A few weeks back, during wheat harvest, I ran into our neighbour John at the local John Deere dealer. We were both standing in line at the parts counter waiting for combine parts, which is probably one of the more honest places for two farmers to compare how harvest is going. Neither one of us was there because everything was going well.
We had started wheat harvest, so I asked John what kind of yield he was getting.
“One field went 119,” he said. That’s 119 bushels per acre, for you non-farming readers.
“Well, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” I replied. “We’re getting about 75.”
Now, I already knew 75 bushels per acre was poor, I also knew why it had happened.
We didn’t get the wheat planted early enough last fall. Other jobs and commitments got in the way, the calendar kept moving, and by the time the seed went into the ground, we had already given up some of its potential. Wheat likes to get established before winter, and ours just didn’t have enough time.
So yes, I was disappointed. But had John said he was getting 85 bushels, I probably would have walked away feeling a little better.
I might have thought, “Well, ours is poor, but I guess it isn’t that far off everyone else.”
Instead, he said 119.
And suddenly, my 75 felt even worse.
That got me thinking. Why should John’s crop change how I felt about mine? His wheat hadn’t taken anything away from ours. Nothing about our harvest had changed during that conversation.
I suppose we all do this. We can feel pretty good about our home until we see someone else’s new kitchen. We can be pleased with a vacation until we see where our friends went. We can even feel proud of something we accomplished until we find out somebody else did it a little better.
Maybe we would all feel better if we lived in our own little bubbles, never knowing what anyone else had accomplished. Of course, we wouldn’t learn much that way either. John’s crop showed me what had been possible and confirmed that planting late had cost us. That was useful information. It just didn’t need to make our own result feel any worse.
Seventy-five bushels was a poor crop when I walked into the dealership, and it was still the same poor crop when I walked out. The only difference was that now I knew John had done better. I suppose there’s a lesson in that somewhere.
Somebody else having more doesn’t actually leave us with less, does it? Unless we let it.
Farmer Rod