Tag: Farm

Spring is Coming: Dust Off Your Dollar Bills

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

Last week, I had to set up a booth at a farming conference. It was my first time in a den of vice–well, technically, my second. The day before, I had gone to the wrong den of vice, thinking it was the right den of vice. 

“I’m here to check in for the conference,” I said. “My name is Stephen Bishop.”

“Conference?” the front desk clerk asked. “I don’t think we have any conferences booked for this weekend.” 

“This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, right? 

“Yes, it is, but we don’t have any conferences scheduled. Do you remember the address for your conference?” 

“I think it was like 777 Casino Drive.” 

“I’m sorry. This happens all the time, but you’re at the wrong casino. This is Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Murphy at 777 Casino Parkway. You need to be at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Cherokee, which is 777 Casino Drive.  It’s about an hour away, back through the gorge.”

I can tell you as someone who has traversed the gorge, in different directions on the same evening, that nightfall imbues all the normal hazards–falling rocks, blind curves, and the raging Nantahala River running beside the road–with a slightly menacing sense of abject terror. You’d think not being able to see the hazards might reduce the sensation, but it does not. 

The correct casino was many scales of magnitude larger than the incorrect casino. And, much to my surprise, my room was big and clean and nicely decorated, the service was outstanding, and the food wasn’t half bad–it’s almost as if they wanted you to stay awhile. I ate twice at Gordon Ramsay’s food court, and his fish and chips and street tacos were quite scrumptious. I doubt Gordon even knows he has a food court in Cherokee, North Carolina, but who knows, maybe he was slaving away in the back?

Admittedly, my only other point of reference for gambling facilities dates back to my childhood. Back then, video poker parlors were everywhere in South Carolina, kinda like Dollar Generals nowadays. The parlors were about the same size as Dollar Generals, but they had the eye-catching design aesthetic of a bouncy house. Parlors were often super concentrated on the state line so North Carolinians (living in an uppity state where politicians prohibited gambling) could easily cross over the line and try their luck at games of chance. Usually, right next to the parlors were fireworks stands. In South Carolina, you could buy the big stuff, like rockets with warning labels about downing satellites. If you happened to win the jackpot, you could just walk next door and spend all your winnings on an arsenal of pyrotechnics. I believe economists call this “burn-it-up economics.” 

Surprisingly, most farmers seemed to be in good spirits. Nobody won the jackpot that I know of, but spring is coming. In the spring, despite the odds, farmers always think this could be the year–the year of great weather, bumper crops, and premium prices. Six months later, we all wonder if we lit our money on fire, but that’s farming. 

But maybe, just maybe, this could be my lucky year. If I hit profitability, I will inevitably spend it all on more farming stuff, which is better than spending it on rockets, right?

From Conception to Cow on a Billboard

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

I’m not sure exactly at which meeting the idea was hatched, but I know who hatched it: Myron.

I first met Myron years ago at an Ag Advisory Board meeting. Our county has a Farmland Preservation Ordinance, which is mostly a feel-good ordinance meant to recognize farms in the county, but the ordinance also created a seven member Ag Advisory Board whose purpose is to advise county commissioners on issues pertaining to cows and corn and such. Back then, one of my job responsibilities was to be the staff liaison for the Ag Advisory Board. Liaison is a high falutin word for complaint herder. 

Some farmers could be pretty bitter and acidic in their complaints (who can blame them), but Myron never took that approach. He was more of a positive lamentor. “It’s a comin’,” Myron would tell me, “maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. We cain’t do nothing but try to slow it down.” 

The “it” he referred to was development, the bogeyman of farmers in North Carolina. Mryon has indeed lived long enough to see another surge of widespread farmland loss and the subsequent loss of farms and farmers in the county, especially in the last five years due to our proximity to Charlotte. People are now moving to the rural ring of counties outside of Charlotte. The only thing popping up faster than housing developments here are fire ant hills, and the latter are probably better constructed. 

