Category: Agriculture

Spring Wheat Fertilizing

I know that I’ve been posting mostly crop pictures on Fridays, but this time of year things are growing so fast and changing all the time that it’s so cool to me to see all the progress!!  Hope you’re all not getting too bored, I’m sure something will break soon and I can post some pics of that haha! (knock on wood!)2013-04-11_11-14-35_780Got some spring wheat fertilized yesterday!

2013-04-11_11-14-39_321This is my very “high tech” console that shows me how much I’m getting on, and my speed.

2013-04-11_11-14-44_338This is my slightly more high tech guidance screen that shows me where I’ve been and where I need to drive to get the best coverage.

2013-04-11_11-15-02_899Here’s another “high tech” item…a rear view mirror so I can glance back and see how much fertilizer I have in the tank.

2013-04-11_11-15-10_336You can see the fertilizer (small white granules) flying out the sides here behind me!

2013-04-11_17-02-07_326Pretty nice day to be out in the growing wheat fields!  It won’t be long before they start to get a much darker green and grow, and grow, and grow!

2013-04-11_17-03-30_881What a good day to be a farmer!

A few Facts & off to the Capital again…

Since I’ve started to follow the US Farmer and Rancher Alliance, I have been learning so much about how to tell my ag story, why it’s important and some key ways to go about doing this most effectively. So while I was back in New York and attended one of their events, I wanted to share a few facts that really stuck out to me that go along these lines.

  1. 25% of Americans have questions about their food.
  2. 49% of consumers think that agriculture is on the wrong track.
  3. 75% of consumers like farmers, but 42% of them don’t like how we farm.
  4. 95% of farms are family owned and operated in the United States.

All of these facts point to us as farmers to start to restore relevancy, and to do that the USFRA says we need to start using trust and transparency. I have an idea what that might look like for a company like Monsanto, and I have an idea of what that might look like for a farm or ranch that is trying to keep things in the closet about what they are doing. But for me, transparency and trust is something that I hope this blog tends to address. I am proud of what we are doing our here, and how we are treating the land. And it’s something that I want to continue.

It goes beyond a blog however so I say all of this while in the back of my head rolling around is the testimony that I will give later today at the Oregon capital all about protecting our farmland. I’m off to Salem again, this time it isn’t GMO’s or pesticides or our right to farm. This time it’s a four land highway, a toll road no less, that is threatening to come right through the heart of our beautiful farmland that we have here. Class one and two soils, that I feel we need to protect. And because of all the facts above, I know that I need to be out there, and let people know how we are growing their food and that we are making the most of the great wonderful soil that we are so lucky to have and cherish. If you’re around come listen to Senate Bill 2696 this afternoon at 3pm, it might be interesting to see farmers get up and tell legislatures why this is so important to stop!!

We’re ALL Farmers Here

I was sitting in a hearing on SB 633 a few weeks ago. I was sitting there knowing that my testimony was “right”, that I was going to make legislators see why this is so important to “me” and “my farm”. After I felt as though I had did just that during my testimony, Barry Bushue Oregon Farm Bureau President got up and pretty much blew me out of the water. Not in the way of making me look bad or anything, we really had very different content in what we were saying and the points we were making. But he did make me feel like at this particular issue I had completely forgotten one major piece, that even if we are organic growers, non-GMO or GMO growers, conventional, sustainable, whatever type of farm we chose to cultivate, in the end we are all still farmers.

I realized that I all too often forget that we have enough risks with the weather effecting our crops, or markets changing and being unpredictable, the price of fertilizer going up and down, all these things are hard enough to deal with…why do we have to go and fight each other in the legislature just to protect ourselves from the “enemy”? Remember they are still farmers!! In Barry’s testimony he talked about how allowing seed to be regulated at only the state and federal level doesn’t exclude people from farming, it doesn’t put a line in the sand about who can and can’t farm in areas. In reality it might just bring people together, neighbors to the table, to talk over coffee instead of law books about how to work together and farm on common borders.

This may be an over simplification of a very large issue here in Oregon. But I think that many times we get so far past simple, our passion reaches in front of our brains and moves beyond any place where a compromise or any sort of “coexistence” could ever exist. I was listening to an agricultural economist a few years back and he said that the thing that makes him the most upset about organic is that many times the organic marketing scheme is just trying to make money on the backs of conventional farms, it’s an us or them mentality! This makes me sick to my stomach because on and on I see the truth in what he was saying and how important the point that Barry was trying to make needs to stay at the front of my head and my arguments. We don’t need more marketing showing how evil GMO’s are and how angelic organic is, because that is not the reality!! The message should be that conventional and organic are just two ways to go about bringing food into the world, both are necessary and both are important, both should be treasured parts of Oregon’s future! Remember we’re all just a bunch of farmers, we’re all trying to make ends meet, and we’re all dedicated to bringing healthy food to tables in our own homes and around the world!