Slow down and smell the ...farm

     Recently we've had a small lull in the action here on our families farm. We are between 3rd and 4th crop hay cuttings, the corn isn't ready to chop, and all my winter barley except for what is going in after the corn, is in the ground and being watered. Its given me time to slow down a little bit in the afternoons and relax. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going in and sleeping everyday, I just simply don't feel like I have to constantly run just to keep up. 
     After making my evening water change the other day I sat down on my irrigation pipe in the quiet field and just took a while to enjoy the sounds and smells that were all around me. I could faintly hear my cows in the distance. I could here thousands of geese in the river right below me, random small birds chirping in the trees by the road. I could even hear a coyote, as it was close to dusk. I wasn't that far from the barn, so I could still get a whiff of my cows, ( I love that smell by the way). I could smell our compost, my neighbors freshly cut hay, and even the dust from the road as an employee passed on his way home. It was like my own little on farm aroma therapy session.
     It really hit me how lucky I am to be where I am and be doing what I do! Don't city folk pay good money to go on retreats where they are out in nature away from the everyday hustle and bussle of the city? How lucky am I to get paid to be out here in it every single day? Yes, there are deffinently days where its not easy, days when it would be nice to clock out and go home to my family at five o'clock, or snowy sundays when i wish I could just stay in the house. But, like every dedicated farmer and rancher I know, we don't do this because its easy, or for the money. We do this because we love doing it.  We love the feeling we get when we turn over the ground we are blessed to work on. We farm because its in our blood and we've been doing it for generation after generation! We do this for those rare moments we can slow down and stop to enjoy the small things that are all around us everyday.
     If you are a farmer and your reading this, do me a favor and just find a moment sometime in the next week to just sit down somewhere quiet on your operation and enjoy what's all around you.

I guess I should be nice more often.

     This week was the opening of the dove hunt here in Utah. This is usually a time of headaches for me...chasing off tresspassers and keeping track of who can hint where. Inevidably the opening day there are lots of wandering hunters that get "lost" or don't know where the property lines are. While I'm usually quick to snap and boot people right off, the farm, this thursday I just happened to be in a (rare) good mood when I stumbled on my first group of hunters.After talking to them for a whille, they seemed nice enough, so I let them keep on hunting with the understanding that it was a one day deal.
     I went on about my day working in my yard trying to finish up a cement project. This was a process that was taking me much longer than I had expected. As the day was winding down I had my sidewalk & driveway all formed up. Clark and I were just putting the finishing touches on the gravel in my cement forms, when who should ull uo but the hunters that I had talked to earlier that morning. They got out and said how much fun theyd had hunting, they all shot there limits! They asked what we were doing, and I proceeded to show them the little project I had going on in my yard. Turns out one of them is a professional concrete contractor and he offered to come and help the next morning and help!  Having only met him earlier that day I didn't really know if he would actually show up or if he was just full of it.
                 Fast forward to 6a.m. the next morning and guess who showed up just before the cement truck? That's right my new hunting buddy Justin! He actually came and did way more work than I could have expected. He did almost all of the finish work and did a much better job than I could have done. I'm good at puring cement that the cows approve of but I don't have that much experience pouring beautiful, colored and stamped concrete like Justin did! It turned out BEAUTIFUL!!
     While I ended up with a BEAUTIFUL stamped and colored sidewalk, Justin earned him and his friends a hunting pass for this year and years to come. The power of bartering is making its way back into society.  With the prices of things rising higher and higher every day we all have to learn to get the most of out of what we've got. I'm becoming a bigger fan of bartering everyday.
     Anybody wanna go hunting? I'm in a good mood!