About
The place and the log
One hundred and forty acres of grass, timber and one stubborn pond, nine miles from Amsterdam in Bates County. I farm it, and I write down what it does.
How the place came to me
The farm has been in the family since my grandfather bought the east eighty out of an estate in the late thirties. He and my father added the river-bottom piece and the timber along the creek after the war. It was a dairy place first, then cows and hay, which is what it still is, only smaller and quieter.
The place came to me the spring my father died. I was living two hours away, working a job that had nothing to do with ground of any kind. I moved back in the fall, and I have been here since. The house needed two winters before it stopped being his and started being mine. The barn still needs work and always will.
What I run now is hay and a small cow-calf herd, on grass that has been managed longer than I have been alive. The pond my father dug in 1968 is still the water for the whole south half. The fence lines are a record in themselves: you can date every stretch of this farm by what it is stapled to.
What the log is
The log started the first winter I had the place, because the insurance man asked me when the pond dam had last been worked on and I could not tell him. I could not tell him the year, let alone the month. That bothered me more than it should have.
So I bought a notebook, ruled one page per month, and started writing things down: rain, pond level, frost dates, what got fixed, what got moved, what broke. I write entries the same day, in the evening, on the porch when the weather allows. If a day only gave one sentence, the day gets one sentence. The log is not a diary and it does not try to be interesting. It is a memory that does not belong to my head, because my head has proven unreliable on dates.
Fourteen notebooks later, the log is the most useful thing on the farm after the water. When the county asks about the crossing, when a neighbor asks when I last burned, when I want to know what August did five years ago, the answer is on a page and not in a guess. This site publishes the parts of it that are worth keeping in the open, plus the step lists for the jobs that repeat every year.
What this site is not
It is not a business. There is nothing here to engage, arrange or sign. No hay, no cattle, no services and no secondhand equipment leaves this place through a web page, and none is offered anywhere on it.
It is not an authority. Everything written here worked on this ground, in Bates County, in these years. Ground forty miles east is different ground. If a step list here disagrees with what your own extension people say for your soil and your water, follow them, not me.
It is not advice of any legal kind. The boundary and recorder notes describe what the county offices show for this parcel and nothing further. For anything that binds, the recorder and the county are the source of record, and a licensed professional is the person to talk to.
How to reach me
The contact page has the mail form, the phone and the address. The phone sits on a shelf by the bench in the machine shed, and calls are answered when it is within earshot, which is most weekday mornings. Letters get answered the same week, generally, unless it is haying.
I write it down the same day. That is the whole method, and the whole reason the log has been worth keeping.