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. 

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.