Adventures in Planting-Gear Malfunction
Oregon, 2018
You realize that the sequence of preparatory activities is so long you will never get to the intended task. So you go fishing instead.
—PATRICK MCMANUS, The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw
The easiest part of hemp planting is figuring out your seed depth, plant spacing, and watering protocol. The hardest part of hemp planting is getting your farm equipment to implement those instructions.
In fact, I’ll tell you right here to plant at a half-inch depth in moist soil that allows for good seed-to-soil contact and thus maximum germination. Doing that with the 7-to-15-inch spacing we discussed will occupy 47 minutes of your 20-hour planting day. The other 19 hours and 13 minutes will mostly be spent under a terrible device called a seed drill. By, say, 11:00 a.m., generally the emotional nadir of a planting day, you’ll be dirty, bloody, very hungry, and thinking, Huh, I would’ve thought my first hemp-planting day would involve more actual planting of hemp. By lunch you should consider yourself in very good shape if you’re even sinking the first seeds in the ground. In case it helps you remember that you’re not alone, this diary of my group’s three-acre 2018 planting of the dioecious Samurai cultivar in Oregon’s Emerald Triangle reflects how planting day usually goes.
7:05 a.m.: Survey of Field, Yoga, Return to Child Mind. The ideal date range for sowing hemp is a latitude-factored-on-climate-change issue. It’ll vary from late March to mid-June depending on your spring weather forecast and cultivar. In 2018, it is at the end of May for our field above the Rogue River. By this point we’ve cultivated billions of microbial communities before the seed even hits soil—mostly by leaving it alone for 20 years.
Not long after sunrise I set my coffee on the tree stump that marks our snack stockpile and tool dump near the gate to the field. After a few Sun Salutations, the whole thing looks so doable. I’m sure we’ll have our 50 pounds of seed in the soil in no time and I’ll be tubing the river by midafternoon.
I should know better. By 2018, I am aware—as I wake in the farmhouse of my mentors and partners Edgar and Margaret up in the hills of southern Oregon’s famous cannabis-cultivation region—that before noon we’ll have basked in two dozen nerve-curdling delays. This is not my first hemp rodeo. I’ve chased goats, woodchucks, and one determined family of wild pigs out of hemp fields.
After a baker’s dozen plantings, I have learned that the only certainty will be joys and hassles we can’t dream up. For instance, the Pacific Northwest version of the—ho hum—Anthropocene epoch’s annual millennial wildfires won’t start for a few weeks in Oregon, and they will last for more than five weeks. But as always, I am willfully forgetting the coming realities of planting day. Spring has sprung. So right off the bat, I’d probably be happy in the DMV.
Being outside sets up a struggle between logic and endorphins, between deadlines and love, where the right brain wins every time. As you stretch, you’re smelling forsythia and raspberry blossoms. Working in the dirt. Your office has no walls. Courting hawks land in nearby limbs. Nothing else exists. For those unused to the feeling I’m describing, it’s called sanity.
From a practical perspective, this “child mind” is what makes you forget last season’s planting nightmares. It is probably some chemical wafting out of healthy soil that casts an indisputable spell of forgetting. This is, really, the essential component of childhood—you don’t know, or don’t care, what’s coming next.
It’s not only last year’s seed drill delays that you forget. Your product’s bottle caps don’t quite fit the bottles? Your state’s regulators are sticking with the absurd “field out of view from road” requirements for another season? Whatever, that was yesterday. Today is planting day. The ultimate now.
7:19 a.m.: Return to Barn for First Human Error–Caused Tractor Breakdown. The wise farmer approaches planting day very much the way a pro ballplayer approaches spring training. It’s intended to get the cobwebs out. But Major League Baseball is smart enough to have 37 days of practice games. We farmers have to wake up, get dressed, and immediately pour lubricants into the wrong reservoirs in tractors.
