Mud, Deliveries, Pork Shares
A rainy winter week. An abundance of mud but a shortage on hay. We still have a couple weeks worth but will likely need to purchase a couple hundred rolls before spring.
After some extra feeding, I was able to make the trip to deliver meat to families in Knoxville on Monday with Amy and the kids. It was good to see smiling Tennessee faces and spend some time with Amy’s family. Back home Tuesday morning for farm chores and wrestling practice that evening.
As farm work always slows through the cold dark days of winter, I’m grateful for youth wrestling to help fill in the gaps. Now that wrestling season is coming to an end, I’m ready to switch back into spring farmer mode. Lots on the spring list to do.
Wednesday we got ORVF pork delivered back to the farm from our processor. Just two weeks out from her due date, Amy was out there helping sort meat into the freezers. She reminded me apologetically that she probably shouldn’t be lifting heavy boxes, but then every time I turned around, there she was moving boxes. You try telling that girl to sit still. Ha.
After getting the meat sorted, we went right into filling the next couple months of pork shares. The kids were glad to take a break from their studies and help fill shares. Much of their chicken processing earnings from last summer have long been spent, so the chance to make a few dollars was as incentivizing to them as the break from school. They really were helpful. And earned their pay. Hopefully all your pork shares are properly filled. If not, we’ll blame Hasten. Ha.
My parents kept the kids yesterday afternoon while Amy and I delivered shares and orders to Bristol and Kingsport. Date night afterward. More feeding and filling coolers today for a big day of deliveries tomorrow to Marion and Abingdon Farmers Market. Amy has been reminding God that she doesn’t have time to have a baby until we get through this month’s deliveries. Prayers appreciated for her in the days ahead.
Not a whole lot of audiobook listening this week, but I did finish SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson as she warns about the implications of chemical use in regards to the the preciousness and importance of water and soil, on which all life depends.
“Of all our natural resources, water has become the most precious… and so most of the world’s population is either experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages. In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water, along with other resources, has become the victim of his indifference.”
“The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal of the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them could not grow, and without plants no animal could survive. Yet if our agriculture based life depends on the soil, it is equally true that soil depends on life. Its very origins and the maintenance of its true nature being intimately related to living plants and animals.”
“By their very nature, chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled. The chemicals may have been pretested against a few individual species, but not against living communities.”
“Inevitably, it follows that intensive spraying with powerful chemicals only makes worse the problem it is designed to solve. After a few generations, instead of a mixed population of strong and weak insects, there results a population consisting entirely of tough resistant strains.”
“Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it, even where we have to struggle against it.”
Have a good week.
Will