Some may think winter is a slow time on the farm; since we don't have crops to tend to. Quite the contrary. There seem to be 2 seasons on the farm: field season and travel season. The spring, summer, and fall are our field seasons. We do manage to fit in a beach trip in the summer. The travel season is in the winter. Also in winter is the time to plan for next year. We have seeds and fertilizer to select for planting the next year. There is equipment to service in preparations for spring. Even though we get a bit of a "break" from the field work the pigs in the barn need our care year round.
The past 2 winters we've seen our fair share of snow.
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| dressed for snow |
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This
was Big C's transportation to the pig barn for a few days.
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| Another major part of winter work on the farm is selling the grain from the fall harvest. We feed corn to the pigs and the excess is sold at the grain elevator. Big C does a lot of the hauling; sometimes 3 trips in a day. |
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| That's a pile of boys. |
We
do a good bit of travel in the winter season as well. We aren't traveling for
recreation and vacation but business trips but they are enjoyable. The
conventions and meetings we attend are in our state and some out of state. Just
this "meeting season" we will have been to Orlando, Cincinnati, New
Orleans, Louisville, Bowling Green, Morton, Illinois, Lexington and Washington D.C. Make
you tired? This was all in 4 months. Makes me tired. While on these trips we
have met many old and new farmer friends from around the country. We can
network and learn from each other and how they farm in their state. I had no
idea "farmers" attended such conventions. It's quite impressive
and humbling to be in a room of 5,000 farmers at the American Farm Bureau
Federation annual meeting in Orlando.
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| This was at the Kentucky Farm Bureau Annual Meeting in Louisville in Dec. |
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| While we were in Orlando we squeezed in some family fun at Disney World. |
The
boys are quite good travelers and look forward to hotel stays. They get to tag
along on some of our trips. Farming truly is a family business and children are
usually in abundance at these conventions. These kids are the future of our
farms. Little C3 has a record of at least one hotel stay for each of his 9
short months of life. And not breaking that record anytime soon.
We were honored with a trip to the Outstanding Farmer Congress in Cincinnati as one of the top 10 National Outstanding Young Farmers. We met many farmers from across the U.S. and learned about their operations. It was a very intriguing and enjoyable trip.
I've been too busy living life this winter to blog about living life. I hope you are up to speed on us. We will be back in the field planting corn and soybeans and harvesting wheat.
