Save Your Farm: Questioning Promises to Lease or Buy Your Land

This post has some urgency. I can't think of everything but it provides a start.

I want to caution my neighbors (and others who stumbled upon this post) about the dubious promises being made to rural landowners. If one needs the money and decides to sell or lease land, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First some background. Virginians across the political spectrum have spoken out against the Valley Link Project, a proposed new high-tension power line that would cut through Central Virginia to power data centers. Locally, we are in a legal fight to stop a hyperscaler from building 12 data centers on 900 acres of rural land formerly zoned agricultural.

These are important battles to win. I'm not opposed to AI per se; my other work includes teaching a class on AI and writing and am co-editing both a special issue of an academic journal about AI and peer-tutoring as well as a forthcoming book about AI and the teaching and tutoring of writing. My work with AI in education (see my other blog) has led me to learn quite a bit about the AI industry, its financing, and its use of land. Right now we have a Wild-West approach to this industry and its buildout. I suspect a crash of the 2008 sort is brewing. But by then, a lot of good rural land will have been ruined for decades.

So now my mailbox (not to mention my in-box) is filled with tempting offers to lease or sell some of our unused land to companies putting energy-storage faculties there. I have blocked hundreds of phone numbers from these firms, too. 

As I learned in a workshop on industrial solar-power farms last year, there are many caveats in contracts that turn a farm-field (or second-growth forest) into a solar farm. The same would apply to energy-storage facilities. Here's what to look for:

• If you sell land, can you get legally binding assurances as to how the land would be used? 
• At the end of a lease, will the soil on your land be returned to its "prior state" fully? One brochure promises that. What exactly does that mean? All footings, conduit, and other below-ground materials removed? Soil cultivated and sown with cover crop? Trees replanted? Which sorts of trees?
  
• What happens when a firm sells the lease? This has left some land-owners high and dry when the terms of a lease do not convey to the new owner. Solar farms change ownership frequently, I discovered. I see no reason that battery-storage would not, too.
• What remedies will you have in court if the lease-holder violates the terms of the lease?  
• How safe is an energy-storage facility? How often do they catch fire? If so, will it cause a forest fire near you? How susceptible is it to vandalism?
• Will the company show you other projects? They should take you to several and you should be able to talk to the owners of the property without hindrance from the lease-holders. 
• If the company needs water, where will it come from? Your aquifer or will they bring in their own water? 
• Will there be emissions? That's unlikely from energy-storage, but you should ask about any generators that may run in the event of power failures. If so, how often will they test these diesel-powered motors?

Valley Link and these land-lease companies couch their advertisements with images of solar panels and windmills. I'm not so sure of their environmental credentials. When one firm noted that we could lease wetlands to them, I know the ecosystems on which our farmland depends could be at risk, as well as our ground water and and soil health.

Say no if you can, "maybe but I need proof in a legal document" if you must lease. And get a lawyer to check the contract for you. Long-term thinking here may save us from some long-term damage to our health and the land.

"Call Some Guy!" It Depends

I've not posted since August because of other writing gigs and deadlines, as well as some much-needed DIY work. 

I've written here, a decade ago, about the fallacy of self-sufficiency; even Thoreau had his mom bring him pies. I love pie. That fact does not diminish Thoreau's genius at Walden.

Instead of rugged individualism, I side with self-reliance. Two recent projects demonstrated when you need a professional, as well as when professionals are feeding you a load of expensive hogwash.

When I Did It Myself

Our HVAC firm, which I will not name, told us that our system at the rental property needed over $1500 in upgrades. Alternately, we might buy a new $20,000 system. Easy financing! This is how these firms suck in folks without DIY skills. This company used to be small, but as they got bigger and bigger, they appear to have become greedy and corporate.

The upgrades included $500 for a UV light to kill mold (which I could not find), new pipe insulation, and a $1000 fan motor on the outside unit. Mind you, the rental is owned by (thanks to my nephew Mike Ryan) "Uncle Cheapass." I told the HVAC firm "um, let me look into this" and found out that I could replace the fan motor for $90 myself. Amazon had a replacement to my door in a few days.

 

My philosophy on repairs is simple: if it is something that might kill me, I "call some guy." The AC unit could fry me like a fritter, but it's easy to turn off the current, so I did. And though I sheared off a cheap Chinese bolt-head while replacing the motor, my years of experience in breaking things paid off. In half an hour, including travel time, I had a threaded stainless-steel rod to replace the sheared bolt, from right down the street at Pleasants Hardware. Cost for the rod and a bunch of stainless fasteners? $10. I put the motor in, checking the wires from the old motor carefully before reconnecting anything. 

