The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  Another possibility is to buy a young calf (or several), and raise it on artificial milk and pasture in lieu of mother's milk. Milk substitute is expensive and pasture calves do not grow as well on it in my experience. These calves, without mother's milk, will also need some grain to make good baby beef and the quality will not in any event be as high as that of calves raised with their mothers. But this is another way to grow your own beef and be sure it is not shot through with hormones and antibiotics.

  If you begin to think seriously about a baby beef business on your farm, understand that you can get a good price for your meat only if you develop your own market. The commercial market does not recognize baby beef as a meat equal in quality to either the Prime or Choice categories that the beef industry and the government, hand in glove, uphold. So according to USDA grading standards, baby beef will not meet Prime and Choice price levels even though to many of us, it has higher quality. Because the whole traditional beef business is built on corn-fed fat cattle, a widespread baby beef business would be considered a distinct threat to the status quo. Why? The agricultural mainstream across the cornbelt is based solidly on corn and soybean production, as feed for cattle and hogs. The bulk of the farm equipment business and agrichemical business rises and falls with corn and soybean production. Moreover, the cattle are fed to market weight mainly in huge feedlots or hog factories controlled by influential people. The feedlots are most often situated far from where the corn and the calves are produced so there is much transport business in moving these supplies around. This monolithic meat establishment aims to keep things the way they are. An upstart who champions an agriculture where corn and soybeans and farm equipment and farm chemicals and truck transportation and huge feedlots are far less necessary, would hardly be welcomed. It is a shame because the production of 1200-pound fat steers is ecologically wasteful and financially inefficient. A baby beef business based on grass and local markets could generate a better rural economy, but with the government blithely stamping "USDA Choice" on the inefficient mainstream market product, it will be almost impossible for baby beef to compete until a million contrary farmers rise up to meet the challenge.

  A cow in milk ought to get at least six to twelve pounds of grain a day in winter, but if she is eating plenty of very high quality hay or pasture, no grain is actually necessary. The husbandman uses his common sense and balances the ration between forage and grain depending on quality and availability. My own rule of thumb is to feed all the good hay a cow will eat. If the hay is not the best, then I add grain to the ration at the rate of six to twelve pounds per day, depending on the size of the animal and how much milk she is giving. Figure roughly that a mature cow, depending on size, will eat two to three tons of hay over winter in the north, less if stockpiled winter pasture or silage is available.

  I do not wish to leave the impression that a small commercial dairy is not a good idea for a cottage farm. It is. One of my neighbors milks a dozen cows on only two acres of land and a little rented pasture in summer. He buys all his feed and the time saved allows him to pursue another career. This is the least-cost way into dairying since it does not require vast outlays of money for land and field equipment.

  A new idea in dairying would also suit the cottage farm. Some dairymen using intensive rotational grazing (see chapter 6) are giving their cows prostaglandin injections that bring the whole herd into heat at more or less the same time, so the cows can be bred to have their calves at the same time-in spring, on pasture. The cows are fed mainly or sometimes entirely on pasture, and dried up in the late winter. This gives the dairy family a two-month breather from daily milking, at least theoretically. (There is always a cow or two who won't cooperate.) I refer you to the magazine The Stockman Grass Farmer (5135 Galapie Drive, Suite 300-C, Jackson, Mississippi 39206) as the best source of information.

  The Homestead Hog

  Commercial hogs are rapidly becoming the counterparts of the factory chicken: they are raised in huge confinement houses on contract with large agribusiness companies. Eventually, like the poultry growers, the hog producers will realize they are only factory workers, although not getting paid as well as other factory workers. Poultry growers are now organizing for a better deal from the companies to which they have become practically indentured and so eventually will the factory hog producers. The big companies are reacting very sharply to this new move because they know that when the grower starts receiving an income equal to what other industrial workers make, the price of factory meat would have to rise. That would allow small, independent farmers to compete with agrifactories even better than they can now. Last year an executive of giant Tyson Foods called the National Farmers Union, which has been in existence for years, a "bunch of socialists" for helping poultry farmers organize to seek a better price. Later he was forced to make a public apology.

  The two pigs I am fattening now I bought as feeder pigs for $32 each. At butchering time, I will have in them about twenty-five bushels of corn and six bushels of oats, which cost me nearly nothing except my labor (see chapter 10). At two hundred pounds they will be worth at current market prices about $80 each. Even if I count all costs, I have a profit, not counting my labor, of about $40 a head. No Tyson Foods giant can equal that. Furthermore, we will butcher the pigs ourselves and get about two hundred pounds of meat-at a price of (conservatively) $1.25 a pound if purchased at the grocery-so our real profit, not counting our labor which is part of our way of life, is more like $100 per pig.

  A cottager can raise hogs the traditional way, that is by keeping a few sows and a boar and raising two litters per sow per year. But I wonder if it is a good idea. A confinement operation costs too much and runs into odor and pollution problems. A pasture operation is much better, but it requires nose-ringing the hogs to keep them from rooting plus a well-maintained fence. I don't like the cruelty of ringing hogs, but unringed hogs can really tear up the terrain of meadow or woods. They manage to do quite a bit of rooting even when ringed.

