She Contemplates the Seductiveness of My Motorized Farming Machine

It’s the break of dawn. A hot, hearty breakfast awaits at the table. You’re gonna need it for the grueling day that lies ahead. You quickly finish and sharpen your scythe. You step out into the field knowing that if you don’t make the most of the opportunity, the animals may not survive the winter. Heat. Dust. Bugs. Sweat. That hay isn’t going to cut itself. Best get to it.

One thing about homesteading is that there are often many means to accomplish the same end. Each has unique benefits and drawbacks. You have to pick your poison. Some are good for personal education and for obtaining a better understanding of what our predecessors endured. That certainly has value. At the end of the day though, what one choses to do on a day-to-day basis comes down to balancing personal preference, cost effectiveness and efficiency. For me, efficiency is typically king.

Some of my early, naive visions of land management involved the use of draft animals. So far, there has never been a time in which that has seemed practical. It requires pretty high level animal husbandry combined with maintenance of equipment that may require making your own parts, welding, forging, etc.

We stubbornly fought against it for a while, but we finally invested in a small tractor. The first one was an old Sears / Craftsman model that looks much like a modern riding lawnmower. We began to see the light. As we became more comfortable with the equipment, we realized that with the amount of land that we had to maintain, a bigger tractor would be a major labor and time saver. So we upsized. Then we upsized again. And again. Don’t tell my wife, but I expect that we will be upsizing again in the near future.

Here’s the rub… We have made it a point to try to keep the kids involved in all aspects of our modern homesteading journey. We see it as an opportunity to fill their mental scrapbooks with experiences and memories. Graduated responsibility has elevated them to machinery operator status. Under the best of conditions, routine use takes a toll on equipment. Our terrain is rough and we ask a lot out of our equipment. Things break.

I’m not sure if anyone else has ever experienced anything like this before, but a magical transformation occurs when I allow my kids to use my things. They seem to break and disappear at an accelerated rate. Exponentially accelerated. No-one ever knows what happened, how it happened, or why it happened. There’s only one reasonable explanation. Fucking witchcraft!

We have spent a small fortune on equipment maintenance over the years. We have just considered it an operating expense. When you rely on someone else to do your maintenance and repairs, the time factor is the most difficult part to account for. You’re on their time. Things tend to break down when they’re needed the most, but that generally doesn’t matter. You just take your place in the queue and wait your turn. This stresses the balance between cost effectiveness and efficiency. Getting behind on land maintenance creates more work, which takes more time to complete and is harder on the equipment.

I’m not a mechanic. But I’m also not afraid of getting dirty and like fixing things when I have time to. Over the years, through a combination of necessity and curiosity, I’ve learned to fix all kinds of things. Slowly and steadily. It is both therapeutic and satisfying. And frustrating at times. I would imagine even more so than for a person that does it for a living.

Last week, a hydraulic line broke on the tractor. Of course it’s a busy time of year and the tractor is in high demand. It’s also a busy time of year at the repair shop. I had a bit of time off and decided that I should try to replace it before sending it off into the abyss of the shop to be seen again God only knows when.

I took the hose off and took it to the shop to see if they had a replacement part on hand or if they could order one. I learned that there are shops that can make replacement lines in mere minutes. I’ve been enlightened. I got the new line, put it on, added a little more low viscosity hydraulic fluid and everything worked like a charm.

And then the tractor shut off and ECU 157.18 pops up on the screen…

Another learning opportunity.

Laws of farming and homesteading: When farming or homesteading, if one thing goes wrong, there is another thing waiting to go wrong not far behind it.

“She thinks my tractor’s sexy.

It really turns her on.

She’s always staring at me

While I’m chugging along.”

- Kenny Chesney

“Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That’s a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The real things haven’t changed. It’s still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and to have courage when things go wrong.”