Farming
Inspired by this post from Acidman.
I farmed as a kid. When other kids went away to camp for the summer, I went to my grampa’s farm. The grandkids (there were a good many) would run the farm as the old man wasn’t in the best of health. Those who lived closest took care of the planting annd harvest, but the rest would deal with the rest of the work. The farm was about 65o acres, just over a square mile.
Anyway, there was a vegetable garden. In it, gramma would not allow tractors or powered equipment, so we cultivated with horses. I’m one of the few people I know who has pushed a plow behind a horse. There were stumps in that field, and when a 14 hand morgan mare pulled that plow you were holding into a stump, it could throw you clean over the horse. At the very least, you got punched in the gut, hard, by a plow handle.
My cousins and I took care of that little patch, fed chickens, four or five cows, horses, goats, milked the cows, all before the sun came up. We also weeded the big fields, mostly by hand. We used what chemicals and fertilizers we could get our hands on, and were glad to have them. A bad summer could bankrupt the old man, and several almost had. In the end, he lost the farm, but the old copper roofed farmhouse stands there, where my father spent his boyhood and where my summers were filled with what we considered slave labor at the time. Now, I’m damned glad to have had that experience, because I realize how important that lesson is: Farming, as Rob says, is damned hard work, and it never ends.
I grew up on a dairy farm, my Dad was programmer and Sys-admin who traveled all over the world on contracts. So my brother and I got sent to live with my uncle who unlike my parents actually liked kids. We were a grade “B” dairy farm or in regular people terms we produced the milk that goes into cheese. You milk twice a day seven days a week and you never get a break. Milk to late one night or have a problem with th emilk system and the cows can get mastitis then you are in for a world of hurt as you watch your profits get poured out every night because you had to put medication on their udders and it can’t get into the milk tank. You raise grain and hay but it’s not for sale you grow it for feed and if you aren’t milking your either fixing eqpuiptment, shoveling sh!t, or working on something to do with crops like discing or haying or sraying anhydrious whatever. Brutally hard work from sun up to sun down and in the winter you still have to make time for school and home work. You get up at 4:30 in the morning and round up cows on horse back even when it’s 10 below zero(any colder than that and we moved them into the barn at night or they would get frost bitten tails and udders). Do you know how cold saddle leather and lattigo rigns are when it’s ten below? There is a reason I moved far, far, far away from that lifestyle and became a software developer. It’s because farming sucks. You work incredibly hard for very little and it’s mind numbing work most of it. I did it from the time I was four until I was 17. My uncle rented out all of his land except some right around the house after we all got done with high-school. Rented it to the corporate farming folks. He sold off his herd and now works as an appraiser for a bank, he travels all over appraising farm machinery. He gets weekends off and even gets to go on vacation and best of all someday he actually gets to retire not die working in the fields like his father. Farming blows you could not pay me enough to ever go back to doing it.