Just a kiss is all it takes.

That, and a slight kick to the ribs gets ‘em every time. Not too hard — you don’t want them to get desensitized. Make it more of a nudge. Nice and subtle, but firm. They need to know you’re serious.

Mostly, they need to know that you’re serious about what you’re asking them to do.

With that, a kissing sound and a nudge to the ribs, the horses bolt up the hill. I never get sick of it — the way they charge forward with hooves pounding, heads pumping, muscles working, tendons stretching, blood flowing — a living, breathing rocket ship and I get to ride it. The wind causes my eyes to water, and I laugh.

Our group gathers at the first stop, which happens to be a relic of farming’s past; a window into agricultural history. “A tribute to my grandfather’s era of farming,” I call it. Our first stop is all of that, plus a fantastic view of the farm.

Everyone is excited from our canter up the hill; a few riders laugh excitedly. There is a genuine positivity in the air. For the horses, this spot is a chance to graze. It is their reward, and they know it. Their ears flicker and relax. They put their heads down and devour mouthfuls of lush, green grass.

Today is the perfect day to talk about farming, and I gather everyone around.

A freakishly late spring means that now since the weather finally straightened out, everyone is busy. Corn planters that had been snowed on just days earlier are now churning up dust and throwing a dozen and more rows of seed into the ground, planting at light speed compared to the way my grandpa did it. Fully-loaded trucks hauling seed, fertilizer, and chemical run back and forth. Manure spreaders race against time, throwing winter bedding pack out on the fields as fast as skid loaders can load them. The smell of fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide twang our nostrils.

What a juxtaposition, to be on horseback while watching this scene!

 “This here is called a diversion.”

Our first stop is a berm of earth that cuts across the hillside we just ran up. “Diversion” is jargon for this berm, which is designed to arrest soil erosion.

You see, when you till up an entire hillside and expose the earth to rain, snow, and the air, the soil is liable to erode away. The purpose of a diversion, is to stop the wash and make it so any soil that is washed down the hillside can at least be captured and reclaimed. Any soil that washes won’t get further than this diversion. Also, later on the ride we’ll talk about green-stripping and the need to protect stream banks when we get to the wildlife area.

Back in the day, my dad and grandpa created several of these diversions on various hillsides around the farm.

It was more popular to build diversions back then.

See that hillside?

I point across the valley to where all the activity is going on and continue:

That hillside used to have waterways, contour strips, and a line of trees. As farming equipment has gotten bigger, all of those traditional conservation structures got ripped out. See that tractor and planter? Those together are worth more than a half-million dollars, but the tractor drives itself, and you can plant seed while scrolling on your phone.

Simultaneously, a sprayer tall and wide enough to drive a motorcycle convoy through unfolds its booms and roars across the hillside. It seems to create its own weather cloud as it works.

In farming, this entire scene is referred to as “progress.”

One of the riders joked, “Smells like cancer.”

We coax the horses forward, along the diversion and toward a fence line — the eastern boundary of the farm. In a few weeks, the blackberry bushes will produce their fruit. As a kid, one of my jobs was to pick blackberries. Also, asparagus, morels, mulberries, rhubarb, sweet corn, milk, beef, and just about anything a garden could produce.

I mention all of this, because in a few weeks we’ll be able to pick fresh blackberries along the fencerows, which was a special treat for a particular group of riders from Chicago who had never heard of such a thing! Imagine, just being able to pick your food right off the vine, and on horseback nonetheless! My word, in what alternate universe does such a thing occur?

At any rate, the point here is that farming ought to compliment the natural world, rather than destroy it. It’s one thing to talk about water quality, soil erosion, and the life we create for the animals we control, but quite another to go out and see it in context.

So then, I ask the group, on a scale of one to ten, how are we all doing?

— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.