A Well-Stocked Kitchen

Yesterday I finally had free time, an empty house, a few baskets of pretty gnarly but ripe and delicious tomatoes, and the will to do something. It was time to make the wonderful tomato soup that I have made every year since Alissa was born, practically. 

I went out onto the porch and found the pot that hasn't been used in a year -- the one with the colander insert so you can lift out a lot of parboiled tomatoes without any effort. I associate this pot with Mrs. Beall. I think she gave it to me a million years ago. Then I realized I didn't have any celery. Dang. But wait, they just picked enough cutting celery to add some to each herb crate for market for the first time this season!  I got on my golf cart and zoomed to the stand, collected up some lovely long red seconds onions and two bunches of incredibly flavorful celery.

And just like that, I was ready to go. Usually it takes some amount of preparation, mental and practical, to be ready to do a big cooking project. But our kitchen is so ready for anything now (mostly thanks to Jon who can't help buying everything he wants when it comes to the kitchen) that you can start the water boiling without thinking through all that you will need by the end.

Started the water boiling and chopped the onions and celery. Heated up a big cast iron pot. Filled the sink halfway with cold water and added some ice. Dragged a stool over to the stove so I wouldn't have to bend over for any reason and I wouldn't drip gross juice all over the floor. Put the basket of lumpy, holey, a little bit rotten tomatoes on the stool and got started. Each batch of tomatoes takes one minute, so you have time in between to do things like peel the last ones, put the vegetables in the pot, stir. I cycled between the stove and the sink and the counter and realized that since I was really the only one here, I had control over the airwaves. That never happens. It is so rare that I don't even really know what I like to listen to, so I just listen to the same things as always -- old music like Graceland and the Pentatonics singing Hallelujah and Arlo Guthrie with his goofy, whiny voice.

It was a delicious 90 minutes. I got all the tomatoes into the pot, seasoned them, and then had to go to a meeting. When Jon came home, he turned the soup back on so it could turn into soup.  The only verb that I have ever come up with for that action, the melding/blending -- is "to soup." There is no soup that can be truly ready without having time to soup.  

This morning after I got back from loading the trucks, I added a new twist to my soup recipe. Usually I use the immersion blender but lately I haven't been liking that texture so much. Since the soup was cool, it was painless to blend it in batches, and I got to use the measuring cup that I love because it reminds me of Fairchild Co-op. It is a cute, tiny little one quart version of the gallon measuring cups that we used to use. I stole it from Lani when I helped her move out of her house about 20 years ago (I told her and she didn't care).

Yesterday I read some parts of an article, or maybe just the introductory blurb, about why stuff matters. Our stuff gives us meaning and identity. Having no stuff would be disorienting because your past is represented by the stuff you keep. Without a past and a memory, who are you anyway.  That's what I got out of the few sentences. And that is how I was feeling as I was putting this soup together. Every pot, every piece of equipment, even the kinds of burners we have on the stove (Jon has a gas burner, an induction burner, plus this modern but substandard glass top electric burner thing) -- it all adds up to what we care about, what we do, how we cook, who we are.

I hope you all get to taste this soup this winter. That's why I make it. For all the people who love tomato soup. This is a good batch.

July Is the Worst

I mean to write at least once a month, but July was a month to be endured, and there was no room on the edges for thinking new thoughts. We just had to put our heads down and tough it out. I really don't like  July. 

The only reason to have this month is that's when the tomatoes come in. I would be willing to wait until August for tomatoes if we could just rip July out of the calendar. 

When I retire, I want to be able to leave the mid-Atlantic in July. I want to go somewhere where there are beaches and ponds and lakes and I can just float in the water and sleep in the shade. 

This July was not excruciatingly hot. It was horribly soggy, and that made the heat hotter. It rained often, the air was a sponge filled with water all day long, and the nights did not get below the mid 70s.  At 6 AM the humidity was 99% and by the middle of the day it had dropped all the way to 94%. 

I change my clothes for the first time about two hours after I first put them on. The best way to avoid nasty rashes and fungal fires in all the places that rub and overlap is to strip down and take off every single dripping wet article of clothing, wait until you stop sweating, then put on another linen shirt, another set of underwear, a dry pair of shorts and a nice brand new pair of socks. These days I store all of my clothes on the first floor. Who wants to climb those stairs four times a day? I don't know how other people survive without multiple costume changes.

