Farmer’s Tan and Washington Broadband

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It’s been a lovely Easter weekend, our first to hit 70 degrees this year. I managed to plant some flowers, but that is all I’ve done to prepare for spring. I do, however, have a great start on my farmer’s tan.

In the “Who Knew?” department is this tidbit of information: The Washington State Department of Commerce has a five year program, the Washington State Broadband Office. (Yes, it was news to me, and I keep track of these things.) If you click on Mapping, you can view their interactive map which will tell you if you have broadband in your area and who the providers are. There are also tools for communities who want inital or better access to broadband for their areas, including grants for training.  They even have a Twitter feed!

If you aren’t in Washington, try looking up a “broadband office” for your state. It most likely will be part of the Commerce department.

Weird things I think about late on a Friday night…

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…when I’m missing Galactibash at the Sci-Fi Museum. (Sigh, just too far away.) So, here goes:

  • When rural folk put up the harvest, they are preparing for a hard winter or a possible power outage. When geek rural folk put up the harvest, they are preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
  • Rural folk trim their hedges into fence lines or, sometimes, animals. Rural geeks trim their hedges into cubes or spheres and call them “the collective”.
  • Rural folk like to get together, have a BBQ and play some card games. Rural geeks like to get together, have a BBQ and play some LAN video games until they realize it’s dawn and they need to go milk the cows.

Just some food for thought…

Winter Wonders

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On the farm, there is never a dull season. Winter, especially, serves up unexpected delights on the dorment land. You just have to watch and wait.

Snow Geese flock to our fields by the tens of thousands, flying in strings and waves across the sky. Swans, be they tundra, mute, or the rare and impressive trumpeter, stream into the flatlands, covering the green fields in a startling white. As I work on the farm, I can look up to see these huge white birds fill the sky as they move from the Sound inland each morning and back out to sea each night. It is an amazing site every single time.

The bald eagles, on the other hand, sit in the tops of tree and squabble with each other… extremely loudly. The Sister had to go outside, one afternoon, to yell at a pair who were disturbing her work. It didn’t really help.

The eagles move south from their Alaskan home to take advantage of the leftovers from the fall salmon runs. I once counted 202 white-headed raptors on a day trip up the Skagit Valley. Yes, that’s 202 American Bald Eagles in an 8-hour time span. One 90-foot tree alone held nearly 75 of them, just hanging out.

By spring, they have almost all but disappeared. A few straggling Snow Geese flocks grace our tulip fields, showing off for the tourists, but they are soon gone, travelling back to Wrangell Island in Alaska. Next winter, they’ll be back, gracing our skies and fields once more.

…and people wonder why I live out here.

Is it Organic?

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I have a strange, yet severe, reaction to milk. It’s not just any milk, however, only milk produced conventionally in the United States. When I went to Australia in 2008, I ate a lot of yogurt in the mornings as that is the common type of protein they have there. No problems! I can have double cream in my coffee in London (yum!) with no affect whatsoever. Milk in the United States is a completely different experience. If I add the smallest pat of butter to a whole pot of rice and eat a few spoonfuls of it, the muscles in my hands and feet start to ossify. They turn to stone and all the tissues around them swell. It is incredibly painful and quite disabling.

After I returned from Australia, I decided to try adding yogurt to my diet here in the states, to disastrous effect. I became disabled and could not work for 6 weeks. It took my doctors and I months to figure out that milk was causing the problem. Once I removed all dairy from my diet, the swelling and pain slowly went away, leaving, unfortunately, scar tissue in the muscles.

Since that time, I’ve been trying to determine what in the milk could be causing this. I started by testing a bite of conventional cheese and noting my reaction to it over the next two weeks. (Yikes! That was all I could say.) Next, I added a raw-milk cheese to one serving of dinner and had no reaction over the next two weeks. I added an organic cheese and again nothing happened. I then repeated the organic cheese and I had a huge reaction. (What the heck?) It didn’t make any sense. Why would I react differently to the same organic cheese?

Then I read this article: http://www.dairyherd.com/dairy-news/latest/Holes-found-in-organic-milk-certification-141103203.html

According to a USDA study, organic milk can, at times, be contaminated by conventionally produced milk in transportation or processing. They are recommending better controls and more stringent inspections to assure consumers that organic really means organic. For some of us, this can’t come soon enough. One way to circumvent cross-contamination is to find an organic dairy that pasturizes their milk on the farm and sells to consumers directly.

In the meantime, I can use some raw and my organic coconut milk to ensure that I don’t get anything that can cause these problems to recur.

A TV Star & Managing Your CSA in the Cloud

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I have been thoroughly chastised for my delinquency in updating my blog. Mea culpa. I will try to to be better. (There’s just so much going on.)

First, Dr. Doug Hammill is going to be featured on “Rural Heritage” on RFD, the rural channel. February 3rd, they will show Part 1 of “Preventing Wrecks” with Part 2 to follow on February 17th. This is invaluable information for anyone working with horses. If you get RFD (DirecTV definitely carries it) check to see what time of the day Rural Heritage will show. 

