Why Farmers Like Spring
As a cash grain farmer, meaning I only raise crops and have no animals, my favorite time of the year is Spring.
Spring is my favorite time of the year for a few reasons. After months of planning what crops to plant and where to plant them, choosing the best seed hybrids, deciding how much plant food to use, what crop protection products will be best and writing out a series of rather substantial checks, I get to put the plan into action. While a few of my decisions will be somewhat obvious throughout the growing season, most of them won’t be decided upon until harvest, which begins for most of my acres in October. The second reason is spring is the rebirth of mother nature. The final reason is my profession allows me to participate in all of the above.
Whether its buds on an apple tree in the middle of your hunting property, or the wild daffodils growing in the ditch along the field, mother nature is exploding with color. Turkeys gobble in the distance, an occasional pair of ducks take off as the tractor passes too close for comfort. A red tail hawk screams overhead, looking for either a rodent or a mate, maybe both, I’m not sure.
And this is where this specific story begins. As I started planting soybeans that day, the sun had already passed the horizon, this made seeing to the east an eye squinting task. Fortunately for me, the field I was planting I was traveling north and south. The next field I planned to plant was directly to my east, but even if everything went well, I wouldn’t begin that task until shortly after lunch.
Once the sun got a bit higher in the sky, I noticed a white tail doe on the hill top in the field to my east, at least 300 yards away. “She will be leaving soon.” I thought to myself, as it was nearly 8 am. Nearly an hour passes as the doe stays in the same area of the nearby field. I have made some mental notes as to her exact location as I am sure she has given birth there this morning.
It is 12:15 as I finish filling up the planter with seed beans, nearly enough to completely plant the 50 acre field I was about to start. The field where the doe had spent nearly the entire morning on the hill. I grabbed a sandwich from the cooler, an orange flag and headed to the hilltop. I thought I would use the flag to mark the location of the fawn in case I was lucky enough to find it. The flag would help me avoid running over the fawn with the tractor and planter.
After a walk of a few hundred yards and several minutes standing still and looking in a circle I found the hidden treasure. Nestled in between last year’s corn rows, laying in the sun was a fawn, probably less than 12 hours old. After several pictures and a short video, I placed the flag and headed back to the tractor.
Shortly after I started planting, the doe made her way to the fawn and escorted the wobbly long legged baby into the small woods south of the field. I thought about the fawn as I planted the field, wondering if I just spent some time with the monster buck someone might harvest 3 or 4 years from now. I thought about the soybean seeds I was planting, wondering if it might be the highest yielding field I’ll ever harvest.
I like spring, because anything can happen.
Michael Sanders
