Farm living fosters innovation

The life of a farm kid can be quite exciting, but it can also be interspersed with unbearable intervals of being stuck in a location with nothing in particular to do.

Innovation without preparation is a skill we learn early in our careers.

What good is the sand that blows all over the fences and in your face? It can be the best alternative to the snow we don’t get to see when it has developed into a tall enough hill — hopefully with minimal vegetation to impede your downhill path. And the optimal angle depends on how fast you like to go and how much room there is to land at the bottom.

Beginners can ride those plastic discs down if they don’t mind the possibility of a little spin. For the crazier kids, a snowboard can be much more directionally controlled, but also can be more likely to not make it all the way down on the intended surface.

What is there to do when you are at the corrals and there is nothing but a manure pile and time to kill? Well, you find some way to slide down it.

If you happen to have left your sandhill snowboard in the back of one of the pickups that you used to get there, you can do it in proper style.

When you weren’t that conveniently supplied, a cowpie fight can be an exciting endeavor. You’ll find that the motivation to avoid getting hit is much more serious than in a simple dirt clod battle.

And the fun doesn’t have to stop when you get back to working the cattle.

If you ended up with the job of pushing the calves up the alley into the shoot, you’ll find yourself with time to kill and fun to devise. If the alley has suitable overhead pipes to grab on to and get yourself up over the calves, you can surf the bovines in lieu of having to use such an amateur method as poking them with a hot shot.

You can try and catch the goldfish that are swimming around in the tank, an amusement that will figure out if you have fast hands. You can climb the sheds and equipment that happens to be nearby. Or you can paint murals on the crowding alley walls with paint markers that are supposed to be for marking a bovine head.

Audra Brown has also roasted quite a few oysters out of boredom. Contact her at: [email protected]