But when agriculture depends on global markets and when rampant development is a response to a national shortage for affordable housing, what can you do at a local level to make a large scale difference, or any difference? 

A lost cause has never stopped Myron. At a board meeting, Myron hatched a new idea. “I was a thinkin,” Myron said, “it’s a shame our community college doesn’t have an ag degree.” 

That thought grew into a mission for our Ag Advisory Board. Three out of our four high schools in the county have ag programs, so the board got proactive and surveyed the local high school ag students to gauge interest in continuing their ag education at the community college. Armed with statistics, the board invited a college administrator to attend an Ag Advisory Board meeting, which may have been a culture shock for the ultra professional and sophisticated Dean of Academic Affairs, but she returned time and time again and helped guide the board through the process and red tape of creating a new degree and the board helped guide her on what classes might be most applicable and beneficial for students in the county. 

Three years later, after many meetings, the Cleveland Community College Animal Science degree was officially hatched and the college unveiled a billboard advertising the program. One board member (there is always one) was upset because the billboard featured a holstein instead of an angus cow. 

“Fiddle sticks,” Myron said, “I don’t care if it’s a longhorn, there’s are cows on a billboard. We ought to be happy about that.”

The college then hired a bright young go-getter to build the program, and she has done a great job of increasing enrollment every year. I’ve even taught a few classes and have enjoyed passing along my extensive knowledge of what not to do when it comes to farming. This semester, I’m teaching basic farm maintenance–and my primary learning objective is for students to learn how to maintain farm stuff while also maintaining all ten fingers.

“All you can do is try,” Myron likes to say. Indeed, you never know what can happen when one person starts thinking and a group of people start trying. In the grand scheme of things, the creation of an ag degree at a community college may not seem like much, but it’s not nothing. It has already made a difference–one of the first graduates from the program now works down the hall from me in the Extension office.

Here is a great video about Myron that highlights his love devotion to farmland preservation. I make an appearance on the tailgate.

Boy Rides Again

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

“I bet you can’t run over Dad,” my wife said, sacrificing me.

Earlier in the day, we had taken Thomas to the park to practice riding his bike. It was a beautiful winter day, warm enough that you didn’t need a coat, and since school was out for Christmas break, the park was full of moral support. 

“You’ve got this!” said a man walking his dog, as we pleaded with Thomas to try riding his bike one more time. I’m not exactly sure to whom the man was directing his comment, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“My helmet is too itchy! This is too hard! I don’t like bikes!” Thomas lamented. 

Santa Clause brought Thomas a “big boy” bike with no training wheels, and we thought it would be the centerpiece of his Christmas, but it quickly became the centerpiece of parent-child conflict. Thomas barely showed any interest in the bike, preferring his toy monster trucks and Legos. We had hoped taking him to the park would give him a chance to focus on the bike, but mostly he just wanted to join the other kids on the playground. 

“You have to make one loop around the park on your bike before you can go play on the playground,” we said, not realizing that we had just committed ourselves to a thirty minute journey that felt one second short of eternity. So it is no wonder when we got home that day, when my wife desperately challenged Thomas to run me over in the yard, that he finally straddled the seat with a sense of determination on his face–and grinned. At the very least, this was progress. An hour or so earlier at the park, he was kicking the bike in frustration and we were kicking ourselves as parents. 

“Just coast down the hill, don’t even try to peddle,” my wife said, giving him a hopeful push. But in his desire to flatten his dear ole Dad, he not only coasted but naturally pedaled to pick up speed. Finally, it clicked. Thomas was not only controlling the direction of his bike but providing locomotion for it. He made it to me, I fell over for dramatic flair, and now he wanted to ride, again and again. 

Here is a video of one of his subsequent rides.

A burgeoning bike rider

Helping Hands

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey. That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast.  Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a sizzling spark flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.

In Defense of Compartmentalization

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV,  your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk. 

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens. 

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives. 

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons. 

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk.