Rambling on and on and on about farming, food and astronomy. Astronomy? Yep. Farming and astronomy go together like garlic and basil, tomatoes and peppers, ice cream and bacon.

9th January 2012

Photo with 1 note

Steve and a couple of his friends were busy over the weekend cleaning out the old barn. Barn hasn’t been used, cleaned or maintained for over 20 years. They removed about 10 inches of old hay, straw, two mummified racoons (whom they named Lumpy and Stinky) and I don’t know what all else. I have to admit that I am becoming more optimistic about the old barn and the possibility of saving it. Steve also found someone who might take the tons and tons of chopped hay and straw still up in the mow. It wasn’t sold at the auction because frankly nobody wanted it. Moving chopped hay and straw is a back breaking operation. In order to get it out of the barn, every bit of it would have to be forked out of the barn by hand and then dumped into an elevator or blower to get it into a wagon. The hay wasn’t considered very good even back then because we raised mixed grasses, not pure alfalfa, which is what dairy farmers want. And since hay degrades over time, there can’t be much feed value at all left in the stuff. About all it is good for is bedding or perhaps mulch or incorporating it into the soil as a soil amendment. One of the experiments I was going to try this spring was getting a few hundred pounds of it out and try composting it. The weather here in Wisconsin has been troubling for farmers. It isn’t that the weather is too bad, just the opposite: too good! No snow at all, not any real moisture at all, and abnormally warm temperatures. The ground is still not frozen in most places, as Steve found out when he buried the tractor up to the frame last week! Temperatures extraordinarly warm, with daytime highs reaching almost 50 degrees a few days. Driving out to the farm I saw a lot of fields with hints of bright green new growth peeping through the stubble left from the last hay harvest, and bright green weeds growing up in the plowed fields. Back in a sheltered corner where we have our herb garden new growth chives and basil are starting to peek up through the leaves covering the beds. Right now, at 9 AM on January 9, the temperature is 40 degrees. Owners of ski resorts are crying, while some golf courses in Southern Wisconsin have re-opened. Wisconsin’s weather has always been a bit unreliable (I vividly recall the mess we had when we had 10 inches of snow on May 10 back in the 1980s) but this is just plain odd.  

Steve and a couple of his friends were busy over the weekend cleaning out the old barn. Barn hasn’t been used, cleaned or maintained for over 20 years. They removed about 10 inches of old hay, straw, two mummified racoons (whom they named Lumpy and Stinky) and I don’t know what all else.

I have to admit that I am becoming more optimistic about the old barn and the possibility of saving it.

Steve also found someone who might take the tons and tons of chopped hay and straw still up in the mow. It wasn’t sold at the auction because frankly nobody wanted it. Moving chopped hay and straw is a back breaking operation. In order to get it out of the barn, every bit of it would have to be forked out of the barn by hand and then dumped into an elevator or blower to get it into a wagon. The hay wasn’t considered very good even back then because we raised mixed grasses, not pure alfalfa, which is what dairy farmers want. And since hay degrades over time, there can’t be much feed value at all left in the stuff. About all it is good for is bedding or perhaps mulch or incorporating it into the soil as a soil amendment. One of the experiments I was going to try this spring was getting a few hundred pounds of it out and try composting it.

The weather here in Wisconsin has been troubling for farmers. It isn’t that the weather is too bad, just the opposite: too good! No snow at all, not any real moisture at all, and abnormally warm temperatures. The ground is still not frozen in most places, as Steve found out when he buried the tractor up to the frame last week! Temperatures extraordinarly warm, with daytime highs reaching almost 50 degrees a few days. Driving out to the farm I saw a lot of fields with hints of bright green new growth peeping through the stubble left from the last hay harvest, and bright green weeds growing up in the plowed fields. Back in a sheltered corner where we have our herb garden new growth chives and basil are starting to peek up through the leaves covering the beds. Right now, at 9 AM on January 9, the temperature is 40 degrees. Owners of ski resorts are crying, while some golf courses in Southern Wisconsin have re-opened.

Wisconsin’s weather has always been a bit unreliable (I vividly recall the mess we had when we had 10 inches of snow on May 10 back in the 1980s) but this is just plain odd.  

Tagged: old barnfarmingagriculturecleaning

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  1. krippner posted this