Guest Blog

The holiday season will soon be here, that time of year when belts shrink and stretchy pants become your best friend. The big three of holiday celebrations come one after another, with scant time for the waistline to recover.

My granddad’s favorite way to describe his “spare tire” was that he had a bad case of “water on the belly.” Now certainly, this was not a physiologically accurate diagnosis, but people understood what he meant. Grandpa’s extra 15 pounds he put on most winters settled right on his gut.

The Idaho Farm and Ranch Museum holds a Live History Day every September. At this event they showcase the history of rural Idaho, complete with their replica “provin’ up” shed and enough cream separators to supply butter to all of Jerome County.

Of all the farming projects I’ve undertaken, our home garden has been the least profitable.

Prussic or hydrocyanic acid (HCN) is a natural compound that can sometimes build to toxic levels in plants. Among forage crops, plants in the Sorghum genus (including sudangrass, forage and grain-type sorghums, sorghum-sudangrass hybrids and johnsongrass) are most likely to cause this problem.

Being very small farmers, we don’t own brand-new equipment. The men of my family are good mechanics who can keep older machinery running rather than spend the total worth of every crop we’ve harvested in the past 15 years on anything straight off the assembly line.