I Love You Mom

Janet Marquardt, suffered a massive stroke on the evening of February 8th.  With the whole family assembled, we removed her from life support on February 12th; she passed 5 hours latter. After the hurried planning of the funeral and visitation, the whole things is still surreal. The reality, that at only 32, I have lost my mother and my Children their Grandmother, is still hard to comprehend. I was driving home from town alone tonight and thought of her. Normally, I would give her a call to catch-up on the 20 minute drive. The last time I talked with Mom, was a few days before the stroke, and I can honestly say the last words I spoke to her were "I love," and she replied back "I love you to." 

Janet Marquardt July 3rd 1955 - February 12th 2014

The following passages are thoughts I prepared for Mom's funeral: 

I never really appreciated how complex a person Janet was. To me, Janet was my kind and caring mother, but after talking with many of her friends and colleagues over the last week, I have grown to appreciate her in a new light and love even more the lady she was. 

Janet, or Sissy as her colleagues named her, was an advocate for women and minorities in the workplace, was sassy and smart, and was a bright ray of sunshine in what can be a hard place to work. Be it telling stories of her dogs and travels, sharing pictures of her children and grandchildren, or even decorating her desk for holidays, for 33 years Janet was part of a team of people she loved and they loved her back.
As a mother, colleague, and friend, Janet was approachable in the way few people are. You could tell her about anything and she would listen. She would not judge you, she would support you. When I started farming, I faced considerable skepticism. Where others questioned, Mom supported me.
Janet was not the kind of person to seek out attention, but she was tickled when the spotlight found her. She was often a quiet presence that was always part of the picture, if seldom in it.
She was a lover of animals, especially horses and dogs. Be it cradling a bottle lamb, letting a calf suck on her fingers at the Marquardt farm, or bringing bags of treats for Snip, her horse, and all his friends; Janet loved creatures of all kinds.
She loved history, especially the civil war and world war II. On family road trips we used to sing Goober Peas, Dixie, and When Johnny Comes Marching home. I remember Dad would get tired of it after a while and want to turn on the radio. When Hazel was born, I made it a point to sing these songs from time to time when I put her down for a nap, so she would remember them.
Janet was an avid reader, and ravenous consumer of audio books. She encouraged her colleges through the book club she helped create.
Mom loved living in the present. She loved experiencing new places, admiring the relationship between horse and rider, having fun shopping, going out with the girls. She loved amusement parks from roller coasters to log flumes, but most of all she loved her family. She was a grandmother of four and she found a way to let each of them know that they were special to her.
I will always cherish the memories I have of Mom, and remember how free she was with her affection to her children and grandchildren. I see my mother living on in my kids; in how my daughter will walk right up to a perfect stranger and make friends with them, in how my son at only 15 months will haul a book around and give a pleading squeal asking to be picked-up and read to, and how both of my children have a curiosity and love of animals.
Daring, mischievous, caring, fun, talkative, intelligent, frustrating, friendly, sassy, and compassionate are all words I could use to describe my mother. I love you, Mom.

Confronting the Cold

It has been all over the news, but we have had some of the coldest weather I can really remember and certainly the coldest temperatures and windchill since I started farming. On Monday, the  high temperature was -3 F and the low was -14 F with wind chills driving temperatures to around -50. We just got back from vacation Sunday night late and the temperatures were an unpleasant surprise to come home to. They even canceled my daughter's preschool on account of the cold Monday and Tuesday.

When I got home the cows had broken through a temperate fence and hunkered down in and around the hay bales for cover. After two very tight flights hauling kids through the airport as fast as we could go, I did not have the energy to extract the cattle from the hay bales and get them more shelter that night. Luckily, I had moved the sheep inside the building before I left for vacation in preparation for lambing in a few weeks. The building was a whopping 10 degrees Monday morning, still more then 20 degrees warmer then outside. Luckily, sheep chores did not get more difficult because of the cold weather.

Sheep inside our farm building

The chickens require a little more attention in this weather. This is the first time since I built the new building that I had to break thick ice on the unheated chicken water buckets. I am also collecting eggs twice per day so we limit the likelihood of having eggs freeze. Since we use roll away nesting boxes, where the eggs roll forward away from the hen to a collection grove, the hens are not usually sitting on the eggs to keeping them warm. 

Frozen chicken waters

Chickens that are happy to drink again

The cows proved the most challenging to deal with and are most of why I spent three hours outside Monday choring. The first thing I did, was to get the cattle a new bale of hay. So, I rolled a bale down the hill and pushed it over on its side before cutting the bale wrap off and putting the bale ring around it. The bale they we eating on before they broke into the hay was 3/4 gone and was quite exposed to the wind. I then had to pop some sheep net out of the ground using a hammer and pry bar so the cattle could get back to their water and also make use of the outside sheep shelters, since the sheep were inside the building. 

