Spring Forward, Fall Back(James brown) Ah, Spring, the cherry blossoms bloom.

Ah, Fall the leaves yellow and drop.

By now the annoyance of day light savings resetting time has receded to another of life’s periodic little irks, an idiotic one no one can remember what it’s about and only a few are glad we’re still stuck with.

For most, the rest of Spring is welcomed as the real beginning of a new year. Spring is in the air and in their step about. It’s why Easter, the Christian renewal, is set on the calendar when none know when it did occur.

For farmers, however, Spring is a time of renewed stress.

I bought the 100 acre farm at age 42, a former California lemming, always land hungry. After the paperwork closed I'd touched the tar baby and had to figure out what next. I had no equipment and knew not what to grow let alone how. After a lapse of a couple years with the land leased and abused by another, I decided to grow what was grown before, cherries.

That was over a million dollars ago.

I made lots of mistakes and began to fail. It took me time and a friend to learn what farming was all about.

First it was the deer and gophers who attacked the young trees from above and below. In a single night 200 trees were munched to death. It takes longer but the gophers eating the roots below leave a dead tree in a year or so.

Fortunately, my friend Glen straightened me out. Having grown up on a farm he knew what I didn’t and told me,

“Jimmie, when you watch Bug Bunny, Elmer Fudd always loses. The truth is, Elmer Fudd always wins and kills Bugs Bunny. You need to know farming is about killing, not growing. You kill everything you don’t want and with a little water and fertilizer, what you do want will do well.”

“Glen, how about beneficials, you know, good bugs and critters that enhance farming?

“Jimmie, the only good bug is a dead bug.”

Then I learned about farmer Spring stress.

With his sage advise I added a 30-30 rifle, poisons, and sprays and declared war on fungus, insects, deer, gophers and voles. The gophers, by evolution, have advanced to super hard to kill pests. Killing them is not satisfactory enough. You hope they also suffer dying.

Within a few years, an uneasy peace was established. Fruit flies no longer hibernate in the soil, fungus doesn't cling to branches, dead deer don’t munch, and gas and poison root out gophers, moles and voles with burning sulfur slaking gopher's hate.

Now, each year as Spring breaks, I start my stress killing cycle anew.

For cherry farmers Spring brings a stress most other farms don’t experience, bees. It’s a simple fact, no bees, no cherries. You rent bees brought to your farm from California almond orchards.

Bee stress is twofold, arrival date and weather. A late California Spring and the almond growers demand the bees linger but Oregon may experience an early spring. Almond growers pay more for their bees and Oregon cherry growers fret about their arrival silently.

Once they arrive the stress becomes weather. Bees won’t leave the hives to do their duty until it’s over 50 degrees. An early dash of warm weather can open the blossoms but then the weather high can drop below a 50-degrees,, and days of pollination are lost.

Then the rains come. Day by day you watch your blossoms struggle not to wilt as they do.

Due to cold Spring weather my crop dropped into less than half normal for the 2 prior years because bees could not do their thing. 2024 is a yo-yo year with temperatures up and down. I sit and fret as the yo-yo spins to see if the bees will do okay. It looks like the crop be may split into two ripen periods due to separate pollination events when we do only one harvest.

A little bitty bee let me down, spoiled my act as Farmer Brown
I had it made up not make a frown, but a little bitty bee let me down.

Then there is equipment terror stress. Equipment is wonderful when it works. My small farm has 3 tractors, 2 fork lifts, two mules, a 500 gallon sprayer, a disc, mover and flail plus lots of other equipment that love to;

Tra la! It's May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.

It’s necessary to have a lot of two’s because you end up with a one in a time stress pinch. sprays need to come on schedules. When trucks come to haul away harvest, the drivers are on tight schedules. If your fork lift is not ready to load they leave unloaded.

This year has started normal. Killing schedules are on time and equipment service and breakdowns have been reasonable.
First the drive shaft bearing went out on the disc tractor. Climbing under it on the cold ground with numb fingers hope, sprung up, It was a bearing not too difficult to remove and replace avoiding a $1,000 plus service call. It took a bit of time, but a replacement bearing was shipped just in time for immediate tractor use.

Then the fan belt on the sprayer wore out. Two replacements were order but once in hand I could not figure out how to pull the sprayer shaft to replace the fan belt. Using the internet, the manual and desperate calls to Canada where the sprayer is made failed to provide an answer. I don’t know how much yet but the nearest service mechanic from 100 miles away showed up the day before it was a must spray fungicide day to avoid blossom rot.

Now I am doing equipment servicing, oil, fuel, and air filters using gallons of fresh oil and getting black ugly oil in return.

Spring is also farm cash crunch time. Farming is a net, net, net business.

Harvesting is in the Fall. That’s when the money comes in. There is no escaping the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Either you make money, or you don’t. Due to poor pollination weather the last 2 years, farm expenses were similar to income which translates into no money, honey. I worked a year for nothing but sweat, worry and fear.

Spring, therefore, is time for cash stress as farmers dole out reserves for income taxes, a new Spring killing cycle, repairs, oil and fuel but must wait for Fall to see the net, net, net which hopefully is not red ink.

Spring stress is occupying my days. I’ve repaired tractor and sprayer, completed 3 sprays and fertilized just in time to match weather constraints, and am crawling under tractors, trucks, mules and fork lifts t service equipment. I need to do 3 more sprays, mow, and disc to get to harvest.

Harvest is the ultimate stress, when dawn to dusk work is not enough.

Currently I’m waiting for for a welder to come up from Bakersfield, California to redo my harvest equipment. Will he show? I simply don’t know. I need a crew to run these cumbersome machines. Where do you find a crew willing to work for 3 weeks of irregular days yet smart enough to operate these machines and not hurt themselves or others?

I’ve trained a few to do this, even former homeless drug addicts, but will they do it again? I don’t know if I can even find them. Yet I must have them, or my crop will rot after the varieties weeks’ harvest time.

Now Spring stress is building until an eruption of harvest chaos in June and July.

Hopefully, Fall will give me a peaceful rest with enough net to see another Spring of stress.

Still, even if the net is good,I'm stuck to the tar baby and must admit, at age 80, I'd like to simply be free.

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