Farm Life

Life on a farm isn't like it seems in those Old McDonald picture books.  Our cows aren't all white and black, my chore clothes aren't pristine blue jean overalls and a straw hat, and our farm isn't red outbuildings with white trim.  We don't use a pitchfork to pitch hay, we don't have hay stacks, and most of our cows have numbers instead of names.

The modern dairy farm is turning more and more automated.  Our fields are worked by horsepower (as in John Deere) as opposed to horse power.  Our hay is baled, not stacked, and lines the driveway at the barn in long white plastic wrapped rows. We use skidsteers and tractors with loaders to haul and feed hay.  No pitchforks involved. Our cows are numbered for convenience (ever try coming up with 40 new names each year without overlapping the 120+ names you already have in use?) and are black, white, brown, red, grey, and every shade in between.  My chores clothes are sweat pants, T-shirts, and sweatshirts and on my feet, the ubiquitous blue mud boot found at the fleet supply store in town.  Our barns are more pole buildings with steel siding/roofing as opposed to the iconic red barn with soaring hay loft.  Fields are plowed with tractors pulling plows that cut a several foot swath instead of a single row of sod turned over by a walk-behind plow pulled by a trusty farm horse.  While I do know how to milk a cow by hand, I rarely have to use that skill for more than the occasional cow as our automatic milkers with their automatic take-offs do all the hard work for us.  If you really want to get fancy, you can get a robotic milker for even more ease.

Yet, farm life isn't all mechanical. There's still the charm of seeing newborn calves wobble about on gangly unsteady legs.  There's still that one favorite cow who nuzzles up for a neck scratch. There's still the appreciation for the land and the animals.  Farmers still sigh with satisfaction when the last load of grain is in the bin and harvest is done for another year.  While things have gotten more automated and farm life has changed considerably since the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the essence of family farming still remains.  My kids will grow up on the same farm their father did and maybe someday V and/or A will farm with their own children here.  Til then, they'll ride tractors with their daddy, watch the calves gambol about in their pens, and grow up as honest-to-goodness farm kids.