Traits of a Great Farm Spouse

I was planning on blogging again after school started, which was last week. I have all kinds of topics that I’d like to cover. This post was not on that list. This is going to be my rebuttal piece to “The Top Above and Beyond traits of a Farm Wife” that I read on Farmtalk Newspaper, written by Mark Parker. I feel very strongly moved to write this and hope the words that come through the keyboard mirror the thoughts in my mind. The strong feeling of emotion is because I cherish and value my wife so much more than washing a ball cap, which is my job by the way. You see I feel Mr. Parker took a swipe at my wife, my mom, my grand mother, and my great grandma

Before I begin lets clear the air on a few things. Mr. Parker’s piece could very well be a very poorly written attempt at humor. Anyone that has ever written an article or a blog has written one that they thought would be great, only to have it tank. It happens to all of us. Looking at the canned response from the publisher to some of the comments on that piece that’s how they are trying to spin it off.

Secondly, I have read a few of the rebuttal blogs written by ranchHers and FarmHers. You missed the mark too! Follow me on this for a second. When I go to some guys place and I am looking at purchasing some hay or cattle, or some other big purchase he always has a price in mind. He is always overpriced and I have to haggle with him to get the price down to fair market value. In the farmHer blogs I read the rebuttal still undervalued the farm wife.

Here is my list of outstanding traits of a farm wife

1A) Supportive I have blogged before about how necessary this trait is. I used to use the story of Andre Agassi in some of my public speaking, when talking to young people. I can never express enough how who you marry will impact your success.

Let’s take a look at the movie Rocky for a minute. In Rocky 1 he was trying to impress Adrian. In Rocky 2 he did not dedicate himself to training because Adrian didn’t support him. There is even a scene when Paulie, Adrian’s brother, confronts her about not supporting her husband. When Adrian woke up from her coma she said one word, “win”. Rocky rededicated himself to training harder than ever before and became world champ.

In Rocky 3 it played out again when Rocky was afraid and wanting to quit.

In Rocky 4 Adrian did it again when she traveled to Russia to be by Rocky’s side while he trained.

So ladies, there it is. Some of the things we do as guys, we are doing to impress you. Even after 20+ years of marriage. When the wife is supportive, of a determined and persistent husband great things will happen.

This might also be the place to point out that the book of Proverbs warns us multiple times about a nagging wife.

1B) Optimistic /Positive Attitude. I know one farmer personally who has a wife with a negative attitude. For years she has never had any interest in what he does. When times get a bit rough and she has to go sign some papers at the bank, for a loan, or at tax time, and she sees Mr. farmer didn’t make any money that year, he hears about it. I have no doubt her bad attitude has helped drag him in a downward spiral.

When one spouse is feeling down, it helps tremendously when the other half lifts them up.

Do not mistake this for the ole saying “next year will be better” That is betting on the come, and is gambling.

2) Flexible I think this is pretty self explanatory. For those who may not be very familiar with farming things happen occasionally that ruin family plans. For example the family may have plans to go somewhere that day. They are also expecting a load of cattle to arrive that morning. The truck driver may have over slept and the load will not arrive until after the family had planned to leave.

On my farm I have a saying, Whenever you are going to bring people, livestock and machinery together just expect that something is going to go a little off track. I feel Mr. Farmer should have a plan in place for most things, so that way he does not miss out on the important stuff in life if something would go wrong. The family needs to understand that sometimes that Mr. Farmer may miss some things if something goes a little off.

3) Initiative This one comes when the Farm Wife has an awareness of how things usually run. Now I am assuming here that she isn’t involved in day to day activities. She may call Mr. Farmer and offer to help if he’d give her some instructions.

4) Focus Things in agriculture take time. Sometimes those 1, 5 and 10 year plans just seem to take forever. This often times means delaying gratification, or giving up something to achieve a desired goal.

5) Faith Asking a farm wife to focus on the 10 year plan is hard to do when she can not physically see it. It requires her to have faith to believe in it, and be supportive of it.

6) Communication it takes a great deal of communication skill to send your wife on a parts run, or to the vet when she has no idea what she is supposed to get or what she’s getting it for. Yet they still manage to get it right!

Or how about those B.S. hand signals we give them sometimes when they are driving a tractor.

7) Tolerance When you send her on that parts run and the parts guy treats her like she’s an idiot. Not to mention the less than tasteful remarks she’ll over hear at some cattle auctions. We can’t change the behavior of others, so she just has to put up with it.

8) Humor having that special someone that can laugh at them self, and can also make you laugh is such a big stress reliever, and there can be an over whelming amount of stress with farming at times. This past weekend my wife was at a horse auction with me. A result of it was an inside joke that will have us both busting up for weeks

9) Will Draw a Line in the Sand Recall the clip above from Rocky 3. Adrian asks “What’s the truth dammit?” and “You have no right to blame yourself for what happened” That is a perfect example of drawing a line in the sand.

Usually drawing a line in the sand is keeping our egos in check, and preventing us from doing something stupid. For example, I was thinking of buying a horse to break. I used to do that when I was younger. My wife politely reminded me I was not in my 20’s anymore, and that maybe I should get something our daughter could ride too. My first thought was I’ll buy two. But, after thinking about it for a bit I realized she is right. I have too many responsibilities to risk getting hurt. Just as a point of reference I used to really pride myself on breaking the bad ones.

10) Smoking hot Ha. I can get away with this one. Look at some of the other rebuttal blogs written by women and some of them pointed out they can do all the things us guys can and look better doing it. No argument here

We all know the west would have never been settled if it were not for women. A strong woman is the glue that often times holds things together.

I still would like to give Mr. Parker the benefit of the doubt and assume his post was an attempt at humor that came across wrong. If it wasn’t I suggest that he may need to take some time and reexamine his values. I think if you look over this list I put together, that it’s not just a list of traits for women.

Agproud Q. 6 Charity

Question 6. What cause do you care about and how have you supported your favorite charity?

My wife and I strongly feel it is important to help kids. Roughly one in seven kids in our area does not have enough food to eat. Over the years we have helped with several fund drives to help children in our area.

Currently we support our local Back Pack Program. The way this works is children in need are given a back pack full of food and vouchers to take home over the weekend, when they otherwise may not get anything to eat.

I do the easy part, I just donate money. The money is used to purchase the food, and volunteers then fill the back packs. I know the money I give is important, but I do want to say that I feel it is the volunteers who organize this program every year, and the people that take time out from their schedule to help fill the back packs are who really makes this program come to form.

One evening when my wife and I were grocery shopping a little girl who knows my wife came up to her to say hello. This girl was so excited that night because she was going to have pancakes for supper. She received a back pack with pancake mix, fresh fruits, and vouchers for some milk and eggs. She told us that there was enough that she was also going to have pancakes for breakfast the next morning! She even informed us how the back pack program works “these nice people, I never met give money so I can have food to eat”. That comment got both my wife and I choked up. Even though that happened a couple years ago I got a bit teary eyed just typing it.

I want to mention the Back Pack Program got started here by a leadership class through our local Chamber of Commerce. They started this several years ago and it has had a residual lasting effect.

One of my wife’s high school classmates had a little girl with a brain tumor. Another woman in our community wanted to put together a fundraiser to help with medical expenses. She wanted to do an auction and a free will donation lunch. She was asking for help on Facebook. I told my wife to message her and tell her that we would donate enough ground beef to serve at least 600 people, and also a beef bundle as an auction item.

Going back even further we started a fun program at our church. We donated the beef from a calf to our church, and some of it was sold off in a silent auction. The money and the remaining beef were used to serve needy people in our area. The parish really had fun with this. One thing they did was hold a name the steer raffle, to earn some extra money.

We would not be able to do any of these things if we had not been so blessed to be in the cattle biz, and I had not learned the right things from the right people.

Shoo Fly

Every year there are numerous articles about fly control. All of them revolve around using some kind of gimmick for control. Now it’s no mystery why these freebee publications will only write about gimmicks that siphon money out of the pockets of cattle producers. It helps them sell advertising space. They probably also don’t realize there is another way: well managed grazing

I know there are people that read this and want me to provide research to back my claims. I don’t care for scientific research, no matter who conducted it. Here is why, science only tells us how we should act if we want to attain definite ends. So for that research to worth a hoot my cattle, the flies, the weather, and other factors in nature must all act a certain way. Ha! Good luck with that.

Here is what happened for me with better managed grazing. I started putting my cattle into groups of 200 head or more. I use poly wire to split the pasture into smaller grazing cells, and rotate daily to every third day. Cell size will vary based on terrain and water. I rent several different pastures, that are only a few miles apart. I will rotate around one then load the cattle up and haul them to the next pasture, then rotate around that one. (I haul them because I have to cross two major highways, and am surrounded by irrigated corn with no fences around it and I have no help)

One day when I was hauling cattle from one pasture to the next, I had an extension researcher riding along with me. He did the typical routine of rolling up the window every time I loaded and unloaded. He finally noticed that I was not doing the same, and he remarked that there were not any flies getting into the truck. We then looked at the cattle and there were little to no flies on them!

