TOWNER, N.D. -- When it comes to weather, there's no pleasing everybody. Sometimes you can't even please one person. Especially if he wants two kinds of weather at the same time.
I like some wind in the summer to pump the water in two pastures where we use windmills. I really dislike the wind in the summer when I'm trying to spray.
Some farmers in our area are getting big wind generators sited on their land. The checks from the power company are nice enough to make them glad Granddad homesteaded that windy ridge. That is, unless they've got a disappearing window of time to spray the crops in the blustery fields surrounding those wind towers.
Maybe it could just blow at night. Like a lot of thirsty people, my cows could start drinking at 10 p.m. The wind could pump water for the cows all night, then quit in the morning in time for me to spray some weeds.
Nighttime probably isn't the biggest demand time for electrical power, but some cities are fighting the trend. New York, the city that never sleeps, for instance. Las Vegas, where the stuff that happens there is supposed to stay there, usually has a lot happening at night under those big neon signs that need evening electrical current.
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Nighttime winds generating nighttime electricity could power those places, leaving calm, still days for spraying fields and killing weeds.
We'll put our order in to Mother Nature to get those windy hours changed.
Weed wars
As it is, here in the real world, the wind blows during the day and quits at night.
It's a rather poor arrangement for folks who need some still air to get their work done in the daylight hours.
I'd just as soon sleep in, but when it comes to killing my old enemy, leafy spurge, I'll set the alarm for the early hours of morning to go do some spraying before the wind comes up.
If you don't know what leafy spurge is, be thankful. Just pick your least favorite, local, nonnative, introduced perennial noxious weed, and you'll get my drift, so to speak.
That was an unintentional pun, but spray drift is what I try to avoid by beating the wind to the pastures.
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Cattle ranchers don't have to mess around with chemicals much, and that's fine by me. But leafy spurge has forced me to renew my restricted-use pesticide license, calibrate my sprayer and calculate my gallons per acre.
If I could just get the spray to land on the spurge and choke the life out of that miserable forb. When the wind blows, I get more spray on me than the spurge gets on it. I change clothes, clean up good and, so far, I haven't shriveled up and expired.
Depending on the wind direction, the spray might just drift over to some of my other spurge or hit troublesome broadleaf plants I hadn't even considered. It might go across the fence to get my neighbor's leafy spurge.
I could bill the neighbor for my unintentional custom spraying work or I could just wait for the wind to switch and give him an opportunity to return the favor. Hopefully, it doesn't just blow more weed seeds my way.
