Peanuts and Cotton

Fenced grasslands morphed to unending tilled fields as we neared Lamesa Texas and the Bell’s cotton farm… also former charter customers. The monochromatic newly planted crops of cotton and peanuts reminded me of the gentle rolling open ocean, boring to look at unless weather comes in! Sure enough, our first afternoon on the farm a powerfully fierce golden sand storm kicks up, with high winds, full rainbow, lightning and thunder that got lost in the vastness of it all.

This 2000 acre farm is a family affair which dad, mom, son and daughter work. When we first met on ‘Surprise’, Corky shook their hands and flipped over the kids’ hands to see huge calluses from the field work… never had we seen that in all the years of running our summer youth camp, Awesome Adventures, on the kids from the leafy suburbs of Connecticut!

150 lambs are to be delivered next week. New efforts to make life easier and more lucrative… sort of. Issues of training 2 sheep dogs, the health of the herd, feeding, weighing, sorting, dousing and dipping, and protecting from coyotes, snakes and bobcat seems overwhelming. Then there is the manure which will attract flies, maybe by the thousands. But Melissa is planting copious lavender which repels flies, she says.
These ‘salt of the earth’ folks deserve the pot at the end of the rainbow!