Wink’s Blog

The orchards are alive with activity.  The bees are busy delving into the peach blossoms, forcing their bodies between petals barely open and emerging with their pollen sacks bulging.  They especially like the wild plums whose perfume wafts across the farm on the breeze.  Max has planted the kitchen garden.  Today we’ll plant new blackberries and mow the alleys in the vineyard.  Grape pruning is next and apple grafting is soon.

The Pheasants are strutting and crowing; Mallards have returned to the pond where Red Winged Blackbirds have taken up residence in the bull rushes; Meadow Larks serenade.  Yesterday Wink had a FOS sighting of a Kestrel.  FOS is birdwatcher jargon for “first of season”:  We’re enjoying becoming steeped in birder-lore since we joined Black Canyon Audubon and decided to open the farm to birdwatchers for a couple of special events.  (Check the web site for details).  Matt is moving into our worker housing and will be helping us this summer and through the harvest.

The peach orchard shows a brighter pink every day; apples are greening and beginning to show a hint of red.  All this color is highlighted against the high mountains still white in snow.  Cautiously, the old timers agree that the danger of a killing frost isn’t past until May 10.  But with the current succession of bluebird days and temps ranging from 40s to 70s it’s hard to envision the need to crank up the wind machines again.  Knock on wood.  Our fruit survived the cold snaps of the last month better than we had hoped and, so far, we’re looking forward to a full harvest.  So it’s full steam ahead.

April 12, 2009

Dear Mark,

It was good to see you Tuesday night at Talbott’s.  I appreciate very much you reaching out to the western Colorado agriculture community through the Western Colorado Horticulture Society.  No doubt you already knew that you’d encounter a pretty conservative audience.  I found it instructive that the big issues were taxation and immigration; plus an aside about regulation (food safety).  Three traditional right-wing whipping boys that are used to distract and obstruct discussion on issues of real importance.  Please know that not all of the Western Slope or the ag community here are so narrowly focused.  I especially appreciated your defense of President Obama’s economic recovery plan.  Thank you.

I recently received an email from your office in which you made the point that you are trying to bridge the divide that separates the parties and that has produced gridlock in Washington.  As a mediator, I appreciate the willingness of a party to reach out.  I also realize that resolution requires that both parties be motivated to settle. The Republicans demonstrate time and again that they are not so motivated.  They make no secret that the only thing they can agree on is obstruction.  The party of “No”.

The vast majority of Americans, including your constituents, reject the Republican Party, their ideas, and their tactics.  We need look no further than their behavior on the stimulus package to recognize their game plan: exact concessions, such as the middle-class tax cut, and then vote against it anyway.  With such an adversary it is a mistake, even dangerous, to try to find compromise.  And “adversary” they clearly are as they show no interest whatever in collaborating to solve the problems that their ideas created.  They are intent on seeing us fail regardless of the pain and cost to the Nation.

Thus, while continuing to seek a collaborative outcome remains a worthy and ethical effort, please be careful not to surrender the values that got you elected.  Max and I urge you to focus on getting the important work done and forget about trying to work with the other side.

We also want to weigh-in on the issue of food safety:  Certainly there is reason to be concerned when people die or are sickened by the food they eat.  The appropriate legislative response, however, is not to create new regulations which shift the cost of enforcement to farmers.  Rather, the FDA should be adequately funded to perform the inspections and enforcement that it is already empowered to do.  The recent rash of food-related scares can be linked to the trend to deregulation and “starving the beast” that has brought calamity on so
many levels.  Let’s restore a more responsible level of utilization of existing regulation before creating a whole new bureaucracy.

At the dedication of the Jerry Ahlberg Outdoor Education Center at CC, you enjoyed one of our delicious certified organic Gala apples. Remember?  As organic, small farm operators Max and I feel that the true threat to food safety comes from the industrialization of agriculture; from the concentration of market power in the hands of just a few large corporations, who are intent on extending their control by monopolizing access to seeds, and subjecting us to GMOs. It is important to remember that their overriding reason to exist is to produce ever-increasing returns for their shareholders.  This is in stark contrast to the small farm community that values diversity, quality, cooperation, and sustainability in addition to a reasonable return for our labors.  Our customers buy directly from us; they know we care about their health and well-being, we care about the health and well-being of our soils and of our rural communities, and we care about our workers and their families.  And our customers reciprocate the connection.

This is what Dr John Ikerd calls “The New American Agricultural Economy” (http://web.missouri.edu/ikerdj/). We urge you to pay attention to his ideas because we consider it a model for how the US can move beyond the collapsing unsustainable corporatist system toward a sustainable future; a future that values community, cooperation, health, peace, nutrition as opposed to just corporate profits.  This movement is well underway right here in western Colorado’s North Fork Valley.  If you’d like to experience it first-hand, we invite you (and Maggie) to pay us a visit here at Mesa Winds Farm.  We’ll show you models of the New American Agriculture, and I can assure you that we’ll turn out a bigger crowd, and actual supporters to boot, than last Tuesday.  In the mean time, please check out what we’re up to by visiting our web site at www.mesawindsfarm.com.  We’re looking forward to it.

