Corn Chopping

 Corn harvesting season was one of my favorite times of year.  I was 19 when dad built the big poured concrete silo and had bought a new International McCormick forage harvester.  Before that, we had relied on a neighbor with a big Fox harvester to fill the old wooden silo and 12x25 concrete stave silo.

We had a Gehl silo blower with a long hopper that would fold down behind the end gate of the wagon.  Then me or my brother would run the apron on the wagon and help pull the corn silage down into the conveyer in the hopper.  It was slower than the big Fox and self unloading combination silage trailer/manure spreader rigs that the neighbor used, but Dad liked the flexibility and cost savings that came with doing it ourselves.  

To this day, the scent of freshly chopped corn silage is still one of my favorite smells.

 In the spring of 1963, our long time neighbour, Old Mr. Anderson, held an auction sale for all his field and barn equipment.  His dairy herd had been sold the previous fall, and the land had been rented out to a local hog and crop farmer.  All his equipment was cleaned and polished, and lined up beside the barn awaiting bidding.  The Farmall Super M and its little brother, a Farmall Cub with mounted sickle mower.  The Cub was Mr Anderson's most used tractor.  He used it for mowing, raking, spreading, scraping the barn yard, and hauling wagons.  The McCormick-Deering silo filler and corn binder that were still used to fill the little cement block silo long after most other farmers had switched to forage harvesters.  The square baler that I had spent countless hours riding behind while helping neighbors with hay making. The bidding started at Mr Anderson's two hay wagons, which were loaded with all sorts of odds and ends, from the IH vacuum pump and bucket milkers, to boxes of bolts and tools.    The auctioneer started his cry, and rattled out numbers as items came up.  There were old wooden buckets, 19th century furniture, and old ox yokes.  All stuff that we thought was common old junk at the time, but later would be viewed as precious antiques, bringing back memories and recalling a disappearing way of life.

The Windmill

In 1955, the old Aermotor windmill still stood alongside the milkhouse at the Anderson farm next door to ours.  Old Mr. Anderson had never married, and as a result his farm had stayed pretty much the same since the days when he had first taken over from his father shortly after he had returned from serving during World War One.  Even though rural electrification had come to the area, the only things that had changed on the Anderson farm were the replacement of the kerosene lanterns and gasoline engine running the vacuum pump. The farm house still relied on a cistern in the cellar and an outhouse.  

Our barn had been updated with a large galvanized pressure tank and an electric pump that were housed in a utility room off the barn.  From there, both the house and cow stable were supplied with water. But over at Mr. Anderson's barn, there was a large wooden tank above the stable that supplied water to the drinking cups.

The Aermotor was a self-oiling model that didn't require constant servicing, but Dad must have been worried about old Mr. Anderson climbing the windmill, because he would always volunteer me for the task.    I didn't mind the chore, perched high over the farm yard, with a birds eye view of the surrounding countryside.  The rolling pastures turning green, the budding trees in the woodlots and fencelines, and the well kept barns of our neighbors was always such an invigorating sight.

The Bradley Farm

 The Bradley farm was located along the main road into town from our rural district.  It was a neat and well kept farm with freshly painted buildings and a tidy white fence bordering the road.  Mr Bradley was known to be one of the most modern and progressive farmers in the area.  The old wooden barn with a hay mow above the stanchions still stood in good repair, but by now it was only used for heifers and calves.  Instead, Mr Bradley had constructed a state-of-the-art Surge picture window milking parlor in 1959.  Beside the parlor, he had a paved cow yard and a loafing barn.  The cows were fed using a new semicircular feed bunk with overhead conveyer from Patz.  Two large concrete silos held corn silage and haylage. It was an amazing sight for a young farm boy to see, driving by on occasion during evening milking and seeing the brightly lit interior of the parlor shining out of dark sky.  It was very impressive, even though the herd of 40 cows that Mr Bradley milked seems like such a small number these days.

