Why would you want to do that?
I want to farm for a lot of reasons, so many that it's hard to list them all. When I started my blog I hoped that I could try to answer that question. However, if I am forced to try to succinctly state in a few words why I want to farm I'd have to say: excitement, education, and tangibility.
I've realized that in order for something to be exciting there has to be some uncertainty. The fabric of farming is wove with many threads of uncertainty and excitement. It' hard for me to think of anything on the farm that isn't a gamble in one way or another. What to grow, when to plant it, how to harvest, etc... That's not taking into account the weather, which in Western Kansas, is as volatile as commodity markets. Both of which, decide how much money you make or lose in a year as a farmer.
When I was in primary education and even some in college, I had trouble believing that I would ever use the information that was being presented to me in class. On the farm, I've had to dust off all kinds of facts from my schooling: biology, chemistry, geometry, accounting, physics, the list goes on. Most of the things that I experience on the farm I've read about in books or I've learned from a class. The difference on the farm, is that I actually get to see the things happening. I get to experience them on a completely different level. For example: The cell walls of plants cells are rigid. I knew that fact when I was in junior high school but actually seeing the damage that a freeze can cause on our crops by rupturing the cell walls taught me in a real sense why that is important. Just about everyday I experience something like that example and I love it every time it happens.
On the farm we produce tangible goods that are used for food and fuel. Just about everything we do on the farm has a physical reality. When you plant your crops you get to watch those crops grow. When you help a cow have her calf, you get to see the cute little thing running around two days later and mature. After sitting in a tractor all day, you look over your shoulder when the sun is setting and there is an order to the soil that wasn't there before. When I was in IT there wasn't any tangibility in the work I was doing; you can't hold a log file or smell a Unix process. There is so much more satisfaction for me in seeing and holding the goods that I've helped to produce.
I've just celebrated my 30th birthday, not by going out with my friends, but by spending all day in a tractor planting corn. I hope that this next year I can watch the corn develop and have fun harvesting it this fall.
-Farmer Ryan
P.S. - I still don't like country music.