  A way to forgo ringing pigs and still keep them outdoors is to raise them in a field that you intend to plow up anyway. After the pigs get through with it, you may not have to plow at all. Just disk and level it. This is a particularly effective way to control weeds like bindweed and Johnsongrass. The pigs root up and eat most of the rhizomes.

  We prefer to raise a few hogs in comfortable but cheap huts. If in the fall I have surplus corn that I know the other animals won't need, I buy enough weaned pigs weighing about forty pounds (feeder pigs), already castrated and given shots for various diseases, to eat up that surplus. The pen I built for the pigs is raised off the ground about two feet and the front two-thirds has a slatted floor so that much of the manure will drop through. The other third is roofed and kept bedded with straw. My pen will conveniently hold only three 200-pound hogs, but of course, if I want to raise more hogs, I can build a larger pen and even run two batches a year through it instead of one. I feed and water the pigs by hand, and clean out the front part of the pen every three or four days. Hogs help in this regard because they are naturally housebroken. They will not manure in their sleeping quarters, but will use the far end of the slatted floor, making cleaning simple.

  A few pigs are easy enough to take care of this way. If I want to haul them to market, I can load them directly onto the pickup truck from their raised pens. That is the main reason the pens are raised so hightrying to run hogs or any farm animal up a slanted ramp into a truck is mayhem.

  Keeping a boar for only a couple sows is hardly worthwhile. A way to avoid that, if you have a pickup truck and racks for it, is to buy a bred sow and keep her in a pen like the one I use for my hogs. The sow will have her pigs, usually eight to twelve, in the pen. Depending on the size of the pen, you can sell as many of the litter as necessary as feeder pigs when they reach thirty to forty pounds at weaning age, and sell the sow too at this time. Then feed out the remaining pigs to a market weight of 220 pounds and sell them. The bred sow will cost about $120. If fi
ve pigs are sold as feeders at $35 each, plus $75 for the sow, that's $250. The other five, fed out and sold as fat hogs, should bring a total of more than $400 at today's price, which is a little below average. That in round numbers amounts to something over $600 for a six months period. Buy ing two bred sows twice a year represents an income of $2400. But as usual, my advice is to try this on only a few sows. A larger number will mean spending more money on facilities and manure handling. Only as a very small, low-tech enterprise does this method return a large per-sow income.

  Although I've never tried this myself, modern technology in hog production makes possible another slick alternative that the cottager can use to avoid both keeping a boar and constantly buying sows. Artificial insemination is somewhat easier for sows than cows. A sow's breeding period extends over four days. Boar semen can't be frozen like bull semen, but thanks to the wonders of UPS, you can order it as needed and get it the next day or sometimes the same day, along with an injection tube and other necessary paraphernalia for breeding. You should breed the sow on the second day of her period, and again on the fourth day. Unlike a cow, a sow in heat will usually stand still, especially if you straddle her. The inseminating tube is gently corkscrewed into her until resistance is met. I'm told that no special training is required, unlike the case of inseminating cows, but of course you will have to watch someone do it a few times to learn how. A cottager with a small, low-cost corn production program could keep as many as four sows year round this way and produce sixty or more pigs for spare-time income. Because artificial insemination allows you to use the best boars available, you could sell at least some of your hogs as breeding stock for higher than average prices. A good half of the feed could come from friends who save their table scraps for you, as ours do for us, instead of dumping them in the garbage disposal. Don't get greedy, though, and try to keep very many sows using this labor-intensive, primitive-facility system because the work of handling the feed and especially the manure will become overwhelming.

  Draft Animals

  The more a farm can produce its own power by biological means, the more it can claim true sustainability. The farmers of my father's generation all began farming with horses only, and to a man, the ones I've asked say that when the horses started leaving the farm, so did the prof its. All those huge, magnificent brick homes that dot the landscape here, many of them now abandoned, were built with horse-farming money. "I'm spending up the money I saved farming with horses on tractors," neighbor Raymond once complained disgustedly at me from the seat of his tractor. And neighbor Junior Frey, who still keeps a team on his farm, told me a couple of years ago that. "if I just hadn't gotten started into tractors and expansion, I could have done just as well farming a small place with horses, but it is too late to back tip now." Grandpaw Logsdon in his wheelchair in 1959 pulled me aside from a family conversation in which I was snickered at for saying I wanted my own land even if I had to farm with horses. He spoke low to me, so as not to be overheard. "Gene, I swear to God that if I were a young man now, I could farm a hundred acres with horses and come out farther ahead than these guys who are going whole hog into big-time tractor and bank-note farming." He was right, because most of those who dreamed of big time tractor farming in partnership with the banks ended up not farming at all. Some of them quit before bankruptcy and some quit after bankruptcy, and some ended up killing themselves. The number of suicides in Iowa in 1987 was 398, the highest number since the Great Depression. The suicide rate among farmers in 1983 was 46 per 100,000, approximately double the national rate for adult men. But the number of suicides in the nmid-1980s was likely higher than what was officially recorded, as Osha Grey Davidson points out in his masterfully biting book, Broken Heartland. Many probable farmer suicides were recorded as hunting accidents and heart attacks because, you understand, good white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon farmers do not kill themselves.

