Game's On

It's been a long while since I've posted, and for good reason. It has been a lousy spring here in the Pacific Northwest, cold and wet. It has been, without a doubt, the most challenging spring I've ever farmed. Just about the time I'd get the water drained from the berry field and the ground starting to dry, another deluge would blow through, pounding the soil with rain and sending the temperatures 15 degrees or more below normal. In a year where diesel was going through the roof, I just didn't need a season where I had to keep the tractors running to keep the berries from rotting.

Still, you have to keep at it. Up and down the rows, inching along with any number of combos of sweeps, Lewiston hoes, shanks, you name it, I drug it along the rows wringing out the soggy ground. So far, we've hit the plants twice with spray, keeping the mildew at bay. No, we definitely do not farm "organically". I want a paying crop.

Safe on high hills thankfully, the plants did not give up. The blossoms popped, the berries formed. A good 2 - 3 weeks later than usual, but the berries did come.

It is the World Poker Tour, but for real. With the crop coming, our money on the table, the processors began their yearly two step. A few underhanded moves, sorry attempts at price fixing were found out. Never did we directly accuse anyone of such things...that's not how the game is played. Still, we made sure THEY knew, WE knew. As the berries formed up and began to show red, a low ball offer was made. We said nothing. I just kept tilling the rows, fluffing up the ground to warm it up and bring the crop on.

The sun finally came out this past week and shades of green and white began to glow redder by the day. The processors kept their cards close to the table waiting for the flop. It came last week when the Oregon growers settled for $.57/pound, a few cents under last year. (Too bad our costs aren't a few cents under last year!) We knew we were holding a good hand, the fruit was developing nicely. Hard work kept the green rot away. The berries began to shape up beautifully. Although our local processor maintained their poker faces, their actions gave them away. I kept seeing their fieldmen driving by looking over the field. For being uninterested, they were obviously very interested.

This week they finally made an offer on our crop. A fair offer, the same as Oregon. The big question was dockage. We hammered that out tonight. They could not argue our quality, we definitely could argue their dockage rate. We went all in and called them at the big table. They cut their normal dockage in half...we settled.

Berry farming is not for the weak of heart...

I think back to this winter, and the hours spent on the #2 shovel keeping the water off the field. Then there were the sore back hours spent pulling weeds, the hours of monotony going back and forth up down those rows in first gear. It's all part of this game, this version of the World Poker Tour.

So now is the easy part; waiting another week or so for the Mother Nature to finish her work so we can turn the pickers loose on the field. The poker game is over...now the fun game's on!

BTW....as I'm typing this there is juice from bright red Puget Reliance dripping off my chin and there is whipped cream and crumbs of a fresh baked Bisquick shortcake hanging from my moustache.

Tomorrow morining I'll be up a 4:30 to personally pick the first flats destined for a steakhouse in Montana..a little pet project of mine.

Oh yeah...the game's on....

No more California crap. It's great to have REAL strawberries.

Battle Weary Soldiers

When locomotive 10217A emerged from General Electric’s shops in Erie, Pennsylvania, men from the United States were preparing to march through the streets of their hometowns, bound for Europe to fight “Kaiser Bill”. The world hoped it would be “the war to end all wars”. The year was 1916. Over the next year, as the bloody stalemate continued in the trenches of France and “no man’s land”, additional sets of G.E. box cab electrics were built and delivered to the then Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, or simply, the Milwaukee Road. Among them were 10109A, the 10102A, and 10209A.



As soldiers went east to the battle fronts “over there” the GE Box Cabs headed west to the theaters of the Rocky Mountains and Cascades. Grinding through the wind and snow of winter, humidity and heat of summer, these electric motors lugged across the divides of the west the supplies that supported the men suffering in the muddy trenches to the east, across the Atlantic. At times the men themselves were carried off to battle with power provided by “white coal”.



When the soldiers returned home in 1919, victorious, their tour of duty fulfilled, the box cabs had hardly begun theirs. Sadly, the lessons learned from that vicious war did not prevent yet another global conflict. Even with a quarter of a century of service behind them and suffering from the constraints of two bankruptcy’s the electric units of the Milwaukee once again found themselves joining in a new battle, transporting yet another generation of men off to another world war. Renumbered and reconfigured, the battle tested units faithfully answered the call and carried the men and machines needed to meet and defeat enemies on two fronts separated by the North American continent.



Despite having fought yet another war, this time in Korea, to an uneasy political resolution a third generation of men found themselves being taken to the killing fields. This time in a country called Viet Nam. Still the motors of the Milwaukee rolled on. Weary from the strain of constant warfare with the mountains of the west, they were now being helped with their chores by the legions of new diesel/electrics. Over sixty years of frontline service had diminished their ranks. Of a battalion that once boasted 90 units, by 1971, less than 20 remained. Combined in odd matchings to make up for those gone, motors 10109A, 10102A and 10209A eventually became the E 39 A,C, and D. Completing the four unit set was the former 10217A, now sporting E 47A on her number board. Still, whenever the pantographs of these survivors were raised and the controllers notched out, the motors knew that duty had again called and they responded just as they did 60 years prior.



Two generations had gone to war and returned battle hardened when the E 47A posed for her photograph, basking in the warm September sun at Tideflats Yard in 1970. A third generation was enduring the same horrors as the previous two when six months later, these motors made their way westward through the snows of a familiar battlefield, the line over Snoqualmie Pass. Dressed in their fatigues, carrying no metals honoring their heroics, possessing no citations for their devotion to service, the weary soldiers simply carried out their duties.



After sixty six years, three generations, two world wars and two “policing actions”, peace finally came to the 10109A, to the 10102A, to the 10209A and the 10217A. The longest day on the western front, the Coast electrification, came in November of 1972.On that day rest came for the class of locomotive known to the Milwaukee Road as the EF-5’s, having been finally relieved of their command. It came nearly 63 years to the day that marked the end of the “war to end all wars”, the day we now know as Veteran’s Day.



Weary soldiers, veterans all too familiar with warfare, they are gone now. Their fields of honor have been long removed from the landscape, defiled to the point of becoming simple hiking trails. Yet just as the ghosts of the soldiers who gave to their last measure linger above the soil of distant lands, their exploits becoming a part of our history, so too remain the spirits of the warriors of the Milwaukee Road. Caught up in the wind that sweeps across the irrigated fields of Othello and the Royal Slope, the souls of the box cabs are carried across the Columbia River and across the barren sage brush of the Saddle Mountains. Lifted high into the clouds that shroud the Cascades they pass over towns with names like Cle Elum, Hyak and Cedar Falls. They finish their journey along the protected waters of Puget Sound only to make a crisp about face and return. They are sentries, forever keeping their watch over the land they served. They are battle weary soldiers destined never to die.

Turning the Good Earth...Not A Product of India

Spring is still slow in coming. A slight break in the weather this past week allowed the snow to melt from the 'daff's" and put me in the field working a little ground.

It won't be the highball kind of year I'm used to, what with the cucumber production being taken from us. In an interesting note, we have been doing a bit of a media blitz to try and get the word out to the consumer about the pickles they eat. Dean Foods and their spin off pickle/relish division, Big Valley are up to their old tricks. Their labels are very misleading....big surprise there! The standard for pickles here in the northwest was "Nalley's". This was the company absorbed and destroyed by Dean Foods. Although they still market under that label, the product is very different. But here's the kicker....right now the Nalley's label
reads "Northwest Grown" ...as it has for many years. On the bottom, in very small print you will read, "Product of India". We are pressing Big Valley to show us what part of "Northwestern" India produces Nalley's products. Needless to say, if you see Nalley's/Big Valley products in your store or fast food restaurant, boycott them.

But onto better things. I am at a loss to think of something that smells better than fresh turned dirt. If there were a smell associated with the word optimism, it would be the aroma produced by the disk ripping through winter fallow ground, or the plow turning over the rich dirt. It is the smell of the good earth that keeps me believing that "this will be the year." This will be the year of good prices for the berries to match good production and quality. This will be the year the plants placed in this good ground will grow disease free and give reason for the same optimism next year.

We live in a very pessimistic age, or so it seems to me. I know I get bogged down in this world of endless bad news. The smell of freshly turned soil, the growl of the diesel engine pulling the plow, the hypnotic motion of the dirt rolling off the moldboards never fails to put me in a better frame of mind.

I think all of us could learn from what the plow accomplishes as it glides along. In one smooth motion it takes the old weeds and worn soil laying on the surface and buries it deep, to be rotted down and replenished. In it's place fresh, good earth is placed to the top where strong, new growth can take place. Couldn't we all use a little burying of the old and a new seedbed put in its place?

Don't you sometimes wish that was your hand on the steering wheel of that John Deere? Don't you wish it was you dragging that chisel plow behind, deep tilling a piece of ground that will yield food? Don't you wish you too could say that you produce not a mere bauble, but a necessity of life?

I can say that, and India still has not stripped that from me.

I'm still one lucky son-of-a-bitch. I can go out and turn the good earth.