I’d like to say that the strong, powerful engine noise that has been prominent around BangShift Mid-West has been due to yours truly. But it’s not. It’s not even due to the neighbor’s newly-acquired Nissan 240SX that’s slammed on it’s nuts and threatening everyone with it’s four-banger rasp. Nope, it’s soybean harvesting season, and if you guessed that was what Farmer John planted in the field behind my property, congratulate yourself, you are very much correct. The fields are being cut down, the beans are being moved out in semi trucks, and afterwards the large trucks with the Stompers-like tires on the back are going out and making laps, flinging fertilizer around all corners of the patch. Meanwhile, the dust kicked up has welded my sinuses shut for the time being, until the rains finally hit.

I can get into farming. It’s honest work, it’s got a purpose, it’s a staple of civilization and has been before “civilization” was really a thing. We need food to eat, and while hunting and gathering has benefits, humans have been farming since about 20,000 B.C. for a reason…having a food supply on hand that could be tended to, monitored and collected easily beat hoping that you would find a berry bush just a little further up the trail or some cereal grains in the next field. Farming is also relaxing in a way…compared to typical business work, you’ve got to put in hours of work but you aren’t trying to do 10,000 things at once. You focus. You fertilize the field, you plow the field, you plant the field, you harvest, you repeat as necessary.

Speaking of plowing…it used to be that to get it done properly you needed one blade, two ox, harnesses, and enough weight on the blade to dig down into the soil. Now, what you need is one of these boosted-up tractors, a multi-tine plow setup, and a heavy right foot. It’s called speed plowing, and in lieu of making a farmer’s daughter joke here, I invite you to watch as this John Deere competes in an actual contest for this sort of thing: