A young woman I know who was dating a farmer once asked me of their relationship, “Will I always come second?”

Oh goodness. She just didn’t know yet that second place is quite a ranking.

Eventually, farm women everywhere figure it out. It’s not an answer she’s told, but one she almost always comes to on her own.

I think farmers put their significant others first as best they can, but we all know they have such a demanding occupation that it can be difficult to prioritize people as quickly as they can prioritize their prize calf for the county fair, or which field they’ll plant first.

For farmers, there’s always a fence that needs fixing. Invariably, someone might call them to say their animals are out for a Sunday stroll … even if it isn’t Sunday. Or they have (for once) dressed up for something, then looked out the window to discover whatever is out.

When that happens, that rare date night can go out the window, too, or at least could be demoted from a nice restaurant hamburger steak dinner to hot dogs on the grill.

Every year there is the crop to get planted while trying to beat the rain or the calendar, and there’s hay to cut, rake and bale and get put inside before clouds break open. Spraying season has nightmares all its own since the winds blow as they will — and farmers work whatever time of day or night they can to keep the herbicide where it belongs.

There’s the crop to harvest while the weather and machinery hold out … and a thousand meals to make and take out on the road for people who have been waiting to see the meal-mobile pull into their field, often steered by women who also work full-time.

There are equipment snafus, and phone calls to grain originators and seed dealers that happen both from inside the combine cab all the way to kitchen tables at tax prep time.

When winter arrives there is snow to move when Mother Nature deems it necessary to whiten things up a bit. The farmer moves the snow, while simultaneously making young kids happy with the new mountain on which to sled and play “King of the Hill.”

How none of the seven of us kids (while growing up) didn’t somehow end up in a body cast or a box after playing that “give-that-person-a-toss” game, I’ll never know.

My brothers played to win.

A farmer has so many things to keep running. Just for fall it’s the combine, the tractors and grain cart/wagons, the truck fleet, the gas truck (and making sure that kind of ‘man purse’ is fully stocked with everything he might need away from home), tillage equipment, and making sure he has every tool in his pickup he will ever need until he retires from farming.

There are a lot of moving parts to a farm to keep all systems going — and yes, oftentimes the farmer’s significant other has to figure out how and where she fits into all of that.

Now and then she might find the “check engine” light on in her car. And with all the other things her farmer has to do in a day, the car can often be the last priority — except when it’s needed for parts runs. Oh, the parts runs.

Still, the farmer knows he has serious issues if the “check engine” light comes on with his wife. And so — the farmer continues to try to balance all the plates in the air and do his part (as best he can) to keep the phrase true: “Happy wife, happy life.”

Every farm woman figures out the farm usually comes first (my mother used to say the farm was Dad’s mistress); the farmer comes second, and she comes sliding into third place, also sometimes as tired, filth-ridden and as greasy as her husband. That grease may take the form of actual grease, or … well, “ending stocks” from out in the yards.

Farm women — we might come in third, but without us, there would be fields untilled, no parts runner, no extra set of hands, and nothing on all those plates the farmer is trying to juggle.

And we all know what a hangry farmer is like.

If 60 today is the new 40, then I think third place is the new first place.

BOO-ya.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, IA. She can be reached at kjschwaller@evertek.net. Note new address.