June comes to an
end, the longest day of the year has come and gone, the days get uncomfortably
hot, the wheat starts to turn from green to gold, bringing with it harvest
anxiety. It also brings the organic
inspector.
Two years ago,
the inspector came as I was emptying the grain bin in preparation for the 2016
harvest. I had to take three or four hours out of my day to visit with him. As we sat going page by page through the
voluminous application I had filled out in February, I couldn’t help but think of
the things I should be doing, namely, hauling wheat.
It wasn’t a problem last year, because there
was no wheat harvest. I did have a bin
full of wheat, but I had until September to dispose of the wheat and prepare
for millet harvest.
I was getting a
little worried as of last week when I hadn’t heard from the CDA (Colorado
Department of Agriculture). I had their
letter saying my application, filled out in January this year, had been found
acceptable and an inspector would be getting in touch with me. It wouldn’t be the first time I had somehow
disappeared from their oversight.
In 2015, I called finally in August to ask
about my organic certificate, which had not arrived. I seemed to catch them by surprise. Three weeks later, I got my certificate in
duplicate, first via email, then by US Mail.
When I was doing
my taxes for 2015, I couldn’t find a fee for the inspector’s services. I emailed the inspector, and a week later, I
got the bill. Somehow, I dropped out of
sight that year.
My worries about the inspection came to an
end on Monday when an inspector telephoned me to ask if she could come for a
visit on Friday. That’s right. She.
I asked what
happened to Mark. She said they like to
have different people look at different operations, so a new inspector.
On Friday
morning, she called about 8:15 and said she was leaving the pavement for the
gravel roads. Our appointment was for
9:00, but I told her she could come earlier if she wished.
When she arrived,
I asked her where should we start. She
suggested we take a tour of the operation while it was still cool. I said we should take my pickup, since we
would cover some rough ground.
I apologized for
the state of the old 4 X 4’s interior. She
laughed. She said she grew up in Montana
in a community the size of Woodrow. Then
I laughed.
We took a 20-30
minute tour of the place. She wasn’t a
bit worried if the runoff from the pasture could enter the wheat field. “You can use manure for fertilizer,” she
said.
I told her about
the time the cattle got out and into the wheat as I was working on the
combine. I called Amy, then the head of
the organic department, who asked how long they were in there. When I said about 30 minutes, she said not a
problem, don’t worry about it.
My riding
companion shrugged that off, too. She pointed
out that I couldn’t keep the deer out of the field. Boy is that the truth.
We looked at the
wheat, still a green tint, hail damage apparent. I took her to the “border” and pointed out the
buffer zone between Jim and me. She
wanted to know why I harvested the buffer zone first, because that meant an
extra cleaning of the equipment. (She revealed that she was quite familiar with my application.) “Most
people do it last. That way, they don’t
have to clean the equipment.”
I pointed out
that I don’t have a moisture tester, so harvest the buffer zone, clean the
combine off, not much of problem after only two or three bin loads, cut enough
for “purging” what I couldn’t get out with compressed air and haul it to town
where I could get an accurate moisture test.
If it should happen to be too wet for safe bin storage, the elevator was
stuck with it, not me.
Her turn to
laugh again. “Method to your madness,”
she said.
I took her north to
the windtower road and east to old number 119, the furthest east machine. She observed that two of the three windmills
are located in the CRP. I indicated
where the MET tower used to be and how much of a relief it was not to have to
navigate the guy wires, especially with one eye.
We returned to
the house. She wanted to see where I
stored my chemicals. We had to navigate
the interior of the shop. I apologized
for that. No worries she said. She seemed satisfied that the chemicals are
all in Orrie’s green cabinet where I can lock them up when the grandkids visit.
I warned her that
I was for all intents and purposes, a bachelor at this location, that she
shouldn’t expect pristine housekeeping as we returned to the house to do the
paper work. She reminded me she was a
Montana girl, not to worry. So I didn’t.
Her laptop was
hooked to another screen, so I could see what she was doing on her
keyboard. We zipped through my
application. I had most of my paperwork
handy. She took a quick look at all my clean-equipment
affidavits, which was pretty lengthy since it included all of Jim’s equipment
used to plant and harvest the millet crop.
One of the demerits I got last year was for
having no documentation for a clean grain bin.
I wasn’t sure I had done that for Jim’s bin, but there it was when I
leafed through the paper.
I had to go to
my laptop to find the planting date for the 2016 wheat crop. That I could find it made her happy—documentation
kept and available. The wheat was an
item since I sold it in 2017, since the last inspection. I have to keep records so that my harvested
grain balances with the disposal of that grain.
She asked if I
had grain receipts. I had those from the
trucker that hauled the organic stuff. I
said I could find weigh tickets for that I sold on the “conventional” (as
opposed to organic) market. I said I
could probably find them if I dug deep. “Dig
deep, if you don’t mind,” she said.
I went to the
file cabinet where Granny had wheat weigh slips in a file so labeled, some
going back to the 1970’s. I dug out all
the 2016 receipts. She leafed through
them and that was that. In other
inspections, we did all the math, including how much for seed, how much sold or
given away in buckets.
When I told her I probably hadn’t sold or
given away more than four or five bushels, she said we didn’t have to concern
ourselves too much with that. We went through
issues of concern from last year’s inspection, including the mouse poison I
keep in the garage. Did I use it on the organic
fields? No. Where?
In buildings around the farmyard.
How about the gopher bait? In the
farmyard where the buggers throw up burrows if left unmolested. But not in the fields? No.
Checkmark that item and on we go.
She signed, then
I signed the inspection report on the screen of her laptop with a stylus. Her start time was listed as 8:30, the end of
the interview was 10:00 a.m. We were
done.
She loaded up her computer and brief case and
took off. She said her next project was
helping to investigate some miles of fields adjacent to railroad tracks, where
the railroad sprayed sterilant on the track right-of-way and it drifted several
yards out into farmers’ fields. Sounded
more interesting than going through pages of an application.
It was only ten
o’clock and I could get back to the summer fallow. And to worrying about a grain bin for wheat
harvest. My bin is still full of millet.
