Working On The Farm

911

911

Well-known Member
Location
USA
A few months back, another fellow here on this forum and I were posting about when we worked on the farm "back in the day." Last evening as my wife and I were having dinner with another couple, I ran into the farmer's son, who I had worked for during my high school days and of course, we began reminiscing about the good old days down on the farm. We must have spoke for at least 20 minutes before our food came.

My friend's dad, who owned the farm had bought the farm next to his giving him over 4 or 5000 acres and a heck of a lot of milking cows to boot. I keep forgetting the numbers, but it was a lot. We had a huge milking parlor, which one of my jobs was to clean it after the morning milking. Sometimes, if I worked late enough, I also had to clean the parlor again after the late afternoon milking. That's hard work for a 17 y/o kid.

So, as we were talking last night, I asked him if he remembered the first time that I drove the tractor. As soon as I asked that, he broke into a big laugh. Well, after all, it was kind of funny, NOW! What happened was, we were going out to bale some of the hay. I was supposed to just pull the wagon as the other guys threw the bales up onto the wagon. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well, we had just finished picking up God knows how many bales and the wagon was loaded to the max. I did good with driving the tractor my first time out, until I got about 50 yards from the barn. I didn't see the stinking groundhog hole until the last second. I swerved slightly and missed it with the tractor, but the dang wagon wheel found it and tipped it enough to spill at least half of the wagon. Now, you would think the other guys would take pity on the dumb kid, but NOOO. I had to reload the wagon all by my lonesome. By the time I had finished, I was totally exhausted when I was asked if I could stay later and clean the milking parlor after the milking was done. Back in those days, I was a greedy little dude, so, yeah, I stayed and picked a little extra money.

I think that's where the saying comes from, "You gotta' make hay when the sun is shining." Don't you think?
 

This really dates me, we loaded our cut hay on hay wagons (this was before mechanically hay balers) with pitch forks, you had to be good at this because if you didn't stack the hay correct or went to fast the entire load of loose hay would slide off the wagon and you would have to reload it. When we got to the barn we had what was called a hay fork that we would stick in the hay on the wagon. The fork was attached to heavy rope that was on pulleys that ran to inside top of the barn inside. Two people would pull the fork with the hay into the barn loft to store inside to feed to the cows in the winter. I think Amish still do it this way. This lucky guy worked on a modern farm, but it was still hard work. We also had work horses before we got a tractor and plow, disc, hay baler, manure spreader, hay mower, hay rake, two row corn planter etc, most of our machinery was purchased used. And we milked cows by hand before finally got electric milking machines. I marvel when I see a 16 row corn planter planting 16 rows today, they cost up to $250,000, our two row planter probably cost $300. I really don't know how I survived,
 
We had a lot of the more modern equipment for that time period. When I first started working on the farm, I was kind of nervous, lacked confidence and had no idea of how to do anything on the farm. So, I started out cleaning the milking parlor after the morning milking, then clean and refresh some of the stalls with clean straw, then who knows what?

We had several different animals, even different breeds of cattle. The hogs were the worse. Cleaning out their pens was enough to make a person ill. There is nothing worse smelling than hog crap. We also had some cash crops that needed tending to like; tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco.

After my first summer on the farm, I was glad that I did it, During the winter that followed, the owner bought the farm next to his property, which almost doubled everything. So, during the second summer, the owner did hire more hands, so that really helped, but I still got stuck with some of the same stinky jobs, which I never complained about. I did get to drive the tractor for some of the easy stuff we did and that was fun and work at the same.

We had a few acres of potatoes and when it came time to harvest them, we did it by hand. We used a spading or pitch fork. By pushing the forks into the ground and turning over the soil, there are the taters. Pick them up, put them in baskets and the wagon would come buy and someone would dump them into the wagon.

I think watching calves being born was educational. Seeing life begin was just very over-whelming. How often does a young person get the opportunity to view that? Working on the farm taught me a lot about life in general. Being around older men also taught me many things that I wouldn't have learned until later in life, so I got a head start about some things. Even though I was just a kid, they treated me like one of the guys for the most part.

All in all, I was glad that I had the opportunity to work on the farm and glad that I accepted the challenge.
 

