What a BOIR from the Feds

It's enough to make me a Libertarian. 

After having filed papers dutifully for years with our State Corporation Commission, I now understand that the Federal Crimes Enforcement Network, under threat of fines, will make LLC owners file even more paperwork. It's a free process but a tedious one, and the online interface is predictably awful in a manner only the Federal Government could design. It did not let me file because the portal would not let me click the final "I agree" button. With some efforts, I used method B and sent them a PDF filing.

Yes, it makes one wish--almost--for the giant axe coming in January for lots of Federal agencies. I just wish I could pick which ones to cut.

The madness for small farmers and other businesses comes from something called The Corporate Transparency Act. Sounds good on paper; we don't want firms hiding illegally obtained money. That said, large corporations can give unlimited campaign funds to candidates, anonymously, since the People United decision by our Supreme Court. I suppose that legal largesse does not extend to little LLCs.

A Texas court blocked implementation of the plan, noting that "The CTA, by its very language, does not regulate any issue of foreign affairs. It regulates a domestic issue: anonymous existence of companies registered to do business in a U.S. state and their potential conduct." I sighed in relief.

 But then our extension agency noted that the stay had been lifted, and we had to file. Yet on the Federal site, it said, essentially "oh, don't file yet until the court case gets decided. But you can file."

Then, my tax guy's office said it's been halted again!

So I filed anyhow and I got an official-looking certificate from Uncle Sam. Our little LLC is honest and not laundering money. We have nothing to hide from any state or Federal agency.

I'm hoping that one day the horrible People United decision will be reversed, and laws like the CTA struck down as unconstitutional blocks on interstate commerce.

Governments build good infrastructure. They protect us from foreign and (we'll see in 2025) domestic enemies. They protect, in theory, our natural spaces.They assure minimum common standards. I like the green cash money they print, too.

But making little farms like ours file above and beyond what the State of Virginia asks seems burdensome and meddling. Here's to The CTA getting struck down for good and little folks, not just huge corporations and billionaires, having some say again.

The New Planned Obsolescence

Obsolescence is such a nice word. I like how it rolls off my tongue. In practice, however, I despise the idea of obsolescence.  Today we associate it with phones that can no longer be updated (I miss my iPhone 4, thank you very much). It still functions and I use it as a camera for eBay listings. But it cannot connect to Verizon's network. It cannot be updated by Apple.

Phones are not refrigerators, however. The simpler ones are the only ones I will buy, and they do not require software updates. No smart appliances, ever, for me.

Once upon a time, Maytag had the reputation for simple, indestructible appliances. Hence their repairman, "the loneliest guy in the world," an ad-campaign worthy of Don Draper of Sterling-Cooper.

Whirlpool, a company whose appliances I have found cheaply made in recent years, bought Maytag and just last month, we paid the price for this acquisition. We'd done our homework after a lightning-strike burned up a high-tech Samsung refrigerator we owned. 

Maytag had high ratings, and I found a floor-model at a locally owned appliance dealer at a nice discount. It had a warranty. Yet in fewer than five years, our simple top-freezer model began to die a slow death. First, the drains would not work in the freezer, so water began to drip into the lower compartment. Then the cooling in the lower compartment stopped working, despite a service call from a locally owned and well-regarded repair shop.  

As the repairman told me, nothing save a Subzero may last more than a decade. Nothing. Companies build their appliances that way, using cheaper parts than they once did, to keep prices stable while getting us to buy replacements more often.

It was not always that way. My GE circulating fan has been in action since before I was born, and the 1940s Frigidaire in my parent's kitchen endured 30 years, until we moved out of the house. Yes, it had to be defrosted. Yes, it did not make ice save in those hard-to-employ metal trays.

Luddite I can be, I wonder what we have gained except a costly convenience and, on a more positive note, energy efficiency. I yearn for government action to punish firms for this wasteful practice, but that seems such a 20th-Century idea in our Cyberpunk present.

So we purchased a simple GE "ice box," a term I still like to use, for under $1000. No ice-maker, either. I am using plastic trays. I did purchase a countertop Frigidaire ice-maker from Amazon that does not require a water-line. It recycles ice that does not get used, melting and re-freezing it. So far we have yet to plug it in, because the GE fridge works well enough for Spring weather. Come Summer we'll need more ice.

I doubt that our new GE will last 30 years, which would also be about my own expiration date. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I am going to try...mightily...to only buy things that have a reputation for longevity.

The dumber the tool, the longer it lasts. Dumb as a hammer. Ever broken one of them?

2021 Fare-Thee-Wells and Thanks

 I said a year ago that for me, 2021 began with hope. I end it the same way, with hope and gratitude.

This blog soldiers along at a slow pace these days, as I've many obligations--writerly and otherwise--to fill my hours. But it would be remiss if I did not pause in the final hours of a gone year to give thanks. It makes a lot of sense, instead of drinking too much and then sounding a noise-maker at the stroke of midnight.  

