Wrenches & Wisdom
Unlearning Agriculture's Hard Lessons
Do you remember when I said nothing goes good without a bit of trouble? We will test that theory when the snow melts and the corn harvest returns. I suspect it’ll hold.
I got up early Thursday morning to kick FTF #16 into the world a day earlier than usual, but then I learned Coach Bobby Knight had passed away.
So, I spent an hour and forty-nine minutes watching videos of the loosest cannon in the world of sports whip chairs and lip off to whoever faced him.
The guy even told Michael Jordan to get his shit together.
Now that it’s two days later and I’ve finished procrastinating, I’ll get on with it.
Coach got me thinking about the first day of a farm gig when I walked in, and a 9/16” wrench zinged an inch from my nose.
During that first week, I learned what it’d be like to work side-by-side with former WWE wrassler Stone Cold Steve Austin if he were all revved up on PCP and several huffs of Elmer’s glue.
On day two, that wrench-chuckin coworker beat the rust off a pickup box with a hitch pin that wasn’t the proper size.
A strange approach, indeed.
I didn’t know if he thought the truck box would grind the pin to size or if he’d misplaced his marbles and was ready to send me home in a body bag.
A heavy load for a fourteen-year-old fresh on the farm.
Fortunately, neither was true. My coworker just experienced a temporary loss of composure and sanity that made Coach Bobby Knight’s rampages look like Taylor Swift prancing in the park.
All this talk of flipping lids and scaring kids reminds me that this was how I learned approximately eighty-six percent of the farm stuff I know:
“Adam, if you don’t learn to get the grain in the center of these trucks, they’ll tip. You are one simple son of a bitch.”
“Listen up, numb nuts, move over farther when you meet a loaded truck on a gravel road or I’m gonna barbeque your ass in molasses.”
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, kid. Good thing you’re thin, or you’d have already hit the trifecta.”
For the generations that came before me, verbal abuse was considered a respected way to train in the new meat.
It didn’t matter if it was your kid or some drifter who rolled off a flatbed Ford. Berating them until they got the job right was the only way folks knew.
In the late 50s and early 60s, they issued insult guides to first-year students at the Agricultural College and passed out switches to take home for when somebody back-sassed.
My, how times have changed.
I guess, in a way, the old-school training methods worked for me.
I’ve never loaded another truck off-center, nor have I not moved over for an oncoming beet truck. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a car, bicycle, or dune buggy; I’m getting out of the way, or those words ring in my ears, reminding me not to be an idiot.
Here’s the problem. I learned the things I know out of fear.
The only reason I don’t bugger up very often is because I’m now hard-wired to be terrified of buggering things up.
Undoubtedly, it’s an effective approach, especially if you’re training soldiers to run the Third Reich.
But for teaching farm help, I can’t say it’s my style. I try to be patient when helping somebody learn the ropes. Just because scaring the bejesus out of me prevented me from destroying equipment doesn’t mean it was the best way.
A dog probably won’t bark at the mailman if he takes a beating for doing so, but there are better ways to teach the dog the same good behavior.
There’s always a better way to teach anybody, especially in today’s sensitive age when kids melt down if they get a Salted Nut Roll instead of Skittles for Halloween.
But hey, if the ‘70s football coaching style works for your farm, you do you, boo.
But, if you’re constantly rotating through hired hands because nobody wants to dodge the wrenches you’re tossing, then it may be time to test a new approach. Your hot-headedness is probably freaking some people out.
I know some will take this advice and use it to wipe their backside and carry on with Coach Bobby Knight's approach to farm management.
Pity if that’s the case, but as they say, you can lead a horse to whiskey, but good luck getting him to do anything for you the next day when he’s hungover.
Some will tell me that the world went and got soft, and the kids today don’t know how good they have it. They’ll say that without Bobby Knight around to scream until people’s ears bleed, society is doomed.
Let them say it. Not everybody is going to get it.
More importantly, who hurt you, Bobby Knight?
Rest in peace; you misunderstood, son of a gun.
Something else that should rest in peace right beside the Coach?
The thought that a swift kick in the ass fixes everything because it doesn’t.
Where’d You Get Your Common Sense?
What is common sense, anyway?
People often complain about others having no common sense.
When they do this, I have to step into the other room to fart, for if I didn’t release the pressure, there’s a good chance my head would explode.
There’s nothing we do that we didn’t learn somewhere along the way.
Nobody comes out of the womb knowing one shouldn’t drive in two-way traffic with the bright lights on.
We don’t learn to piss with the wind until the urine speckles decorate our shoes or we hear the Jim Croche song, whichever comes first.
That guy you hired isn’t an idiot because he didn’t let the tractor warm up, or he turned too sharp with the cultivator in the ground.
This may be a news flash, but he probably doesn’t know better.
