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Farmers. Love them, but some do mess up.

My job was to spray crop, sow crop, or fertilize crop. Sometimes spread rodenticide. Farmers used to stand at each end of the paddock and wave a flag (now it’s all GPS marking). We would fly a straight line between both. It was great to work with farmers marking (Australian term) or flagging (American term). Well most of the time it was. There were occasional times when some of them frustrated me.
Here are two incidences that I well recall.
Les here at Tocumwal. Can’t mention his surname simply because I don’t remember it. Les had a small rice paddy to spray, it ran N-S. Les stood on the SW corner to mark and the other marker diagonally opposite on the NE corner. If I had have sprayed it would be grossly overdosed in the center and be underdosed everywhere else. The tracking would have resembled the union jack. Well I chose to run from the one marker on the NE side and eye-balled the square bank on the east to remain somewhat parallel. Well Les got angrier and angrier, lost his temper and stomped off because I wouldn’t mark off him too. He wasn’t happy either when I caught up with him later and explained why. He just couldn’t see it.

Boree Creekis a Fertile Farming Area South of the Murrumbidgee River. Two brothers, both new to farming had bought a farm there. Aerial work was new to them and they were to spray cereal for weeds. Both were briefed well but messed it up. Two loads only. A simple rectangle paddock. After the first load one marker was about half way through the paddock, just where he should have been and the other had got nearly to the end, just where we were to finish the second load. We had this big angle. When I returned to pick up the second load I sent a farmer to help the fellow. When he got there he found them parallel. A big triangle was thus formed and was sprayed a second time. Yes they did comprehend my explanation that followed the job.

So with GPS now we no longer get these sort of frustrations. The job order is computer generated so we no longer have contact with the farmer. The friendships that were formed, the camaraderie, the morning teas and lunches the girls brought for us are now all things of the past. I miss this. It’s become a bit of a lonely job. And we need to take our own lunch to work!
The picture is self spraying sorghum on the Darling Downs about '76. Insecticide for midge at 6oz per acre. Ultra Low Volume (ULV). Such a low dose you cannot see it. You can see the marker - farmer in the bottom rhs of the picture. He's small.