A decade in...

Ten years ago today Kris had his first day on our farm.

I moved here in February of 2007 to work full-time at TechSmith.  I took great satisfaction in the fact that I could still fit all of my clothes, shoes, home office, and music in my little Pontiac Grand Prix - just like all of my college years!  Kris moved everything else by himself.  Luckily, he is great at packing.

So when he moved here in March, he had his first day at work.  Of course I wanted to take his picture.



My parents got him that coat as a gift for his birthday the month before - his first Carhartt.  Right now, he was just leaving for the barn, and we calculated that he's on his third!  His current one is a taaaaaad dirtier.  (What a testament to a durable product.)

We got out the photo album tonight and showed the kids.  Ty and Cole kept marveling at how giant pregnant I was with them, and Max asked continually, "Where am I?!"  The pictures already seem so dated - here we are in the old barn, here you are climbing up to fix the old silo, here we are - just two of us - in our house!

I love to speculate what our lives would have been like if we wouldn't have bought the farm.  We have good friends who work for Caterpillar, and it's like checking out the parallel existence.  It seems great also!  It's just different, for sure.  As for us, we're happy we bought the farm, we love living here, and we're excited to see where this adventure goes.

Let's think ...

How many more coats will Kris go through before he sheds them and heads for a warm, sunny retirement community?

How many changes will the farm go through in the next ten years?

and -

Did anyone think that electrical setup in the picture above was a good idea?



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Spring in February

We had a super-warm and lovely February.  Whenever it thaws, it gets super muddy and messy on the farm.  Kris doesn't particularly like it.  I ... love it.  We were barefoot around the farm last weekend! Then this week it got cold and we had flurries - it even hailed.  The tulips that were already pushing their way out of the ground were completely surprised!



I hosted Fuel Up to Play 60 at Ford Field in Detroit.  It was so much fun! It is such a great event, because the kids are so excited.  We had two motivational speakers, a workout with the Detroit Lions, different dairy foods, and we did it all with fun people like these two dairy girls here - Ashley Messing Kennedy and Madeline Meyer.



I attended the Voice of Ag in Traverse City and toured the FARM Science Lab. It is SO cool.  They take it around to different schools to bring the science about ag to them!  I can't wait until we can schedule it for ours.  People in Michigan - I'm pretty sure they're scheduling into 2018 now.  Go ahead and contact them for your school.



Here we are making plastic from corn.  This enthusiasm is not faked.  We loved it.  Science experiment love is not limited to kids, obviously!



Most exciting to us, we welcomed new cattle to the farm.  So far, they love it here and are giving us lots of fantastic milk.  Thanks to our friends for selling them to us!

As February ends, it's back to winter around here.  Our hats and mittens are back on, we're back indoors, and we're ready for spring when it really comes!

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The Farmer - Land O'Lakes and Amelia E. Barr

Land O'Lakes made this video internally, then when everyone loved it, they released it.

It features a poem called 'The Farmer' by Amelia E. Barr (1831-1919).

AdWeek writes about it, "Created by The Martin Agency, "The Farmer" recites Barr's poem as picturesque scenes of American agriculture, shot by a National Geographic team, flick across the screen. The result is a reclaiming of our agricultural roots, mingled with something sad and nostalgic."

The rest of the article is critical of farming.

"But farming has never really been all that romantic. Being, as Barr wrote, a partnership with sky and earth, sun and rain (not to mention economics), it's a relationship that can be characterized only by volatility."

It is a volatile relationship, it's a hard business, and it is difficult.  But not romantic?  Come on!  There is just something about farming and the relationship with the land that is like nothing else.  Watch any farmer describe how he planted a seed, watched it grow, tended to it, and harvested his crop, and you will see pure satisfaction.  Obviously, this writer has not listened to country music.  Full of romance.

She continues:
 
"When Barr wrote "The Farmer," rural life had already lost many of the charms we attribute to history. Most Americans still lived in rural areas in 1900, but urban sites were growing faster. A drought in the late 1800s drove many homesteaders into debt, forcing farmers to build alliances and even try forming a political party. (It didn't work out.)

The agricultural revolution was also in full swing, with new technology (and hybridized corn!) completely disrupting established ways of life—paving the way for farming that looks a lot more like the creepy, cyberpunkish dystopia of Chipotle's "The Scarecrow.""

