A NEW YEAR NEW PLANS

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It is no small task to collect all our records of last year's food production. In the rush of planting, harvesting, and storing, a lot of information has been scrawled on odd scraps of paper, the backs of seed packets, or the barn walls. The number of hay bales thrown down for the goats was recorded in notches cut in the old hand hewn beams of the loft, while sale and purchase receipts were "filed" everywhere from the glove compartment of the pickup to a nail in the wall beside the kitchen door. I collect this odd assortment of information, then sit down to transfer it to the permanent ledgers.

OUR RECORD

Through the year we try to keep up with the following four informal journals.

1. Daily Diary. In the ell the room connecting house and barn I keep a large appointment type calendar with space to write brief daily entries. On it each evening we jot down important weather information, non routine tasks performed, and really major events such as the arrival of the bluebirds.

2. Input records. A sheaf of papers, one for each crop or animal, is kept in a folder that travels all over the place with us. There we record all "inputs" made, such as planting information, animal breeding dates, etc. The papers get pretty dog eared by harvest time.

3. Output Records. This is a writing tablet hanging on a nail above the kitchen sink. Each day we enter details of the harvest so many ounces of spinach and from which garden plot and row, pounds of, milk from the goat, number of eggs, and so on.

4. Garden Plan. This is a drawing to scale of each garden showing which plants went where, planting and harvest dates, and other odd information such as which pieces of land received manure or row compost during the year. It shows the garden reality, vastly different from the plan lovingly designed and redesigned over the previous winter.

Through the late winter I transfer all these jottings to permanent records. Farm bureaus and the like sell elaborate forms for record keeping but mainly I just use plain writing paper. For each goat, for example, I make four vertical columns: the date on the left, followed by pounds of milk given that day, feed consumed, and finally vet or other costs. On the right margin I leave about a quarter page space for analysis or comments. It is good to know why a particular thing came about and the records give us the information which, with a little thinking, can help us learn from our mistakes or give ourselves a bit of a back pat for an earned good performance. For example, if the goat's record indicated a fall off in milk production in mid-August, the weather data might indicate a bad heat wave, the feed records might show that we had changed grain supplements, or the harvest records could show that we had slaughtered the last of her buck kids and she was feeling a little lonely.

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