Anyway, we were working in a hot yoga studio, pulling onions and picking zinnias and loading and unloading truck after truck for the last week of June and every week of July, and I could only write farm notes for workers and customers. Could not think of anything but how to drink enough water to keep up with the sweating.

Moving on. So far August is DELICIOUS.

Peter Pan Pig Spa, Continued

We have reached the point where pigs are an essential part of our lives, except in the winter when they would be so sad here. When we don't have pigs, we just end up feeding the crows and the squirrels -- not nearly as satisfying. They just pick out the bits they want from the compost pile and leave a big, spread out mess.  We are trained never to throw away kitchen scraps or outdated food, and the pigs are enthusiastic about their role in waste management.

It all started maybe 20 years ago when I decided I wanted a few pigs.  My father never wanted to keep pigs because they are so smart, and it hurt his heart to keep them in a pen and treat them like they weren't that smart. None of us ever had an issue with eating animals if they were part of our lives, but somehow he drew the line at offering pigs a life that was less than they deserved.

I guess all animals deserve to be allowed to run around and forage -- like deer and groundhogs and rabbits and all the other creatures that are the bane of my existence.  But there is certainly a category of animals who live within fences or in pens in order to be the ones that we eventually eat. 

Our pigs only come to visit. They come as recently-weaned piglets and they stay for a season of digging in the mud, eating mountains of vegetables,receiving lots of visits from friends and neighbors bringing kitchen scraps, and wholesome grain every day. I called it the Peter Pan Pig Spa because they never grow old here. They live a charmed life. Well, if it rains too much, the charm wears off because their pen gets very muddy and it takes a long time to dry out.

This spring we got two pigs that were more mature than usual, but Bev (the pig farmer) brought them because they were extremely friendly and they seemed just right for us. They were brothers and he wanted them to grow up with good habits, not turning into competitive, nasty boars because he wanted them to be breeders. Like all the pigs he brings, they had never seen a vegetable. They had lived in straw, on concrete, and they didn't know anything about Swiss chard or fruit. They had never dug up a compost pile with their snouts.

It always takes the pigs a few days to learn about their new opportunities. They do start to dig and root as soon as they get out of the trailer, which is kind of amazing. Bev switched out the pigs a couple of days ago, bringing some smaller cuties, and they put their snouts down into the dirt immediately. This is an essential activity for pigs. Bev is trying to breed a more environmentally friendly pig with a shorter snout and less capacity for digging up trees -- they like to live in the shade in the woods. For years he was working on a lean pig with a long snout but he has changed his priorities and the pigs are stubby and short, like overgrown guinea pigs now.

The reason we can't live without pigs is they are so important to our kitchen and farm. We don't have to throw anything away anymore. They eat almost everything, with gusto. They prefer cooked foods for sure, and people food is their favorite. They stomp all over things that they are tired of or don't want (the last pigs would not even take a bite of an uncooked summer squash), but they learn to eat whatever is in season. There is a limit to how  many tomatoes they will happily eat, but if they get hungry enough between snacks, they eventually clean their plate. It is so deeply satisfying to take outdated leftovers out of the fridge and take them to the piggies. It is hard to describe how disorienting it is to be without pigs, when they have to go home in late November. Throwing away food feels so terrible. How do most people exist without pigs?

People always ask us what the names are. We used to name them, but after 20-plus years of little pigs, it seems unnecessary. They have personalities, they are unique and delightful, but they don't actually need names since they are going home in a few months. Everyone names them whatever they want. Kids love to name them.

Our goal is to socialize these little pigs enough that they are eligible to be bred, rather than raising them to be eaten. They are still part of the meat-producing process, but our pigs have the chance to have a longer and more interesting life. Bev sends me pictures of the baby pigs when we successfully produce mama pigs.

Bev freaks out if they get out, and there was one memorable adventure (described in July 2023 in this blog). The reason he gets so upset is that once pigs learn that they can get out, they have new information and they will never stop trying to figure out how to get out again. He came and whisked away the renegades within days. He didn't like it that someone called the police when pigs were seen walking along the side of the highway. Fair.

Rebecca has said for years that I like the pigs more than my own children. There is no comparison. Just because I make sure the pigs are fed everyday and I delight in their antics -- they are definitely not my children. Rebecca is just jealous because she thinks I am more attentive to the pigs than I was as a mother. So untrue. But I am very aware of the hazards of letting the pigs get too hungry. Bad things can happen. When my kids got hungry, they could just solve their own problems. 

