The Accidental FarmerLearning how to farm on the fly

As a small farmer, finding good hay is one of my biggest challenges.

All hay is not created equal. A “popcorn bale” for $4 is no bargain. If you can carry two bales at once, you probably bought popcorn bales. You have to knuckle under to toss a real bale of hay. If your fingers get caught, it should be heavy enough to drag you off your feet when you toss it, even if you are 200 pounds.

Some years, poor growing conditions south of the border send  folks up to buy hay for premium prices. They buy it all happily and local farmers end up buying hay from Alberta. This year, a neighbour sold 150 bales to someone who drove 100 km to buy it. I could have picked it up without insuring my truck and it would have been perfect for us. Hay, as it turns out, can be a cut-throat business.

You call this hay?

Mouldy bales, light bales, no bales or weed filled bales, it is a constant challenge.

Honest sellers seem to be a dying breed. My buddy Brian bought 12 tons and ended up using half of it for mulch and bedding because it was mouldy and his animals wouldn’t touch it. I’ve bought hay that was so riddled with weeds, it left me with nothing but work. I’ve bought popcorn bales thinking I was getting a bargain.

This year, we are buying hay from Grand Forks. When I called James, he told me that some of his bales had Hoary Alyssum, a noxious weed. The 800 pound bales were better, he assured me, but he wanted me to be aware of that. That is an honest hay seller. When he told me he could deliver 12 – 800 pound bales for $130, bare minimum, I offered him $150. Eight hundred pound bales are $50 each and I have a bobcat with forks to unload them. I’ll probably give him some lamb chops too. It is how we tip our favourite helpers on the farm. They can’t buy what we give away for free and James grew up in northern Idaho on a sheep farm. James and his wife Teresa run a bed and breakfast/retreat on their property near Grand Forks. Hay is a sideline.

Good luck tossing that bail without some hydraulics.

For $750, we will get nearly 10 tons of hay. The only other source we had found was $210 a ton, plus delivery and I would have unloaded it all by hand, not an option with 800 pound bales. That is a hell of a difference and owning a bobcat made it possible. Had I not owned the bobcat, there are no less than 10 within a 2 km radius and hiring one to unload would have paid well.

With the extra hay we will have, we can look for calves for next year and take them through the winter and summer on hay so most of our pasture is available for sheep. Last winter we were saved by a friend when we ran short and it is nice to be in the position to help other small farmers. Two tons would have been plenty for this winter and any extra can be used next year if necessary as long as we store it properly.

Producing hay has always been tight but is fast becoming a very challenging business locally. Long time hay farmers in the Creston area are getting out of the business because increases in property values and lease payments mean that growing hay does not pay the bills on land that is within the ALR. Most hay producers own some land and lease more to make their equipment and operation profitable. The land they grow on is some of the best, if not the best, local farm land yet it is too valuable to grow hay on.

The modern Elmer Fudd. "I thought I saw a developer."

Hay is a large component of food production but when you can take land out of the ALR for condominiums and subdivisions if you pay enough money, food production suffers a loss that will never be recovered.

In the end, this is just one more arrow in the heart of local food production. When purchasing hay becomes a battle, it is tough to encourage others to get into local food production and drives up the cost of the end product and reduces availability for all.

Pearl Crebbin’s old farm had a good sized orchard combined with other farm activities. I can only find apples but she may have had others. Many of our neighbours have trees that were part of her orchard, most sadly neglected.

Time for some tough lovin'

We have 20 old trees. They have a lot of funky character and can produce a lot of apples with the right conditions. The previous owner had pruned 4 trees from their wild state and they looked okay but the rest had long been abandoned.

I love trees and always have; looking at trees, climbing trees, falling trees, planting trees and my favourite, skiing trees. Pruning trees beyond removing the lower branches of plantations, spacing them or cutting firewood was beyond me.

I discovered that what the last 16 trees needed was some tough lovin’ otherwise known as a chainsaw. They were too tall to pick, ugly as hell and produced few apples. The previous owner had told me to be ruthless and roughly described what he had done. He told me some of the best apples came off trees that needed work but he hadn’t wanted to forgo apples from them for a few years.

There was an amazing amount of wood. Anything larger than my wrist got bucked up for firewood and the rest was burnt in piles. The trees looked like dead stumps. I left only the strong branches and cut out anything that pointed up or crossed other branches. There wasn’t much left. Within 2 years, it is tough to tell I spent hours on each tree. I get to do it all over again and still have not made it to some trees at all.

