Preventative maintenance

I’m a big fan of preventative maintenance. I like it when equipment works as it’s supposed to work and can be pushed hard when necessary to beat a weather window without breaking. Do we always get things looked at in a timely manner and follow maintenance schedules religiously? No, no, we do not. We have livestock and busy lives and enjoy the occasional day off.

This morning, Emily and I have the morning off thanks to one of our wonderful employees, Taylor, and my dad, who got up and are doing chores and milking. I’m still up early, writing this column, but this is fun work I only do once a month. Emily should be up soon, and we’ll clear a spot in the living room and do some yoga after I finish this cup of coffee and she gets some breakfast.

You might be saying to yourself: “Wait a minute, you do yoga? Isn’t that a thing only fit women who call thermal underwear pants and uncannily flexible aged men in India do?” Well, yes, I’m sure that’s a stereotype for a reason, but they aren’t the only ones allowed to practice yoga. They’re just probably much, much better at it than us. We like doing yoga to stay flexible and strong. I’m sure Tai Chi, calisthenics and a ton of other movement options are just as good, but yoga is the thing we found, and we haven’t had a reason to change.

Maintenance isn’t just important for the farm equipment; it’s important for our bodies as well. With winter coming soon, the slippery snow and ice will be upon us before we know it. Maintaining a strong and flexible body prevents you from ending up in the hospital because you slipped on a patch of ice while carrying a pail of milk and tore half of the connective tissues in your knee and hip. For anyone who has done that, I apologize for bringing up that painful memory.

I’ve mentioned before that I listen to a lot of books and podcasts while doing fieldwork. The 30 minutes of ads per hour on the commercial radio stations just doesn’t do it for me, and even Spotify music gets old after a few 16-hour days in the tractor. We have been busy hauling compost on all the hay fields now that we finally got the fourth crop up after it forgot to rain most of the summer — then did rain for three weeks straight when we originally planned to take fourth off.

That’s given me a lot of time to listen to books. One I recently listened to was about training for ultramarathons. I started listening to the book because it just automatically started playing after another book I had been listening to. I found it interesting, so I kept listening, even through the parts when they talked very in depth about different training styles and their effects on pyruvate uptake by mitochondria. Despite the fact that I will probably never run a 100-mile race up and down mountains, I’m happy I know part of what kind of training goes into being able to do it.

Sometimes, seeing the crazy things that people can do with their bodies, from running ultramarathons to maybe just touching their toes, feels like they were just born that way and it’s not an achievable goal, but it often can be. It just takes the right training and, depending on what you want to accomplish, possibly years and years of training.

I think I hear a cereal bowl being rinsed, so it’s about time to go do some of that training to touch my toes and maybe someday be able to put my hands flat on the ground with my legs straight.

Until next time, keep living the dream and don’t forget that your body deserves some maintenance too, not just your tractors. Get down and do some pushups before heading to work, balance on that curb while you scrape stalls, meditate for a few moments when life seems overwhelming. Any of those things are way easier than changing a leaky tire and are just as important.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.