Terrible sounds and smells alert the group to the problem. In 2018, our perpetrator (not mentioning names, he is just playing an assigned role) avoids eye contact by checking irrelevant tanks with a dipstick. Then the tractor expires into a profound quiet. Our planting day stops before it starts.
This, of course, happens when the temperature is still frosty, and the last thing anyone wants to be doing is unscrewing metal plugs. The next 27 minutes are spent draining one disgusting fluid, pouring in a second, and remembering that we meant to run to town yesterday to pick up a third.
7:46 a.m.: Talking Big. This important phase of planting day commences when, already three-quarters of an hour behind schedule and clustered around the stalled tractor and seed drill, your whole team is now on-site. Just seeing a bag of hempseed unleashes passion. The infectious excitement about the season opening in front of you all results in conversation that goes something like this:
“We can probably do two hundred fifty thousand units,” your partner gushes, pouring a bit of test seed into the seed drill reservoir from a 25-pound bag balanced precariously on his shoulder. “These babies look like they’re ready for it.”
Before you can decipher that remark, the tractor-fluid situation gets straightened out and the engine turns over, leading to a group cheer. The ice is broken.
The aged diesel motor is loud. You shout louder. The hawks scatter. You and your team continue crunching numbers, visualizing the killing the enterprise is going to make when this superlative crop finds itself on shelves.
“Gonna be a great season,” you agree, ignoring the fact that implementing your colleague’s 250,000-unit suggestion would mean 25 times the storage you have dialed in for the flower harvest alone.
As the seed drill is attached to the tractor in a sort of awkward Iwo Jima re-creation, you spend some moments wondering if they award prizes for Most Righteous Farmer of the Year. Before getting a seed in the ground, you tend to put the cart before the oxen.
In the business cycle, planting time represents what you might call the R and D retreat, or the spitballing phase. Some good ideas do come from these field meetings. But really what unfolds represents the primate love of daydreaming. It’s pleasant to visualize that “lying on the beach with an umbrella drink” moment that provides the final scene in 73 percent of movies produced in the 1980s. Everything is ahead of you.
7:51 a.m.: Tractor Moves. Leading a parade of choking farmers and dogs, the farm conveyance crawls 200 yards to the field, churning roughly Bhutan’s annual petroleum output. This is one reason my product labels boast of a petroleum-free harvest. The planting, usually but not always, has been a different story.
8:04 a.m.: First Seed Drill Malfunction. There comes a moment on planting day when the final distractions fade. You feel an all-systems-go sensation. You’ve built soil, acquired your genetics, and prepped your field. Your seed has germinated at 95 percent in the 100-seed paper towel test you conducted as soon as you brought it home six weeks earlier. The tractor has bumped its way to the east side of the field, something that seemed wildly improbable half an hour ago. There you plan to make your first “pass,” which is farmer-speak for the bundle of rows you plant each time your tractor does a lap.
Something clicks. The whole crew feels it. An internal timer signals that you’ve daydreamed long enough. Between fast-moving foggy hints of rain and skin-singeing teasers of how hot the day may get, everyone shoots one another an effervescent thumbs-up or shaka. Let’s get to work.
This, according to the universal calendar of hemp, is when the seed drill fails. As the walls of our bubble of forgetting explode around us again on May 28, Edgar and I shoot each other a glance that says, Oh, right. This.
This is my fourth year of planting delays. His 62nd. We know our day has changed. We will have to spend many gory hours resolving this kind of SNAFU.
The seed drill (also known as a grain drill) is a device invented to punish us for something (maybe for staying still and farming at all, rather than wandering around seminomadically after caribou, wildebeest, and bison, the way we’re hardwired to do). It’s a nonmotorized machine hitched to the back of a tractor (or oxen team), basically a storage container with carefully calculated leaks that drop seeds down a series of chutes from the bin to the ground as often and as deeply as you calibrate it to do. Theoretically.
