One thing about farming, especially when it comes to soil, is you don’t really get quick answers.
Most of the decisions we make, you don’t truly know if they were right for years. Sometimes decades. And the truth is, you probably only get a handful of chances in your lifetime to really change the direction of a farm. So you think about things longer than you’d like to admit.
Which is why this week felt like a bit of a big one.
I did something this week that, a few years ago, I would’ve told you I’d never do. I bought a big tillage tractor.
Now, it was a good deal. One of those friends and neighbour kind of deals where you know the machine, you know its quirks, and you’re not walking in blind. She’s got a few gremlins, but at least they’re honest ones.
But the tractor isn’t really the story. The story is what it means.
We’ve been no till farming for over 20 years. In simple terms, that just means we don’t work the soil every year like most farms do. We leave it alone so it can build structure, hold moisture better, and stay full of life. When it works, it works really well.
But the last three years haven’t been great for us on some of our heavier fields.
Same farms, same crops as the neighbours. The only real difference was how we were working the ground. And while they might have one tough year, we seemed to be stacking them up. After a while, you run out of things to blame.
And I found myself doing something I don’t usually do.
I threw my hands up and thought,
"Maybe I just need to start doing what everyone else is doing."
I had to be honest with myself. I already knew what the issue likely was. Over the years, even with the soil getting better in that top 12 inches, there’s a hard layer below that. Something we likely caused ourselves during harvest, when we were out there in muddy fields. Maybe when we shouldn’t have been, but had to be. What we’re dealing with isn’t on the surface. It’s deeper down, a compacted layer the roots can’t push through and the water can’t move past like it should.
So this tractor isn’t about going backwards or tearing everything up.
It’s about doing one deep pass, once in a while, just enough to break that layer and let the soil work the way it’s supposed to again. That’s the plan anyway. We’ll see.
What made this one feel different though was who was beside me through it all.
For a lot of years, I had my senior advisor to lean on. This time, it was Ezdon, our son, an ag mechanic and farmer.
Anne and I still call him the junior advisor, but truth is he’s not so junior anymore. He was right there in it, looking the tractor over, talking it through with me, and in the end, driving it home.
That part meant something.
Because decisions like this on a small farm, they matter.
And who you make them with matters even more.
I still don’t love the idea of that tractor sitting in the shed.
But ask me in 10 years, or maybe Ezdon in 20, whether it was the right choice.
Farmer Rod