So what am I thankful for, in the Tractorpunk scheme of things?

First, that my wife and I have the health to continue our DIY lives. In spite of a fall for her and arthritis for me, we still remain flexible, strong, and active. Today I moved 600 pounds of chicken feed into storage, after we made a trip to the factory where it is made in the Shenandoah Valley. I'm thankful we found that factory, to cut our operating costs for non-GMO chicken feed. Yes, we must raise egg prices in 2022, but not by the margin we feared, once inflation reared its ugly head.

I'm also thankful that my DIY skills continue to ramp up. I replaced the wire harnesses on our old John Deere M tractor and rebuilt the carburetor for the second time in a decade. With electronic ignition and all that includes, the 70-year-old beast still can mow the grass as well as when it was new. The work left the machine down for months and that delay had its frustrations, but in the end, I learned a lot. That's the satisfaction of much mechanical work. 

Beyond that, I'm finishing the year by putting old-fashioned wood weatherboard siding to replace some of the vinyl on our house. I planed it myself, from wood my brother-in-law sawed, from logs of trees my late father-in-law felled. From tree to board, in one family. We are not Amish (lots of power tools got employed) but there are few manual joys to rival making your own building materials. Eventually all the vinyl siding will be gone: cement board will replace some in hard-to-paint places, but where I have wood available, that will go up instead.

Third, I'm thankful that my wife could retire. So many of my friends cannot contemplate retiring, but our rather frugal lives and my day job, plus the miracle of compounded interest, let Nancy leave full-time teaching July 1. It has been a rough semester for her colleagues with COVID and a return to school of children not accustomed to sitting in a classroom for a few semesters. Now Nan can focus on her tasks with our LLC and do some part-time work for the school system, as I drift toward retirement in a few years. I'm planning to get a first-year writing textbook published, which is no easy task in this publishing market, but at the same time, I've published pieces in Style Weekly, back from the grave thanks to a purchase by Virginia Public Media. I've also written for Hemmings Daily and Modeling Madness (plastic models, not insane fashionistas).

Finally, I'm thankful for the locally owned businesses that have weathered the pandemic. Good Foods Grocery expanded and diversified its selection of foods, and it offers a quieter alternative to Ellwood Thompson's, another favorite. Several restaurants we love hung in despite the virus and labor shortages, and most of our favorites have been recently crowded, including the Athens Tavern, where we held our rehearsal dinner in 1992. We have a new local hardware store, too, to compete with Pleasants. Then we discovered a fabric store just down the street for projects, too. At Virginia Beach, we found The Barclay Cottage B&B where we found gracious hosts for a short getaway. We met a second farm-sitter, too, to help with the animals when we are away.

Not everything we love endured, of course. Our favorite wine store, Sonnys, shut its doors a few months ago, but that was more due to a greedy out-of-state landlord than anything else.Drive through Richmond, and you'd find more than few old businesses shuttered.

So we should count the losses, but at the same time, I'd start by counting what endures. There's a lot to fix, but we start where we can: locally.

Maybe that process can begin in 2022.  

Sunset image from Wikipedia

Garden Lessons, 2017

2017 was a year of many lessons, not all of them good. I don't know that my experiences will help others, but here's what happened.

Weather:

With a challenging summer, first hot and wet, then hot and arid, it was good that we had 1200 gallons of stored rain water. One tropical system moved west, only giving us perhaps half an inch of rain when we could have used two.  We tapped the 500 gallon cistern once, pulling about 200 gallons out after we'd been through another 300 in our smaller rain barrels.  We'll see about adding another 250 gallon tank next year, so we can water young trees as well as the garden.

Our harvest, save for white potatoes, was still very good. Frost arrived a month after the average date, so I was harvesting tomatoes and peppers later than ever. I save a window-ripened green tomato in the fridge now, in time for Thanksgiving.

Hot Peppers: 

Let's start with the bad news. Despite beds that grew into thickets of hot-pepper bushes, it's likely my last season growing them in bulk for a local restaurant. At the prices I can get per pound, we are better off giving up some of the garden for increasing our flock of laying hens. We just cannot meet demand, and if we even sold two more dozen per week, we'd make as much money as we do with the peppers.

The hours of work starting seeds in the greenhouse, transplanting to larger pots, then harvesting the peppers simply do not add up to economic sense. I've yet to tell our customer, but he may want a different source in any case: despite cross-pollinating our Thai Dragons with super-hot peppers, the heavy rain early on and the later-than-normal harvest may have made their heat content too low.  I watered deeply once per week when the dry weather came and stayed. That should not have been excessive, but the peppers lacked the bite we want.

I've learned an adage that my friend Dominic, at Dellicarpini Farms, told me: focus on crops that provide more pounds of harvest. Thai Peppers are small and difficult to harvest. I'll still grow a few for myself and to continue my cross-pollination ideas.

