Why are we still doing this?

Editor's Note: I wrote the following post a couple of weeks ago....Since this time, we are still in a wait and see approach about the crop. It has been cool and wet so it is hard to tell what we have. We continue to wait for an insurance adjuster to come out, and assess the damage. And we look forward to marking 10 years together two weeks from today!!!!

Ok, since it was rhetorical, I know the answer to the question, but it still makes me wander sometimes!

Kevin and I are less than a month away from our 10 year anniversary. We were two young pups when we married! I thought I was fat, (I have since realized that was so not the case!), I thought I was older than my 19 years, and I knew everything there was to know about life. I think when you are young, it always seems that way. You think there is nothing that you haven't seen or lived through....Until there is!

I love our life on the farm. It is a great, serene place to raise a family and to live. I love that we are teaching our children all about their heritage through the farm. I love that we live where my husband's grandparents once had a home. I love the history I see when I look outside. I even love the way each triumph and disaster causes my brain to do a rewind, and I tend to replay all of the major triumphs and disaster we have had in 10 years of farming together.



This is usually one of my most favorite times of year! I am ready to get outside and start gardening. It is always exciting watching the wheat head out and get ever closer to harvest. It is amazing the way those little plants can change in a matter of weeks. I always marvel at Mother Nature and how the conditions have to be just perfect for us to make a living.

We have lived through a couple of years of drought, a late season freeze a couple of years ago, to flooding rains where it literally didn't stop raining for weeks on end. We even broke records here in Oklahoma for the most consecutive number of days with rain. I can't remember the total, but I know it was well above 20.

Last year, what can I say. It was the type of year you farm for. We had a bumper crop, a fantastic price, and looked forward to this year after harvest was over with!

Fast Forward...The wheat was planted in Sept and October. It came up and started to grow. We lived through a couple of months of no rain. It needed a drink but wasn't to the point of no return. We caught a couple of rains recently and it looked to be on track for an average crop. Then, a HARD FREEZE set in almost two weeks ago. Temperatures dipped into the teens and low twenties. We sat and waited and hoped for the best, but feared the worst!

Our fears were realized earlier this week! The heads that are usually bright green and ready to produce a crop are for the most part white and dried up. A crop that once looked to be a 35-40 bushel wheat crop has been reduced to a 5-10 bushel crop, if we are lucky.

Of course, we are insured. If past experience has taught us nothing else, it is to carry crop insurance! And as comforting as that is, it will not be the same. You spend all summer (June, July, August) working ground and preparing it for a crop. You spend most of Sept and Oct sowing the crop. You watch it for bugs, weeds and pests all winter. You spray it with fertilizer. You watch in amazement as it grows, heads out, turns from a bright green to a golden yellow color and is ready to cut by the end of May/first of June. You invest a whole year's worth of money, work, sweat and tears into this crop to watch either as your cattle eat it into the ground, you swath it and bale it up, or you cut it and get lucky to get a truck load out of the field. It is truly disheartening.

Will there be another wheat crop after this one? Yes. Will we be okay and move on? Yes. Will we soon forget this year? I highly doubt it! So the question still remains, why are we still doing this? It is for those years like last year when you hit a proverbial home run as Kevin would say. It is the pride and enjoyment we take in our hard work. It feels like sometimes it is about getting knocked down to the point where you think you are going to break, and rising back up from it!

Those two kids still have that same twinkle in their eyes that they had when the married almost ten years ago. They cherish and love each other more than they ever thought possible. And they have grown up and learned some of the hard lessons life has to provide! But they continue to have trust and faith in not only in each other, but that the Lord will provide just as He always has, and it will all work out in the end!