The Old Silo

 My grandfather had built the wooden silo in the 1930s during the middle of the Depression.  All of the materials had arrived from the factory by train, and he had to take several trips with the wagon and team to bring everything back to the farm from the railroad depot.  I had heard stories about how Grandpa had mixed all the concrete for the foundation by hand in a wheelbarrow.

     In 1960, the wooden silo still stood next to the barn, and a newer 25 foot tall concrete stave silo had joined it.  Both of them were filled with corn silage every fall that was fed along with hay from the haymow throughout the winter, and until the cows returned to pasture in spring.

     The concrete silo had a Patz electric silo unloader that worked with the push of a button, but as the youngest son, it was usually my job to climb up the wooden silo and throw down corn silage to where my brother Henry would load it into a wheelbarrow, and bring it out to the cows in the stanchions.  I always loved the early spring where I didn't have to worry about frozen silage along the silo walls.

     Although the wooden silo has been gone for many years now, and I don't miss my work with the ensilage fork, I still have fond memories of that wooden silo.

The Feed Mill

 One Friday in late January, Dad sent me to run down to John Dixon's Feed and Hardware Store for some calf grain and fencing supplies.  The reports were calling for mild weather in the upcoming week, and Dad wanted to get a head start on replacing the fence at the northern end of the cow pasture, along the woodlot.  An ice storm earlier in the winter had taken several trees down, and they in turn had left the page wire fence as a crushed and mangled mess.

I left the farm right after breakfast, and before long I was parking the farm truck alongside the loading ramp at the side of John Dixon's store.  The sign proudly stated that the business was established in 1895, and it seemed to me like everything was always exactly the same every time I visited, ever since I was a small child.  The Purina checkerboard sign hanging up on the side of the mill was starting to show rust stains, and the snow had been shoveled away from the Texaco gas pumps out front.

The inside of the store was filled with almost everything that was required on a family farm of that era.  From boxes of nails and rolls of wire, to chicken feed and rubber boots.  Mr. Dixon was behind the counter going over a ledger and I recognized old Mr. Anderson leaning over the counter reading a farm newspaper.  His farm was next door to ours, but he had just sold his dairy herd the previous fall. After telling Mr. Dixon what I needed, I turned to Mr. Anderson and innocently asked if he was enjoying the freedom of no longer being a dairyman. 

He didn't reply right away, and at first I thought maybe he hadn't heard, but then I realised that he had tears in his eyes.

"Son," he said.  "I've been a dairy farmer all my life, I hardly know what to do with myself.  Every morning I walk to the empty barn like I've been doing every morning for the last 60 years, and just stare at the dust and empty stalls for a spell.  I feel like part of me died when the cows left"

At the time I didn't fully understand his sentiment, but many years later there would be a time when I too would share those same feelings.

Winter Problems

In the year of my 17th birthday in the early 60s, the winter started off pretty mild.  It was a green Christmas that year.  That all changed shortly after the new year when a cold front moved in.  One Monday morning when dad and I entered the barn to start morning chores, we were dismayed to discover that a jersey heifer had gotten loose and had somehow opened the door to the silo room, allowing a cold draught to come in and freeze the two closest cast iron drinking cups, causing them to crack.  We watered the affected cows with buckets and finished milking.  

As soon Jerry's Farm Service opened up at 8:30, dad sent me the ten miles into town in the farm truck to get replacement drinking cups.  Thankfully Jerry had just what we needed and we had everything fixed by lunch time.  That day was another good reminder that sometimes you never knew what what to expect on a winter day on a family dairy farm in the 1950s.

25th of December

Early on Christmas morn, before the sun had begun to rise above the snowy hills, I decided to leave the warmth of the house and trek across the yard to the dairy barn, as I had countless times before.  Across the fields, the neighbour's farms are all silent. Their barns are dark and stables all sit empty.

