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

Kerry Heifer Birth Announcement

We were pleased to gain a new Kerry heifer this morning. When the total number of a breed numbers only in the hundreds in the US, each new heifer means a lot.

She is a little too closely related to her daddy, but that is one of the challenges with rare breeds.While I am already thinking about the best way to maximize heterosis while still keeping the stock pure; maybe we need to let her grow up first!

St George's Day and Agrarian Injustice

I wrote a post about St. George's day in 2009 that can be found here.  Unlike St. Patrick's day, Americans of English descent will not be parading in the streets or gathering for bangers and mash or fish and chips washed down with  brown ale. In fact, English Americans have virtually no ethnic identity. Most historians attribute this to the ability of English immigrants to quickly blend in among earlier arriving cousins. I think there is more to it.

For the Irish, the oppressor that drove people from their homes was a foreigner. Most English immigrants were  oppressed by their own government. I think that once the mourning over their displacement was over, they just never looked back.  In addition to starving the Irish, the rulers of England kept pretty busing destroying their own peoples subsistence agriculture through the enclosure movement. The Terrierman blog (one of my daily reads) has a pretty good summary of this.

The great estates shown in Pride and Prejudice or Downtown Abbey were created by 800 years of legal chicanery and outright force to consolidated  land in the hands of a few.  Our romantic view of these great houses covers up the incredible squalor of cottagers and laborers in old England.  When the smallholders turned to poaching to get their families a bit of protein, the great lords responded with mantraps.

If you are an American of English descent, you might wish to read some of William Cobbett, the original contrary farmer.  Cobbett was an exceptional writer and easy to read today.  Reading Cobbet also helps explain why the most recent emigrant among the founding fathers (Tom Paine) was later concerned with agrarian justice.

The enclosures created the surplus labor force that fueled the industrial revolution. The poor of England were regarded as just another industrial input. Miners were bonded in a form of pseudo slavery. The worst example of this was the use of little girls to hurry coal. We know their lives because the governing elites were finally moved to action more out of concern about Victorian  morality than human decency.




Like the Irish, the English poor rose up against their oppressors multiple times. There were Swing Riots, Topuddle Martyrs and numerous miners strikes (which is why my maternal grandfather's  family came to Pennsylvania). Like my maternal great grandfather, the worst of the troublemakers typically fled to America or Australia. For hundreds of years, these two places served as a safety valve for a very sick society.

It remains no wonder that there was little nostalgia for the old country among English immigrants. From the religious troublemakers who settled Plymouth in 1620 to the children of Northumberland miners or  Lancashire mill workers in the 1800's, America offered a new and better England where land ownership, universal suffrage and equality before the  law became realized.


Music for your very own agrarian St George's day party:
Unthanks sisters perform the testimony of Patience Kershaw


Dance to Tom Paine's bones with Graham Moore

A couple of favorites from Show of Hands 

Checking in from 1907

I have been neglecting this blog more than normal, and thought I should check in to let some friends and correspondents know I am alive and OK. We are in the midst of lambing right now and expecting Kerry Calves soon. In between my farm and agrarian urbanist work I have been working on a family history project. I have been walking around with a lot of oral history in my head from questions I asked my grandparents decades ago. I decided to source it all (if possible) , then write it down. I also have my great grandfathers daily farm diaries from 1907 to 1917. Each day he noted what he did, who visited, and what his wife and children (my grandfather and great aunt) did. He listed every sale and expenditure, and when he bred each animal from dogs to cows.   I decided to transcribe these so that they will survive past their physical deterioration. While nothing is more boring than someone else's family history, his life has a lot of agrarian lessons, as he farmed the same land  I do. I may end up posting some of the entries after I finish, but for now I am heading back to 1907! In some ways I like it better there anyway.

Kerry Cattle

JUNE 1, 2012 UPDATE: I am now blogging full time about these wonderful cows www.kerrycattle.blogspot.com

We are starting the new year with a new project. We recently brought home a small herd of Kerry Cattle (as well as six Dexter heifers).  We are doing this as a partnership with our friends, the Dean Family. The partnership enables them to  keep the Kerries as commercial milk cows, while providing  a source of  beef feeders and replacement heifers for us to raise and sell.

The Kerry is a frightfully rare breed, and we are honored to be apart in preserving the breeds unique genetics. However, conservation was only a part of our interest. Rare Breeds are important and there is no better explanation of why than this essay from Auburn Meadow Farm. 

Our long term interest is developing the Kerry as a minor  breed of commercial value. I would like to see increased   interest among dairy farmers looking  for a long lived,  moderate size cow who can provide both beef and dairy production with less feed costs. While we are committed to breeding with only  Kerry semen or bulls on the rare cows, our Kerry bull is enjoying his work crossbreeding on cows of other dairy breeds.

Why the Kerry?
We spent a lot of time discussing this project before taking the plunge into the Kerry.  Here are some reasons:

I like the fact Kerry Cattle are black. Whether  feeders or fat cattle, black hair is worth extra money at the sale barn: (sometimes even if their carcass is inferior to a Hereford).  For a dairy farmer, a pure black bull calf should bring a premium over a Holstein bull calf as well.  A Kerry Bull on a Holstein cow should always give us a black calf. Kerry cows are also small, and I think there will be a growing market for smaller sides of beef for the freezer trade.Many people no longer have freezer space for a 400 pound side (half) of beef. Small calf birth weight  mean less work and worry as well. 

Finally, I am impressed by the breed's intelligence. I have wrestled dumb dehorned cattle who stuck their heads in feeders. Even with impressive horns, the Kerries seem to know where their heads are in space and don't seem to  get stuck.   In spite of the regal horns they have thus far proved to be docile.

http://kerrycattlesociety.org/

SOPA Strike

If you are in the US and reading this, please take five minutes and contact your senators to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
I am not tech savvy enough to blackout this site for the day, but in the time you could read anything I have to say, you can call your senators and make a difference.

Thanks,

Richard Grossman, the midland agrarian