Of the trees that were here when I arrived only 2 are gone and 5 require some lovin’. One wobbled so badly when I climbed it with a chainsaw that I climbed down and pushed it over with the bobcat although a good body check would have worked.

The other doomed tree ended up in the middle of the garden. What I used to refer to as a garden grew into a food production center with a greenhouse, berry patch and vegetables I had heard of but never seen. When I left the farm for a few days my partner, the gardener, had “Nick the Wonder WWoofer” severely limb the tree. When I got home, I hooked up to the stump, pulled it out, put it on the burn pile and cursed myself for poor planning. Shit happens but I hate to take a tree that is older than me and part of the farm.

Most of our apples aren’t great eaters. We eat some, juice more and feed the rest to the livestock.

A grand old tree that produced a pickup load of apples last year

I rattle the branches with a 2×4 and collect the fallen apples in a 5 gallon bucket. The sound of apples thundering down the slope into the pasture as I dump them over the fence will bring sheep or steers running for miles. It makes for tasty meat, efficient use of our fruit and none is left to attract bears that also like to snack on farm critters.

While our home and infrastructure are relatively new, these trees, miles of fallen barbed wire and buckets of old horseshoes remind us that at one time, farming was a more productive and acceptable way to make a living while feeding yourself and your neighbours with healthy local food.

We were fortunate to have a recent farm visit from Crystal Klym, Coordinator for the Central Kootenay Invasive Plant Committee. (CKIPC) After 5 years of battling weeds on our own, it was time to call in the expert.

I became aware of CKIPC when I attended one of their guided field trips and talks at Fort Sheppard, south of Trail. These trips are well worth attending with information about invasive plants, things NOT to plant in your garden and methods of controlling different species. We saw how dumping a load of weeds off the side of the road can require a backhoe and dump trucks to eradicate years later.

Yellow Hawkweed, spreading by root

There are three general ways weeds spread. Some do so by seed alone, some by root alone, and some by seed and root. It was one of the latter that caught Crystal’s attention first, Yellow Hawkweed. She explained that if you cut it as we do, it sends runners sideways, creating a solid mat of greenery that kills everything else. Allowing it to seed only makes it spread further and faster.

I was unhappy to hear that the  recommended treatment for Hawkweed is a so called ‘short-acting’ herbicide. We have worked hard to avoid such things by hand pulling, cutting and ploughing. We will think about that one and see if we can find an alternate treatment. The longer you wait the less choice you have so we need to figure it out soon.

In general, Crystal gives us the thumbs up for effort with some words of caution. “Deal with that Hawkweed, Sulphur Cinquefoil and Creeping Buttercup.” is her first recommendation. She gives me a wealth of material and we sit down to browse through it and discuss the nasty’s that lurk on our property.

Crystal encourages me to come up with a plan. Apparently, I have been shooting from the hip until now.

This plan involves mapping and classifying of your invasive plants, finding control techniques for each and then prioritizing. We go over our problems species and how to handle them. She walks me through the steps and shows me how to fill in the worksheet before our conversation turns to mountain biking, home renovations and how she came to live in the West Kootenays. I love those conversations.

We are now attacking the weeds that will do the most damage first. The plan involves continued monitoring and Crystal encourages me to take pictures to document it. Comparing photos is far easier than trying to remember what things looked like last year. I don’t have a photographic memory.

Creeping Buttercup thrives on poor grazing management

The list of weeds on our property is long. Plantain, Hawkweed, Burdock, Canadian and Bull Thistle, Yellow Bog Iris, Common Knotweed, Mallow, Chicory, Shepherd’s Purse, Knapweed, Creeping Buttercup, Mullein, Chickweed, Cudweed, Curled Dock, Oxeye Daisy, Pineapple Weed, Sulphur Cinquefoil and Yarrow. Some are native but most were imported from Eurasia as garden ornamentals or medicinal herbs.

Some are beautiful in full bloom. The deep purple-blue of the Chicory flower is one of my favourite wild colours. Invasive plants won’t feed our animals though and certain plants can kill them or taint their meat so it is less than ideal.

Time to get back to work on that plan.

Speaking of plans, the next weed post will contain some great resources I have found and what we have done to control weeds. In the meantime, why not check out the CKIPC website by clicking the link at the right side of the page.