, one of the tasks of sustainable farming will be to learn how to grow food on the marginal areas that farmers (as opposed to industrial agri-producers) can actually afford to purchase, live on, and farm. 

Epilogue

Our twenty acres is an oasis of native grass, bottom swale and the virgin garden plots where we grew your food in a vast landscape of inert planting medium that was once rich prairie soil.  Right now it is harvest time for the agri-industrialists.  Living right next to our normally very quiet road, this is an awful time of the year for us.  Battalions of combines whine all day and well into the night as we try to sleep.  Convoys of eighteen-wheelers pass our place at intervals of about every half-hour, sometimes until almost midnight.  Everything is dust – our house, our pasture, our animals, our sky even.  The atmosphere looks as though we are experiencing a south-eastern level of humidity, but it is not moisture, it is dust, as far as the eye can see, and that’s a long, long way out here.  Dust kicked up day and night by this army of machines waging war on the land, huge piglets on the petroleum sow roaring “let’s see how much diesel we can burn this year!!!”

There is nothing about this situation that resembles “farming” as we understand it.  This is because it is not.  It is agribusiness.  Whenever the agribusiness has business in our neighborhood, quality of life plummets.  The onslaught is relentless while it lasts, the pace frantic, panicked even, the environment dangerous.  I daren’t let the dogs out, and I worry our horses will get the heaves from breathing so much of the pulverized earth into their lungs.  I occasionally prevail upon the owner of this particular empire – “Would you please water the road down?”…  “Would you mind not running your convoys for all of our long weekend?”…  “Would you please not spread your strychnine along my fenceline where my animals are liable to get at it and die a hideous death”… “Tell your men to slow down before I hurt them!” …  After speaking to me briefly in the tone of a used car salesman trying to give me the business, this ‘farmer’, one of the largest operators in an area of large operators, always has the same answer – “We’ll see what we can do, Jon.”  And we see that what he can do never amounts to much, although his drivers have become more respectful, insofar as respect can have anything to do with the operation of eighteen-wheeler convoys on a quiet rural road.  What he has proven he can do repeatedly, if not intentionally, is step all over our toes in a fashion I would never dream of doing to him nor anyone else.  But this is the problem not just with today’s agribusiness, it is the problem inherent in being “BIG”.  Show me a “big man”, show me a big concern, show me a big business, show me a big city and I will show you people and environments being disrespected.  It cannot be helped.  It’s the law of critical mass beyond which everything goes downhill.

For all of this frenzy, I have heard that Mr. Big’s concern is not doing well these days.  The cows that stand around in their own ordure for weeks on end as they’re “finished” for slaughter are not paying the bills.  This was inevitable, of course.  Unsustainable is unsustainable, and as scores of American business concerns are finding out, being BIG – nay – being GI-BLOODY-GANTIC doesn’t change this natural law.  I wish my neighbors well, of course, and sincerely hope their operation goes straight down the toilet.  Good riddance, as this would be best for all humanity.  When all the massive agribusiness concerns of the world finally hit the wall of their own disgusting reality, perhaps then, and perhaps only then, we can move on to a better way.

Thanks again everyone, we very much appreciated your support and are buoyed by knowing there are concerned, kindred people out here with us in these interesting times.

“Farmers Jon and Andrea”