Growing Up On A Farm

Dear Byron,

The last time we talked I mentioned that I grew up in Minnesota and I told you a little about the farm that was my home during my childhood years. Well, what do you know, I have a photo of that farm, taken from an airplane. I don't know where my parents got the photo or who flew the airplane, but here is my farm, exactly as I remember it.

Way down in the right corner you can see the little house that was my first home. And if you look very close you will see a fence out front. That fence was for me and my sister Elaine. That's right, we were fenced in. My parents had the idea that we might wander out into the road and get run over by a car or a truck. So when I was a little guy, they let me play outside in the summer, but always inside my fence. 

I had a sand box and a swing and a teeter-totter. Like you can see in the drawing above, it teeters on a bar in the middle. You can ride it up and down if somebody else is on the other side. I spent many good times out in my fenced yard with my little sister Elaine. 

In the middle at the bottom is another building called a creamery. My Dad ran a dairy farm. He and his hired men milked over 40 Holstein cows every morning and every evening. Here's a photo of a Holstein cow. They make lots and lots of milk every day.  

After milking them the men cooled the milk down in a special tank of cold spring water and then carted it across highway 52 (the road in the middle) to the creamery where they pasteurized  the milk and poured it into glass milk-bottles with paper caps on the top. Then they delivered the milk to homes in South St. Paul. The bottles looked like this picture. Of course, nobody uses glass bottles for milk any longer, as you know so well. 

They also made chocolate milk in our creamery. Often they let me have a glass of it. Boy, did it taste good. I loved milk and I drank a ton of it, especially the chocolate kind. 

A couple more things about our farm. Our barn had a hay loft. That's where we kept sweet smelling hay with which we fed the cows. We kids could climb up in that loft and jump around. There were even ropes you could swing out on, let go and fall down into the hay. It was great fun. 

In front of the barn you see three tall buildings made from wooden staves. Those are the silos. Each fall my dad and his men filled them to the top with green ground up field corn. The corn would ferment because of the tiny organisms that live in the grass and turn into what they called silage. It stank pretty bad, but the cows really loved it. We fed it to them all winter long instead of the grass they ate out in the pasture in the summer. When I got older one of my jobs was to crawl up into the silo and throw forks of silage down to feed the cows. 

Behind the barn you can see a pond. Some cows are standing around the pond. Maybe if we could look closer we might even see some of the ducks that loved to swim in that old pond. I remember that as the years went by the old pond got a green scum on it because it was too small and had no way to drain. That was not at all good for the ducks. Many got sick and died from the dirty, scummy water.

Off to the right side of the pond is the chicken barn. My Mother and Grandmother kept over a hundred chickens in that barn. We ate the roosters and kept the hens for laying eggs. The hens would crawl into small boxes along the walls to lay their eggs. It is their nature to lay eggs, sit on them to keep them warm so that little baby chicks can grow inside. When I would go into the barn to take their eggs from them they'd really get angry and try to peck my fingers. Of course, we did allow some hens to keep their eggs and grow babies. It was very special to watch the little chicks hatch. Many times there were so many eggs with baby chicks in them that my Mother had to keep the eggs warm under electric bulbs until the tiny little chicks pecked the shells and came out. Remind me to tell you more about this some time. 

We had lots of other animals on our farm. Back of the barn on the left side you can see the horse and pig barns. The fenced in area behind the barn is where the cows, pigs and horses roamed around when not in their barns. When I got older another of my stinky jobs was to clean out the manure from those old barns. I'll tell you more about that too one time. 

There is so much to say about farming. Ask your Daddy and Grandpa Derrick about it. They both grew up on farms. All in all I think that farms are very special places for kids to grow up on. Not many get to do it any more. The world has changed a lot since I was a kid.