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Harvest Season

As I ponder how best to fill this space, I often seek parallels in the real world that have some logical relationship to the state of our affairs in the club. No stretch to imagine that this is our season of harvest, since we have just finished bringing to life a very successful annual show. By all accounts, it was at or near record levels in every measure. We really only get one payday per annum in our business, and that was it, our harvest for the year. Like all the farmers among you, we now turn our attention to seeing what worked, what didn’t, and what seeds we need to sow for next year. Planting and planning, pretty much the same thing. It’s a little like playing the Futures Market.

But for the moment, we’ll content ourselves to reflect a bit on the recent events. We are known far and wide as a “tractor” club, but as one of our leaders is fond of saying, it’s really a “people” club in the final analysis, and we have had a bit of a harvest in that aspect as well. We are proud to note the birth of Trevor Gross, to Keith and Glenda, the impending birth of another child to Dan and Carla Mose, the recent marriage of Andy and Ashley Shuster, combining two member families, all to add emphasis to the considerable social dimension of our group. Like life in general, the human component of our group can be touched by joyful events and sad events, as the random nature of life unfolds before us. We have also experienced the tragic loss of member Mike Fuoss, as if to remind us how temporary all things human can be. As with the harvest, to everything there is a season.

Maybe it’s a Michigan phenomenon, but as the harvest season approaches, it often feels accompanied by a building sense of urgency. Deep down, we sense that we are running out the clock on summer, and as I have noted before, the days are getting shorter, just as the work is getting longer. Another cruel joke played by Mother Nature. And so it is with the club, we have a full calendar for the month of September, as we try to fulfill our year’s obligation to our friends, fans, and customers. We have to fit in all the remaining tractor events before the season can be put to rest, but as any good farmer knows, next year’s harvest is only as good as this year’s planting, so we have one more special event yet to stage. On the 25th of September we will have our 3rd annual Education Day. I think we could view this as our own version of “planting”, as we sow the seeds of interest in our club and the agricultural business into the fertile, impressionable minds of elementary school kids from the area. In an era when fewer and fewer youngsters have any direct contact with the history and the business of farming, I believe this exercise is of very genuine value to the kids involved. It is an investment in their future as well as ours, and that’s not just good business, it’s good neighboring. If you have any doubt, check the photo page from the 2008 Education Day outing. They don’t look that happy in math class.

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