Make sure the rows are straight!

This GPS monitor attaches to a large tractor.
I wouldn't be surprised  if we try this out for straighter rows.

In a few weeks, our garden will be plowed, rototilled and laid out for the season. One serious point of our garden is that my mother insists that the rows be straight. I wouldn't say that she was obsessive about this, but she wanted her garden to be neat and organized. For her, part of the quality of the garden is translated into the straightness of the rows.

We originally eyeballed the rows and she trusted all of us to make the rows straight. After a few years, she decided that the precision was inadequate. I distinctly remember my father making a contraption that had a notch on a standard board that you could lay out and that solved the problem of unequal spacing. However, if the first row was crooked, all of your rows were crooked. We needed a better system

So we used the old stakes and string. These were two stakes that were connected with a taut piece of string. We would sometimes use these, but the string would move if you made a furrow too close with the hoe (or if it was windy). And when asked about why our rows weren't straight, it became a running joke that "it wasn't our fault, it was windy that day!". My mother wanted an even better system in her quest for straight rows.

The last few years, we entered the 21st century with our straight row technology. My father took his laser level, and set up the laser at one end and pointed it at the other end at the second stake. This created a straight line that wouldn't be affected by wind, and was always straight. I chuckled when I noticed my dad doing this, because it looked more like a surveyor site rather than a grower preparing for the season. Our rows were laid out with laser precision. This was maybe a bit ridiculous, but we have the nicest rows in our garden around.

While we may laugh about my mother's quest for straight rows in her garden, it's been a quest for people in the ag field for thousands of years. Precision agriculture has been a growing trend in the past 30 years. Growers now have options of using GPS and robotics to ensure that their rows are pinpoint accurate. Whether or not you see a significant yield is negligible, but there's something to be said about driving down a road and being able to see down the rows of corn to the end of the field. Perhaps there's something within the human brain that yearns for organized rows.

Child labor on the farm, immoral or essential?

Life on the small farm, my sister and I weeding the garden.
 ( See mom, I told you I weeded that garden!)

My first "official" job was when I was 12 years old. I called it "official" because it wasn't just a weekend gig, I was home-schooled at the time, and I worked from 9:30 until about 2 (my schooling was from 8am until about 9:15am, it's amazing what you can get done when you don't have to wait for others to catch up). I worked at a game preserve/farm and sporting clays range about 10 minutes from my house. When I first started out, I was bundling this coastal grass the owner had grown for duck hunters. He would sell the bundles for duck blinds, which were pretty popular for the region. When I first started out, I worked with this guy named Ryan, who was 27 at the time. And like any new guy on the job, I did my best to follow Ryan's lead, and listen to everything he told me. Now, bundling Atlantic coastal panic grass is not a strenuous task, but about 15 minutes after work, Ryan says, "let's take a break". At the time, I was a bit surprised, I mean, we just got started. I grabbed my water bottle, took a big gulp and got back to work. Well, after another 15 minutes, Ryan got up from his golf cart, and walked over to give me a hand for another 10 or 15 minutes before taking another break. This went on and on for about 2 weeks, until the one day I came in, and my boss started off with, "are you ok with working by yourself today? Ryan is no longer with us". I found out later that Ryan had been fired, as he was lazy, but up until I came on board, he was my boss' only option. I had replaced an employee who was more than twice my age. 


This was a nice job for a youth my age, after bundling the grasses, I helped out with other things, cleaning up the range, mowing the grass, and doing small tasks. These were appropriate for someone my age, and any kind of inherent danger was minimized. There's no denying that there's an inherent risk in working in the fields, but the chances of this is relatively slim when managed properly. It was a good experience, and it gave me a different perspective on agriculture beyond the small farm I grew up. 


Growing up on a small farm, I was nowhere near as exposed to the rigors of living off the land, but nonetheless, I was able to take away some valuable lessons from this experience. For a practical matter, I learned to drive stick-shift, first on a tractor, and later on a truck. It served me well on multiple occasions, including in Europe, where nearly everything is manual transmission. But more importantly than learning how to drive a manual transmission, or how to drive a tractor, I learned something that is much more important. I learned what it means to have a solid work ethic. I learned what it means to give a man a good day's work, and the true value of a dollar. This is something I feel that people simply have lost through our disconnection to the agriculture system. In a globalized economy, it feels good to work a full day and earn an honest living.

I understand, it's not glamorous work, you probably won't get rich picking watermelons, but there's more to life than riches at that young an age. I feel that if more children had the opportunity to work on a farm early in their life, that they would not only improve their behavior, but would also take more pride in their work. I am a firm believer that hard work builds character, and some of the best characters I have met have come from an ag background. And who knows what you can achieve when a sound work ethic is instilled at a young age?