Looking Back by Paul Assink: Chapter 11: On the Farm

Whatever pleasures and satisfactions there were in working with animals, for me those did not balance the distaste I often had for that aspect of farm work.

Cleaning the udders of muddy cows in the spring, shoveling out the manure to keep the barn clean, putting up with temperamental cows who liked to kick, being stampeded and nearly trampled upon by hungry hogs you were trying to feed, castrating squirming pigs who squealed at the top of their lungs, trying to prod hogs up the ramp of a truck to get them off to market--all these things were the unpleasant necessities associated with farm work in my youth.

Field work was much more pleasant and, for the most part, even enjoyable. Plants were generally predictable and seldom uncooperative; the dirt of the field was much cleaner than the manure of the barnyard; and the open field less confining than the barn or the hog pen. Besides, field work was for men, or near-men; whereas, chores with animals was largely the domain of boys.

When I was small the highlight of the year was oat harvesting time.

Shortly after the 4th of July the oat fields would become white with ripened grain and the binder would be greased up and pressed into action. The binder was a machine pulled by horses or a tractor that would cut and bind the oats into bundles. This operation would begin on the outside edges of the field, proceeding around the field by cutting seven-foot swaths until the standing grain had dwindled down to nothing. The binder had a long cutting bar with perhaps 25 or 30 triangular blades attached to it. This bar knifed back and forth very rapidly and cut the standing grain, causing it to fall onto a moving canvas platform. This platform sent the cut grain toward the heart of the binder where two additional rotating canvas conveyors brought the grain upward to the apparatus which tied the grain with twine into neat bundles approximately one foot in diameter. The head of the bundle would contain all the grain and would fluff out. After the bundle was tied it was dropped into a cradle. When ten bundles collected in the cradle, the person operating the binder would release the cradle dropping the bundles in a pile on the stubble.

Later, the men would go out and "shock" the oats, stacking the bundles to stand together with the heads up forming what looked like little huts. Two bundles were then placed on top, capping the other eight bundles. With that, the oat shocks were set to survive the effects of heavy rains should they come. Shocking oats was heavy work. I didn't do a lot of it because by the time I was in high school, the coming of the combine had made oat shocking a thing of the past.

One of the pleasantries associated with the shocking season was the rare opportunity to drink beer.

Pa always felt that beer-drinking, whatever evils may attend it, was certainly justified after such laborious work regardless of how old one might be. I can still taste, swirling in my mouth, the distinct flavor of that yellow fluid from the long-necked brown bottle and feel the prickling sensation of the carbonation being released. Today, especially when drinking from a can, these sensations are difficult to reproduce and must be specifically concentrated on to recapture some of those first experiences.

The most exciting part of oat harvesting was the threshing time. A group of ten to fifteen farmers in the neighborhood formed a "run" in which they cooperated by helping with the threshing of each others oat crops. Each farmer would supply a wagon with a team of horses and the group owned or rented a threshing machine. In our run, Ed Johnson owned the threshing machine. The farmers moved from one farm to another and cooperatively completed all the farms in the run.

We, or at least I, eagerly looked forward to the day when the threshers would come to our farm. The prediction of the day before might be that they would be coming about noon. And, sure enough, about 2:30 the first two teams and racks would finally arrive. They would go immediately out to the field and, with pitchforks, begin to toss the shocked bundles onto the rack. A few minutes later two more teams and racks would arrive, and soon the field would be swarming with hay racks being loaded with bundles of oats. You can be sure, too, that the racks would be loaded in minimum time because no man out there wanted to be known as a "poke."

