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Farm Stories with Pork Producer Wanda Patsche

We all have our own stories on the farm. But sometimes its the little things that make us laugh and/or frustrated. Here are a couple things that happened in the last week.
Incident #1
Hearing this secondhand and imagining in my mind what this looked like: When we harvest, our combine keeps track of important information such as field info, yield, moisture, etc. Because we are old school, we also write down our loads manually. I like to use the two to reconcile our yields for the year.
A few days ago, when my husband was accessing the paper load sheets on a clipboard, the wind caught the paper sheets and started blowing them around the bin site. It was very windy and immediately went on a dead sprint race after the sheets. He was hoping and praying the sheets would get caught in a lump of dirt so he go in for the capture. He said he has not run that fast in a very long time. The result? He captured every one. Thankfully he is in good physical health and was able to fetch the sheets. But, what a sight that must have been.
Incident #2
Harvest is never clean and simple. We have vehicles and tractors scattered everywhere. And never in the right spot. Last week, as I was combining, my husband needed to transport himself to the grain setup site. It’s about a 1/2 the way the crow flies. So needless to say, he decided to go that way through the field. The only vehicle with wheels available was a bicycle. He rode the bicycle as far as he could on the road and then decided to walk the bike the rest of the way across the bean field and up a hill. Also, I might mention, the wind was probably blowing 35 mph. The struggle was real. But he made it. If only we had remote controls on our vehicles or a few more people.
Incident #3
I was in the combine and I was getting an error message about the engine running too slow. I wasn’t sure I had all the correct buttons pressed so I called my husband and we were reviewing the settings. He said to me, do you have the jackrabbit button set? I looked down and there are two rabbits and a turtle. Which one is the jackrabbit? I was becoming very agitated because why would you put two rabbits to signify speed. Oh, one was a jackrabbit and the other one just a plain ole rabbit. How do I know which one is faster? We have no jackrabbits around here and I don’t know anything about jackrabbits. And why would John Deere use two rabbits and a turtle? Yes, the rabbits looked slightly different, but they were rabbits and how was I to know which one was a jackrabbit? Yes, we had a few moments of frustrated yelling as we figured it out.

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