Hot summer weather is here and so are the challenges of working outside in the heat of the day.
We’ve put together a series of articles about people whose jobs have them sweating in the sun.
This week it’sTravis Marak, a dairy farmer from Meeker.
In the sun scorched fields in his knee high boots and sun-protectant hat, there stood Travis Marak. On a butterflies-on-clover day in late May, Marak and his short-horned dairy cows embraced the gentle breeze with the worst of the summer yet to come.
At 40 years old, Marak is in his tenth year running the local dairy farm, Marak Farms, where he tends to his cattle producing milk and occasionally beef. “On an average day it could be anywhere from five to ten hours of work a day, depending on what we’re doing that day,” Marak said. It’s a steady workload with the time commitment and manual labor, but when high temperatures come in the summer it becomes even more strenuous.
“When it is 100 degrees outside, I really try to work outside as little as possible,” Marak said. “But sometimes you don’t have a choice. You just have to do it anyway.”
For Marak, avoiding the heat isn’t an option as he always works outside, which can lead to its negative effects.
“Fatigue is definitely one of the effects of working in the heat,” Marak said. “A big one is mental fatigue because you know that even when you go outside early in the morning, it’s going to be muggy and still pretty warm, and just miserable. So convincing yourself that you need to go out and do what needs to be done that day.”
For Marak, farming in the summer is a persistent challenge inducing sweat and strain from sunrise to sunset. In the span of a day in the sun, that fatigue can quickly set in. “There’s days when you can definitely overdo it,” Marak said. “If you don’t hydrate, that is a big deal for the next day.”
The summer heat not only results in physical draining, but is even harmful at times. “I don’t think that I’ve ever had sun poisoning or heatstroke, but I know people who have. I’ve gotten some severe sunburns for sure,” Marak said. The combination of dehydration and sunburns hold potential to make for a wretched experience, so proper preparation is crucial.
After 10 years in the field, Marak takes precaution farming in the heat and slightly dismisses its difficulty. “I definitely think there’s harder jobs,” Marak said. “But I think you know, depending on what your job is for the day, with the summer heat, farming is definitely up there. Out of 100, with 100 being the worst day of your life, farming is probably an 85 to 90.”
Between herding, caretaking, feeding and milking his cattle across countless hours outside, not many people endure the heat more than Marak. He may downplay it, but the fact of the matter is few jobs work as hard in the summer heat as a farmer.