Holy cow! Can you believe that it’s already June?! Yeah, me neither. But I’m sure you know that June is dairy month! (I had to throw that in…check out these cow facts if you’re interested!)

This spring was crazy busy, and seemed to basically pass us by as we rolled straight from winter into summer. In April and May we were pretty successful at completing our fieldwork. We fertilized our hay, harvested our triticale, planted our corn and most of our soybeans, and got the weeds sprayed in our corn fields. And in the last few weeks the things we have planted have really started growing – that’s largely because it’s only June 12th and we’ve had almost 8 inches of rain this month!

The corn is loving it, but it’s starting to become an obstacle for the remaining portion of our “spring” fieldwork. What’s left? We have 30 acres of alfalfa pretty far past its prime that needs to be mowed and baled. We also have 10 acres of soybeans, 20 acres of sorghum and 20 acres of milo left to plant. The soybeans we have planted still need to be sprayed, particularly where we planted them behind triticale – the triticale stubble is re-growing well with all this moisture, too!

We’re not complaining, though. At least not yet. The 2012 drought is fresh in our minds (read: Let it Rain and Drought 2012), and in all honesty, our farm probably can’t survive another extreme drought in 2014.  We don’t like to think about that, so we’re doing our best to smile and not complain about moisture. In fact, a week ago local meteorologists were saying that we were still behind 3.5” of moisture this year. Those type of statements make us cringe. We’ve now exceeded our county’s average June rainfall of 5 inches, and we needed to. We truly feel that this is a blessing, but at this very moment we could use a different kind of blessing – a short break! As soon as we get a few more things in the ground and off the ground, though, we’ll be glad to have those sprinklers turned back on.

I guess it’s true what they say – when it comes to the weather, farmers are never happy. Regardless of our level of satisfaction, though – we have to take the weather as it comes. One of the greatest challenges in farming is that God doesn’t really take requests; there is no “on/off switch” for rainfall (no thermostat, either!). All we can do is make our best guesses and pray that this year we will be able to grow enough to feed our cows until next year. And if we succeed, we’ll do it all over again. It’s a challenging, demanding, frustrating, rewarding, amazing, and beautiful cycle.

So far – 2014 is wet, but at least it’s not 2012.