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Strenious farm chores

A

Anonymous-0

Well-known Member
There is hard vork to do on a farm.
As a small lad on the farm, one of the hardest chores my paw instructed me to do. He said, "Throw the cows over the fence some feed."
Do any of yo'all remember chores yo didn't like?
 
Ive thrown a fair amount of hay over the fence to the cows.But I've never thrown a cow over the fence to the feed! LOL
 
Sister was about 11, I was about 8- we had to feed the calves (usually about a dozen at a time). That was OK, but we had to carry water by the bucket full about 50 feet from the water trough to the calf pen- kind of a pain, especially when they were off milk replacer and drinking a lot.

Sis got the idea that we should pool our allowances and buy a hose. We measured how long we needed, and got one next time we went to town. Couple days later, Dad complimented us on figuring out a way to save some labor, and then said since the hose was being used to water the calves, it should belong to the farm, so could he buy it from us? You bet, pop! He even helped us make and hang up a hook on a fence post to store it when not in use, so the cows and tractor wouldn't run over it.

Years later found out that Mom lit into him, for making us kids use our own money for something he should have got a long time ago.
 
Cleaning frozen silage off the silo walls with a pick axe and ice scraper is never much fun. I just did that Saturday afternoon. But cleaning out rotten grain out of bins or cleaning the cistern are worse... I have always enjoyed feeding livestock, even if it is with buckets and a pitch fork.
Lon
 
When I was about 12 and my Brother was 10, we used to have to carry 5 gallon buckets of ground feed to some steers my Dad would keep back and put in a feedlot at our house.
We backed the pickup up to a grainary and load up to 25 five gallon buckets and set them in the back of the truck. Then go to the lot and start carrying them into the lot to dump into feedbunks.
If it wasn't bad enough that the buckets weighed about as much as we did, it was in the late winter and early spring where the ground would freeze in the nights and thaw in the days so that there was deep holes where the cattle walked around and trying to navigate with two five gallon buckets full of grain and keep upright was very hard to do. More than one bucket of grain was spilled for sure. I can remember my arms aching while navigating the frozen cow ruts. Did that every winter for 6 or 7 years. Sure was glad for it to warm up each spring.
 
Cleaning calf pens and sheep barn in spring. We had a free stall loafing for our milk cows and used saw dust for bedding. I took the 2 ton truck with 8x16' box and went to saw mill and loaded it by hand with a #14 aluminum scoop shovel and took about an 1 to 1-1/2 hours ( back when I was 23 years old).
 
I remmber two. Castrating hogs after they got to big to handle and carring 5 gallon pails of water out to the barns when the pipes froze.
 
carrying feed sacks usually weighed between 80 to 100 lbs my dad loved to save money even if it cost him money cant remember how many loads of corn and oats shoveled in the truck hauled to town filled the gunny sacks then hauled home .they only reason he gave up on cans is that the wouldnt take them anymore
 
Pitching the 6' of rotten silage off the top of the little silo every August... What a mess. You'd get big chunks of moldy dry stuff that the fork would bounce off of, and wet heavy slop that stunk so bad it took a week of hot soapy showers to get rid of the smell. Not to mention the dead pigeons and occasional dead cat.

Unfortunately, there was no other way to do things so the cows would have feed for two weeks in September when both of the other silos were being filled.
 
I can repeat a few of the jobs some of the other posters mentioned. Pitching manure, especially away from the hay manger, castrating those 150 pounders, chopping thistles, carrying ground feed walking the bunks. One winter dad had seven bunks lined up and I carried 250 pails a day down those bunks. Wouldn't have been so bad if the cattle's heads weren't in the way. If I stepped on a tongue it kind of rolled under my foot. Oh yes, the most dreaded job-leveling the Grain-O-Vator auger wagon when dad ground feed into it with the Deere #10 hammer mill. The hammer mill spout barely made it over the edge of the auger wagon so there was a lot of scooping, and I was right beside the cyclone blowing white dust in the air, and on me. Used to hate rock picking. Now it's a job I brag about, being in my 60's and still able to pick up tons of rocks, unlike the neighbors who hire lazy kids. Jim
 
Shovelling mouldy grain at the bottom of the flat azzed bin to the centre auger....No wonder I have bother with my lungs! Found out later that mums cousin got a new style bin with a coned azz....made Dad get one fitted to our bin for the following year! ...Then we self fed silage to the cows...let them feed straight out of the pit, with an electric fence wire to stop them wasting silage, Of course we always filled the pit too full and the cows could not reach the top 3 foot of silage. So I had to cut it with a silage knife and throw it down to the cows....absolutely hated doing it and once or twice or maybe even 4 times I nearly fell down with the silage! Mum made Dad get a silage grab and an extra spool valve fitted to the tractor as a present for my 16th birthday....Best present ever!

Sam
 
I'm getting tired of having to plow snow or tunnel to get out to feed the critters. Gotta go out and shovel the gate out again this afternoon. Animals get a little unruly if not fed and watered regularly. Also getting tired of carrying hot water from the house....
 
Why do think Henry Ford left the farm and got into the car business? Farming was too much physical work. The other option was to be a lumberjack as Michigan had lots of trees back then, really hard work with manually powered saws and axes.
 
When I was high school age I worked for a guy across the field in the summer.. Walked his hay fields picking thistle. Funny thing was I just clipped the heads and let them drop.. always figured THAT wasnt the solution but he was the boss..Also hate muckin stalls..
 
Fun to read all that stuff below- most of us did most of that stuff, at one time or another on the farm. I escaped the silage stuff, but did feed brewers malt for 40 cows, by wheelbarrow, for several years. Still remember the sequence- couple sheafs of alfalfa, couple shovels of malt, coffee can of beet pulp, and a drizzle of molasses on top, in front of each stanchion. Try to do it fast, so you're done before the cows come in after they were milked- lots easier that way.