Like the tractor itself, it’s supposed to make agricultural endeavors easier by improving on the time it would take actual human beings to plant seeds. Instead, working with a seed drill is easily the most maddening element of planting season. Not the only maddening element. Just the most reliably maddening. More practically, seed drill–maintenance delays ensure that agriculture remains about as efficient as it was on the first planting day along the Euphrates.
We appear to be trapped in a constant here, which I call Fine’s Law of Abandoning Traditional Economic Rituals, or FLOATER. This constant establishes that in mechanized agriculture (defined as farming that employs machines rather than hands, hand tools, or livestock), a mission critical problem with a poorly designed, factory-made piece of crap will occur exactly once per pass during the first morning of a given year’s planting season.
It can vary, but early in the day when everyone and everything is rusty, the time it takes to plant a pass plus deal with the malfunction leading up to it usually totals around an hour and a half. We have about 60 passes in front of us this day.
For a long while all the hawks can see are eight booted feet protruding, midfield, from under a tractor and its seed drill attachment. All they can hear is the occasional expletive when yet another socket wrench attachment proves to be just the wrong size.
Despite the delay, spirits are high in the long-angled morning light. That’s because the mood in the field is that of a home birth. We are hemp midwives, and loving it. If you speak to most midwives, they’ll tell you it’s a pretty joyful occupation. A perpetual birthday party. And in our bodies as we plant any crop, oxytocin is exchanged as in any parent-child relationship.
Plus as a farming group, enough of us know that the pace tends to pick up in the afternoon. Even during the worst moments of FLOATER despair, it helps to keep in mind that the hemp will get planted. It’ll just take 10 times longer than you’ve budgeted.
I haven’t yet heard anyone say, “Dang, planting day was just too much of a pain in the ass. I decided not to go through with it.” I have indeed heard such a sentiment following harvest quagmires. But not at planting.
The brain is a remarkably flexible chemistry lab. It can secrete, at electromagnetic speed, any emotion for which the situation calls. The sequence of planting day emotions is: Bliss. Frustration. Elation. Repeat. Unless you really do plant a small-acreage crop by hand, though (not a bad idea), just don’t imagine for a second that you’re immune from the FLOATER constant.
In our case at 8:04 a.m., what we notice before a single seed has dropped, before we have even “calibrated” the rate of planting on the device, is that the seeds aren’t dropping at all. Something is clogged.
During the brief periods when a seed drill is operational, the hopper at the top of the machine, filled with thousands of seeds, drops exactly one (yeah, right) down each opening in a line of such inch-wide openings that extend across the bottom of the hopper. Each opening has a roughly seed-sized exit that is connected to one of those long chutes. The chutes feed a drive wheel where the seed emerges near the ground. And each opening plants one row. That’s why a seed drill is supposed to be faster than hand planting: It plants multiple rows simultaneously. This drive wheel is what you’ll calibrate to plant seed at your desired spacing.
Probably the biggest problem with seed drills today is the composition and design of the chutes themselves. In principle, they’re just four-to-eight-foot-long straws, like elephant trunks. The primary issue is, for the past half century, they have usually and inexplicably been made from a variety of fake rubber that invariably cracks mid-tube when exposed to sunlight but fuses chemically to the two areas where the chute gaskets attach: at the hopper (the top of the chute) and near the ground (the bottom of the chute).
This makes it all but impossible to remove a chute from its metal fastening pins when cleaning or maintenance is needed. No reason it would occur to the designers of every seed drill in the world that a farmer might need to access the most essential part of the device—the one that actually plants the seeds.
On this now gloriously humid late-May morning in 2018, the issue is what you might call “be kind, rewind.” The farmers who previously leased our seed drill (I’m guessing sometime in 1973) didn’t clean it out at the end of their planting. Probably too blissed out by oxytocin. And the local farm-supply guys didn’t bother to check.
As a result, an invisible-to-us glob of moldy seed cholesterol is stuck in the least accessible part of 6 of our 10 chutes. This is dangerous because there is no way to know what kind of seed formed the clog. Pro farming is an industry where crop contamination is a major issue. Along with our hemp, we could be planting soy, lavender, or opium. Also, the fake-rubber seventh chute is, predictably, disintegrating, spilling out seeds indiscriminately.
