Wintery Blues

I get this question often?

"What do I all winter?"

A lot, a lot a lot. It's okay though. It is a great question. While most jobs run year round with set hours and stat holidays; agriculture is different. Ranchers have it worse the grain farmers like me. Ranchers need to take care of their equipment and animals years round, every day. Regardless how the weather is or how they feel, the animals and chores come first.

Grain farming is a "hurry up and wait" type job. There is a lot of prep work and planning done during January and February. Doing research and booking inputs. March comes along and the equipment is taken from storage. Things are put through the shop to get everything prepared to run during upcoming seeding season. Once April starts, its long hours getting seed fertilizers and chemicals staged, so once you start planting your seed, you do not stop except for sleep and breakdowns.

Summer rolls around and things slow down for most farms. Letting the crop grow, checking for pests. Maybe even spend some time at the lake or cabin. Here at Golden DEE, we use irrigation and once the crops comes out of the ground we start irrigating to help supplement the rainfall. This requires a lot of babysitting irrigation pivots and fixing tires.

Irrigation continues into harvest time as dryland crops will mature faster due to the stress they have endured all summer. So while we combine fields, we may still irrigate some fields where the higher value crops are.

Harvest is the "hurry up and wait" season, go hard until the field is done, but then sit until the next one is. Harvest can take 3 months to accomplish from the earl crops such as peas, to later crops like our irrigation edible beans.

This brings us back to the blustery cold season of late fall. Once harvest is complete, we will clean the equipment, send some away to be checked out by professionals, and put everything away for winter. We use cold storage sheds to keep the sun and elements off the equipment during the winter to help preserve the plastics and rubber components.

Now winter is back and after the long harvest and clean up season, I can relax; i spend time with my family and try to travel a bit. This is where i trade my busy time for doing very little and unwind. After Christmas, i start my planning and continued education season all over again.

This shows the major seasonal makeup of living on a grain farm. Which is one reason I love being a farmer. So what do I do all winter? I relax with family, learn some new things, and make plans for next year.