Okay, the writer and I completely disagree here.  There has always been drought and debt.  As for turning farming into dystopia ... I'm convinced this writer has never been to a farm.  There aren't a lot of farmers crying to go back to the old ways before machinery and technology.  (We haven't traded pitchforks for cell phones ... we've just added another tool!)  And Chipotle?  I, personally, am anti-E.coli.

But disagree as I may with that writer, I agree with everything in this poem.  Here's the video, followed by the beautiful words.  I mean, she even gives a special mention to milk! Now that's poetry.  

 


The Farmer

The king may rule o'er land and sea,
The lord may live right royally,
The soldier ride in pomp and pride,
The sailor roam o'er ocean wide;
But this or that, whate'er befall,
The farmer he must feed them all.

The writer thinks, the poet sings,
The craftsmen fashion wondrous things,
The doctor heals, the lawyer pleads,
The miner follows the precious leads;
But this or that, whate'er befall,
The farmer he must feed them all.

The merchant he may buy and sell,
The teacher do his duty well;
But men may toil through busy days,
Or men may stroll through pleasant ways;
From king to beggar, whate'er befall,
The farmer he must feed them all.

The farmer's trade is one of worth;
He's partner with the sky and earth,
He's partner with the sun and rain,
And no man loses for his gain;
And men may rise, or men may fall,
But the farmer he must feed them all.

God bless the man who sows the wheat,
Who finds us milk and fruit and meat;
May his purse be heavy, his heart be light,
His cattle and corn and all go right;
God bless the seeds his hands let fall,
For the farmer he must feed us all.

End of the year

It's time to say goodbye to 2016 ... and a happy goodbye it is!  While this year has been the toughest since we've been here, there were a lot of good things that happened this year.  So in order to focus on them, here's the best of the year!

- We have really great employees.  Dependable, cheerful, and help you get cattle in when you call.  Good friends and good neighbors!  They have really gone above and beyond this year.

- We also have really great families.  My parents live down the road and Kris' just an hour away.  They all have also been farmers for 30+ years, so they have lots of good advice and conversation.

- We have a great school and community.  People always want to come and tour, ask us to come and speak to them about farming, and even make agriculture part of the educational curriculum.  We love it.  We'll be out and kids will say hello to me. My kids will say, "How do you know them?" Depending on whether they call me 'Carla' (swimming lessons) or 'Mrs. Wardin' (schools), I can tell them.

- Our weather has been superb.  Wonderful summer, warm fall, and so far a super mild winter.  I love Michigan!

- Kris can leave sometimes.  It's nice to not worry about your business for a few days, and it's even nicer when no one calls because nothing goes wrong!  This is not something every business owner gets to enjoy, and it's again due to great people.

- We have support to help us in our business.  Thanks, vets, nutritionists, custom harvesters, cattle haulers, etc!

Here's hoping for a wonderful 2017 for all of us!  Thanks, as always, for reading.

Totally normal picture of us standing in the pasture dressed in regular clothing. Just kidding.  This has happened twice in our life when I insist on doing this in the five minutes we have in the summer and it results in an odd photo. It was also incredibly windy, and this is the one picture where I don't appear to be completely bald. Even the cattle are perplexed.

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Headed into winter

What a month!  We had the annual Michigan Farm Bureau meeting, where Kris was on the policy development board.  We traveled to see my siblings in Kansas and Oklahoma, where we did another Team Chocolate Milk race and visited a farm with goats and chickens!  (I fed a goat and held a chicken.  Two firsts.)  On the farm, we're making changes all the time, as we head into winter.

One of the biggest - the heifers are all set up with the feed pad:



But this week when we got our first snow, they got SUPER excited and got out.  When it was just Kris and me getting them in, it seemed really hard, but our neighbors, team members, and my parents all came out, and they were safe back home in no time.



As we head into the Christmas season, I'd like to express how thankful I am for all of my readers, near and far.  Thanks for reading! (And for those of you who came to chase cows, thanks, too!)

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Spider webs blanketing the fields

See how many incredibly rural components there are to this next sentence ...

When we were driving home from our first 4-H meeting in Kris' truck, we noticed that the pasture was blanketed with spider webs.  The sun shining on it made it look golden.  When we got to the farm, we saw that every tree and every weed - as far as you could see - was covered in spider webs.

(Rural, right?)

How many billions of spiders made these?  Does it have something to do with the warm weather and no frost?  Is it because of the fog this morning?  How can it be that I had NEVER seen this before?

I tried to take pictures, but I had to take them into the sun to make the webs show up, and it didn't work very well.

