In agriculture, as in many other jobs, every day we are faced with decisions that may be as simple as getting up at five or six a.m. Leaving for work early enough can allow you to have a leisurely coffee and chat with coworkers before work starts.
Those who leave just a few minutes later will hurry and be frustrated and caught in rush hour just as the majority of other workers are daily.
Dairy farmers that milk their cows at twelve hour intervals twice a day or eight hour intervals three times every day seem to ship more milk per cow milked than those who have uneven times between milking.
On many hot humid summer evenings we see heat lightning light up clouds far enough away that we don’t hear any thunder. As a kid, I listened to many of my elders exclaim as we watched this evening light show, “There is no rain in those skies.”
A few nights ago we were entertained by a heat lightning show as we drove home. Because it was a hot humid night, we opened windows before retiring for the night only to be awakened later by a real thunder storm and rain blowing through open windows and right across our bed! I had just received another lesson about public opinion versus a second opinion.
A couple decades ago a new herbicide was introduced for killing weeds in grain fields that were under seeded with alfalfa that would produce future high protein hay crops.
At the time, spraying with an aeroplane was the choice of application used by many neighbours. Aerial application was fast and left no wheel tracks and tramped no crop like conventional tractor sprayers did.
Within a few days, the sixty acre grain field was weed free and the grain crop looked perfect. After closer inspection I noticed that all the little alfalfa seedlings were dead too. The only place that the alfalfa seedlings were not killed was under a hydro line near a hardwood bush where the aeroplane couldn’t spray.
After spending a couple days re-tilling the field after harvesting the grain and at a cost of several thousand dollars to buy and replant the new alfalfa seed, I learned that getting second and sometimes third and fourth opinions rather than doing what others did is often worth some time.
I once sat in on several parliamentary hearings as a major drug company spent untold fortunes lobbying and testifying, trying to get a new man-made hormone that allowed milk cows to give more milk, approved for sale in Canada. This hormone was later approved in the U.S.
Because of a Canadian whistleblower exposing some undisclosed and unfinished trials and because of the tenacity of one Canadian senator, the hormone was never released for sale in Canada. The whistleblower was later dismissed by the government of the day but years later he was reimbursed for unjust dismissal. Because of adverse health effects on the cows it is used on and negative public opinion, the hormone once used on the majority of U.S. milk cows, is now used very little in the U.S. too.
The pills, medications, and medical procedures that many of us take or receive are tested many times before being used widely. What works great for one person may cause another even more sickness and grief. In this world of “snap decisions” and millions of dollars of testing before anything is released to the public don’t take all advice as gospel and don’t be afraid to ask for second opinions.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