With best wishes,

Wink & Max

Speaking of “fleece,” we’ve got plenty of it.  Black Welch Mountain sheep fleece, that is.  A week ago Max and Aaron and I went to a nearby sheep ranch to lend a hand wrangling sheep for a day of shearing a couple of hundred head.  For more on these fuzzies go to Desert Weyr’s website.

The day was clear and cold with a biting wind.  But the work, on the whole, kept us warm and moving.  Max and I have recently been warming to the idea of grazing sheep in our orchards and vineyards to keep the cover crop mowed and to add manure to the soil as well as meat to our table and wool for whatever one does with raw fleeces.

Max has done considerable research and has learned a lot about this proposition.  So we took advantage of our neighbors’ shearing to get hands-on with the subject matter.  It was a treat and an education to observe a real Welch sheep shearer at his work.  Aaron crowded the fuzzy black critters toward the shearing floor which Max and I kept tidy.  We moved the shorn sheep back into the paddocks and admired the fresh fleeces as Oogie extolled their relative virtues and shortcomings.  Nothing is wasted; even the “junk” fleeces are salvaged for garden mulch.

The deep, soft, warm, slightly greasy black fleeces were seductive.  Max brought home one of lamb’s wool that is sheer delight (no pun intended) to caress.  All week she has been washing and cleaning and cleaning and washing the wool.  Then drying it on the rack by the wood stove.  Finally tonight the clean fleece is stored in moth-proof sacks awaiting the next phase and we have use of our dining table again.  She admits to being obsessed:  a beginner flock will definitely be on site at the Farm next spring.

It will be interesting to see the carrying capacity of our orchards, as the goal is to do away with fossil-fuel-powered mowing.  The variety she has settled on is Southdown Babydoll; a relatively smaller heritage variety said to have exceptional wool, excellent meat, and a quizzical grin for a fixed expression.   An Extension Service researcher in our area has been experimenting with training this variety to graze in vineyards without harming the vines and we aim to learn from her.

Rain rode in on the winds of yet another cold front yesterday afternoon.  Our west windows are splattered with mud — fertile topsoil from the corn fields around Delta, presumably.  It rained over night but we’re still expecting snow and another night of deep cold temps.  Max claims this could be the last cold weather for a while, so I’m tuning up the sprayer and preparing to sally forth into the apple orchards as soon as the weather warms to spray against powdery mildew.

April 2.  I’m up early again this morning, awakened once again by the roar and throb of our neighbors’ wind machines and the question whether to add ours to the chorus.  For over a week now it’s been an early-morning routine: either our alarm thermometer goes off or we hear someone else’s machine start up.  Usually both.  The thermometer tells us that temperatures are heading into the critical range where damage to the tender fruit buds will occur.  The neighbors’ wind machine tells us that he thinks there’s enough warm air above and that by mixing it with the cold air trapped near the ground he may be able to stave off some damage.  I phone the CSU Extension Service Experiment Station to connect to their reporting thermometers, one at fruit level and one at 40 feet above, and see whether there is a temperature “inversion” — one mile away.  My neighbor (one-half mile distant) also has an elevated thermometer.  But also has a couple of machines that turn on automatically.  Has he made a calculated decision or not?

So the deliberation narrows: how localized is the inversion?  How severe is the frost?  How steeply is the temperature declining?  Is there any cloud blanket?  Any wind?  How soon will the sun be up?  One thing’s for sure — I’m up and not likely to get back to sleep with all those questions and machines stirring around.  So far, we haven’t turned on our machine a single time this year.  But maybe I’d better call the station again…

Up to last week we were headed into an early spring.  Day after day of warm, dry, bluebird days.  The fruit trees awakened almost a month ahead of average: buds were swelling and showed hints of pink blossoms.  The further advanced the bud development the more vulnerable to frost damage.  We monitor the bud stages and correlate to charts depicting temps where 10% bud kill is expected all the way down to 90% bud kill.  We set the alarm thermometer accordingly.

Then came the first cold front — roaring in on 50 mph winds and sending the mercury plunging to 13 degrees.  We welcomed the snow that followed but worried for the fruit.  A succession of fronts, wind-events, snows, and storms has followed.  It’s winter again, time to break out the fleeces and boots again.  But try telling that to the trees: they can’t go back to sleep.  So we engage in early morning deliberations that reduce to weighing whether the cold is due to a cold-air-mass that we can’t do anything about or radiational cooling that we can temper by turning on the big fans.  A morning like today where the temp is hovering around 20 degrees (well into the critical zone) is actually a relief from recent mornings when it just keeps sliding into the teens.

So, what are our prospects for the fruit season?  After the first two cold nights we clipped a few representative peach branches and brought them inside to dissect the buds in search of the tell-tale brown of freeze damage.  Before we accomplished this, though, we had another very cold night, and our earlier results were obsolete.  Now those buds are swelling to beautiful pink blossoms in a vase in our living room.  We’re not without prospects to report, however.  Our friends at the Experiment Station have been diligently dissecting bud samples and their reports are far more encouraging than our fears had been.  We still have at least a month of exposure to potential frost events, so prognostications remain premature but we’re again optimistic for a bountiful harvest.

Just to be sure, I phone again for the temps at the Experiment Station…  No change…  I can continue to peck at my keyboard, and sip morning tea by the warm fire, and listen to my neighbor’s wind machine and wonder what he knows that I don’t…