Cattle moved to the south side of the building

Cattle in a more sheltered place

Cattle now making use of the outside sheep shelters

 Then I had to cut the cattle off from getting into my bales of hay. I started by setting up some temporary posts and running a temporary fence line. I had to take a cordless drill and make holes in the ground for each of the half dozen posts.

Temporary electric fence posts put in with the aid of a cordless drill

 I also had to open the cattle water. I love my Cobett waterer, but that was the worst ice I had ever seen on the thing. It was 4 inches thick where the cattle last drank from it and 6 inches on the other side of the waterer. It took several minutes of work with the hammer and pry bar, but I got it open and then the cows, who were impatiently waiting for me, started drinking.

Thick ice on the Cobett cattle water

The cows swarm the Cobett once the ice is off

Lastly, I had to deal with the little things that happen when you move livestock into an area you don't usually have them. I had to reconnect that section of fence to my electrified fence because I had cut the supply line a year or two back for some forgotten reason. The I found that several calves decided to escape through a gap in the the wood fence that I had always intended to close off. So, that project got completed  and the calves got rounded up and returned to the pasture, but not before I chased them around the house yard far longer then I would have liked given the temperature.

Former small gap in the fence that the calves decided to exploit

All and all it is good to be home. It is hard traveling with children and it is nice to work on getting them back into a routine. I think my Son is the happiest to be home since he is not nearly as outgoing as his sister. It could also be that he was tired of ridding around in the back seat of a mini van with his father for several days. 

Watching Daddy int he back of the mini van

I am looking forward to preschool opening up again and life retuning to normal,  but Hazel and I did enjoy a morning of playing with Duplo blocks together.  I will keep you posted as the weather moderates and I get a chance to tackle some farm projects that could use my attention. 

Showing Daddy the rolling Duplo tower

Rounding Out 2013

I figured an end of the year wrap-up was in order. I have been at home with both kids for the last week and it has not always been easy. The weather has been much colder then normal with one or two decent days each week. I avoid working with the kids outside most of the time since it has been so cold. My daughter has been helping me with chores and the neighbor's chores the past few mornings when Janice has been at work.

Working with Daddy Outside

Getting Water for the Neighbors Horses

Hauling Hay for a Crippled Calf

I did find some time to attack one of those nagging projects that have been lingering for way too long. I built a lean-to door for our lambing building. Janice talks about it some in her blog, but the thing to know is the older door was junk and I disliked it so much that burned it in late summer on one of the burn piles I had around at the time.  This was a way to force myself to find a long term solution.  I started by measuring the irregular opening and coming up with an approximation of what would fit. I then cut up all the wood and laid it out on the floor to make some adjustments, then I screwed it together with quite a few fasteners. The only thing I purchased specifically for the door was the single shed window, the rest of it is scrap lumber, hinges, hardware, and screws from project left overs and decommissioned chicken pens. The door took quite bit of finagling to get it relatively straight in the opening. With the aid of a reciprocating saw and adding quite a bit  of framing around the portal (mostly on the inside) it all turned out quite well. Janice and I are quite pleased with it, and even though it is a heavy door, it is still hung well enough that our daughter could maneuver it.

New Lean-to Door Laid Out

Front of the Lean-to Door Hung

Back of the Lean-to Door Hung

One of the largest expenses we have on the farm is hay. It is very stressful each year trying to procure enough hay at a price I can live with to feed the cattle herd. This year I found a guy about 40 miles away who was selling 25 bales at $50 a bale so I bought everything he had. Since then I have been hauling three bales at a time on a flat bed trailer that I traded some cattle for. I do really like having the flat bed trailer around, it is very handy and it was something that I wanted to get my hands on for some time. 

Hauling Hay Three Bales at a Time

Over at the new farm, our contractor finished rocking the driveway (54 tons later) and leveled out the building site for our future cattle shed/machinery building. I also met with MidAmerican Energy about bringing power into the site. It is not a cheap proposition (around $2500 a pole). After some finagling, I got the MidAmerican engineer down to putting in a single pole, but I had to remove two large mulberry trees. I was not against this as one was hollow and the other had a larger crack down the trunk. In the photo below, you can see some of the rock at the top of the drive that our contractor put down. You can also see the power pole in the distance that I had to clear a path to.