We also lost a verbal contract for a crop of super-hot Ghosts and Scorpions. The would-be buyer had told me he'd buy "every pepper I grew" the year before, then turned about to say he'd not need any at all. I sold a few pounds, but about 20 pounds froze on the plants and are now compost.

So next year several raised beds dedicated to peppers will go to other plants, as we rotate our garden and let the soil rest.  Two beds will be given up entirely, as we expand the chicken run to add a coop for a laying flock and our first rooster.

One good thing that came from the pepper crop was a method I learned for curbing weed growth. We rolled out 4 oz weed-block fabric from A.M. Leonard, and then we cut slits in the fabric for transplanting. It's labor-intensive at first, but in the long run we saved hours and hours weeding. The fabric gets rolled back in winter, so our chickens can scratch up the raised beds.

Tomatoes:

Okay, I gotta cage the beasts; next year it will be welded wire cages. We had good luck with Mortgage-Lifters, Long Keeper, Yellow Pear, and Sungold Cherry varieties. I saved seeds from the best plants; some of the Yellow Pears had wilt and others did not. So I chose wisely when saving seed for 2018.

Cucumbers:

We experimented with using Doctor Bronner's Eucalyptus soap (1 part to 9 parts water) on the plants weekly. We did not pickle this year, but we had slicers until the vines died in the heat of early July. Squash bugs were rare this year. I'm going to try the same treatment next year on our cukes and our squash; we did not put in any this year.

Our Lima Bean harvest was sufficient for the two of us, and there too I sprayed the Dr. Bronners a couple of times. It's cheap enough on the scale we grow.

Garlic:

While our multiplier onions only produced enough bulbs to replant this fall, we hope that next year we'll expand our crop enough to actually eat some!  I need to side-dress the onions a bit, as the bulbs were small.

Garlic, however, proved a real bonanza for us. I credit Ira Wallace's workshop from the 2016 Heritage Harvest Festival. She plants late, up to mid-November in prepared beds. We more than replaced our seed garlic this year, both hard-neck and soft-neck varieties.

I froze a lot of last year's crop, in March, that we stored in our root cellar. I put the peeled cloves in olive oil and froze that, in small tubs. We used that all summer for a weekly pesto dinner.

Greens:

These have been another ongoing success. We ate lettuce (Slow Bolt) into June, and I replanted with seeds (that variety plus Tennis Ball and Spotted Aleppo) in September. We are eating lettuce now that we put under a row cover.

Chard survived the summer, looking horrid and blasted, to feed us again in Fall. The freeze nipped it, but we keep cutting and cooking good leaves. Our mustard and collards, however, are thriving after the freeze and are very sweet. We put them in in the bed that had the garlic and onions until harvest.

Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes:

I stupidly planted the white potatoes in not enough soil, over a layer of weed block. We got four small tubers and ate them in one meal.

The Becca's Purple sweet potatoes, however, were amazing. In a raised bed I got nearly 60 pounds that will carry us through the winter. They are great weed-blockers, only needing attention when the drought got really bad or when Japanese Beetles really got after them. We handed picked the plants daily, and the crop shrugged off the pests.


Berries:

Our first year of jam! We had a nice early crop, and we'd have had more had I weeded more later. That is the plan next year. The plants draw critters, and I shot one groundhog in the patch, despite good fencing: the whistle-pig found a gap at the gate.

Rabbits also had fun in there, but with a scoped small-bore rifle I rid the garden of a few of them. Our livestock guardian dog got others, to judge by the skulls at the back of her run.

That, too, is nature. Everyone has to eat.

Our wild blackberries came in heavily. This winter I need to bushhog two thickets of old canes, so we'll get young canes and new fruit. We got enough as it was to freeze several pounds for winter.

So next year I'll put these lessons to work and see where 2018 take us all. In dark and difficult times, full of so many disappointments and tragedies in our nation, it's good to at least eat food you grow yourself.

Putting the Farmer Back in The Market

I cannot grow everything I eat, and since I do a lot of canning, I have to buy extra tomatoes, green peppers, and, some years, cucumbers. We usually get our own produce at a farmer's market. It can be  great bargain; I've snagged 25 lb. boxes of locally grown canning tomatoes for as little as $10, as the markets wind down.

Though you'd not think it from the crowded Saturdays around here, there's been some discussion at major newspapers that these are in decline nationally, and that bothers me for many reasons.

First, eating well should be more than a "lifestyle choice," as the author of the piece to which I've linked noted, when talking about the younger customers visiting the DuPont Circle market in DC. I don't want the less affluent to have to settle for less than the pouty fusspots who insist on nary a single worm-hole in their arugula.

Second, the "lifestyle" may not have a lot to do with cooking food.

