It’s time for the annual Krzmarzick Farms Post Harvest Update. A lot of readers look forward to that.
Anyway, 2024, what can we say about you?
A year to remember. Like how you remember banging your head on a pipe. We had a winter that wasn’t a winter. Then there was record rain from April to July. Then came the warmest, driest fall ever.
“Is it dry? No, wait, it’s wet. No, that was last week, now it’s dry.” Picture my head on a swivel.
Disappointment: Yeah, my yields sucked. In crop farming, all the labor and decisions and investment come down to one number in the end.
How many bushels did you get?
If this was baseball, I hit below the Mendoza Line this year. I joked during harvest, that if that’s the best I can do at raising corn, I should quit farming.
Too. Much. Rain. There were drowned out spots interspersed with areas where the crop was stunted and short. The high ground saw the best yield. Unfortunately, we have more low ground than high ground. The small corn ears we harvested would have been cute in table arrangements. Not so much running through the combine.
Looks like I’ll be leaning on crop insurance and the farm program. I’ve criticized those in the past as bloated programs heavily subsidized by you taxpayers and overly generous to big farmers. That doesn’t mean that this little pig isn’t going to line up at the trough when the government starts shoveling it out. Call me a hypocrite. Just don’t call me late for supper.
Jealousy: Despite everything nature threw at us, there were farmers growing 70-bushel beans and 230-bushel corn.
Better tile, missed a rain, maybe some exaggeration, who knows?
Every year, someone gets better yields than me. I’m the D1 college football program that can never crack the Top 25.
I have this image of getting to Heaven. St. Peter meets me and says, “Welcome Randy. Up here in Heaven, you’re going to grow 300-bushel corn every year.” I say, “This is great. I’m going to like it here.” Then I find out, the guy next cloud over is getting 400 bushels.
Proverbs 27:4 says, “Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service and pays the bitterest wages.” I need to find some other passions.
Perplexment: I’ve been doing this for most of fifty years, and I’m still surprised by stuff.
Why did this part of the field do better?
Why are those weeds growing there?
Why did the combine make that noise?
Being regularly confused by why things are happening keeps it interesting. I could farm for a thousand years and never figure it all out. It makes things challenging, and sometimes even fun.
I suspect working with people is at least as perplexing as working with plants. I wouldn’t be good at that.
Fatigue: I know. Fatigue is not an emotion. Work with me here.
On Sept. 16, I started inspecting soybean fields. That’s a part time job I have with the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association. That lasts up to my own harvesting of soybeans, which leads to corn. Then follows tillage. Each of those takes about two weeks.
This year, it never rained. Most years, a rainy day is a chance to catch my breath and rest a bit. This year it never rained. I worked every day for six weeks straight. I’m not that hardworking a person. I like hanging out, drinking coffee, and wasting time once in a while. Not working EVERY day.
Six weeks! Every day! You’re thinking, “Do you want a medal, or a chest to pit it on?” Yes.
Anger: I spend a lot of time on Highway 14 in the fall. We haul grain and move equipment. I’ve never liked being on the highway. When my great grandfather bought this place in 1896, there was considerably less traffic.
One dayl, I was hauling a load of corn to the elevator. I had to make a left turn from the curve onto a gravel road. Flashers and turn signals were all working on the tractor and the wagon. There is a bypass lane to my right that following traffic can use to get around me. The road is clearly marked for no passing.
I slowed to make my turn. There is no way it could have been more obvious what I was doing. I began the turn with my tractor when some guy decided he needed to pass on my left. I saw him just in time to jerk my steering wheel to the right, putting every other vehicle around me at risk. If I hadn’t seen him, he would have either hit the tractor or driven off the road.
The driver slowed when he realized what had happened. Then he drove away really fast, as if that would make it better. My bad thoughts followed him as far as they could.
When I was unloading at the elevator, I described that to Jay, who was unloading at the pit.
I said, I’m not a particularly violent person, but should I have driven that idiot off the road?
Jay suggested that a front-end loader on the tractor might have gotten the message across better.
A little sadness: Maybe you can’t tell from my complaining, but I do enjoy this. Working fields, growing crops, being outside are things I love. Despite my goal of farming forever, I know I’m in the later innings here, hopefully not the ninth inning.
My friend Gigi Portner is a poetry reader. Occasionally she sends me poems, handwritten in a letter. That is truly an amazing thing. You should all have such a friend.
During harvest she sent me one called Down to Earth, by James Crews. It’s about a farmer who opens his hand to the rain “seeping through layers to kiss the roots of every plant alive on this living, breathing planet on whose back we were granted permission to live for a limited time.”
It reminded me that this is all a gift. Thanks Gigi.