Not to hard to figure out why guys on this board are so testy about folks who just wait for their check from the guvment every month. . .
 
Still got some now.
Got 6 Biotech hog barns. Put round 5x6 bale of straw in, cut the strings, if you're lucky it's only the top 6" thats frozen solid, try to peel that off, then unroll the bale down the barn turn it at the bottom push back up the other side.
If you're unlucky you get 6 bales a day that are frozen solid and have a flat spot on so you struggle to push them and 180 hogs in the barn don't help either.
Add the fact that you've probably got to dig snow to get the tractor out for 20 mins, chisel frozen crap to get the pig barn doors open, and deal with the end tarps, and the last 3 or 4 weeks its been Minus 20 oc and nearer 30-40 0c with wind chill. It's being a brutal job this winter.
Regards Robert
 
Used a lot of Armstrong equipment. Most kids today don't know how to operate it, unless it had a computor hooked to it.
 
Well, maybe no the equipment, but the Armstrong Steering, seems a lot of trucks and farm equipment had that option.

I have heard of the "Georgia Backhoe" - now who in heck coined that phrase I'll never know or why one state over another, its all the same when it comes to a darned shovel LOL !

Chores, were not too bad, clean stalls, put up hay, cutting firewood, can't really complain.

Later years, stripping stalls completely, wet bedding, or after the barn was flooded, that was a real pain, or re-framing the section of the barn that collapsed, in December and January, won't ever do that kind of work again, or lets say the way we did that one. Its worse as you get older, all the hard work, even if you liked doing it, knowing you really worked hard, body don't like to cooperate, only gets worse too LOL !
 
I doesn't do any good to feel tired of doing chores. Just makes it more of a chore. Been carrying water night and morning to the eleven horses since the Start of January. I can just drop bales down for the four in the barn but the others up the hill I use a two wheel cart to get the hay up to them. Digging out the gates is part of it here also. When I am carrying the feed and water the horses want to walk slow in front of me in the foot deep paths or try to push from behind faster than I can walk. You would think at 75 I would want to give it up. Nope, I don't like the cold and deep snow but I love being able to work with the animals.
As a kid I didn't mind cleaning hog pens but it was a much harder job cleaning where the cows bedded down in the barn. All pitch fork work until I was a junior in High School when Dad was able to buy a loader.
 
forking the manure out of the steer pen. They would stomp the straw bedding in there all winter and when it came time to clean it was so packed together that it was almost impossible with a fork. It was worse yet if we threw some corn stalks in.
 
I use to clean hiefer Barns everyday by hand. I pitched a 160 bushel spreader full from one barn one day and another from the other barn next day. One winter of that and I got tired of it. Dad refused to buy a skid loader so I knuckled under and I did.
 
I hated cleaning the hog houses but that was only every few months. It was feeding sileage that was the workout.

Using the loader tractor would waste too much. We used the old Chevy pickup. It would idle the whole time with the door open to hear the am radio. It was the combination of the fumes and the sileage smell that I got so used to. We had to fork the sileage in by hand and then unload it by hand. A heaping pickup each day. I remember hating that job. Grandpa did more than I did and he was over 70 at the time. He was one fit man.
 
Sorry can't relate to farm chores . I grew up in the suburbs. In the 70s I was in grade school my dad put on an addition onto our house I wound up digging the footing during the day while he was at work then more digging when he got home how I spent my summer vacation .6, deep 20x30x20 then on Saturday,s we shoveled the dirt into a dump trk and took it to various places to dump it. Then we built a 2 story addition . I was the only grade school kid w caloused hands like any man in construction .
 
Building fence. Dad had a 6 foot steel bar to poke a hole in the ground, then a pointed wood post drove in with an 18 pound sledge hammer.
One summer we had a hay field that had a huge amount of dock plants in it, so Dad mowed it and had Mom and us boys pick out the dock plants before he raked it.
Also remember forking out stables as being unbearable.
 
Worst job was mowing away loose hay in the barn mows, especially when it got up near the roof. mowing bales away off the end of the elevator was no snap either...always hot and humid in Michigan at first cutting hay time. Nothing made me sweat more or got me dirtier. Ran the mounted 2ME cornpicker on the SMTA after the ground had frozen (we thought) and got so cold and dirty I begged to haul and shovel the stuff instead. Then the tractor/picker got stuck in the field and the fun really started.....horrible trying to pull it out. I never enjoyed "Doccing (castrating hogs)" either.
 
I hated castrating pig and cleaning sow pens. I never could figure out why any one would park a sh?t spreader in the front yard. Any time dad said get the tractor and hook on to it, it ment work till your azz was dragging.
 

I never minded picking rocks or stacking hay up to the roof in the hay mow, but I didn't like cleaning calf pens with fork and wheelbarrow or loading the dump truck full of gravel with a spade. It just took too long.
 
Cleaning out the chicken house every Saturday morning. It was 160' long, everything was done with a 5 tine backhoe and a #14 grain scoop. But it kept my brother and I from wondering what to do on Saturdays. We used to try to get ahead of the job so we could go hunting on Saturday afternoon.
 
That's kind of like an old Amish man told me one time. He said: I went the stairs up to look the window out to see the band play the road down. Possibly this is the way it is said in German or Pa. Dutch.

Dick
 
Milking 12 cows morning and night 365 since i was 10.Got the job handed to me of cleaning the gutters with fork and wheel barrow at 12.
Did that and much more all trough my school years for my dad. (He married late and was over 50 when i was born).And after i graduated school and my Dad fell ill i did the whole farm including milking 24 cows by my lonesome.
BTW the milking was done by hand;)
 
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