Guess what? the HVAC system ran like a champ when reconnected. $900 bucks saved. And the insulation the HVAC firm quoted me? I can do that for $10, instead of $150.

Uncle Cheapass!

When I Call Some Guy

My brother-in-law Joe and I have felled some huge trees. He's good at it and the earth shakes when the tree falls, right where Joe wants it.

A dying 60' Red Cedar, however, was another matter. it was on a steep slope between two farm buildings! It had been in decline for several years, when a Davey-Tree arborist told us to remove it before the fungal disease it carried infected our other huge cedars.

Joe needs cedar for making fence boards at his beach place, and he owns a saw mill. Despite that motivation, in his usual taciturn manner he said "gonna be tough" as he inspected the tree. I envisioned felling the tree onto a building, so I answered "I got a guy who does great work" and called Braxton that day.

Braxton has forestry training. I met him when helping a friend cut up a giant red oak. We chatted over a fence and I got his card. Since then he's done a few jobs for me. For the cedar, he gave us a tremendous estimate: $800 to fell the tree, plus trim up a Maple and fell 3 dead Hemlocks in our power lines. He can climb with a saw, something I would never do. 

The catch for most homeowners? I'd cut up the fallen trees, after Braxton got them into 8' logs. No worries for my big-dog Husqvarna saw, after nearly 30 years running a chainsaw. 

Braxton even got me a face cord of seasoned White Oak in exchange for an old boat trailer that he's going to convert to a log trailer for his firewood business. I think I found another Distributist Tractorpunk. 

The brush on the ground? Joe owns a highway-department-grade wood chipper (let the Fargo jokes run wild, you betcha) that we'd use on limbs and other brush. He'd get the cedar logs. The Hemlock would go in the wood stove. 

I have heeded the lessons learned since 2012, when this adventure began. One can be self-reliant to a point. But when death might be the option? Call some guy!  

Know your limits, but when it comes to home repairs, be wary of big-company estimates. I was talking cars with a dude in Pleasants the other day. His brother owns a perfect Pontiac GTO (a Holy Grail for me). The guy owns a small HVAC firm. I'm in the market for a new, smaller firm to do our annual maintenance. I may not get a GTO out of the deal, but I may get some honesty about repairs.

 

When I Put Down a Book Now

I am not sure which blog this post merits. The topic concerns a YA science-fiction trilogy I dropped half-way through its second book. Yet the topic here is more about how we choose to spend our time, our slow, curated time. So I think the rural-life blog is the place.

A student recommended it, and I really enjoyed the first book of the Arc of the Scythe books. The first I found fresh: instead of the typical YA dystopia, we get a flawed utopia, a perfect world of immortal humans overseen by a benevolent and sentient AI, The Thunderhead. It's a place without war, poverty, or serious crimes. If you become "deadish" you can be brought back in most cases. Climate change has been solved. 

 For SF that would be a boring concept, and a good novel needs tension, so we have the Scythes, a secretive order beyond The Thunderhead's power, each of them tasked to "Glean" 200 people per year. This, in theory, reduces human population and also introduces uncertainty into a perfect world. 

I loved the concept. That said, I put down the second book unfinished. Reading the plot of it and the final volume proved interesting, but not enough to continue. Why?

Lately, as I enter my last 30 years on this rock, I decided to say "NO" loudly to most books, movies, or TV that people say I simply must experience. I don't get as many of these "must do" orders nowadays about books; in fact, too many friends have stopped reading books and that horrifies me.

Frankly, a good deal of what does get recommended bores me. Besides, I'm less interested in fiction now and more interested in knowing where we came from, who we were, and why we ended up the way we did. Thus, I read more histories and biographies of an academic and not popular sort. I've books on tap about the financial struggles of Mark Twain, the journal of Sir Ernest Shackleton (having read Endurance I want the man's own words), and works about America's Founding Fathers.

Yet I do continue to read fiction, including some SF. I'm in the midst of Ursula K. LeGuin's brilliant novella "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" It's as fantastical  as the Scythe books: a child awakens from the crash of a small plane to find herself in the company of Native-American animal spirits who pose as human beings. The characters, however, are far from flat and their motives are not fully explained (a typical narrative device that annoys me about a good deal of YA I've read). 

