Decide. Stress. Pray. Farm

Passion for their work is a little different for farmers than for the average career-minded person. For instance, most farmers live on their farm. How many people actually live where they work? How many people have to worry that if their business fails or falls on hard times they might lose the house/property/business that has, often, been in the family for several generations? In addition to that, how many people operate a business where SO MANY factors are completely out of their control?  It can be very stressful to say the least!

This year has been an interesting year for my family’s farm. We had an unusually wet spring and worried that we weren’t going to be able to get our corn in the ground in time. Beans seemed to go in a little more smoothly, but due to the wet conditions, it was almost impossible to get fertilizer on the crops. Then suddenly the rain stopped and the thermostat was cranked up a few degrees. It didn’t rain here in central Indiana for weeks and didn’t start raining again until right before (and during) harvest. I know that other parts of the country have also experienced crazy weather, severe floods and drought – there’s nothing anyone can do to control the weather. Farmers just have to make the best of what they’re given and trust that they made the right decisions with the factors that were under their control.

Then harvest rolls around and suddenly its time to see how the decisions they made – type of seed, fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, etc – panned out. How did those choices, combined with the weather effect the yield? Sometimes things work out and the right decisions combined with the right weather result in high yields. Other times it doesn’t work out as well.

HandyMan and his dad spent a lot of time over the summer talking about the weather and how it was affecting the corn and soybeans. HandyMan’s dad commented several times that guys who got their beans in just a week or so before he did were getting a better crop. Then rain would be forecast and HandyMan would be glued to the radar, praying for some rain only to be disappointed when the rain seemed to break up and go around us or dissipate right before it got to us (almost every time). HandyMan would come home from work, go out into the field and come back with a few ears of corn from various sections of the field to see how the ears were filling out and then to see how they were drying up. Several times I’ve had to ask HandyMan to relax and stop stressing, to remind him that we can’t control the weather. All we can do is make the best decisions, based on the information available to us, and then pray that it all works out in the end.

So far, this year isn’t looking as bad as HandyMan and his dad worried that it would. I don’t know exactly what the per acre yield average was for beans, only that it was better than what HandyMan’s dad had thought it would be. And so far corn has turned out the same – better than expected but not as good as last year.

And you know what, I think we’ll take it!