Farming is a business, say those who offer advice to beleaguered stewards of land and livestock. If your business can’t turn a profit, maybe it’s time to quit.
Simple words. Too simple.
In the cold of a February morning, you feed the bales you made in July from hay that grew in June after the rain you prayed for in May.
They aren’t as heavy as the bales you put up two years ago, which was two years after you seeded the alfalfa and when it rained just when rain was needed.
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You feed these bales to the cow you bought from a neighbor in 1995 and to the cow that was once a calf that you treated for scours three years ago and to the rest of the herd, which has a history you can trace.
Tomorrow you plan to load up the barley that went into the granary last August, some of it from the last load off the combine you bought new in 1992, but last fall you damaged the header against that rock that surfaced in 1988, the same rock you’ve been meaning to dig out and haul away when you get time.
The pickup has a crease in the tailgate from when your daughter backed into a gate post while you were teaching her to drive, back when she was eight, and then she grew up and now lives in the city from where she calls you every Sunday and says she misses home.
The truck isn’t pretty but it still gets you around the place, to the steel grain bins you paid for a few years ago, and the shop with its fix-it projects and its bins of bolts collected from all kinds of equipment and parts over the last 20 years.
The truck can still take you to the corrals where you’ll soon be sorting the gonna-calve-any-minute cows from the neighbor’s-bull-got-into-the-pasture-last-October cows, and to the fields where you look forward to future crops of all kinds.
That same truck takes you to town, where you wave back at everyone who waves at you, and the woman at the post office asks about your aunt or your uncle or your grandma, and you buy and read the local paper to make sure it got the facts right.
On the way home you drive by that field where you think you’ll plant canola this spring, and the barn that you’ll reshingle if the canola yields well.
And as the talking heads on the evening newscast say that farming is a business, and that some people should just pick up and leave, you shake your head and think about the simplicity of it all.
