Mid-summer is a time for county fairs, cool drinks, barbeques, swimming, fishing, vacations and just plain being lazy in the shade. Ah, that would be the life, but when it comes to farming – in my case wildlife food plots – it’s business before pleasure.
With only days remaining before heading down South for a business conference, I had put the food plot work on the back burner until returning the first week in August. Planting in early August is perfect for a variety of annual and perennial seed mixes, but hoping for good weather to do so can be problematic. As we all know, Mother Nature can be as fickle as life itself; her unpredictable demeanor has nothing to do with fairness, hard work, or good intentions. Like real farmers, it plain gambling.
In any case, when I saw that my neighbor, Bucky, was disking his food plot parcel, I approached him on his antique Ferguson tractor and learned he was planning to not only disk the soil, but he was going to seed it the same day. I changed my plans on the spot.
My tractor still had a rear flat tire, so I too needed the use of Bucky’s tractor for my site work. Since we’d have to change implements from the disk, to a drag, and then a cultipacker, it made sense to get our sites done together to avoid double work.
Home I went to change into my work clothes, which are usually about anything I am wearing at any given time. Sunscreen, some cool drinks in the cooler, a hat, gloves, and ear plugs rounded out the necessary personal items.
By the time Bucky had disked his land, it was time for his lunch and time for my turn on the old machine. Since I didn’t have all the requisite seed on hand, I would head to the grain elevator in Morrice, when my good neighbor returned from lunch and after my disking chores were complete. So far, so good.
We pushed that old tractor hard (and, ourselves for that matter) in 90-degree heat and it never missed a beat. Then, it was on to the spring-tooth drag. Following that, the cultipacker was used to prep the seed bed, before broadcasting brassica and legume seed mixes, which is done the hard way with a hand-held seeder. Lots of walking, cranking, and sweating. I looked close at the skin on my arms, where the tiny seed had stuck to the sweat and wondered if they’d germinate before finishing the legwork ordeal.
The cool drinks ran out and so did my seed, even though I had purchased what I thought would be enough for the seeding session. Bucky came to the rescue with some leftover mixes that saved the day and I pitched in with some fuel for the tank.
It was 6 pm before we finished one day in the life of a farmer. And, when thunder and lightning and then rain followed some nine hours later, it was music to my ears.