Other fiction I've read recently has been by masters of concealment: Kazuo Ishiguro and Naguib Mahfouz. More Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (some of which I'll re-read) await me. I cannot wait to savor Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop again; it's one of my all-time favorite novels.

My remaining years are too short to read all the books I want. If I manage one a month for the next 30 years, that's only 360 books. So it's time to choose wisely. No more fluff or formulaic stories.

What draws me to reading? The desire to learn first, or enter a fictional world where I feel completely immersed yet gets populated by characters I care about. That's where the Scythe books failed me totally. I felt no emotional connection to the good characters or the rather flat evil ones. An author can pull something off amazing by crafting a villain we find interesting. Some bestsellers do that, as with All the Light We Cannot See.

Compared to A Pale View of Hills or Midaq Alley, so many modern novels of a popular sort are like eating fast food instead of having a slow, curated feast. No more please.

 

Some Sad Thoughts About Using Roundup (And Why I Do)

A piece about weeds appeared in the New York Times recently and readers erupted when the article's author mentioned the usefulness of Roundup. Granted, many of the respondents are not small farmers; they only have to deal with pests like poison ivy on a quarter-acre lot. 

 Our fence-lines are full of the pesky plant, and we are taking over 1000' feet of fence and growing. That's small by most small-farm standards. Then we have invasive vines and other plants that become "Copperhead Road" in breeding season. That means getting things done before 8am many mornings. We work hard to keep the fences clear. Glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup keep them that way for a few years, when applied correctly.

Beekeeping was long a concern for us as we battled weeds in the fences; we are winding that down because the summers are simply too hot and the miticides too potent to make us want to work hives in July and August. We'll keep our gear but our last hives will go to a younger beekeeper. For native pollinators we continue to plant for them, and our limited use of herbicide does not occur on plants they frequent.

As for the weeds, Hot water and other organic solutions won't work. A burning torch would, but not if it starts a wildfire. Reluctantly, I began to apply Roundup as directed on the bottle of concentrate, spraying the plants early in the day when the wind is still. 

I'd welcome other solutions that work on the scale of a small farm. Our extension agency was NO help, a biologist suggesting we spray a field we want for native plants with $10,000 worth of Roundup to kill everything and start anew. It would get rid of invasive Stilt-Grass all right, but the environmental and monetary costs are beyond our desire. Instead, we'll bring in Mountain Mint and other plants that stifle the invasive.

 And so it goes in strange times, ones likely to get stranger in years to come.

Image: publicdomainpictures.net 

Weeds And My "Carboard Hack"

One day a former neighbor came by to help with something. He said "I saw you out front weeding around your trees. I like your cardboard hack!" In short, I was putting broken-down boxes around our plantings and covering them with mulch.

Experienced gardeners know this trick, but if you don't, here are some pointers I learned. I did this because 1) I have a lot of Chewy boxes delivered 2) I'm a cheapskate and 3) It saves work.

Here are the basics:

1. break down your large cardboard boxes and remove as much packing tape as possible. Don't fret if you miss some. It will come up to the top of the soil later and you can dispose of it.
2. One layer of cardboard works great. If you have wind, weigh down the corners with old bricks or stones until you have the mulch on.
   
3. Spread your mulch of choice. For ornamental plants up front, that means pine-bark mulch. In the garden? Straw, hay we cut, even dried-out weeds that have not set seed.
4. We go a few inches deep in mulch. Here's an area we covered up a bit late, after the weeds had gotten really tall.

This system really cuts weeding in our humid, hot, and too often like this month, smoky summers. You can safely go in and weed around the cleared area. Copperheads often rest in tall grass and weeds near mating season (August in our part of the world). So bring a hoe to check the area first.

The cardboard will be saturated with the first rain and in time becomes permeable. It cools the soil under it and retains moisture. You can get clever and arrange the pieces to channel water into row-crops and other plantings. I just use it to give me paths that are weed-free, so I don't step on a Copperhead. Here's an ideal finished area.

 In the cool months, or when the garden goes fallow, we let in the chickens. They demolish mulch and cardboard in a few days, eat any remaining bits of plants, and they hunt for bugs. I don't even have to clean up. Any leftover tiny cardboard scraps, save for stray packing tape, disappear after 8 months or so. 

