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

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.