Everyone sees a farm as something only an adult or a wise old man runs. This was true for our farm until 2023, I was 14 at the time and that was the year I found out that I would be running a farm by myself. When I first heard the news my stomach dropped. I thought I was not ready to run a farm. I did not want to give up the few sports I was in, and I just thought it would be way too much work and I wouldn’t get anything out of it. But after thinking it through I realized I needed to step up and help the farm. Even though I still have mixed feelings about farming, I did it anyway. 

My grandpa and my dad are the ones who normally run the farm, but that year my grandpa had tests at the doctor that would not be accurate if he bounced around on a tractor. Which made him not able to farm that year. But my dad was still available to help, so it was going to be me and him. That was also the year when we got out of school early for school construction. My dad has a full-time job on top of farming, and I run my own lawn care business. I could schedule the lawn mowing around farming. So, I decided to spend my first few weeks of summer planting fields by myself, and giving my dad the year off. I was not 100 percent certain of this decision, but I knew if I needed a little help, my dad would be more than willing to help me. With that reassurance, I knew I could do it. 

Luckily, I wasn't just thrown into the deep end to figure out how to run the farm. The amount of time I spent on the fender of the tractor with my grandpa and dad paid off. I initially thought I wouldn’t need the skills I'd learned from those times because I never in a million years thought I would run a farm. But in this case, I am glad I took the time to ride along with them. That wasn't my only resource for figuring out how to run the farm, I also did a lot of YouTubing, but not information on how to get the fields ready. I already know how to do that, but I used YouTube to learn how to set the planter, what population is the best for corn and soybeans, or how many pounds per acre I needed of fertilizer. Between my grandpa, dad, and YouTube, I made it through. With all this preparation and digging in the back of the brain for information, it was finally time to start farming. 

The first thing to do was tillage, we run a full tillage farm so I had to chisel plow, spread fertilizer, finish cultivating every field, and the next thing to do was plant. Throughout planting I was very stressed out, I didn’t know if the planter was plating right or if I was plating it in a way that would be easy to harvest. This wasn't so much for soybeans but it was for corn because I have to follow the rows when harvesting corn. But the scariest thing about planting is I don’t know if I had rabbit runs or miss plants for at least a week after it’s planted when it pops out of the ground. But I just went with my gut and sent it. Until that day when they popped out of the ground, I would drive to each field every day, sometimes multiple times a day until they did, in fear that I screwed something up. But the day I drove to the fields and they were up, they were almost perfect and had no miss plants. I did all that worrying for nothing, but most of all I felt the reward I never thought I would get. I felt accomplished, not the feeling when my room was clean. But the feeling that I pushed myself and it paid off. 

With the planting successful, harvest came quicker than I thought. But this year was different from any other, not just me running the farm myself but the yields were fantastic, we yielded 60 bushels an acer beans and 250 bushels an acer corn. This was the 3rd highest our farm has ever had. I never thought I would get excited over yields of a crop but it felt like my birthday. My initial feeling was that I was not going to like farming, and thought I was going to lose out on the few sports I was in but my feeling for farming did a total 180 when I saw the yields that the crops produced and how excited I got over that. I never in a million years thought at the age of 14 I would run a farm by myself, but I did. Since then I have been very involved in our farm today, have quit football so it's not in the way of farming, and I have joined FFA. I have found something I can’t live without and will somehow implement agriculture into my life.