Although we haven’t been reporting to the blog these past couple of months, the farm project has been evolving quite a bit. There is of course a substantial change coming, in that Joël won’t be at the farm full-time for the next few years while he builds up his coffee roastery. Which leaves us with the choice to a) reduce the operation to a size that I can manage on my own or b) not reduce but find other ways to get the work done. The option to scale down is, everyone will agree, the more reasonable solution. But… I dunno… it’s hard to work up enthusiam for a project that is less challenging. Jean-Pierre meanwhile has been gravitating more towards the farm project, so we have settled on an option that will allow the farm operation to increase while (theoretically) preserving our sanity, and our backs!

And so we come to the decision to buy a tractor: in order to increase production through mechanization. The implications of the decision are profound in so many ways, but we won’t go into that just now — I want to give you an idea what it can do!

Day one with the tractor was last Saturday, and a lovely day it was. Remember those fence posts that Jean-Pierre and I had pulled up from around the grass ring that will become the new garden? Two days of labour hadn’t sufficed to get them all picked up and hauled to a stack near the fire pit, and most of the posts were still lying around the field, more or less stuck in the frozen ground and covered with a few inches of snow. Jean-Pierre and Nicolas thought it would be good practice with the fork lift to try to pick some up. Whoa! I went out to see how they were doing after a while, and my jaw dropped: a job that would have taken us a couple more days in the Spring was done, easily, in a couple of hours.

In the photo above, Nicolas is lifting the posts that Jean-Pierre has previously pried up a bit. Nicolas does let Jean-Pierre have a turn on the tractor every now and then!