Day 123: Farms & Farmers

When you grow up in the Midwest in a small town that’s surrounded by farmland, there aren’t too many opportunities job-wise, except, you guessed it, working on a farm. If you’ve never worked on a farm, you should. If you’ve never visited a farm, you should. If you’ve never spent a day with a member of a farm family on the farm, you should. The farm is a way of life that sadly too many people don’t have Clue 1 about. In fact, I’m almost completely serious when I write that if you live in America, spending an entire day on a farm toiling away should be mandatory, if only to pay your respects to the good people and the good land that makes stuffing your face full of food possible, whether they means eating the goods that come from an organic operation or a family-owned farm. (My respect for farms and farming doesn’t extend so generously to corporate-owned operations.)

My dad spent the majority of his working life working for grain elevators and Farmer’s Co-Ops. He also grew up on his grandparents’ farm in southeastern Nebraska. Those two factors gave me some insight to farming in general. I remember vividly riding with him as a kid in the trucks that delivered food to the pig farms and being mesmerized by the squealing that filled the air. I also remember not seeing him during the spring and fall months during harvest because he seemingly worked around the clock.

Early on in school, I learned that farm kids were tough. I learned that they didn’t complain a lot. I also learned that typically there was a great deal that was expected of them. We didn’t see much of the farm kids during the summer when school was out, and later I found out why—they were busy working their asses off.

It wasn’t until I actually started doing farm work, however, that I truly started to appreciate the demands that farming places on spouses and children living on that farm. Like a lot of kids in my hometown, my first official farm job was walking beans, a job that meant arming a bunch of teenagers with large, sharp corn knives and turning them loose in the fields to cut the weeds out of the rows. Not a terribly difficult job, but for teenagers not used to walking miles and miles in hot, humid weather in the middle of green vegetation with mud caked on their shoes and pants, the job wasn’t a pleasant one. The lucky kids were the ones who had parents who bought them a corn hook, a device that equipped them with the means as to not to have to bend over to cut weeds; they just reached the hook around the weed’s stock and tugged. Whammoo. I always felt like it was cheating. Back in the day, walking beans paid about $3 or $3.50 an hour. Not bad for a kid back then. Dick Styskal was the first to hire me, but eventually I’d walk beans for a lot of families until ultimately graduating to spraying beans, which was almost fun by comparison.

Bailing hay, however, was the “real” farm work for kids in my town. It paid $5 or $6 per hour, depending on the farmer, but it was hard, hot, and long work. I bailed the first time at 14. I weighed about a 125 or 130, and trying to heft hay bales three or four bails high was nearly impossible. We worked some days from 6 a.m. to midnight, and spent hours upon hours in stuffy, hot barns unloading rack after rack while dodging angry wasps that were torked off at having their nests clobbered by bails. Riding a hayrack in a hayfield is an art form onto itself, sort of like surfing but not nearly as much fun. Riding a full hayrack on top of hay stacked five rows high is trickier yet and was often terrifying depending on who was driving the tractor. On those occasions the rack did spill and you were left picking up every last bail and restacking them, you nearly cried.  

Despite how difficult bailing hay could be endurance- and stamina-wise, I have great memories of the people I bailed with. Bill Smith made me laugh nearly nonstop. Chris Craven did the same. My cousin Dicky was a man of few words, but he sprung for lunch at the Memphis Lake café almost every day, and the hamburgers were damn tasty. Food, in fact, was a strong motivating factor in bailing hail. Farm meals were to die for. Lunches were four-course affairs, and afternoon snacks were full-on sandwiches, cookies, and more. It wasn’t uncommon for Kenny Rogers’ (no, not that one) wife to serve fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, green beans, and pie at lunch. We ate so much, getting back to work was nearly impossible.

I find myself thinking about farms and those days at this time of year when the air starts smelling like growth and I see farmers out in the field planting. Each time I drive back home, I try to get off the interstate and instead take the less traveled highway, and even then get off the highway and take the country, dirty roads from there. The aroma never fails to disappoint, and the sun shines differently in the country than it does the city. Moreover, the country just feels different. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s time you visit a farm.