Hope and Porter

 

 I young man of my recent acquaintance has begun a "nanobrewing" venture in Beaver Falls Pennsylvania. 
 http://www.beaverbrewingcompany.com/
Beaver Falls is one of many small towns in western Pennsylvania that used to be known for making things. While these towns were industrial-not agrarian, they created real products like axes, cutlery, and pottery. The towns lost their manufacturing base because the stock-jobbers and the white shoe boys  decided that paying their fellow citizens real money to make real stuff was too much of a bore. They started re-enslaving Asiatic coolies (See George Orwell for the term) and creating derivatives instead.  This left the good people of places like Beaver Falls to figure out what to do with the Superfund sites and all the other chaos and problems left behind by de-industrialization. 

Once in a while, a young person will choose such a place and say, "This is where I will make my stand. Here I will build a life as a craftsman". In doing so, he becomes an agent of real hope for the future.  I believe the way back for small cities is in a large measure to return to wealth creation by actually making products. Food is one of those "products". Food also has the advantage of building a closer link between city and countryside. It is often the craft-level food producer who is the small farmers' friend.  

This particular small farmer's friend is anyone who can make a good dark porter or Brown Ale.  A glass of dark beer at bedtime is the difference between me sleeping 6+ hours, or only three hours straight. 

"We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old".

Martin Luther 

We are not going to fix what is wrong with this country by voting. We might start to fix it by buying what we want and need from people who are creating real wealth in an agrarian sense. I could buy Guinness, and see my dollars flow back to London, and enrich the same multinational company who once owned Burger King and attempted to use their political power to suppress an award to a Scottish micro-brewery. Or, I can buy my beer from someone who is trying to revitalize a town for which I have affection and takes great pride in his good work. Having done this, I can sleep even better at night. 

The Essence of Agrarianism and Industrialism in 15 minutes

Please take the seven odd minutes to read and watch this video posted by Terrierman.
 http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-one-video-you-should-watch-today.html

Then take another seven minutes and scroll back through this picture blog I stumbled on a while back.
http://agrarianrhythm.tumblr.com/

Why does one set of images disturb us, and one draw us in?

I could post about the lives of animals and man, whether there is enough land to grow food for people and a bunch of other thoughts, I think the important point is  that most of us know dehumanizing  evil when we see it.

Learning his Life's Work

While I have not been blogging about it, I have been enjoying life. Almost every day (unless pressing business or weather intervenes) I run my Mountain Cur pup in one of my woodlots for at least a half hour. Calhoun is 4 months old. He was bred to run and tree squirrel, coon and Bobcat. I have pretty low expectations at this point. My short term goals are for him to:

Learn to come when called.
Be comfortable with the sites and smells of  the woods
Learn to leave the Deer and Turkeys alone
Learn that he is part of a team with me and he can trust me

 He is doing well on all those accounts. As he grows older, my expectations for him will grow. My hope is that about the time the leaves are off the trees, he will find squirrels on his own  and bark tree.

These daily walks also let me see my woodlots, which was something I could not do as often as when we had sheep. Truth be told, Hardwood has been one of the most profitable crops on our homestead over  the years. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex subject, we have always "low graded" so we grow more timber than we cut. We open up small spaces to give partial shade to new undergrowth and let the big straight trees grow faster.

This months Farming Magazine has an excellent  article by Wendell Berry on that subject.My interest in the woodlots have always been beyond timber. The peace of the woods is a place for me to think, and important to my spiritual health. 

There is nothing I would rather do than run with woods with a dog. I also like to eat squirrel, so I have made a few management decision that other woodland owners might not. For example, I don't get too excited Beech Tree encroachment (Beech can be invasive, and is lower value. Some woodland owners eradicate them by spraying).

Squirrels look plentiful this year. and I don't have much competition in hunting them. most hunters today are after bigger game. Few bother hunting squirrels and fewer still seem to want the time commitment of training a dog. If anyone is interested, there is a good article about squirrel dog training in this months Fur Fish and Game, which to my way of thinking is the only general interest hunting and fishing magazine still worth reading.

A Fourteen Year Old Farmer

In this day and age, when 25 year old "children" are staying on their parents' insurance as dependents, and still living at home without any self support, its nice to see a young entrepreneur.

 A friend of mine has a really smart 14 year old boy who wanted to make summer money. In my youth, almost everybody still made square bale hay, and a boy could make a bit of money helping put up hay throughout the summer. Round balers put an end to much of that by reducing labor needs.

My friend had a underutilized square baler, and an ambitious son. So he:

• Gave him use of 8 acres fields around the homestead.
• Staked him an advance for fuel, fertilizer, and twine.
• Set him up with a checking account.
• Watched to make sure he was safe with the equipment. 
• Turned him loose.

Since we decided not to try  make our own hay anymore for a few cows, this work great for us. I have already bought 118 bales from him, and intend to buy another 200 or so. If weather holds and he works hard, he will make better money than any fast food job. He is more independent than other teenage jobholders, as he does not need his mom and dad to haul him to work.He has no boss besides his father's veto on safety.   He is also learning a about money management, dealing with customers, forage quality, and safety, and decisions about how much to cut, how much to sell off the field at a lower price and how much to store in the barn for later sale. 

I asked him if he was becoming a farmer, or he is just a capitalist.  He is not sure whether he likes the hard work as much as the money!  Either way, the young man will be better ready for the "real world" than most urban college graduates.

Biting off more than she can chew?

Adam sent me this photo of Susie, their new farm pup, meeting our two older Kerry Cows over at Gibsondale Cheese.   Susie is a typical Border Collie, and sometimes too smart for her own good. Luckily Adam was there to keep her from getting the snot knocked out of her. All of the border collies I had over the years would work sheep, but some were not tough enough for cattle in close quarters. One good kick and they were cow shy. The one I had who was tough enough was way too hard for sheep and I sold him to a farmer in Missouri who had  enough wild cows to give him honest work. I like Susie, and she may be tough enough if she manages to grow up.

We quit keeping Border Collies after our last one died of old age. I also have  sad associations with the breed due to a nearby crime and tragedy among a couple I knew and liked who raised and trained sheepdogs.

Twenty Five Years and 1,200 Sheep later

 Slippery Rock Creek near Elliott's Mill site.

Sometimes a random email from a friend can restart a dead blog. A lot has happened in the year since I posted what I expected to be a final entry in this journal.  Most notably is that this is the last year of the sheep business for us. When the Marcellus Shale boom came with truckloads of money to our little community. I said to my wife that "I guess we will see who really wants to farm now". I surprised myself in being one of those who did not. After 25  years, we are getting out of the sheep business. We had been downsizing, and the last of the flock has already been passed to a young farmer, and I could not be happier. I expected to miss the wooly little creatures, but have not. In fact, was actually ready to sell the whole farm and move on to something else. I had plans!

• Move to Day County South Dakota and fish for Walleyes and Hunt Pheasant.
• Move to the big empty part of North Central Pennsylvania, fish for Trout and hunt Bobcats and Coyotes with Dogs.
• Move to Eastern Crawford County PA, where we also have family, fish the Allegheny River, and  buy some cut over timberland to improve. 

I can live with the Marcellus shale boom.  I am less happy that my community has changed in so many other ways, primarily by starting to become a suburb of a City known as "the Paris of Appalachia". I usually call it something more vulgar, by replacing the TT's in "PITT" with "SS", or the "P" with "SH".  

We are staying here because my wife, who has lived in such diverse places as Beirut, Lebanon and
Washington DC, has made a home here. Perhaps better than I do,  she understands this as home, and  us as the living continuation of a community bigger than us. That community  includes both our living neighbors and the dead.

I fish as much to clear my head as to catch fish. When I do catch fish, I need to cook them outside on a camp stove as my wife cannot abide the smell of freshwater fish or waterfowl. This morning, I fished the branch of Slipper Rock Creek about a mile from the farm. I was casting on the opposite bank from where one of my ancestors worked at grist mill here in 1806. He was referred to in an early local Presbyterian church history as "A German miller, named Grossman, who was a blatant and outspoken infidel." He apparently got religion very briefly during the solar eclipse of June 16, 1806, but left meeting and went back to work when the sun came back.

While I was ready to move out, I realize that it is something unique in highly mobile Twenty First Century America to still live in a community where my family has spent over two centuries. When my lifetime and memories are combined with those of our fore-bearers, a crick is no longer just a place to fish, but a part of who we are. I think that connection is part of agrarianism. It need not be a 200 year one of blood and DNA, but an attitude that this place, means something beyond other ones.

A Fond Farewell to the Midland Agrarian

Dear Friends, 
I know about 50-100 of you stop by here each time after I post. This is the final post on the Midland Agrarian blog. After 4 and a half years of sporadic posting (including putting her up on blocks twice), on any and all topics, I have decided to restrict my modest writing efforts to one subject: Kerry and Dexter Cattle.I hope you will consider following me at my new weblog www.kerrycattle.blogspot.com. 

I am about the age where I am both looking backward and forward, and giving serious thought to the matter of vocation. When a small herd of the rarest dairy cattle in the world fall into your lap,  it causes one to think. I hope I have about two decades of useful farming life left in me. I am going to use that time to try to build, improve and stabilize the Kerry cattle, and help my friends at Pasture Maid Creamery in telling the world about western Pennsylvania's finest cheese. I am committed to something new with my blogging hobby:  I am going to try six day a week blogging at the new site. I hope you will follow me. There will be posts on all things Kerry and Dexter related, and  my progress in the aforementioned twin goals.

Midland Agrarian will remain as an archive as long as Google allows, the stillborn Agrarian Urbanist will be removed tomorrow. 

In closing, I want to thank Linda J, Backyard Farmyard, Herrick Kimball, Scott Terry, Back to Basics Living, Rick Saenz, (and others I am sure I have forgotten) for reading, writing, and their long support of the agrarian cause.

Respectfully,

Richard Grossman
Craighill Herd of Kerry and Dexter Cattle