Montana Farmers in 2021 and 2022

Howdy Folks!

I am WAAAAYYYYY overdue for writing another post here, but better late than never, right? So, I’m going to make this post a summary of how things went here at KD Farms for the 2021 growing season.

First, June was incredibly, unseasonably, and record-breakingly hot here in the Flathead Valley in NW Montana. I cannot remember, in my somewhat short time of being alive, if we have ever turned on the irrigation earlier than we did this year. So what was the end result? Winter wheat yields were around 60-70 bu/acre. We typically get been 80+ bu/acre for winter wheat. Last year, we averaged over 100 bu/acre. The bright spot is that the price of winter wheat went up a lot, but that was due to a lack of supply, and part of it was inflation as well. A lack of supply means that there were disasters in other parts of the state, and country. And there were.

Hay prices skyrocketed this year. Again, not because of an increased demand, but because the drought caused a serious shortage in supply. I don’t know how many tons of hay were shipped in and how many cows were shipped out of the state, but it was probably tens of thousands of tons of hay, and probably several thousand head shipped out, at a minimum. Anybody have those numbers? I’d be curious!

At KD Farms, we did our best to manage the pasture to optimize the feed, but between the drought, smoke from forest fires (which inhibits plant growth), and probably having a few too many head considering both the drought and smoke, probably ran our herd a little bit thin. 20/20 hindsight tells me I probably should have gotten rid of some animals after we had that nasty June. But, I thought we’d be able to stay ahead of things because our pasture is irrigated. The irrigation was absolutely a lifesaver, but with the heat, it still wasn’t quite enough to stay ahead. The cows aren’t in terrible shape, by any means, but they’re not as fat as I’d like to see. We had good breed back, and the yearlings and steers look pretty good, but the mother cows have probably never been quite this thin coming off summer pasture.

We raised quite a bit of hay this year and small-square baled it in hopes of retailing it to try to make a few extra dollars. We had to water the hay three times between cuttings, which is at least once and, in some years, two more times than we typically have to do. We have deep wells and the power company has no problem hitting us with a huge demand charge if we run our pumps during peak hours, so our hay was pretty darn expensive to get growing as well. We raised our retail price by about 20% and we’re currently sold out of small squares except for what we save back for one of our longest customers who has a large pack string.

We had a bad crop of dill this year as well. Similarly to the wheat though, there was a crop failure with the dill in other parts of the country and the price came up a bit. The price coming up certainly didn’t hurt, though didn’t entirely make up for a bad crop.

We had lots of straw this year. We small square baled most of it and I set up a rudimentary self-service station so folks could just come grab what they wanted and leave cash in the box. It worked last year, and I would venture a guess that it worked even better this year. I believe we sold about 6 stacks of straw last year, and I think we’ve sold nearly 10 stacks this year. We do still have more to sell, but this straw is noxious weed free certified, so it’s a little more expensive than our other stuff. We do still have some big square bales of straw left as well. We figured the straw might be a good commodity this year as you can feed animals straw if you give them a high quality protein supplement too. Basically, they get their nutrition from the protein, and the straw helps them feel full.

We tried a few acres of peppermint this last year and the results were pretty disappointing. Again, it was a rough growing year, and with the smoke and then cool August, it was tough to get the peppermint to stress like it should have, which pulls the oil out of the roots into the top of the plant, making it harvestable.

We increased our catmint (aka, catnip) acres this year in hopes that a product development effort will yield a good, and long term, market for catmint oil. This is a new crop to be raised commercially, so it’s been fun seeing what does, and doesn’t work to raise the catmint in a commercial setting. Harvesting is also proving to be challenging, but we’re figuring more things out every year. Our yield was pretty decent, considering all other factors.

I fall planted some canola after forage barley (which I baled for feed) and had a pretty bad germination due to, again, probably drought. I can patch it up in the spring though, so hopefully we get lots of snow and fall rains to make up for the 2021 growing season water shortfall.

Some exciting news, we did get a small NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) contract in place, so next year, we’ll be starting on some resource-conserving modifications to help us better manage our natural resources. It’s a five year contract, and we’ll be doing a few things every year for the next five years. Next year, we’ll be modifying some of our fences to “deer friendly” configurations, putting in a hardened water access for my cows (so they don’t muck around in the slough and cause massive amounts of bank erosion), and putting in electric fence offsets to enable easier cross fencing for rotational grazing. I’m pretty excited to work with the NRCS folks, on this. I’ve always wanted to be a better manager of our resources, and some of what they encourage folks to do, we’ve already been doing. But the contract allows us to get compensated a bit for our efforts, which really helps a lot.

That’s a fairly comprehensive review of 2021. I’ll post again next week with an update on the beef business and what we’re expecting for 2022.

Be Blessed,

Kenny

P.S. Pray for Snow!