The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
I asked Katie what I should write about for this week’s column. Without missing a beat she replied…”why we have to stack hay on Sunday”. I teased her that it is a character building moment and she rolled her eyes as she knew a story was soon to follow.
My dad’s mother died when he was only 5 years old and her parents took in three small grandchildren to raise during the heart of the depression.
Granddad and Nana taught life lessons by telling old stories or “sharing words of wisdom” with dad, Uncle Sid and Aunt Sheila as they helped around the farm.
Dad and Uncle Sid learned to farm with horses and milk cows by hand.
They celebrated the day both left the farm forever, but the lessons learned by the hard work lasted and were passed on to the next generation.
My family farm is on the eastern bluffs of the Mississippi River in Illinois. It is prefect grazing land for beef cattle with plenty of deep ravens, creeks and timber.
There are even natural amphitheaters where Indians held pow-wows..at least that is the story Dad told his wide-eyed children!
One summer day, Dad decided we needed to build a fence along Ellison Creek that ran as the northern border of our pasture.
The banks were steep and Dad didn’t want to lose any cattle over the edge.
Our whole family trekked out to the remote part of the farm with truck and tractor.
We dug post holes for anchors, pounded in metal fence posts and strung three strands of wire, one fine and two barbed for over mile up and down hills through the pasture.
I can still hear the echoing sound of metal cracking through out the pasture. I also remember it being the hottest and most humid day of the summer with a heat index of at least a 120!
And since we were in the bowels of a raven, no summer breeze could reach us.
The only breeze we felt was from the buzzing wings of mosquitoes and yes, they were bigger than the ones in Minnesota!
We were hot, miserable and dead tired when we finally finished, but we got the job done together as a family. Thirty-five years later, the fence is still standing strong and protecting the cows from the deep drop-offs of Ellison Creek and I treasure the lessons learned.
There is a reason “ol’ time” farmers rejoiced when a new son was born. An extra set of strong hands to help them do the hard manual labor on the farm. Why invest in technology when you have enough help at home to get by? When Mark and Al were growing up, they had to stack the hay twice a load…once on the rack and once in the barn.
Everyone baled hay this way. There were no bale kickers and only flat racks to stack in the field. You had to be coordinated enough to maintain your balance while your sister drove the rack through a field containing rocks and gopher holes and still throw a bale up five stacked rows.
Mark never complained about how this job was accomplished, but just when he and Al started farming, they purchased a bale kicker and a couple of kicker racks. They had learned their lessons well and moved on.
Now our children are learning life lessons and building character as well as muscle. They don’t have to stack in the field, but they still stacked over 2,500 small squares this 4th of July weekend up in barn.
Granddad was right when he said “you make hay when the sun shines”. There were no doppler radars scanning the skies on 24-hour weather channels back then. You had to rely on the lessons learned from “reading clouds”. I think sometimes it is like “reading tea leaves”.
But even the weather channel can be wrong. We were supposed to have a dry weekend, perfect for baling hay. We would get everything up in time to enjoy the 4th of July weekend like everyone else.
With clear skies on Friday we started baling and after a couple of hours the clouds started to darken up in the northwestern sky. It was too late to call in a big baler, so we put it in high gear and loaded up the elevator with as many bales as it could carry to the top of the barn. Al needed empty racks in the fields to pound out as many bales as he could before the skies opened up.
By Sunday afternoon, the fields would be dry enough to finish baling. We caught the Bowlus Fun Day Parade that morning at our usual spot under the tree by the Fire Hall. Afterwards the Schmitt’s and Middendorf’s were both heading home to finish baling.
As the boys talk in the hay barn about what changes they would make in how things operate, I just listen and smile. From horses to tractors, from flat racks to kicker wagons and from small squares to large bales, the means have changed over the years, but the lessons remain the same.
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As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota.
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