It was inevitable, following my reprehensible actions. Late last week I expressed dismay (? well, at least disbelief) that I had not once this winter shoveled our driveway. It was very shortly thereafter that the first inklings of the latest (last night’s) snowstorm started to hit the weather predictions. Then over the weekend I found opportunity again, and repeated my proclamation, thus sealing today’s “snow day” for schools all over the midwest, and adding another X inches of in the east and northeast today. To all who feel inconvenienced by my actions, I apologize. To those who get out and enjoy this snow, You’re Welcome!

I was up last night around 2am, helping Mandy get out the door and on the road, in the middle of the snowfall. Actually, near the end. We already had 8-10″ on the ground and only a couple more inches fell after that. It was beautiful outside, and the snow was perfect powder, light and fluffy… a joy to shovel, or even to sweep.

my winter friend Tippy

This morning though, it was worktime. After coffee and some early emails, I headed outside with water and feed for the chickens. First I shoveled out to the west flock (not so far) and shoveled out a circular path for them in their yard. Then I invited them out and sprinkled scratch grains all along the circular drive… half of them joined me. Changed water, collected eggs, added feed, chatted up the peeps (6 little ones, three months old, have their own little corral in the coop) and headed back to restock.

Tippy joined me then, stretching as he came out of the garage… the other cats (Caprica 6, Georgina and Sassy - our three polydactyls) had been across at the east flock last night, so I hadn’t expected to see anyone this morning here. Tippy rides my shoulder all winter long whenever he’s around, and he mewed to jump up.

As we trudged across to the east flock through the drifts (not quite knee high), I found I was following Tippy’s footpath. Obviously it was the footpath we use every day, but the 6″ of snow that had fallen since yesterday’s trip to close up the east flock and the blowing powder should have obliterated the path… but here it was, freshly marked by Tippyprints only partially reclaimed by the drifts.

Tippy's trackway, 10" powder

O Intrepid Cat! O Noisome Traveler! (I could say noisy, but sometimes this field cat is more noisome than noisy). After following his path, I could see that he went from the east coop barn overnight, over to the nearby garage, then back to the usual path and over to find me. He had leapt through the deepest snow in several places, but mostly trudged through the powder dragging his belly. I was proud of him then. He is a fine companion cat for the out of doors.

The chickens are all fine this morning. I used my boots to scuffle out a smaller circlepath for the east flock and scattered their scratch grains outside too. The roosters deigned to join the hens this morning, as seems their fair-weather prerogative. But everyone seemed happy. And I was too.

Sometimes our lives are quiet, like reading a local newspaper front to back without looking at the headlines, just reading about what happened to who, day after day.  And sometimes our lives are like headlines and more headlines with no time for details, no time for the articles, no time for who’s who, just go and go and go.

Slowly I’m moving toward a more quiet life, and I’d like to reflect that here on dragonwood.org.  I have succeeded to some extent… the snick! of firewood splitting isn’t so very loud after all.  Our headlines are smaller and more local, terrifically important to us, but hardly momentous. I’d like to think that the headlines of our lives are quieter but more important, messages that set a mood for a period of time, or reflect the mood around us for a season, for a phase we’re in, or just for a spell.

The photo banners at the top of the site are our headlines now, the headlines of our life together, of the seasons of Dragonwood. They tell of our doings or local happenings, or they tell of what surrounds us here, what captivates this moment in Dragonwood time.  Mandy carries her camera out and captures the action, or I pause with my little phone camera and capture a random moment… and a banner appears.

Autumnal Asparagus

Right now it’s late autumn (late because the leaves are mostly down, and mostly not raked up) and the brightest colors are mostly past.  But as we step out our back door toward the garden, on bright crisp afternoons, we are treated to a tiny pyre of bright yellow flames where the asparagus patch has caught fire.  The colors vary with the sun angle, from fiery yellow and gold to damp bedraggled yellow matter custard.  And it’s hard to catch it with the camera, hard for the camera or the eye to find focus and produce an image that shares its feeling.

But in this banner, I managed to catch not just the color of the lacy fronds, but there in the folds a single autumn leaf cradled in the fragile arms of this wondrous vegetable.  Suspended in time, representing this short season of Dragonwood, when quinces smell up the porch (and kitchen), and the last of the cider is being pressed, and the younger chickens and kittens are wondering about the chill in the air, this one browning leaf is kept from blowing away, kept in these thin woven arms, held for me.

Banners of our seasons, seasons of our lives, lives at Dragonwood, lived daily with eyes open wide.

I do enjoy splitting wood.  I do, I do, I do believe.  It’s good for me physically — it takes about an hour average to split enough for two winter days.  It’s good for the environment, too.  Our use of the wood stove probably saves us about two tanks’ worth of propane each winter, about 5-600 gallons.  That’s a fair bit of fossil carbon not going into the atmosphere, replaced by a renewable biofuel.  Good for our pocketbook… that propane costs real dollars.  Our cost is about 1-2 gallons of gasoline for the chain saw, plus another gallon or so of chain bar oil.  So I like everything about burning our own locally gathered wood.

But this is about splitting wood.  I have a friend who avoids splitting wood if he can.  His woodpile is neatly stacked with thousands of pieces of wood no more than 4 inches in diameter, 16″ or so long, just right for shoving into his little stove.  If it’s big enough to require splitting he just doesn’t bother with it.  Or rarely, at least.  His philosophy is simple:  “Work less”.  Splitting is work, no doubt.  And he avoids it.  To be fair, we’ve worked together at family ash tree fellings, and he surprised me with the fervor of his swinging of the maul and working around the edges of huge ash slices (3-4 feet diameter, 18″ thick), slabbing off wonderful broad wedges of the ash, just right for the stove (some require resplitting they’re so wide, but only 2-3 inches thick).  So it’s not that he isn’t good at splitting, he just prefers not to.

What I really like about splitting is what my friend avoids:  the challenge.  Some days I just want to get some wood split and onto the rack, but other days I savor the challenge.  On the savory days, I start with some easier logs to get warmed up and build my confidence.  Then I move into the knottier pieces that I know will give me trouble.

Obstreperous ash and elm splits.

Yesterday was a savory day splitting wood.  I currently have a small pile of logs ready for splitting next to my splitting stump, collected from an ash tree we felled a couple weeks ago and some elms I sliced up just after that.  I set the biggest and knottiest ones at the bottom of the pile then, and have been slowly working down to them since.

So I started with some of the elm.  These are elms that have been dead for several years, dead of Dutch elm fungus but still standing.  When they fall down, or are leaners in the forest, I take them down the rest of the way.  Elms are great, they give you lots of 3-5″ sticks that don’t need splitting from their long tapering branches, and the wood is strong and stiff.  My friend would approve.  But when elm needs splitting, you’re in trouble.  Elm has an incredibly twisty grain, where one strand will wrap 30 or 40 or even 60 degrees around inside a 16″ piece.  The strands almost seem to weave a 3D fabric-like interior, making them terrible to split with a maul.

But if you let elm season in the forest before you harvest, it gets wormy.  Elm perfectly seasoned this way has just enough worm/larva trails running through the wood to make it split really nicely, but the wood is still quite hard and ready to burn. Less seasoning than this, and you’re in trouble trying to split it by hand.

So I started out with a couple elm pieces that were more than seasoned.  In fact, the first one had a wormy core that was a goner.  I kept the nicely seasoned outer couple inches, but the core was light and falling apart, so I tossed it over the fence.  The second one was smaller and just about perfect, with some incipient splitting already apparent on the log end.  Snick!  One stroke splits it in two.  Snick! Snick!  Four perfect quarters, and a warm spot in my heart.

That was the end of the easy logs… I’m nearing the bottom of my pile.  So next I went for two 12 inch diameter ash logs.  The other ash logs of this size had been near the top of my pile and had split easily early.  These went to the bottom because they were knotty, at least three good knots on each.  You can’t just go through the middle of fresh ash this size (or bigger).  My friend’s ash splitting technique of working around the edge is the only way, and makes an impossible job fun.  But with knotty ash, the edges are no more fun than the middle.  The grain weaves elm-like around the knots, and refuses to yield.  Our ash is not well seasoned, of course… the Emerald Ash Borer beetles went through our stand just a year or two before we moved into Dragonwood, killing all the ashes bigger than 3″ diameter.  And this ash was 60 feet tall and still standing strong until a couple weeks ago.  No leaves at all this summer, so it’s finally fully dead, but not seasoned in the least.

I line up and pause for zen centering, envisioning the Snick! as my maul dives through the log.  I see the maul traveling all the way through the ash, knocking a nice spall off from the edge.  I wiggle my toes and settle my stance once more, then swing my 6 pound splitting maul back, and around and down hard and fast on the log.  The log is upright about 16″ above ground level, perched on my splitting stump, and inside an old tire.  The stump puts my ash log just about at waist level, perfect for my swing, and the tire helps steady the ash.

