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Dirt

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I heard a snippet of a blog and they said, “A person will work three jobs so they can go home and farm. You never hear of a person working 3 jobs so they can open a plumbing shop.” Sweeping generalization alert there. I’ve been thinking about that since I heard it. And while I’m in the tractor I think about what it is that makes farming so entrenched for us. What exactly is it that calls us to it? For me, it’s a lot of things: I like the machinery, I like working on the tractor or changing the oil, and learning, and having the skills and tools (and shop!) to work on stuff. A sense of achievement. I like working up a field and watching the soil turn black. Stan Rogers says it best in ‘The Field Behind the Plow‘ “Watch the field behind the plow, turn to straight dark rows. Put another season’s promise in the ground”.

I like being this close to the seasons and the circle of… everything. The growth, a faith in something bigger I guess. It’s deep and it pulls in my chest.

I’ve had a few late nights. Working at the college, then home and it might be 6 or 7:00 before I get out in the tractor and to the field. But it’s my time and I got nothing else at the moment. I feed the chicks, talk with Kelly. Daughter asks me to sit on the deck with her. We play with the dogs. Going out half an hour later doesn’t matter. (unless there’s rain in the forecast)

Daughter, turning 30 chronologically, but maybe 16 developmentally, she gives lots of hugs, but when we say “Love You!” she responds, “yep” or “OK” or maybe just “Bye”. And it makes me chuckle. That is when she doesn’t roll her eyes and simply walk away.

So, I’m in the tractor. One night I listened to Joni Mitchell. I haven’t had her albums or listened to much of her stuff. Just the hits. We saw Ben Folds in Rochester on Wednesday night and I listened to his stuff. I did some classical MPR. On the weekends it’s MPR News and their great programming: Wait Wait, Moth, This American Life, Radio Lab. It’s all so interesting! And some podcasts. In the tractor is the only time I can really do that, when I can listen and pay attention.

Best of all, I found some podcasts of TLGMS!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mpr-skits-from-the-morning-show/id104720092

It has been so fun to hear all these characters again. Cap’n Billy, Bubby Spamden, The Bowzer Bed, Wally’s Sherpa, Dr. B. Marty Barry and his bottomless Well of Wellness, Spin Williams, Congressman Beechly, Genway, and that wonderful cure-all pill, Purplex from Spendy Popper. I cannot get over what an amazingly creative writer Dale is! How he came up with all these ideas! We didn’t know what we had at the time, did we?

Me and Bailey enjoy our tractor time. She’s 7 1/2 years old and I have to boost her up into the tractor. Every few minutes she sits up and put her head against my knee and I scratch her ears and she lays down again.

It was a busy week. Filled the big tractor with fuel. It only needed half a tank.

Ordered more diesel and gasoline for the barrels.

I’m using the boating app again to find my place in the fields. And how can I take the linear distance to make it acres? (13.6 miles x 5280 feet divided by 24′ digger divided by 43,500 sq feet / acre = ? Hmm, that doesn’t come out right. Seems like it should make sense.

Did a lot of math figuring what 18, 50 lb bags of oats, at 32 lbs per bushel and I want 3.5 bushels / acre will do how many acres. And if I ran out at 6 acres, how much did I really apply?

Went back to Meyer Seeds on Wednesday morning and bought 12 more bags. Remember last year when I ran out 1/2 acre short of finishing with rain in the forecast and I said I would order extra seed next year so I didn’t run out?? I DID order extra! But I got a different variety of oat seed and the rate changed so… back for more.

After planting, this year I had time and cooperative weather to go over the oat ground with the drag (harrow) to smooth it out and help cover the seed in the tractor tracks that don’t always get covered.

Got the old 630 running pretty well. And I’ve ordered a new exhaust pipe and muffler for it. I’m looking forward to working on that after the spring rush.

Parked the tractor in the shop and changed oil, engine air filters, (there’s two) and cab air filters. Two tall, narrow ones outside, and two small ones inside the cab.

The new exterior shop lights are great!

Finished planting oats on Friday while my brother was out working up corn ground. The Co-op applied corn fertilizer on Thursday, and I hope to be planting corn on Saturday.

When I’m planting, I’m travelling at about 5 MPH. Faster than that and the seed spacing gets messed up. And seed spacing is really critical in some crops. Corn it’s extremely important. Soybeans it’s moderately, and oats doesn’t matter so much.

Fancy newer ‘high speed’ equipment carries a seed to the ground using a brush belt to gently place the seed in the trench. New planters are capable of 10 MPH. Time is money you know. It’s fascinating how fast some of these parts are moving to drop a seed every 6″ at 10 MPH. There’s some math for you. Bill, how long does it take to go 100′ at 10MPH and how many seeds does it drop if they’re 6″ apart? That mechanism is really moving!  

Getting ready for commencement at the college. Hung some of the fixtures over the stage, before they place the stage. Had the gym to myself and it was pretty nice.

Will look a lot different this time next week.

Got the laptop and ‘Hog’ console set up and doing all that math / prep work. Or trying. Thursday afternoon the laptop didn’t want to play nice. But Friday morning all was well. I have a plan B and C. It will be fine, FINE I tell you!

HOW MANY JOBS HAVE YOU WORKED AT ONCE?

FOR WHAT GOAL?

32 thoughts on “Dirt”

  1. First of all, 100 feet at 10 mph would take a tiny bit less than seven seconds.

    When I worked as a freelancer, I designed product concepts on the computer, I sketched on site when companies held new product concept sessions, I designed and produced books and cases for DVDs, I wrote copy for business to business communications and some of the copy in the books I produced, I wrote copy for TV and radio advertising, I participated by invitation in many product idea generation sessions (for my ideas), and I built props for professional photographers. You could consider those all separate jobs or just one nebulous one.