At first we were only interested in how my new grazing system would affect my grass, now we were both interested in following up on how it would affect my cattle and flies. For the next month I had the same results, until I rotated up against the perimeter fence and the neighbor’s cattle bunched up next to mine. Then I had flies, a lot of them. I also ended up with their bull too, I was running stocker heifers.

After loading the cattle up and then moving to the next pasture I still had the flies for a while. This pasture has no neighboring cattle. I rotated as I needed to and eventually the fly load lessened. I think this is because my grazing system breaks the fly cycle. In the short amount of time it takes for a fly to lay an egg and for that egg to become a fly my cattle are gone away from that area.

I have only done this for two years, and have noticed a big difference in fly control. I mentioned the neighbor’s bull for a reason. Long story short they ended up paying for a preg check on my cattle. That got expensive for them in a hurry. The following year, they didn’t turn their cattle out into that pasture until I rotated away from the perimeter fence. That year I didn’t end up with their flies or their bull. To me that one variable right there is why science doesn’t mean much out here. It proves how other people’s sloppiness can affect your plan.

We all know that parasites can affect cattle performance and their behavior, so I don’t feel I need to get into that, to keep this short as possible. I do feel that I should do some cost comparisons.

For my grazing system I had to invest in a fence charger, rolls of poly wire, pigtail posts, a water tank, valve, and portable water line. I bought extra poly wires and posts so I could build fence several cells ahead when I have time, so all I have to do is move the cattle which only takes a little while. My total cost for all this was around $5000. That is a lot of money. Thing is I started this program to help improve the pastures, and it has. This is a small investment when compared to that. Also at the end of the year I still have all that equipment.

If I were to spray my cattle for flies it would cost me $400 for a concentrated solution, that they recommend I mix with water and diesel fuel. The fuel would cost an additional $36. Its by far the cheapest solution. There is labor involved to gather all your cattle in, unless you use a rubber. Here’s the rub for me. Why do you want soak your cattle in a little bit of poison over and over? Second, these products will also kill the good bugs that are essential for a healthy pasture. Not to mention the pests you are trying to get rid of will come back before the beneficial bugs do. How do you assign a cost to that? I am not sure but I can assure you it would be high.

Fly tags would cost me almost $2000. I have used fly tags in the past and they are just crap. In fact when I buy my grass calves, if they already have fly tags in their ears (which is the wrong time to even have them in, leading to the flies building a resistance to them) I cut them out, even though they are brand new.

Then there is using flow through control in your mineral. I’ve tried this and it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. Also I have never gotten a straight answer on how it affects dung beetles. That literally could be a million dollar question that I have not yet got an answer to. If I were to add Altosid IGR to my mineral it would cost me an additional $1600. If I used it in tubs for 60 days it would cost me and additional $1900. (cost difference in tubs with compared to without, so you would also need to add in the cost of the tub/mineral itself) Then begs the question of what do you do with the empty tubs. Around here no one takes them if they are plastic. I can’t help but notice that people around here just leave their empty tubs accumulate in their pastures. Nice uh?

Now for Vet Gun. If I were to purchase this thing it would cost me $1250. That includes CO2 cartridges, gun, and the balls. If I were to go out and start shooting a couple hundred head with this how do you suppose it’s gunna end? If I were to walk into a crowd of people and start shooting them with a paintball gun is the crowd just going to stand there? Heck no! Plus what if I miss and hit one in the eye? To me this just looks like it don’t end well.

Then there are predator wasps. I have a little experience with these guys. I have noticed a little affect with them and the cattle seem to hang around the area where the wasps were. I plan to experiment with them more in the future

Now I didn’t start my grazing system to control flies. I did it so I could look at all my cattle in just a couple hours (I couldn’t do that when I had 50 here 200 there 20 in another pasture and so on. There was too much travel time between pastures). I did it to improve soil and grass, and cut down on less desirable species, while lightening my work load. Using my system I grow more grass. Assuming I only grow a mere 150# an acre more grass, and it’s valued at $60 a ton, there is my $5000 initial investment for water line, tank, posts and poly wire in just the first year! And just a reminder, I still own these things. With the other fly controls, you spend money, use the product and it’s gone. You also are not improving rangeland, or wildlife habitat.

All of these controls take time/labor except the mineral. All of these have a negative impact except the controlled grazing and the wasps. To me it comes down to what kind of person you are. Are you really a steward of the land or not. Are you really a stockman or not. It comes down to your work ethic, and managerial skills.