I’m disking a field today. It’s been a while since I’ve ran one. I am finding it therapeutic—as work with good and observable results often can be.
The field I am working is covered in ruts. It was a wet spring and, sometimes, you have to make the best go of a bad situation and do what you can—even when conditions are far from right.
That’s been a lot of this year, in many ways. You make the most of what you’re given, as you can. You pray for the best, then when chance arrives, amend what troubles follow.
The ground is hard, compacted, having been worked in wet conditions—mud compressing in subsoil layers that compound issues seen at surface.
Like many problems, the best solution is to rip it up and start again.
Tillage is this for farm ground.
You feel the blades bite heavier whenever compacted ruts are crossed, tearing through the denser under layers, breaking apart, and starting anew.
Disking is something you can’t rush. The ground works as it will, and it’s on the farmer to work with the ground, not the ground with us (something in our modern scientist before husbandry; “producers” and no longer “farmers” is easily forgotten or dismissed by education sponsored by an industry with solutions and technology to sell).
4.8 miles per hour. That’s what the ground and disk like best today. 4.8mph—this is what I go. Too fast, the disk rides out of the hard ground and doesn’t cut. To slow, the clods are not properly broken into seedbed crumble. I work the field on slight angle. This keeps field smooth when planting and working in the future, but breaks apart compactioned lanes of tire-tracks rather than reinforcing in same-lane path.
4.8mph, henbit and chickweed cover turns under—clean seedbed for the wheat. Stalks of the beans are broken, sized, and turned under soil too. After, ground is a clean dark earth and you smell the humus of: a distinct and pleasant farm smell—like silage or fresh hay, baled, and curing in the field.
I take my time, work as earth allows.
I think.
I pray.
I write.
4.8mph, it’s a beautiful blue sky day.