On a business trip to Petaluma, California, last fall, I visited the new Baker Creek Heirloom Seed store aptly carrying the sign “SEED BANK.” Baker Creek Seeds, doing business out of Missouri, has added the west coast store and chose an abandoned bank building for its 2nd retail setting. Displaying over 2,500 varieties of seeds, and an assortment of handtools and books, the store is a visual and gardening treat.

But there is hope & I witnessed that as well. Young, radical farmers showed themselves beautifully—many of them draft horse farmers in the Northwest, bidding alongside everyone else. Asking for advice on plows, harnesses, potato diggers, & horses, we are inheriting not only the equipment from the elder generations, but also the knowledge. And so many people are willing to share that knowledge at the auction. The young farmer movement is bustling & full of energy, & every year it grows—but without the input & support of those hanging up the saddles for good, we face a tough road ahead.

Monks of St. Patrick’s in 5th century Ireland developed primitive systems for raising livestock, primarily sheep and cattle. Early Irish hermits also planted small garden plots to be self-sufficient. In Italy, followers of St. Benedict were the first to embrace agriculture as an organized way of life. By the 6th century, during the so-called “Dark Ages,” Benedictine monks were demonstrating the dignity of hard work in the field and in the barnyard. In addition to their traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, many Benedictines took an informal vow to treat farming as a vocation.

Rather than respond to a specific question in this issue I have chosen to share the following comprehensive information on trimming, shoeing and the care of equine feet by Gene Ovnicek. My reason for doing so is that hoof care is one of the most necessary, reoccurring, complex, and often confusing requirements of domestic horse ownership, and Gene, an internationally respected authority and researcher, as well as a highly skilled farrier, has developed the best information I know of on the subject. – Doc Hammill

One weekend I attended a Biodynamic meeting at Ruby and Amber’s Organic Farm in Dorena, Oregon, in the Row River Valley, just east of Cottage Grove. I always enjoy seeing other food growing operations, as this is such an infinitely broad subject, there is always much to learn from others’ experiences. At this farm, draft horses are used for much of the work.

If you were there you might have a good sense of the entire event… but then again you might not. I was there, from the beginning on throughout and I can’t tell you first hand what all occurred. A lot of people showed up, things were happening in every corner of the lovely old fairgrounds pretty much non-stop. We had more items consigned than we have ever had, we worked up to three auction rings selling at the same time, and I can tell you it felt like a good time was had by most.

The Winter 2009 CQ on portable hoophouse construction featured an article by Ted Blomgren and Tracy Frisch about caterpillar tunnels. At the end of the column, we promised to report on our own experience growing cucumbers in one of these inexpensive walk-in tunnels after we had completed the second year of the SARE-sponsored curcubit pest experiment coordinated by Penn State Cooperative Extension and The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.

Nutrient management can be tricky because of the unique environment within high tunnels. High tunnels exclude environmental factors (such as rain, snow and winds) that facilitate leaching and may lead to a build-up of salts that can negatively affect plant growth. In addition, most high tunnels are equipped with drip irrigation, which also limits leaching. Different crops respond differently to soluble salt levels as illustrated in the table below.

In the Summer 2008 SFJ we reported on our initial experiment using the fallow field cover crops to generate enough mulch materials for a 380’ row of un-irrigated winter squash. Encouraged by the excellent crop growth and yield despite the dry, hot conditions of 2007, we repeated the experiment the following years, trying to determine the optimum ratio of land in straw producing cover crops to cash crop area. In 2009, we finally got it right: we seeded a 36’ wide strip of rye and medium red clover in September of 2008, then, in April, 2009, we skim plowed a 12’ wide area in the middle of the overwintering cover crops for planting the winter squash.

“The longer you are in farming the more you begin to realize just how inter-related everything is to each other. The real challenge is trying to get things right, nudging little bits of nature here and there so that they work in harmony, like getting the animals and the grass to work together, with as little effort on their part as possible. Like growing turnips and letting the sheep harvest them for their own feed. It is the harmony of getting all these different aspects to work together.”