Top of the Now Rocked Driveway 

Cleared Path to the Electrical Pole 

Great Mass of cut-up Tree Debris 

The sun goes down very early right now, so I left this great big mess of tree debris from the two mulberries I cut down. Once we have working power on the site, we will be able to have the contractor put up the cattle shed/ machinery building that I mentioned earlier. We shall see how things go next year. We still have a long way to go. It is our goal and hope to be able to serve Thanksgiving dinner 2014 in our new house and have the farm fully functional as soon as we can. I want to wish our friends, family, and customers, the best of luck in 2014 and I hope to see you folks soon.

Big Machinery & Lots of Dirt Work

We have just made it through the storm that is our busiest week of the year on this farm.  After four deliveries in six days we are all ready for a break. Even my daughter said at our last delivery, "I don't want to deliver turkeys anymore." Along with deliveries, we have a contractor working on the new farm, and have had to bring the cows and sheep home from up the road because the weather has deteriorated sharply and stayed wintery.

About two weeks ago, I  recognized several realities. One, that I am going to be here on the old farm this winter. Two, that my new tractor was not up to the task of clearing the driveway and building site in a timely fashion (before December). Three, that we were going to need a contractor. So this means two things: that we had to find a contractor that would not break the bank and it means we will have to find hay to buy and have it brought to the old farm. I hired Tim Daugherty of Daugherty Construction out of Adel. He had done work on my Grandfather's place and I was impressed with how clean a job he did. I got to the site yesterday to continue with tree work and found a driveway waiting for me. That driveway is being rocked with a fabric base today.

Driveway Before

Driveway After

New Driveway from the Road

This driveway has been a giant pain. The revelation that a waterline was going to prevent our planned driveway from being a reality and negotiating with the county engineer's office took quite some time and energy. We had to go back and forth on whether or not it was even possible. Tim originally thought it would not work out, but I got him to come back and measure the site with an instrument. Turns out that it was really not that bad.  We are so glad it is done and we feel vindicated that our instincts were solid. Tim also cleared out the downed trees at the top of the hill and make a lane to the site we wanted to use for our house.

Before Looking into the Site From the Top of the Driveway

Driveway Toward the Future House Site

 Future House Site

I am eager to see the new farm later in the week, I am sure we will have more pictures. Tim has yet to clear out and level the area that the farm building will go on. Once he pushes the remaining fallen trees down to the pile, then he will take the leftover dirt from the driveway and level out the pad for the future garage. It is amazing how much bigger Tim's machinery is than my tractor. The bucket on his backhoe alone is as large as the entire operating station on my new tractor. It is cool to be around working large yellow iron. I am excited to see this project take a major step forward and stay tuned as we continue this crazy transition.

Family, Farm, & Life Status Report

Well so much for more frequent updates. Wow, have we been busy. I will try to bring you up to speed with life, family, the farm, and the new farm.

I am no longer working part-time for the federal government. I left my position with the Natural Resource Conservation Service at the end of September, before the government shutdown. My role with agency had shifted (wetland determinations, high erodible land determinations (HEL), Conservation Reserve Program monitoring,  and the development of conservation plans) from being one that I found fulfilling to one where portions of our authority and responsibility to make decisions had been stripped away and moved out of the hands of my office. The result of that shift, left my position much more of a paper-pushing office job with little to no creativity or authority. My family and farm needed me more then I needed to keep doing that job.

On our farm we have completed our 2013 production system. In the first two weeks in October, we processed almost 50 turkeys, 100 broiler chickens, 50 stew hens, and 9 lambs. We also sold/traded two cow-calf pairs and just got a commitment on another cow calf pair. At the same time, we have had 5 little calfs born and are busy bouncing around the pasture playing together. We had a catastrophic predator attack on our remaining hens costing us ten hens and all of our two roosters in one night. It was the perfect storm of combined raccoon and fox strikes, and the last gasp for one of our pasture pens that is now being disassembled. The remaining 24 hens that we have left have not been outside since, so the color of our yokes is not as rich as I like to see it right now. One the sales from, we have commitments on all of our whole chickens right now, almost all of our turkeys, and beef continues to fly out the door. Lamb will start moving out this week as we distribute to Ames and Pella. I am pleased with strong sales of our product, especially since it has been so long since we have had some of it available for sale.

Little calves dot the hillside

When I have not been working on finishing the production season, I have been working out at the new place. Janice found a home daycare within 5 miles of the new farm and it is working out well for my son. He likes his environment much quieter then his sister and is fairly content to play with himself. He is doing well there and I am very pleased with the arrangement.

