Farm Week

-Posted by Isaac

Change of pace this week.

 Big Ag

Everyone knows the recent plight of the honeybee. 

"All the bees are mysteriously dying!" "The end approaches!" "Einstein once said, if all the honeybees disappeared,   ...blah, blah, blah..."

Yes, bees have their troubles. 

Varroa Mites, tracheal mites, foul brood, nosema, hive beetles, chalk brood, CCD... the list goes on. (A few foolhardy idiot beekeepers continue to "save the world" in spite of it all.)

We've dissected the problems to death. We've come up with a few solutions. Some solutions lead to more problems. 

One rarely mentioned but very big problem (the biggest, in my opinion):

Big Ag

When there's nothing to eat, honeybees don't do very well.

Big Ag

CornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCorn

This stuff will be turned into Pepsi and cattle feed.
But if you're a honeybee, a corn field might as well be a parking lot. Just nothing tasty out there.
Back in the day, farms were small. Farms were diverse. There were fence rows. There were weeds. There were animals. Cows, pigs, horses, chickens, sheep, goats.... dogs, cats.... bees...
A little clover here, a little alfalfa there. A garden, a grape vine or two.
There were people.  It took a lot of caring hands, some responsibility, some love to watch over it all and see that things happened just so so.

See any of that now?

Agriculture has changed. And with it, beekeeping. (Society too, I might add.)
For the better? Progress? Hmmmm....
Listening to the radio this week I heard one particular ad (about a hundred times) for a new Syngenta fungicide / insecticide spray for soybeans. For next year! It's September, for God's sake!
Man oh man... What are they going to say about us in a hundred years?

Well, I'll get off my soap box. If you can't beat'em, join'em, right? My brother happens to be one of these big farmers. About this time of year the crops come off and he needs some help. I got to spend a rather enjoyable week driving this white Freightliner:

Yes, just like the Towns Van Zandt song.

But it wasn't all trucking.
One morning I worked in the buckwheat. The field had finished its bloom and thinking we might get another bloom in October, I bush hogged it and ran a cultiipacker through later to push the seeds down. Mason tried his hand at tractor driving.

After bush hogging over a few gardens, some puppies and cute little kittens, we decided that he'd  learned enough for one day.

We grabbed Mommy and made it to the Farm Science Review:

There, we found tractors.

Big Tractors.

Little Tractors.

And Big Sprayers.

And Little Sprayers.

And Combines Too!

Mason is quite the fan of Big Ag. It was better then Christmas. He probably climbed on thirty different things.
And he wanted nothing to do with the small hidden beekeeping display off in the corner of the OSU gardens.
Hmmm.
Maizy and Bridger just enjoyed giving their parental slaves a workout.

Generation Lazy

At least they aren't texting.

After two hours of Big Ag and Mason's perpetual excitement; running, climbing, yelling, trying on a new tractor about every ten feet... Mommy, Daddy and Bridger all felt the same: