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.
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.
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!