This is obstreperous wood.  Noisily and defiantly stubborn wood.  I swing fast and hard and my aim is right on, but I am disappointed.  It’s a loud one; the log and the stump reverberate with the stroke… the chickens pause momentarily, having forgotten for a moment that I was splitting wood nearby.  But my modest maul buries only a quarter inch. I have made a small dent, without a hint of the fracturing that is needed for a split.  It is flatly impossible to dent your way through a log… it must split, fracture between the strands of the grain, find its own path of least resistance through the wood.  Your job as splitter is not to force a new path but to find the path that already exists, the one that has grown into the grain, that has been there from the beginning, waiting for you to find it.  I have not.

There is tremendous pleasure in finding the fracture that has been waiting for you all these years.  Tremendous pleasure indeed when it is found on the first stroke.   The seasoned elm gave me that pleasure, and warmed me to this task.

About six noisy, reverberant strokes later, I have one small fracture appear.  It is a splintery mess, looking more elm-like than ash-like, but it is a fracture.  Three more good strokes and I almost have it… a dowdy 4 inch wide spall down the edge of the log, held in place at the bottom by wrapping around a 1″ knot.  That branch stub is stubborn, and I have to work to get this scrawny, 1″ piece of ash loose and into the pile.  But it’s a start.

That log was obstreperous, but I burned some more of it this morning.  I see a split of it here next to me in the wood bucket, a nice split with a centered 2″ knot about half way down.  The top of the split facing me has no fewer than nine minor dents where the log refused to recognize my maul’s annoying tapping.  That ratio seems about right.  That log and the next several that filled my barrow took about 10 maul strokes per split, and the splits are splintery and “ugly” (see pic).  Nothing pretty about them.

My last three logs were my favorites of the day.  The first was an elm that I cut down two years ago, and couldn’t split at that point, so I gave up and set it aside to season.  Last year I tried again, and got no further in our negotiations.  Yesterday it succumbed to my reasoning, with perhaps even less resistance than I expected.  I love burning elm, it catches quickly and heats up the stove fast.

The last two were “Woodies”.  We have a friend Woody who has an enormous wood stove that can burn anything.  Woody shows up with his truck at family tree downing events, and takes all those impossibly resistant forked logs and pieces with 8″ knots that can’t be mauled or wedged or dented.  And welcome to them.  I had four woodies that I had set aside in earlier weeks when I could no longer spall anything off the edges of these knotty pieces, and they were too big for our stove.  But yesterday was special, and after tackling the hard part of the pile, I went after two of the woodies and found the fractures that had been waiting for me these 30 years or more.

Thud!  Thud!  Bonk!  Thud!  Snick!

I love splitting wood.

The gardens are, of course, full of critters.  There’s thems we tire of (the moles, the slugs), and thems we can’t get enough of.  Here are three of them from our recent camera rolls.

Sleeping cat buried in weeds.

A mantis in the tomatoes

A 3 inch garden spider on its web above the strawberries.

Tis August, and I’ve not posted since the first market day.  We’ve gone every week save one, and sold eggs, herbs (dill, basil, tarragon, parsley, cilantro), lettuces of several types, mixed greens of several types (like our Dragonwood Wild Mix), arugula, lamb’s quarters, purslane, garlic, leeks, turnips (ok, so no one has bought any turnips yet, but they look great), cut flowers (every week’s different, of course), nasturium bouquets (either for looking or for eating — about half our customers just want them to look pretty), edible flower mix (nasturtiums, lemon marigolds and arugula flowers last week), and oh I’m sure there’s a few things I’m missing on the list.  Our tomatoes and many other late summer regulars are only just coming in here, so the list will get longer by the end of the season.

The market has been a lot of fun!  We’ve got friendly regular customers that come back for more eggs (and even bring us cartons), or for garlic, or just to stop by and say hello and check us out.  We’ve got helpful neighbors to help tie our rickety sun canopy down when it gets too windy (every week), and a great crew at Zingermans running things smoothly (thanks Corinna and Kristen especially).  I just wanted to write and say ‘Hey!’ to anybody who stops by here, and make sure to come out to the Westside Farmer’s Market soon.

The Westside Farmers’ Market in Ann Arbor opens today, and we’ll be there.  We’re bringing flowers and greens, rhubarb and herbs, and of course some pretty eggs.

Rhubarb, Arugula and Garlic Flowers

We’ve harvested more than we expected, though less than we hoped, but everything looks (tastes!) great and we’re excited for the first day of the market.  Hope to see you there!

