VICE: What are you wearing right now?
Mark: Green work pants, a white T-shirt with...I think it’s supposed to be a tiger’s face, gray cotton work socks, second-hand Nike running shoes, a Dunlop baseball hat with a deerfly patch (a skin-colored strip of sticky tape used to catch the deerflies buzzing around your head). Hey, my patch has seventeen deerflies on it. That’s a lot. Everything I have on is filthy because I’ve just put in a full day around the farm.
Jen: I’m wearing very well-worn dark-blue Lee corduroy cutoffs and an old light-gray “Tiger Brand” T-shirt (there seems to be an unplanned tiger theme happening here). I have on black socks and black Kamik hiking boots I got for $20 at the discount shoe store in town. I was wearing a wide-brim straw sunhat, but I took it off to sit at the computer. I was gardening all day so I needed things that were comfortable and not too hot.
What would be a typical tractor outfit? Like, if you were cutting hay, what would you have on, some XXXXXLT-shirts and doorags?
Mark: What are those?
We’ll send you some. Seriously, though, what do you wear?
Mark: Usually, if we’re cutting hay, it means it’s hot and dry out, so I’d probably be wearing cut-off shorts, a T-shirt, running shoes, and a baseball hat with maybe two deerfly patches on it. The tractor has a canopy, so I don’t have to worry about the sun.
Jen: When we’re cutting hay I have to be very specific about what I wear. I’m the one on back of the hay wagon, where there are 60-pound hay bales pelted full-speed at me from the baler every 20 seconds. Once they’re fired out, I have to pick them up and stack them while being jostled around in the moving wagon. Given the circumstances, I dress appropriately to avoid serious injury and pain. Sure footing is essential in dodging the oncoming bales. Anything short of a running shoe is a death wish, so my Kamik Hikers do the trick nicely. If you wear shorts to stack bales, your legs will look like two well-used scratching posts by the end of the day, and you will be crying because they sting so badly. Hay is scratchy and hay bales are heavy enough that you need your thigh to help lift it up. Same with the shirt. I always wear a long-sleeved button-down shirt open over an undershirt to protect my arms. Gloves are also a must because of the scratch factor. I wear a sunhat for the sun, but no sunglasses, as they can be smashed off by a flying bale.
Any fashion tips for milking the goats?
Jen: Rubber boots and clean hands are my only fashion tips for milking. Rubber boots because you need to go into their pen to milk them and you want to avoid getting manure in your shoes. Clean hands because anything that touches the goat’s teats needs to be clean so the milk doesn’t get contaminated.
