S.C.A.T.

Coyotes hang out with our cattle.  When the calves are little, their colostrum-rich poo is a delicacy (to the Canis family anyway), in the summer the cows stir up the grass and roust out the voles for the coyotes.

Seeing coyote scat with cow manure is an everyday occurrence for me, but it is also food for thought, too.  I have had this post stuck in my head since this past summer.

August 17, 2011

Some people ponder the world when they shower, I do my ruminating when I work with the cows each day.  One day last summer while I was waiting for the water trough to fill, I was looking at the coyote scat near my feet, and I thought of our little neighbor kid who insists on calling all poop, scat.  He has stopped doing it lately but it just sounds odd to hear a kid say, “look at all the cow scat Mom, those are big ones!”  I guess it is scat, but normally scat is used to describe wild carnivore poop, not farm animal manure.  Anyway, you see how my mind wanders…when the dogs act like this we call it, “sniff a rock, chase a bird.”  I start out looking at coyote scat and come up with an idea for a blog post titled SCAT to solve gardening and farming problems.  Geesh, talk about wandering minds…this is what I came up with on that warm summer day; some ideas on how to identify the weak link in your gardening or farming.  My farming/ gardening weak link changes from time to time, lately I have realized learned that carbon is my weak link.

S&*t, poop, manure, crap, or scat if you will.
Carbon, in any form.
Attitude.  As in adjustment, if need be.
Time.  We all need more time, or maybe we just need to think of time differently.

S.  The S in my SCAT acronym stands for manure.  A great fertilizer for growing your plants, whether it be vegetables or grass for grazing.  On our farm we spend as much time managing the output from our stock as we do managing their feeding.  If you’re not gathering your livestock manure through rotational grazing (grazing season) or bedding of some sort, deep or removed daily (dormant winter season) that may be your weak link.  If you think my gardens look lush, thank you, but I owe that lushness to my cattle and chickens.  Yes, I do all the other stuff required to grow a garden, plant, weed, harvest and eat, but it is the composted animal manure that makes all the difference, IMHO.

Building compost piles from winter deep bedding.

Winter is the time to be gathering your bedding for future garden/pasture use.  Cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and chickens (or exotics if that is what you have) are all candidates for winter housing and manure gathering for composting.  I’m not too thrilled with the idea of using pig manure in food garden areas, so we try to make sure pig manure goes to the fields instead of the garden.  And not to be too confusing, I think housing pigs indoors in winter with a hoop house or other types of structures are useful, I’m just not advocating using their manure for garden areas.

What came first, the chicken or the chicken manure?

If you don’t have animals and don’t want them, then growing nitrogen fixing cover crops is in order.  Legumes in conjunction with cereal cover crops will improve your soil conditions.

C is for Carbon.  That is my weak link.  It took me awhile to figure that one out.  Until I really started paying attention to Greg Judy and his writings, I wasn’t getting the carbon stockpiling thing.  I was stuck on nitrogen.  Meaning, in my situation, I thought manure was the end all for my pastures, I was grazing too short and too often, and not leaving any carbon.  I’ve come to the conclusion I can never have enough carbon.  I actively grow carbon in the form of cover crops in the garden and stockpiled pasture.

Tall grass mob stocking farmstead style.

We buy also buy carbon in the form of lots of straw for bedding and mulch, and a neighbor gives us their stable cleanings.  It’s a full-time job, that carbon.  Nature builds soil with carbon, but it takes some time.  By combining carefully orchestrated livestock manure with the carbon, you have a win-win situation.  Don’t get me wrong, not paying attention to nature is what got us in degraded soil conditions in the first place, but we aren’t trying to recreate nature on our farmsteads and in our gardens, we are trying to do some faster-paced, somewhat un-natural things.  For the most part, none of us are full-time foragers (don’ t get me started on foraging), we are agrarians, and we patronize other agrarians for our food that we can’t or don’t want to grow ourselves.  So by trying to replace what we take, and re-building our soils we are helping ourselves, of course, and everyone else, too.

A is for Attitude.  Ooh, that’s complicated.  We all have one that probably can use some adjusting at one time or another.  It could be that you’re fresh to farming and thought it was a breeze, and it isn’t.  Or a spouse,  partner or kids aren’t all the way on board.  And a big one I see with people new to farm or homesteading life, they see themselves in a supervisory position and not wanting to really do the dirty work.  This really goes hand in hand too with the manure conundrum.  If you see the manure on your farm as a liability, then the attitude is that you may be too busy, important, good, or above the work of handling that liability.  If you change your attitude about the output from those animals and see the manure as an asset, then maybe you would think about shepherding that manure fertility yourself.  I’ve found I’ve learned a lot from getting up close and personal with all the manure around here.  Just like you look in the diaper to see how the baby is tolerating what you ate, or when you introduce a new food, it is the same with livestock.

Another thing too is that if we hire tasks done, we reserve the right to blame someone else.  If we do it ourselves, we only have ourselves to blame if something goes wrong.  There is nothing wrong with hiring people for projects, but for day-to-day stuff sometimes it isn’t necessary.  Too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the soup.

T is for time.  It seems like there is never enough.  That is a continual weak link in the garden or on the farm.  What you don’t get done today may not wait until tomorrow.  A cow dies, the fruit gets too ripe, the water freezes, the feed runs out because no one ordered it, the cream sours, the animals escape, the weeds grow, the deer get in the garden, eggs need sorting, the greenhouse collapses because you shoveled the barn roof off instead.  The tasks are never-ending.  Some are disasters and some are just the product of too full of plate.  Some things are inevitable, if you make hay it will get wet sometime in your haying career.

We can’t fence time, but we sure can manage it better.  Maybe seasonal farm production is the answer.  The surest way to no down time is a flock of laying hens, or dairy animals.  I like having some time for rejuvenating in the winter.  We still have chores, but they are of the light variety, and they are change from intense, summertime chores.  Maybe it is as simple as timing breeding and birthing schedules, or deciding not to garden year round.  This is the first year I haven’t really tried to have delicate lettuces and other tender greens on the table during winter.  We’ve been “making do” with root vegetable slaws and salads, and to tell the truth, they seem to offer a more toothsome and hearty meal.  And a root slaw of kohlrabi, celeriac and carrot seems more fitting in a deliberate lifestyle.  Green salads day in and day out, smack of the store-bought mentality where we can have everything we want everyday of the year, without any regard to the seasonality of the production or the costs of moving goods from point A to B.   I did the work with those root crops this summer, now I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Sometimes too, we need to resist getting in too deep.  The steep learning curve of gardening and animal husbandry is very real and can be disappointing if not downright heartrending.  Building a “farm set” type of farm while an attractive thought, is tough and expensive.  Better to start small with a few animals or types of animals than to go whole hog and be overwhelmed.  The picture perfect, abundant garden in seed catalogs and gardening books really acquire  a lot attention to detail at certain times or the disappointment factor can be, well, disappointing.  I get lots of questions about growing root crops for my milk cow, and my suggestion (which is sometimes not taken too well) is that if you can grow enough winter roots for your family, then expand to the milk cow feed stage after that hurdle has been made.  It works the same for growing meat animals for sale, after you go through the seasons of growing your meat, then try selling some.  That way all the husbandry and processing wrinkles get ironed out.  Just like a chef, taste your food, only when you’re farmer, you’re living your food every step of the way.  You get a taste every day, you want to make sure it is a good one.

Take it slow, think about what may be your weak link, and savor your time, with yourself, your family and your farmstead.