A Beautiful Story....But It's all About Turds

Susie and Snowball on the John Deere spreader,
newly restored with fresh paint. 

When Pa was first getting into horses, he just had saddle horses. One day, he was lamenting to a mentor of his that he needed to get some machinery in order to haul manure. Harold Hermansen, old-timer, harness-maker and proprietor of Hell’s Half-Acre (which I believe was more land than a half an acre) said to my Pa “you mean to tell me you got all them horses and they can’t haul their own shit?” As I remember the story, this was the beginning of Pa as a teamster, a driver of horses, and a deep rabbit hole of horse drawn machinery. 

Harold helped Pa get a harness together so the horses could indeed haul their own shit. At that time it was just a matter of converting saddle horses, Susie and Snowball, to driving horses. Converting saddle horses to driving went better for some than others, not every saddle horse is good at learning new tricks. For all they know, the noisy contraption being pulled behind them might be a horse-eating monster. One of Pa’s horses, Sam, never got the hang of it, but Susie and Snowball learned to drive. That first harness from Harold, and that first ambidextrous team opened the trap door for Pa, and down he went into the driving horse rabbit hole. The trap door slammed shut behind him and before we knew it, we were farming almost full time with the draft teams we’ve loved so well over the years. I never knew Harold Hermansen, but he sure left a tremendous legacy and shaped my childhood more than he will ever know, or likely ever expected to.

If there is one thing that holds fascination as a farm-favorite activity for some strange, unknown reason, it’s manure hauling. Even on modern farms, and no matter the size of the machinery, manure hauling is usually considered tons of fun. Perhaps there is something meditative about it? Who knows. For me, it was a favorite Saturday ritual when I was little, and therefore it will always hold a place in my heart. Plus the old, horse drawn manure spreader seems to be the only spreader that we can keep working reliably. 

Mama pulled stories out of thin air, even stories about poop. Her stories were about a little girl who lived with her family in a little house at the edge of the forest. She had no name, no one in her stories ever did, but her experiences always seemed to mirror my own. I can’t tell stories like she can, but I can tell you I sure had a whole lot in common with that little girl who lived there at the edge of the forest. Let me just tell you, that little girl loved stories about hauling manure. Whenever I requested a story about hauling manure, Mama always looked baffled. “A story about hauling manure… hmmmm.” She looks perplexed and thinks for a minute.

“Once upon a time, a little girl her lived with her Mama and Papa in a little house at the edge of the forest. She had a dog (quantities vary by year), six horses (quantities also very by year), some pigs, a few chickens, and maybe a few cats might be in the mix too. She was happy there with her mama and papa. She liked Saturdays best because that was the day of the week that her Papa pitched manure.”

Mama’s stories went on to tell how we dealt with manure. In the old days, Pa had a day job off the farm. Saturdays meant he was home, and it also meant that the barn was cleaned up whether it needed to be or not. In rain, snow, sleet, or shine, manure was taken care of along with another list of activities that needed his attention.  

Barn cleaning happened with a small and simple repertoire of tools. A fork, a scraper, a wheelbarrow, a wooden plank, and horse-drawn, John Deere manure spreader, and our ever-trusty team Dude and Rusty. When motorized tools aren’t used for a job, work takes on a meditative quietness. You find a rhythm that is distinctly your own. Scraping up a fork full dumping it in the wheelbarrow, scraping up a fork full and dumping it in the wheelbarrow, repeat. I could help with this part, no matter how little I was. As a parent now myself, I realize how much I must have disrupted that rhythm and probably flung manure in Pa’s face on accident more than once. But I don’t remember that part, just his steady pace. When the wheelbarrow was full, Pa wheeled it up the wooden plank that was bridged between the bit of concrete just outside the barn door and the manure spreader. He had a swinging, awkward stride of walking a balance beam and great strength to push the heavy wheelbarrow up the ramp. I have tried to wheel a full wheel barrow up a plank, and I can’t. At the top, he neatly dumped it and returned for another load, until the spreader was full. All the while Dude and Rusty stood there, hitched to the manure spreader having a quiet conversation of their own. If they were feeling feisty, in addition to tying off the reins on the handle Pa also would drop one tug chain. This old farmer’s trick means if the team decided to walk off, they would walk up into the reins and not get very far. I learned this trick years later with another team. I don’t remember Pa doing it with Dude and Rusty, I only remember them standing like a rock. 

