No Tractor No Problem??? + What Small Farmer's Should Know About Bird Flu

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight. It is Thursday, December 12th, 2024, and today we're gonna talk about why I don't have a tractor, a farmer's guide to bird flu, and where I go for farm news and info. So let's do it. All right, so I hope everyone is having a good time gearing up for the holidays and all that good stuff. In fact, I'm just going to warn you now that it looks like I will not be able to put up anything the week of Christmas for all the family stuff going on, but I will be back to it the following week for New Year's. With that in mind, I thought I would be fun to do a couple of top 10 lists on the 30th and 31st of January, but I need to hear from you all what are the top 10 lists you would like from me. I have some ideas, but I'd rather hear what you all wanna hear. They can be solely from 2024 or from farming in general. Drop those ideas for top 10 lists in the December show thread at Patreon or in the YouTube comments section, and I'll try to get to a couple of them for those last days of the year. And then January 1st is on a Wednesday. I haven't stayed up to midnight for the ball drop in many, many years. I'm more likely to wake up at midnight than stay up to midnight, and that'll probably not change this year, but that's especially true because I will be doing a podcast on New Year's Eve and day so we can all ring in this new year together like a bunch of nerds. But these things, this podcast, requires early mornings, so no late night New Year's celebrations for me. Maybe I'll treat it like I treat the late basketball and soccer games that I want, that I always wanna see and are just starting at 10 p.m. or whatever. I'll record it and then not look at my phone so I don't know who won, and then I'll wake up the next day and just watch it fresh in the morning at like 2.30 a.m. So I'll just do that. It probably works the same with ball drops, right? Yeah. Okay, so my original plan was to dedicate this first segment to bird flu, but I think I'm gonna save that for the last segment. So if you have animals, I would stick around for that one. Right now, I'm going to instead continue catching up on some of the awesome Patreon questions from November to get caught back up on that. Today's first question comes from Patreon member, Kyle Putnam, who writes, quote, "'Okay, I'm going to ask a question I think you've been asked a lot. Why no tractor? Does the financial farm math just not work? If so, okay. I had a major spinal issue this year and broke down and bought a tractor for our large home garden slash hayfield. Owning one confirmed my belief that tractors are the reason things can quickly get ripped up or compacted on a farm, but being judicious with ours lets me produce a lot of food this year while saving my spine. Over 40, man, things change." End quote, and totally over 40 things do seem to change. I hear that. I feel it. So great question, Kyle. There are a few reasons that I have not yet purchased a tractor. Emphasis on the word yet, I suppose. The first is that our sized operation, the math really doesn't math out very well. It would take me something like 15 years of making all my own compost to pay for a small tractor with a bucket slash front end loader versus just buying in what I need in the compost realm. I also don't have a lot of use for one in the fields beyond mowing, which I can pay someone else to do or trade melons for in the summer. Moreover, one thing I love about my farm currently is that it is not dangerous at all. Okay, my flame weeder freaks me out a little bit and it's not impossible. I could have a freak walk behind tractor accident, but by and large, my farm is safe for myself and for my kids, and I like it that way. Tractors add a whole other level of safety risk. If nothing else, the smashing of fingers, swapping implements, I do not miss that. As my mentor, Eric Smith, used to say, metal is unforgiving, and I have lived that for a while, switching implements. Also, I am limited here on this farm in terms of covered space in which to keep a tractor, so I would have to expand the shed I already have or build a new one or whatever, or add on a lean-to. Not a huge deal, but also not nothing, right? Can't simply buy it, park it, use it. I have to house it as well. Now, a lot of my math comes from pricing new or fairly new tractors, so could I just buy an older tractor for a reasonable price? Sure, maybe, but I'm not a machine head, and I definitely don't have the mechanical savvy to, I don't know, identify potential problems in a used tractor, nor do I have the tools or know-how to fix said tractor on the farm. Also, for me, sitting is actually the hardest thing on my back, and the tractors we used to use during my two-year apprenticeship absolutely ripped my back to shreds. For that reason, I have actually looked into the Dingo from Toro or a Bobcat mini-steer, picture like a skid-steer that you drive while standing up, but I've kind of looked at those as an option because that size is compact enough that I could store it easier, it's lower on the danger scale, it could move large loads of compost for me, and, well, I could use it standing up. They are not cheap, though, like surprisingly not cheap, often more expensive than a tractor, and may effectively math out worse than a basic tractor, though I do believe they have pretty high resale value, so maybe there's something there. Anyway, yeah, there are five or six times a year where I really wish I had a tractor, but for the moment, with all of the calculus that I just kind of laid out, those are the reasons I haven't bought one yet. If I was farming more land or I