When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging

I love John Deere equipment. Almost every piece of our Union Grove Farm equipment is John Deere green. Sometimes I love it too much – because I also have this drive in me to always want to make things better. I used to buy old equipment and spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars fixing it up, believing if you loved something enough it would always work for you in the end. It has taken a few lessons to convince me that perhaps my son, Benjamin, is right: buy once, cry once.

We have well over a million dollars of “big iron” on the farm, but it is the right equipment for the speed to get things done, especially John Deere Gators. I have an old Gator that was among the first pieces of equipment I purchased. We depend on Gators every day for hundreds of tasks – watering, spraying, hauling equipment from one site to another, checking the crops. The list goes on and on. We have rebuilt this particular Gator two times, and I hate to part with it, but I simply can’t keep it running. Adam, our farm mechanic, has put literally ten thousand dollars into its upkeep over the past two years, and today it sits in the shop waiting on yet another repair.

It’s time to say goodbye to an old friend, as the financial hole it has put me in is deep enough to have purchased two Gators to replace it. It’s a life lesson, but it sure is hard to think about not putting money into it and not seeing it toddle around the farm, purring when it stops and waiting on its next task.