The new farm is a huge task and we have a limited amount of time to get things done before winter.  I figure that we have about 6 weeks to build a complicated drive way, clear off the rest of the trees (building sites and driveway lane), and level out the area where the new building is going. I have all of the trees along the new driveway mostly cleared off, the fence row has beed removed, the trees where the house site is located have been felled, but not cut-up, and the orchard trees we were planning on moving have been moved. We also started digging the driveway from the road. I think the next step will be to work on the driveway front he top side of the site access and pull the hill up. The driveway will enter the site 20 feet and begin to curve to the left (east).  We have to be nearly at grade by the time we cross the rural water line, just four feet past the fence.

Birth of a driveway

Cleared path the driveway will take as it climbs the hill (left/east)

I still feel like the hardest part of this task may have been clearing the trees among the road and just in from the fence. I must have cut down cropped up and largely hand drug over 100 trees in September & October. The pile of logs for posts & fire wood alone is sizable not to mention the rest of the degree. I am excited that I feel like the most tedious work is done. We were held-up a bit because the tractor died on me. It ate up much of a work day to get the fuel filter removed and replaced, and get the air bleed and worked out of the fuel lines, but it got done. I am not mechanically inclined, so I was pretty frustrated at multiple points during that process and am glad it is behind me. 

Family life is pretty good. I know Janice and I would like to see more of each other. We have a date night coming up, yay. We both know what we are working for will pay dividends and we are willing to make that sacrifice. I have enjoyed getting to know my son better over the last three months. He is quite attached to me and travel together a lot. He sits right next to me in the old blue truck and we sometimes break into pica boo with his travel quilt or copy-cat games during travel. My daughter is growing up very quickly. Her vocabulary has increased and the structure of here sentences has grown more complex since she started preschool. She wants to do more things by herself and help out around the house. I feel good knowing that she is at a quality preschool that I like and trust. I try to enjoy the time we get together since she often gets home latter in the evening. 

Vacuuming the living room before a house showing

Play-time with the kids

All and all, we are hanging in there. I have delayed the purchase of hay, because I did not know where we were going to be through the winter, but it is looking more and more like we will likely stay where we are at, since we don't have our new facilities up and running and we have not sold our home yet. Stay tuned as we move forward. If you made it to the end of this, then you are a die hard and I will try not to go a whole month between posts for a while. Stay tuned.

Things I Want to Replicate on the New Farm

There are some things I feel like we got right on this farm, other things I feel like we got wrong, and many things we learned from. I wanted to post a bit on each of these thoughts and I figured I would start with something we did right.

When I look back at things we did here that I would like to replicate, I  immediately think of our water system. We fenced out our waterways and put in a well using the NRCS program EQIP. The well feeds into a pressure tank in our existing root cellar (Built September 1910). In the root cellar, all of our water comes together at a junction of valves. We have the capacity to run our livestock on either well water or rural water and the same is true for our house. Should we loose power for some time and the pressure tank become depleted, we can switch the livestock over to rural water. Should be decide we want to save a few dollars a month, we  can use the well water in the house. We have never used the valves, but they present us with options, and in farming, options are very valuable.

Root Celler Water System Junction

From the root cellar, out livestock watering system powers four hydrants and a year-round watering facility. It was not the cheapest option, but I have nothing but praise for our Cobett livestock waterer.
We have a LB model for handling two to three head at a time with a float valve system. When I was shopping around, I liked that these units do not require supplemental power to keep waterers from freezing. They use ground heat to keep the units from freezing and animal interaction to break the thin ice layer up that can form when it is very cold out.

Cobett Waterer (The Cow Calf Pair are for Sale)

Cobett with Large Chunks of Ice in it After Breaking the Layer

There are only two scenarios where I have had trouble with them. If it is very very cold out (say -20) then the cattle bed down for the night and don't touch it until morning. In that instance the thick ice layer might be difficult for them to remove. If it is also windy them sometimes the ice covers more then the opening on top and is a little more difficult to remove as well. The only other scenario I have encountered  difficulty in, is when the cattle break the ice in a small spot and drink the water down, dropping the water level in the Cobett and trapping the float valve in the ice and not letting it refill. Either way, I just make it a practice of checking the unit in the morning to make sure it is working find. It does come with an ice chisel, which I use to fix these situations easily. I would also suggest a small strainer to fish out ice chunks from the tank after the chiseling is done. It is not a big deal, and it is not a frequent concern, but it something to be ready for. Other then those situations, the unit has performed very well for me, needing absolutely no maintenance, except to occasionally clean junk and algae out the tank, as I never get around to putting the cover on it.