had access to really, really nice manure and feedstocks for compost, it may be worth it, I think, but for my operation of farm, it just doesn't make a ton of sense. That said, I fully get it when people do go for the tractor, especially because not all back problems are the same, and it would help in some ways, and there may come a time in the future when I bite the bullet, but for now, I'll continue to do some things the hard way and stay friends with my wonderful neighbors who are often happy to help with their tractors. Again, I think if I had a bigger farm or honestly a different type of farm, a tractor would be viable. I really love, for instance, the idea of doing some grain production, but it just doesn't make sense on my scale and I don't have the room to expand. What about you all? Have you bought a tractor? Was it the right purchase? Any regrets? Did it math out for you? Does it matter? I mean, some of you might be like, I don't care about the finances. I love my tractor. It's fun. It saves my back. Saves me work. I look cool driving it. I don't judge. All that's fine. For me, at my age, I'd like to start moving away from the debt a little bit, but also, I get it. Great question, and keep them coming, Kyle, and other Patreon members. Up next, we'll talk about where I go to learn. Yeah, BRB. Today's episode of Growers Daily is brought to you by Tilt Soil. Tilt Soil is a worker-owned co-op in Cleveland, Ohio, making NOP-compliant living soils for organic growers. Everything from Tilt is compost-based and they divert around 4,000 tons of food scraps from landfills each year. I have used Tilt Soil for several years now for my plant starts. I love the results. I get consistent germination and consistent growth, plus excellent customer support. It's a lovably nerdy cast of folks who run Tilt. So, start your season with excellent germination and strong transplants. Check out Tilt's pre-sale pricing for the 2025 season at tiltsoil.com. That's tiltsoil.com, and click Farmers. All right, back to the show. If you, the listener, are enjoying this podcast and would like to support it, you can do so over at patreon.com slash no-tillgrowers. I try to get to questions from everywhere that questions come in, but I will always get to those Patreon questions, clearly. So, today's second question comes from Patreon member Mike Williams, who asks, quote, apologies in advance if you've already answered this in a previous post. What sources do you use for market reports or updates, news for growers, policy changes, notifications slash alerts, et cetera? I am new to gardening and the internet will show me exactly what I am searching for, bias and ignorance included, which can be overwhelming and confusing, if not contradicting. What sources do you trust for your updated information? Thanks for your hard work, end quote. First, Mike, no, I don't think I have answered this one in particular, and I like it. I also hope no one hesitates to ask a question out of fear that it has been answered before. Sometimes, even if I have answered it, it doesn't mean I covered it fully or don't have a new take on it or that I can't answer it from a different angle. Not everyone listens to every episode anyway, though, shout-outs to those of you who do. So yeah, ask away. Okay, so back to the question of what resources I use for, to quote Mike, market reports and updates, news for growers, policy changes, notifications slash alerts, et cetera. So in market gardening, market reports are less significant than they would be for a wholesale producer or a commodity producer, like corn and soybean type of grower, for whom a shift in a few cents per bushel in one direction or another can mean thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. In market farming, we are largely setting our own prices based on the market that we're in, what others are charging, and how much the item costs to produce. Those are our factors. I have a question coming up soon to address on here on how we set the price of produce, so be on the lookout for that. However, if I have a product that I have absolutely no idea what to charge, I will actually start by looking at Whole Foods, yeah, like the retailer website, the one that I guess is owned by Amazon now, and other retailers of organic produce to get an idea of what a specific crop might go for in a large commercial setting. That gives me some sort of baseline to work from. So it's not a market report per se, but it's a good starting point for what the market is charging. Now, the USDA does have some market reports that you can find, but I've just never really found them super helpful for our situation because they're more based around large wholesale pricing. Perhaps others can comment with their favorite market sources for pricing produce. News for growers is an interesting one. News in the grower's sector is not super common because not a ton happens for small-scale growers, and usually when something does happen to a farmer or a small grower, it's everywhere within a matter of minutes. A lot of folks use the Facebook groups, which can be great, and lots of good growers contribute to those. I got off Facebook several years ago, though, because I just can't handle the fabricated stories and inaccurate and misleading news that flood the general feed, like ditto Twitter, and not just political stuff. Almost everything is wrong or inaccurate there, and I can only read the word BREAKING in all caps a couple times in a day before my brain melts. But for instance, I have a Facebook page that I have to manage for a soccer thing, so I have a Facebook account with zero friends, and it's exclusively for that soccer thing, but it gets soccer news, and even the soccer news shared on the main feed is inaccurate. I mean, they're just made-up stories about Messi leaving Miami for some random club or whatever. So although there is some decent growing info in the groups for sure, the juice is just not worth the squeeze for me to have to log in to that site. Instead, we have the No-Till Growers Forum as an alternative that also has a lot of really good growers populating it, and you don't have to see which club Messi isn't actually going to. There is a bonus. I also listen to a couple podcasts to keep up with what's happening in the market garden world a bit, but we also produce several of those podcasts that I get to listen to every week, and that helps a lot. Beyond our own stuff, much of it largely created to be a reliable information source for market gardening. I really like Growing for Market magazine. That's a great resource. Ditto Instagram, honestly, if you curate it well and follow a range of good growers who share what their practices are. I should also say that getting on your own local ag organization's email list can be helpful for finding grants and things that might be beneficial to you or affect you specifically in your region or in your context. Conferences are another place to pick up important tidbits that might benefit your farm specifically and find other organizations to follow. Extension agents are getting more connected to small farms, and they will likewise know what's gonna help you. Sometimes it's like county by county, and they'll be like, we have this grant from such and such that you can apply for it. There's no way I would know that for you, like if you're in, I don't know, Wisconsin. There's probably a ton of stuff going on there that I would have no idea about. As for reading about larger ag policy and such, I like Politico's Ag Reporting. I wrote for Civil Eats for a while and did a couple articles for The Atlantic. Have I mentioned I was also a journalist? I feel like I've done everything. Those are both excellent resources. I read The New York Times' ag policy and science stuff as it pops up, and I also seek out conservative and progressive analyses alike for different farm policies. I think a good habit we should all develop is to get to the point when we can argue the opposite side of every issue we care deeply about or that anger us or that we're really passionate about. I think the assumption of most contentious issues is that the other side is just, well, dumb, which, spoiler alert, is more often than not not the case. It's just that the way news and information is delivered to us anymore, it's heavily weighted in one direction or another. Again, Facebook and Twitter are the worst, and TikTok can be bad, but I avoid it because I don't get on that side because it's just a time suck, but anyway, that's another digression. It's easy to assume the other side of an argument just doesn't get it. The reality is, though, most people are smarter and more thoughtful than what the media we consume ever gives them credit for, and I'm not just talking about politics. This scenario can play out in ag, too, with things like subsidies, which people have strong feelings about and should because it is a lot of money but may not understand the full reality of those subsidies. In fact, farmer Chris Newman posted a few videos recently on farm subsidies that I thought were really insightful and worth listening to or watching, and I'll link those in the show notes, but anyway, I think having a diversity of news sources is as important as having a diversity of soil organisms. That's how you develop a healthy understanding of the world and a healthy world. Did that at all answer your question, Mike? I have no idea. I hope so. Let us know where you go for your market garden info. Up next, let's talk about bird flu and talk about what farmers should know about it. Be right back. Okay, so I promised to talk a bit about bird flu this week. I'm not going to editorialize or anything really here. I don't know that anyone could. There's not enough information out there about it to do that, which is great. We're in a good spot. I'm just going to lay out what is happening with it so farmers know what's up because it is kind of a farmer situation right now. So first, I wanna start by saying and emphasizing for the health of all of our brains that the CDC still considers the risk to humans to be quite low. There have been a few cases in people the vast majority of mild and come from those individuals having direct contact with livestock. Only one of them that we know of has turned severe. Canadian teenager was hospitalized for some time with severe bird flu infection in the lungs. They were unable to identify the original source of this infection. The teenager did not have any known contact with livestock but the subsequent testing of the teenager and their family and everyone had been in, they had been in contact with found no additional outbreaks of the virus, which is great. All that to say the risk is still low but the reason it's important is that the level of risk can change quickly. As of right now, there are no known human to human infections and only 58 confirmed human infections in the US, I think as of right now, all but two linked to either poultry or dairy farms. So yeah, again, we're at low risk to humans right now and I'm hoping by putting this on everyone's radar, we can do a little, do our little part to keep it that way. Backing up for a second, highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI, H5N1 bird flu, which we'll just call bird flu from here on out to avoid all that word salad, is a virus that as the name suggests, primarily affects birds and is often transmitted via wild birds. Perhaps