Second, I went to Cavalia in Marymoor Park this last weekend. The show is a mixture of Cirque D’Soleil and your favorite horse show. One breed they showcased was the Comtois, a smaller French draft horse. I’ve never seen one before. He looked a lot like a tiny version of our Belgians, but with light feathering and just a star on his face. The breed is said to be very gentle in nature and perfect for small farm work. (I just have to remind myself that I don’t need another horse, no matter how cool they are.)

Third, I had a lovely chat with Miriam at Farmigo.com. This online tool streamlines CSA systems so that local, small farmers can grow from subsistence to profitability. By eliminating the paperwork of planning, marketing, collecting payment, and statistical analysis, it frees farmers to do what  they do best – grow stuff. Take a tour of the customer-facing site and see what you think. I’ve talked at length with one farmer who was able to increase the number of families his 10 acres could feed from 80 to 130. It was enough to keep him from having to work off the farm and with the statistical analysis he received, he has some great planning tools for next year.

Fourth, the FDA, in response to the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, has just restricted the use of cephalosporins in livestock, according to a New York Times article. Interesting…

Oh, and a few hundred thousand people made their voices known. It looks like SOPA and PIPA will not make it through congress.

Hey, don’t mess with our internet.

So, I’ll add more tomorrow. Time for sleep…

This dog just won’t hunt…

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Every time I want to sit down and write a little bit about how rural folks can better use the internet, someone in the US congress proposes a bill that just reinforces how little they understand about how the online world works. Here is the case in point: the Protect IP bill in the Senate (S968) and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House. These two bills were introduced as methods to stop the piracy of intellectual property, mostly movies, online. Unfortunately, they are written so very broadly, that they subject casual social media users (yes, that’s your grandmother posting those baby videos) to prosecution and jail time and endanger the very stability of the internet itself.

I agree that intellectual property needs protection. Much of the value of business in the US involves IP in one way or another. However, these bills are not the way to go. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing for the New York Times, says, “While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.”

To better understand this proposed legislation, see the video on the Fightforthefuture.org site. To see what’s happening since these bills were introduced, see Matt Cutts’ blog entry. (Scroll down past the video for more fun facts.) He has an interesting graph showing the amount and type of funding going into these bills.

For rural folks, this legislation could have some serious repercussions. I think the most serious side-effect would be the fear created. Would you post anything on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter if you could potentially be prosecuted for it? I’ve quoted lines from TV shows in previous posts, mostly as an homage to them. Would I have to pull those or risk going to jail? Would a small business, such as a farm, be willing to use these online tools with that level of risk? Censorship could happen to anyone accused, (not convicted, but only accused) of posting content that might infringe on IP rights. Something as simple as quoting a popular song or submitting an outdoor video that had a logo or background music in it could get you censored or jailed. Any social media company that didn’t actively censor every posting could be shut down.

We would, essentially, become China. I don’t know about you, but I like my hard-won civil liberties.

Okay, can I get back to talking about rural geek things now?

FCC Overhauls the Universal Service Fund

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What’s the Universal Service Fund and what does that mean to those of us who want and need broadband? Let’s just say, it’s a big deal.

“We are taking a system designed for the Alexander Graham Bell era of rotary telephones and modernizing it for the era of Steve Jobs and the Internet future he imagined,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

In other words, by improving efficiencies in how technologies are handled, rural places can be brought into the 21st century, without increasing the amount of funding already set aside for rural communications systems. More details can be found in the USA Today article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-10-27/fcc-rural-broadband-fund/50960016/1?loc=interstitialskip or at http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/connecting-america.

Still, I’m constantly amazed at how many people feel that rural broadband should not be funded at all, that internet access is a privilege granted only to those who live in densely populated areas. They say, “If you want broadband, move to the city”. I say that this is the height of self-interest and denies that rural places have anything to offer those who don’t live there.

If you live in the city or the suburbs, you benefit directly from rural production. You wouldn’t have food, building materials, oil, gas, or all the minerals that go into your iPads and X-boxes if it weren’t for folks who live and work in the country. By denying these industries, and the people who work in them, access to high-speed connections, we are actually increasing the costs of those goods to ourselves. When farmers have to call long distance on a conventional phone in order to get their produce to the right market, they have to pass those costs onto their consumers. The same goes for any industry that tries to succeed on an uneven playing field. By getting the efficiencies of new technologies into the hands of businesses, rural or urban, we make everyone’s life better. I won’t even mention how difficult it is for rural industries to compete in a world market, where other countries have much more advanced high-speed systems. (Oh pooh! I just mentioned it.)

Here are a few statistics about the benefits we’ll see from the overhaul of the Universal Service Fund:

  • Americans living in unserved rural areas who will receive access to broadband over the next decade: 18 million
  • Consumers who will get mobile broadband coverage where they live, work, and travel: millions
  • Jobs created related to new deployment in rural areas over five years: 500,000
  • Annual economic benefits in rural areas from new deployment: $700 million
  • Annual increase in economic growth, creating jobs: $50 billion
  • Benefit to cost ratio for consumers: $3 to $1
  • Percentage of FORTUNE 500 companies that post job openings online only – and require online applications: over 80 percent
  • Graduation rates for students with broadband at home compared to similar students with no broadband access: 6% to 8% higher

 

 

Pony Litter

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At the end of the summer, the Sister and Brother-in-law had the drainage in the paddock area re-done. We get so much rain that all the land ends up with standing water, including both the paddock and the pastures. If it’s not properly sloped, graveled, and channeled, the horses, with their big hooves, can turn any ground into the biggest mud bath. It’s not good for the land and not good for the horses.