At last, the big steam engine with the giant rear wheels and its big boiler and smoke stack would come puffing into the driveway pulling the monstrous threshing machine behind it. It would set up in a place where the straw stack would be formed. By time the threshing machine was in place the first loads, piled high with oat bundles, would be ready and they would drive up next to the threshing machine. When everything was ready to go the big engine revved up, rumbled into gear and began to drive the huge belt that operated the threshing machine. With a deafening roar and a cloud of dust the machine settled into full operation and the men on the racks began to feed the bundles into the hopper of the thresher. The hungry machine swallowed the bundles, pounded them to pieces and sent out a stream of oats through a spout into a waiting trailer or truck. On the other side and beyond, a huge spout with a blower moved slowly from side to side over a thirty foot semicircle, disgorging the straw and chaff to form the straw stack. Someone, usually a younger member from the host farm, like me, would have the responsibility to operate the spout and to see that the straw would spread out evenly on the stack, enabling it to reach a sizable height. Another person would be on the stack with a pitchfork to compact the straw and smooth the edges. If the person on the stack was a friend of the spout operator he could count on occasionally getting blasted with a barrage of chaff and straw.

Another fascinating part of the threshing operation was the meal time.

The women were expected to serve all the hungry men, and serve them they did, with some of the biggest and most delicious meals I can remember. A bucket of warm water and a basin with soap and towels were set up on a table outside the house and here the men, blue shirt sleeves rolled high, would wash, splashing the water onto their grimy faces with both hands, snorting as they did so in order to keep the water out of their noses. I was always impressed with the transformation from filth to cleanliness that this pre-meal washing could produce.

After about a day the threshing would be done. With sadness I would watch the wagons, one-by-one, begin to pull away and leave for the next farm, followed at last by the exit of the steam engine and thresher. The noise, the activity, the excitement, all faded away and threshing would be completed again for another year. The farm and life on it would return to quiet and peace.

An appendix to the threshing season came about three weeks later. All the farmers would meet for an evening at Ed Johnson's place and figure up how much work they had put in at each place. If Harold Larson spent 10 hours at our place and my Dad and Henry spent 20 hours at his place, he would owe for those extra 10 hours. And so a great deal of calculating took place as the men sat around a huge table with pencils and pads of paper squaring up the labor costs.

But the exciting part of this night was that it was also an ice cream social to which all the women folk and kids were invited as well.

So, while the men were determining who owed who, and the women were visiting, the kids were outside in the dark having all the fun that kids know how to have under the shroud of darkness. Finally, however, the grand climax to the threshing season arrived when the huge dips of ice cream were portioned out along with cake and pop, and coffee for the grownups. It was fascinating to watch those big metal dippers dig into the huge cans of ice cream, while one's mouth drooled waiting for the third dip to be deposited on the plate next to the angel food cake.

The day would come, though, even while I was still on the farm, that the oat binder and the threshing machine along with the oat shocking and the threshing run would all be relegated to the pages of memory such as I'm trying to preserve here.

A new machine called the combine made all these things obsolete. The first combine came to our farm about 1941 or 1942. It moved through the fields picking up oats that had previously been cut and left in windrows, threshing it as it moved along. A trailer hitched to the combine would fill with oats and periodically would have to be exchanged for an empty one. Later combines cut the standing oats and performed all the threshing functions in one operation. The combine also made the growing and harvesting of soybeans a much simpler operation, a factor that led to soybeans eventually replacing oats on most Iowa farms.

Haying time occurred three times during the summer. We grew alfalfa as our primary feed for the cattle and usually three crops could be grown in the period from May to September. The alfalfa was cut with a mower which had a moving cutting bar similar to that on a binder. After being cut it would lay on the ground for about a day to cure or dry out. If it did not dry out sufficiently there was the danger of it heating up in the barn and causing a fire, the very thing which probably caused our barn to burn down that night in November 1937. After sufficient drying, the alfalfa was raked by a machine that moved it into long, continuous windrows. Then, with our pitchforks, we piled the hay into small mounds. When all the hay was so arranged, we proceeded to load the piles onto a hayrack pulled by a team of horses.

To unload the hay and put it into the barn required that three sets of rope slings be placed on the rack, one set on the rack floor and an additional set after each 3 or 4 feet of compacted hay was added. When the load was full it would be driven home and placed directly under the huge upper barn door which had previously been opened. A pulley would be lowered from the top front peak of the barn and hooked to the set of slings under the top section of the hay. This pulley was attached to a very long, thick rope which extended all the way to the top rear of the haymow and down through another pulley on the west side of the barn to the ground. Here, the end of the rope had a large hook to which the team of horses (or a tractor) would attach. When everything was set, the horses would begin to pull the rope and the hay under the top sling would curl over and eventually lift up and rise on its way to the peak of the barn where it hooked into a carrier. The carrier was a device with wheels which ran along a rail placed about a foot under the top of the barn. The carrier would then carry the slingful of hay to the desired location in the haymow, where, upon signal, a person standing on the outside of the barn would jerk a long thin rope attached to the carrier and trip the mechanism so that the load would drop. After depositing the load, the same person would pull the carrier back to the front peak of the barn with sufficient force so that it would lock into position at the end of the peak. From there the pulley was lowered again and the two other slings full of hay were each carried up into the barn in the same way. At the end of haying, or if rain threatened, the large barn door would be hooked to the pulley, raised up and closed.

One farmer on one occasion used this loading operation with considerable creativity. He had a large bull which he wanted to load into a truck. But, no way!

Neither he nor his helpers could coax, pull or push the beast up the ramp and into the truck. He had an idea. He moved the truck, walked the bull to the front of the barn, got out the sling ropes, put the ropes around the bull and hooked it to the pulley with the intention of lifting the bull just enough to deposit him into the truck. They hitched a team of horses to pull the other end of the rope, but as soon as the bull began to be lifted he let out a mighty bellow. This frightened the horses, causing them to bolt forward and run, which in turn sent the bull sailing upward and into the haymow, where they had no choice but to drop him onto the hay. How they got the bull out of the haymow, I do not know, but I'm sure that a creative person like him could handle that.

In later years we had most of our hay baled into rectangular blocks. This eliminated some of the work, but the bales would still have to be picked up and loaded into the haymow in basically the same way as before. Later balers loaded the bales directly onto a flatbed wagon, eliminating the job of loading them by hand from the field. John Eekhoff had a baler and did some of our baling. I spent a couple of weeks in two summers during my late high school and early college days working on the baler.

An important part of field work, of course, was the seeding or planting operation. I did very little of this. These were activities that occurred mainly during the school year, and only in dire emergencies would my folks consider it necessary to keep me out of school for work--or for anything else. Occasionally on Saturdays I might help with some oat or clover seeding, but planting corn was a rather skilled operation, not the kind of thing to be entrusted to a weekend helper.

Cultivating corn and soybeans, however, was a summer activity and I spent many an hour going up and down the rows, stirring and blackening the soil and eliminating the weeds that, since Adam's fall, have made labor so laborious.

Corn was usually cultivated three times and possibly four, if it didn't get tall too soon. Cultivating was a bit monotonous--up two rows, down two rows--but like anything, it could be made moderately interesting by playing little games with it, like trying to predict how much I would be able to complete by morning coffee or by noontime dinner. It also allowed one to think and reflect on whatever one chose to, for serious decision-making was not involved in this work; nor were there radios on the tractor or headphones plugged into our ears to impede those reflections.

Another enjoyable job was plowing. We had a two-bladed plow with about 14-inch bottoms; so we could plow a 28 inch strip. The ground to be plowed usually consisted of oat stubble, alfalfa stubble, clover ground that had been used as pasture, or corn ground whose empty stalks had been previously chopped up into smaller pieces with a machine called a disk. The plow was usually set so that it would slice into the ground to a depth of about 4 or 5 inches. When everything worked well the blades would slice the soil cleanly and smoothly, curling it up and over and leaving two shiny, black ridges and a flat, one-foot furrow in its wake.

One of the biggest challenges of plowing was to start a section of the field by plowing a straight line, a feat that could be accomplished only by keeping one's eye fixed on a target at the opposite end of the field and then holding the tractor rigidly steady all the way across the field. If the first transit was straight, it was then a simple matter of following the furrow, and continuing up and down the field and watching the strip of black soil get a little wider with each new furrow you created.

The most demanding field work on the farm was corn picking, some called it corn husking.

This was a job that would consume much of October and often last well into November. Imagine a plot of ground one half mile long (from 123rd Street to 127th Street) and almost 2 city blocks wide (from the street west of us to Navajo school on Oak Park Ave.), and then realize that every 32 inches there would be a row of corn, and on that row every 32 inches there would be a "hill" of three stalks with three or more ears of corn on each hill. Then, realize that each one of those ears were firmly attached to the stalk and encased in dried husk. It was the challenge of the picker to sever each one of those ears from the stalk, remove all the husk from each ear, and then toss it into a wagon being pulled alongside the rows of corn by a team of horses. This is the way corn was harvested on our farm, and most farms, until about 1940 or 1941.

I did very little of that kind of corn picking, although I would help my dad or brothers on Saturdays or after school. There was a real skill to picking corn by hand, and a great deal of attention was given to the art. Corn husking contests were held in almost every county throughout the state and the winners would eventually compete in a State Corn Husking Contest. One year, about 1938, Tony Carlson, a young local farmer, received much acclaim in our parts for winning the state contest.

The skilled husker would approach the task very methodically, grasping the ear of corn in his gloved right hand and with a steel hook, which he wore over the glove near the palm of his left hand, he would rip the husk open, tear it back in one motion, and with his right hand, jerk it free from the stalk and flip it against the bangboard of the wagon. A good picker would keep a steady bombardment of ears against the bangboard and in the course of a full day could pick over a 100 bushels of corn.

That 100 bushels was considered the picker's par. Henry was quite skilled at it and regularly picked his 100 bushels or more. Harold, possible due to less experience, had a difficult time attaining that widely sought goal. One day, I remember, he determined he was going to get his 100 bushels. He got up extra early, hastened to the field before the sun had dawned, and husked furiously all day long until dark. He just did accomplish the feat and gave us all a cause for rejoicing. He never, to my knowledge, bothered trying to repeat that accomplishment.

I'm not sure when it was that we got our mechanical picker, but I would guess that it was before the War, probably about 1940. This machine could be mounted right on the tractor, driven between two rows of corn, and husk the corn probably 20 or 30 times as fast as it could be done by hand. There would be delays due to mechanical breakdowns now and then, there might be a few more husks, and some of the ears might be missed if the corn stalks had been bent or twisted by strong winds, but corn picking would never be the same after the mechanical picker came on the scene.

Viewed from the perspective of the times, It was with gladness that various forms of mechanical progress came to the farm in the early to mid- forties. These were the War years, of course, and farm production was essential to the war effort. Also, many of the farm hands were serving in the armed forces, so new labor saving machines were produced and welcomed. But an era was passing, and an old and good way of life was rapidly coming to an end. The family farm which required the cooperative efforts of the parents and several children to till the soil, raise and harvest crops, and care for a variety of animals, was heading for extinction.

Being right in the midst of this revolution, we didn't see very clearly what was happening at the time, but "progress" was grinding inexorably onward to make farming a big business operation, forcing hundreds of thousands to find a new relationship to life, often in less satisfying ways.

The tractor, which we had had since about 1930, eliminated the need for one team of horses, and soon the second team could be dispensed with, consigned to become the ingredients of high quality fertilizer. The useful, hard-working and faithful draft horse would become an endangered species, noted only in those history books describing the agriculture of a former age. The 160 acre farm, standard size for Iowa families during my childhood--who could ask for more?--would become ridiculously small for the monster farm machines that were appearing. And with crops so easy to produce with such machines, why mess with 300 chickens, 100 hogs, or 20 cows? Buy more land; forget the animals. And with chemicals to control weeds and insects, and chemical fertilizers to spur the growth of crops, all that was required in farming now was a few days in the spring to plant the corn or soybeans, a few days for application of weed and insect killers, and a few days for harvesting the mature crops, and the basic work of the farmer was done. Children may still grow up on the farm, of course, but they're really no longer farm children. It's a different way of life: more productive, to be sure, and necessary, perhaps, but not as good. And so it is with a bit of sadness that I look back and reflect, knowing that something precious and beautiful has been destroyed from life as it was--something that will never be recovered. At the same time, I am grateful because I was privileged to have experienced that life on the farm.

Read more farm posts...
9: On the Farm - Playtimes
10: On the Farm - Chores

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Looking Back by Paul Assink

Chapter 11: On the Farm - Fieldwork