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Neighborliness is more than a good fenceWhen my family had our farm we had a neighbor a couple of places up the road who epitomized the old saying "Good fences make good neighbors." This was mainly because he was such a lousy neighbor. His fences were always down and in disrepair. From the roadside, they simply didn't look like the kind of fences that a person could be proud of. Inside what fences he had, volunteer wheat sprung up everywhere. Dad had a nickname for this guy. The Mayor. The Mayor would roll down the country roads in his battered pickup truck and visit everybody while they were working in their fields. In our case, he'd amble out of his pickup and shuffle up to talk with us while we were working or putting out feed for our cattle, fixing up our equipment or taking care of harvest. While I think he meant well and was trying to be nice, The Mayor seemed to have this radar-like sense of knowing we were out working hard to get something done and would come out to interrupt us. We never knew when he took time to take care of things at his own place. "The Mayor's out here again," Dad would grumble at me as he caught sight of his frequent source of consternation. "He's out to check on everyone like he runs this part of the county. Too bad he won't check on himself." Memories of The Mayor came back to me recently at a meeting I attended that featured Extension experts on preparing one's fields for wheat planting later this fall. Everything these Extension folks said were of what not to do, which seemed to be all the things The Mayor used to do. Primary among them this time of year is taking care of volunteer wheat. The Mayor was horrible about this. The experts stressed that control of volunteer wheat eliminates problems for producers and their neighbors in the next growing season. Sure, I always thought leaf rust was a result of volunteer wheat, but there's so much more. Here's a list provided by K-State Research and Extension: -Wheat streak mosaic virus; -Wheat curl mites; -Hessian flies; -Russian wheat aphids; -Take-all; -Stem rust; -Barley yellow dwarf virus; -Banks grass mites; -Chinch bugs. That's not including the precious moisture volunteer wheat saps from the soil. It almost made my head explode to learn all this. "Wow! That's a lot of stuff that can go wrong because of volunteer wheat!" That's why chemical burndown of volunteer wheat is so important and why everyone who grows wheat needs to be aware of this. As we start to move to state fair season, now's the perfect time to get volunteer wheat under control. I heard a lot of discussion at that meeting about asking neighbors if they needed help in getting their volunteer under control. "I got this one worthless neighbor," one man said. "I'm afraid he'd come after me with a shotgun if I told him to get it taken care of." The Extension folks suggested that if neighbors said they didn't have time to do the work offer to do the work for them if they'd cover the fuel bill. That even means asking about clearing along field edges, ditches and roadsides that county road crews, sometimes, but don't always take care of every fall. The same thing can be said about fixing fences as cattle weaning finishes up and cows get set to move to winter quarters. Being a good neighbor in farming and ranching today requires an education that has to be taken to an even more professional level than ever before. With the costs of inputs being as they are, this is a must. At the same time, perhaps a few of the words of Robert Fulghum's All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten fit in this whole scenario of neighborliness. Play fair. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. As summer turns to fall perhaps we all can turn over a new leaf and work at fixing fences and controlling volunteer wheat. The Mayor may not have been our best neighbor, but he's a reminder to me to do right by the neighbors I now have. Hope he'll be the same to you. Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com. 8/18/08 Date: 8/13/08 Advertisement
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