Lucky to grow up on a farm

Pleasant memories:
1. At age 12 pulling a load of ear corn and oats 5 miles on country roads to the mill. Boy was I grown up!
2. Leaning against a warm cow while milking in a crowded, warm basement barn full of critters. Frost on the windows an inch thick.
3. Smell of the earth in the spring while discing fall plowing with a flock of birds following, leap frogging each other looking for goodies.
4. The warm air coming up from the HeatHouser while plowing on a cold fall day.
5. Cheery warmth and peeping in the brooder house while changing out water jars and feeding chicks.
Leo

More memories: Going groundhog hunting at 11 with a single shot 22 rifle. helping a baby chick peck out the egg shell and wraping it up in a warm towel. Carring water from the spring to drink and take a bath with. Dropping taters in the row barefooted in the garden. Pulling tobacco worms off the tobacco and dropping in a can of gas. Walking to the store to trade eggs for groceries. Going to school barefooted until winter time. That was the good life.

Going down the line in the stanchion barn, doling out the alfalfa. Most of the cows got a pat on the head, but watch out for that little Jersey, Mossy- she'll hook ya if she gets a chance.

Tying bales on a Case hand-tie baler when I was 10 (and getting to drive the truck in the field because I was too little to handle the bales).

Carrying water to the calf pen in 5 gallon buckets, until my sister and I went together with our allowances and bought a cheap garden hose to make the job easier.

Combing "ducktails" over the pin bones on the wet cows in the milking parlor.

Real nice memories, there are some great books out there about life on the farm from the 40s thru the 60s or when ever. I liked Jerry apps's books, when chores were done, every farm tells a story, living a country year ect. Christmas in dairyland by Leann Ralph is also a good book!

Fond memories. dad have some corn in town in "grain bank" he had 2 wagons hooked behind the Super M in the driveway ready to leave to haul some of it home. I went and got my metal wagon and wired it to the hitch on the back wagon while he was wiring to hitch pin on the first wagon, he didn't know I had wired mine to the back one , he gets on the M starts to leave, Mom comes flying out of the house, GEORGE!!!!! Looking back I'm glad Mom saved me,, again.

Going fishing in the pond, hunting for rabbits and squirrels, feeding the hogs, learning to drive the tractor, feedsack shirts, killing hogs and grinding sausage and curing hams, going to school barefoot in the summer and getting out in the fall to pick cotton, building forts out of firewood and using walnuts as ammo. This could go on forever.
Richard in Oconee Co, SC

I always loved pitching corn silage down out of the silo. It was dark going up the ladder, but when I got into the silo, it was light enough to see what I was doing. I loved the smell of the silage and I liked to suck the sap out of the corn stalks.

When the silo would get nearly or completely empty, it was my rocket-ship that carried me to Mars, the moon, and outer space.

Tom in TN

The smell of corn silage. Fresh cut hay. The mix of diesel fumes and freshly turned dirt. The satisfaction of watching the last rows of corn disappear into the feeder house of the combine! Walking soybean fields with a hoe, chopping weeds. Laying out lands to plow a field all by yourself, for the very first time. The excitement on the day a new tractor arrives!

I can relate to just about everything that's already been said---the hog-killing, chopping corn, picking cotton, going barefoot eight months of the year,finding all the plum thickets, berry patches, grape and muskedine vines, chinquapin and hickory-nut trees in the area.

The big community social events were hog killings (all our neighbors would come to help, and we them) and pond-seignings (giant community fish-fry everytime this happened). On a smaller scale, when friends or relatives would drop by to help with the pea or butterbean shelling. Sitting out on the front porch in the dusk, shelling and listening to the grownups talk, is a memory that cannot be taken from me.

Much of my recollection is based upon smells: even the things that smelled bad were proper in their place---the chicken yard, the cow pen, the outhouse. Remember what a box of biddies smelled like? We used to get ours in the mail---square box with holes all around. I remember the smell of dried peanuts on the vine in the barn as I twisted them off. I remember the winey smell of sorgham silage in the trench silo my dad experimented with. I remember the smell of chlorine from water we used for everything in the dairy---and that stayed, to my embarrassment, on my hands and arms when I went to school. (I probably smelled "cow-ish" as well, after shoving the bossies around in the dairy each morning. Also, I have been guilty of rousting a sleeping cow on a frosty pre-dawn morning, sending her on her way to the barn, then lying down in her warm spot to catch a few more precious winks.)

Yes, we are all products of these memories. If all of our fellow citizens had something this solid to reflect back on we would be a much, much better nation.

Great descriptions!! You sure brought back some memories.

