I wrote once when I was young, that farmers had about 40 seasons to ply their trade. When I wrote that, 40 years seemed an unimaginably long time.

Here I am, past that number, still putting in a crop. You could say I’m in extra innings.

Each planting season is highly anticipated, stressed over, hard work, and unique. No two are ever the same. If I am done planting, this one was quite pleasant.

I say “if,” because replanting acres is not uncommon. The last two springs are examples of that. In both years, hard and excessive rains meant I replanted large numbers of acres, more corn in 2023 and more soybeans in 2024. I never put my planter to bed until June, lest I jinx things.

This year the ground “worked up” really well. No mud spots, dry on top, moisture down below. We got started on April 15, which is ideal, and finished May 5, which is the earliest ever.

“May 5,” reminded me of “July 5.” July 5 was the day I finished planting in 1991. That was the year from hell: incessant rain, tractors stuck in the mud, broken arm, water in basement, pregnant wife. It gives me shivers to think about. We’ve probably all had a year like that where just surviving is all we can hope.

Back to present time, we have an eight-row planter. Like much of the way I farm and think, it is outdated. I tell people when I’m done farming, I plan to donate my Case IH 1200 eight-row planter to the Smithsonian. It can go next to the planters pulled by horses. Kids will ask their parents if farmers really planted eight rows at a time.

Eight-row planters used to be common. Over the decades, planter size shifted to 12 and 16-row. A few years ago, if you drive around and pay attention to these things, you know we leapt to 24 and 36-row planters. There are 54-row planters out in the Dakotas that are just waiting for enough line fences to be taken down around here.

I know my perception is slow to catch up with reality, and mega planters have been coming on for a while. But it seemed like the number of them exploded in recent years. That coincides with some of the most profitable corn and soybean years ever. It makes sense farmers would upgrade to increase efficiency and also save on taxes.

A 36-row planter is nothing my father could have imagined. He was born in 1908 and spent part of his career with draft horses. I came along in 1956, so missed those noble beasts by a decade or so. My dad’s horse tack is still hanging in a shed. You know, just in case this tractor thing doesn’t work out.

When I was a boy, we had a four-row John Deere planter. I’m not sure how that came to be since everything else we’ve ever owned has been red: Farmall, International Harvester, CaseIH. I’d like to ask my dad about that.

Wouldn’t all of us with deceased parents like to ask them a few things?

One might think that a 24-row planter would plant three times faster than my eight-row. That assumes a constant speed. I plant at four to five miles per hour. Most newer planters are “high-speed” planters. They are designed to maintain precise seed placement up to ten mph.

My nephew Jay, who I share machinery with, and I were talking to a friend who has one of those planters. The 80-acre field we were starting that morning would take us all of a day, and that’s if everything worked perfectly. Our friend could do that by noon.

I would be a nervous wreck going down the field at that speed. Most of these planters are pulled by tractors using auto-steer. The markers on the planter aren’t used unless the satellite connection goes down.

There are other amazements in the new generation planters: variable seed rate, automatic row shutoff, seed-level sensing. These are things my planter can only dream of.

Then, they are linked to layers of information through technology that connects that seed to the fertilizer used in that spot to growing degree units measured through the season. Finally, the yield of that plant, or that area in the field, will be measured in the fall. This will all be available to make plans for next year.

I carry in my head approximations of these things. I can walk in my field and point to worse and better spots. But my head is hardly a match for a computer.

Even though I don’t use these modernities in my own farming, they impress me. I read farm magazines in wonderment.

Of course, there is more to this story than machines and fields. There’s a human element. A bit of math tells us that it takes six times as many people to plant as much with our old 4-row John Deere planter as a new John Deere 1775NT 24-row planter.

A quick search finds numbers that reflect that. In 1956, my birth year, there were around 200,000 farms in Minnesota. Now, that’s about 65.000.

I spend time with farmers of my vintage talking about the way things used to be. We just caught the end of when most farm places around here had cows, pigs, and some type of poultry, along with a flock of children.

Sometimes we can be wistful and miss how it was. More often, there’s quiet acceptance. One needs only look at our main streets and the disappeared retail to see farming is not alone in large shifts. Then you can read about miners, steel workers, auto workers, etc. to see we are really not alone.

These are all giant changes in my lifetime. Yet our economy has been strong, and employment is high. There has never been a time I could not have found a good job somewhere in or near Sleepy Eye.

Some of this just is. Some of it could have been different perhaps with different policies. That’s a discussion for another time.

For now, I’ll clean up my planter, grease and lube the chains. Maybe we’ll do this again next year. Maybe I’ll get another inning.

— Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.