The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
9/22/2014 column
When you walk in our barn, you automatically flip the light and radio switches on. If the lights are on, the radio is on. It is just automatic.
Of course we listen to country music when we’re close enough to the speakers located half way down the barn to catch a song or two. Otherwise the music is just a background distraction until your ears pick up a key word or a sound…like severe weather warnings or the score of the ballgame. Generally I just tune out the radio until a catchy tune captures my attention and I start to sing along.
Miranda Lambert’s new song “Automatic” is a cute song with a catchy chorus. She reminisces about things from her childhood. Quarters in a payphone. Laundry drying on the line. A watch to tell time. Reading a Rand McNally map. Standing in line to pay for gas. But the chorus is what really caught my ear. “Doing it all by hand, cause when everything is handed to you, it’s all only worth as much as the time you put in. It all just seems so good the way we had it. Back before everything became automatic.” Honey…do you really know what you’re wishing for?
It seemed strange to hear this song on the radio as our automatic green feed cart quit moving. It was done traveling up and down the feed alley. No matter how much I pushed on the foot controls, it was not moving forward or backwards. Luckily it decided to die just as I finished unloading the last of the feed for the morning and was out of the way. I had noticed the cart was a little bucky about moving as I stepped on the controls for the past couple of days. I thought it was just a drive belt. I walked away from the stranded cart and kept on with the morning chores. I left the cart project behind for Mark to work on. It turns out it wasn’t a problem with the drive belt. It was the hydrostatic transmission!
It was definitely a Monday morning! Once I had finished my other chores, I had to slip in the office to pound out an article before I could be roped into a farm job. I was once again up against a deadline. As I struggled to put the words together, Mark popped his head in the door and asked if I could run the feed cart in to town. I don’t know how Mark and Al were able to drag the cart out from the back corner of the barn, but they did. With the bobcat, pallet fork and a plank, they were able to lift it in to the back of the farm truck for a quick trip to town. I put my article aside, grabbed my purse and out the door I headed.
I never realized how “spoiled” we are to have a hydrostatic feed cart until we didn’t have it anymore. When I first started helping out in the barn, we used both a Wic feed cart and green push carts to move feed around to all the cattle. The automatic feed cart put silage and haylage in front of the cattle while we used the push carts to top dress with high moisture corn and concentrates. There had to be a better way of feeding cattle. Then we found a spot between the silo and barn to put in a TMR mixer and said goodbye to pushing feed carts around the barn at feeding time. We still use the same green molded plastic carts to haul feed and bedding to the other animals around the farm. Not everything can be automatic.
Two feed carts and 20+ years later, we suddenly found ourselves doing it all by hand again. We now had to fork out 4 tons of feed by hand every day we didn’t have a cart. Let me say this, physical work is a great motivational push to replace a 9 year old feed cart…along with a very expensive and lengthy repair option. We had a new feed cart in the barn by Tuesday night feeding. It took the cows a while to get use to a bright orange cart chugging past their heads but they have settled down and wait for the fresh feed to be dispensed. I’m trying to convince Mark that I should take some blue duct tape and make the cart an Illini mascot. He’s not liking that idea.
I agree with Miranda’s song about how some things are great to do by hand. Laundry drying on the line. Reading a Rand McNally map. Shifting gears on a Mustang. Homemade pies. But feeding cows by hand is not something I want to go back to! I like doing automatically or hydrostatically.
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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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