Although I could never do it now, I loved working on the farm when I was a teenager. I had a similar experience as you 911, but after I disconnected the wagon full of hay, I climbed back on the J. Deere and thought I was in first gear, but I had put it in 4th or 5th and I took off like a shot. Before I could get it under control, I had tore up some fencing and damn near ran over a worker.

Got a good talking to, but they let me continue to drive. Pitching bales was the hardest 50 cents an hour I ever made.
Also, my buddies hay loft was a great place to work on our cars.
 
So, one day just after we had finished lunch, the owner, who was my friend’s dad, told all of us to just stay put for a few minutes. Then, he told us that his wife’s sister was killed the evening before in a car accident and he had to accompany his wife to New York, but he would come back for a few days and then go backup for the funeral. Farmers seldom get a vacation.

The next day, the owner had already left for New York with his wife. Just about quitting time, I walked into the barn where we had the one sow in a separate pen because she was close to birthing. It was my job to check on her every hour up until I left for the day. I looked at Sally (good name for a sow, don’t you think?) and she was lying on her side grunting and I saw stuff coming out of her nose and mouth. So, I ran and got the boss. When he looked at Sally, he said “She’s stuck in labor. We need to call the vet.” It took the vet almost 45 minutes to show up and we could tell that Sally was really suffering. I felt really bad for her.

The vet put on a long clear glove and reached up her you know what to check on the piglets. He told us that a piglet was stuck in the birth canal. It took him maybe 3 or 4 minutes to get the piglet into position and pull it out. It was a male (boar). Once he had him out, the others followed pretty quickly. When Sally was done birthing, there were 13 piglets all totaled. Things ended well.
 
I am right there with you, grew up on a dairy farm, putting up hay, milking, feeding calves the whole nine yards....four row planter, three bottom plow was the big one, most of the time two row plow. I tell everyone I love cows, I love to see them in a pasture field as I drive by, they are great memories and lots of stories.
 
ronaldj said:
I am right there with you, grew up on a dairy farm, putting up hay, milking, feeding calves the whole nine yards....four row planter, three bottom plow was the big one, most of the time two row plow. I tell everyone I love cows, I love to see them in a pasture field as I drive by, they are great memories and lots of stories.
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I understand, I love cows too..lol Almost all of our cows had names and they had personalities, some were friendly and some would try to kick or butt you. I can still remember when we stopped milking and sold the herd. That was a sad day and I was just a kid.
 
I liked cows the most out of all the animals we worked with. I will say that piglets are the cutest little babies and they squeal almost as soon as they see daylight. Pigs, in general, just don’t like bring handled or even touched.

We had mostly Holsteins and Jerseys as our milking cows. I’m just going by what I was told, but they give more milk than most other breeds. Herefords and Angus were our beef cattle. Beef cattle have a different, more aggressive personality. We also had 10-12 Golden Guernseys that were mainly just for taking to fairs and such. Their milk is very rich and has a very distinctive taste of its own.

As for beef, I’m OK with Angus, but prefer Charolais. Just a better taste, less greasy and whenever we have served it to our guests, they have commented very positive about the meat. There’s a farm about 15 miles from where we live that raises them. Usually try to get the meat from a young steer or a cow. Hereford would be my second choice, at least for roasts.
 
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I have too much time on my hands since my wife went south to care for a sick family member. She hopes to be home sometime next week. Earlier today, I was driving down a country road when I passed two young girls on horses riding down a lane towards a farm, which brought to mind another story of when I worked on the farm.

The owner had seven kids all total, but two of the daughters had horses. One afternoon, I had been walking between barns when I saw the one daughter, Gloria, talking to her horse and rubbing his head and ears. I yelled over to her if she wanted me to bring her the saddle, but she said that she thought the horse was sick. I walked over and asked her what was going on and she said he keeps coughing and won’t eat. I grabbed a hand of oats out of the barn and offered them to the horse, but he turned his head from it. He was also having like snot coming out his nose. I told her that she should call the Vet because this horse never turns down oats.

She got her dad to look at the horse and he told her to give the Vet a call. When the Vet arrived and checked out the horse, he said the horse had “Choke.” He took a hose and put it up his nose and down his esophagus. He said that he felt a blockage, so he pumped a lot of water down the horse’s esophagus and finally was able to push the tube down the rest of the way.

