Summer in Olalla

Summer in Olalla Canyon has been good. Worthy of some updates:

Visitors!

Mike & I have been lucky enough to have visitors this summer. In June we hosted Shea & Kari from Minneapolis, did lots of sleeping and eating and touring and hanging around in the yard, oh, and strawberry picking:



Also hiking the Icicle Gorge trail near Leavenworth, a couple of miles past where the Icicle Road washed out last spring (see here where the road used to be).


So now you hike around the washed out part of the road and continue along the road (where you used to be able to drive) until you get to the trailhead.


It was a really nice outing.






In July we hosted Rachel & Micah. Micah, who is almost 2 years old, took a real protector role with the goats. In the morning when he woke up, he would hear the goats bleating, stand by the window looking at them, and shout "I coming, goats! I coming!" and then go with Rachel and let them out of their small nighttime pen to go out and graze in our (finished!) larger fenced in area. Rachel & I had timed the visit to do a triathlon reunion tour, picking up where we left off 3 years ago at a sprint triathlon in Minnesota and keeping it going with a sprint triathlon in Chelan. In the end, Micah ended up getting sick and throwing up in the car on the way to the triathlon (poor kiddo!) and so Rachel mama stayed with him in the park while friend Amy & I did the triathlon. Here's the start and a couple pictures:






Both Rachel & Micah and Shea & Kari's visits included a trip to the new Leavenworth Farmers' Market where friends Tony & Amy (yup, triathlon Amy) grill pizzas as their first venture of a new catering company (plus there's lots of normal farmers market fare too. We've ended up coming to this market a lot to help out a little, buy food, and support the pizza booth.


Goats and chickens!

I promised last time to tell you about our new goats. Dublin and Breezy are pygmy goats, the meat breed equivalent to Frosty and Cle (who are dairy breed nigerian dwarves). It's been fun to have a few more goats running around keeping the grass in check, although Dublin seems to have a bit of a mean streak. Goats have to establish dominance when they first meet by head-butting for a while.



Okay, fine. But Dublin didn't know how to stop. She had not been the dominant goat in her previous herd, so she never learned how to be dominant graciously. And with our goats, she's by far the biggest. But even after her dominance was quite accepted by all, she'd run and head-butt the others, but sneakily in their side or stomach, rather than head to head. Which we wouldn't have worried about too much except for Frosty being pregnant and having goat babies in the belly that Dublin was head-butting. But they've seemed to pretty much work it out by now.

Frosty, by the way, is ready for babies any day now. Since our fence is done, we've stopped locking the goats up in the kennel inside the fence, instead leaving the kennel ready for Frosty, so she can have some space to herself rather than get bugged by the others during goat-birthing-ness. Already she's started keeping her distance from everyone else. Cle and Dublin and Breezy, especially now that the weather has cooled off a bit, go bouncing around the pasture, while Frosty just hangs out and chews on grass.



Meanwhile, Cle has really done well with the larger space -- he's back to cute and friendly again, no more mean and pushy (maybe because Dublin has that role now?). Nowadays, Frosty, Dublin, and Breezy go off minding their own business, eating while Cle wants to be part of the action -- see desire to be near camera.



Yesterday he started half-climbing up the ladder I was standing on to re-paint some numbers on the barn, deciding it was important to chew on my sneakers and untie my shoelaces.

But when we open the door to the chicken section of the barn, all the goats take notice and run to try and sneak in and steal chicken food. Meanwhile, the chickens themselves are now big and grownup.



The layers (6 of them) have gotten over their initial role as scaredy chickens. Originally, anytime we'd open the door or try to let any other chickens in with them (including the much younger and smaller meat chickens) they'd all huddle in a corner hiding and hoping no one would touch them. In part this makes sense because when we tried to introduce them earlier on to three "jungle" (i.e. half wild) chickens that we inherited from friends, the jungle chickens just kept pecking the layers until we separated them again.

Anyway, now they're all big enough that they all get along fine, they sleep inside the "coop" (a little room in the barn) and then run around outside during the day. Of the 6 meat birds we got originally, three have worked out well. The other three were breeds designed to live inside tightly packed chicken houses and eat nonstop. So they were kind of lazy, messy, not good at finding their own food, and generally just not too sharp. One of them was killed by a neighbor dog who broke through the chicken wire while we were at work, inspiring us to redo their barn room security (no problems since (so far)!). The dog also paralyzed one of the layers, but she has recovered astonishingly well, and still limps, but otherwise does just fine.



Meanwhile, the two commercial-style meat birds who were left after the dog incident had to be butchered at 8 weeks (or else they would get too heavy to support themselves), so Mike & I had a chicken-butchering sunday a couple weeks ago, which was a little sad, but okay in the end in an existential sort of way, and resulted in chicken in the freezer and some chicken soup.

Since then, all the animals have gotten into sort of a groove. When we come home, they come running (I'd like to say it's because they like us so much, but mostly it's because we feed them) and trip us because they're running so close under our feet. Meanwhile, we're trying to keep up with watering the pasture that feeds everyone. Central Washington gets almost no rain in summer, and so everything has gotten yellow and crispy. But so far so good. We've also managed to plant a few small fruit trees and a few tomato plants -- not the garden we had hoped to put in this year, but not bad for a busy first season :)


Work updates

All is well on the job front. After some job uncertainties, I seem to have more jobs than I need. The project I am on now got re-funded, and I've also committed to working with a faculty member from my (ex-)department (Community & Rural Sociology, which has since been cut, but many of the faculty are getting shifted to other departments) on a grant of hers. It shouldn't be more than full time all put together, but I have in the back of my head the idea to eventually cut down to slightly less than full time and get to spend more time on goats and gardens. So that may be pushed off a bit for now.

