Disking For Rain

All too reliably forecasted rain systems had avoided drought-stricken Palmville Township in 2023, and just taunted our crops. I had little reason to think these scattered showers would act any different.

  Disking my over-grown firebreaks on Thursday, April 11th, to help prevent the spectre of wildfire did the same thing as washing a car did long ago, for toward evening it progressively rained, sleeted, and hailed on me a quarter mile from home, forcing me to take shelter in a dense windbreak of white spruce trees north of the one-room Palmville schoolhouse; I loved the irony of it.

   It was a partly cloudy evening. I was disking a 16-foot wide north/south firebreak between the county road ditch and a 4-row windbreak that is almost a half mile long, using my old Massey-Ferguson 180 diesel tractor and eight-foot wide tandem disk. The firebreak hadn’t been disked for two years. I had lucked-out, fire-wise, hoping nothing would ignite the ditch and the grass-covered separation between it and the four tree rows that bordered over 150 acres of trees and under-story plants immediately on their east side. 

 

West side firebreak

East side firebreak

Old 1967 tractor, much older disk. I think it's over 125 years old.

Yes, the right side rear tandem end is bent out and so wobbles -- but works. I caught the corner on a tree or rock years ago. There are scrapers built onto it that clean mud/debris from the face of each disk. On its tongue is a sliding adjustment device connected to a rope that the tractor driver: pulls to either advance the tandems so to be parallel to each other, (= - shaped) for transport, or pulls the rope, reverses the tractor to put the disk in this X-shaped arrangement so when traveling forward, it cuts the soil. Modern disks are designed the same way but are hydraulically operated.

   Roseau County had recently been put under a burning ban as the whole county had become a tinderbox, so my anxiety heightened. Oddly enough, though the grass upon it was dangerously dry, the soil under it was yet too sodden to allow heavy equipment on it so I had to wait until April 11th, before I could access the ditch edge and successfully disk its west side. 

 

   Using such a small 8’ tandem disk, even weighted down with 800 pounds of concrete block, took multiple passes to break through the sod its whole length; I had to make a U-turn at each end. The neighbors who farm small grain crops on three sides of our farm could satisfactorily disk that stretch in one pass in about five minutes, using a forty-foot wide disk, BUT wouldn’t be able to turn around at the end like I can; in this case, size does matter.

 

I tied a backpack fire pump on my tractor, and my ATV, when I went anywhere on the farm in case a wildfire would develop in the wealth of dry grass on either side. The spots on the hood are raindrops.

 

 

   My equipment is quaint. My tractor has no cab, no windshield, no roof to shield me from the elements; no heat in the wintertime; no AC in the summer. It sits outdoors all year around and looks it, but is well-maintained as I need to use it occasionally. I depend on it for a job like this. Besides, I love driving it. Must be the old family farmer gene in me that is pleased when it starts up; when it sips diesel fuel; when it walks through wet areas in fields I’d think twice about, pulling a 4-bottom plow, and gets through on the other side without getting stuck (That calls for a HURRAH!) Really, it does happen.

   So as it was this April 11th, it was a lovely partly cloudy evening by the time I had almost finished disking both sides of the firebreak. Scattered showers burst forth from cloud formations in the distance around me; occasionally I felt an errant raindrop from afar I imagined, for all too reliably forecasted rain systems had marched around us in 2023, so I wasn’t convinced that Palmville would get any of its passing glory — until it fell right on top of me as fat rain drops that splattered on the hood of the tractor, BB-sized sleet that bounced off my lap and brim of my cap, then pellets of hail that peppered me and drove me off the tractor and into the trees, laughing and hollering in sheer appreciation of something so long awaited.

   Of course I called the wife. “IT'S RAINING! And sleeting! And hailing!” I may have said ecstatically. 

 

   She didn’t believe me, naturally, for I am often joking about something or nothing as some husbands on faraway farm fields or prairie landscapes are known to do. Strange how that effects a person … So I sent her a photo, er, videos ...