No seed drill repair task is a good one. Either you crush your knuckles trying to access key areas of the device, or you engage in extended duels with a family of recluse spiders in the barn while looking for spare parts. I can save you some time on this one: The part you need resides under an unmarked bucket of old fertilizer sitting atop a pack rat nest. It’s another constant.
One moment you’re in your midwifery bliss mode, and the next your colleagues are trapped under a sketchily jacked-up half-ton piece of machinery, bathed in WD-40 while consulting a manual written in Swahili. In between testy requests to “pass the dang adjustable wrench—no the other one—the one that locks,” your crew starts making macabre jokes like, “How many hemp farmers does it take for automation to make life easier?”
Luckily we have a whole rotating team of Edgar’s extended kin on hand. It’s very hard to tell who are in-laws and who are nephews, aunts, or grandkids in the Winters-Flewellen Brady Bunch of a clan. Especially since a few in attendance might be locals Margaret met at the feed store that afternoon. But Margaret’s got a good work ethic–detection meter. Everyone is always uniformly pleasant and hardworking if they make it to this remote farm, which proves vital. Each time someone gashes a wrist to an extent requiring bandaging, a new farmer will crawl under the seed drill. So at least we get to be close to the soil this morning.
After 20 grunt-filled minutes, when we actually expose the clogged chutes, we have to ram through, hose down, and completely dry their interiors so they don’t clump right back up with our own seeds. Crouched in the soil and grunting, we resemble those clever chimps who poke sticks through logs to extract termites. Observing all this journalistically for a moment, I recall thinking, Man, all we are doing is trying to sink a couple hundred thousand seeds into soft soil. It’s about the oldest thing we do, right after hunting and gathering. Have we perhaps been overthinking it these past few centuries?
9:36 a.m.: Calibrating the Seed Drill. With chutes unclogged and refastened, now we are ready to calculate just how many seeds we want to get into the ground. We are, in other words, about to answer the universal sixth grader math question: “When will I ever use this in real life?”
By adjusting the drive wheel, you determine the rate and depth at which the seed falls into the soil as the tractor pulls the seed drill across your field. It’s circular, so geometry is involved. Your field is graphical and angular, so trigonometry plays in. And it’s a seed drill, so advanced knowledge of chaos theory is helpful. The decisions you make now will affect your whole season.
Say you want to plant one hempseed every 30 inches in 30-inch-wide rows at a ½ inch depth. First, get out your scratch paper, logarithmic tables, and metric-to-standard conversion charts. Fifty-six minutes later, attempt to move unmarked, rusted levers somewhere beside the drive wheel to correspond with the result of your calculations. A time-saving tip on the math: I find it’s not necessary to go more than six places on either side of your decimal point.
Now you can test your calibration. This only involves further jacking up of your seed drill on mushy, uneven soil (precariously, seems to be the custom, on a primitive jack prototype from the Edsel era) in order to measure the circumference of your drive wheel. That will tell you how far the tractor–seed drill caravan must travel for one seed to drop. You’re trying to avoid double planting, under-planting, unevenly spaced planting, or planting at the wrong depth.
Of course, the seed exit hole in your hopper will either be too big or too small for your hempseed. So bring several jumbo rolls of duct tape to your regenerative hemp planting as well as a powerful battery-powered drill. These are the easiest and most reliable modes of drive wheel–hole adjustment. Once the seed drops, some variety of metal disk, rolling pin, or flat rubber flap (like a squeegee) follows to cover the seeds. That allows the seed-to-soil contact that hemp wants for germination.
So you’ve now calculated how much seed to plant per acre. Or have you? A word about those rusty and unlabeled levers you’ll eventually find in a hidden spot on the machine. Don’t even bother to read the calibration chart that usually resides under the grain hopper lid. For one thing, “hemp” won’t be one of your settings. Also the printed drop-rate-setting numbers correlate to nothing but themselves. There are no marked units. If you set your seeding rate to 11 with that particular rusted lever, as on a Spinal Tap amplifier, it means “11 on whatever scale the Schmeiser grain drill assembly guy felt was 11 that day.”
