The Rest of the Story
Yesterday I wrote about Sam, our male llama, leaving the farm to go to a petting zoo. I said,
“So this morning a couple of guys came with a trailer, and we got Sam corraled, haltered, and down to the trailer. (That sentence was lot easier and quicker to write than the actual doing of the deed, believe me!)”
That was one of those “understatements.” But I didn’t write about it extensively yesterday being tired and needing to get to other work. However, I DID write about it last night in an email to a friend.
So as Paul Harvey would say, here’s “The Rest of the Story,” being lifted from the email I sent my friend.
“I got the humor email done, fixed eggs for breakfast, and stuff in a lunch box when the guy was calling to say he was almost here and double-checking directions. I guess I wasn’t clear enough, because he still ended up going to xxxx ROAD instead of our house on xxxx LANE.
I told him how to turn in the right direction, and he finally got here. That’s when the real fun began. (That was sarcasm in case you’re wondering.)
First, he couldn’t get his truck and trailer through the gate and into the back yard and on into the llama pen so it would be close to Sam’s pen. I don’t know if his vehicle really was that much wider than our truck that we CAN get through there, but at any rate, he couldn’t do it.
That meant we had to walk Sam down from the pasture to the trailer in the driveway. This is a llama that just stays in the field, never wears a halter, and is certainly not trained to walk on lead. And the shortest distance was to take him out of the little lot that is behind the sheep shed, straight down through the main pasture, back yard and into the driveway. Sounds easy enough, right? Ha! And again I say, HA!
To walk him so far, he needed a halter. Who do you suppose had to put the halter on him? Oh, you guessed that did you? Yes, after telling this guy I have a back condition and he needed to bring someone to assist him in loading Sam because I couldn’t help… I helped. A LOT.
Sam went up to the furthest little corner of that pen, close to the orchard. As in about the furthest point he could get in the field away from where the trailer was in the driveway. Figures!
Anyway, I got the halter on him and was holding him while the guy brought the lead rope. Sam was stomping his front feet and I told him to stop smacking my legs with his, and the guy said, “He’s not fussing with you, he’s standing in an ant hill.” OH NO!!!
Oh, YES, we were both standing in a fire ant hill. I got several bites on my ankles. they hurt like the dickens earlier today but are okay now. Of course, having been through this before, I know that I’m not necessarily home free on that. Sometimes they come back, so to speak, and swell up even bigger a day or two later. But maybe I’ll get lucky. (today’s note: I didn’t… the bites are red and swollen today… I seem to have a bit of an allergy or sensitivity or whatever to ant bites.)
Well, anyway, we got the lead rope attached to the halter, backed out of the ant hill and started down the pasture with Sam. He wasn’t happy about it and balking. Have you ever tried to move a big male llama that has planted his feet and does NOT want to go?
So I got the idea to run down and get a little piece of PVC pipe The Farmer had that he used some times to help herd animals. While I was doing that, they got Sam further down the pasture, and get this… that guy who will be Sam’s new owner walked back and got my camera and lead ropes I had hung on a fence post, so I wouldn’t have to walk back and get them.
Wow! I told The Farmer this evening that “my own husband wouldn’t have done that.” He agreed, and said my husband probably would have just reminded me I left them there, and don’t leave that expensive camera behind! Ha!
Which just goes to prove that not all Southern Gentlemen wear a suit and a tie, but some wear jeans and a tee shirt! From talking to him on the phone, and meeting him today… I feel really good about where Sam is going. I think he is going to be with good people.
At any rate, it took us close to two hours to accomplish all this from the time they got here to the time we finally got the llama loaded in the trailer. He balked at every gate.
We got him as far as the driveway. I had to stand and hold him quite a while there while the guy turned his truck and trailer around, because he had pulled in and there was such a narrow passage between the storage pod in the driveway and his truck and trailer, we all agreed we’d never get Sam through there the way he was not wanting to go through gates. But of course this was a 4-horse trailer and the guy had quite a time backing out of our driveway and trying to get it turned around.
But at long last he did, and then we had to get Sam in the trailer. That was fun! (That’s sarcasm again, just so ya know.) The guy holding the lead rope we attached to the halter walked in the trailer ahead of Sam.
I had the rope we tied around Sam’s neck as an extra precaution and stood alongside the trailer with the rope threaded through a window and getting leverage on the metal post to keep him from backing out.
The second guy was pushing on Sam’s butt, trying to push him up and into the trailer.
And Sam? He had planted his front feet like a … donkey, and didn’t want to budge!
However, we finally eased him up to the trailer, and he stepped in. Once he got his front feet in there, we worked fast to push him the rest of the way in and shut the trailer gate.
It took us a while, but we finally made it!”
And that, my friends, is the rest of the story.
Conundrums on the Farm
Conundrum – defined as
- a : a question or problem having only a conjectural answer
- b : an intricate and difficult problem
Besides the obvious conundrum we’ve had of wondering why the cria was born too early, there are other puzzles on the farm.
For instance, what happened to this rooster’s tail feathers?
Where's the tail feathers???
Or how about this? Why does this guinea hen have a chicken chick?
Mama guinea with her chicken chick
Or we might pause to wonder why there was a foil star balloon blowing across the main pasture . . .
Why do we have a balloon in the pasture?
And perhaps we could wonder where it came from in the first place.
Then there’s the question of why something so pretty as a butterfly should enjoy something so disgusting as manure tea. . .
