Thursday 12 November 2015

Challenging

Farming tests you physically, intellectually, spiritually and always emotionally. 

Not a day goes by where I get away with just using my brain. Muscles are a must on a farm. If you don't have them, you soon build them. There has been many a joke about needing to use my 'man muscles'. It can be utterly infuriating as a woman on a farm. There are days when I have to wait for a male to help me do something, only to find they can do it by themselves. It's not just muscle though, it's stamina. We've had loads of young, fit, and strong people come through the farm. They just don't make it through a whole day of farm work day in, day out because they don't have the stamina. You become battle hardened to long days that leave you dog tired and bone weary. 

There are intellectual challenges in everything. Laws of physics apply to fencing, building gates and sheds, lifting heavy items with a loader. Math equations are in every element of measuring materials, dosing animals, assessing seed or chemical rates. Chemistry lessons are in the fertiliser components and the chemical make ups. Biology tutorials are in makeshift autopsies, in learning how to keep an animal healthy, in keeping worm burdens down and understanding their ecosystem along with the ecosystem of the farm. Farmers are just frustrated engineers, we prop things up that should really fall down, we build new things that last for tens of years and we run million dollar businesses in the middle of nowhere. 

Farming tests you spiritually as well. I'm not a religious person but I can't help noticing the beauty in nature or the natural balance in everything. I also can't help noticing the pain some natural systems inflict on animals or ecosystems. Through all of this there are days when I wonder if it's all someone else's plan or if evolution is what it is and we just keep finding new ways to survive. We may never know. 

Farming always taxes you emotionally in some way, at some point. It also uplifts you, every single day. Some people aren't cut out for the days when it taxes you. Today is one of those days. Last year it was a fly wave that kept hitting the sheep harder and harder that broke me. I couldn't keep chasing animals down on a bike to treat the maggots crawling over them, eating them alive,  and hope that I wouldn't find them dead the next day. Today, it's knowing that the weaners were put into a lovely paddock, thick with feed, only to find the grass seeds have stuck in their eyes and turned some of them blind in a matter of days. This also means they can't find the water point in the paddock, which wears them down until they just can't hold onto life anymore. Seeing animals that I care for as my own in a state like that tears me up inside, it's like being hit by lightning. My emotions explode within me, splintering in every direction. Then I gather the pieces and I tend to the animals as best I can because I love them, and I love what I do, and I will never let the pain I feel rank higher than their wellbeing. The day my wellbeing is placed above my animals wellbeing will be the day I quit farming, because I won't be caring for those animals the way they deserve to be. 

Undoubtedly I am lifted higher by farming than I'm ever pulled down by it. Drought, deaths, frost, hail, fire.. The list of 'taxes' goes on. I take all of that because the joy of farming, of lambs, of beautiful crops, of being immersed in nature will always lift me higher. 

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