Might be 30-inch spacing. Might be 300. I think that’s so farmers all over the world will be equally confused. It’s comforting to know that whether you’re planting in acres or hectares, meters or yards, and measuring your seed in pounds, grams, tons, or metric tonnes, at least the system is fair.
Even the John Deere–capped host of a seed drill–calibration video I watched to see if I was exaggerating some of my experiences could only say, “Sometimes you can get some help calculating by reading the calibration chart you’ll see under the grain hopper lid. But [and here he pulls out a calculator], it’s best to use this chart as an, um, starting point for your real calibration.” He should have added, “Also be careful, the heavy grain hopper lid tends to fall off backwards loudly if you have an idea as crazy as trying to open it.” I nearly squashed a Vermont colleague in a hopper lid mishap one year.
If your seed drill is relatively small, let’s say 10 feet wide like ours in Oregon, it might have a dozen chutes that can empty that many rows at six-inch row spacing. If you want 30-inch row spacing, leave one hole open, then fully duct-tape up the entry point for the next four chutes in the hopper, then leave another one open. Be careful as you tape these tiny spaces: If you leave any sticky part of the tape exposed, you now have a seed planter that works more like a strip of fly paper.
Now you’re ready to address your half-inch desired planting depth. It might make you feel better to adjust the particular rusty lever assigned to that task. But doing so doesn’t adjust the seed drill in any noticeable way. You wind up dangerously duck-walking alongside your tractor while manhandling the soil-punching disk part of the device until it seems like it’s churning less than three inches of your microbe-rich soil.
In case I’ve disguised the seed drill takeaway, it’s “Plan to spend a lot more time than you’d like calibrating, unclogging, or otherwise tinkering with your planting equipment.” It’s not so much that seed drills won’t work. It’s just that they almost never work well at first, sort of defeating the time-saving reason for their invention.
After a dozen plantings, I’ve seen a seed drill calibrate without hassle only twice. That’s an .833 batting average. Babe Ruth only hit .342. So five-sixths of the time, something goes wrong enough for stress pheromones to intrude on the oxytocin. These do not mix well. There should be warning labels to this effect on seed drills.
One of my two seed drill–assisted plantings that was worth the effort came 3,000 miles to the east. It worked primarily because my Vermont partners’ neighbor, Charlie Morse, had waded deep into that scary back part of the barn and unearthed a solid 1940s unit. This seed drill came to us from before what my sweetheart calls the Time of Plastic Crap. The thing was all metal, from an era when more pride was taken even in steel forging.
Once the New England branch of the recluse spider family had been relocated and the very few moving parts lubricated, this seed drill required no maintenance. And, icing on the cake, Charlie oiled the delightfully old-school main spring that anchored the device’s axles with hempseed oil. Worked great.
The other key factor in that planting’s success is that the seed drill was designed before the era of overengineering. Keeping things simple and functional: That’s how people survive in northern Vermont.
When Cary laid out our cultivation plans to Charlie over a microbrew one evening before planting day, Charlie puffed a few contemplative drags on his ever-present cherrywood pipe and said, “I think I have something that’ll work. But it’s old.” That turned out to be an understatement, but if I’ve learned anything from four years working in Vermont, it’s that Charlie’s is the culture of understatement.
The unit itself was small (the footprint of a golf cart) and simple: Two direct chutes dropped seed from two sensibly side-mounted grain hoppers next to two posts whose cymbal-shaped tops you could grab to manually adjust planting depth. Took half a second. Just a twist of the wrist. The thing looked like nothing so much as a mobile drum kit. There were no fake rubber tubes to clog: The seed dropped from the hopper to the soil. No calibration was required other than a touch of tape here and there—one small part of the right hopper had rusted through. You could tell from a look that this thing was going to work. When they needed refilling, the grain hoppers were not just easily accessible, but their tops came off only when you wanted them to, with a satisfying, sibilant clang.
