Lives
When the wind blows
Farming life
by Tom Martin
While I love to break farming stereotypes, here’s one that stands up: farmers always talk about the weather. But why? To answer that, let me take you back to a recent fateful summer on our farm.
I clearly recall an afternoon in July 2020 when with some trepidation I went to look around our fields of rapeseed. You may also know this merry crop—covered in yellow flowers throughout April—as “oilseed rape,” or possibly “canola.” Rapeseed is a “brassica”—the same family as mustard— and I had nurtured these five-foot-tall plants from their tiny mustard-sized seeds through one of the wettest winters in living memory. They had staved off attacks from pigeons and flea beetles and survived the driest May on record.