Next stop is the field. Pa flips the seat back up, sits down, unties and adjusts the reins, and they are off. Away from the barn, up the steep bank heading out the barnyard and out to the field. Once, a particularly icy year, Pa sharp-shoed the team so they could make it up that bank. It worked well, but it also meant they were able to have better traction in the pasture too and the rest of the horses paid the price for it as they went slipping and skating around the barnyard while the team bullied them. Pa didn’t do it again. 

In the field, Pa pulls up the team for a minute to adjust the settings on the spreader. Beater settings on the left, apron settings on the right. Down the length of the field they go, leaving a trail of brown in the snow. A sad disruption in the winter when the field is a pristine sea of white, but a welcome sight in the spring when the soil is fed with the nutrients being added in. It’s a preparation of the year’s promise of crops. Colman, our dog that was my same age as a youngster, always ran behind the spreader. This was heavenly for an old farm dog, but less than ideal for us when the dog would be laying under the breakfast table in an hour or two. Pa goes slow, keeping an eye on the load. After a while he disengages the beaters and the aprons push the last bits off the bottom of the spreader. Then they head back to the barn yard for another load before breakfast. 

Maybe breakfast was the best part of spreading manure. Mama makes terrific pancakes, and those pancakes are the best ending to Saturday morning manure hauling. Homemade pancakes, with home raised, homemade sausage patties, and maple syrup. If we didn’t have maple syrup, Mama made her own concoction boiled into a syrup, and it is far superior to any store bought (Find the recipe here), corn syrup monstrosity. I still make it if I am out of maple syrup. Often breakfast had a side dish of homemade applesauce, home-canned pears or peaches, and it was all delicious. It was just the thing to keep you going like a lumberjack on a cold winter’s day. No wonder Almanzo Wilder ate as much as he did. If his mother was half as good a cook as mine, its easy to down twelve pancakes. Which is exactly what everyone, everyone, everyone needs!

One year Pa bought a skid loader, affectionately now named “Little Bob.” Grandpa, Pa’s dad, advised him against this, noting that if he quit using a wheel barrow eventually he wouldn’t be able too. The work keeps you young and healthy, this is true. The natural exercise of caring for your livestock and minding a farm in the old way is a great health plan. The advancement of technology also changes the routine. You no longer take the time to find that rhythm in the silence of work without the constant roar of an engine in your ear. You miss things, like the sound of the wind, the sounds of livestock shifting around. The livestock also misses the work in mind and body too. Teams we’ve had since that Saturday ritual stopped have never been trusted to stand unattended in the same way that Dude and Rusty did. How could they be expected to if there isn’t the routine practice? Their girths have also thickened without the routine exercise. Grandpa was right. And what was good for us was good for our animals too.

Our advancement into the technologies of the twentieth century also lead us to make a manure pile to be hauled out in the spring and fall. It isn’t the same as the Saturday ritual of my childhood, but now I ride along with Pa when the pile needs to be hauled out. The team isn’t as practiced so they don’t stand on their own. I sit on the seat minding the team while Pa loads the manure spreader up with Little Bob. We giggle like fourth grade boys when Pa accidentally dumps manure on me. Why wouldn’t we? Poop is hilarious! 

Ivan and Nellie

When the load is full, Pa lays a plank across the spreader, like he did sometimes when I was little, and we haul it out together. The silence is back. The spreader makes a little creaking under the full load when we head out the field. Pa sits on the left so he starts the beaters. I sit on the right so I start the aprons in the first notch. Down the field we go listening to the a gentle, rhythmic clicking sound of the aprons as they advance, the beaters a steady whirling “womp, womp, womp” sound. All the dogs since Colman were smarter. They run next to the spreader, not directly behind it. Pa keeps a close eye on the load as he drives. See, when you haul from a pile like that, there might be stones in the load. It could be a painful experience if one of those stones got kicked back at us by the beaters. After the load is mostly off Pa shuts off the beaters and I move the aprons up to the second notch so they scrape the bottom clean. We head clicking back to the barn for another load of the pile. It is a great way to spend and afternoon, but it isn’t quite the same to me as the Saturdays when I was little. Maybe it’s the lack of pancakes. We generally don’t eat pancakes for supper, as manure hauling is no longer a morning ritual.

I don’t think we will ever return to Saturday mornings like they were was when I was little, but that is how it is with a journey through time. It goes on and things advance. Old magic is replaced with new magic and new traditions. If we didn’t have a pile, I would probably miss hauling manure with Pa because I am grown now with a busy family of my own. Mama still makes pancakes most Saturdays and Sundays though. If I time it right, I can stop in for breakfast and a cup of tea.

The Dog Days and Hay Days of Summer

You know- I never understood that phrase, “The dog days of Summer.” For me it calls monotony to mind, those days that all blend together. Just uneventful and dull. Or when it is hot, the image of a poor dog laying there in the shade, panting relentlessly when it is just too blasted hot to do anything else. But Pa calls this good haymaking weather and seizes the day with joy and gusto. He frolics about on a wagon load of perfect bales with a passel of dogs and you would think he was a six year old at a waterpark. “Mmm mmm. Good hay, eh’ kid? Isn’t this lots of fun!?” He says to me like it isn’t a hundred degrees in the shade and I’m not standing on this hay wagon in the sun wearing the heaviest pair of jeans I own. Mama glances back at us from the tractor and smiles. It is hot there too. 

The year I was born there was a drought. Right in the middle of the “dog days.” It was a hundred degrees the day Mama and Papa brought me home from the hospital. Or at least that is how the stories all go. Nothing grew - except for a thistle in the yard that got quite tall because there was no need to mow the dead lawn. Mama carefully cut the brilliant purple blossom and put it in a vase in the house. It was beautiful and it also kept that thistle from going to seed. Lord knows we don’t need more thistles in the lawn. Heat has never really bothered me as much as it seems to bother other folks. At least not until I was expecting our second child. It usually has to be at least 80 before I consider putting on shorts and I don’t like to get in a pool unless it is 85 or higher. I do wonder if that has had something to do with how hot it was when I was brought into the world. However, haymaking is hot, sweaty business no matter what the thermometer reads.

In the beginning, haying was done with the horses. Pa cut with the team, then raked with the team, and then put up loose hay in the mow with the team. Nowadays we use a tractor with a haybine and rake that most farmers would now consider vintage. Mama does some of the cutting and almost all the raking. No matter the equipment, the real challenge is choosing the best days to cut and put it up in the barn. Just like with planting, I used to tag along while Pa strode to the field to check the hay. He would pull a handful from various places in the windrow; a little from the edges, a little from the center. He twisted the stems back and forth a bit, checking the moisture. Sometimes he would nod and head to hitch up the horses. Other times, he’d look annoyed, shake his head and head back to the house. If the hay had too much moisture, it needed another day of good, hot sunshine. If there’s one thing my Pa truly dislikes - it is poor hay. 

When my folks bought the farm, we did not bale our hay. We made loose hay like they did in the old days. The sort of hay all these old barns were built for. Hay was cut, dried, raked, and then loaded onto flat-rack wagons with standards on both ends - all with the horses. I was too little when we made loose hay to remember much, but when I look through the old box of photos, it looks far less strenuous than making small bales. Pa informs me that this is indeed true. You just push the hay around with a fork to balance the load out. In the mow, the sling does most of the work for you. Not like with small bales where it is a continuous cycle of moving a sixty pound bale of hay from one place to another.

