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.