Monthly Archives: June 2011

Five Acts of Farm Safety

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Act I Excluding safety

Farm life has always involved lots of hard work. Although most have traded hand tools for massive equipment, long hours still wear
farmers down. Wet weather has increased the stress of farming as it
has compacted the different stages of raising a crop into a complicated ball of activities that must be pulled apart like a tangled electric cord. It seems like most people involved with agriculture are tired, stressed and in a hurry. When these three elements join hands they exclude the most important partner in farming-safety.

Act II Safety Sensei

Barb Schmitz from Plummer owns Safety Compliance Services. Barb farms with her husband, Arnold, and teaches people how to stay safe at work. Barb started as a Safety officer in Red Lake County in 1991 and a few years later began a private practice teaching people how to come home from work with as many fingers as when they awoke that morning. The subject of safety is about as interesting as listening to play by play of gray paint drying on a wall, however Barb makes it work with personal stories and fairly
accurate emotional appeal. She inspires as she teaches and brings it
all home when she makes her pupils realize that being safe make it
possible to come home to the families we all cherish. She implores
her fellow man to be safe with a delivery that is equal parts motherly caring and sweetly hectoring nag.

Act III My own personal un-safety

The night before our safety class, I moved the cattle to a different
paddock. It was late so I was tired, I wanted to get back inside the
house so I was rushed-add both of these together and I was stressed. While moving the fence posts, I walked right into a small post which lodged its narrow end into the area where my belt would have been had I been wearing something more than boxer shorts and a t-shirt. At some point, a fair percentage of my weight was balanced somewhere near my center of gravity on top of that little post. After a suitable amount of time, I fell from the post and reacted with anger towards the post. I was unhurt but I was also unsafe.

Act IV Including safety

Barb told me that staying safe on the farm means trading time for
safety. You need to use this time to observe you environment for
hazards like low electric wires when moving an auger or an angry bull standing in a blind spot when moving cattle. You also need to take the time to get some sleep as a sleepy operator possesses an equal reaction time to a drunken operator. Also, keep the kids off the tractor even when they beg; bad habits are learned by example. Stress can make you blind to impending problems so remove the safety blinders as you remove stress. Get some sleep, accept change when it happens plus find the humor in your situation; all acts that will make your life very infertile ground for stress. The biggest guard against stress is belief in a higher power, yes God believes in safety too.

Act V The safest person you know

Barb asked us to write down who was the safest person we know. Those of you who watch the television series “the Office,” will find my answer a little ironic as I wrote down Dwight Schrute. Anyway, take care on the farm this summer; slow down, relax and be the safest person you know.

Letter to Dave

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Dear Dave, I enjoyed our talk last week even thought it was cut short by the Achilles heal of cell phones, the network upon which they operate. The technology which has removed the phone booth from street corners across the nation never sounds as good, nor is as dependable, as the calls made from our kitchen using a phone that hangs on the wall. Anyway, they’re still pretty cool.

This spring has been changed by a real estate transaction. Travis Black and I have worked together for about nine years but recently he and is his family became our new neighbors. In the short time Travis has been a resident in our neck of the plain, he has already established a mammoth garden in addition to all of the work associated with moving into new digs. Last week, Travis came over to help me clear the woods back from our driveway. Just so you know, Dave, Travis is lucky enough to possess a build which would allow him to pass for one of our brothers-he is in no great danger of falling over due to high winds. Now I have seen some guys with a big chest, big arms and spindly legs who crumble at the first sign of physical labor; and then there’s Travis. He looked like a little firewood processing machine as he moved steadily through the brush laying waste to trees both short and tall, taking a break only when he had to occasionally hike up his pants.. I hate brushing; uneven ground, stumps to trip on, hauling chunks of wood through a ditches-the whole thing seems like suitable punishment for bad people. Travis made this mess kinda fun, the mark of a good worker and a person of character. Anyway, I’m glad Travis and his family got out of town into the country where they belong. They should also make this year’s “Bray township Cotillion” much more enjoyable.

Dave, much like you in Carrington, North Dakota; we have had our share of rain and cool temperatures. This is a recipe for good pasture growth which makes the cattle happy. Our pastures contain a lot of alfalfa which can make cattle bloat. Weather conditions have made our cool-season grasses outpace the alfalfa this year which had made bloat very uncommon for us. We have so much lush forage that it clings to our fences and creates “voltage drop” which means the electric shock decreases the further it travels from the fence energizer. A clean fence line will not do this unless it is longer than what the fence energizer is rated to handle. I used to spray fence lines but that only seems to open up ground for weeds to grow and is an unsustainable practice. I would rather divide our fence between more fencers and so that is what I am doing today.

I hope all is going well your way and that you have good neighbors and green pasture.

