The Joys of Farming

Today's Wednesday's Guest is Slim Randles, who is here to share the joy of working the soil and planting the seeds and living the farming life. While I haven't reclined on the ditch grass, I have sat out on a stump and looked at my little farm and breathed that same sigh of contentment. There is something wondrous about being so connected to God's green earth. I think I'll just go pull a red, ripe tomato off the vine. You bring the salt shaker.

Harley pulled the tractor over to the ditch and cut the engine. He climbed down stiffly, walked to the water and soaked his head and shirt. Then he looked around. No cars were coming down the county road. No one at the house could see him.  So he smiled, sat on a rock and leaned back against the ditchbank.

 A farmer’s recliner, he thought, wiggling slightly to avoid kidney puncture by a twig. He was smiling that dignified farmer’s smile on the outside but laughing on the inside. So nice to just rest here for a minute in the sun. Oh, he wouldn’t have done it if he’d left the engine running. Waste of gas. But the engine was off, all the seeds were in for this year, and all he was doing was plowing summer fallow now. No rush. Do it any time.

So Harley locked his hands behind his head, lay back against the ditch grass, and just looked around.

Marshmallow clouds today against a dark blue sky. Crows flying in to Harley’s fields from Roger’s. He paused a moment from pure observation to lean a bit on philosophy. He considered that fences and land deeds and farming contracts meant nothing to these birds. There is more than a bit of envy there, but just for a minute. Harley stood, stretched his back and drank from the canteen on the tractor.

Crows didn’t worry about deeds, he thought, but hey, they didn’t get to watch football in the fall, either.

All in all, on a nice summer’s day like this, there’s nothing wrong with being a farmer.

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Monday Morning Blues

It's been a busy few days since I posted last, which kept me pretty much offline, especially over the weekend. Our son came to visit for a few days, and we always enjoy working outdoors while he is here. Like me, he is a frustrated farmer, so he likes to do chores. The first day, we built a huge fire in the back and burned a lot of limbs and logs from trees that had fallen over the last year since we cleaned up back there and had a big burn.

We were also having a new roof put on the hay barn and discovered we have termites feasting on the posts. Not good. So we spent a couple of hours doing termite control. That entailed moving some old wood that had been stacked on one side of the barn and injecting insecticide into the ground around all the posts.

This morning, I'd hoped to get that old wood carted off to the burn pile and clean my front pasture, but got up to rain. None of us are liking it. Not even the goats. They head for the small barn when there is even a spit of rain. The cats all ran for the hay and the dog came inside.

I am not sure why I titled this Monday Morning Blues. It is really Monday Morning Gray. If the rain stays at a steady drizzle, I can keep working in my office, but if it develops into thunderstorms, I will have to shut down my computer. Not good since I have tons of work to do today. So maybe that's why I'm a little blue right now.

Inequities in the Farm Bill

Well, they did it. Congress passed the bloated Farm Bill, President Bush vetoed it, and the Senate overrode the veto. Now they have discovered that Bush vetoed the wrong bill, and the right one will come up for a vote this week. Bush will probably veto it again and the Senate will attempt another override.

So I guess I will go through another few days of wishing that someone would have the good sense to break this bill into components and not have the assistance for the poor in terms of food stamps and food surplus distribution attached to the same bill that gives corporate farmers thousands of dollars that they don’t need.

Oh, they think they need it because the hundreds of thousands of dollars they clear each year just aren’t enough. Compare that with the small family-owned farm that sometimes can’t even feed that family. Where is the help for a farmer who has three bad years in a row and has no capital to buy seed to plant another crop? He can’t even qualify for food stamps because he owns equipment worth thousands of dollars. But even with those assets, the bank won’t lend him any money to get him through the winter until he can try again next spring.

If the government really wanted to help the American farmer and not just the ones rich enough to support the lobby in Washington, the current Farm Bill would be trashed and a new one written. The new one would not allow for a situation where a farm owned by the same family for generations would have to be sold before the farmer’s wife could qualify for Medicare to pay for dialysis. Or another farmer’s home would not have to be mortgaged because the bottom fell out of the pig market just before his were ready to go and he didn’t make enough to pay his feed bill.

Nor would any farmer have to face the ultimate humiliation of not being able to feed his family.

It shouldn’t be happening….