Where the grass isn’t always greener
A friend quipped this week that he was pleased it was February.
Nothing to do with the improving weather or the fact the kids are back at school. He was just pleased that the farmers in the district would only have 28 days to find something to complain about this month.
Another city-dwelling friend who visits regularly reckons the same thing.
After yarning to the locals at the pub, he’s come to the conclusion that it’s either too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too expensive or too cheap.
Are our farmers a bunch of whingers?
Back when I was uninitiated with rural life, I remember driving through a back road on the way to the middle of nowhere and thinking being a farmer must be awful.
Isolated, miles from anywhere, covered in mud and out in all weathers to do things with animals that I had no idea about.
And to be fair, farmers’ lives are dictated largely by the whims of Mother Nature, who can be fickle at best.
Now that I live rurally, I’ve learnt the lot of a farmer is much worse than that.
Add in the fact they don’t sell their product at what they think it’s worth, like everyone else who does business.
The price they’re paid is what the client thinks their product is worth. It’s kind of like going to the supermarket, filling your trolley and then deciding what you want to pay for what you’re buying.
So when you’re off at the beach, the batch (a crib for you southerners) or the lake this summer, spare a thought for the humble farmer.
Stock don’t take holidays. So there’ll be no strutting their stuff in their speedos for your local sheep or beef farmer, who is probably going round and round in circles getting winter feed ready or hard at it in the yards, drench- ing, dipping or shearing.
Or cutting baleage and silage ready for the colder months, because farmers have to prepare ahead.
And while our northern city dwellers might have the odd whinge about house prices, a farmer is pretty much never, ever out of debt.
Sound like the ideal lifestyle? Idyllic huh?
Most of the farmers I know don’t seem to mind it too much, and some of them might even admit to liking it.
Sitting in a tractor all day is far more entertaining than sitting in an office, they reckon. At least the view changes. One of my farmer friends reckons being out in the hills on a nice day makes up for the days when they’re out in a southerly that’s so cold ‘‘you can smell the penguin crap on it’’.
They work hard, but by jove they party hard. A keg in the woolshed is a social engagement not to be missed.
They’re a resilient bunch and they’re certainly not isolated. They know their neighbours better than most living in the city.
After all, who else would you have a beer over the fence with?