Here’s a conversation a retired farmer who’s still a landowner and I had at a local breakfast hangout recently:

“We started tilling the second week of June,” he recalled. “Places in the field were still heavy, but weeds were tall.”

I added, “I disked down ragweeds taller than the tractor hood for a friend. I know what you’re talking about.”

The farmer continued, “We got our four-wheel drive stuck and asked the neighbors to bring their four-wheel drive over to pull us out.”

That was nice of them, I noted.

“Well, we got a chance to return the favor,” he said, smiling. “Two days later they got their tractor stuck, and we took ours over and pulled them out.”

Sound familiar? Did you hear any stories like that this year? I did — knocking down tractor-tall ragweed and getting stuck were common occurrences.

There’s something you need to know about the conversation between the retired farmer and myself. We were talking about 1981, not 2019! The 1981 planting season played out much like 2019 in many parts of Indiana.

What was it the famous philosopher and New York Yankee Yogi Berra said? “It’s deja vu all over again.”

Special significance

Personally, I remember the 1981 planting season very well. My late father, Robert, was still farming, and my brother, David, and I helped him when not busy with our full-time jobs. We didn’t get into the field until the first week of June. And yes, we plowed and disked back then. We also “disked lightly even though it’s heavy to let the soil dry out.” We still had a few things to learn.

Actually, I was transitioning between careers. I spent my first four years after college as a vocational-agriculture teacher and FFA advisor, first at Cascade in Hendricks County and then at my home high school, Whiteland Community High School in Johnson County. While the wacky weather was delaying planting and the school year was wrapping up, I received a call from the late Tom Budd, editor of Indiana Prairie Farmer. Would I be interested in interviewing for a job?

I enjoyed working with FFA kids, but the stress of day-to-day teaching had led me to write a letter to Budd back in January. He’d sent me a “Dear Tom” letter in February, but apparently something had changed. To make a long story short, I interviewed with him, wrote two sample stories when he asked me to write one — I love to write — and he hired me as a field editor. My first official day on the job was Aug. 3, 1981. We held a story planning meeting that week, deciding on stories for the next issue and beyond.

What does this have to do with the 1981 and 2019 crop seasons? The very first stories I wrote for the September 1981 issue included topics such as “Will corn mature before frost?” and “How to make silage from late-planted corn.”

Sound familiar? The take-home message is that we, collectively, as Indiana agriculture, made it through 1981. We’re still going strong nearly four decades later. It will take more than 2019 to stop Indiana farmers. We’ve been here before.  

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