No winter rest for Ohio farmers

There’s plenty to do on the farm dur­ing ‘off’ season

By RYAN CARTER

rcarter@recordherald.com

Although you won’t see them toil­ing in the fields from day­break to sun­set, the win­ter months are hardly a time of rest for Ohio farmers.

In fact, most farm­ers keep just as busy when the weather turns cold as they do dur­ing the hot sum­mer months.

“Win­ter time for farm­ers in Ohio is spent just like every other day,” said Adam Shep­ard, the Exten­sion Edu­ca­tor Agri­cul­ture and Nat­ural Resources at the Ohio State University-Fayette County Exten­sion. “For those pro­duc­ers who are rais­ing live­stock, they spend a great deal of time car­ing for their ani­mals and assur­ing they remain healthy and safe through­out the winter.”

While most of the field work has been com­pleted for the year, grow­ers are now tasked with look­ing back over the grow­ing sea­son and mak­ing deci­sions on how to reduce the risk for next year.

“Win­ter is also a pop­u­lar time to ser­vice equip­ment in heated shops and do some main­te­nance that may get neglected dur­ing the busy fall,” said Shep­ard. “Mar­ket­ing stored grain and fill­ing con­tacts with local grain ele­va­tors is also a pop­u­lar task for those grow­ers with on-farm grain storage.”

Pro­duc­ers are also given the dif­fi­cult task of mak­ing pur­chases for next year’s grow­ing sea­son before this one offi­cially ends.

“Grow­ers are given the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase a great deal of their crop inputs for next year while also receiv­ing a nice dis­count for order­ing early,” said Shepard.

Most grow­ers use the win­ter as a time to attend edu­ca­tional meet­ings, such as the ones offered by the OSU Exten­sion to help them be more pro­duc­tive in their oper­a­tions, Shep­ard said.

“Some grow­ers carry cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to com­pleted var­i­ous farm-related tasks that require train­ing and re-certification, which is nor­mally com­pleted dur­ing the win­ter,” he added.

The busi­ness aspect of farm­ing never stops, said Fred Hoppes, who has oper­ated a farm since 1967, when he was only 19 years old.

“Now more than ever, farm­ing is a busi­ness,” said Hoppes. “And if you don’t run it like a busi­ness, you’re going to go broke. I worked seven days a week for 40 years. There is no break.”

Hoppes, who retired from rais­ing live­stock in 2009 but still oper­ates his grain farm, added that not only is there no break dur­ing the win­ter months, some­times even more work may be required than when farm­ers are out in the fields.

“First of all, your tax returns need to be done prop­erly,” he said. “There’s machin­ery, main­te­nance, tax returns, the finan­cial aspect, etc. There’s a whole lot involved. And when you’re deal­ing with crop inputs, it’s a com­pet­i­tive world. You have to have your ducks in a row. You have to pay atten­tion of where to buy cer­tain items and where not to buy them.”

An increase in exca­va­tion in Fayette County has also added more work dur­ing the winter.

“There is more exca­vat­ing now than I’ve ever seen it because the prof­its are a lit­tle bet­ter and peo­ple can afford to do it,” Hoppes said. “I deal with the busi­ness side every day dur­ing the win­ter. You can’t just walk away when the win­ter months come.”

(Ryan Carter is man­ag­ing edi­tor of the Record-Herald in Wash­ing­ton Court House.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Jan 10 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.