By Jim Hagarty
2011
A farmer wears many hats, both literally and figuratively. He is a meteorologist, able to predict weather with uncanny accuracy, using the behaviour of birds and animals and even the leaves on the trees to make his forecasts. He is an agronomist, able to identify soil structures and needs and knowledgeable about both natural and chemical ways to enhance the power of earth to grow food. He is proficient in animal husbandry, able to deliver baby goats at 3 a.m. or treat a bloated cow and save its life in the process. He is a mechanic, able to keep machinery new and old in running order. He’s an architect and carpenter, erecting sheds, barns and all sorts of other outbuildings and feeders.
And maybe most important of all, a farmer is an inventor – the world’s first do-it-yourselfer, a man who through necessity and to satisfy his own curiosity, comes up with ingenious solutions to tricky problems and dilemmas. In another life, my Dad could have given Thomas Edison a run for his money. The most fun he had farming was in designing new ways to do jobs with less back-breaking labour. Some of his solutions were no solutions at all and, in fact, has some serious consequences which I will write about someday, while other ideas worked out brilliantly.
I was always in awe of this ability of my father to assess a chore and devise a strategy to do it in a better way. I have inherited a little bit of this ability and love nothing more than to solve a problem with some thoughtful ingenuity. In both my Dad’s case and mine, necessity always has been the mother of invention as neither one of us could just go out and buy the latest, most expensive gadgets.
Many years ago, the five-acre gravel pit at the back of our home farm froze over well in winter and some chums and I would have hockey games on the ice. But even on great pond ice that sometimes was so smooth and glassy you could hardly stand up on your skates, a couple of hours of hockey would rough it up a lot and leave it with ruts.
To the rescue came Dad one day. He drove the smallest of our John Deere tractors right out on the ice and parked it near the rink we had carved out. He then chopped a hole in the ice and into the opening he dropped one end of a hose that came from a pump that was attached to the power take-off of the tractor. He started the tractor and engaged the PTO. The hose underneath the ice sucked up water from below and he grabbed the other end of the hose and flooded our rink with it.
The tractor stayed there for the longest time and when we needed to, we started it up and flooded the rink. I know that that little success would have made my Dad very happy. He had put his thought power to work and solved another problem, albeit a small one.
Over the years he came up with more ingenious schemes than that, but to a 10-year-old boy, having a Dad who could perform a miracle like this while his friends stood around in wonder, was a pretty special thing, and went a long way to cementing his hero status for me.
