No resolutions, only reflectionsNo resolutions, only reflections

I'm not making New Year's resolutions.

I'm 70 years old. I am not likely to change my behavior, even if I wanted to. I don't. Making improvements to my character requires way more time, energy and sacrifice than I am willing to accept. Consequently, friends and family, deal with it.

I will reflect a bit, however. Not on all 70 years, more than 40 of which have been as a Farm Press employee. See, I am not prone to change.

Looking back on 2019, however, offers a manageable time span. I will admit to achieving less than I hoped. I always do. I'd like to think that I set the bar too high but doubt that's true.

I start off every year with the best of intentions, planning to visit more farms, write more in-depth stories, take better pictures. Things usually begin falling apart about January 6, usually in conjunction with the Beltwide Cotton Conferences, which always offer more informative presentations than I can get to and more people I want to visit with than I have time to meet.

I typically eat too much, stay up too late and come home with a head cold that puts me off my routine for the next week or two.

February is too cold and miserable to consider roaming too far from a warm house, so I am prone to delay visiting farms until it warms up a bit, although I have made quick work of outside photo ops when north winds were howling around equipment sheds, cutting through my heaviest coat and stinging my ears.

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Interviews around the kitchen table offer a better use of my time. Coffee and pie might extend the interview.

April and May are excellent times to visit farmers, who are busy planting, so I sometimes conduct interviews on turnrows, get phone numbers and email addresses, shoot a photo and head to another farm.

Mid-South summers get hot, so interviews work best around kitchen tables in air-conditioned farmhouses. I can shoot photos pretty quick, too, when temperatures top the century mark.

Fall, though, is my favorite time to visit farmers, as I have mentioned before. Harvest time offers anticipation, hope and an accounting of what went well and what went awry.

Making a round or two in a combine or cotton picker as it chops its way through a good crop gives me just a small sense of why farmers continue to till, plant, maintain and harvest year after year, good years and bad, up markets and down ones.

The regret I have with the end of one year and the beginning of another is that I had too few opportunities to visit farmers, fair weather or foul. Truth is, those farm visits are why I've enjoyed this job for four decades. Another thing that hasn't changed.