This is George Raider Hamilton Clooney Fat Boy the Third. He’s the biggest baby of our cattery, always lounging, ever running from fights or confrontations with other males, always ready for a scratch on the belly. George likes to lounge in the chicken yard where he can be near the chickens. The Delaware hens sometimes will come up and peck him lightly, to see if he’s food, and George just accepts that as a part of life at Dragonwood. They are the same age, George and the Delawares, to within a few weeks, coming up on their first birthdays later this spring.

George has the most perfectly coifed fur on the farm. It has a nice mixture of colors, with just a hint of gray that gave him the Clooney/Hamilton parts of his name. The “Raider” part was his original name, after he gave us one of these looks (in the photo) and it reminded us of the evil or not so evil after all Cylon Raider starfighters in BSG. Fat Boy was added later, as he grew into his skeleton. There’s no hint of evil in him these days, despite this look, just pure kitten playfulness, laziness, gluttony and Georgeness.

Sigh.  It’s not starting off to be a good year, legislatively, for small farms, for organic farms, for people who eat food locally grown, sustainably grown, thoughtfully grown.

Yesterday it was HR 875, the bill that will make it functionally impossible to grow food sensibly and in effect make only the lowest common denominators of food products available, the kind mass produced by Big Ag in our stores.  Urban farmer’s markets selling local produce will become economically untenable, and they’ll wither and disappear or turn into craft fairs.

Today it is HR 814, the bill that will make NAIS mandatory.  HR 814: TRACE Act of 2009, “Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009″.  This bill requires, for the “safety” of our food supply, that every farm animal on every farm, large and small, be registered so that it can be traced from birth to death. As if that will make us all safer.

What’s wrong with our food supply is that certain large corporations value profits over consumer safety, and value revenue over responsibility.  They find creative ways to cut costs by poisoning the soil (and everything that grows in it) in the name of cleanliness and safety.  They pack their animals into tiny concentration camps where they defecate all over each other

HR 814 doesn’t specify how to trace the animals. That’s left to the regulators to decide within a year of the bill’s passage.  One year?  That means the only choice is to make mandatory the government’s only animal tracing program, the NAIS run by the USDA.  NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, an Orwellian Big Brother surveillance program for animals.  Ostensibly voluntary, the USDA puts pressure on state agencies to get their local farms to sign up and participate.  The state agencies cheat on this by using existing farm records to sign up farmers without their permission, or by calling farmers with surveys and using these results to sign them up, or by refusing state benefits or programs to farmers if they don’t sign up.

What’s wrong with NAIS?  That’s not the question.  What’s right about it?  There is no research that says the many millions spent on it will be able to stop any disease outbreaks or help anyone deal with the situation.  It is designed by Big Ag to benefit Big Ag and to penalize small farmers.  For example, if your company grows hundreds of beef cattle at a time and ships them all in one batch from feedlot to slaughter, then you need exactly one tag, one registration for all these animals.  But if you’re a small farmer with 60 sheep, trying to raise lambs for local sale, you have to register and track from birth to death every individual animal, every ewe and every lamb.  Sixty times the paperwork of a whole feedlot of cows.  Sell one lamb?  File the paperwork.  Keep the records.  Allow a government inspector to make copies of any piece of paper and any disk drive that might have information related to any of your animals.  Trust them with your privacy.

Sigh.  I’m not really the one to write this… not yet.  I don’t know enough about it, haven’t experienced it firsthand.  Go read the accounts of people who’ve already been affected by it at NoNAIS.org.  Find out why several states have banned the NAIS, who have taken a stand against this onerous burden on small farmers… with no increase in food safety, only costs.  Find out that federal legislation such as this could run roughshod over the states, forcing their farmers to comply despite the state statutes.

And then wonder why the supermarkets have more and more of less and less that you want to take home to cook and eat.  And think of us while you eat it.

I can’t write a lot about this just yet… too much studying to do, learning about the ways of politics, agribusiness, deceit (aka “framing the discussion”). But I want to put something down here.

Introduced last month into the US House of Representatives is a new bill, H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 , that has been carefully designed NOT to enhance food safety per se, but to ensure the long-term dominance of agribusiness at the expense of small farmers.

This bill was introduced by a Democrat and is co-sponsored by 39 Democrats (unfortunately including my own, Rep. Mark Schauer, 7th District Michigan). I’m glad that Republicans are standing, so far, against this. What I’d like is for Democrats AND Republicans who care about health, food and the freedom to choose will take a stand against this and make their voices heard.

