Nirvana! Tell us about your farm, please?
 

We have questions!

You breed dogs and beef cattle and grow mint? What else? Any other crops? How many breeds of dogs? Do you have a pig?
Why can you only grow mint for four years -is it crop rotation? Do you then use another field? Or do you only have one field? Are you near South Bend? Did you recover your Paddy o'Furniture? How long is a piece of straw in a haystack?

Inquiring minds are Inquiring.

I would love to see a pic of your mint fields. I can't say as I have ever seen one.

More farm posts would be awesome. I loved those pictures a while back when you got a shipment of some silage or something for the cattle and had huge piles of it you had unloaded from the trucks.

You breed dogs and beef cattle and grow mint? What else?
Any other crops?
Corn,soybeans
How many breeds of dogs? 4 Australian Cattle Dogs Chihuahuas, Belgian Sheepdogs and a JSU
Do you have a pig? No
Why can you only grow mint for four years -is it crop rotation?Yes

Do you then use another field? Or do you only have one field? 1 field
Are you near South Bend? Yes 30 miles

Did you recover your Paddy o'Furniture? Yes cheap resin it flys but stays together :)
How long is a piece of straw in a haystack? We only have small bales

I will try to take photos later. . .

Would love to see some pics of the heelers! That must be the ideal dog for a farm. I would be too lazy to have one!

Thanks, Nirvana. Do the dogs have their own building(s)? How many cattle to you have?

Beest paintballs not far from there once or twice a year -"Sherwood Forest"

Old Nirvana had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O
And on this farm he had some mint,
E-I-E-I-O
With a "SNIFF--That smells good" here
And a SNIFF--That smells good" there
Here a SNIFF, There a SNIFF,
Everywhere a SNIFF SNIFF,
Old Nirvana had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O.

your turn

The blue female her name is Stompy and the red male is Suede. Suede is the working dog here on the farm. Stompy has ADD so she mostly runs around and pants. :)

Except that Nirvana is most definitely not a he.

Suede lives outside or in the barn 24/7 all the other dogs live in my house. I do not breed the ACDs. My Chihuahuas are almost all geriatric, 10 years and up. I have 2 intact females. One I am showing she is 2 yrs old and her mother who is 5. I may have one litter every 2 years or so.

We have 30 cows and 3 bulls plus their calves.

This is Rufus my JSU he is 13. He lives outside/barn too :)

They are a lot of WORK. Let me tell you. And we don't live on a farm. They need constant attention and exercise. But we love our Boomer.

Thanks, Nirvana.

Any one else here farm?

Ooh I have another question.... What will you grow when your 4 years of mint are up? Or will you just leave it fallow for a while?

The mint field

I would say corn will be planted after the 4 years.

Is that the overhead center pivot irrigationwatering system in pic 1?

there seems to be a lot of space between the mint plants. Do you have to do anything about weeds?

I inherited a share of a dairy farm.
I don't like the cow milk though, trying to grow gas instead...

do you have tenants/employees to run it, jinx?

Not much to run atm. It's me, my sis, my dad (who don't live there) and my uncle (who does). Uncle has some organic grass fed beefs hanging out until the gas crop is ready to harvest.

edit: We recently had the zoning changed to tree farm - lowered the taxes by quite a bit...

That is a pivot irrigation system.
This is the first year so this is called row mint and I took that photo on the edge of the field. By harvest there will be no more space.
The field is sprayed for weeds we had some volunteer corn in it earlier.

Couple pics of my place...

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../288640837.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../278779134.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../278780636.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../278792238.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../278792210.jpg

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL162.../278779131.jpg

Nice place, jinx. That's 6 miles east of my ancestral home (where my aunt lives now) and 4 miles east of the lake where I am a trustee of the family cottage. Real familiar looking scenery.

What is a gas crop?

glatt, this lake?
http://home.ptd.net/%7En3cvj/wallenpaupack.jpg

Natural gas.

That is interesting, I wonder how its decided there is NG?
I wish we were the Clampetts :)

Not that lake. No Dunder Mifflin cruises on our lake. This lake.

I want to get up at dawn, smoke an entire joint, and paddle my kayak around that lake.

Nirv, I just thought, do you ever have all the dogs together? Outside? Do they pack up and start to work as a team?

They can and do sometimes.

The picture of Suede is great - He looks so serious!

I was once by the North Judson/Winamac area (an ex had a deer blind out there) - I remember smelling the mint fields!

There's a documentary coming out that talks about the fracing process necessary to get that gas out of the ground in your neck of the woods, Jinx. Apparently it isn't always environmentally friendly, nor a happy thing for those who lease their land to the companies that produce the gas. YMMV, but the movie apparently starts with people lighting their tap water...

As compared to what?

Did you watch it? I don't have HBO.

review

I take the environmental consequences of this seriously, since we are in the same region. I had the misfortune of hearing an interview with the director on Fresh Air. It was one of the few times I've heard Terry Gross give someone a complete pass. I am however concerned since the gulf incident that deep drillers know less about what they are doing than they pretend to publicly.

She posted a pic of her mint fields a while back in dwellar nsfw

I thought those were her strawberry fields. ;)

I just heard a report about that film on Vermont Public Radio. The fraccing process didn't sound all that great, but what I found most interesting was that when you consider the entire lifecycle of natural gas vs coal they produce the same amount of pollution.

Curious what do you mean Terri Gross gave him a "pass"?

It was the only way he could get to the bathroom.

2 minutes for unnecessary roughness

Old Nirvana had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O
And on this farm she had some mint,
E-I-E-I-O
With a "SNIFF--That smells good" here
And a SNIFF--That smells good" there
Here a SNIFF, There a SNIFF,
Everywhere a SNIFF SNIFF,
Old Nirvana had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O

I live not too far from Dimock, PA where they made a lot about lighting tap water on fire. Problem being they've long been able to light the tap water in Dimock and apparently there is a local pond which the locals light once a year. The drillers may or may not have made things worse, but the problem was pre-existing. Terri treated the interview like an entertainment piece, when she had someone with a clear political agenda on the show.

That's fucked up. There's no way Mr. "documentary" didn't know that.

I lived in place in the catskills and the well water was filled with methane. I used to light the faucets. The water didn't burn, but there was a burst of, I assume, precipitated gas that preceded the water. Fun and really dangerous.

I'm sorry, but, if my tap water "lights"...Imma GTFO!