The many faces of a farmer

I think farmers can be called many things. Farmers can be called caregivers because how they treat both the land and their animals, they are horticulturists and talk about how much nitrogen there is or isn’t in the ground, they know what bugs do what to their crops -so they can be called entomologists, they can be superstitious and do things hoping that there will be a certain outcome. And finally, they can be called meteorologists. Now I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other titles that can be added to this list, but the one key that sticks in my head today is the meteorologist title. With the crazy weather that we’ve been having, it no doubt that the weather is on everyone’s topic list. Now some of the farmers are thinking that even with rain they won’t have a crop, but if we got rain soon, we think we would have at least something in our fields this fall. So with a 30% chance of rain today, our hopes were high that it would rain. Since I’ve been boycotting the weather on the news, all of a sudden I could hear it thundering outside. Being a little bit superstitious myself, I thought I wouldn’t go look because maybe it’d jinks it. But after a few minutes of this thundering, my curiosity got the best of me and I headed outside on the porch. The clouds were just rolling and there was a storm coming our way. Now normally we don’t want any kind of storm in the summer because it’ll bring wind and hail, but we needed the rain so much that we were ready to take just about anything. Daryl called when I was watching the weather and said if it was raining at our house because it just got done pouring in town. Nope, no rain. He said he was watching the radar and it should be raining soon. But still just a couple of drops and that was it. But after about 20 minutes the wind picked up from the west and she started to rain. It was such a slow moving storm that it just took that long to get to our place. I don’t know how much rain we did end up getting, maybe 1/4 to 1/2 inch (?) but we’ll take anything at this point. It wasn’t too long after I talked to Daryl that he was standing in our kitchen and was in a pretty good mood. He said he’s making popcorn and sitting on the porch to enjoy the fresh air that the rain was bringing with it. It took sometime for the air to clear, but then a cool breeze blew through and it was really nice. Once the first rain went through, Daryl said that the wind changed to the east and the way the clouds looked, maybe it would bring the storm clouds back around again and we could maybe get more rain out of this storm front. This is when I started to think about the how the farmers watch the weather from when the seeds are just going into the ground until it’s time to harvest. They watch the weather faithfully on the news and you can catch more than one of them checking out the clouds and wind when there is rain forecasted. Todays storm also brought in some different temperatures with it. When I was at my brothers farm around 2:00, the temperature was at 107 degrees and very hot. I was driving around 5:00 and noticed on the car the temperature outside was 69 degrees. Now that’s a big difference. But by 8:00 the temperature was back up to 89 degrees. There are more chances of rain coming up tonight and tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed and if you want to know what the weather is looking to do for the next 10 days – I’d go ask a farmer because it’s a pretty good guess that they will know.