The DuPont Market is a bustling place, but according to some of the vendors, the younger visitors seem more interested in the scene than in supporting local agriculture. They tend to buy prepared foods more than farmer-grown produce. That would be fine if the farmers could make a living; many are saying it's getting tougher. Treehugger.com gives many reasons for the decline.

Granted, I do see Millennials eating out, a lot, and I don't know too many of my students who cook, though I'm sure they are out there. I only really began to learn to cook in my last year of college, and my Middle-Eastern sauces in the 1980s were nowhere near as good as what I cooked all day long today, using my own tomatoes plus some farmers' market peppers.

It's more critical than ever for all of us to support local food, and I'm not sure the best venue is that artisanal and hip restaurant that buys up all the locality's micro-greens.  If you want to really know about your food, find the growers and then prepare the results yourself.

At the farmer's market you should chat with producers. Make sure, too, that they grew what they sell; resellers are getting more and more common, and it's something I don't like one bit. It dilutes the entire premise of a grower's market.  I'd argue that if a farmer cannot fill the table with fresh produce, then add prepared foods, dried herbs, jams and jellies. But make it all yourself.

It's now a question I ask at the market.  If I want to patronize a reseller, there's a nice old guy who runs a fruit stand near my university. The food is well selected and quite fresh. I've been buying melons from him for years.

Finally, the best way to appreciate a farmers' market is to learn how to cook.

Cooking is one of those essential skills we all need at some point. I'm no professional chef, but I'm a good cook. I can look into the refrigerator and canning shelves and produce dinner from leftovers. I can follow a recipe as I learn, too. If you claim you cannot cook, go out to the piles of used books at the thrift stores and pull down a copy of something basic, like The Joy of Cooking. Start with something basic, like meatloaf. I'm not kidding; when well prepared and paired with potatoes and a green salad, it's a time-machine to a simpler era.

Learn to can and preserve, too. Our grocery stores stock only three days worth of food. It would not take an Apocalypse to  make a lot of folks very, very hungry fast.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a few weeks' worth of produce in the cupboard, socked away against that next big hurricane or snowstorm?

After reading these articles about farmers' markets, I'm more determined than ever to buy more this year at market. Please join me.

DMCA Reversal that Helps the DIYer

Ironic, isn't it? At the very time of "Maker Fairs" and a renewed DIY culture, it takes Federal action to insure we can work on our own modern cars and tractors.

Glad to learn from Hemmings Daily's Terry Shea that the Federal Government has clarified the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to permit owners to work on their own cars.  I am not joking.  To crack the code of a modern computer-assisted vehicle--for the farm or the road--risked violating Federal law, because the code and many of the tools used were proprietary to the company making the original equipment.

John Deere apparently was among the firms fighting to keep the safeguards for their profits in place buy penalizing any customers who worked on equipment they owned. Shame on Deere. At one time, as with my 1950 M, the company deliberately designed all machinery so a small farmer could do any repairs that did not require a machine shop. I saw that on a friend's Farmall Super A as well, where we pulled the cam and replaced the cam gear with hand tools.

Modern computer-assisted systems make such tasks harder, but not out of reach of the enterprising DIYer. Go at it, friends. Check YouTube for how-to videos. I learned to reverse-flush the power-steering system on our Honda after the dealer told me doing so would run $120. NAPA had a sale on the Honda-only fluid at $3 per bottle, so for $12 and 30 minutes of my time (plus 15 more watching videos) I did the job myself.

I would be the first to say that we should not return to the engines of the 1950s. They ran dirtier and consumed fuel at rates that would make us stagger today. Car engines might last 50K miles before being shot. Yet at a time when our phones have more power than any early PC, we should be able to get diagnostic tools and connect them to our cars to repairs and other modification, including, yep, hot-rodding. I felt damned good after rebuilding my first carburetor.

There's a hunger for this out there. I see it at festivals and meetings. Perhaps we can blame Steve Jobs.

He helped to make many of us even more helpless, and in the age of mobile phones I'm actually seeing my students LESS able to write code, manipulate software, or fix hardware-software problems than their peers 10 years ago. Jobs, unlike Apple co-founder Wozniak, wanted enclosed boxes with proprietary hardware--damned well made and lovely hardware. The look of Apple speaks to me like the lines of a '67 Pontiac GTO or a current Audi coupe.

Maybe I'm shallow, but I buy cars that look fast and trucks that look like trucks, not toys.

