This year is International Year of the Woman Farmer and Oregon Department of Agriculture is featuring female farmers from across Oregon all year.
This week I was surprised to be the first featured farmer. Honestly I was surprised just to be nominated and to see I made the list of those who they are highlighting was even more exciting! I am looking forward to see more names on the list throughout the year.
Oregon has a strong tradition of female farmers and I am proud to call many my friends. You can follow along as the department adds more names to the list this year by following Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Facebook page. A big thanks to ODA and to who nominated me. I truly appreciate it!
Sometimes when I walk outside in the morning I can feel in my bones it’s time for a specific task to happen on the farm. It may be the smell of fresh cut grass because it finally dried up enough to get out there on the mower, or the dew, or settled dust, or the temperature of the air. But all those things come together on certain days to just say the season is changing and it’s time to “blank”. Maybe I’m the only that experiences this, but I doubt it. Whether it’s time to harvest, time to feed the crops, time to kill some weeds or prune some trees, that seasonality becomes a part of what you feel when that first morning air hits you.
And of course there are growing degree days to pay attention to, fields to walk, work orders sent from our field men, and of course neighbor farms to watch. But there’s also a rhythm to the seasons that gets ingrained in you when it hits year after year.
This is our fertilizer buggy, it may look fairly Mad Max but she gets the job done!
So this morning as I loaded the kids onto the bus to head to school, all I could think was, “Goodness it feels like spring fertilizing weather out here!” My intuition may be helped by the fact that we have planned to start fertilizing, and also that we had some amazing warm days last week that helped dry out the fields from some pretty deep puddles. But either way, today is a great day to get out there on some finally dry dirt and start feeding our plants so they can get to their job of growing a healthy crop!
I hope this post finds you and your family all well during these random days that occur between Christmas and New Year’s. Our family and the farm has taken a nice break to celebrate and to give thanks and (tomorrow) ring in the new year.
For our farm and the crops that we grow, we usually have a pretty good break right now. This time of year jobs can somewhat be triage or pushed off for a few more days to get a few longer chunks of downtime to just hang with our family. But of course, when the weather is nice, there’s always something to be done to take care of the crops. We were lucky to get a few breaks where we were able to get some weeds sprayed before it started to rain again. We don’t get much snow in our area this time of year usually, (much to our kids dismay) so being able to apply crop protection pesticides in between rain showers, and when the ground isn’t so saturated you’ll get stuck, is always a priority.
Other than that, we are about at the middle of meeting season when there is no shortage of opportunities for farmers go to get continuing education on a multitude subjects. Some of these classes go towards our hours needed to be able to keep our pesticide licenses, alongside market and crop updates that help us stay informed on what’s going industry wide and worldwide with the crops that were growing or hope to grow in the future.
So as the year draws to a close, I just wanted to send a quick update to let you all know that while I’m not posting too much here, the farm is chugging right along. Also I wanted to share a family photo but I failed to actually get one this season, so here is our Christmas card to wish you all a great Holiday!!
And I should mention that of course my goal in the new year is to post more on my blog….so cheers to that! Hope to see more of you and continue talking farming in 2025!!
NuttyGrass 