"Farming is so cool!"

“Farming is so cool!”  “It’s beautiful here!” “Corn is amazing!”  These were all comments I heard in the last 2 weeks from visitors to our Harvest Host camping site.  The first was a family with 3 boys ages 11, 7 and 5.  Those boys, who had been cooped up traveling all day ran with glee from tractor to tractor, climbing in, pretending to drive, asking questions.  Another family from Boston couldn’t get over how green it was here and how you could see miles upon miles of fields. (Or, in their Boston-y accent - “miiy-uhhls ‘n’ miiy-uhhls, kid”) The last comment was from a worker traveling with a trick dog show to earn money towards college.  He was studying biology and horticulture and was fascinated by how fast corn grows and the entire process of farming.  It was good to see our work through their eyes – new, fresh, curious eyes taking it all in.

This week I am grateful for the abundant harvest that appears to be waiting in the fields.  Harvest is so close that we can almost feel our pulse quicken with the anticipation of the adrenaline; can almost feel that dog-tired-but-satisfied feeling at the end of a 16-hour day; can smell the bean dust in the air.  We are close.  Since our last report, we have received about an inch of rain and have again been spared storms.  The corn is filling out to the tip and putting on large, fat kernels. We are probably about two weeks out from silage cutting.  We only do about two days-worth of cutting silage and will then move on to combining high moisture corn, then dry corn. So far, we have seen minimal pressure from disease, the humid weather finally giving way to some dryer air has helped.

The soybeans are tall and have lots of pods.  Here too, we have not seen much pressure from white mold or other diseases and the aphids have remained below threshold levels. 

Our sunflowers, a few weeks ago they looked happy with their bright yellow faces following the sun.  Lately, they are looking a bit sad, in the way that heads heavy with seeds drooping towards the ground drying down do.  They should also be ready to harvest in about three weeks.  Since this crop is new to us, we don’t really have a good guess as to what the harvest will be. 

We were able to finally finish up the last 40 acres of hybrid rye and finish baling the straw.  We saw a good oat crop, a nice cereal rye crop that we harvested for our own cover crop seed but the Triticale and Hybrid Rye were disappointing with 36 and 58 bu/acre, respectively.  Right after baling the straw, we plant a 10

species cover crop mix using a drill.  We are hoping for a little rain to get those seeds out of the ground.  If we get enough growth, we will turn some cattle out on those fields for grazing. 

We are quite empty right now in the feed yard, having sold most of the calves we got in last fall.  We have some contracts with ranchers out in Montana that we have done business with for years for calves to arrive in Mid-October but other opportunities have been hard to come by, with prices out of reach for a reasonable break even.  It will be interesting to see how that market plays out in the next few months. 

I guess when you think about it, farming is never dull.  Sometimes when we do the same things day after day, year after year, we forget how interesting, how unique and how special our work is and it takes some visitors with a fresh perspective to remind us of that.  On this Labor Day weekend, I am grateful for this work – this lifestyle – and this opportunity.