It’s Hard Enough 

Farmers are a frugal bunch. I can say, from my first year of experience doing this on my own, that running a farm is a labor of love. Spending every moment of daylight doing some type of chore around the farm is required. Madness may be defined as waking up to work a full-time job just to support the habit of spending every other moment of daylight doing chores around the farm. Money is needed to buy seed, fertilizer, water, contracted work, tools, and such.  

Time and effort will keep most people away from farming because they feel they have better things to do with their time. Factor in the money that is required to play the game and you will find that saved money dries up fast.  We begin to make do with what we have. We begin to utilize tools in ways that they weren’t meant to be used. We begin to bend our own practices to just get by. Needless to say, the job is hard enough. There is no guarantee that the crop will grow. If the crop does grow, you would be lucky to break even, let alone generate a profit.  

Acquiring the tools, vehicles, implements, and storage structures needed is a slow road of accumulation. A farmer learns to appreciate every ounce of help that is given 

Focus 

The focus of the day is based upon the season and month. Give a farmer a day and month out of the year and they can tell you where they would be on their property and what tasks would be doing their priority on that given day. This is based on experience and accumulated knowledge from over the years. Take July 1st for example. My neighbors and me would say that on July 1st, we had better have bales in the field that need to come into the barn or at least have grass on the ground that needs to baled. Water is shut off while this is happening, and irrigation will be turned on right after harvest. This would be the pinnacle of first cut.  

Days off from work may be required to focus on bringing in the harvest. We then can look at how many bales we have off from each field. This will give us a “tons per acre” calculation that we can use to compare this year’s harvest to last. It is also a time to make adjustments as we go into dormant season of our cool season grasses and watch weeds take over the ditch banks and empty spots in the field. The point of all this is that our focus is on our daily tasking. All these tasks require knowledge and some type of equipment. A big hiccup to the mountain that we are trying to move is in the distraction that the tool or asset that we need is missing. 

It Needs Saying 

I’ve struggled with myself in whether to talk about this topic in this article, but I truly think that it needs to be said. I came to this property with no equipment to farm. I only have my recollections of farming as a younger version of me (and with the support of my parents and brothers). Now it’s just me doing this and of the things that remained from my parents’ time here on the farm, we had one working all-terrain vehicle (ATV). I used this ATV to get around the ditches and in my endless quest to cut down all the elm trees on the property. Elm trees are an invasive tree that spreads its roots and spreads like wildfire. It is basically a very, very large weed. I will have an upcoming article about invasive plants, but more on that later. I woke up this morning to notice that the area where I normally keep my ATV… there is nothing there. I walked the property to see if I might have parked it somewhere else and simply forgot. No, it really was gone … taken at some point in the night or early morning. Either way, it is gone and that simply adds to the frustration of farming through a drought. Like I said, it’s hard enough.  

The reason I wanted to write about this in this article is because in talking with our membership, it seems like many of us have a story to tell of property invasion, trespassing, theft, and deviant behavior. This seems to be a problem that affects most of us.  

In gossip, I hear how certain areas should be avoided based upon crime and drug use. I was oblivious to think that my small acre farm away from town was safe. My story of an asset purchased by my mom is sentimental only to me. To whoever took it, it will be just a dollar figure of worth for whatever they get for it when they sell it.  

More importantly, it hurts the morale of what we are trying to do with whatever tools we have when trying to do the right thing, keep to ourselves, and steward the land with whatever we have. I feel bad for people who must stoop down to stealing from others to feel complete. I wish they could feel the way that they make others feel when they do that to someone. I feel the need to say this out loud because I now know that I am not the only one who feels this way. Like I keep saying, it’s hard enough to do this. Protect your assets.