Your little bro’

An Affair of Plain Living II

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I received inspiration recently from a book titled “Foxfire” to document some of the tasks unique to rural living which I occasionally perform. “Foxfire” was first published in 1972 and included instructions from old-timers on how to render lard, raise a log cabin or even make moonshine; these
activities were called “affairs of plain living.” Last fall, I
explained how to cover a septic tank with straw-which proved to be as
boring a read as the subject matter promised . This week I want to
explain how to build a fence corner. I will talk about something else if I notice your eyes begin to glaze over-or maybe I’ll just juggle.

First off, I like round posts for the corner and a nice railroad tie
to support the corner from the direction of each tensioned wire. If you do not
have the fortitude to dig a proper hole for all posts, you should
hire someone to do it for you-or move back into town. I dig all of my holes to four feet
deep, if you don’t then frost will heave your corner posts and you
will have shamed yourself (that may be a bit strong.) I dig the first
foot of the hole with a shovel then the rest of the way I used a
post hole digger. You should only dig the opening about one foot in
diameter, any wider and it will be difficult to make the surface of
the hole firm-this is important because most of the strength of the
post hole comes from the top foot or so.

After holes are dug, you can simply throw the wider end of your post
into the hole and plumb with a level (or by eye if you’re old-school)
then fill the hole around the post. Do not use the original dirt,
clay or sand that you dug out, use something solid-I like pea rock.
Pea rock is small and fills every crevice around the post and inside
the hole. The portion of soil around the hole that is undisturbed will
be solid, however using the soil you recently disturbed to fill the
hole is short-sighted and will allow the post to tilt under the pressure of the wire when
tightened. Use the black dirt to fill flower pots, the sand for your child’s play area and throw the clay into your neighbor’s field. You should also dig your hole a few inches deeper than four feet so that you can add
a few inches of pea rock on the bottom for drainage.

You must mount a cross-piece between the corner post and each bracing
post. I prefer those extendable steel posts people use to support
basement joists-you can adjust them to any distance and they’re very
strong. Please don’t nail a board on for the cross-piece, it won’t work and, with the final result, you will once again have shamed yourself (still too strong?) The final act of good corners is one of fairly simple engineering. You must wrap a wire from the bottom of the corner post up around the
top of the bracing post and back down to the bottom of the corner
where you splice the wire together. You can then thread a stick in
between the two lengths of wire and twist the stick until the wire
draws together tightly-not tight enough to break but tight enough to make the
corner successful. If you are obsessive about tightening you will break the wire, instead use a little common sense and realize you can only increase the tightness later if you haven’t broken the cross-wire during the initial tightening process.

There you go, how to build a fence corner-an affair of plain living; or content just boring enough to make excellent bedtime reading.

Exchanging pain for knowledge

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Certain incidents in my life give me a lot of traction, they cause me to learn more than just the obvious lesson. This spring, I told you a story of how mutant gophers had chewed through the inch and a half water pipe that we used to water our cattle. The obvious lesson was that I need to control the gophers (done) and also how to repair the pipe which has also been completed. This week I went a little deeper into the incident and found greater meaning.

First off, we have repaired this pipe about three times. Each time we thought we’d fixed it, another problem peaked up from beneath the earth. The third repair occurred when I noticed water rising from a connection. I reached through about twenty inches of very cold water and could feel the pressurized water hitting my hand. I could have waited until the water drained down or make the repair that day. I believe true character comes out in bad times so I always try to be at my best in the worst situations and so decided I would tighten the coupling right there and then. I rely on daily prayer so that was the first club out of the bag. I had been worried that week about the pipe repair which had caused me to be short with my wife, Lisa so I prayed for more patience. I virtually never pray for things or success so instead I also asked God to please help me to understand what lesson He wanted me to learn from this broken water pipe and to please “do it soon.” If prayer doesn’t work for you, pray for something else.

I needed two pipe wrenches and my four wheeler (amazing how many of my stories start with this phrase.) I arrived at the coupling and took off my watch and jacket and plunged my hands into the great, cold water unknown; my hands hurt immediately and I got a little headache. I always say that pain is not necessarily injury-it is just pain. This was just pain so I loosened the coupling with the pipe wrenches then pulled my hands out of the water and threw my jacket over my arms to warm up. I did this about four times during the repair and by the fourth time I had acclimated and was able to keep my hands and arms under water for quite awhile. I jiggled the pipe until it slid into the coupling then tightened it up. I turned the water back on and it somehow did not leak. I was proud, I really was.

I always look up to people who not only can take the pain incurred in living, yet still operate and even fire back at life. This was just a small incident but I stood the pain and was still able to think and complete a repair and that made me feel good. Even better, I prayed for the right things (patience and knowledge) even when it would have been easy to ask for something else or complain to God that life was unfair at that moment. I could have failed in the repair by letting the pain of cold water defeat me just as I could have let the pain of life defeat me by asking God “why me” instead of asking Him for the lesson of life from that particular day.

Anyway, no leaks as of today.