Overrun by mice

So yesterday I was gone all day, taking some reports to clients in Swan River and Marilyn decided that would be a good time to shampoo the carpet. She buys these packages of 5 fluorescent coloured fuzzy mice for dingbat the cat and he just LOVES them. But he loses them. Regularly. Right now there's about 15 of the stupid things in a puddle on the lounge chair where she put them as she found them during the big cleanup. One of them is hiding under the Mexican blanket on the couch with just its tail sticking out. He really likes it when they do that.

Jorgito has his own little routine now. Marilyn has been working in the office in the house. Actually she has paper spread over three rooms in there but that's a whole 'nuther story. Anyway, she goes off to work in the morning and Jorgito is always waiting at the door with his little arms stretched up so he can go with her. He likes the room to roam in the house. He roams in the bus too but it tends to get on our nerves. Karlita taught him to scare people while she was here. I doubt she realized she was teaching him but she certainly taught him well. He hides at the end of a hallway or behind a doorpost until you are just about at the doorway and then leaps around the corner, bounces off the wall and runs away with his tail in the air. When he did that to Karla she would always scream and then chase him. Later in the day Jorgito will be ready to come home before Marilyn is ready to bring him. If I happen to go into the house he waits at the back door and puts his little arms up to be carried back to the bus.

It just won't warm up here. There's still a snowbank on the north side of the big shop and in Marilyn's north flowerbed. The grass on the south-facing ditches has turned green but it is brown everywhere else and the trees are ready to bud out but just can't bring themselves to do it. I guess that's better than what they did last year but its getting monotonous. I got my new tractor home last week and did some work with the blade to get a new pad ready to park back by the barn but there's no point mowing the grass yet. We're still parked on the pad in front of the garage and we'll likely stay here until we get some rain. I'd like some moisture to compact the new pad and I'll probably drag some more fill into that area before we finally move. I've got an external wi-fi antenna coming from the US so I'm not in a big panic to move before that shows up either. It will be quieter once we get moved back there. We get a lot of road noise from the highway here.

I made a hurry up trip to Swan River and Minitonas yesterday to get some client signatures. We're as far along with seeding as anybody along that trip. It still amazes me that some areas haven't figured out zero or min till. You drive through regions where they still have cultivators going hard. I can understand using a cultivator to put on ammonia but full tillage?? Give me a break. That's just a sign that our farm support programs have failed miserably. Any government policy needs to be responsive to change. Unfortunately our farm support policy is locked into supporting everyone at any cost. I think it is slowly changing to accept the reality that some farmers just don't deserve to survive but that change is way too slow. I'm especially aware of it in the context of some of the farm reviews I have been doing. I gave one back yesterday and the farm wife said "There was no point in us doing this because we didn't get any money anyway." In other words, learning or making change based on the content of the report simply wasn't on the table. The only reason to do the exercise was to get a cheque from the government. Fortunately they aren't all like that but unfortunately some of them still are.

Its over 15 years now since Jim Halford had Keith Head doing a min-till tour with his then revolutionary ConservaPak drill. At the time we thought it was stupid. It would never work. But time has proven us wrong and it not only works, the technology works so well that it should be the starting point for every farming system. Fuel prices have probably quadrupled since 1990; fertilizer prices have more than tripled and seed cost is likely up by a similar amount. Any businessman who ignores the potential efficiencies of min till is simply too stupid to deserve to continue in operation. Any government support policy that tends to keep that business in existence is a drag on the whole economy.

I watched Gary Armstrong seed the quarter west of the yard here earlier this week. He's a smaller farmer, probably 6 quarters now, with correspondingly smaller equipment. His drill is about 35 feet and he pulls it with a medium sized front wheel assist tractor. He seeded that whole quarter in an easy day, all alone. I don't think he got rolling before 9:00 and he was all wrapped up well before 9 at night. Compare that to the performance that would have had to occur for him to seed it with a high tillage system and he likely took 1/3 of the time plus he did a superior job of seeding from a fuel efficiency, fertilizer use efficiency and moisture efficiency standpoint. Any program that supports an idiot neighbour so that he can compete with someone like Gary to rent land is just plain wrong.

Its starting to smell pretty good in here - Mama's making ribs for dinner. Ribs and corn on the cob. It must be summer, no matter what it looks like out the window.