As a kid is SE Ohio, I worked on a tomato farm for Mr Humphrey. He also had a dairy operation. Late one summer as the tomato operation was winding down, Humpy told me and another kid, Bobby to go over to the silo, climb up the ladder and throw down the "bad" silage. Kenny the hired hand would be on the tractor and he would load up the manure spreader and haul the bad silage away. Then Bobby and I would need to throw down good silage that Kenny would feed to the cows. This was an extra job that only went to the good workers like me and Bobby-or so we thought.
This silo had a ladder inside a tunnel going up the side. We climbed up to the top and stood on the the brown silage cap. There was no top on the silo, so by straining we could just barely see over the top and survey the surrounding farm from high atop this silo. We felt like bigshots in the hot August sun hi above the other kids working in the fields in the distance. As we began to throw the bad silage down the tunnel (we couldn't get it over the top) we began to see, no smell, that this was not quite the reward job we originally thought it was. The old silage cap was rotted, slimy and it stank. We worked fast without talking to get down through the bad silage to the good green silage below. Finally we were out of the bad silage and ready to fork down some good smelling green silage...Kenny hollered up and said we were needed elsewhere and that we would come back to get the good silage a bit later. Bobby and I had to go down the ladder in that tunnel enclosure with the slimy, rotten, stinking silage sticking to us as we made our way down to the ground. When we hit he sunlight, we both saw that we were covered in the slimy brown goo. I have never gotton over that smell. My mom told me to spray myself off with the garden hose and leave my clothes outside.
I DO love the sweet sour smell of good fresh silage though....Forking that down was always a fun job.

nice post! Real good topic thanks for sending it,and all the responses were great too,

What a bunch of selective memories we have.
How about picking up a bale full of bees, Trying to teach a new cow where her stanchion is,her next door neighbor peeing on you while you are taking off the the surge, chipping frozen poo of the beater bar on a February morning.

Growing up on a farm was alot of hard work,But when you put it like you did memories are priceless.Thanks for the great post
Tony

I always figgered farming was the joy you got saving a newborn calf, and the humbling you got burying the one you didn't. They both tend to make you a better man.

We worked pretty hard, pretty steady. Milked 3 to 5 cows by hand 7 days a week, morning and night, sold lots of the milk to neighbors, separated the rest and sold the cream. Grew, put up and hauled hay in the Summer and fed it all Winter. Moved a lot of manure, and my Dad didn't ever get a tractor with a loader until I went away to college. Raised lots of hogs and chickens. In the Summer, there were always weeds to tend to, in the garden or in some field. We always cut and hauled in 4 or 5 cords of firewood every year, and hauled coal once in awhile. I always wore out my pants in the right rear pocket, because that was where I carried my pliers--I fixed fence all the time. I also had to pick rocks very often, who knows how many hundred tons I hauled off the fields and piled over the years? There was always something that needed to be done, and my Dad and Mom pointed those jobs out to me if I hadn't noticed them.

I kind of enjoyed field work. It was peaceful and fairly easy, just sitting on the tractor keeping it going where it was supposed to. Summer fallowing was pretty dusty, and we never had real respirators, just tied rags around our faces. Plowing was great!

A couple of months after I turned 13, my parents left on a 2 week trip, leaving me home to take care of the ranch and take care of my little brother. When they got home, everything was in order, the separator and milk equipment was clean, as was the house and barn. I had sold milk, cream and eggs and collected more than $100 while they were gone. I did get in a little trouble for hooking the hay wagon to the tractor and driving it to the local store a mile away to get some stuff, including a case of soda pop. But all in all, my parents were pleased with how I had taken care of things--more or less like they expected me to. I suppose that leaving a 13 year old for 2 weeks today would be considered child abuse or endangerment, but it worked out fine for me.

Since I was so busy all the time, I didn't have as much time for the things some other kids liked to do as they did. But I also never got into any real trouble either. I got along great with my parents and got good grades in school.

I was great friends with my animals, especially the milk cows and bucket calves I handled all the time. They were pets and I still think about some of them 40 to 50 years later.

Working so hard on the farm was good for me. I learned responsibility, diligence and tenacity, was extremely strong physically and learned a lot about mechanics and how things work. And since I grew up that way, I didn't know any other way to live. Being a farm kid had a lot to do with the man I am today. I too think I was lucky to have grown up on an old fashioned working farm!

Even though my dad and I worked a "hobby farm" of about 85 combined acres, I think that it made me more of a realist.
Like rustyplow, I birthed and buried my share of calves in our 40 some Herefords.
Walking next to a dusty 1940s combine to make sure the canvas kept moving
Walking the plowed fields after a few rains, lookin fer arrowheads!
NEVER wanting for food by raising, butchering, storing, canning, and selling all that we grew
I may have been hard.......but I'd never trade it