Christmas At Liberty Farm

For us Christmas begins on December 25th and runs through January 5th so rather than saying we had a good Christmas, I will say that we are having a good Christmas. So far this week has seen more play and less work on my part but that's OK.

We did get the ram removed from the ewe flock and put back into the pen with our other ram. Their heads are a bit sore from reestablishing who's boss but we have them in a small enough pen that they're not able to get enough of a running start to hurt each other much. The ewe lambs are reunited with their mothers. Tomorrow I hope to get hay. My first source didn't pan out so I'm going to call my second source soon.

Yesterday we drove over to Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio. It is a recreation of a canal town from the early 1800s. I picked up a neat little book - A Fine Poor Man's Country by M. Ruth Norton. The title comes from an excerpt from a letter printed in the preface:

...I would say that it is a fine poor man's country and if you ever come [to Ohio] now is the time...money is plenty...I have more boots to make now than I can make for two or three months and could not get any [apprentices] to hire this fall...any industrious man at any employment can make a decent living here if he should begin without one cent in his pocket.
-letter from John Boyd, shoemaker in Roscoe, Ohio to his cousin Hugh in Ireland

Here is a photo of me taken there.
I've always liked this beard style but my wife can't get over the Amish look. So I guess this was me for a day. Here a couple more photos from our daytrip. Have a blessed Christmas season and a happy New Year!

Update

Well. I suppose the lack of posting shows that there's not much going on around here. Today was my last day of work off the farm until January 2nd so I've got some work planned for the coming week - not the least of which is trimming all the sheep hooves, moving the breeding ram back into the bachelor pen and reuniting the ewe lambs with their mothers. We also need to buy another 50-60 bales of hay to get through the remainder of the winter. I hope to put together my seed order and last but not least get in some reading and relaxing time. Sitting on the shelf in front of me are: Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by Senator-elect James Webb, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo and Fields Without Dreams: Defending The Agrarian Idea by Victor Davis Hanson. Plus my mom always buys me books for Christmass. Oh yeah, I've been spending a lot of my time working on a remodeling project at my church and will probably put in a couple days work there over the next week or so. And I'm working on the first edition of the Liberty Farm newsletter. (I better end this post - my list of work keeps growing).

So, that's what's happening here. I'll try to post some sheep photos next week. Be well and have a blessed Christmass.

What is This?

These photos were taken in the eastern sky between 7:05 and 7:15 this morning. When we first saw it, the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon. There was a very bright light that appeared to be moving up surrounded by an umbra of light. Just minutes later the ball was gone and only the "tail" remained. As soon as the sun lit up the sky enough, the whole thing was obliterated.

The top photo was taken last. The bottom photo is the same as the middle one but I used the "auto contrast" feature in Picasa2 and then cropped it. This was much more spectacular in person than the camera was able to capture.

So, any ideas on what it is? Our guesses range from atmospheric gases lit up by the sun to an exploding meth lab.

Update: Thank you, Polly. This is apparently what we saw.
Update II: And here's a link from our local newspaper.

Conserving Forest Communities

The third essay in Wendell Berry's Another Turn Of The Crank is titled "Conserving Forest Communities." In it, Berry brings many of the same ideas he has about agriculture to woodlands. Just as agriculture is best when done on a small, local scale with relationships between farmers and eaters, woodland use and management is done best on a community scale with local ownership and use of the products of the forest. These products may include lumber for building and for furniture, firewood, woodland herbs like ginseng, grape vines, etc. Rather than me trying to summarize, I'll let the author speak for himself.

Often the trees have been regarded merely as obstructions to row cropping, which, because of the steepness of the terrain, has necessarily caused severe soil losses from water erosion. If an accounting is ever done, we will be shocked to learn how much ecological capital this kind of farming required for an almost negligible economic return: thousands of years of soil building were squandered on a few crops of corn or tobacco.

There is no local interest connecting the woods workers to the woods. They do not regard the forest as a permanent resource but rather as a purchased "crop" that must be "harvested" as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

The economy of this kind of forestry is apt to be as deplorable as its ecology. More than likely only the prime log of each tree is taken - that is, the felled tree is cut in two below the first sizable branch, leaving behind many board feet in short logs (that would be readily usable, say, if there were small local woodworking shops) as well as many cords of firewood. The trees thus carelessly harvested will most likely leave the local community and the state as sawlogs or, at best, rough lumber. The only local benefit may well be the single check paid by the timber company to the landowner.

But we must be careful. In the past we have too often merely trusted that the corporate economy or the governement would dispose of natural resources in a way that would be best for the land and the people. I hope we will not do that again. That trust has too often been catastrophically misplaced. From now on we should disbelieve that any corporation ever comes to any rural place to do it good, to "create jobs," or to bring to the local people the benefits of the so-called free market. It will be a tragedy if the members of Kentucky's rural communities ever again allow themselves passively to be sold off as providers of cheap goods and cheap labor. To put the bounty and the health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error. For whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people.

We can safely predict that for a long time there are going to be people in places of power who will want to solve our local problems by inviting in some great multinational corporation. They will want to put millions of dollars of public money into an "incentive package" to make it worthwhile for the corporation to pay low wages and for our labor and to pay low prices for, let us say, our timber. It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a governement subsidy. [emphasis mine - J.G.]

That last quote is my favorite. The nearby city that my family's business is in gives away these kinds of tax incentives and abatements all the time. We've never sought anything of the kind and never will. It's disgusting when you think about the working people paying taxes to subsidize these "free-market capitalists."

Once again, Berry nails it. Local ownership, local control, local economy, strong community.