Combining Deep Thoughts

I ran the combine for about 9 hours on Saturday, which is enough time to catch up on some thinking. I hadn't combined corn before, which doesn't exactly reinforce my farm-kid bonafides, but that is what it is at this point. Running the combine is pretty mindless, but you also need to stay focused enough to react fairly quickly if something goes wrong. So, for something that involves sitting on your ass and driving around 2 miles per hour, it's sort of mentally exhausting after a full day. You can space out, but not too far, or else you'll end up driving through the field with the unload auger running and dumping all that nice, freshly-harvested corn back onto the stubble.

Grandpa has told me stories about picking corn by hand following behind a team of horses when he was in high school. Dad has told me stories about running the two-row picker, which mounted onto a tractor without a cab, before he and Grandpa bought their first combine in the mid-'70s. So, even though Dad's combine is as old as I am, I was still considerably more comfortable than previous Gillespie generations had been while doing this job.

While most attention gets paid to ethanol, nearly as much corn is fed to livestock in the U.S. as is used to produce alcohol. My parents raise sheep, and their goal has been to raise all the feed, roughage and bedding material for the sheep (a combination of corn, alfalfa, oats (for both feed and straw), and grass) on their farm, and sell the excess as they're able, depending on how the year goes. Last year, there was a big alfalfa hay crop, so Dad sold what he couldn't use from that. This year, oats and corn were the bigger producers. So, their 160 acres takes in seed corn, diesel fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, and some other miscellaneous inputs, it produces enough cash to support my parents, and the meat from 600 sheep or so is the primary product that goes into the larger world.

I'm still working out how I feel about that, and what I would prefer to see done with the land if it were up to me. It's decent land in an area where it would be used for agriculture regardless of who owned it. I really enjoy that it's not just a slab of earth with half corn and half soybeans every year, but anything that you do beyond that requires orders of magnitude of additional effort, planning and thought. Would it be better if they just sold the corn, oats, and hay, and left the livestock raising to someone else? Would it make more sense to change the makeup of the sheep flock to be more for wool production than meat production, so that less grain is required? Should some of the ground (more than their gigantic garden) be turned into vegetable production? Should it all just be turned into a hemp farm, maaaannn? I have no idea, but I'll continue to ponder. Eventually, it'll be up to me, so I need to get a semblance of an idea of a plan.