Gloria had given the horse an apple and we figured he must have not chewed it well enough before swallowing it. The good news was that the horse was taken care of and he acted like nothing ever happened. But, that’s the way animals are. No matter what life deals them, they just go on. They adapt to any change and move on.
 
This is turning into a diary or journal, but my mind has been tethered back to the days of being 15-18 and working "down on the farm," like Bob Evans ads reads.

It was early August and very hot and humid. The humidity around here gets unbearable at times in the summer. I had just finished cleaning the milking parlor and was preparing to go and clean some of the stalls and put fresh beds of straw down when the boss comes to me and said to leave that job for later. He wanted me to go with Jimmy and move one (we had two) of the Black Angus bulls over to the breeding area in the palace, which is what we called the new barn that was built the year before for breeding with two cows that were waiting for him.

Oh, man. I would have rather cleaned out the stalls, but you do what you're told or good-bye job, especially the young guys. Jimmy says we need to put a rope through his ring (in his nose) and also one around his neck (no halter). This bull probably weighed in at about 1500 pounds, give or take a 100 pounds. Fat, lazy and ornery, that was Big Daddy. Good name for this bull. I never knew him to be mean, so that was a good thing.

We got the ropes on and opened the pen and started to pull on Big Daddy. This bull wasn't going anywhere. He's in one of his moods where he just wants to be left alone. I asked if we could use the tractor? Jimmy says not yet, but we may have to. We tried to coax him out with some fresh Alfalfa. No, that's not going to work. How about some clover? Nope, no good either. Corn? No, he wasn't interested. He just stood there chewing his cud and laughing at us, or so my imagination told me.

We were pretty much at the end of our rope when Jimmy said to go bring one of the cows over here. I went to the other barn and put a rope around Marcy's neck, and she followed me with no problem to where Big Daddy was. That perked him up. She was in estrous, so I guess they give off a smell that bulls can detect that they are ready for breeding.

OK, now we have Big Daddy's attention and he would have followed us to New Jersey, if we wanted him to. I wasn't working on the farm in November, but my high school friend, whose dad owned the farm, told me that they had the Vet come out and check the two cows that were bred in August and both were pregnant.

Big Daddy was going to be a daddy again for the umpteenth time.
 
MeAgain said:
🏆 to all who knows what hard work is really about.
Imagine if we had a food shortage today and this generation had to learn to farm?
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It is a fact....food shortage world wide is predicted in near future..People are undernourished (starving) in India today. Science fiction have us not consuming food, but just eating a tiny green wafer. My mind can't handle this. lol
 
Another cow story. It was getting late into spring, like the middle of June. We had a couple of cows soon ready to give birth, so we had moved them into the birthing area of the new barn. When another hand and me went into the barn to start cleaning stalls, he said that the one cow is pushing. How he knew, I don’t know, but he had a lot more experience than I did.

She was starting to “moo” frequently and swish her tail and just appeared nervous. Soon after, her water broke, so the other hand yelled at me to go get Randy, who was our boss. Randy came in and went over to the pen, looked at her, raised her tail and said, maybe an hour yet. An hour came and went, the cow is mooing more and no calf, not even a head showing. Randy says, “Gotta’ call the Vet.”

The Vet gets there after almost another hour. He puts on the glove bag and reaches up her you know what and feels the calf. The Vet then says, “We gotta get it out. It’s not moving much.” Now, here’s where I get confused, excited and a little nervous all at the same time. Randy looks at me and said to go get the calf puller. I’m like “What?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He jumps out of the stall and tells the Vet that he would be right back.

Randy comes back with a long pole, another piece of metal that looked like a big metal “U” and a set of chains. Now, I’m really confused. The Vet reaches back up into the cow, hooks up the chains and puts the other end onto the puller. Randy and the Vet start ratcheting the calf puller and in about 5 minutes out comes more bloody water and a calf followed. The calf fell on the floor. The Vet sticks his fingers down the calf’s throat and says, “It’s alive.” Then, he says, “It’s a heifer.” WOW!. I never saw nothing like that before. Mamma cow goes over to the newborn calf and begins to lick it.

It was a good day on the farm.
 
One thing that did bother me and I never quite got past it. When one of the cows would have a bull, more than likely within a week, the owner would have one of the helpers take it from the mother to sell at auction. I asked why and the answer was to kill it and get the veal. If the cow had a heifer, some were raised with mom, but some were also taken away. That bothered me because there were times when Mom would moo and moo like she was crying.

The calves are better off with getting at least a few days of mama’s milk to get the colostrum, which gives the calf the antibodies to help ward off diseases. It’s an interesting life sometimes if you weren’t raised on the farm.
 
Sally was a breeder hog. Her job was to get pregnant and have a bunch of piglets. She wasn’t mean, so I was able to get into the pen if she was alone. If she was with a boar, forget it. Boars are nasty. They remind me of what a “dirty old man” is always referred to as being. Dirty, lazy and cantankerous. You never know what a boar is going to do, so it’s best just to leave them alone.

Well, one day, things were slow. One of the few days that ever happened. Half of the other guy’s went with the owner to an auction and the other half were painting the outside of the newest barn. I had my morning jobs completed and Randy (the boss) wasn’t at the farm, he had gone off with the owner to the auction. So, I went to see Jimmy, who was Randy’s assistant, and I asked him what I should be doing.

It was a really hot and humid day, so Jimmy said to give Sally a bath. I thought he was kidding me. Whoever heard of giving a hog a bath? I even asked him if he was kidding. No, he was serious. He even gave me some special shampoo made especially for hogs. According to Jimmy, hogs can get skin problems and this shampoo is supposed to help with that.

I go over to the outside spigot, hook up the hose and get everything setup. Jimmy yells at me, “You don’t have to dry her.” Good! I thought he was going to tell me to blow dry her or something else that would be a little embarrassing. Now, normally, Sally is very cooperative for a hog. (Most hogs squeal their butts off whenever someone touches or even bothers them.) On this day, Sally didn’t want bothered. I told her that I was taking her for a bath and the water was nice and cool. (The water came from a well.) I don’t think she really cared.

I went into the new barn where we had a really big refrigerator and grabbed some carrots. Anything is food to a hog, but Sally always really liked her carrots. I walked back over to where I had left Sally and I showed her the carrots. Yep, that got her attention, she started grunting. I slipped the rope over her neck, gave her 1 carrot and off we went. Every time she would stop, I would give her another carrot. When we got to the spigot, I had 1 carrot left. WHEW!. I mean, this hog probably went at least 500 pounds. (I really have no idea, but she was big.)

After we were ready to start the bath, I turned on the hose to run the water out slowly. When I started to wet Sally down, what does she do? She drops down and starts to roll around in the dirt and came up muddy. Then, I heard laughing and I looked over towards where the guys were painting and there they were. Tommy and the rest of the men were laughing at us.

Tommy “then” tells me to take her over to one of the older barns where inside we had a cleaning area for the cows and any other animal that we wanted to wash. For whatever reason, it never dawned on me to use that area. I got Sally there with very little trouble. I think she was cooperating because I was nice to her or that’s what I wanted to believe anyway.

I gave her a really good bath with the special shampoo, which was almost odorless. Well, maybe just a little lemony smelling as I remember it. She really enjoyed the brushing, especially her belly and around her teats. After we played in the water for about 20 minutes and she was all nice and clean and brushed, this time, she gladly walked back to her stall, which I tied her to, so I could clean it and put in new straw.

Bath over and it tired me out, but we had one clean hog. I asked her if she wanted to brush her teeth, but she just grunted and since I didn’t know hog, I assumed that meant no.
 
911 said:
Thank you. Did you grow up on a farm?
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Only up until I was about 7 or 8, but I remember it fondly. My job was to help feed the chickens and gather eggs from the henhouse. There was one old settin' hen that didn't appreciate having her eggs taken away and I had to put some wooden eggs under her in the hope that she wouldn't know the difference. She usually did, and would fly up in my face if I wasn't careful. She was one mean hen and I wasn't too sad when she finally ended up in the Sunday stew pot.

Also we used to visit my grandpa's farm in Arkansas every summer and I used to follow grandpa around and "help."
 
I just love all these farm stories. I didn't grow up on one, but I did make a few visits over the years.

I never drink milk, but always loved cows.

