I look up to see Rob, one of the equipment operators, walking towards me.
“Hey,” I say, dropping one of the pencils back in the tin and reaching for a lighter one to work in some highlights.
He stops beside me, resting his hand on the side of the tractor. “Figured when the tractor didn’t come back, I’d find you out here.”
I glance up at him again. “Do you need it?”
“Nope.” He shakes his head, then tips his chin towards the sketchbook in my lap. “Looks good.”
I sigh and look down at it. “Something’s missing.”
“Hm,” Rob hums. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter, then shift my gaze to the field. “It is too.”
He lowers himself to sit next to me, leaning back against the tractor tire.
“Yeah. Sucks to lose this one, eh?”
“We’re not going to lose it,” I say immediately, and maybe a bit too sharply.
I glance at him with a wince, but he just laughs and pulls a long blade of grass to stick between his teeth.
“That’s the spirit,” he says.
I let my eyes linger on him for a moment longer as he gazes out at the field, and let the familiar comfort settle. Rob’s worked on this farm longer than I’ve been alive. He’s one of Dad’s closest friends, and he’s always been really good to me. Even when I was at my worst, when I was hitting Mom and running away from her for things I still don’t understand. I always ran to him if I couldn’t find Dad or Papa. He’d let me climb in the cab of the tractor or sit under his workbench, and he’d just talk. Not at me… just with me. He’d talk about whatever it was he was fixing, or what the plan was for the day. He’d talk about what went wrong with the spreader last week, and what he thought he might be fixing next week.
When I eventually came out from under the bench, he’d give me a flashlight to hold or a wrench to pass to him, and I’d help. And when I was ready, he’d walk me back to the house so I could try again with Mom.
I don’t remember those moments of anger, overwhelm, and upset. My brain just turned off, and I had no control. It still does that sometimes.
But I remember him being there and never judging me for what I couldn’t control.
And he’s still here.
Rob sits quietly next to me for a bit as I continue to add detail and adjust the lighting on my drawing. But something that’s been gnawing at me since yesterday keeps pushing in. Something Dad said when we were driving to Charlottetown, that I can’t get out of my head for some reason.
As I shift to deepen the colour of the sky, blending in faint oranges where the sun dips below the trees at the far edge of the field, I pull in a slow breath and keep my eyes on the paper.
“Dad said he’s getting someone from Farm Services to come work with us,” I say, adding some more light blue above the orange. “Why?”
“Ah,” Rob says. “Well… we don’t know what this field’s going to give us this year. So we need to prepare as if it won’t give us anything, just in case.” He pauses for a moment, and when I nod, he continues. “And that changes the whole plan. This is a big field, so it’s a big loss. Everything elsehasto perform at its absolute best now. There’s a lot riding on the rest of the farm, so we need to make sure we do it right. One bad season, and we’ll feel it for a very long time.”
I stop shading and lift my eyes to look over the field. “Yeah…”
But I still feel… uncomfortable.
“What’s going to change?” I ask, dropping my gaze to the paper again to keep working on the sky.
Rob hums. “Hard to say. They may recommend changes in planting patterns, rotation order, soil nutrients… Or maybe just support with planning and managing workload more efficiently. I imagine they’ll look at all the data your dad’s been pulling from the last several years and do some fancy computer shit to run projections and make models, or whatever it is they do. They can simulate different scenarios to predict how changes may play out, like if we switch fertilizer, or if another field underperforms. We can see what adjustments will give us the best output.”
My brow furrows as my pencil stills, and I look out at the field again.
Models? Like… of the fields? And what the fuck are projections? How can they take numbers from previous years and know that changing planting patterns would make any difference?
I’ve heard all of this before, but it just makes my head hurt. I can’t picture it, and I don’t understand how farming can be put into graphs and numbers. And now numbers are going to tell us how to farm?
My mind feels fuzzy as I try to picture the report Dad gave me, which I haven’t even tried to read again. Pages and pages of words, numbers, charts, graphs… and that was for just one field.
