I wouldn’t want to be a farmer. His income depends on the most undependable most unreliable thing on earth; Mother Nature.
First he has to get his seed in the ground as soon as the winter snow melt will let him get onto the fields and before the spring rains come.
If he is lucky enough to get that timed right he can start to be a little optimistic, but not much. He still has to wait and see if there will be the right amount of rain at the right time, too much too soon and his crop will be flooded out, too little and it will dry up.
The farmer cannot be sure of his money crop until it is in the bins. There have been too many years where a bumper crop has been destroyed by hail just days before harvest. I think the most frustrating thing about farming is the fact that there is not a darn thing you can do about the weather.
For the livestock farmer the grain crop means more than money in the bank, it is food for the livestock. If he has to buy the feed for his animals then he loses his profit from the sale of the cattle.
A non-farmer might drive by a herd of cattle grazing in a pasture and think that those cattle have lots to eat, and they might have, for the summer. If the grass in that pasture has not had the right amount of rain at the right time it will not grow tall enough to cut and bale for the winter feed, again forcing the farmer to buy feed.
Spending your life trying to outsmart Mother Nature can really mess up your personal life too. Kids want to go to the town fair? Well, maybe if it rains and the hay is too wet to cut, but if the sun shines then there is no play for the farmer, there is a truth to the old saying “you have to make hay while the sun shines”.
How about a spring vacation? Not when those cows could be calving any day. In the fall the farmer is on the fields day and night trying to get that crop in before the frost gets here.
What would we do without our farmers? Where would we get our breads, our meats, our dairy products?
How often do we stop to think about where the food in our grocery cart comes from? Next time you put a package of hamburgers or a jug of milk in your cart think about the local farmer, and maybe say Thank You the next time you see one.