Too many of us expect others to know what we’re thinking. We think people know exactly how we would like to see something done and get bent out of shape when they don’t.
Hell, I don’t even know what I’m thinking until I’ve spent some time writing so I can properly sort things out.
Not everything comes easy to everybody.
Next time you find yourself frustrated with somebody, ask yourself if there’s more you can do instead of expecting the common sense gods to get your hired man to stop leaving chisel plow skips and maybe wash his windows occasionally.
Help people understand. Be a teacher and leader, and don’t be a dick.
Common sense doesn’t exist. Everybody learns in different ways and at different rates. We have to be patient with people and show them grace.
If you manage this, you’ll be more fun to be around, your relationships will improve, and finding good help in a tiny talent pool will become easier.
Did That Go The Way You Thought It Would?
I’m guessing you’ve all dreaded doing something. Whether getting your wisdom teeth yanked out or riding the roller coaster at Camp Snoopy (yes, I’m old, and I’m aware it’s no longer Camp Snoopy. Don’t @ me), we get ourselves all worked up over things we fear.
Then the thing comes, and we get done with it and think, huh, that wasn’t so bad.
Your expectations were so low they made a shitty thing seem less shitty.
Not many realize we shape our reality. Our minds are powerful, but they crave certainty. They desire it so much that we become convinced we know how things will go before they happen.
That’s usually when life shows us how wrong we are and cracks us in the jaw.
Things are going to happen whether or not we want them to. Sometimes, the rain comes six weeks too late, and sometimes, it snows when we still have corn in the field. The best we can do is to roll with it and be okay with things being out of our control.
It’s taken a few blows to the jaw for me to understand that I don’t know squat.
Sure, I’ve had a few short-winded successes — some good calls.
I bought Bitcoin in 2015 at an average price of $171 per coin. Fifteen months later, I began scaling out at $1771 (cause I always wanted a ten-bagger…then I would be happy…uh huh) and was ultimately out of the trade by $2500.
Never mind that it would go on to hit almost $69,000.
Oops.
My first and only ten-bagger, and yet, I feel like a complete nincompoop.
Bitcoin was an incredible investment for me. I shoveled it off the ground and made over ten times my money in eighteen months. Most investments take decades to produce returns like that. Many never do. If I offered this opportunity on the street, eleven out of ten people would trample one another to accept it.
And yet, I look at my experience with Bitcoin as a complete failure. Why is that?
It reminds me of when we have a bumper crop.
The crop looks like trash all year, then you combine your first field, and it’s kickass, bro. It runs far better than you expected. After that, you go to the rest of the fields, and they don’t run as well as the first one, but still better than you initially expected.
Suddenly, the crop that exceeded your expectations turns into disappointment, all because that first field altered your expectations.
Getting wrapped up in the expectations game is easy, especially in farming.
I’ve always been something of a worry wart. As a child, I worried about all the useless things: tornadoes, the ladies, that mole on my left elbow pit.
Up on the Northern Plains, we don’t see severe weather, especially tornadoes. The last one that touched down was back in 1950, thirty years before I was born. Yet, for a spell between 8 and 10 years old, I lost sleep, night after night, worrying that one was coming to destroy us all.
I’m nearly forty, and aside from seeing a funnel cloud or two, I haven’t found myself in the same county as a tornado.
All that worry was for naught. Same with worrying about the girl and the mole. I still haven’t ended up alone, and even though I’ve had a couple of scares, that mole still isn’t skin cancer.
In those cases, my expectations were never close to the actual outcome.
Worry and farming seem to go together like lamb and tuna fish. Most farmers expect the worst, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Look back on everything you’ve slogged through in your farming career: floods, droughts, depressed markets, and lost crops. How many times did worrying about those events help you get through them?
Zero. You did your best to work through those disappointments and the upside surprises.
The point is, with or without the worrying, you made it to the other side. And, time and time again, you will continue to make it. We always get through. You might say worrying prepares you for the worst outcome, and I get your point, but I think it’s flawed.
You’ve seen and done enough to know you’re prepared for whatever comes next. And if you’re underprepared, you’ll quickly figure that out, too. That’s what being a farmer is all about—figuring it out.
That’s what being human is all about.
And if something else comes up, we’ll cross that bridge. The point is not to sit around worrying about these possible outcomes when neither you nor I nor Johnny Bench know how things will play out.
Author Gary John Bishop once wrote, “Expect nothing. Accept everything. You’ll never be disappointed.”
The corn will get harvested.
Who knows? It may even get nice enough to knock out more tillage.
Only time will tell. And that’s the point. It’s not always up to us. Our job is to make the best decision using the best information we have.
The rest will fall into place.
Yet another well-written, wisdom-rich post. 🙌
Right on man 👌🏼. Avoiding the trifecta is my key takeaway 🤣. Thanks for the belly laughs.