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Friday, April 13, 2012

plowing straight

this joke actually has a couple of morals to it and it strikes a chord with me because i'm a farm girl.

two farmers plow their fields.   the first has nice straight rows where as the second has terribly crooked rows that don't follow each other.   the second farmer looks at the field of the first and askes him how he gets his rows so straight.    he tells him that its simple, "pick something off in the distance and use that as your guide instead of watching the ground ahead of you all the time."   so the farmer tries to plow his field again using this advice.   he comes back again with horribly crooked rows and goes to the other farmer to ask for more advice.    the experienced farmer has never seen such a thing and asks if he had chosen a distant object to focus on.   the second replies "well, i kept lined up with something in the distance just like you said.   but that dang cow i was watching just kept moving!"

quick morals to this story.   choose your long distant goals, leaders, destinations, whatever you focus on, choose wisely.  

the thing that struck me though was the reprocussions of not following a straight path.   first off, straight rows are not about looking good.   water has to flow down those rows and later, the harvester will be driving down them.   crooked lines mean the water doesn't flow correctly, the crops don't grow as well or at all.   when the harvester tries to drive through, if the lines are crooked and don't line up with each other, it runs over crop instead of running down the rows so your losing crops.   so the choices you make now can have larger effects on future "harvests".  

and really, if you don't have experience driving a tractor, maybe you shouldn't buy a farm.