Once we visited the round stone barn at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that was established in 1791. (historic site since 1960) It was a scorching hot day, but inside that barn it was nice and cool!
Round_Stone_Barn%2C_Hancock_Shaker_Village_MA.jpg
 
As long as someone is reading these stories, I will try to post them as they come to mind. Back then, I did not keep a journal.

After the owner purchased the other farm next door to his, we took on a lot of work, even though the owner had hired more men. We also had more, lots more cows. Every so often, we would move the cows from one grazing field to another. Cows can eat a lot of food in a day. I think between grass, grain and hay, they may eat like 80 pounds or so pounds per day. This is important for you to know because can you imagine feeding a cow all year and then she doesn’t have a calf? No calf means no milk. So, now you fed a cow for maybe a year and you get nothing in return. That’s a pretty good hit on a farmer’s income.

OK, so, Randy, (the boss) tells me and two other men to go up to the field where the heifers are grazing (a heifer is a female bovine that has not yet had a calf, for anyone that doesn’t know), and move them over to the (what we knew it as) the DeKalb field. I think the owner had a deal (contract) with DeKalb that they would get his corn, beyond what we kept in the silos for feed. We probably had about 25 or so heifers that had been bred, but not yet checked for being pregnant.

When we got to where the heifers were, the one man yells to Randy, “Come over here.” When someone yells like he did, all 3 of us went over to find out what he was yelling about. There was heifer laying down with yellow stuff coming out of her mouth. I thought right away that it was probably her cud, but what’s wrong with her? After we tried to get her up and wasn’t getting anywhere, Randy said to go back to the barn and get two ropes. I brought the ropes to him and he threw one on the ground and put the other around her neck. Now, we tried to get her up again, but nothing. She wasn’t moving.

After about 15 minutes of trying to get her up, Randy went down to the barn and called the Vet. It was about 2 hours, maybe longer, before he showed up. Meanwhile, we moved the other heifers. The Vet checked over the heifer and said he thought she had an LDA (left displaced abomasum) or a twisted stomach. You have to understand a bovine’s digestive system to know why or how this happens. It’s really caused by gases floating around in the stomach. I don’t think cows can burp. Just think if we (humans) had 4 stomachs (actually 4 chambers) how much gas we could produce. The real story here is that bovines only have 1 stomach, but that stomach has 4 compartments. See what I mean when I wrote that their digestive system is complicated and hard to understand?

Anyway, the Vet found the twisted stomach by using his stethoscope and flicking his finger against the cow’s stomach. He was listening for a certain sound and once he heard it, he knew the cow had a twisted stomach. He and two of the other men got on one side of her and rolled her onto her other side. (That’s funny to watch.) Then, the Vet took this big needle with a hook on the end and stitched her stomach wall to her hide (I think), or at least, that what it looked like. The Vet was going to cut her instead, but decided this way would be best. I have seen the Vet cut the side of another cow, reach in and turn the stomach to its correct position, but not this time.

After about five minutes, the heifer got up and slowly walked away, stopped and started grazing. All was back to normal, for now. Definitely educational.
 
Two of the owner’s daughters had horses. I didn’t know much about horses back then and still don’t. Remembering back, one of the daughter’s friends also had horses and one day, she showed up on her mare to ask the daughters if one or both of them wanted to go riding. The older daughter agreed and said she would saddle up the older mare and it would take her maybe 15-20 minutes.

In the meantime, I thought that I would be a nice guy and get the horse of the friend a handful of oats. I went into the barn to get the oats when I heard the friend scream and yell, “Oh, No!” She had gotten off of the horse, but never tied it to anything. Then, she walked over to talk to the other daughter and that’s when, for whatever reason, the horse took off.

The two daughters, the friend, Jimmy and I went to look for the horse. This was like 1:30 in the afternoon. We looked everywhere, but couldn’t find the horse. Finally, after about an hour and a half of looking, Tommy said we’re going back to the farm and call the police. When we got back to the farm, the mother of the daughters told their friend that she was supposed to call home right away.

Wouldn’t you know it. The horse ran home.
 
Oh, Brother! In high school, I was a decent dancer and could dance the dances of the day. But, looking at these guys, I don’t think that I could hold a candle to them.
 


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