You can find expensive and labor-intensive alternatives. Weed-block fabric works fine for a year, but we'll never use it again. Wire-grass and some other invasive weeds set their runners into the fabric, locking it in place. I had to use a reciprocating saw to cut it out. Black plastic is not permeable but it does block weeds. We have used it in a few spots and covered it with gravel. 

Cardboard does not have the problems outlined above. Give it a go, and save yourself a recycling trip in the process.

 

 

And Just When It is Ready for the Scrap Heap...

I wrote earlier this year about how badly a GE refrigerator had behaved. We were on the cusp of buying a new Bosch refrigerator when, suddenly, the old unit stopped leaking water into the lower compartment.

It remains a mystery. There is a device called an evaporator coil that I'd considered replacing; it's an easy job for that appliance, within the reach of anyone with a screwdriver and some patience.  Perhaps--a big perhaps--the evaporator began to work normally again. 

Rather than throw $150 at the old icebox, we did throw $60 in its direction to replace the utterly cheap plastic holder for the two produce drawers. This supports a piece of tempered glass which serves as the machine's bottom shelf. It had cracked across in several places.

I love shopping locally, which is how I got the door gasket for the GE before; this too, may have fixed the problem. But when I called the out-of-state company that bought out our local parts provider, they quoted me a cost higher than GE would charge to sell me the shelf-holder directly. I told them this politely, and looked elsewhere, as I'd use two gallons of gas to pick the part up.

I was already looking at Amazon, where I got the OEM GE part cheaper still, with free delivery. It's in the refrigerator today.

We will use the money we saved to install another garage-door opener, as my wife can struggle with the large commercial doors we have on our building. We have one opener that we got fixed for free, and the company was ready to install another but the German supplier's parts have doubled because of the stupid tariffs from Washington.  We found a US-built option that is not as fancy, which is fine, but reported to be durable and comes with a warranty.

Anything but the planned obsolescence we see in modern appliances, particularly those built in the US or sold by US firms. The not-very-old GE hums on, meanwhile.

Image: Creative-Commons license, spares-direct-oldham.co.uk 

Time for Aesthetics

 

We don't live by bread alone, and most people I know don't live to work, either, but some jobs make leisure more pleasant.
 

We began our farm adventure in late 2012, and we spent a large sum of money and quite a bit of time renovating the farmhouse to look and feel like us, while retaining the characteristics that made it charming as the childhood home of my wife. The next several years saw us put in a fenced garden, planting shade trees and ornamental plants between us and a busy road, keeping bees, raisng chickens, adopting and working with livestock dogs. We've been here long enough to bury two beloved dogs and two house cats. We opened new pasturage and began managing a field my in-laws own, across the street from us. We repainted the entire house once and most of the out-buildings while building an equipment run-in. We continue to rid our property of scrap metal and other useful salvage.

That's only part of 12+ years work, but finally, and after much learning, we began to make things pretty in the areas where visitors most often want to visit, our garden and hen-yard. Little children love this part of their trip to our end of the county.

The fences need maintaining every year, but after several years, the old home-made gates needed re-hanging. I found that the strap hinges typically used for attaching gates to posts begin with a good deal of "play" and slowly acquire more, until we and our farm-sitter struggle to open them.

 While I've gotten more skilled at building gates, I discovered that I'd overbuilt mine. When it came time to re-hang them, I was able to shed some of the supporting boards on the biggest gate, replacing them with corner braces. And new hinges that are made for posts got the gates to hang true for a few more years.

 Then, it got to be time to finally add visual interests to our garden, beyond the chickens themselves who patrol the paths and a few pieces of statuary.  I used a solid-color penetrating stain I've discussed here before to add a vibrant barn-red to our center gate. The gates to the dog-run got stained a bluish green that I used simply because I had a can and wanted to use it up.  Some inner gates are getting the barn-red treatment as well. Staining the wood appears to deter carpenter bees and makes the wood hold up longer, overall.

I do not buy into the old-timers' maxim that if you are not working until you exhaust yourself, you are "piddling," and that includes painting for lots of old guys. 

The spaces we inhabit should look good if we can afford the time and money to do so. Staining and re-hanging gates cost little money and time. The reward? At sunset,  you look at the garden and feel more inspired. An wooden picnic table will be next.

Art museums always make me feel better about the human race. I can't fix our species but I can make my own corner of the world more pleasing to the eyes of all who stop by.

 Happy gardening this year. The corn is already knee-high!