I don't know of anyone else who has a program like this, but it is worth replicating. I always think that every neighborhood or sprawling development should have a couple of little pigs so that everyone can be part of this satisfying system. You don't ever have to eat them, you don't have to name them, you just get to feed them and see how happy they are to eat whatever you have. There could be pig farmers who switch out the pigs every few months so no one has to deal with the 300 pound version. That is a whole different game, and not the one I like to play.

Moving the Piano

Sometime in March, I was driving home from my piano lesson and I don't know what came over me, but an idea just popped into my head. The way they do. It seemed so right, I just had to go straight to my mother's house and tell her.  

I think we inherited my mother's piano in 2002 when her house was being renovated. Alissa was a piano student who practiced regularly, so we traded the Groisser spinet for my mother's baby grand. It felt special to have this heirloom in our house. We stuck it into the corner of the living room and over the years it got a lot of use while the top of it got buried in papers. Underneath the piano we stored a collection of things that didn't have a better spot. When Alissa left for college in 2007, I started to take lessons so it wouldn't be a big piece of furniture that never got used.

Then last fall, my mother's husband had an idea -- he asked Mom if she might want to take piano lessons. She hadn't had a lesson in 66 years. She said that could be interesting. I asked my piano teacher if she would take on an unusual student -- 89 years old, an accomplished pianist, memory loss happening, an excellent sight reader. Claudia was intrigued and said yes. So my mom has been taking lessons for months now, and practicing for hours at a time.

One day I heard her practicing on the spinet and I thought, that is a terrible piano. I can't believe she plays that for hours at a time. And that's why this idea popped up suddenly as I was cruising down Lawyers Road. I said, "Mom, do you want your piano back?" And without missing a beat, she said, "Yes." 

It took maybe a month to let her husband get used to the idea of a baby grand invading their space, and for me to assemble the right crew to move the piano. I enlisted my brother because he understands the importance of this particular piano and he isn't afraid of a big task. He lives in Denver, so we had to wait until he was here.

We set the time for 7 AM on Saturday morning, the morning of our big anniversary party. That's when there were plenty of bodies around, and it's the only time we had unscheduled that weekend. It was a little bit rainy, but I brought the Sprinter van to the front steps, with a slightly muddy dolly from the stand (it had been used an hour ago, in the rain, to load market trucks). A sleepy but willing group of guests assembled -- Tillie's boyfriend, Alissa's boyfriend, nephew Hugh, brother Charles, Benjamin.  

I had cleared the piano and a path to the front door. Our house was in chaos, as a result, with crates of junk stacked in the middle of the living room. Luckily we weren't having the party here and we could just leave everything in a big cluttered tower for the weekend. Our closest friends and family ignored the disaster zone and visited anyway, sitting on couches that are always kept clear -- sacred space.

The piano was really heavy. It is over a 100 years old (according to one piano tuner who told me it was not worth tuning anymore, it had run its course) and made of some heavy materials. They were very careful, every staggering step of the way.  The dolly was useful, leaving a muddy track in the hallway. Getting down the front steps was the most precarious, with people at the bottom trying to keep everything steady while people at the top tried not to drop it. Once they got it into the truck, I knew the project was a success.

Charles drove very slowly, with four people in the back, protecting the piano from falling or banging around. He backed up to my mom's front stoop and they skillfully unloaded it, like pros.  My mother's husband was a little taken aback by the punctuality of the project. It was still pretty early. Then it took about 4 tries of spinning the piano around until they found the correct orientation, at the far end of the living room. Perfect.

Then my mother sat down to play. Tears came to some of our eyes. It sounded so amazing. This is the piano that my parents bought when they were first married. It may not be the best piano anymore, but it is my mother's piano and it is back at home. 

I learned later from Nell that our piano teacher was uncomfortable with this whole plan. Why didn't we get piano movers? What were we thinking? It absolutely never occurred to me, not for a second. This is a do-it-yourself family and we have a lot of capacity. It just takes planning and execution, but we can do pretty much anything that we decide to do.

It took about a week to get our house back in order and we have so much more space. I now practice on a keyboard in the guest room, but this means I am not interrupting all the activities and naps that happen in this beehive (as my friend Laura describes our house). It's a win/win/win.