What’s HR 875 about? HR 875 first charges that the FDA is inadequate to the task of protecting our food supply proactively… not enough inspectors, hamstrung by antiquated legislation, yada yada. Next it proposes a new Food Safety Administration within… well, let’s let the bill speak for itself:

Purpose: To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Who could be against safe food? Nobody. But this isn’t really about safe food… it’s about large-scale, factory-farm agribusiness coming under fire for endangering public safety. Think about it… every food safety issue you can think of has involved large-scale factory farms and agribusiness, not small farms and organic farms and folks who care sincerely about delivering healthy fresh food to you. There’s no major E. coli or salmonella outbreaks coming from farmer’s markets in this country.

What’s wrong with HR 875? I’ll take a first shot at it, but I’ll come back to visit the topic more in the future, because it’s that important.

Since agribusiness knows the situation for them is bad and that legislation could be introduced to penalize them for their sorry ways, what do they do? Well, if your CEO $$$ bonuses were on the line and stock options were underwater, you’d come up with a way to turn the situation on its head. And that’s what HR 875 does. It says “Hey, we need to protect your food from the farmer’s field to your table, and we can only do that with more regulations and unscheduled government inspection and animal surveillance, with mandatory food safety plans approved by the government, including minimum standards for fertilizer use, hygiene, and packaging.” These things might sound reasonable if you live in town and buy your food from a supermarket. But not if you’re a small farmer just trying to scrape by, which is about all that small farmers can manage to do, usually with the help of some outside income.

In short, make regulations that put an administrative burden on ALL farms regardless of size. If you sell food to consumers, you must comply. That makes some sense in a Big Brother, We Know What’s Best For You kind of way. But let me give you an example of what this means.

A farm, of any size, is called a “food production facility” (as opposed to a slaughterhouse, which is called a “food establishment”). Section 206 of HR 875 states that the government has the right and responsibility to visit and inspect the facility, approve the food safety plan, review food safety records, conduct monitoring and surveillance of animals and plants, and more. It goes on to establish that the government has the right to have access to and ability to copy ALL records (paper and electronic) necessary to determine whether the food is in compliance with food safety laws, and to track the food in commerce.

Hmmm? To “track the food in commerce”. Paul, I don’t see your records as to tracking your food in commerce. Wha? I deliver eggs and produce to a farmer’s market in Ann Arbor and make a few special deliveries door to door. I sell a few eggs from my back door. I need to track this?

A few years down the line, the regulations change… I need to what? Use bar codes to track my tomatoes? I need to use RFID tags on any lots larger than 10 pounds?

OK, could I be jumping the gun on this? Could I be paranoid that maybe big business really doesn’t have it’s own best interests at heart, and it’s really concerned first and foremost about the safety of our people?

No. I’m right. They know what they’re doing. Who? THEY. This is the biotechnology lobby, that got former Iowa Gov Tom Vilsack into the Department of Agriculture Secretary position (Vilsack champions GMO products and was selected “Governor of the Year” by the BIO, Biotechnology Industry Organization). This is Monsanto, whose strategic consultant Stanley Greenberg is the husband of US Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, who introduced HR 875 in February.

This is the dirty tail wagging the food safety dog. This is going beyond overkill to create overlords.

(sigh. breathe. focus.)

There is a Variance. In this bill! You’d hope that there would be a Variance, a loophole, something that would allow those with a legitimate need to skip the more onerous parts of this bill, and just get their jobs done. And there is! Right there in section 206, right after the hard parts about the bill’s burden of inspection, surveillance and seizing of records…comes this welcome relief:

States and foreign countries that export produce intended for consumption in the United States may request from the Administrator variances from the requirements of the regulations under subsection (c).

That’s right… not small farms. FOREIGN farms. All they have to do is write a request to the Administrator describing their practices, have their request reviewed, and get a variance. No inspection. No surveillance. Just ask and it shall be given unto you. So… all you have to do is get yourself a foreign farm, and put a few containerized freight carbon miles on your produce, and everything is fine again.

( breathe. )

I’m going to quit this post now. I’m going to think about it some more, read some more, and probably write some more. I’ll consider writing about it as if there is no complicity, no devious big agribusiness plot to come out ahead by writing food safety legislation their way. Perhaps I’ll convince myself that this bill is well-intentioned, but simply has too many unintended consequences for small farmers, for organic farmers, for reducing the food choices of all Americans, and ultimately the food safety of all Americans. I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, every Representative in Congress who will vote on this bill needs to know what the small farmers in their districts think of this bill, what every person who cares about the food that goes onto their plates thinks about this bill. It’s about choices. Where is that Farmer in Chief anyway? It sounds like Michelle might be getting the picture, with her new vegetable garden coming today. As long as they don’t try and sell any of the produce without keeping tracking records. No vegetable market stand on the White House lawn for those Obama children, not after HR 875 passes, or at least not without a White House staffer to record and track that produce.