A Ride to the Farm

(L to R: Benjamin, Tricia, Emery, Kristian, Russ, Mom & Dad)

Since most of the family was in for Christmas, we decided to load up and drove to the farm in Oberlin in the late afternoon after lunch.  It was a remarkably beautiful day, and we drove around and visited and brought up many good memories.  The farm is leased out to a farmer who grows rice and crawfish.  Dad still goes out every day and checks on the wells and changes the oil.

There have been lots of changes in farming over the past decade or so.  Many of the irrigation well engines are being converted from diesel power to electric.  Also, our farm borders the northern area of rice growing region in Louisiana.  Because of that the land isn't as flat as rice land further south.  An effort is being made to laser level the land and take out levees, resulting in larger, flatter cuts within the fields.  An instrument is used to level and large tractors with dirt buckets move mass quantities of dirt with precision.  When done, the land is as flat as a pool table.  This makes irrigation very efficient as you can pump exactly 3 inches of water across the entire field.  In old days, you may have 3 inches of water on one end and 9 inches on the other.

The size and cost of equipment will blow your mind.  It enables fewer people to work more acres, but it also means that your capital investment is very high, which presents serious problems when commodity prices are low.  One other change that we marveled at was that a farm just to the north of our land that we rented to farm was planted in pine trees and they've grown.  Fields that we planted soybeans and rice on are now forest land.  It's totally unrecognizable.  Time sure flies.  Nothing stays the same, it seems.

We passed by the old graveyard with the huge live oak where we'd park in the shade and eat our lunch each day while listening to Paul Harvey.  We drove down gravel roads where Louisiana iris grew wild in the ditches.  In the photo above directly behind us toward the woods was our first crawfish pond.  My grandpa bought me some traps and an aluminum boat that I would pull way back in the early 1980's before farm-raised crawfish (versus Atchafalaya Basin crawfish) took off.  We were early pioneers in the crawfish industry, catching and selling crawfish locally for boils.  Now the boats are primarily motorized and manned by labor brought in from foreign countries to run.

What memories!  As we rode around and talked, and so many sentences began with "Hey, remember in that field we..."  Some of the old landmarks are gone and much of the technology has changed, but our love for the land has not.  The farm is part of me and love for agriculture and all things pastoral and dealing with seeds and dirt flows in my veins and remains a integral part of who I am.

A Trip to Corpus Christi

We were out of pocket for a couple of days last week and didn't get to post Thursday night.  We don't have cows or goats in milk so it seemed like the perfect time to take a little trip.  Dad and Mom graciously agreed to come check on the animals and feed and water them, gather eggs, and generally make sure everything was okay on our little farm.  We left Thursday morning on a 6 hour drive to Tricia's hometown to visit her Mom and brothers that live there.  We stopped for lunch west of Houston at one of the two Czech BBQ joints we like to stop at - Mikeska's and Pracek's, and stopped on the way back at Bucc-ee's, of course, which is famous for it's clean bathrooms and snacks.

Tricia grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas.  It's really not a bad drive, west on I-10 through Houston and then south on 59, then south on 77 right into Corpus.  There's always lots of wind off the gulf and driving into Corpus, there are numerous windmills generating electricity.  It's wild to watch all those turbines spinning.  Corpus Christi is beautiful city sitting right on the bay.  It's now home to the USS Lexington, a naval air station and they just got a brand new harbor bridge.  You can see it in the distance in the photo below when the boys and I drove out to Cole park and walked out on the pier.

Corpus Christi was also the home of Farah Fawcett.  Who can forget Farah?!  The famous singer Selena was also from Corpus.  Freddy Fender, a singer I really liked from my youth lived in Corpus Christi as well.  He sang, "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" and "I'll be there before the next teardrop falls."  But the most important thing in Corpus is Tricia's Mom.  She's 88 and in great health and Tricia tries to go visit as often as she can.  This time, Russ and Benjamin and I accompanied her for the visit and I'm glad we did.  We enjoyed visiting with Mrs. Garcia and two of Tricia's brothers, Albert and David, as well as Albert's wife Janice and their kids, Michael and Celeste.

We laughed, played games and visited and had great fun.  In our neck of the woods, cooler weather is also called "gumbo weather," and we eat a lot of chicken and sausage gumbo and shrimp and okra gumbo.  In the Hispanic culture, there's another dish that's eaten, and we were introduced to menudo.  Tricia's brother, Albert is a good cook, and worked hard in the kitchen to make menudo.  Menudo is a soup made with chili powder, cumin and other spices along with hominy and tripe.  Tripe is the stomach lining of a cow.  In Mexican-American culture (as well as Cajun culture), when an animal is butchered, nothing is wasted.  Menudo is good and spicy and we enjoyed it!

We drove by the T-heads and watched the shrimp boats come in and admired the beautiful water.  Corpus Christi, despite being on the coast, has a water emergency.  They're running out of it, and water rationing is in effect!  They do get less than half the rainfall we do, averaging only 31.7 inches a year.  The reservoirs are low, but that's not the primary reason for the shortfall.  Industry is gobbling up most of the available water usage.  There is talk of water desalination plant construction, but the cost is high and prohibitive.  What are they going to do?  It reminds me of a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that says, "Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink."

Russ & Benjamin

We like to work on projects while we're there.  Russ is a plumber and was able to take the reins and help install a new washing machine to replace a 1992 model that had worn out.  Actually, it was still working, but the selector switch had broken and parts are no longer available.  I'd say Mrs. Garcia got her money's worth out of it - 34 years!  Wow.  We talked about the fact that my brother still has an old International Harvester deep freezer that my grandmother had that still works.  To the best of our knowledge, that thing was manufactured in the late 40's or early 50's!  Things used to be made to last.  Unfortunately, in a disposable society, those days are gone.  Back to the washing machine, we made a quick trip to Home Depot for some new water lines and had the new or gently used washer in place in no time.

While at Home Depot, we picked up some paint for our next project.  We repainted Mrs. Garcia's shed.  We first applied some Ospho to eat away at some rust spots and then we put two coats of exterior paint on the shed.  It was like Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" where Tom fooled Huck into painting the fence.  In this case, however, it WAS a privilege to do so.  The three of us tackled the project and had great fun in "quality control," pointing out spots that each other had missed, teasing and harassing each other relentlessly.  We actually ran out of daylight and painted the first coat by the lights from the head lamps of our SUV!  The next morning when the dew burned off, we quickly got the second coat on.  While not professional painters, by any stretch of the imagination, the finished product looked good!

The Painters (Benjamin and Russ)

Fueled by several cups of strong coffee along with egg, potato and chorizo taquitos for breakfast, we were adequately caffeinated and energized and got the second and final coat on in surprising speed.  We'll see how our work holds up to the test of time.

 

The painters and Mrs. Garcia

Tricia's mom was pleased with the completed work, but we were more pleased to be able to do something for her.  I snapped this photo of Tricia and her Mom in front of the freshly painted shed.

Mrs. Garcia and my bride

At half past 11 AM on Saturday, we loaded up and said farewell to Mrs. Garcia and Tricia's brother, Albert.  I tried my best to get Mrs. Garcia to come and stay with us for a while, but she said, "Maybe later."  We'll keep trying.  Hopefully, we can get her to come visit us soon.  Now, we're back home and have a lot of projects here on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm we'll be discussing with you in the upcoming days.  Happy New Year to all of you!  What type of projects do you have going on?  We'd be interested in hearing about them.