Holy Week, Holy Month, Holy Cover Crop

People around the world are getting ready to celebrate Holy Week.  A week before that, Passover starts.  All the weeks of this month are holy weeks, if you think about all the ways that April bursts into bloom. And you are not too particular about what “holy” means.  “Holy” is generally related to God or divinity, and April can be a whole month of divine experiences, just by walking around and looking up.

Last Friday at Shabbat services, the cantor led us through a brief meditation, asking us to remember each of the days of the week leading up to this Shabbat, and to breathe out and let go of the things we wanted to move on from, and to breathe in and hold onto the memories that we wanted to keep.  Amazingly, I could remember each day. And just as amazingly, I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to forget or move away from. Each day had good memories.  We were supposed to be looking for the sacred, in amongst the mundane.

The thing about farming, or probably most work, there is a large amount of mundane every day and, if you turn it over and look at it from a different direction, there is a steady supply of sacred. It can be a sacred event, watching a tiny carrot stem emerge from under the soil, pushing and cracking the surface days before it appears.  The joy of smushing a solid root ball of lettuce down into soft, wet soil, then flicking the soil over the roots and just knowing that plant will grow – that feels sacred.

Cherry blossoms are breathy, airy glory – as are all the flowering trees that suddenly cascade into being, one after the other, faster and faster as the years pass. It used to be a more orderly succession: first bright yellow forsythia, then pink cherries, purple redbud, pink and puffy crabapples, elegant white dogwood, many colors of azaleas. Today on my walk I saw all of these at once, in various stages of arrival and departure. I even saw peonies, about two feet tall already. The mundane part of this is that it is worrisome to be living through climate change. The sacred part is that trees bloom. Period.

We live for eleven months of the year without all of this. It’s okay.  It would be mundane to have cherry blossoms every day. But from a different perspective -- in farming, we wallow in mundane dirt, day after day, and somehow that becomes a  sacred experience. There is so much beauty. Maybe not everyone would see it like this, but a green and lush field of rye, blowing in a stiff spring breeze, is just about the most gorgeous sight. And when the yellow flowers of overwintered kale pop through, or the thumb-shaped blooms of crimson clover appear in the mix, that is like a heavenly bouquet.  Cover crop as an expression of holiness.

I have been part of this cycle (walking on this hamster wheel, no that’s not right at all) for so long that it would be reasonable to have lost interest in the repetition of everything. But it is precisely the repetition that makes it interesting. You wait to see how it will all turn out. When will the soil be dry enough to spade, when will it be warm enough to germinate a seed, when will a field be wet enough to turn it again so the cover crop will get digested. When will it be time to plant a plant that can’t manage cold?  It is never the same. There is more to learn each time.

Also, it is normal, sacred work that fills the soul.  What else is normal these days?  So little. Most people do not have the luxury of planting broccoli into perfect soil on a clear, sunny day despite the cruelty and chaos that is crashing all around us. We farmers escape the politically profane and mundane. We keep planting, knowing that vegetables are normal and there is nothing that can change that. We all need to eat vegetables.

If you ever need a deep breath of sacred air, come into the greenhouse in early April. Since God created the first greenhouse, this has been the holiest place of all at this season.

This is still my favorite prayer, appropriate every day, abbreviated a bit: Blessed are You, Adonai, for giving us life, sustaining us and enabling us to reach this season.  (again)

Writing My Job Description

Just to finish off the last story, there was no check from the USDA in January and meanwhile the government was being viciously dismembered, starting on January 20. I did not hold out much hope that this little program would be honored. Two other farmer friends got payments that month but we did not. I stopped thinking about it. And then yesterday we got a letter from the USDA in the mail, saying they had deposited $14,000 in our account in late February. We didn't notice because that is the same time that our CSA payments are pouring in. So it did work. Amazing. I have decided to think of that as the money that will pay for all of the seeds this year. That way expensive seeds just don't seem quite as expensive. Thank you, Joe Biden, and all of the federal workers who quietly keep things going. Efficiency is not the only measure of success, obviously.

__________

All around me, my friends and fellow senior citizens are retiring. When our book group started over a decade ago, every member of the group was employed. Now I think there may be 4 of us left, out of 12, and one beloved member died a few years ago. That is a lot of change in ten years.

I recently made an unpremeditated public announcement that I am planning to "retire" in four years. I always say that I really cannot retire until my mother does, and she is still working at 89. But it is time for other people to be able to start planning on a change of leadership, and deadlines always help.

Then I started to wonder what my job really is. There is an easy answer, but that's not the one I am wondering about. What parts of my job will be hard to write a description for and who will want to do it?

