On the Farm with Sylva and Freddy, By Chuck Lochner

Some of my best times as a kid were spent on a farm.  Although I’ve never lived on a farm, my parents always had friends or relatives who had a farm.  Occasionally, when I was younger, I would even take a job working on a farm. As I got older, I found friends of my own who would share their farm.

One of our relatives had a farm -- Sylva (my mother's first cousin) and her husband  Freddy Emhoff.  In fact they had 2 dairy farms at different times in Edmeston, N.Y., 70 miles east south east of Syracuse.  

Sylva was a cousin on the Baker side of my mother’s (Esther Taylor Lochner) family.

Farm life is very difficult and all consuming.  With 35 or 40 cows that had to be milked twice a day, 7 days a week, there is no such thing as a day off or vacation.  You simple live your farm … forever.

My parents knew this and felt bad for Sylva & and Freddy, so they decided to take a week of vacation and spend it on the farm visiting and helping Freddy with whatever he needed help with … everything from milking to haying to shoveling manure.

We kids, four of us in the 1950’s (Dave, Chuck, Julie and Ricky; Teddy came along in 1963), were in heaven.  We had free range of the farm, including the barn and hayloft, the pastures, the creek and especially the cow pies!  An added feature of the week was the fact that firecrackers were legal back then!  And the lethal combination of firecracker and cow pies …?  Life for a kid just doesn’t get any better than that!

Morning for Sylva and Mom started with fixing a hardy breakfast before sunrise.  Meanwhile Freddy and Dad took a jaunt out to the pasture to drive the cows into the barn.  The cows were milked on the first floor of the barn.

The cows had to be locked in their stanchion and hay was pitched down from the upper portion of the barn.  A portion of grain was added and the cows were moo-ved to gratitude; the milking would start.

The milking machines operated on vacuum lines and had a distinctive suck and squirt sound that would sound throughout the barn along with the sound of the vacuum pump.  The barn cats would look for their portion and Freddy would hand squirt it to them.

Another sound in the barn was the eternal sound of the radio.  It was a soothing sound for the cows.  The continuous drone of commodity prices … “corn 2.25 a bushel, oats 3.40 a bushel, hogs 15.60 a hundred weight …”

Dairy barns have their own distinctive variety of smells, some pleasant, some not so much.  Hay has a dried grass smell familiar to everybody.  Grain feed is fermented oats similar to baking bread.  It makes your mouth water.  Cow pee is a strong acrid smell that’s jarring.  Manure is just the essence of farm.  Ahh, ode du country!

As the milking machines fill they have to be emptied into milk cans that hold about 20 gallons each.  The milk comes out of the cows at about 95 degrees and has to be cooled to 40 degrees as soon as possible to prevent bacteria growth.  The milk cans have to be carried to the cooling shed and deposited in the cooler, a bath of cold water waiting to be picked up and sent to the processing plant.  This is a job as they weigh over 100 pounds by this point.

By this time it’s 7 AM and breakfast is ready … eggs, ham, oat meal, home fries, steak, corn bread, milk, coffee and pastries.

Then back to the barn for clean up. The milking machines have to be cleaned and sterilized.  The gutters have to be shoveled into wheelbarrows and the barrows dumped into the honey truck to be spread on the fields.  Everything must be hosed down to wash out the cow pee and all the equipment must be turned off and prepped for the evening milking that starts at 5:30 PM.

Afternoons were a time for more farmly duties among them, haying.  During the winter cows are fed hay stored in the barn.  Hay fields are cultivated and planted in the early spring, grown, cut, dried, bailed and stored in the barn 3 times during the summer and fall.  This is where teenagers come in handy driving tractor bailing hay, loading it on wagons and storing it in the barn.  It’s hard, dirty, hot, sweaty, exhausting work.  It’s also some of the most satisfying work you’ll ever do.  It turns boys and girls into men and women.

 

Sylva and Freddy had 3 kids; Freddy D., Linda and Christine.  Freddy D. was older.

So the 3 of them and the 4 of us kept things busy around the farm.  While the men folk were working and women folk were doing what they were doing (talking, cooking, etc?) us kids were sleeping late, eating, exploring and playing.  We explored pastures, barns, animals and manure.  Life was exciting!

The pastures extended out back of the house and they went on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever …   We would hike till we found an old apple tree or two, find a straight branch to strip and whip apples.  Better yet are fresh cow pies to whip and splash at each other.

Speaking of cow pies … and firecrackers another favorite pastime was blowing them up.  That’s where you learned about fuses; slow burning and fast burning and how to get your younger brother to watch up close.  I was the younger brother.  Later in life I ate a lot more.

During calving season we would fan out in the pasture looking for new born calves.  I watched my father and Freddy pick them up on their shoulders and carry them into the barn.  I thought I knew how to do it.  I found one and hoisted it on my shoulders and started through the pasture.  I guess I scared the poor calf.  It crapped down my shirt and arm.  Didn’t do that again.

Running down one side of the pasture was a creek with really cold water. It must have been spring feed.  Fishing and swimming was the order of the day.

Then, of course there was the barn.  And the best part of the barn was the hayloft.  The smell of stored hay with hundreds of bails stacked to the rafters.  It was a giant play pen with bails to stack into forts, places to hide, ropes strung from barn braces and wars to be won.  It was a piece of kid heaven.

As happens, eventually someone gets hurt and comes out crying.  Somehow it seemed to be my brother Dave.  Once he fell off a pile of hay and got a sprained ankle.  Another time a rope broke and he fell to the barn floor, just missing a broken pitchfork.  That time he had to the hospital with a broken leg.  Ah, the price of bravery!!

Ya just couldn’t ask for a better summer vacation!