Cutting hay with horses is sneaky and methodic business. After a few rounds, the horses just know, and they work their way around the field almost on their own. The driver runs a little foot pedal with his right foot to raise the sickle bar a bit for the corners. Many a wayward animal has lost its legs or a tip of the tail to the horse drawn hay mower because they are so quiet. All you hear is the gentle swish of horses plodding through the tall hay and a quiet whisper of the sickle blades on the McCormick #6 or #7 mower, depending on which model Pa was sitting on. High from the adrenaline, the injured animal sprints off on stubs. We had a cat once, the sort with nine lives, that had a poor relationship with the mower. Poor Petunia lost the end of her tail and a few toes to the hay mower. Petunia was a very special cat for our family and lived a remarkably long life.

Raking with Dude and Rusty

After the hay has been cut and dries for a bit, Pa set out to rake the hay with the team, windrow after windrow to dry in the summer sun. When it was fit, the flat-racks were spread with slings made from rope and slats of wood. The hay loader was hooked on behind the wagon. Dude and Rusty plodded down the windrows of hay, baked dry in the hot summer sunshine, making their winter’s meals. The hay climbed the hay loader and was spread out over the slings. After a good thick layer, another sling was laid down, and when the wagon was full it was off to the barn to unload.

Some of the best family stories come from making hay on the back field, the only field we have on a good-sized hill. I spent years of my childhood hearing the line about the time we ran a bee hive up the hay loader, but never knowing much more than that. Finally I asked Pa what the rest of the story was. Bumble bees had a nest in the ground in the back field that year, unbeknownst to us. Unfortunately, the windrow had been raked over the top of the nest. So, imagine hundreds of fat, fuzzy bumble bees crawling their way through a foot or so of hay to find their home. Along comes the hay loader pulling the windrow up, and along with it, a nest full of lost bees. Nothing sets a man to hopping about like a kangaroo on top of a load of hay like a swarm of bees. Pa sent out a sting of expletives, and a command to get the wagon moving, and they trotted out that situation. 

Running the Hay Loader with
Dino the Dog Running Along

Another great story was the time the pole broke on the back hill with a full load of hay. It was a testament again to how truly great a team Dude and Rusty really were. The harness that the team wears to work is carefully engineered to push the wagon along through a collar that is attached to the tugs, which attaches the horses to the vehicle. The pole and the britching strap around the horses behind are what allow a team to hold back heavy loads while going downhill. If the pole breaks… well suddenly there isn’t anything to hold the wagon back anymore. So heading downhill with a full load of hay and a broken pole could have very well been a catastrophic situation. Dude and Rusty handled the situation with all the ease and finesse anyone could dream up. The wagon came up behind them and bumped them in the rear ends and they continued their calculated descent down the hill holding the wagon back with just their large

The Hay Loader

Belgian behinds. Pa pulled them up at the bottom of the hill and unhitched. He ground-drove them back to shed for a new pole, and possibly a clean pair of overalls. With the new pole in place, he drove the full wagon into the barn to be unloaded like nothing ever happened.

Ever wonder why there are doors on the side of the barn that drops down into the barn yard? When you pull the load of hay into the barn to be unloaded, the team can get a nice breeze, and some fresh air looking out those open doors while the wagon is being unloaded. In the old days, a second team was hitched to a rope that was attached to the pulley system that moved the hay to the mow. For us this job was done by an old Allis-Chalmers W-C tractor on steel. First, the ends of the sling are attached in place. Then the tractor drives ahead, and the sling lifts the hay all the way to the peak of the barn. Click! It hits the top and a mechanism sends the sling of hay along the peak of the barn through the queen posts and into the mow. Pa takes hold of a rope and sets the sling swinging. The trick is to open the sling at the right moment to make the hay land in just the right spot. Back and forth, back and forth. Click! Wooosh! The hay falls into the mow. A bit of rearranging, and it is back for another sling full until the wagon is empty. Then back the horses out and it is back the field for another load. 