About a month ago, Jon and I went on a brief road trip. On the last morning, we were visiting some friends and I got a frantic phone call, kind of early for a Saturday in the winter. It was Sue Moutoux, calling from the ER. That morning, her husband was unable to move for unknown reasons, and they called an ambulance. Sue gathered up all his medications and papers and got in the ambulance without her phone. And then she discovered that she could only remember about three phone numbers. One of them was mine. The mind works in mysterious ways.  She needed me to locate one of the farm workers so she could help to get everything back in order -- finding her phone being the first piece of business.  I called my brother in Colorado, knowing he would have the middle son's number, and I called him to tell him about his dad. Then I started to call everyone in Wheatland, trying to figure out how to reach the Moutoux employee.  Eventually Stephen conjured the number and problems started to get resolved. Charles was diagnosed with pneumonia and antibiotics worked and he came home after a few days, so that was a relief.

So, I am a switchboard operator. 

Every year we order potatoes to plant, and the order comes all the way from Colorado. Because shipping is so expensive, we make it possible for others with smaller orders to put their potatoes on the same truck. By now there are about ten small farms who add their potatoes to the pile.  It is no trouble for us to share the truck space.  It is a little bit of trouble getting the potatoes unloaded and sorted out. I can't remember why it happened this way, but one year Stephen and Benjamin had to rig up a very long set of cables to pull the pallets back out of the 40 foot long trailer. I think we didn't have a working pallet jack and the trucker never brings one. But most of the time, I unload the potatoes and Carrie helps me to get the piles organized. 

A different form of switchboard operation, but still pretty much the same job. So, that is one part of the job description -- being part of a web of connections, and sitting in one of the hubs, holding threads. 

Another part of my job which may be hard to define: I get to be the primary gatekeeper. In the real world, this would be described as hiring. But our farm is weird. We do hire people, but we also accumulate them. Dozens of volunteers and other associates gravitate to this place. We can't take them all. I turn away lots of potential help. So, without much input from my co-workers, I let in the small trickle of unconventional helpers that give this place its character, in many ways. 

Here is an example, and I have no rational explanation for why I said yes this time, except that it was such an interesting idea. Several of us were working behind the stand, getting vegetables ready for the CSA, something we do many days of the week. A woman we had never seen stopped by to say hello, with a big smile and so much enthusiasm. She was picking up a CSA share for a friend and she had never been here before. She wondered if we ever took volunteers. Her "mum" grew up on a farm and really needed something to do. She was good with her hands. She came from Ukraine. She needed a purpose. She didn't speak English. I said yes, she could come for two hours on Fridays. That's usually what I say when someone has potential. So, this woman's mother, age 78, got dropped off on Fridays and got right to work. Zina cleaned onions and garlic, she bagged arugula, she cracked garlic seed in the fall. She loved it. She could only say thank you and hello, but she was so full of joy -- and efficiency -- that we missed her on the days she wasn't there (her work days increased as the weeks went by).

Zina is one of a parade of helpful, kind. quirky people who make such a difference here. I can't take credit for all of them -- some of them just find their way in without an invitation. But I mostly get to choose who works with us, and that is not a straightforward task.

There is one more job that I know others will be able to do, they just need to start thinking like this. I allow my mind to come up with ideas that have not been tried before. Systems, buildings, calendars, signage, messaging, sales. Many other people think about things that I do not think about much: seed varieties, cover crop mixes, cleaning up, purchasing, maintenance.  My job is to try to think of ways to improve what we do. Ideas arrive in unpredictable ways. You just have to be ready to grab them when they pop into your head. 

A few years ago, I noticed that we were working really hard not to make mistakes when we were creating market loads. For decades we had stacked each load separately in the cooler, keeping a list for each market. It suddenly occurred to me that this was foolish. Since then we have behaved like a normal warehouse, with stacks of the same vegetables, easily recognized. We don't do inventory management like real businesses, we walk into the cooler and look to see what we have. Our mistakes have gone almost down to zero. We make fewer mistakes when there are two of us loading than when it is just me. Turns out I am so not a detail person, even though I keep track of a lot of details. I rely on my systems completely.

When my brother was in college, he accepted a leadership role at Fairchild. Back in my day, the job was "President." When he was there, it was "Loose Ends Coordinator" or LEC.  I think that may be the perfect description of the invisible parts of my job, and I need to start documenting so someone else will know what loose ends may be dropping into the abyss. 

