Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2022 i Farm and Ranch Living

ON A WEDGE-SHAPED PLOT OF LAND near Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, Hsar Lar Doe is busy preparing for the upcoming growing season. Lar Doe is tilling and testing the soil and deciding which crops to plant, and where to plant them, at Ohio City Farm. These are familiar tasks for Lar Doe, who emigrated to the United States in 2010. He and his family spent 15 years in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand before arriving here, but in his home country of Burma, he worked on his family’s “home farm,” growing vegetables and rice as well as raising chickens, goats and cows. Landing a job at Ohio City Farm not only gave him a way to adjust to his new life here. It has also enabled him and…

Hi there! I’m Tressa Graveley. My life on a Montana ranch dates back to the summer road construction job I took in 2003, when a rancher named Kyle (who regularly drove through my job site) came to be the first in a line of halted traffic. Kyle teases that I pursued him because I stopped him every day, whereas he was only following traffic rules. At any rate, here we are: married and living on his family’s ranch with our kids, Kadin, Natalie and Reid (14, 12 and 6). The main ranch, established in 1867, is where Kyle’s mom and dad, Steve and Sue Graveley, live, as do his sister and brother-in-law, Brooks and Dean Phillips, and their kids, Sydney and Trey. Kyle and I live on the other part…

My dad, Herbert Brown Sr., and I are small farmers in Southside Virginia—an area that stretches from the James River south to the North Carolina border. Together we own and operate Browntown Farms, where we raise strawberries, blueberries, grape tomatoes and other seasonal produce. Our farm was founded in 1908 and has been officially recognized as a century farm. It originally included 348 acres of land, which my great-great-grandfather Sandy Brown and his brother-in-law Collins Jackson purchased for $1,200. Over the years the land was split among various family members, and my dad and I now have 114 acres of woodland and cropland acreage. Today we are produce farmers, but that wasn’t always the case. Historically, our roots are tied to raising tobacco as a cash crop. Almost two decades…

Over the last 45 years, we’ve had many barn kittens and cats, and this has resulted in numerous litters. Many of the mothers would hide their babies, and these kittens grew up to be unsocialized and somewhat wild. One such litter contained a gray angora-type kitten we called Fluff. Unlike the others, Fluff seemed to want attention, but he would shy away when we tried to pick him up or pet him. We decided to keep him and figured that if we had him fixed, he’d stick around. On the veterinarian’s advice, we lured Fluff into a pet carrier using food as bait, and before long we were off to get little Fluff neutered. I cautioned the folks at the vet’s office of his semi-feral nature. They told us we…

On a hot June evening, instead of running an air conditioner, I opened the door that links my home to the garage. The storm door was closed, but it had a screen that let in the night’s cool breeze. In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of my walking sticks clattering to the floor. I reprimanded my house cat, Annie, who is always on the go, then I went back to sleep. The next day my grandson came by on his usual rounds (he feeds the farm cats for me before he goes to work). When he arrived, he saw that the storm door had been torn apart on the bottom, cat food was scattered all over the garage floor and garden tools were in disarray.…

I was a young teenager in the summer of 1963 when a friend, Fred, asked me to help put up hay on his grandfather’s farm. I liked farms, and I would be paid for the work. It sounded grand. When Fred’s father dropped us off, we puttered around for a while, checking things out and visiting the animals. After dinner we listened to the radio and talked. Fred and I had a big day ahead of us, so we went to bed early. Then, way too early the next morning, his grandma called us down for breakfast. I’m not entirely sure the sun was up yet, but we ate and then headed out to the field. Fred’s grandpa ran a 1921 baler that made round bales secured with twine. As…

Goldie’s belly was quite round. The kittens would be arriving any day now, and every day after school my sister and I would tear down the driveway, running straight to our soon-to-be-mama to see if her belly was still full. One day my friend Tina came home with us, and we began the search for Goldie. We looked in all her favorite places, but she was nowhere to be found. We grabbed flashlights from the house and searched the remotest corners of the barn. At last we saw Goldie and her new little family deep in the rafters, right next to the sloping roof, in a tight space obviously chosen to keep her babies safe. Even with flashlights, we could barely see the kittens. But we were desperate to get…

My parents, my six sisters and I moved to a 140-acre farm in 1945. About half of the land was tillable; the rest was forest, pasture and brush. We had no plumbing, electricity, insulation or central heat, but we were happy, and I wouldn’t change a thing. We built stanchions for the cows, and neighbors helped us build a milk house and dairy. We also grew about 6 acres of Concord grapes, with some Niagaras mixed in. The Concords were sold to wineries. We kept the Niagaras for table grapes. Things changed in the 1970s when several local wineries went out of business. Tastes in wine were changing as well, from sweet wines to drier ones. Grape growers had two choices: plow everything under or market their own product. Some…

While I love all of our ranch dogs, Obi-Wan is remarkable. He is a Belgian Laekenoisa rare breed initially developed for herding and grazing sheep. We picked him up as a pup in Belgium and then spent a week touring that country with him. He was unfazed by the many draft horses we saw there. Allowed into restaurants, he’d settle at our feet, where the wait staff brought him all sorts of gourmet goodies. We take the sheep out each morning to graze, and though I trained Obi early on, his natural abilities amaze me. Our sheep graze in a different area every day, and he keeps them going in the right direction. He watches for stragglers and leaders alike, and he ensures they stay together, calm and moving at…

Nearly every piece of farm equipment my dad ever owned was purchased secondhand from a neighbor or at auction. But in 1973, 12 years after he and Mom moved to our family’s farm in Lawton, Dad was doing enough hay and straw that he took the plunge and bought a new New Holland 273 Hayliner square baler and a New Holland sickle mower. Over the years, that baler has seen more than its share of action, at its peak sending more than 20,000 bales per year through its chute. My brothers and I estimate it has handled upward of a half million bales of everything from first-cutting grass to second-cutting alfalfa, as well as wheat, oat and rye straw, cornstalks, asparagus ferns and even the occasional snake. Things have changed…