For some time now as people ask what I am doing with my life at the moment I have responded with the usual, "Well I work part time in the bakery lab at KSU, I live at home, and pretend to be a farmer." Tonight I decided that I am no longer a pretend farmer, I'm legitimately a farmer. As the sun went down and the rain is said to be approaching tonight, I was out there working to get things done. I just planted our first cover crop ever, as far as I know. One thing I have realized since returning from my vagabond trip is that the sun goes down much earlier; the days have gotten considerably shorter leaving fewer hours of sunlight and productivity time. Tonight as it became too dark to see the ground I was trying to rake up and prepare for the seed, I ran to get my headlamp. Thanks to my new headlamp and it's ability to shine, I was able to finish preparing the soil and got my seed spread. I'm not really certain where the seed all went as it was a bit too dark to really see it falling to the ground, but I do know that it escaped from the spreader I was using. Time will only tell how good of a job I did, but if it rains tonight as I've been told it should, hopefully we'll see some great buckwheat cover the ground with a nice blanket of green manure.
So according to dictionary.com a farmer is:
1. A person who operates a farm or cultivates land.
2. An unsophisticated person from a rural area.
I don't so much agree with that #2 definition but I am cultivating the land. It might not be very much land, but it produces amazing food and I am doing what I can to increase it's productivity in a rural area. I think that is quite sophisticated.
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
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