Apple fanatic I am, mostly for the hackability of their UNIX-undperpinned OS and durable hardware, I should not be a critic. Yet Jobs never wanted ease-of-modification in his hardware. I've come to realize that it was an anomaly of the late 90s when he came back to Apple. My wife has owned two Mac desktops that have worked well for a total of 16 years. But I was able to update their hardware. I added Firewire to a "gumdrop" iMac in a lickable grape color that lasted us a solid six years until it could not run the newest Mac OS. A parent in Alaska bought it on eBay from me and his daughter continued to use it. I then replaced the beloved gumdrop with a G5 that lasted nearly a decade. I put a power supply in that second machine, using a unit from a mom-and-pop repairer in New Jersey, and sold the G5 for a handsome sum on eBay to a guy who was going to replace all the capacitors on the mother-board (my soldering skills are pretty good but not that good). It was near the end of the line for Macs that could be opened easily and upgraded. I'd still have that G5 and bought a new set of capacitors if the generation of computer ran a current operating system or applications.

Jobs' plans for his customers resulted in my being unable to hack my iPhone or sleek MacBook Pro easily. Though Nan's amazing new MacBook Air looks ready to last a long time (partly due to having a solid-state hard drive) it's as incomprehensible inside as our Mini Cooper's engine bay.

Microsoft is going the same route with Windows 10 and its alluring-looking Surface laptop, it seems. I do love the docking-station / keyboard aspect of Surface, something that steals a march on Apple's designs, yet I expect Microsoft to emulate Apple's model under the hood. Hacking Windows' Registry has, after all, always been far more daunting than getting deep into Apple's OS.

Making us consumers brings profits, and DIYers can be dangerous to the bottom line.

The allure of early PCs, the Apple II, and the Macs of the 90s-early 2000s was how one could open the cases and have fun tinkering. Given the DMCA changes, some upstart maker like Tesla will figure this out and make vehicles for tinkerers again. I'll be in line to buy one. For the small farmer, I'd say buy old equipment if your operation is small. Careful repairs and maintenance can keep the old stuff going nearly forever.

Heritage Harvest Festival 2015: What I Learned

This event at Monticello is one, like Maymont's Herbs Galore, that I look forward to for months. I only attended two classes this time, a free one on fermentation by Sandor Katz and a paid workshop with Lisa Kivirist (pictured above) and John D. Ivanko, authors of Homemade for Sale: How to Set Up And Market a Food Business From Your Home Kitchen. The Wisconsin couple has made a living by gradually building up a market for their processed foods. Along they way they became writers, relying upon their experience in marketing to effectively craft words and lobby politicians to change state laws that hurt small businesses.

They answered a question I had about amortizing equipment costs. I guess it surprised them that I'd spent so much already getting started, but my project does not involve merely canning a few cases of pickles in the kitchen or selling home-baked goods. To farm, I needed equipment to cultivate, protect, and water our first cash crop. The idea of selling some pickled peppers or honey have been there all along, and this is where the authors' advice is pure gold to a beginner.

States have gradually loosened laws for "Cottage Foods," though anyone trying to get raw milk will tell you how difficult regulations can be. Luckily, that's not in the works for us. At most, we'll sideline our honey, pickles, and a few other things to supplement our income when the field is not producing vegetables or herbs.

What craft brewing has done for the drinking landscape, Cottage Foods and the broader local-food movement could do to big agriculture, an industry that exacts a heavy toll on the soil, water, and diversity of food.  It may feed the world, but I've yet to be convinced that we could not feed ourselves in a more sustainable manner.

Sandor Katz has me happy that I've been fermenting food from my own soil; Kivirist and Ivanko make me proud that our little LLC has a business plan. As I felt last year, at Heritage Harvest 2015, I came away optimistic about a better world waiting to be born.

An actor portraying Thomas Jefferson strolled the grounds and talked to visitors. I didn't get a chance to ask Mr. Jefferson what he thought about today's local-food movement, but he was a fan of the American yeoman and our self-reliant streak. That philosophical stance, as much as his Deism or the founding of my alma mater, makes Jefferson one of my culture heroes, despite the contradictions and compromises of his personal and political life.

I think that he would approve of how entrepreneurs are taking on the established tyranny of factory food to bring commerce to our communities and variety to our pantries.

First Lessons in Commerce

Despite the happy looks on the farmhands' faces, it was a tough harvest at the start. With no pumpkins, we got no income from one customer.

Squash-bugs were a horror this year, and from 18 vines we harvested exactly 2 pumpkins. Only one went into the root shelter, while another one had a bad spot. I cut up the rest of it and froze it for our pumpkin soup or pies.

Lesson learned: to continue an organic regimen for squash and pumpkins in the garden, I'm going to have to start with insect netting over them and have diatomaceous earth down as soon as I put in seedlings.

Luckily, our little venture as an LLC has sold some cucumbers, lettuce, and now hot peppers. That said, even with these cash crops we'll not realize a profit this year. I must next year or will revert to "Hobby" status for IRS purposes. Thus I won't hire farmhands next year, my major expense, and do the picking myself.  My main helper does other work, anyway, on buildings here and helping to split wood, so he can be paid by me and not the LLC.

Next year will be interesting, however, as a new customer is about to open a produce stand just down the road. He's an Iranian with family who help him, and they'll sell produce from local farmers. He wants whatever we can provide.

