Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Farmer?

"BEEP, BEEP, BEEP". That's the farmer's alarm, and he pops out of bed like a jack-in-the-box. It's five-thirty in the morning. While most people are asleep, the farmer is wide-awake. His day starts before the sun comes up because there's a variety of places he has to visit each day. One of the many places he has to visit is his fields. He has to make sure that every living thing is alive and kickin'. Therefore, he hops in his truck and heads out to check on his crops.

Another stop is at the cotton gin. The farmer gets out and talks to the gin manager to make sure everything is all right. At the gin, the gin manager checks the harvested cotton to make sure it is de-seeded. Then he takes the separated cotton seed to the "seed shelter". There the seed waits for its turn to be loaded into a truck and taken off to get used for feed or made into cotton seed oil. The lint is sent off to be made into clothes.

His next stop is at his seeding and dusting company. There he examines the airplanes and spreaders used for seeding and fertilizing. He also talks to his friends. Soon he is back in his truck, and he's off to another site.

The next location he heads to is where his equipment is stored. He looks over his equipment like a hawk looking for its prey. Another thing he does while he is there, is to pick up the equipment that he requested to be fixed. It would be lunch time now, so he heads back home to eat a hearty meal.

After eating, the farmer looks over his cotton grade sheet. On the grade sheet, it explains the bale number, the owner of the farm, the name of the field, strength of the cotton, micronair, the color, the leaf content, and the length of the fiber. Another thing the grade sheet shows is the amount of money each pound brings, and the amount of pounds each bale weighs. He begins to think back to the time when the cotton was picked by a cotton picker and was packed into a module maker on the side of the road. His worries were over once the cotton reached the gin in the module mover.

It has become dark, and the farmer's day is almost over. If the farmer is lucky, he has someone to help him with all the paperwork required to run a farm. The farmer we spent the day with has a wife who handles ninety percent of the paper work. This allowes the farmer to spend more time in the fields. If he does not have any help, then the farmer must spend several hours paying farm bills and filling out paperwork so his workers can be paid. We never knew it took "soooooooooooo" much to be a farmer. We always thought that all you had to do was get up really early and slave in the fields. As you can see, there is more to it than that.