Meanwhile, although I still don't love research, the new project might be a good change from some of the frustrations of the old. I really do like the outreach portions of the old project, although I still feel like they're just half-efforts at good outreach. The team I work with is used to working with the tree fruit industry (i.e. growers, shippers, packers, etc.) and not with farm workers. And so, even though my job is in part to do outreach to workers, when push comes to shove the priorities are a bit different.

A couple of examples: We held 4 field days to help teach growers to use softer pest control methods. Four of us (plus several others from other WSU divisions) spent days preparing and then four full days out at the different sites. Attendance ranged from 20-40 people. I also helped organize two health fairs this summer at two migrant farm worker housing camps (well, really the community health clinics mostly organized them, but the project I'm on sponsored them). When the time came, no one I worked with had been involved with or really knew when the fairs were. I sent them an invitation, and no one came. Of course, the health fairs were held on a weekend, and the project did sponsor the events, which is great and a big improvement, but beyong that the level of involvement was pretty low. Nevertheless, we had 2-300 people at each health fair. So hours and hours and hours and personnel and personnel and personnel dedicated to 20-40 person grower trainings, but very little time dedicated to 2-300 person worker trainings.

A second example: When our final report was due to the state department of agriculture (who funding the project I'm on), four of us spent a full week sending drafts back and forth and perfecting it. When the final report was due for the section of the project related to environmental/labor issues, I was asked to write it and send it around for comments. After a week, no one had responded. I sent a reminder and got a few helpful suggestions. Granted, this second report was for a grant that provided less money than the first, but still, priorities are not as evenly distributed as I would like them to be, even if there is lip service to them, and so it makes it harder to invest as much in what I'm doing when there's little institutional support.

A third example: I went to meet with a toxicologist in Seattle who works on pesticide safety issues. He is concerned about farm worker health issues related to pesticide exposure. When I came back my boss said, "Oh I think I know who that guy is. Be careful -- he has an agenda." But from my perspective, he doesn't have any more of an agenda than anyone else. He has different politics and different opinions, but framing it as an "agenda" just serves to undermine his scientifically "objectivity." Which of course is a really slippery concept, since all scientists choose what questions they ask, what data they notice or don't notice, etc. in ways that are influenced by more than straight "facts." (of course, this perspective got me into lots of trouble with economists during my dissertation, even though it is philosophically and scholarly-ly quite well researched and supported). Anyway, point being there's a real hesitance to engage with anyone with different perspectives on the tree fruit industry and it's done under the guise of calling people "unscientific."

Here's a little break for a picture (of the bird babies that were living above our porch), and then back to the work stuff:



Okay, one more. My boss, who is actually a really nice guy and really really good at what he does (so I don't mean to downplay that), goes to Guatemala every year with his church mission to help build schools, hospitals, etc. It's a nice way for him to give back to "humanity." But at the same time, he doesn't seem terribly interested in this kind of "charity" for the people involved in his own community and own industry even (i.e. worker spend years moving from one housing camp to the next having their kids miss school, picking fruit, and making well well well below the poverty line in terms of wages). Not that the farmworkers are all doing so badly -- they have a lot of good opportunities and possibilities, but it seems as though it's easier to invest in social problems in a country far away where you have no involvement in the social problems you find there. Engaging more fully with farm workers here means questioning what the "industry" is doing in terms of providing a safe workplace and opportunities similar to what it provides to other workers. And if your professional life is wrapped up in supporting the industry (although i'd argue that the WSU tree fruit center, as a public institution, defines its clientele too narrowly), then it's easier to do your charity work away from home. But it also feels like restricting your broader social engagement to once a year and meanwhile sticking your head in the sand a little bit so you don't have to engage as much with what is around you.

Nevertheless, I can't be too negative about this (and keep in mind that I'm not so invested in my job that this particularly upsets me or makes me not like my boss (as I said he's a really nice guy) or makes me want to look for another job -- it's just one of those things that in an ideal world could be better). Actually I did just see a job posting for someone to do farm worker safety trainings, which is kind of appealing, but not the right time). Anyway, when we were writing a recent grant proposal (the one we just got), my boss really emphasized that he wanted a strong component in there to focus on outreach to Hispanic growers and workers. He also seemed really impressed by the number of people that attended the health fairs, even if after the fact. And also, our final report (the one that took four people a week's time to write) really did highlight the work we had done on outreach to workers (of course it's good publicity no matter what realities it represents, but still, it didn't have to highlight it quite as much as it did). So I can't really say there's not some commitment to the outreach portions, it's just really not the way I would approach it at all, and when push comes to shove, action priorities come out differently than what's proposed on paper.


Meanwhile

Other summer happenings have included a trip to Madison, WI for a conference (work-related), a trip to Minnesota for a funeral of Mike's grandpa (sad-related), and lots and lots and lots of logistics for having a wedding at our house in a couple of weeks (exciting-related).

So, that's pretty much all I've got for the moment, but see you again, if history holds, in another month or so.



p.s. Aren't those cool looking clouds? (from our yard one evening this summer)