It will be called "Garden of Eden," and I've high hopes for him and whatever I can contribute. The other lesson learned, then, is to have a couple of high-volume customers and diverse offerings. If the peppers had not come in so well, we'd hardly have any income for 2015.

Luckily, I still have a day job. For now.

30 Months of Lessons

It has been two and a half years since we began living here; three since we began taking care of this piece of rural land. I had no idea then what lessons I'd have learned, this far along. I was already somewhat handy and very Type-A about learning things that interest me. If something or someone does not interest me, I won't recall it or them. I'm bad at names that way.

What follows is not a bragging list but a taking stock. I've failed at most of these things too. Still, how much of this would I have learned had I sat before this screen and played video games? Obsessively checked others' Facebook profiles?

What really counts in life? Socrates said that only the examined life was worth living. I am not very social, so you can guess that I'd pick items on this list over more time with online "friends." Sometimes over seeing people I cherish face-to-face, when I'm on-task, a habit familiar to every successful academic.

Anyhow, see how much of this arcana of DIY life would be new to you:

Financial:

• Setting up an LLC and learning the basics of State and IRS rules
• Learning to scour Craig's List like a pro
• Honing my haggling skills with equipment suppliers, sellers of used gear, and repair shops. I will blame my Middle-Eastern heritage here for being tough when haggling.

Mechanical: 

• Cleaning points in a distributor
• Straining all gas and diesel through paint filters
• Knowing the difference between load needles and idle screws in a carburetor
• Learning how to set the gap on a spark plug
• Painting with an auto-paint gun
• Helping a friend tear down a tractor engine, replace a cam gear, and finally see how valves, tappets, and a cam dance together to make a big heavy machine move.

Garden:

• Watching the life-cycle of pests such as squash-bugs and beginning to interrupt it
• Keeping ground hogs and raccoons out of the garden.  Improving head-shots when these critters enter a trap. Live-trapping and safely releasing a skunk without being sprayed (skunk seemed to think it was a game and appeared to enjoy it)
•  Learning how to air-cure garlic and onions and store them in a root cellar
• Building that root cellar
• Living with black snakes (those great mousers) in every out building
• Installing 400' of dog-pen fence and an equal amount of wooden-post-and-wire garden fence, using a tractor-mounted post-hole digger
• Figuring out how to hand-bale hay and straw
• Continuing to avoid pesticides and herbicides (we still paint stumps of Tree of Paradise with Roundup and will spray our apple trees next year--once, when not in blossom--with Captan)
• Expanding out rainwater-collection system to 1200 gallons (and getting closer to a goal of 3000 gallons for the main garden).

Kitchen:

• Getting much more serious about canning. Mainstays now have grown from tomato sauce and pickles to include green beans,  apple sauce, and grape leaves
• Freezing peas, squash, butter beans, and blackberries with success
• Drying and saving seed from hot peppers and string beans.

Handyman:

• Cutting out areas of rotten wood and repairing with Bondo
• Planing a sticky door until it closes and looks good
• Building sag-free garden gates 6' tall by 8' wide
• Learning to use well a router and planer
• Figuring out what to reuse and what to toss with 10,000 square feet of barns and out buildings.
• Installing a hardwood floor of salvaged oak flooring tucked in a corner of the barn.

The next 30 months will bring more adventures, and I will return to this list to see what can be added.

Small Farms And 2015

Having just set up Beepasture Farms LLC, I do want 2015 to be the year of small agriculture. I've now a personal stake in it, as we move toward retirement from academic work and toward a "sideline income" from producing food without inputs of pesticides, herbicides, or petrochemical-based fertilizers.

Today is a watershed moment, as California's Proposition 2 bans some of the worst practices involved in the intensive rearing of caged animals. Americans have long been distanced from their food, and animal-welfare issues are only the visible aspect for an industrialized method of producing what we eat. I am as concerned with the invisible and slow effects of GMO crops; we do not know the long-term effects of trace amounts of herbicides that build up in our bodies from eating mass-market food. I suspect that in my remaining years, we'll find out and the results will not be pretty.

Writer Bill McKibben has urged America to become a nation of small-scale food producers again. We began that way. With our LLC I'm the only member, and it shields a producer from liability against his personal property. Only the assets of the LLC could be seized in court. It gives a member the flexibility to write off expenses, as long as the firm shows a profit at least every third year. A hobby, on the other hand, can only cancel income with expenses. It cannot show a loss. But mine is no hobby; it's a future small business and part of a much larger future for how we produce and eat food.

An LLC also provides a method to license with the state; some Libertarian friends disliked my doing that (it's not any of their darned business how I conduct my affairs, which should be a Libertarian principle, but I try to be cordial on Facebook). My incentive is licensing with the State Corporation Commission is to establish the firm for the long term. If I pay a few taxes now, it makes it easier to scale up to a larger operation when I begin to lease or buy more land for production nearby.

For now our horizon is small: 400 pounds of hot peppers for one restaurant in 2015 and a small annual profit after the loss shown for starting up in 2014. We ordered seeds, bought a post-hole digger for the tractor, and had several other incidental expenses related to fencing. It's a very hopeful start to the new year.

Mend It, Don't End It

I have been accused of being a Cheapass. Guilty as charged, but only if you mean my penchant for saving some stuff that might be of future use. There's a profound lesson in saving-and-mending for the next generation of tinkerers, hobby-farmers, and market gardeners.  In sum, a long way from the "ending is better than mending" in Huxley's Brave New World.

Long ago I dispensed with saving or trying to repair everything. It was a habit acquired from some Depression-Era friends and family members, and while it worked well for them in very hard times, today it induces madness when one cannot find a counter-top clear enough to do useful work. At times my urge to purge has gone too far: I once chucked, unknowingly, into a dumpster the air-cleaner for a '56 Chevy under restoration (this is my official confession). The damned thing looked like a flattened and filthy tin can, so "toss!" out it went.

Yet faced with an disposable present--who can recall returnable bottles?--I felt that I had to reuse things by upping my repair and restoration skills.

October 2014 was, most certainly, a month of successfully fixing stuff. The big project was disassembling, repairing, and repainting a John Deere M tractor, a piece of machinery that has given the family long and dutiful service since purchased new, in 1950. It saved my bacon in 2013, when our new John Deere had to go to the shop after a hydraulic line broke. The old M ran, but had some issues with the fuel system that I've repaired with replacement parts, learning how to flare a metal fuel line along the way.  It may still have a slow oil-leak around the engine, nothing fatal for a machine made to be serviced on the farm. Once I diagnose that, if anywhere leaks I even have extra (cork!) gaskets for the valve cover and oil pan, a dirty but rather simple job on such a simple engine.

Now I'm zeroing in on the final coats of paint for the cowl, nose, and fenders. The tractor will even get a shiny new gas cap and some factory-fresh decals. Along the way I taught myself how to use an auto-paint gun, including how to employ hardener and reducer in the paint. I've sanded out the blemishes using the same techniques I employ on 1/35 scale tanks, with Bondo in place of modeling putty. The results really "pop" and I'll feature the old machine in a future post.

Yet the tractor will be back next year, cutting grass along with its harder-working, younger stablemates who mow, skid logs, and dig ditches. That's typical for old gear, and I like that about the farm-equipment collectors. One rarely sees "trailer queens," as one does with show cars. Of course, getting the right finish on a tractor is far easier, after some paint chips, than on a Corvette. Keep it clean, put it up dry, and a machine or implement may be left to the next generation. I just pulled a rake-harrow out of the leaves after finding it. it will get a redo in the Spring, when I clean and repaint our plows and disk harrow.

As with cars, such old equipment teaches one the values that produced them. That's also true of an old GE electric fan I fixed. A machine from that time was meant to be mended and owners were considered to be smart enough to fill a small oil-cup containing a wick. When maintained, these things last down the eons. Newer technology is tricky, but help is usually a YouTube video away, as attested by helping with a starter motor in a friend's pickup and repairs to two left-for-dead lawnmowers.  It surprises me how simple and inexpensive many of these repairs can be.  In fact, these tasks bear some resemblance to growing one's own food, a task that many dream about yet do not attempt.

Yet why don't more of my peers do some of these DIY projects? I'd not be much of a Tractorpunk if I did not speculate.

First, there's a type of patience and intelligence that one must have, or acquire, when doing this work. Matthew Crawford, who is the husband of one of my colleagues, discusses it at length in his influential book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Everything in our 140-character culture, from our want-it-now, Huxleyan consumerism to broken political system appears to lead us to crave immediate gratification.  Yet the slow accumulation of mechanical and agricultural skills does not match any calendar but that of the seasons. This may be why so many young people I teach choose careers such as accounting and finance, chasing phantoms called money that are really no more than electrons dashing around the Internet and appearing as no more than glowing pixels on a computer display.

It may be that a new generations of farm-hacktivists, locovores, and old-gear fanatics can reverse the ethics of the Brave New World we're in. Matt Crawford's book helped show me that it would be possible again to recapture craft as meritorious, as or more meritorious than the more hands-off, but no less intellectual trades.

I like that idea; in the 70s we made progress against the tsunami of disposable culture and goods, fixed our motorcycles after reading Robert Pirsig. We slipped in the "Greed is Good" 80s, yet re-embarked on a quest for meaningful relationships to hard work, perhaps out of a half-acknowledged and almost spinal sense that our resources are either limited or come at an enormous cost to the biosphere. I still think there's time to prove Huxley wrong, and I'll be turning my wrenches and, I hope, teaching a few skills to a few young tractorpunks in the decades left to me.