I will miss our Orchard. We have already set the gears in motion to replicate much of what we liked about our home here. I will miss our amazing peach tree (we have a pile of saved pits from), our service berries (50 already on order for next spring), and some of our other fruit trees (the smallest ones are coming with. I think we will be OK. Experience with grafting may also come in handy in replicating what we have here. We shall see how that goes.

I will miss much of our chicken building. I do especially like our brooder set-up, although it would have benefited from additional windows to help vent the heat and moisture better. With the new brooder, we use far fewer heat lamps, and the brooder requires many fewer adjustments.
I have already drawn up plans for the new chicken building, that we will aim to build next year at the new place.

Current Brooder (could use more windows)

We did make choices in our pasture seedings, including some native warm-season grasses in places. Some of them worked, and some did not. I can say, that I was very pleased with seeding in chicory and encouraging sweet clover in our pastures. Both of these plants are very deep rooted and can really pull moisture and minerals from great depths, making them great drought plants. Learning to work with our sandy soils has been very hard at times. You expectations are quite a bit lower then neighbors just a mile or two away. I have been very pleased with chicory especially. The cattle and sheep like it and it helps to control internal parasites, an all around win in my book.

Chicory in Bloom on our Scorched Pasture

I do love our Pella customers. Pella was a hard community to get started in, but word of mouth and time prevailed. Right now, Pella represents about 40 to 50% of our annual sales. My only concern about this is simply the limits on the size of the Pella market place for our product. I am sure there might be room to expand there, but the potential for expansion is much more limited then the west-side of Des Moines.  We will still be supplying our Pella customers with product in the future via our drop-off site.

That is much of what we did right around here. I am sure there are things I did not touch on. If you have things I did not hit on and you want me to comment on them, drop me a comment.

Runaway Livestock, & Showing the House

Well I skipped a week or two, but things were crazy around here and I am just getting back in the drivers seat after some livestock chaos. We had cattle get out three times in five days a week ago. That resulted in hours of work to recover each time. The first time they got out, they jumped a electric temperary fence that is serving as my boundary fence in that area. I got a call on Christmas Day last year from the neighboring landowner that he wanted to tear out the fence and cleanup the trees in the fence row. The fence was not great, but it would hold cattle. I agreed to having the section of fence cleared as long as the ground was left smooth so I could put a new fence on it, because I do not really have equipment to move dirt, other then a shovel. Let us just say that the fence row is anything but smooth, so I did not build fence there this spring. A gorge or channel was dug between our properties that has made it so I have no place to even put some of the posts on my property line.

Center of the Shot, Cow and Calf Return After Adventures Off-property

Anyway, the whole thing is a mess and my cattle, tired of warm-season grass pastures, decided corn and brushy pasture looked better. After tasting corn, they wanted to go back, so they blew out an old wooden gate from their new paddock to get get out the second time. Then they found a spot in the fence where a different neighbor cleared out brush along the fence, pushed the fence down, and put up a tree stand for deer hunting. After collecting all of my cattle for the last time, I was short one very pregnant cow. You guessed it, she had a calf. I tried many times to find them, but came up short or could only find the mother. Early this week, almost a week after she went missing, I walked her and the calf home. They joined the other two mothers who calved in the past week. This brings us, counting all of the calves & mothers, to 22 head now. That is a lot of mouths to feed.

All of this was going on amongst a backdrop of maintaining the rest of the farm and trying to get the place in show able condition. It has been exhausting and quit frustrating at times. We traded out our energizer from the Speedrite 2000 to the Kube 4000 and fences seem to have much more bite then they have had for a while. The Speedrite is a better energizer for wet conditions and the Kube is much better in dry conditions. We also stopped using the poly line as much with the cattle and have instead switched to net. I wanted them to herd to have a couple reasons to respect electricity and break them of the escaping habit.

Poultry are doing well and made it through the heat of last week. Broilers are growing rapidly even though the pastures are in terrible condition. They came through the heat well and they appear to be growing quite a bit faster since it has cooled off. Turkeys are starting to really grow quickly. All of them are eating a lot right now, this means a lot of money is getting dropped on feed. They will all go into the locker in early October, which will make my like much easier.

Broilers in what was the Morning Heat

Turkeys Seeking Shade

Janice and I have been working like crazy to get and then keep the house clean. We had the realtors walkthrough the house early this week, and we had a showing this morning. We will just have to see what happens. I would like to get this place sold sooner then later so we can move in late November after turkey distribution is behind us. We shall see what happens, stay tuned.

Kitchen

Living room

Sunroom