The milkhouse door creaks open, the bulk tank sits empty, and the pulsators all hang in a row, covered with cobwebs and silent forever more.  The calendar on the wall sits frozen at April 1994, the month when the cows left.

The stanchions are layered with dust and it was cold and forlorn without the warm and friendly cattle.  The wind howls down the empty silo.  

I reflect upon the memories of countless Christmas mornings in the warm barn, protected from the blowing snow, and think that Christmas without all that, just isn't the same.

December Manure Spreading

 

Manure Spreading

It was a crisp early December morning.  The sun was only just begining to rise in the horizon.  The ground was frozen with only a faint dusting of snow.  It was a great day for spreading manure. The bare frozen ground gave for a rough ride, but at least the tires of the Minneapolis Moline gas tractor wouldn't get stuck in either the snow or the mud.  

Dad always insisted on spreading as late into winter as we possible could before he started piling the manure in the barnyard.  This meant that on most years we were still spreading manure daily in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  We didn't yet have a loader tractor, so the manure was dumped straight from the litter carrier into to wooden side New Idea spreader.  The Louden litter carrier was a big time saver when it came to cleaning the stable, but it still required the gutters to be forked out by hand, and some larger farms in the county had already installed new mechanical barn cleaners made by companies like Patz, Acorn, and Jamesway.  The litter carrier hung on a single rail track that ran around the whole stable behind the cows, before heading out the big double door into the cowyard.

Once I had a full load in the spreader, I headed straight to the field to empty it before it froze solid.  I was thankful for my thick coat and woolen mitts as I struggled to stay warm perched up on the seat of the Minneapolis Moline as the gas engine purred away.  Once I was finished I knew I would be able to enjoy my breakfast in the warm farmhouse. 

First Snow

The snow started to fall in the early hours of the morning.  The snowflakes glistened in the warm light coming out of the barn windows as I brought the cows in from the barnyard.  The twenty-eight Holsteins didn't seem to mind the snow very much.  The barnyard had a concrete base and was sheltered on two sides by the corn crib and old horse stable, and on the other side by the stout stone foundation of the bank barn.  I slid open the big wooden door and the cows cordially followed each other into the warm barn.

Dad and I locked the cows up in the stanchions and started to put the milkers together.  We didn't have a pipeline yet, instead we used four Surge bucket milkers that we carried over to the milkhouse and dumped into the flat top Sunset bulk tank after every cow.  My brother was running corn silage out of the silo.  Dad had built the poured concrete silo in 1965, and we felt like it was the pinnacle of luxury with its Patz unloader.  It sure beat the back breaking chore of forking down silage from the old wooden silo. 

By the time we had finished morning milking, the whole countryside was covered with a crisp blanket of fresh white snow, covering the scene of brown dead fields that we had seen the day before.

Corn Picking

The Anderson farm had been in the family for several generations.  During the autumn of 1959, Old Mr. Anderson still milked 15 guernsey cows in the old red barn with the date "1902" stencilled in white letters just below the peak of the roof.  Every November, after we'd finished filling the two corn cribs on the home farm, Mr. Anderson would hire us to fill the old wooden drive-through crib that was nestled beside his pig sty.  My older brother Henry was always the one running the New Idea picker behind the Oliver 66.  My job was to bring the galvanized gravity wagons back to the Kewanee elevator that   dumped the ears of corn into the crib.  Perched on the wagon watching the corn tumble onto the rattling elevator, I had a pretty decent view of the farmstead.  The old white farm house, the barns, the rusty windmill with the missing blades, the hogs rooting around in the barnyard, and old Mr. Anderson himself in front of the milkhouse, loading milk cans into the back of his Studebaker truck.  Further out I could see the golden guernsey cows out on pasture and the colorful leaves of the trees along the back fencerow.  I couldn't see Henry behind the tall corn, but knew we only had one or two wagons left to fill this morning before we'd be done for the season.

Now, decades later, I sometimes wish I could be that 14 year old boy picking  corn in rural Illinois again.