Charlie, who like most Vermont farmers looks to be somewhere between 40 and 90 years old, loaded the seed drill into Cary’s truck bed with a winch, took it to a meadow owned by Cary’s father-in-law, and by midafternoon our Vermont acreage was planted and I really was tubing the closest river. That’s how these Yankees roll. You don’t hear a whiner north of the 32nd parallel.
I’ll never forget Charlie, champing on his pipe from the tractor seat while the rest of the crew walked beyond the seed drill, raking dirt over the seed: The device had no squeegee, roller, or disk to fill the hole into which the seed dropped. So humans—including Secretary of Agriculture Tebbetts—played that role. Nice day for a stroll.
To the casual observer, the pace of that planting might have looked a little slower than many modern plantings. But it was the exception to the FLOATER rule. We hardly stopped. The 2018 Vermont planting was my first in a continuing series of lessons that older might be better, when it comes to farming modes.
Why did humans ever stop doing it this way? My guess is persuasive fake-rubber-chute salesman. Or else the fake-rubber people bought out the seed drill people.
10:42 a.m.: One Row Planted. Back in Oregon, a seed finally gets planted when and where we request. It’s always a fun moment when you’re the guy crawling on his belly behind the seed drill procession, and you can shout, “A seed dropped!” In doing this, you employ roughly the same tone of voice as the starving Santa Maria’s lookout did when shouting “Land ho!” from the crow’s nest.
But even when the seed drill appears calibrated, here’s a tip I learned from Dan Townsend in Washington: Check on the seed drill’s performance often. Stop the show, get out of the tractor (or hop off the oxen yoke) and crawl around with your eyes attuned to seed drop rate and planting depth. Do this once per pass, even if things seem to be going smoothly. You’ll see why.
Once actual seed starts to drop, morale, which has started to droop with each wasted hour, is restored. The importance of this period in the day is not the 11 percent of the field you’ll get planted before the next problem arises, but the resumption of bonhomie.
The successful moments in a group planting provide an ideal way to bond with new partners. This is serious entrepreneurial advice. This is when you see who brings the work gloves, physically and spiritually. Who does and doesn’t complain about the sun/humidity/smoke/rain/blood. The humans with whom you’ve shared this hemp birth are your community. When we say, “Keep the economy local,” this is why. People vested in their own backyard can lead the rebuilding of rural societies worldwide. You have these people’s backs and they have yours. Not sure how often that is the case with stock trading.
11:28 a.m.: Second Seed Drill Malfunction. The most interesting fact about the seed drill tool is that the reason it will fail once per pass, per FLOATER, is never the same twice. For such a relatively simple machine (at the end of the day, it’s just a glorified slide), what’s astounding is the diversity of what can go wrong.
Maybe the way you set the incomprehensible calibration levels causes half your 20 acres of seed to drop on the first pass (or, after 10 acres, you notice almost no seed has been planted at all—I’ve experienced both). Sometimes you don’t even have the right size of discontinued hitch ball needed to connect the seed drill to your tractor, necessitating another town run before you even leave the barn. Surprisingly often on a day on which you wake thinking you’re planting a crop, you find yourself on hold with outsourced customer service in the Balkans. It’s different every time.
One of my more harrowing seed drill malfunctions had all hands taking turns huffing stuck seed out of chutes with a sort of homemade blowgun made from a section of garden hose. That’s how inaccessible this often-needed part of the machine was. At another planting two of us at a time had to ride, terrified, atop of the moving seed drill, using brooms to force the seed from the hopper into its chutes.
And no FLOATER problem will ever instruct you how to solve a future problem more quickly. The important thing is that something will malfunction and at intervals throughout the morning you’ll find yourself stranded in the field on your back, usually when profoundly hungry for lunch.
