I’m grateful that Jeremy and I work together pretty darn well.
I’ve tried to figure out what makes this happen, and I don’t know, really. Our dads have completely different styles. For the most part, we learned outdoor and mechanical work from our dads, although we are our own individuals and awfully independent (yes, sometimes to our detriment).
In the way-back era, Jeremy’s dad hired my dad to combine his corn. We are sitting here trying to suss out why that happened, and I guess I’m just going to have to ask. I mean, we lived in New Mexico at the time. That’s a long way to truck a combine. I do know my dad loves picking corn, and he loves working in Nebraska. And, David needed a combiner, and he and Dad were college friends. It probably was just the collision of all the circumstances.
The first year David was out of farming and Jeremy was on his own — that’s the year I was working for Dad through fall harvest. I drove a grain truck at that time, a lot. It’s possible that having our first interaction as adults being working together influences our continued ability to work together.
Jeremy has a level of pickiness about his work, particularly harvest, that matches my dad’s awfully well. So maybe that’s another part of where we find our able-to-work-together common ground.
In any case, it’s silage harvest time at Flat Water Farms. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We don’t do newest and best, we just do awesome. (Jeremy says we don’t do new, we just do.) This operation would be the height of technology about the time we were learning to drive, but that 5400 with the Duradrum upgrade is a good little chopper, and I happen to know how to drive this model of truck (kindly on loan from Eddie and Kelly) really well.
If you put a combine behind it, I could pull it over a mountain. Just saying.
We will do our double-handful of acres together. We will both be perfectly fine without air conditioning. We will usurp our kid’s walkie-talkies to communicate when hand signals won’t do it. We will work side by side. We will even enjoy it. And I’m grateful for that.
This Prairie Life. 