Farm life

In the last ten minutes I’ve seen old Boomer squiggle herself under the fence to get into the barnyard. She likes a taste of cow poop in a while, and she doesn’t mind rolling around in it either. She’s fifteen years old. Let her have her pleasures, I figure.

Before she does the fence she’ll always cast a side-eye on the stoop to see if she’s being observed. She’s too close to blind to know whether I’m watching or not, or even whether I’m on the stoop, but it must be force of habit. She knows she’s being naughty.

Also witnessed Doublewide prancing proudly up the drive with her latest meal clenched in her jaws, tail still wriggling. She’ll make a spectacle of the meal. I’ve taken to looking away and covering my ears because I find the crunching sounds as she’s eating a wee critter alive to be disconcerting.

Just part of country living.

The other morning I was out there doing a little research for my forthcoming best-seller, “New Biblical Scrolls Reveal Xi Jinping is ANTI-CHRIST! (Mike Pompeo has agreed to write the forward!) when a car pulls in the lane.

“Excuse me, are those your cows all over the road down at the corner?”

Hell no! Cows are way too much work, but I’m guessing they belong to the guy who rents my pastures. I thank the lady for the heads up, and head down to the corner on my bicycle.

Buddy has fourteen cow-calf pairs grazing here, plus a bull. There’s a cow and a couple of calves in the meadow, and the rest of the crew decided to make a break for freedom. Now they’re loitering in the middle of the intersection wondering how to get back on the other side of the fence.

As I’m leaving the Farm Manager is already on the phone, and in no time there’s plenty of help, and between a couple of ATVs and me we herd them up the lane and back into the pasture.

Just part of farm life.

Around here it’s mostly cattle country. An acreage like mine is typically about half in hay, because that’s what the cattle eat in the winter. We have good hay fields, but other than that there’s not a lot of cash-cropping around here. That’s why you can still buy a hundred acres with buildings for under a million bucks. Go a little south, and a hundred acre field with nothing on it runs well north of that.

There is the occasional exception though. There’s a JD 9630 that hums by on a regular basis. A unit like that is worth more than my farm. You have to be doing a few thousand acres to make that pay. The guys who own it lease up all the open fields between here and Owen Sound that they can get their hands on to get the economies of scale they need.

To my way of thinking, once your farming operation becomes a multi-million dollar enterprise, you’re probably making more money for the bank than you are for yourself.

That too is farm life in the modern era.