Farm News 10-08-06

Baby Ducks!

Thursday evening I discovered six baby ducks in a nest I didn't even know the mother was sitting on (or is it setting on?). Anyway, she was there enough to hatch out babies. Like all baby ducks, they are delightful.

This marks the beginning of the late baby season. There will probably be several more duck nests producing babies, and we might have kittens, too. The bantam chickens used to produce fall chicks but they seem to have lost their procreative urge over the last two years.

Travels

This issue of Farm News is coming out a day late and is brief because I have been on another expedition, again to the Flint Hills. Mile after mile across high pastures, the only sound the crunch of gravel under the tires, when, after crossing a slight rise, the land rapidly drops into a valley with a tree-lined waterway undulating across the bottom.

In the valleys there are birds calling and squirrels scolding, clearly audible over the tires on the gravel. Butterflies skip along the roadside weeds. And, there are trees, some of them well over a century in age.

The Flint Hills are tall grass prairie, an environment that has almost disappeared. The grasses are no longer tall because thousands of head of cattle eat them down short. Without the cattle, the Flint Hills would be a very dangerous place. Three hundred years ago, when Bison herds ate paths through the grass, a spark of fire could set off huge roaring fire storms rolling across the hills and leaping the valleys.

The fires killed off any small trees that might have sprouted since the last fire and turned the grass into a cloud of smoke, dust, and ash that was spread by the winds. For most humans and small animals caught in the path of one of those fires, death came with the flames. The danger was high enough that people didn't start settling in the hills until after the Civil War. Work began on the Hawthorne Ranch in 1861 and the house was finished in 1864. In the same decade Elwin Braten Ware left Massachusetts for the Flint Hills and settled there, starting a tree nursery. Elwin B.'s great-granddaughter, Annabelle, married Bill Hawthorne.

The house is nestled into a crook of a stream that curves around the east and south sides of the yard and then goes on south to feed Fall River. The stream is bordered by Walnut, Sycamore, Burr Oak, Hackberry, and Green Ash. Unlike northeast Kansas, there is little Osage Orange, Honey Locust, or Black Locust. I didn't find any trees that I thought were as old as the house.

Three hundred years ago there must have been Beaver along the stream. That might explain the lack of any really ancient trees. Besides being good for lumber, the destination of many trees, few trees would be able to survive for very long in the presence of Beaver. In the Cimmaron National Grasslands, an area in far south west Kansas, trees over 14” in diameter still have to be protected by wire netting from the Beaver. If there are Beaver out on the High Plains then there would have been Beaver in the Flint Hills.

If, due to various lucky breaks, a tree makes it past about 14” in diameter, out in an area that is mostly grassland, then what is going to stop it from continuing to grow? It now shades out the grass around its trunk, protecting itself from grass fires. People with stone axes are going to move on to find a 6” tree to cut. So what kills it? Lightning probably kills many. It kills the tree and ignites a grass fire at the same time.

One year, during a winter thunderstorm, lightning hit a 75 or so year old Osage orange tree south of the house. The next spring a few branches on the tree had a few leaves, but the bulk of the tree was dead. If lightning can do that to an Osage Orange, then I think it is safe to assume it can do it to other species. Over a three hundred year period, I think it would be hard to find a tree growing on the hilltops that hadn't been hit by lightning. In fact, lightning might be as important a factor in keeping the Flint Hills treeless as is fire. Its hard to keep the effects of the two separate.

The Flint Hills, by the way, is a big table land, composed of quite a few different layers of tables, all chopped up by wind, stream and river erosion. Unlike north east Kansas, where I live, the Flint Hills were not shaped by glaciers. You won't find any Dakota Quartzite in the Flint Hills. Much of the surface limestone, though, has an orange to dark brick color from being exposed to heat in fires. A grass fire in a Tall Grass Prairie is a big deal, even though they can occur in a given area every two or three years on a millennial calendar. The Flint Hills is an area where big deals, whether climatic, geologic, or spiritual, can occur fairly surprisingly often.

Disaster Planning by Dr. M.

As a nation, we have come to realize the importance of disaster planning on a personal, local, and regional level. We can all think of the events that have brought this topic to the forefront of our minds. The United States Army has been more or less engaged in disaster planning forever simply by the nature of an army. Managing large swaths of people moving about exposed to nature and violence is basically what we do. To that end, my commander sent me to the garrison disaster planning tabletop exercise this week.

Fort Monmouth sits on the coast of New Jersey, 45 minutes from NYC, in an area with the same coastline configuration as Mississippi. However, this section of New Jersey has roughly eight times the population density of Mississippi and a lot more people with money, influence and lawyers. With this in mind, the garrison planned a pandemic influenza outbreak plus Cat 3 hurricane scenario. The idea was to make it as bad as possible so that we could contemplate the worst.

We talked about education, containment, at-home quarantine, and first responder responsibilities. We discussed communications, hospital capacity and ventilator numbers. We had a serious discussion around the Red Cross manual on the handing of dead bodies in disaster areas. And then I brought up carcass disposal.

In the event of an outbreak of human to human transmissible avian influenza (the current definition of pandemic flu) all birdhouses would be depopulated. What do you do with the birds once they are dead? According to the tabletop exercise, you lay them out in a field, cover them with a tarp, and let them decompose until a temperature of 120 degrees F has been reached. Really. The plan is a field and a tarp.

Now, being a new Captain, I am generally loath to point holes in the statements of those around me, because one never looks good by making others look bad. However, it hardly takes a genius to point out that we live in New Jersey, not New Orleans and that there are about 2 weeks in a year here that a pile of dead chickens will reach 120 degrees. But, birds aren’t the only animals that would be affected.

You see, many animals are susceptible to the flu. Avian influenza has been documented in a number of species, including dogs and horses. So, when I asked what the plan was for carcass disposal of those species no one had an answer. Well, that’s not really true, one lawyer pointed out that this is New Jersey and we can always get rid of the bodies.

I brought up carcass disposal because we have a huge horse population in Monmouth County. If those horses become carriers of a strain of pandemic flu, they will have to be put down. And disposing of a horse carcass requires at the least a backhoe; at the most a bone saw, some sharp knives and an incinerator. If 40% of the workforce is out of commission as most pandemic flu forecasts project, just how are we going to get rid of these 1200 pound animals?

I don’t have an answer right now, but, I am fairly certain that I can find an incinerator or two in the county if I looked. And that’s what disaster planning is. Looking around and asking what’s going to happen and what are we going to do about it? And it doesn’t take an experienced planner to point out that a field and a tarp do not a disaster plan make.

Dr. M., I always knew you were smart. While thinking about disposing of horses, I hope you include the idea of making jerky out of them. Calvin and I still hope to make fortunes out of horse and mule jerky. Would you have time to be our sales manager, do you think? We'll give you 15% of the gross, how about that?


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