All the gold is spider webs, covering the ground

                                                           
After awhile I gave up and just enjoyed it.  We all went for a run/bike/stroller ride and I stressed to the boys I'd never seen this before and they might never see this again.

I looked it up and saw tons of pictures of this happening across the world.  This picture is off the internet from here, but it looked kind of like this, only with the sun on it:
                                         

I googled things like 'why is the ground covered in spiderwebs?' and found this article:

***

"What’s causing the blanket of silk web covering parts of a field in a residential neighborhood is a migration event called “ballooning.” What happens during ballooning is that spiders disperse by shooting out threads of silk. These threads catch wind currents that transport these members of the Linyphiidae family forward several feet at a time.

...“This would explain the fact that thousands to hundreds of thousands may take off at the same time,” explained  Susan Riechart, a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and former president of the American Arachnological Society, to The Washington Post.

“Caught by the air currents, the spiderlings have no control over where they will land, but it is not surprising that they may fall in the same area," said Dr. Riechart.

Such ballooning events are not unique to Memphis. They can happen all over the Northern Hemisphere – and have been spotted in Britain and Australia – but scientists don’t really know why and when.

Ballooning is simply, “a spectacular natural history occurrence," explained Robb Bennett, a spider expert at Canada’s Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, to National Geographic.

In 2012, for example, record rains and flooding in News South Wales, Australia, caused millions of wolf spiders to shoot their silky way to safety up trees and bushes, covering the city of Wagga Wagga in white."

(Of course 'Charlotte's Web' came to mind.  But most importantly ... )

"Though events like this are understandably unnerving to people, they’re an indication of a healthy ecosystem. Memphis residents might feel consoled to know that these spiders feed on many agricultural pests, which is beneficial for farmers.

“I would not want to live in a world where such things were no longer possible,” Reichling from the Memphis Zoo said. “The presence of these spiders tells us that all is well with nature at that location."

***

So this article basically is telling me that this occurrence happened as a benefit to us and that all is right with the world?  I don't know when I've liked an article as much.  I'll take it!


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October glory

A lot has gone on this month ...

NUMBER ONE -

I would be remiss in not making this number one, since my dad AND mom have been working really hard on it.  We're building a concrete feeding pad for our heifers to eat off of over the winter.  It required concrete pouring, welding, bolting, digging ... and we really appreciate all of the work!

             

Funniest thing about this:  My mom texted me and asked if I could go help dad bolt boards, because she had dropped one on her foot the day before and it hurt.  I said I wasn't home, but could go later. She said, 'Don't worry about it.  I'll go.  It doesn't hurt that much."  (Are my parents tough or what?!)

NUMBER TWO

Everyone on a farm has a role, and part of mine is public relations.  This month I've gone to the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, TX with U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, hosted a tour of MSU students, and visited St Joseph Elementary and Oakview Elementary to do dairy lessons.



Funniest thing: We spent at lot of time listening to people who have never produced anything talk about how farmers are ruining the world.  And yet, every single one of them ate food produced by these same farmers ... Later, I was reading a preschool class a book about where food comes from.  It outlines each food in a lunch box from where it's grown, to how it's processed, and how it's shipped.

After each food, I'd say, 'So where did it come from?' and this adorable little boy would answer, 'From the store!' (He would have fit right in at the conference!)



Also, I ran my first race as a member of Team Chocolate Milk!  Since I love chocolate milk and do love refueling with it after races (and ... just drinking it because I love the way it tastes), this is really exciting!  More of these to come!



Funniest thing: There were cider and donuts after the race, (it was at Andy T's, so perfect for that!) but no chocolate milk.  I had to go purchase my own to make this truly chocolate milky.

NUMBER THREE

Another part of farming for us is being a part of policy work.  Kris is on the Michigan Farm Bureau's state Policy Development Committee.  This is one of eight ag boards Kris is currently serving on.   That was three days this past week, and then he spent another day at a United Dairy Industry of Michigan meeting.



(This is a picture from the Michigan Farm Bureau site. I don't follow him to his meetings and take his picture.  I swear.)

Funniest thing: Kris came down in his suit and Max said, "Where are you going?" Kris said, "I'm going to the barn, of course."  Max looked so shocked.  (These kids are still easy to fool.)

NUMBER FOUR



It is a gorgeous fall.  You can see our cattle here, across the road from our house.  It's been warm, it's been sunny, and the leaves are glorious.  It's the prettiest fall ever.

Funniest thing: I say this EVERY FALL.


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