As someone who has had several desk jobs before returning to work on my family’s dairy farm, I understand the different types of exhaustion associated with each. A desk job leaves you restless at the end of the day and mentally worn out. Farming, on the other hand, often leaves you more worn out physically (although, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of mentally exhausting moments as well).
Dairy farming and crop farming often involve numerous repetitive, somewhat mindless tasks, such as scraping manure out of freestall barns several times a day or hauling endless loads of silage. And when you’re running low on sleep, it can be tricky to keep those heavy eyes open to finish up the more mundane chores. A lot of times, music will help me push through. Whether listening to the radio or focusing on my curated playlists, music can put pep in your step and is easy to have on in the background. If I need a little more stimulation, I often turn to podcasts. When you end up sitting in a tractor by yourself, podcasts allow you to listen in on a conversation and keep your brain alert, plus the topics are vast. But, when I need to keep my brain going while providing some much-anticipated entertainment, I break out the audiobooks.
Listening to audiobooks is just like reading a physical book in that when you get into a good book, you want to keep turning those pages — or in this case, keep listening to more minutes. I find that a good audiobook can make some of the more boring or even dreaded farming tasks quite pleasant, while leaving your hands free to get things done (I use small wireless Bluetooth earbuds, while my husband uses a Bluetooth headset because he uses it for phone calls as well).
If you’ve never tried out a podcast or audiobook, I sincerely encourage you to give it a go! My pro tip is to use the app called Libby, that allows you to check out audiobooks for free using your library card. Or you can, of course, buy audiobooks on several platforms.
Besides the benefits of keeping me awake and providing entertainment during routine chores or long days in the tractor, there’s another huge advantage to audiobooks. You know the classic question most people ask their spouse when they get home after a day of work, “How was your day?” Well, when you work all day, every day, with your spouse, that basic question is pretty inconsequential. A lot of our chores are completed alongside each other or we at least know what the other did all day, so there isn’t much to debrief on over the dinner table at night or on car rides. So, what do my husband and I talk about? We, of course, talk about our kids, families, futures and so on. But, as for the day-to-day work questions, they just don’t apply to our situation. Since we’ve both taken up listening to audiobooks, we’ve started recommending favorites to each other or listening to whole series together. Just like that, we have something new and a little different to talk about. We get excited for the other person to finish a book so we can discuss it, or we check out books for the other to listen to.
If you’re looking for some entertainment during the long, summer days on the farm, or are looking for a new way to connect with your farming spouse (or mom, brother, etc.), I highly encourage you to give audiobooks a try — you might just get hooked.
The author dairy farms with her parents and brother near Hawkeye, Iowa. The family milks approximately 300 head of grade Holstein cows at Windsor Valley Dairy LLC — split half and half between a double-eight parallel milking parlor and four robotic milking units. In the spring of 2020, Molly decided to take a leap and fully embrace her love for the industry by returning full time to her family’s dairy.
