Nostalgia on the farm

“Grandpa, what was your life like in the winter back when you were a farm kid?”

We didn’t have a furnace in our house – just a wood stove in the middle of the living room. Our job was to carry wood to the house every night from the woodshed, which was about 125 feet up the hill from our house and halfway to the barn. We usually would load sleds with wood pieces and try to make it to the porch before they fell off. If each kid also carried an arm full of wood, that would be enough to get through the night.

The kitchen was warm from my mother cooking on a gas stove for seven kids and two adults. The coldest room in the house was the upstairs bedroom in which I slept with my three brothers. The chimney went through the center of the bedroom and was the only source of heat. Thick quilts and lots of them kept us warm. Sometimes the frost on the windows was over an inch thick. Padre would call up the steps at 5 a.m. to wake us up. We would reach out from the under the covers and bang our shoes on the floor to make it sound like we were moving. But he figured out what was going on and only once did he have to come back to wake us up. The pipe coming out the back of the stove would get red hot, so we’d carry our barn clothes and shoes and dress next to the stove. Getting too close to the stove pipe created a corrugated burn pattern on our bellies.

The goal each morning was to feed the cows their corn silage, ground feed (made at the mill from our own corn and oats), and baled hay before school. My mother milked cows with four Surge buckets while the three oldest kids each milked three cows by hand. We were told that it helped Mother get done faster, but I think it prevented a waste of energy from scrapping with siblings.

While milking, cans were placed in the center alley with strainers and filter pads for collecting the milk. Milk from the buckets was dumped into the strainers along with the milk from the hand milking pails. We had only one cow that gave more than 80 pounds. A milk can holds 80 pounds of milk. Milk cans filled from the night milking were placed in a water tank to cool the milk, with cold water running constantly.

For many years, we didn’t have a barn cleaner. The cows were let outside so a tractor and spreader could drive down the barn’s alley while we cleaned the gutters by hand. If one brother splashed another, the battle was on until the boss intervened.

Adding a barn cleaner was a huge improvement and made our chores so much easier. This was Padre’s first expansion. We went to 70 cows. This was in the early 1960s. Us kids were getting older, but the routine was still much the same. Mother milked with the buckets and Padre fed the cows with silage the kids had throw out of the silos the night before. As the oldest in the family, I hauled the manure after cleaning the gutters. All this work had to be done before 7:30 a.m. so us kids could make it on the school bus. If we missed the bus, we walked the 2 1/2 miles to school. It wasn’t uphill all the way, but it was a lesson learned.

A Farmall “M” was used to haul the manure. It had a heat cab on it called a heat houser. The only heat came from the engine. If the wind was behind the driver, he got no heat. Chains on the rear wheels were essential for getting through the snow. If a chain came loose and caught the heat cab, it would pull the driver into the wheel if he didn’t stop quickly. On the bright side, on Saturdays us kids would connect 20 bale strings together and tie them to the spreader and get sled rides while Padre hauled the manure. Snowmobiles were not popular yet.

When I was 15, I got to haul milk to the local creamery with our trusted Chevrolet pickup. The truck held 22 cans. Having a full pickup was important – if the truck wasn’t full, the cans would slide around a lot. One day the roads were a little bit slippery, and since our farm was located halfway up a hill, I decided to take the lower route. As I got closer to the bottom of the hill, the truck slid into a snowbank and the cans slid into each other and popped many of the covers off. The guys at the intake were helpful and gave me some covers. I always hoped I wouldn’t get behind a can milk truck at the intake. If I did, I would be late for school.

Christmas on a dairy farm still stirs a lot of emotions. In those days, we didn’t realize the meaning of my dad saying, “No one ever goes to the house until all the animals are fed and bedded.” He meant it every day. Everything we had materially was because our animals rewarded us for good care. We didn’t realize that we didn’t have many things at that time, but we were happy and healthy. I will always remember feeling that a pair of socks and a tube of toothpaste were the best gifts ever.