Favorite colors

If we had a round table discussion about everyone’s favorite colors, what would you pick? Do you know what your spouse or partner would pick? Would men even volunteer a color if it wasn’t the color of their tractors?

On the road trip home from World Dairy Expo, I started to think about Mother Nature’s colors at this time of year – the oranges, yellows and bits of red. The hardwood trees in our Driftless Area of Wisconsin started turning colors three to four weeks ago. We often get to see those colors starting, hitting prime and then a frost comes along and turns everything brown immediately. It’s almost like Mother Nature tipped over the easel for painting, but we don’t lament long – the colors will come again next year.

We have red tractors on our farm, but color alone isn’t the reason we have them. We grew up with them, many have the same filters, and they are simpler for us to repair ourselves. We do have some green equipment – a corn planner, a haybine, a no-till drill and a baler, so we’re not stuck on red.

However, as a tenant of the soil, I like green. Especially this time of year, as we remove a green corn plant for silage and replace it with a rye cover crop. We plant no-till rye immediately after the corn silage is harvested and then apply liquid manure over the top of it. With the warm weather we have been having, the rye will sprout within two to three days. The young sprouts are purple and then turn to green within about five or six days. I find myself glancing at these fields from the road hoping they will turn green soon. When that happens, we know we are doing our best to conserve our soil and the nutrients in it. If the rye can get started in September or early October, it will help sustain our whitetail deer population in the winter, too.

Another color that is very common in our area is brown. Brown soil, brown trees, brown manure and brown roads mean winter is coming or is here. Open winters are nice for doing chores, but a two- or three-inch blanket of white snow sure makes the country look pretty. I am not an artist and probably couldn’t draw a tree that would pass a third grade art class. A few years ago I was taking a servant leadership class at Viterbo University in La Crosse, and the instructor posted some artwork on a board and asked for my interpretation. I bluntly told her that art interpretation was out of my league. The closest I get to art is driving a manure spreader around a field and making designs in the snow. College students were introduced to agriculture that day.

We live on top of a ridge so the sunsets, early mornings, rainbows and storms present a multitude of other colors. And, lucky for us, we cannot see any neighbors from our farm. When night falls, it is totally dark here. We can sit outside and listen to the coyotes howling and see a thousand stars. There’s actually an observatory operated by a university in Illinois on a neighbor’s farm for that reason.

Coming from World Dairy Expo, we need to acknowledge the colors of the best-looking cows in the world. Those show fitters can make the black and whites shine as well as the red in the Red & Whites, the roan in the Milking Shorthorns, the brown in the Brown Swiss, the Jersey tans, and the dark red and other colors in the Ayrshires. When a local TV station does a news clip and says there are nearly 3,000 cattle at the show, few people understand how big this show really is. How many bales of yellow straw, green hay and brown feed mixes are necessary for all those exhibitors to lead their perfectly groomed animals into the ring. I didn’t know there were that many pairs of white jeans and white shirts in the country. Isn’t it remarkable that dairy show people dress in the color of milk?

One last color I need to honor is blue. If we didn’t have blue skies and blue water, we wouldn’t have much of an environment, would we? So have some fun at the dinner table or the café and ask someone about their favorite color.