Hoppers in My Boots!

Insect Woes and Farming Frustrations

A week ago I was standing on the patio near the house getting the ol’ Weber fired up for a quick Thai-style curry chicken, and as I turned away from the heat and looked out into the pasture I thought I saw something down around my turkeys flying in a weird, hovering pattern. I am nearsighted and didn’t have my glasses on, so of course I squinted and screwed my face all up, trying to produce a clearer picture with no effect, when it dawned on me what I was blurring.

Dragonflies! Big ones! Big enough to be seen without glasses from on top of the hill. It might seem like an odd thing to become excited about, but I have been trying to entice more insect life onto the pasture and it is nice to have a bit of a win in terms of producing more life down there, even though the foliage isn’t behaving as readily as I was hoping it would.

AI never fails to really understand what I want in an image.

The recently acquired/discovered L.B.H. Air Force felt like my first unintentional success in a long time. Afterwards, I was talking to Kayla and she expressed much the same and we both realized how farming frustrations have been weighing on us for the past couple of weeks in the form of unmet expectations and personal deadlines, backward movement on the garden, and the reality of work involved during our first year managing multiple animals. It is giving us quite a few nicks, bumps, and stings, both metaphorically and literally.

One example is moving the turkeys and chickens in the pasture, and it comes readily to my mind because I never considered how much of a pain maneuvering a 150lb turkey hoop house that is 10’x10’ and 7 feet tall would be. I also didn’t take the 4ft grass ocean into consideration, and to add just a little more spice of life, the grass has huge, sticky seed heads. Very sticky.

Also, while moving the turkey tractor, grasshoppers enjoy diving into my boot top like an Olympic diver with his little friends raising score cards on a nearby leaf. I don’t wear socks in my rubbers in the morning and I can not express the discomfort of having a grasshopper nuzzle in between the third and fourth toe.

The scoring is very complex

Once the houses get wrestled into motion through the grass, and the hoppers are practicing, then the ground wasps start to arise from the 5th layer of hell where they have been tormenting cherubs all night long. They fly right up to eye level, flashing their nasty little mandibles and lifting their shirt tails, showing small pistols tucked in their waist bands. Then they do that thing where they are going directly at your face, only mockingly dodging away the last second before impacting an eyeball, while flipping you the bird.

Moving away from the pasture problems, I know that for Kayla, juggling the milk from three different cows and dealing with the limited space we have—a regular fridge, a baby fridge, and a deep chest freezer—has become a daily source of unwanted Tetris practice, and anxiety. The Tres Leches can be quite a handful as well. They crowd around the stanchion, vying to be the first to be milked, or they push their way in behind whoever is already locked in, just because they can. It's like managing 800-1200lb babies who know they're bigger and simply don't care what the bipeds want.

The hardest part for me about each and every frustration that we have experienced is my reaction to failure. In the moment, if I could just step back and big picture everything instead of losing my temper, it becomes clear how much better our lives are because of the things that cause daily temple massaging and curses. When I am mature enough to think that way, it resets my outlook and allows a chance for me to teach myself that there is a better way to behave, and the outcome will leave me happier and calmer.

While Kayla is overwhelmed with the amount of milk and managing it in our little kitchen, she's probably the happiest I've ever seen her. Often, I look out the kitchen window in the morning and see her with one or both of our daughters who are petting and talking to the cows. How can I not want a life like that every single day, regardless of the cost, the work, or the frustrations, when I see my family like that?

There is no upside to the ground wasps. They are the devil’s plague.