There are now french drains all the way around the sacrifice area and across the paddock, carried through one of the pastures to a sump area which then drains into a lovely ditch that continues into the county’s system. Additionally, the surface of the paddock is covered in fabric and then sand gravel. In this soft, yet bone dry area, the horses can walk, sleep, chase each other, and roll around. It’s just great.

I can now easily clean up after the horses. The paddock area is firm and dry. Using a hay fork, I can sift through the gravel and pick everything out that needs to go to the compost. It’s very much like cleaning the cat box, only on a monumental scale. (One bale in equals one bale out.) We’ve started calling it “pony litter”.

Broadband, at Last!

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As of noon today, all three houses on the farm were hooked up to high-speed DSL. We’ve been waiting for a decade for this and today it finally happened. It’s almost unbelievable.

Frontier, a smaller telco company, recently bought all the rural telephone lines across the nation from Verizon, with the ideal of providing fiber broadband to every one of their customers. Then they started rewiring every area that was still without a connection. They installed new equipment, hired new, locally-based customer service representatives, and started contacting customers, letting them know that broadband was coming.

Frontier has discovered that rural broadband can be profitable. Once the capital cost of the initial equipment and wiring is covered, the return on investment can be quite good, providing management maintains a handle on costs. Distance will diminish profits somewhat but does not eliminate them. In a down market, Frontier is growing and hiring, simply by providing services to rural areas.

The adoption rate around here, I’m sure, is going to be high. A number of neighbors called me, asking if it was really true that we were going to get a high-speed connection. They wanted to sign up right away. Then, the techs who came to install my system said they already had 200 requests for new connections that weekend.

Today, I dropped some of the last squash to be harvested at The Neighbor’s house. She, in the few days she’s had broadband, has discovered online gaming. She took the pumpkin and carnival squash from my hands and, without even setting them down, went back to slaying the enemy’s cavalry before they overran her castle. Apparently, she said, there is no pause. I have an indelible image in my mind of her hacking at the enemy troops while cradling squash in her left arm. Truly, she’s a bonafide rural geek.

Doc Hammill’s Draft Horse Workshop…

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…or how to drastically challenge the limits of my comfort zone.

Cathy Greatorex and Dr. Doug Hammill drive a Forecart with a Cultivator

Two weeks ago, I attended Doc’s workshop to learn more about driving and working with my horses at home. It was an eye-opening experience and, after so much time spent in the technical world, a great way to reconnect with a more natural system of thinking. In so many ways, I had to rearrange my methods for solving a problem. I had to think much more like a horse.

Horses predominently think about two things: protecting themselves and getting along with their group (that is, when they aren’t thinking about food). By keying into that mindset, we can start to eliminate the confusion of communicating with another species. (At least, that’s how the theory works in my head.) Theory and practice are, in the real world, quite different. Doc’s workshop takes you from theory to practice, in a very safe learning environment. (I didn’t get a single bruise or scrape the whole time I was there, unlike working here on the farm.)

Three Fjords!

After adequate preparation, I was handed the reins on the very first day. I drove Ann, the Suffolk Punch, down the road, up the hill, and back. Then I remembered to breathe. (I should do that once in awhile…) As I got used to handling the reins over the next week, the actual breathing part got easier.

Doc and Cathy teach four workshops a year at their ranch in Eureka, Montana. Each workshop has no more than five students. This means that we had a big enough group to learn from each other, yet each of our personal questions were addressed. In the six days I spent there, we learned how to:

  • Following the side rake.
    Side Rake in the hay field.

    bring the horses in from the pasture,

  • groom the horses and care for hooves,
  • put on the harness, including fitting and adjusting it
  • hitch to carts and wagons
  • ground drive
  • skid logs (little ones, mind you)
  • rake hay
  • use a walking plow with a single horse
  • cultivate with a team

That’s a great deal of information for one week. My head is still swimming, I tell you.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been able to change a few things to make working with the horses a bit easier. They are now coming in from the fields a bit more readily and I’m understanding their actions and motivations better. My blind quarter horse will take more work, but I now have, I believe, better ways to deal with his confusion. Because he can’t see, he’s very sensitive to both sound and touch which makes training him a delicate operation. I’m working on having him stand quietly and we’re very slowly making some progress.

Doc and Ann

I’ve gained new confidence to work with my horses (and not screw them up). I can drive a team now. (I know! It’s shocking!) I just need to learn to breathe while doing so.

Other students from Doc’s workshops have gone onto full-time farming with horses and even driving competitions. If you’ve ever considered animal-powered work, this is definitely a great way to start learning. You can find out more information at his site, http://www.dochammil.com/. Many times, during the winter, he will travel throughout the West teaching classes. Catch one near you!