Taking a break at the Manure Tea Cafe
We could also wonder what all these peafowl and guineas are looking at.
Do you see THAT???
Except that’s not really a conundrum, because I know what they were looking at and squawking about. . .
Soaring and Seeking
There’s a hawk that’s been hanging around the last couple of days, and I fear it might enjoy a chick or keet for a meal. If it’d eat the mice, I’d be happy, but I don’t think it will be particular about eating other birds.
Maybe it’s a conundrum after all. How do you enjoy having beautiful predators like hawks around without having to worry they’re going to snack on your baby birds?
An intricate and difficult problem indeed!
Farm Credit Services of Mid-America
The Farmer and I went to a Farm Credit Services Of Mid-America Customer Appreciation dinner on Tuesday evening. They hold one every year, and I think we’ve been there every year since we moved to the farm.
They always have doorprizes, and I always hope I’ll win one of course! And also of course, I never do. This year, however, we had a number of “blue shirts” at our table and one of them won the table centerpiece. By default I ended up with it… the “blue shirts” were Farm Credit Service employees and guess they didn’t think they ought to take stuff home at a customer appreciation dinner!
Doorprize of sorts!
If you’re into farming and ever needed a loan, chances are you’ve heard of Farm Credit Services. They are one of three well-known GSEs (Government Sponsored Entities), the other two being Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unlike Freddie and Fannie, however, they are continuing to thrive and maintain solid business practices.
They’ve been around a long time:
The seeds of the Farm Credit System were planted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, when he appointed a Country Life Commission to address the various problems facing a predominantly rural population.
At the time, agricultural real estate loans from commercial banks, if they were available at all, had prohibitively high rates and short terms. Until 1913, for instance, federal law prohibited national banks from making loans with maturities beyond five years.
The Joint Committee on Rural Credits drafted the 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act. That was the beginning, but there are three more things that shaped Farm Credit Services.
In 1929 the Agricultural Marketing Act was enacted to help stabilize farm prices and finance agricultural cooperatives. Then in 1933, the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act recapitalized the land banks with $189 million and cut interest rates to deal with the Depression. The Farm Credit Act was also enacted in 1933, and that revamped the FICBs and created 13 Banks for Cooperatives. All this is the basis of the Farm Credit System as it exists today.
Of course, that’s just a very condensed version of the history of Farm Credit Services. The speakers at the dinner were quite good and had a lot of interesting information to impart on that subject and more. I wish we had a program so I could call them out by name because my memory … isn’t that great.
We did get a hand-out with information about Tennessee agriculture, noting that Tennessee ranks 31st in livestock sales in the entire country, creates over 21,000 jobs, and pulls in over $60 million in property taxes and $110 million in income taxes.
In Tennessee there are:
- 4,653 corn producers
- 1,115 dairy farms
- 42,872 cattle farms
- 2,967 soybean farms
And Tennessee ranks 13th in the nation for broiler production, 9th for cotton production, and 3rd for tobacco production. Interesting!
Oh, and Farm Credit Services is not just about agribusiness. They help small farmers too. (Or we wouldn’t have been there, with only 12 acres!) And they also have programs to provide scholarships to youth going to college, and a new program to help young people going into farming.
We need people in farming. At the rate farm land is being turned into housing developments, I sometimes wonder who is going to be feeding the people in this country in a few years.
So how about this? If you like to eat, hug a farmer today!
Pond Scum
It’s been really hot for a long time with no rain. When that happens, the pond starts to look pretty yucky.
The entire surface is "scummy".
Fortunately, we finally got some rain yesterday afternoon. That always knocks all the stuff floating on top of the pond down to the bottom.
Clear water!
I don’t know how long it will stay like this, but it sure looks a lot nicer when the surface is clear and you can see bushes and trees reflecting in the water!
A Working Tractor
Yes, The Farmer FINALLY has a working tractor.
First we towed it to the shop, and he had the tractor repair guy work on the electrical system. When we picked up, the guy told The Farmer the water pump was bad and could go out soon. That was an understatement, since he hadn’t been mowing an hour with the tractor until the water pump went totally kaput.
So The Farmer took the old water pump off and ordered a new one. Somehow it got sent to Florida instead of Tennessee. It took a couple of weeks before it finally got to the right place.
Imagine how bummed The Farmer was after he got a new water pump on… and the tractor still wouldn’t start. He was afraid, in his words, that he’d have to take the tractor back to the repair guy and “have him lick his calf over.”
Fortunately, he decided to try jumping the tractor with our truck first, to see if the battery might be bad. It was.
So THEN he went and bought a new battery and put it on, and HOORAH! The tractor is finally working.
Saturday The Farmer had a mowing frenzy and mowed the back pasture, which hadn’t been done for a couple of years.
Almost done!
The weeds were pretty high, so it took him a while to get that 3-acres mown down. It’s kind of too bad… the weeds at least made a little bit of screen from seeing all the houses in the subdivision they smacked down on the used-to-be farm behind us.
One more round. . .
Then he decided to mow a little around the pond.
Don't get too close to the edge Farmer!
I watched while he did that in case he got a little too close to edge and slid into the pond.
The bank is a little steep in places.
I was hoping I wouldn’t have to fish him out of the pond, though it would have been a great picture! Trouble is, he might have got hurt in the process, so I just wanted him to stay safely on the bank. He didn’t try to get too close to the edge of the pond, however, because he was a little leery of sliding in.
After a few rounds around the pond, he finally called it a day and gave his orange beast and himself a rest!