@spicytuna62

1 year ago

My dad is a wheat farmer. We're from Oklahoma, and our cash crops are wheat and cotton. The process is largely the same, but the seasons are flipped. It's mid-September so they're planting right now. They'll water the wheat over fall, but the rain usually starts to come back around this time of year and through October. It'll snow some over winter and it'll get some water that way. They'll also buy some young cattle to turn out to the wheat fields to eat on it. Their poop is valuable as it'll help with fertilization and moisture over winter. The rain comes back between March and May. As it does and they prepare for harvest, they'll sell their cattle (which will have grown over winter) and earn a little side money. Then they'll harvest in late May or early June, depending on how warm the winter was. A warmer winter means an earlier harvest. It might still be raining a lot in May so there's a huge risk associated. If you wait too long, you can't harvest the crop, but it's also impossible to harvest a muddy field. Harvest is absolutely the hardest part of the year for him. He will go 3-4 weeks in late spring working from 4 am to 12 am the following morning. As soon as it's time, it's a race against the clock. A lot of older farmers who can't really do it themselves will outsource the harvest a lot of times. I've talked to guys all the way down from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba looking for work. Most of them come from Montana or the Dakotas, though. It's very lucrative. My pop is 50, still young enough to do it all himself. There's a near constant battle with the weather. You want it to rain, but there's a very small range of acceptable rainfall amounts. Additionally, our rainy seasons often come with severe weather. A bad hailstorm can destroy a crop. You can't get too emotional when it happens. All you can do is take the insurance money and cross your fingers that it works out next year. May/June and September/October are his busy months. He gets all the other time to just piddle. He's an excellent welder so he'll go do welding jobs around the area. He'll maintain the cattle otherwise. There's not much to do in late fall, but once it starts regularly freezing (usually after Christmas), the cows will need the ice broken on the water tanks so they can drink. He also digs cattle ponds to stay busy during the off season. During the winter, there's not a lot to do outside of breaking ice so he spends his days watching football on TV, setting up some cans downrange to practice his shot, or hunting. Once in a great while, they'll hunt deer, but his choice is usually quail or pheasant. It's a pretty comfortable life, but not one I want. I work in finance and prefer this to farming. I drove the grain cart during harvest and decided at 16 that it wasn't for me. But he loves what he does, and it's always really cool to see people doing what they love.

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