There are four distinct farm seasons. Planting, Growing, Harvest and WaitingRestlesslyToPlant. Today we are at the tail end of WaitingRestlesslyToPlant season. 

During the long cold season of WaitingRestlesslyToPlant, farmers drive along muddy turn rows, staring at black furrows laid out like fans, willing the weather to warm. They wait and plan and watch the sky counting down to the first day of Planting season when collectively all the farmers exhale, along with their wives and children.

Nurturing crops day and night during Growing season, farmers pray for sunshiny days, then pray for rain, then pray for no rain. So do their wives and children.

Finally, the smell of defoliant fills the southern air. Harvest Season. The most wonderful time of the year. The fields are saturated in white, a sea of snowy cotton.  Golden wheat bends and bows to the earth. Rice hang heavy and dry. Dust flies. Combines roar. Blackbirds watch from a safe distance. The end of another year, another cycle.

At the end of Harvest, farmers are content to have a bit of money left over to plow back into the soil next year.

Farmers toil from sunup to sundown, from can to can’t. They do it because they love it. They do it because they can’t not do it.

talya

Be sure to watch this video above of our farmers from home!
Never A Dull Moment…Fishing for Cotton…
(Senter Farms, Holthouse Farms, Mississippi County, Arkansas)