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        1. At that rate, 3.3 x 7, you’d get 23.1 seeds every 100 yards at 10 mph or 46.2 at 5 mph.

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    2. And I had my math wrong; linear distance x 5280 x the width of the implement, divided by 43,500 = roughly the acres. So it is close.

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      1. Yep yep, Bill, I had my math wrong again. I was thinking one minute for some reason.
        Your math of 28 seeds / second is more impressive.

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  2. My father loaded boats seasonally and farmed and had another 6-7 ways to make money to provide for his family. My mother said we could have not farmed for the same cost but it was better food, a better life, and a better experience for their children. Two out of three of us agree with that.
    I was a teacher and a pastor for 11 years. I don’t think I ever worked 3 jobs. I once counted up all the things I did for which I got paid. It was a high number. From resurfacing hockey rinks to building sets of steps down to Superior to editing manuals to directing plays to coaching.
    Clyde

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    1. “…building steps down to Superior…” Do you mean on Lake Superior, private properties? My friends outside of Herbster (South Shore) have an intricate stairway down to the Lake, and it occurred to me that would have really been something to build!

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  3. Seems like I’ve always had at least two.. When I was teaching, I was also taking at least one evening class to complete the California credential requirements – I consider that another job.

    Being a wife and mom was one job, on top of whatever part-time job I had during those years – office management, or book store staff…

    I feel like I have more jobs now than ever before – cook and caretaker here, the UU Board Director is certainly a part-time (volunteer) job – but now there’s a 2-month break, as we take the summers off… But now we add garden into the mix!

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  4. I worked at the Regional Center while going to LPN training. Later, when I worked for the DNR in Waterville, I also worked part-time in a long-term care facility in the memory care unit.

    In the first case, I did it because I could. I needed the income from my job to pay rent and tuition for school, and I wasn’t doing anything else that was productive at the time. In the second case, I needed the second job to survive in Waterville.

    Happy birthday, Ben! I hope it rains once you get all those seeds in the ground!

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  6. I have now assumed multiple jobs.
    2. I retired and get all my Social Security and union retirement.
    3. I’m recalled to supervision of the Milton, Ohio High School floor covering.
    4. Calling Trump to account on Mediaite.com.
    1. Caring for my budgie flock.

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  7. Better Late than Never, Baboons,

    Between my junior and senior year in college, I worked the overnight shift at a nursing home where my sister and cousins also worked. Mrs. Brady called me fill in for vacations all summer which I did. Then part time during the day I worked at a dry cleaning store doing alterations and delivering laundry. I socialized in the small amount of down time left over. It gave me college money and a down payment for rent in the apartment I rented with some other girls.

    Other times I have also worked a FT job, then taken a very small side job as a therapist for small non-profits. When I wrote curriculum and trained social workers for the state of MN that also was also a sideline job that paid well in addition to another job. I never gave up a chance to make a little money.

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  9. I describe myself as a farmboy. Truth is I was much more of a woods boy. I grew up playing in the woods, but I also did more work in the woods. My father had several ways to make money off trees. Back then people would want peeled straight poles for a variety of uses. First way that I earned money was peeling the poles which ran from 10 to 20 feet in length. I think I got paid a quarter for each two. It was a sticky sweet smelling job. My mother worked as hard as I did getting the clothes clean. I started at age 10. By age 14 I got $1 each and got much faster and did not get very dirty. We would cut cedar trees and shape them into fence posts and haul them to Missouri. My father built a sawmill and people brought us timber to saw. My father logged and cut pulp. My father had been a lumberjack. I only applied to three colleges as a senior. For a variety of reasons I was not going to go to college. The three I applied to were offering big scholarships. The U of Chicago offered me one. I still hesitated. I was planning to work with trees in all the ways my father had.
    Clyde

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  10. Took him 3 years in between other tasks. Bought an old county dump truck and sold off parts except for engine for much more than he paid for it. Overhauled engine and made it the power to run sawmill. I have 3-4 photos of it in operation.

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  13. I’ve never had more than one job at a time that anyone paid me for. But as Barbara mentioned, single motherhood certainly felt like another full time job when YA was growing up!

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  14. When I was young, I sometimes held a part-time job in addition to may my full-time day job. Mostly because I needed the money, but also because my full-time jobs were pretty sedentary, and I needed some exercise. Later on, when I didn’t need the extra income, I took on volunteer work with various neighborhood organizations. I was a phone counselor with Face to Face for a couple of years, and I served as board member on various non-profit boards.

    I found volunteering a really good way of becoming meaningfully connected with people in my community, and meeting people with similar interests. Very often involvement in one activity such as planning and planting a community garden, would lead to other endeavors as well.

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  15. i’ve always viewed life as my job and I’ve had different things along the way as the sales guy I get to wear a bunch of different hats and enjoyed that now that I’m a driver and delivery guy. I feel more handcuffed with the hours of the day, but it gives me time to think about the things that I’d like to do and I come up with multiple ideas and can’t eliminate any of them because I love them all

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  16. On my last tax return I had three schedule C’splus a W-2. Nothing is close to full time. The goal is to just keep a steady trickle of money coming in.

    Hope you had a great birthday, Ben!

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  18. I hope some of you listen to the Morning Show podcasts. It was sort of bittersweet, but I sure enjoyed them.

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    1. I did listen to one, and I’ll go back and find more. It was interesting to go back to 2008, when the Franken/Coleman recount was underway. The November 12th Cap’n Billy sketch has a reference to candidates claiming they were robbed…sounds kind of quaint in retrospect.

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