Our second total seed drill failure of the 2018 planting occurs when the freed chute gaskets—which we spilled so much blood to un-fuse—now don’t want to stay reattached to their chutes. Their size, viscosity, or maybe chemical composition has changed. As a result, one or three of them keeps sliding off over the course of a pass, dropping a half acre’s worth of seed in one heartbreaking mountain of fecundity. This necessitates breaking out the toxic goop with which organic agriculture seems to always bring one into the closest contact. Awful epoxies and two-part bonding cements make the chutes once again inaccessible. But at least they stay on for a pass or two.
Unless rain is imminent, this is a good time to break for lunch (you won’t, for another hour and a half), while your fingers still work and before they become completely covered with noxious gel.
12:05 p.m.: Customer Service Call. Every hemp planting is as unique as the birth of a child, and every one is an education. For instance, May 28, 2018, is the day I learn that you don’t want to be on the wrong end of an Edgar Winters customer service call. He speaks his mind, to be sure, starting in the humble Alabama drawl and gathering steam as he gets worked up. But the call is always more confusing than shaming to the subpar contractor or farm-equipment-rental fellow.
This is because Edgar is, with the passing of Yogi Berra and with all due respect to both Ringo Starr and George W. Bush, the world’s reigning king of the unintentionally metaphorical malapropism. Especially when you catch him stressed out in the field.
“I’ve got this thing all jacked off,” I hear him inform our seed drill–rental salesman via Margaret’s cell phone. “We’ve lost two hours of the day, and my brother-in-law’s still in the field, dismembering the thing.”
Ten seconds of silence ensue on our end of the call. Then Edgar says, “Nah, you’re missing the … You gotta make sure people return your rigs clean, man. It’s only logistical. What? Yeah, logistical. Like Dr. Spock. Now the dang gaskets won’t even bond to the … to the—”
That call only scratches the surface of both my adventures with seed drills and of what I call, in my texts home to family, Edgarisms-of-the-day. Bigger picture—check your equipment carefully before you use it. Modern hemp pioneer Ryan Loflin, a farmer we met in the pages of Hemp Bound, said you can bypass farm-rental shops and get planting gear cheap from the federal Farm Service Agency (FSA) office in some regions. Thanks to the hemp provision in the Farm Bill, now you can even tell the good folks there what crop you want it for. You still might want to make sure the chutes are clean before you load it up.
12:12 p.m.: Running Barn Laps. I am panting hard as the mercury crosses the triple-digit threshold just past noon. My legs feel rubbery with each barn run during this chute reassembly phase. (I am in charge of fetching tools.) I am no longer trying to avoid stepping on fellow farmers when I return to the repair spot. I do try to leap across already-planted rows, but I am not really paying attention to where I land. And, ominously, it is starting to cloud over again. A cloudburst might provide relief from the heat, but the tractor can sink up to its axles.
This is when pain, hunger, and close quarters begin to accentuate your annoyance at the way your nearest farming partner breathes. He sort of hisses out of his nose and through his mustache in the most grating way. And the mustache badly needs trimming. It’s difficult to tell where nostril hair ends and external facial fair begins.
1:15 p.m.: Lunch, First Aid, White Lies. Limping inside like a team down 17 points at halftime, you find someone has prepared the necessary 9,000-calorie lunch. As in commercial fishing, it’s important to cut the cook in for a full share. An army runs on its stomach and all that. Also as in the fishing trade, tall tales are necessary to maintain morale. The cook (in this case, Margaret’s mother, Kathy) asks me brightly, “So how’s it going out there?”
A just-arrived volunteer is paying attention to my answer. We have spent most of the morning repairing equipment. We are bleeding on the carpet and dripping sweat into the stew. I answer, “Could hardly be better. They say rain’s on the way. Perfect for germination.” As yet, we have little to germinate.
2:08 p.m.: Bee Distraction. With bellies full, just when we are all ready to really get planting, someone remembers that the remainder of the seed got left back in the garage. The tractor is switched off, which everyone recognizes is a highly experimental maneuver. This is when we hear the bees.
