Working in the Heat

I have a great respect for anyone who can do hard work outside in the summer heat. This last month, the stretch of high humidity, brilliant sun, and only intermittent breezes made farm work rough—and some days impossible.

I’ve never been very good with the heat. With cold, you can add more layers, dip inside for a warmup, or catch a hot drink. But with the heat, it seems to follow me everywhere, relentlessly. A cold shower or an iced drink (and, of course, gelato) create a break in the action, but then the heat finds you again, sucking with it any ounce of energy you may have regained.

During morning chores before opening Farmstead Creamery & Café, there’s a time at the wakening of the day when there is no breeze. The sun is gradually climbing, shadows shortening, and you can even feel the moisture rising up from the land to meet the sky as the dew on your boots disappears. Those same boots that kept my socks dry just an hour before are now individual torture devices, baking my feet. Time to swing back to the house to change into breathable shoes…if only it didn’t seem to take 20 minutes to walk back to the house in a daze.

My legs get weak and heavy, my head gets light and dizzy. Sometimes I’m even plagued by nausea. While carrying buckets of water or bags of feed, my motions slow to a crawl during extreme heat. I’m sweaty and sticky—I don’t even want to touch myself! The crown of my wide-brimmed sunhat is soaked around the edge, and my arms from below the T-shirt sleeve to the top of my chore gloves are itching with the next round of sunburn and bug bites. Flies buzz, pestering me and the livestock relentlessly.

The animals are certainly not fans of the heat either. They drink two to three times as much water (which means more hauling for me), seek any available shade, reduce their movements to a minimum, and pant. Chickens pant, stretching out their necks on the ground. Turkeys pant, spreading their wings away from their bodies to release heat. Ducks pant, making little gasping sounds.

Sheep pant, wishing they didn’t grow wool this time of year. Pigs can even pant in desperation, as they wallow in the mud to create evaporation since they can only sweat off the tip of their nose. The dogs pant, their pink tongues lolling out the side of their mouth. I haven’t seen the bees pant, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they could!

Butchering chickens is a real treat, standing out in the heat. The propane scalder sends waves of visual distortion through the air. Sometimes, as I’m loading and hauling chickens either to the festivities in the barnyard or out to the recently vacated chicken tractor pen, I simply have to stop and let myself evaporate for a while before going on. It’s just too darn hot to be working this hard!

Grandpa, who is now 88, seems to tolerate the heat better than any of us. When we’re reduced to laying on the tile floor in the walk-out basement, he’s still out cutting grass! Grandpa grew up on a farm in central Illinois, where summers are beastly hot with no air conditioning to escape the situation. AC on a Depression-era farm? Forget it! They still had to cook on a wood or coal stove outside in the summer kitchen…just imagine canning fruit for hours over a hot stove in this weather!

Maybe growing up this way allowed Grandpa’s system to find ways of working with the summer climate better than ours, though even he remembers days as a kid on the farm when work was called off because of the heat. His favorite story is of his own dad calling off a day of threshing before the workers, drenched in sweat, succumbed.

On our farm, work is forced to be squeezed in early in the morning and late in the afternoon. The aquaponics greenhouse becomes an unbearable oven by 9:00 am. Even the plants wilt limply at midday, perking back up at night. One afternoon the thermometer read 112 degrees in there! Cool evenings are the only way to keep the water in the system from rising too high in temperature, harming the fish and plants.

I can’t sit on the black seat of the ATV that pulls our water tanker around on the farm because it’s scorching hot. I wipe my wet hand across the well-loved vinyl and any moisture instantly evaporates. The lid on the dumpster burns my fingers unless I grab them gloved—the painted metal has soaked up so much solar energy I could probably cook eggs on the surface! (Ew, though, not on a dumpster lid…)

An angry storm passes, followed by a brief relief from the blazing sun, but then the steamy mugginess ensues with a new horde of mosquitoes buzzing at my face. They lay in wait in the evenings by the poultry, just in time for chores. Before darkness fully settles, I make the rounds again to fill waterers and lock in the birds to keep out marauding predators. The latest hatch of mosquitoes clings to the door frames, ready to attack. They bombard my face, latch onto my arms, and chase me across the pasture. With each chore station, I take a deep breath, dive into the swarm, and rush out again–hoping to make it through the ordeal without losing too much blood.

Oh for the days of fall—I can hardly wait! That crisp dryness in the air, the cool nights, the demise of the biting insects. But in-between now and then is still August, likely with more heat and more bugs. It’s all part of the process, part of the growing season, and it certainly brings folks in for gelato. But working in the heat is certainly not my favorite part of summertime. Time for a cold shower, and then back to chores. See you down on the farm sometime.