Eng 21 - Farm as a Profesion

Sheynis Elena

English 21

April 26, 2018

Topic#1 I would never choose to be a farmer as a profession.

     I always dreamed of going to a summer camp where girls enjoy doing all kinds of art and

crafts, learn how play musical instruments and have lots of fun, but instead I spent almost all my

summers living in a village at the farm with my aunt. She had a good size farm where she had

about fifty different kinds of fruit trees, five greenhouses with tomatoes, a field where she grew

potatoes additionally, her farm also produced milk, cheese, sour cream and homemade butter. In

the back of her property, she had her livestock which included pigs, rabbits, geese, chickens,

ducks and cows. She used to sell most of livestock and crops to make a living. Every day I would

help with chores around the farm and a payment for my long hours of work was an cone of ice

cream. Having to touch all kinds of bugs, feeling dirt on my skin, and being exposed to smells of

animal waste and hearing animals being butchered made me realize that I would never choose

farming as profession.

     One of my chores was to remove nasty little bugs that were dark green in color, which made

them hard to see on leaves of the potatoes. They would swarm the potato plat and attach their

bright red eggs to the bottom of the leaves as soon as potatoes would start to bloom. Since

my aunt did not believe in pesticides, we had to manually remove them, or the plant could be

stressed and could die. I am not a big fan of anything that creeps or crawls, so every time

I had to touch those little creatures, I would get goose bumps. We did not have any gloves, so  

feeling their small legs scratching my skin was beyond disgusting.

     Pruning tomatoes was another task that I didn't enjoy because it involved working inside the

greenhouse, and that heat and humidity made it very hard for me to breathe. When I removed fan

leaves off the tomato plant, it made its stem thicker and stronger, which create better quality

product. It would not be so bad if those leaves did not produce glue like substance that stuck to

everything. I would have to shower twice to wash that stickiness off my skin, and the smell was

still present. It was impossible to wash that glue off the clothes, so wearing old outfits that could

never be fully cleaned felt horrible.

     Taking care of the animals was a nightmare. While I was feeding the livestock, I had to be on

top alert at all times because some of the animals were aggressive and would try to bite me and

sometimes they succeeded. Moreover, cleaning out their waste and not getting splashed with

manure that we used later to fertilize the plants would require a special kind of skillset. The days

when I came out of the stables without any droplets of poop on my face were considered lucky.