And to Matt Crawford, I promise I've not tossed the three old motorcyles in a shipping container. We chatted about them LAST winter, but now that the snakes are hibernating again, they are ready, this winter, for you or your customers to mend.

A New Future, Visible in the Distance at Monticello

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was already fretting about the localized changes to the state's climate, brought on by the clear-cutting of forested lands between his home and the coast.  Jefferson describes hazier, more humid weather from what he recalled from his youth.  At his mountain home, the man could see far and, whatever the foibles and contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson recognized far ahead of his time the changes humanity can bring to the land that should sustain us.

I suspect that the former President, buried just beyond the lawns at Monticello, is proud to see the annual Heritage Harvest Festival take place on his land. My wife and I have been going for several years, and 2014 proved one of the finest so far. The classes ran a bit short; I'd prefer 90 minutes so the presenters have enough time, but I got to attend one free and two paid events.

Here are a few highlights for this Tractorpunk.

• Michael Levatino of Ted's Last Stand Farm (shown above) talked in detail about "The Sustainable Farm Lifestyle" for hobby farmers such as me or "sideliners" who make extra income, which is what I plan to be during retirement. I was impressed by the Levatinos' ability to find the right niche at their farmers' market, to learn the hard way the best practices for water use, weed control, and cool-season crops. Michael also alerted me to the free woodchips from tree companies. They work well in paths and build soil under the paths (that can be raked up onto raised beds on either side).
• Given my larger-than-usual Fall food garden, I was an avid attendee of Pam Dawling's workshop on Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables.  Pam's excellent book Sustainable Market Gardening has been on my shelf for over a year, and this season I am starting to apply its lessons to our small crop. Next year, we plan a business license and first sale to a restaurant, so Pam's will be indispensable advice. Her remarks on using row-covers and hoop houses at Twin Oaks Community for three-or-four season production came in VERY handy.
• Ken Bezilla of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange reinforced Pam's lessons and added more tips that I plan to use this year. He focused a free workshop on "Fall & Winter Vegetable Gardening," and, like Pam, discussed the cold-hardiness of various crops. I'm already thinking of ordering my big batch of spring seeds from these folks.

What I'm getting from these festivals is nothing less than the birth of a sustainability movement to bring local food and best practices to every corner of our state, a future beyond the Monsanto and Ortho hegemony of sterile seeds and pesticides. A future where local growers and consumers put as much back into the land as they take from it. In a time of accelerating climate change, such efforts may be too little, even doomed. Yet they come not a moment too soon.

Jefferson would be proud of another revolution, this time one fought with muskmelons not muskets, brassicas not bayonets, being dreamed up at Monticello.

Sustainable, Chemical-Free Christmas Trees?

Rural landowners face a big dilemma when deciding to earn money from the land. First, there is scale: one must have enough land in production to earn one more than a pittance. I hope, with some pasture nearby, to eventually raise Christmas trees without any herbicides or pesticides. My plan would be to employ Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices, as we do in our garden, mow for weeds, and hand shear trees each year properly until we harvest them.

As I read up on these concepts, and talk to a few local vendors who might buy my trees in a decade, I look no further than our farm garden for some advice on how to manage some of this.

We loaned much of our garden this summer out for an ongoing experiment by a tenant gardener, Dominic, who runs delli Carpini Farm. Other than feeding bugs to our chickens and applying diatomaceous earth to some plants, Dom has not been invasive in his practices. He uses organic fertilizers for top dressing, hand weeds, works the soil with manure, limestone, and fireplace ash, and hand digs most of his beds. Only one bed, never broken before, got the plow and harrow treatment by me. We both dislike that, but my own belief is "plow or till once" to get the weeds gone, then work small plots by hand after. In our sauna of a climate, it is tough to do otherwise.

Right now, the experiment has also showed him and me that being sensitive to the market and finding a niche crop helps.  For next year, if the weather holds, he is thinking of more cantaloupes and fewer tomatoes. After all, in Central VA, everyone grows tomatoes. Local melons, while not exactly rare, are harder to find and his first sales showed that these easily sell out. I will add hot peppers to the mix. Very few growers here have certain varieties I know will sell out at the farmer's markets.

I am considering something similar for trees, but I will have to identify varieties popular around here and that grow well in our climate. I love Scot's Pine but Jean English's article from Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners shows how relentlessly the market determines things. Scots Pines, also a favorite of the author, did not sell because the needles are too prickly for most consumers. Then the question becomes, what trees thrive here and will survive enough shaping to give the iconic (and artificial) conical shape that modern consumers expect?

Our great-grandparents were happy with a "natural" tree, open branches and all. Perhaps in the future, in a new era of energy scarcity, we will be again. Yet I cannot grow that tree for a profit. So the research begins as I talk to local merchants and read more from those in the business.

Because if we have to spray poisons, the deal is just off.