Break Me Off a Piece of That Kit Kat Bar
We needed a break after three hundred forty-seven hours of work in October. This isn’t a manifesto where I brag about how hard I work. I’m simply illustrating the fact that the fall was damn busy.
We took two days off in October, and they weren’t days off because I spent them preparing for our Post-Harvest Variety and Biological meeting at the end of October.
Three hundred forty-seven hours a month equals over eleven hours per day for thirty-one straight days.
Gee cripes
I enjoy farming more than most, but I occasionally need a break. Johnny McEnroe enjoyed tennis, but I’m sure even he wanted to put his balls down and take a sabbatical sometimes.
Elmer Fudd probably got tired of hunting wabbits, too.
We’re human beings, not machines.
Mother nature, however, doesn’t give a fart about your schedule or your feelings. She’s like the matriarch who says you should be welding scrap iron sculptures instead of taking a day off to inhale burritos and salsa with your family.
Work, work, work.
They say to make hay when the sun shines, and it shone plenty this fall. Considering how late our crops emerged, we’re blessed to get the weather we did because, in many years, our working windows can be much shorter.
Or wetter. Or whatever thing comes along to keep you from bringing the crop to the bin.
These sunny weather windows are great for productivity, but if you’re like me and rely on traditional fuel sources like fruit and vegetables instead of meth and mountain dew, you’re bound to hit the wall.
Even tweakers need naps now and then.
I hit that wall on the second day of the corn harvest and ran on fumes until the late October snowstorm shut us down.
Wall or no wall, I had to keep chugging.
Back in August, I thought hosting a post-harvest meeting at the end of October would be brilliant. It was drier than a John Kerry speech at the time, and hopes of a quick harvest remained.
Prepping for a meeting poops a guy out. It was the first seed meeting I’d ever hosted and had been at the forefront of my mind for nine weeks.
Usually, I can shut my brain off and coast through harvest with mindless jobs like chisel plowing or ditching, but when there’s a presentation on the horizon, my brain refuses to let go.
My mind can be like a crazy ex. Relentless with the drama and nonsense.
M’lady needed a break as well. For ten weeks, she got to bear witness to my anxieties and phobias that surface when I’m spooked about speaking publicly.
My girl is the most supportive trooper, as farming has been my go-to dinner topic since early May. And coffee talk. And pillow talk. And talking in my sleep talk.
All the talk.
Sheri hails from the city and didn’t meet her first farmer until she worked at a flooring store around age sixteen.
That’s no shit. To her, farmers were like the Loch Ness Monster or promise-keeping politicians. They didn’t exist.
I’m not telling this story to be a butt munch. Sheri isn’t some ignorant, rock-dwelling moron. It’s just that farming isn’t something people outside of the ag world generally think about.
We’re a small portion of the population, but that’s another thing that makes agriculture unique.
Plus, it keeps out the riff-raff.
Let's enjoy the downtime while it lasts. We might have a weather window to finish our corn next week, so I will probably start talking about the farm again within four minutes.
Your Favorite Mistake
Did ya have a good year?
Well, how’d she go?
Think you made enough to be able to farm again next year?
I’ve heard farmers say all sorts of goofy things like this to one another. I wonder the same things when chewing the fat over a bucket of small talk at the hardware store.
This year, I’ve got a different question in mind.
What mistakes did you make this year?
No, I’m not talking about being a space cadet like me and knocking down the stop sign at the local choke and puke.
I’m curious about your mistakes, the ones that are designed to teach you something.
Maybe you jumped the gun and planted a field too soon or waited to spray and got rained out and now have a weed seed bank that your kids will battle for the next twenty years.

I’m talking about the decisions that cost you. The lessons you look back at and say, wow, I never wanna do that again.
What did you learn?
Maybe you didn’t learn anything. Maybe everything went perfectly, and you wouldn’t change a thing if you found a genie in a lamp.
Maybe, but I kindly doubt it.
We all make mistakes. Nothing teaches our stubborn brains faster than F’ing up. That’s the good stuff.
I’m not asking about your blunders so I can pick on you. I’m not the type of guy to blab about every boo-boo I see.
Things happen. We can’t take em’ back.
Earlier, I mentioned that we are humans and not machines. We’re going to mess things up. It’s part of the game.
A more important part of that game is keeping our composure. Don’t lose your head. Beating yourself over mistakes is not the answer, but learning from them is.
There was a time when I despised mistakes. Even worse than that, I hated myself for making them and went so far as to define myself by them.
But those missteps made me who I am today. If it weren’t for spending thirty years boogying through the shit swamp, I’d be a completely different person.
I might be a dentist in Sheboygan if I had played by the rules and based my decisions on how they say we’re supposed to do things.
But I didn’t. I goofed up. I made mistakes. F’d around and found out, as the kids say.
The best part. I’m grateful for every one of those blunders.
Without them, who knows who or where I’d be?
I’d probably still write a newsletter, but I'm unsure if "Drilling Full-Time," a newsletter focused on cavities and crowns, would be as popular as this farming one.
It’s not that I’m an Anti-Dentite. Other things command my attention. I was born to farm and learn from my mistakes, so it’s good that I made plenty of them.
I recommend you do the same. You never know what kind of stuff you can learn until you get out there and screw a few things up.
It’s called livin’, and it sure beats dyin’. Which one are you busy with?
If you’ll excuse me, I will work on that next mistake and report back.
Trust me, I won’t be long.
Thank you so much for reading. I appreciate you.
Ya’ll have a fabulous week.