What you do when you're not harvesting…
A friend sent this Youtube link to me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYb3aQjWp78&feature=player_embedded
We are both rural journalists and feel the agony and delights of "our" farmers keenly. So it was great to see a group of frustrated farmers who had shrugged off a heartbreaking turn to the year put the bizarre season to an interesting use.
A bit of fun to lighten an otherwise pretty depressing time, and it captured another group of farmers dealing with their own weather woes.
While it's usually only the BOM site that can hold a group of farmers inside and spellbound around a computer on a sunny day, this video kept the farmers at our house clustered around the laptop yesterday.
The new fans loved the video and how much fun it would have been to do, but in practical farmer fashion talk soon turned to the mechanics - how long it would have taken and commiserating on what that amount of time on one's hands said about the state of a much-anticipated harvest. And I loved how they capped it off by then thinking about the next job - "it looks like a lot of fun – 'til the water goes down and you have to start rebuilding fences."
When they fell away from the computer it was back to deal with the results of wild weather here; one straight back home to lift everything at the bottom of the garden to higher ground and stock the pantry as they wait for the river to peak and cut them off later this week.
And I can't wait to see whether this leads to a Hollywood career for the enterprising new film makers.