  In the 1950s I was too young and stupid to see what was happening to us, and to see that we who remembered horse plowing were going to be the Last Farmers just as surely as Uncas became the Last of the Mohicans. It was only later that I started calling myself Uncas. But I did not follow my heart and get a hundred acres and a team of horses because I had neither the courage to run against the march of history nor the money to afford even that. But maybe you can. It is not a stupid idea, if you like horses. You would be in very good company. I could mention a score of Amish farmers who would make good role models for you; contrary to popular thought, they don't work any harder than tractor farm ers and enjoy lots of recreation and travel if that's what you want. Maury Telleen is not Amish but he operates an exemplary cottage farm in Iowa with horses (and a little tractor) and has time to publish the Draft Horse Journal. Elmo Reed, during the years when he was a professional musician and professor of music at the University of Tennessee, also farmed with horses and today manufactures new horse-drawn machinery, especially a forecart equipped with hydraulics so that horse farmers can now use any three-point hitch implements made for small tractors. Down the road a few miles from me, Jack Siemon raises and sells mammoth jacks and jennets for the draft mule trade and makes good money at it. People come from all over the world to buy his mammoth jacks. Wendell Berry, one of our leading poets and essayists, farms with horses in Kentucky. Until he grew too old, neighbor Dale Kin raised and sold donkeys. On the other side of the county, Glen Keiffer has trained and worked oxen for many years. I worked one day in the field with him as he used his team to pull a corn binder. I much preferred their slow and ponderous movement to fidgety horses. Llamas are raised more for pets in this country or for guarding sheep, but in South America they are draft and pack animals. I have already mentioned that one llama raiser in Montana recently told me he had sold a female for $23,000.

  And of course nearly every community supports or could support at least one farm that raises or boards saddle horses.

  New, Rare, and Minor Breeds of Livestock

  Interest continues to increase in offbeat breeds of farm animals, of which the pigmy pigs from the Orient are a good example. Some breeds of animals that have all but become extinct are now being patiently brought back into circulation. New crosses of minor and major breeds are becoming stylish as shifts in methods or markets take place. For example, Jersey cows are being sought again to give Holstein milk more protein. Dutch Belted and Milking Shorthorn are being cross-bred with commoner breeds of cows to produce an animal that can graze more efficiently-to take advantage of the widespread shift to intensive, rotational grazing. Beefalo supposedly combine the best of beef breeds and buffaloes. Other rare and even endangered breeds offer an opportunity for cottage farms. Joy Wind Farm Rare Breeds Conservancy (General Delivery, Marmora, Ontario, Canada KOK 2MO) is an excellent example of what can be done and a good place to write for information. The Institute for Agricultural Biodiversity (RR3, Box 309, Decorah, Iowa 52101) is another good source of information, as is American Minor Breeds Conservancy (Box 477, Pittsboro, North Carolina 27312).

  Producing for the Pet Market

  As urban populations move farther and farther away from indigenous nature, the demand for pets grows. Raising dogs, cats, and pet birds are enterprises well suited for cottage farms. The following is an example of what can be done, from a brief news item in a farm magazine of a few years ago:

  A cottage farm couple, near a fairly big city, were selling baby chicks from their own incubators for 60¢ each. Also bantams from $5 to $10 each. Also parrots, parakeets, cockatiels, canaries, French poodles, German shepherds, and ducks. An Amazon parrot might bring $300; parakeets, $6. If human-raised instead of letting mother do it, a cockatiel might sell for $100, otherwise $70. Poodles, if small enough, went for $100; German shepherds from $25 to $100.

  This farm also reared and sold a few beef steers a year, lots of baby pigs from their own sows, and live turkeys. Butchered turkeys brought more money, but that meant harder work. The couple neither advertised nor delivered. A sign in front of the place listed what was
for sale currently and people stopped in, made their purchases, and hauled them away.

  And now the punch line: All this on four acres.

  Fish and Bees and Earthworms

  Since even on a very small farm such as ours, there are more opportunities than any one family can pursue, I place great stock in fish and bees. Neither requires much attention. Both can provide food and fascination without the regular labor and continual feeding that domesticated animals require. They therefore make ideal "livestock" for cottage farmers short on space. If not densely crowded, fish in a pond (see also chapter 5) find enough food from their immediate habitat to forgo supplemental food. Society allows the cottager to harvest honey from all the land around, in return for the pollination the bees perform. I could add pigeons to this list of do-it-yourself homestead animals, since they too can scavenge most of their food on their own, as city rooftop pigeon raisers long ago realized.