These days I call myself a farmer. However, I was not born into the farming life. In my late teens and early twenties, I began to have the creeping suspicion that my privileged upbringing in a first-world household, my secondary education and suburban lifestyle had left me completely bereft of any useful skills with regard to the fundamental situation of being a human animal on the planet. When I came of age I had this gnawing suspicion that in the first eighteen years of my existence on earth I had learned next to nothing of the kind of skills that would allow a person to survive in the natural world.

To be literate and educated is never enough. The watermelons I loved were suddenly new. I rushed toward the pallet at the front of the store where they were confined in bins, waiting to be handled, to be chosen. The seedy and the seedless. The mealy and the meaty. One of them – just one – would be perfect, and waiting for me.

It is only natural for the owner of a new combine to want to try his machine as early as possible. This results in most new combines being started in the field before the crop is ready for combining. As soon as a binder is seen in the neighbor’s field, the urge to start becomes uncontrollable. When grain is ready for binding, it is not ready for straight combining.

A Cow and Calf • Lady B and her Colt

The practical everyday working of horses and mules in harness has always been at the heart of what the Small Farmer’s Journal is about. And like the Journal, a good horse powered farm keeps the horses at the center: the working nucleus of the farm. All the tractive effort for the pulling of machines, hauling in of crops, hauling out of manures, harvesting and planting is done as much as is practicable with the horses.

There are hundreds of plants that can be toxic to livestock. Some grow in specific regions while others are more widespread. Some are always a serious danger and others only under certain conditions. Poisoning of livestock depends on several factors, including palatability of the plant, stage of development, conditions in which they grew, moisture content of the plant and the part eaten.

Every day in the winter, and a fair number of days in the summer, I choose to work with a team of Dexter oxen, just about the smallest breed of cattle in North America. Harv and Mr. Whistling Sweets are three years old, were named on a half-forgotten whim by my young children, and stand 38” tall at the shoulder. Sometimes, perched on top of a load of hay, moving feed for my herd of thirty cows, I look and feel comical — a drover of Dachshunds.

I thought you might be interested in the foto of a machine I made for rejuvenating pasture. Old meets new meets old again… the old is the seed box which is circa 1930s, the new is the slitter and the old is the lifting gear I replaced the hydraulic ram with… too much hassle to put hydraulics on my hitch cart, which is a blatant copy of yours I got in the Handbook by the way.

It was the beginning of winter and the nights were getting cold. Soon one of the calves sickened and died. He convinced Ann that in order to save the other scrawny calf, he would have to house it in their basement. He erected a make-shift pen, put down lots of straw and had plenty of feed near-by. The calf appeared to be in bovine heaven.

Hungary is traditionally an agricultural state. At the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century, Hungary was the pantry for most of Europe. The huge agricultural production was based on the unique farmers methods, which survived for hundreds of years. Hungarian meat export was mostly beef from the Hungarian Gray Cattle. Sheep and pork raising were also very significant.

It is always advisable to place coldframes and hotbeds in a protected place, and particularly to protect them from cold north winds. Buildings afford excellent protection, but the sun is sometimes too hot on the south side of large and light-colored buildings. One of the best means of protection is to plant a hedge of evergreens. It is always desirable, also, to place all the coldframes and hotbeds close together, for the purpose of economizing time and labor.

Once upon a time, the writer had much to do with varieties of grapes, the growing from cuttings, layers, etc., and came to the conclusion that a good, strong, healthy, well rooted plant, grown with space of one foot apart, was better and more likely to be successful than the plant grown from a single eye and only three inches apart in a frame. My estimate is now appreciated by one who watched my work, and who says now that every yearling grape grown from a cutting should have eighteen inches of space to make it really valuable.

Nature, and humanity’s better interactions with her; that combination does hold the best and I think only answers for a good and fertile society. As for the planet and its future health, it is pretty darned obvious she doesn’t need us anymore than she needed the dinosaurs. Wouldn’t it be magical and even divine if the societies of man could attain a plain of conduct and stewardship which would have us all be an invigorant and bejewelment for our Earth? A future essential?

I had a step Grandfather that we would go to visit, mostly because he was married to my Grandmother. He was a transplanted Tennessean who had worked for Kelsey Hayes in Detroit, but after he retired moved back to his home state of Tennessee, where he had a hillside farm, more like a mountainside farm. He had a small herd of beef cattle, and plenty of hogs that seemed to me were mismanaged, but he made a fairly good living off of it.