Not a day goes by that I don’t pay homage to something I learned when I lived and grew up on my dad’s dairy farm.
It’s a long time ago now. In fact it’s almost 50 years since he and my two uncles who ran the farm with him got rid of the dairy cattle and moved to growing crops to sell and raising a few beef cattle. And it was less than a half a decade after that the farm was totally gone, after a mid-westerner bought it all and developed a mobile home park on half of it and sold the other half to Murray City to build what is now the Murray Parkway Golf Course.
But for the first 17 years of my life that farm was our life blood, something that never went away, a 24 hour a day overseer by which all else was determined. Anyone who has ever farmed knows about that. In that regard it’s even worse than the newspaper business for putting you in the middle of things 365 days a year, and I certainly know about that as well.
Okay, that all sounds ominous, but the fact is the good always outweighed the bad. Of course, as in all businesses we were at the mercy of the markets. If milk was high, things were good. When it went down in price, well it was very much how the coal miners around here feel during a coal lull or bust. But the one good thing about the farm is you can change up some of what you grow to send to market. Even with that it still it could be tough.
The farm was a living, breathing animal of its own. This is not about the cows, the chickens or even the alfalfa or the corn; this is about its personality, its geography, its layout, its temperament. There were good lessons to be learned, many very hard to take.
The first lesson I took away, very young, is that everything in life changes. On a farm animals come and go, crops thrive and fail and sometimes even those you work with do both as well. Everything is affected by the weather. One year you have a bumper crop of something, the next you almost lose your shirt. Prize cows would die out of the blue. Machinery, yes even new machinery, would break down exactly at the time you needed it the most. The raw milk cooler’s refrigeration unit would never give up the ghost in January; but it was bound to fail in July. The guy who picked up the milk from the farm for the dairy company would just get trained on the job when a new one would appear and it would start all over again.
Sounds just like the rest of life, doesn’t it?
No substitute for hard work
Next I learned that there is no substitute for hard, dedicated work, and being there on time. My dad got up every morning at 4 a.m. to milk cows. And while he came home for lunch for about three quarters of an hour each day, he then would not return to the house until at least 7 p.m. or sometimes 7:30, after cleaning up the equipment after milking. This happened six days a week. Hauling, plowing, cutting, digging, herding, fixing, watering, plowing again, baling, stacking, feeding, you name an “ing” and that’s what he did the rest of the day when he wasn’t milking the black and white animals. On the seventh day he took a rest, or kind of. He still had to feed, sometimes water, and always milk twice a day. What did it get him? Well it wasn’t much money, but it was satisfaction of doing the right things the right way. Our dairy was always top rated for the kind of milk we produced and the cleanliness of our operation. He was proud of that. I am sure he would have liked to have made more money, but it certainly wasn’t the most important thing.
Con artists and country folk
I learned that honesty is the best policy on that farm too. I never saw my father do an dishonest thing in his life; not at work, not at home. Sure he made mistakes, but they were honest ones. He trusted people most of the time, but he was also wary of shysters. And many came to talk to him. You see con artists have this impression that country folk aren’t too smart; funny thing is that people like my dad could see right through them. Me being a kid he could see right through me too. And when I did get away with something, I think it was because he wanted me to, not because he didn’t realize what was going on.
I learned that partnerships and teamwork are important. My dad’s partners in business were his brothers. In life, my mother. In both relationships people worked together to get things done. I remember once my sister went out with a young man that worked for another farmer that did our field threshing for us. He observed that my dad did all the work on the farm while my two uncles drove around in their pickup truck. My dad would have blown his stack if he had heard that; they all had their jobs to do and they did them.
Finally I learned that you should love your family. My mom often accused him of loving his cows (he had names for every one of them) more than her. It was one of those family jokes, but not all joke. There was some truth to it. However, nothing was ever too good for us as kids unless he just couldn’t do it. And when he thought he couldn’t do it, my mother, his partner, would convince him he could.
I was very lucky to be raised on a farm. I know people who never lifted a hay bale, cut field corn with a machete and threw it on a wagon, thinned sugar beets, cleaned ditches in the spring, herded cows through four feet of snow with ice under it, got up four times during the course of a dark night to go out and change irrigation water or any number of hard jobs one does in a farming operation. I hated a lot of it when I was a kid. But hate when you are a kid sometimes is like the taste of vegetables are to you as a kid too. When you get older you realize how good they really were and are.
And how good they were for you.