Never Say Never

A gentle word of advice from a long in the tooth student of human nature.
Never say never, you are just setting yourself up for crow eating.

A few years ago, after several years of drought and near drought conditions Robert and I both vowed that we would never complain about getting too much rain again in our lives.

After 5 1/2 inches of rain in the month of June alone we are sitting down to a fine meal of crow and complaining about the bloody rain.. There is water sitting in every field, the dug outs have spilled thier banks, the creek is running high, I have mushrooms growing all over my lawn and things in the garden are turning yellow from too much moisture and a lack of sun. Just last night while towelling off after a soothing soak, I swore I felt the beginnings of web between my toes for Christ's sake.

Robert is in a foul mood, being behind in your work by a month or two would do that to anyone.

I have to mow the grass every three days so that it doesn't get too long and clog up the mower discharge. MY main concern is that is smarten up for July so that we can get some haying done..especially now that we have put our selves into the poor house buying a new tractor and discbine.

That's right,  you read it here first folks. Cathy and Robert actually bought a BRAND SPANKING NEW piece of farm equipment instead of farm sale cast offs.  and not just one new piece but TWO...pieces of new equipment.
It was a very traumatic experience for us both...having never done it before...Robert had to throw a hissy fit with the bank to get the terms we wanted...and to spare the boring details...we are now in hock with the bank for the next ten years...Life as we previously knew it has ceased to exist...we are paupers now...having to scrape every dime to make next years payments...But to quote Robert..." it was either we do something drastic, like buy a new tractor or we get out of farming"...... All our tractors are at least 30 years old or older and on their last legs...Robert is not mechanical enough to fix them on his own he says...but I think he has done an awesome job keeping them going this long...

Anyway its done and all that's left is the paying....we get the disbine next week along with a loaned tractor since our new one won't come until the end of July....

The whole ordeal turned into quite a pissing match between the two sales men...John Deere and Case IH dealers.   It is amazing the mark up they have on that equipment and the gobs of money they can knock off when they want to.  The cost of our tractor went from $ 140,000.oo  to in the end$ 112,000.oo and I bet they still made buckets of money on the tractor.

So in a month they will deliver our new tractor and a guy to spend the day with us and show us all the computer stuff...and how to run it.  It was funny but after we signed the deal and headed into the city for groceries...rather be ecstatically happy we were both nearly barfing out the windows...
that works out to a shit load of money.

112,000.oo  for the tractor
  16,000.oo  for the loader for the tractor
  29,000.oo for the discbine
__________
157,000.oo   quite the sticker shock for two old farmers who have never bought new stuff.  It was a very steep learning curve. Very steep.