One Farmer Down

12:50 PM, Friday, 5 February 2010
Temperature: 65, sunny with occasional sprinkles, gusty breeze

One is off for a day or so, leaving the other to keep things going.

The usual correspondent fed and watered the animals this morning, so work today largely consisted of counting the number of ducks which have escaped confinement (three so far) and checking the placement of the electric mesh fencing.

While doing so it came to mind that people have asked what equipment is most important in farming. Obviously, this depends heavily on what one intends to do - a combine harvester is little use in a ranching operation or a hydroponic greenhouse. Still, a few things spring to mind:

A truck. As much of a cliche as it is, a truck is just very useful. It is a tool for hauling things back and forth. Animals. Feed. Equipment. Supplies. If we had no truck, we'd get donkeys and a cart, but we would need something because there is a lot of stuff to be moved.



Rubber boots. Unless one is farming rocks, there will be mud, and dung, and wet straw and other slippery things. In Western Washington, it's always wet - the natural environment here is temperate rainforest. Good rubber boots give good traction and keep one's feet dry. Feeling the water seeping in, ice cold, and knowing there are hours more to be worked is not pleasant.

Gloves. Heavy work gloves. Until the day when we have robots farming the land, their composite flesh gleaming in the sunlight which feeds them, there will be hard manual labour to be done. Even simple things like hefting bales of hay and digging ditches are much more pleasant with good gloves.

Eye protection. There are always flying wood chips, splashing bits of grit. Why waste the daylight washing stuff out of your eyes when there is work to be done? They even sell polarised protective glasses. A farm is no place for contact lenses.




A good hat. Farm work is mostly outdoors. Cowboys wear wide brimmed hats because hats defend one from the elements. Ignore the jokes about square dancing and country music, and just get a hat. In Arizona, make it a nice shady one. In Maine, be sure it will take the rain, but get a hat.

Rope. Rope gets used everywhere, for everything. Baling twine is fine for the little jobs, but when one needs to haul a fallen tree, or a stalled vehicle, or just tie things down on the back of the truck, there's no substitute.

A knife. There are specialised knives for butchering, for hunting, for carving and more, but in reality a good pocket knife will do most of those jobs well enough, and right now because it's in the pocket. It does everything from opening a package to cutting hide.


So much of the rest depends on the farm that it's hard to generalise. A shovel, sure, a sledgehammer, a mattock, these things are cheap enough that everyone should have them.

This weekend there is a lot of work to do:

• Finish grazing arks for the rabbits. They need to get out of those cages.
• Separate the lambs from the rams. We don't want early pregnancy complications.
• Move the bulk of the sheep to fresh pasture to help clear it out.
  
• Start digging holes to prepare for planting season. When it hits, it will be furious.