by John Mattingly
If you’re like me, you’ve been trying to quit farming for at least ten years. Only when people point this out to you do you try to explain.
OK, so here goes. . .
In the summer, it’s impossible to quit. You start out managing the farm, and the farm ends up managing you. There’s so much to do that you actually dread the sunset, even the gorgeous ones on the longest days, because you crave more hours of daylight to get that one more chore off the list and off your mind. At the critical peak of summer operations, it’s like an athletic event, in which shaving few seconds off your performance time is the difference between winning and losing, success and failure.
If you take farming seriously, which you should, you consider management of earth and water resources something akin to a fiduciary responsibility. You can thus be obnoxious to anyone in your employ (or anyone in your supply chain) who takes the job casually, makes a careless mistake, or jumps into a job without preparation. No time of the year puts more pressure on you than summer. Dedication, discipline, and determination pay off. You didn’t have a losing season in 42 years, but you made friends and enemies in approximately equal number, got a reputation for being hard to get along with, caused people to tighten their belt when they saw you coming, and your fields were cleaner than the inside of your house for the entire summer— all because you are absolutely inflexible when it came farming your ground the way you wanted it farmed. Period.
Oh, and your crops show the effort. You can’t hide your work like people in many other professions, such as law, finance, or construction. No, your work is right out in the open for all to see. Some farmers get their crop looking good next to the road so people will think they’re husbanding the soil with a firm hand, but any farmer who knows his crops can spot these flimsy cover-ups. Summer is a time when the difference between the farmer and the farm becomes blurry. If it isn’t already obvious, the possibility of quitting in the summer never even comes up.
The fall of the year would seem like a good time to quit, after the harvest is put to bed. But fall is also the most seductive of seasons, infecting you with survivor’s conceit. You’ve made it through another summer. Pride has a way of seeping through the cracks of your relaxation, surrounding your deep breaths of relief. Mornings allow for an extra cup of coffee and a leisurely read of, say, Colorado Central, The Economist, and Drover, an indulgence never possible in the frenzy of summer. Fall afternoons spent chiseling in stubble, sprouting volunteer, getting seedbeds ready for next year’s crop—these are all very enjoyable work because you’re getting ahead instead of always fighting the feeling that you’re behind.
The landscape is saturated in the enhanced fall light, the changes in leaves, the deepening of colors. The earth simply appears richer, maturing in the cycle of the seasons. The rhythm of life and death fills you with feelings as a deep peace settles in over the tensions of the previous summer. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that there’s money coming in from the sale of crops, and a few of those big bills are getting paid.
Winter rolls around, and this season is clearly the best one for quitting. Nothing critical is going on with operations. The ground is all worked and ready for planting the next spring. Machinery may need repairs or replacement, but there’s plenty of time for that, and the shop is finally organized a bit after the hectic grabs and tosses of summer, and you just insulated the north wall. You have a good stove, a radio, and coffee pot.
The only decision to be made with harvested crops is when to sell or how to haul. Money is building up in the bank. It actually takes a few minutes to calculate your net worth. It’s a perfect time to walk away and start a new profession.
The problem with this theory is similar to the problem of fixing a leaky roof. In the summer, when you most want to quit, you can’t, and in the winter when you could most easily quit, you don’t need to. There’s no pressure, nothing biting at your heels. In fact, you congratulate yourself on being in a profession that gives you much of an entire season OFF. You get invited to the promotional dinners of various equipment dealers and vendors. You win a few door prizes. You have a John Deere tractor for a mailbox, New Holland boxholders, a bright red International vest, and Caterpillar clock. You go to a few machinery auctions in your winter overalls and jawbone with neighbors, and accidentally pick up several unexpected bargains and a few tips on a local market opportunity.
At home, the winter nights are long enough that you spend decent time indoors catching up on little remodeling and maintenance projects, and you run crop scenarios for the coming year, check your bank balance, and contract a few items ahead, just to be safe, and in some cases take advantage of discounts. Your easy chair gets a familiar dent in the seat cushion from helping you watch a few hours of your favorite TV shows or football games. In short, your physical and emotional batteries get fully charged.
Spring rolls around. You bring a tractor or two out of the shop to hook up a ground-engaging tool, just to be sure everything will work and fit. The smell of diesel exhaust mixes with the aroma of thawing earth, igniting in you an irrepressible urge to turn your fields green again. Your fields now look like big brown canvases, waiting for you, the master, to bring them back to life.
The seduction of spring is even greater than that of the fall. If someone came up to you and offered you good money to join a new profession, something with no risk, no hard work, and no stress, you would look at them with a bewildered expression and point to the NO TRESPASSING sign at your entry gate. Nothing short of bondage, immobility, or death could keep you from your fields.
The problem with quittin’ time on the farm is as simple as it sounds: timing.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
