Farm Mechanics

My friends Festus and Rosalita, who I have written about before, are farmers. They have a small scale, intensive organic farm that sells to local restaurants, farm markets, and the Willimantic Food Coop. I once spent a day as a volunteer farmhand just to get an idea of what the life is like.

We spent a good part of the day wrestling with equipment. He had a manure spreader that was originally horse drawn, believe it or not. It had a steel chain system that was originally driven by the wheels as the thing rolled along, but had been modified to run off the tractor's PTO. That way you could control the speed of manure distribution independent of the speed of travel. Some of the chain links needed replacing. We also installed a tiller on a tractor and did some other wrenching. Festus told me that his job consisted mostly of mechanics. It occurred to me that in the old days, growers must have spent as much time taking care of horses as they did growing plants.

I do my snowplowing with my tractor, which I hope not to do next winter because it means I have to take the loader off, and it would be useful to have the loader as well as a snowplow. They each have their own utility for moving snow around, and I might have firewood to transport in winter as well. Actually most of this past winter was so mild the ground wasn't frozen and I could have done some landscaping.

Anyway, the time has come for the annual Royal PITA of getting the loader reinstalled. It inevitably involves scraped knuckles and needing help from a neighbor. (Don't believe the alternative facts in the owner's manual about how simple it is.) Part of the process is connecting four hydraulic fittings. Yesterday I struggled for half an hour and I couldn't get one of them to click on. Three went on just fine, but that fourth one was impossible. I tried all the tricks -- pressing on the button to bleed off pressure, moving the stick around. It was hopeless. But there is one bit of lore I learned a few years ago. I went back first thing in the morning, when the temperature was around freezing, and it slipped right on. That's the story -- when I removed the loader back in the fall, it was cold. Yesterday afternoon was warm, which meant the pressure in the system was so high the fitting would not seat. Wait for the cold morning, and there's no problem.

The point of this story is that we all have odd bits of knowledge and expertise that are specific to our ways of life. The Bushmen of the Kalahari know just as much as a college professor, they just know different stuff.