Of course there are the moments when the catch on the track in the peak of the barn isn’t working as it should. In these moments, Pa climbed hand over hand up the smooth, thick, hay rope to flip the catch by hand. Poor Mama was left standing on the barn floor wondering whether to admire this great feat of strength, or chew her fingernails clean off looking at Pa twenty five feet in the air hanging on a rope with nothing more to hold him there but his own endurance and brawn. I bet he could still do it if he set a mind to. 

Unloading Hay in the Sling in the Barn

Another time when the track wasn’t at its best, Pa laid planks across the barn rafters in order to easily access the track for maintenance. There in the peak of the barn, he found a hammer. I see this hammer now and then in the wood shop. A hundred year old hammer some farmer, a few owners back in our farm’s family tree, set down in a safe place while fixing that very same track and forgot where he put it. I bet he never dreamed it would take another hundred years for someone to find where he forgot he put his hammer. I wonder if he missed it. 

I don’t remember much of the old hay-making days. I really wish I did. I love watching the whole process on the old movies Grandma made. The sounds and that dust, I can almost smell what it must have been like to be there. And I was there. I’m in those videos too. A little, adorable, scruffy, and a little dirty two year old or so. Too little to remember on my own. 

What I do remember is the fun we had when we switched to small bales. With small bales, so much more hay fits in the barn. When we switched from loose hay to bales, it meant that a section of the mow was baled and another was loose. Oh, what fun! You just climb up into the bales and jump into the loose hay. A clear, free fall into a big pile of prickly, stems that felt more like a pillow when you landed in it. Over and over again. Climb up, jump down. I’m sure Pa wasn’t very impressed with the mess I made, but it sure was fun.

Hay Wagon Dogs

My folks still make small bales on the farm with the same baler, bought in the early 90’s, and I’m sure it wasn’t new then either. We have always stacked our wagons, that old New Holland baler isn’t a kick baler. Honestly, unloading kick bale wagons is messy, slow business. Avalanches here and there slow up the unloading process. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer the bales to be in my hands and not falling on my head. Stacking wagons had Mama on the tractor and Pa on the wagon. When I was old enough, I jumped on the wagon too. And this is why I never learned to drive a tractor until much more recently. Remember that I mentioned my Mama is of small stature? I passed her up pretty fast, and that meant I was tasked with throwing bales. Now when Pa has other things that need doing during haying, it is just me on the wagon and Mama on the tractor - putting to the test all those tidbits of knowledge I picked up from Pa. I’m not half bad at repairing broken bales. I can’t get them as tight as he can, but I can keep the bale counter on track and save us the time of re-baling.

When we unload, Pa is up in the mow and sometimes it is just me on the wagon. Other times it is me and Mama. By the time we are unloading, we are usually starving and chores need doing. Mama starts in on chores and supper while Pa and I unload. But that is how it is on a farm sometimes, there is no shortage of work to be done.

Even though I haven’t actually lived on my parent’s farm in years, I still go back for haying. It gets to be a certain time of year and I start thinking about it. "You make hay on the 4th of July,"  Pa always says. Even though most folks feel like watching a parade, I still feel like I aught to be on the hay wagon. There are a few reasons for this. The obvious reason is that it’s just the nice thing to do, helping out your folks and all. More subtle reasons, and maybe the bigger reasons for me, include riding around the field with Pa and a few dogs talking about life, animal care, dinner and daydreaming about ice cream. Or the irresistible feeling of a good day’s work. Or even the fact that a glass of ice tea is a million times better when it is drunk up under the maple tree while the sun is going down over a clean cut field of hay stubble. Days later, as the tiny needle point scratches and scabs from the prickly ends of the bales fade away, you smile and count the days on the weather forecast until you can do it again. Gratification has so many forms, but none so great as a hard days work.