I understand that this wandering job description is absolutely no different from anyone else who runs a business. I think about my next door neighbor who started a professional firm, ran it for his entire career, and then pro-actively and carefully executed an exit strategy. He is much better at details than I am, but I have a much, much bigger group to help with this transition. 

Part of making something come true is just to talk about it. So that is what I am doing here. I am talking about starting the process of shifting myself out of the center. I don't want to go away completely. There is too much about all of this work that is meaningful and satisfying. But it would be a disservice to the farm if other people didn't know what it takes to keep this place going. I have only begun to make that list.

Filling Out Forms

When Dave told me about the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops program, I immediately shrugged it off. I don’t like getting into the crowd of people who are looking for free money. And filling out forms from the government is just daunting. That is not my department.

Last year we applied for a grant to try to build a commercial kitchen (there is no way to imagine having enough money to do that project without help) and it took hours and hours of conversations and number-crunching and design revisions. I didn’t do it. Katherine did it – she has been doggedly trying to find a way to get this kitchen built. It seemed like we could be good candidates for this grant. We met the requirements. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act was practically written for us. We didn’t get the grant and we will never know why, but that was so much work that it reaffirmed my aversion to grant writing.

Dave insisted that this one was easy. It was designed for farmers like us, he said. The first thing I needed to do was find out if we are already in the system with the Farm Service Agency. He gave me the phone number and a link to the website and told me to do it. I looked at all the forms and decided to sit on it for a few days. Then I wrote to Katherine and asked her to look at it to see if it seemed like a good idea.  After a few days she wrote back to say it looked do-able and she could help. At the time, we were away on the annual Newcomb retreat, so I decided to wait until we got home before tackling it.

I have found that whenever something seems hard and I don’t want to do it – kind of like homework – if I sit on it for a while and do a little poking at it, and don’t try to really confront it right away, it gets easier. This might be the opposite approach from normal people, but I just need it to settle a little, stop looking so hard. When we were learning a whole new system for CSA registration – a really complicated, oversized system that wasn’t designed for us – I would wait a few days after each lesson before looking at the notes and instructions. And then it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and I could always ask for more help if I needed it. That’s really the lesson: I can always ask for more help, once I figure out the right questions.

The program opened on December 10. Apparently, they were trained to answer questions about it on the afternoon of December 9. The deadline is January 8. In between there was Christmas and a possible government shutdown and New Years and then a government-closing snow storm.

It’s true that the forms were not completely daunting, but they needed to be filled out in quadruplicate (not kidding) because we are a corporation with three owners. There were forms on Highly Erodible Land Conservation, one that certified that none of us earns more than $900,000 a year – hilarious – and a form that will allow them to look at our books for the last three years. I also needed to calculate how much of our earnings come from crops that we grow versus those that we buy for the CSA. That was a good exercise. Now I know exactly where the missing money is from 2024 – we grew and sold $100,000 fewer vegetables in 2024 than the year before.  That explains it. It’s not that we threw away lots of surplus food. We failed to produce it in that super heat, combined with drought. 

But I digress. Some of the forms were exempt from the Paperwork Reduction Act. Some were not.  Luckily, the FSA lady filled out the hardest ones for me by asking the questions in plain English and then checking the boxes on her computer. Completely different from homework, really. You can’t just call someone and ask them to do it for you when it is homework. Being a grown-up is much better.

I put on a few extra layers and trudged through the snow to get signatures from my mother and Carrie.  Came back and dumped the pile on Rebecca’s desk and she quickly scanned it all and I sent it off to join the rest of the applications that are coming in from all over the country on the last day.

It’s an unusual offer. They are specifically offering assistance to small farms that grow everything but corn and soybeans and hay. Cut flowers even count.  Apparently they have two billion dollars to divide up between all the farmers who somehow manage to get all the documents in during that chaotic month.  No one has said how they will decide how much to give to each farm but they warn us that the pie could get divided into very small slices. That’s okay. Who ever heard of even having a pie like this? But this is an example of government trying to do something useful for people like us. It doesn’t happen very often and we should take note, before the next administration comes in and tries to take the government apart.

There is no timeline attached to this. The whole thing is a little vague. But I appreciate that someone thought it was important to try to do something to support farmers like us.   And Dave said that he heard that they will be distributing the funds in January. That sounds unlikely. But stay tuned.