What do you do in the winter? It’s January in Nebraska, we are between harvesting crops in the fall and the cows haven’t started having their calves yet. So, I guess we’ll just sleep in and go to bed early. Oh well, I guess we can dream!
This time of year we spend a lot of time caring for our animals and preparing for Spring. Our cows are on the cornstalk fields, so we are checking on them and giving them extra minerals and vitamins. Their calves from last summer are growing fast and are on split into two groups with the bigger calves being fed with the feed wagon and we are carrying buckets of corn to the smaller ones. The pigs are nice and warm in their barn that is temperature controlled like your house; it’s the best place to be on a cold winter day. One of the continuous projects this time of year is to make sure that all of the water for the animals stays thawed out so they can drink. Right now, we don’t have much snow, but when the snow blows, someone will get to spend hours in the tractor and payloader working on clearing roads to get to all of the animals.
We also clean up and put away the harvest equipment and begin to get ready to plant our crops in the Spring. There is a lot of time spent in the machine shop as we work on any broken tractors and implements and repair and maintain anything that we will need in the field. There are many hours spent in the office working on keeping farm records, we finish up the paperwork from last year and plan our budgets for this year. The record keeping that has to be done on the farm seems like it never ends.
There are also a lot of things to learn this time of year! Farmers attend meetings and conferences to learn from experts on everything from ag trade to corn hybrid selection. Farmers are required to renew a lot of licenses from pesticide applicator training so we know the specific science of how to help our crops grow to BQA and PQA programs that help us become even better animal caretakers and review what we know. We just returned from the American Farm Bureau Convention in Hawaii, I spent some time at the South Dakota Women in Blue Jeans Conference, and we will go to our Nebraska Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers Conference next weekend. That is just a small assortment of our meetings and we have had to turn down a few more because you can only do so much in January while still taking care of the farm.
What exactly do we do at these meetings? At the American Farm Bureau meeting, we competed in the Excellence in Ag contest, attended workshops about Ag Trade with Asia, Regulations, and many others, and went on some great Ag tours to learn about farming and ranching in Hawaii. While we were on tours, some of our good friends were working on setting policy that will guide our legislative projects during the next year. The discussions were about everything from the Farm Bill to the Water management! We can’t forget networking and getting new ideas from other farmers and ranchers.
When we go to the Young Farmers and Ranchers Conference next week, we get to visit with and learn from other farmers who are under 35 about how they have been successful. Quite often we get ideas that we can implement to improve our farm from these meetings.
Next time you wonder what a couple of farmers with college degrees do all winter when we are not in the field, I hope you think about us! We take care of the animals, prepare for the crop season, and seize a lot of opportunities to never stop learning!