The Farm

Now it seems time for an autobiographical sketch ...

When I was 14 years old I had the lucky opportunity to work a whole summer on a working farm. A friend in high school got me a job on Lee Brandt's farm outside of Newville, Pennsylvania which is near Carlisle. This farm was a bit of everything ... it had a barn with about 10 Holstein milking cows, a heifer, a steer, a bull, a large apple orchard with a variety of apple varietals, a peach orchard, chickens, hay fields, pastures, a corn field, and the requisite two dogs and a barn cat. The farmer also had much of the usual farming equipment ... a Farmall tractor, a hay wagon, a plow, a harrow, a manure spreader, a hay baler and a set of discs. In exchange for baling other farmers' hay fields, he would get to use their combines or seeders or money ... so, yours truly spent many days on the hay wagon stacking bales of hay ... often having to lift them over my head.

After arriving at the farm my first job was scything the underbrush and weeds off of the side of the road leading upto the farm house ... interesting and tough job. Next, farmer Brandt had me clean pick a cherry tree (I think it was Rainier cherries) near the house. It yielded about a bushel of cherries which we then drove into Newville and sold to a local grocer for about five dollars. Later that day or, more probably the next, farmer Brandt gave me the keys and, after some brief instructions, told me to take the tractor and harrow a nearby field which I surprisingly did. About halfway through this chore I had a call of nature so I hopped off the tractor and returned to the farm house to relieve myself. I was teased about this for the rest of the summer.

That night I was introduced to milking the cows ... which I did morning and night for the rest of the summer. This task consisted of first bringing the cows in from the barnyard or field, tethering them, , feeding them hay and grain, briefly washing their teats then attaching the milking machine ... after which I finished them each off by hand into a bucket. All this milk was then dumped into 10 gallon milk cans and deposited into the cold water of the spring house. This milk was sold to the Hershey Chocolate Company which would come by every day or two to pick it up. After the milking was done the cows would then be moved out to the barnyard (in good weather in the evening) or to a field (in the morning). After the morning milking I usually had to muck the area and move the manure to the barnyard ... and replace it with fresh straw. About once a month or so the farmer loaded the manure from the barnyard into his manure spreader and dispersed it on the appropriate field.

One of the worst jobs on this farm, which i did a few times during my stay there, was cleaning the chicken coop ... a dirtier job I cannot imagine. The coop was full of dusty droppings which just about overcame you before you could finish the job. But I got back at one of these little buggers ... one afternoon the farmer's wife gave me a hatchet and ask me to get a chicken for supper. Using a tree stump meant for this purpose I dispatched this bird with a certain relish. It flopped around the front yard for a good five minutes before she took it in to clean it.

The neighbors of this farmer were very friendly. Every time you passed them on the road they would greet you with,a hearty "hi, cousin." whether you were one or not. On Friday nights all the locals would assemble at a nearby church yard for an auction, country music, and some local entertainment. I still remember one local wag saying that, although he was too old to cut the mustard, he still could lick around the jar (right on the edge of my adult awareness). The auction consisted mostly of unused farm stuff donated to the church and watermelons. Someone apparently drove down to Virginia every Friday morning and brought back a truck load of these beauties. But I don't recall my farmer ever having the winning bid on even one melon. The country music was tolerable and did whet my taste for this genre. At the end of the summer this assembly morphed into a super gala (in the narrow world of these people ... as it was in mine) with their famous chicken salad sandwiches, lemonade and coleslaw. All this festive Saturday (after chores were done) was devoted to eating, music, bake-offs and games at this local church..

There came a day that one of the farmer's two dogs died. I was given a shovel and a burlap bag full of dead dog and told to go bury it in the woods. Being a tad lazy for this chore, I went deep into these woods and just flung this sack as far as I could ... to my eventual dismay. About a week later the farmer decided to graze his cows in a different pasture which, unfortunately, meant I had to drive them through these very same woods morning and night. The daily stench of this rotting dog then was my punishment for my previous lassitude.

The daily life at the farm was rustic. For breakfast, the farmer's wife gave me a bowl of cereal and milk which, when finished, was supplanted with a fried egg. In general this woman was not a very good cook (contrary to folklore). The lunch and dinner was forgettable. One day later in the summer we killed a steer I had been feeding and tending to ...  the slaughtering is an experience anyone eating meat should see and appreciate. I was anxiously awaiting a dining upgrade ... some of my buddy for dinner. Not so fast, George. The first night of this bounty was the ox tail simply roasted (to be tender, it needs to be braised or served in soup). I went to my bed depressed. I was allowed a bath only once a week on Saturday night. The ring in the bathtub was an inch thick. I was only sick one day at the farm. I came down with a fever and pock-marked skin. Since I had alread had chicken pox and measels as a youth, I have since surmised that this was cow pox.

One day one of my older cows escaped her fencing and got into a corn field. This bovine ate so many young corn plants that she killed herself ... her throat and mouth were so full of chewed leaves to the point where she suffocated. What a dumb animal! The farmer called a butcher who came and winched her stiffening body onto his truck ... to be disposed of in some economical manner (fast-food burgers?)

On Sundays after my chores I often visited a neighboring farm to help my buddy (who got me the job) with his milking. When we had placed the milk cans in the spring house, my buddy would retrieve from the cool spring water a large jug of apple jack. Boy was that good! It was carbonated, thick and dark like thinned apple butter and carried a kick ... nothing like the insipid stuff that they call hard cider today.

That summer was filled with a variety of other work projects. I helped the farmer build a silo. I thinned, with a stick, the peach and apple trees of excess fruit so that the remaining fruit would be bigger. I cleared the weeds from around the apple trees to keep the mice from damaging the roots. I plowed fields (see: Haiku Wanderings for one of my experiences). I helped with the early apple harvest (Transparent apples as I remember). I helped with the cutting and storage of corn silage. I, of course, stacked and emptied into the barn, many many hay wagons. I fed the animals (try lifting a sack full of wheat ... I think it weighs well over 200 pounds). My days were always full of things to do.

For that ten weeks of my back-breaking farm work, right before I left to go back home, I was paid $100 (less a few advances I was given during the summer). Plus, of course, I got room and board (such as it was). Now I usually worked there about 60 hours a week for ten weeks which means I worked about 600 hours for $100 ... or almost 17 cents per hour. On an inflation-adjusted basis this is $1.52 in today's terms ... and it was and still is the best money I ever earned.

Thank you Lee Brandt and family.