Bees are the new Save the Whales, what with colony-collapse disorder and the growing movement to rid humanity of dangerous synthetic pesticides once and for all. But even before that, everyone from A. A. Milne to the inventor of the facts of life story recognized that there’s nothing that says “life is overall good” like a lot of bees zooming around. When engines are off, the digeridoo-esque white noise captures your awareness as completely as a jet passing overhead. The bee density at planting season isn’t yet anything like the cloud it will become by flower time in August. But your groggy, yellow-and-black fellow hemp farmers are waking up, working the raspberries, and checking out who you are.
Both honeybees and native bees adore hemp flowers (especially the male flowers). “It’s just shocking how valuable hemp is as a pollen resource for all kinds of bees,” Colorado State entomologist Dr. Whitney Cranshaw said in a 2018 interview.1 I once watched a bee whose corbiculae were so loaded with hemp pollen pom-poms that she had to take a running jump to become airborne. I remember thinking, Pace yourself, sister!
Bee bliss session endings tend to be abrupt. In our case this afternoon in Oregon, someone must have found and emptied the seed into the drill hopper. I learn this when the tractor clears its throat and Edgar, who has a bit of a bearded, prancing Bombadil presence in a hemp field, shouts, “Hey, are we planting or are we napping?”
I jump away from my bee bush guiltily when his voice rings out, trying to look busy, but discover he is addressing his grandson, Chris, who is doing his meditation over at his own bee bush. And so we set to work on another pass.
4:21 p.m.: Halfway Through Sixth Pit Stop, Contemplating Hand Planting. It is during this final delay (too many seeds dropping from the pesky third chute) that, as I always do at this point in a mechanized planting day, I begin to think about earlier techniques. I wonder, Can it be as efficient (or close) for a professional, digital-age hemp farmer to hand-plant and hand-harvest as to use tractors and combines?
If you’re not a master mechanic and blacksmith, the answer might be yes. To see why, consider my all-time favorite seed drill FUBAR. It was in 2016 in Vermont, and the seed drill was wider than the roller that followed it. We wanted them to be equal so the seed that dropped from all the chutes would be sufficiently pressed into contact with the soil. That was when John Williamson popped into his shop and, before my eyes, cut and attached two eight-by-six-foot-wide metal sheaths to extend the roller’s range.
Unless tossing on a welding mask and building your own equipment is your idea of a morning meditation, you might consider the calculus of hand planting. Because it’s really not that hard to press a hempseed down the necessary half inch with your finger. I’ve hand-planted small-acreage fields in several states, and here’s the only calibration tip you need: A half inch is about the length of your finger up to its first knuckle. (In the “This Little Piggy” sequence, I usually use Wee Wee Wee All the Way Home.)
If you have six colleagues, you can probably plant three or four acres a day, budgeting some time for daydreaming and bee watching. Moderate acreage harvesting, too, can be done by hand, as we’ll see.
6:23 p.m.: Elation. The seed somehow gets in the soil. You eat dinner overlooking your planted field. And what’s more, you have no regrets. Of all the season’s ups and downs, planting day almost always provides the fondest memories.
You sleep deeply and dreamlessly following planting. Maybe because you’ve been absorbing so much vitamin D. Maybe because, like a dog circling a dozen times before settling down on a couch, your body tells you you’ve taken care of something elemental.
Then, a few days later, before you expect it, someone spots the first green hook of a sprout. Then 10. Then 1,000. Again flows the oxytocin. These are moments you never forget. You watch early cell division and all the associated miracles, followed soon after by the first leaf bifurcation. Before your own hands have healed, you see that distinctive cannabis hand shape forming on the little guys and ladies.
Congratulations, you’re a hemp farmer. You’re serving your family, community, and species by doing something that 10 years ago could have got you 10 years to life. Now it’s extending your life, and hopefully helping the customers who wind up enjoying the harvest.