obviously that means that this virus can infect poultry operations and has indeed wreaked some havoc in recent years. In 2022, 5 million birds were cold in Iowa for a bird flu outbreak. And then in May of this year, another 4.2 million were cold in that same state. In Colorado in July, 1.2 million were cold. And these are just a few of the big operations that have been affected and bird flu has also infected backyard flocks as well. If you have sick chickens, you can report it to your vet or call the USDA's toll-free hotline. I'll leave that number in the show notes. There is a good article from the University of Minnesota that I will also link in the show notes where they write, quote, in chickens, HPAI, that's bird flu, signs often include respiratory, gasping, and digestive, extreme diarrhea, signs followed by rapid death. Rapid death is their words. Anyway, chickens may have swelling around the head, neck, and eyes. The heads and legs may also have purple discoloration. Other poultry species, including turkeys, may have nervous symptoms such as tremors, twisted necks, paralyzed wings, laying down and pedaling, end quote. So if you are seeing any of that, maybe start with your vet and they'll give you a number to call if they can't help. Also handle any dead animals with gloves and a mask just to be on the safe side. Now in March, bird flu started popping up in dairy cattle, which is not great. That means it has or can adapt to mammals, cattle, and thus humans. Mortality and culling rates in dairy cattle is currently very low. Signs in cattle include lower appetite, lower milk production or discolored milk. It's recommended to call your vet and separate sick animals from the herd as well. The issue is that the more mammals it infects, the more opportunities it has to evolve into a virus that can infect and or sicken humans. One way this can transfer is through raw milk and they have been finding live bird flu virus in raw milk. Not advising one way or another on raw milk, but if you're a raw milk producer or just a milk producer in general, it might be worth contacting your vet for guidance on how to reduce risk of spread between animals and spread to humans. Now, the other animals have been infected with bird flu as well. And in fact, there is a new study out about how cats can become a vector and the mortality rate of felines could be as high as 67%, according to at least one review that has not notably been published in a peer reviewed journal just yet, according to the New York Times. But dairy cattle and poultry are the two primary ones right now. If you see anything weird in other livestock or pets, or especially in pigs in line with a respiratory disease or diarrhea, I would report that as well. There has only been one confirmed case of bird flu in pigs. In Oregon, there was a single pig who mingled with some ducks and chickens and was confirmed to have bird flu. Finding the virus in pigs is concerning because pigs share some influenza strains with humans and other animals. So if infected by bird flu and perhaps another influenza strain, the viruses could potentially swap genes and create something our bodies have not seen before. So effectively pigs and other mammals like cats and well, just humans can serve as miniature labs for breeding novel viruses. That's where we are for it at the moment. I know death and such isn't particularly uncommon among livestock, but if something seems out of the ordinary, don't hesitate to call the vet and just mention it. I just thought, especially since many growers also have some animals, that it wouldn't hurt to put that basic info out there just so you know what to look for and what to think about. Obviously confinement operations are likely to be more at risk, but that doesn't mean small pastured operations are totally out of the path. So anyway, I'm gonna wrap it up there. Huge shouts to Willie Breeding for the theme music and to the team at No-Till Growers for their support. Big ups, oh, that's fun to say. Big ups to everyone over at patreon.com slash notillgrowers where at a certain level, or if you just bump up from one level to another, or if you just sign up in the month of December, you get a shout out on the show. So big shout outs today to Rachia Grant. Wish I started 20 years ago, I remember you. Dwight Yoder, hi Dwight. Honeyworks, Steve Hurlburt, Rebecca S, Mark Revenell, Doug Wilkes, Lee Shelley, Brian McCarthy, Larry Shepard, Spencer Carter, Martian Cindy, DP, Kat Branigan. There's our novelistic name Kat. You started all of it, I think. Little Row Farms, Hank Zeka, Ashley Sharp, Jill Crosby, Scott Roser, Norske Garde Farm, Laura Breton, Laura Britton, Joseph Sanguinetti, Alex Savatsky, Alberto Diaz, Jason Ruel, Earthcare Farmer, Jane Murner, Derek Page, Meredith Light from Granite Springs Farm, Grown Up Farm, Bob and Anne Patton of Hexham Shire Organics, Jared Kirst of Rivendell Farm, Dan Breezebois, Steve Larson, Fiona and Donnie of Firefly Farm, and Jen Lawrence Mortimer, Kimberly Monacho, Monacho, Monacho, and Ayla. This is actually the list of passengers on a small cruise, and they were out on the ocean, pretty far away from where Godzilla was attacking stuff, because that's what they were doing, but pretty far away from that, so that wasn't a problem. But what was a problem was that, whoops, somebody gave all of the dolphins mind control devices. And dolphins are actually really nice creatures, but they are jokesters. So a lot of hilarity ensues, and it's just a big, fun, goofball time, and yeah, and it will have you in stitches, or so say the reviews. Anyway, thanks for listening and or watching. We'll see you on, what is today, Thursday? We'll see you tomorrow. All right, bye.