We started the onion harvest, and the rains came. It was a slow gentle shower. The dry clover patches sucked up the water quickly. Within the hour, the rainfall was gone. Moved on. Lasted long enough to clear the smoky air, a little.
The onions look good this year, got enough timely rain through the growing season. The water and long hot days produced fat, sweet onions. So far, so good. Still gotta get them from the field to dry. Then it’s time for the keeper onions. Same drill, different field.
We consolidated the hanked garlic in the barn to make room for other alliums. Soon Ailsa Craig and Red Torpedo onion varieties would cure on ropes until the neck seals to the bulb.
It’s been a long summer, full of work. No more, no less than for any working stiff in the state. In one of my more boneheaded ideas coming from long, work days in the sunny field was to put my name into the hopper to get on the governing board of the Montana Democratic Party, as the next chairman. I know, right. Everyone always loves that guy, I snark to myself.
I’ll drive to Livingston to give the eight potential Flathead and 200 plus statewide delegates my best pitch for why the state party should change course, revitalize, and just plain smarten up. I’ll ask Democrats to establish a transparent governing board that listens and is accountable to rural parts of the state. Whatever Democrats did over the past six years in Montana didn’t go over well with rural voters. We lost big time.
Look, I got an outsiders shot of winning. The party wants to coronate one of their own. I get it. It’s what has occurred for decades. Insiders select. Yet given the climate of today’s politics, I had the unstoppable urge to act, to seek change. Do anything, do something. I chose to tell my party we gotta change. And change now, not in two years. I realize telling anyone they gotta change never goes over well.
The work continues and the state party deserve a vigorous debate regarding change. To extract itself from a pandemic work mentality and get back into the office, working across the state, listening to people. To organize, to focus, stop the drama, and clean up its act. The same old, same old, won’t go. No matter how good the status quo tells us everything is. It’s almost like they’re not listening.
Change isn’t easy. Not on the farm. Not in politics. Those in charge, like to rule. But modern politics has overlooked working people and retirees across rural Montana for too long. Regardless of how politician repeatedly insist that expenses are reducing, getting cheaper, folks know that everything, and I mean everything like groceries, parts, or housing cost way more.
Montana farmers have lost much from Washington, D.C.’s new 25% tariff with Canada and gained unpredictability elsewhere across the world where growers had built deep ties over many decades to sell and purchase farm goods.
Many farmers are finding themselves underwater, yet again, with the cost of agricultural inputs like fertilizer and basic parts causing major distress on the wallet and savings. It’s a big problem in farm country when it cost more to produce a crop than a farmer can get at the elevator.
Farmers, like every other working Montanan across the state, face big increases in health insurance, home insurance, car insurance, crop insurance and many continue to see power bills and property taxes on a forever incline. All we hear from politicians is how they’re gonna fix it good, real soon. Yeah, right. Said that last year, and year before. They’ll say the same thing two years from now.
Change takes courage, discipline, and structure. Rural Montanans deserve to be listened to just as much as the urban areas. Democrats have to decide if they want to be more then just the party of college towns. No insider wants to hear that kind of truth, especially from a hard working farmer.
I’ll let you know how the convention in Livingston pans out by this time next column. Like I said, I’m the outsider choice, smart money is on the nice lady from Missoula. If I only got a vote.
On the farm, the work continues. After the onions are cured in the shade of the barn, the apples and pears will be closer to harvest. Soon thereafter it’ll be time to turn the garlic rows, to ready for planting before the ground hardens as we head in the late fall, much like we’ve done for three decades prior with saved seed.
On our farm, the growing season has been good this year. So far anyway. With days getting shorter again and fall rapidly approaching, September will hopefully continue to bless us with more kind, wet weather. Autumn is one great season on the farm.