Peter Hendra wrote in
:

He hasn't the
time as he milks 180 dairy cows with electricity and a milking machine


I was born and raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather
milked 360 head of the biggest Holstein milk producers on the planet, 3
times a day. I, on the other hand, have more sense than to work 18 hours a
day like he did most of his life. I do, though, have extensive experience
running milk machines, bailing hay all summer, loading silos, unloading
silos, feeding, shoveling sh*t and spreading it across pure snow all
winter, to the delight of the crops planted in the spring....

Joining the Navy in 1964 was one good, politically-correct way out of the
dairy business.....forever....(c;

I didn't find out until I was in the Navy that you DIDN'T pour pure cream
from Grandma's precious Guernsey's onto breakfast cereal! Those idiots
were putting SUGAR on it! Very strange, city folks. They think "milk" has
only 6% butterfat in it...which, to us farm boys, is like "skim milk"...(c;

Larry
--
Still supporting America's Dairy Farmers.....every day.

I was born and raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather
milked 360 head of the biggest Holstein milk producers on the planet, 3
times a day. I, on the other hand, have more sense than to work 18 hours a
day like he did most of his life. I do, though, have extensive experience
running milk machines, bailing hay all summer, loading silos, unloading
silos, feeding, shoveling sh*t and spreading it across pure snow all
winter, to the delight of the crops planted in the spring....

Joining the Navy in 1964 was one good, politically-correct way out of the
dairy business.....forever....(c;

I didn't find out until I was in the Navy that you DIDN'T pour pure cream
from Grandma's precious Guernsey's onto breakfast cereal! Those idiots
were putting SUGAR on it! Very strange, city folks. They think "milk" has
only 6% butterfat in it...which, to us farm boys, is like "skim milk"...(c;

Larry

Wow! And I thought that all American kids lived in cities and didn't
realise that milk came from cows but was just another factory product
- there were/are 9 year old kids in South Auckland (N.Z.) who thought
so as well.

I too lived on several farms as a kid and did as you did but we never
milked 3 times a day. N.Z. mainly had Jerseys (high milk fat content
and lovely natured) and Fresians (similar or same as Holsteins - with
high volume). As the farms I lived on took their milk to the local
cheese/butter factory in cans, in the morning, before stirring them
up, we would skim some of the settled cream off the top of and take
it back to be heated - clotted cream. As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,
choumolier (sp?), turnips, swedes and mangolds (the least three beet
crops). We also made ensilage - made by stacking cut undried grass or
green maize (plants and all) in a heap and excluding the air -
fermented and smelled a bit like sauerkraut. This would be fed out by
pitchfork on the back of a tractor.

No barns either so no alimentary wastes to shovel out apart from the
washdown sump in the milking shed every couple of years. We would just
use chain harrows to disintergrate and spread out the cow pats. Even
though the farm families got paid handsomely by the government for my
upkeep, I still had to work just the same as the other farm kids which
i am glad of now.

Sigh! Memories. feeding chooks (laying hens), collecting and cleaning
**** off eggs, making hay throughout the night because of impending
rain - so tired that I was found asleep in the full bath with my
overalls on, going to school on the school bus and managing to "cop a
fe--" from the early developer good time girl on the way, smell of cut
hay, training my own farm dog to fetch the cows "Get away back Flo",
going to stock sales and best of all, looking over my shoulder in the
dawn from the cow shed at the first light turning the snow cap on the
dormant volcano, Mount Taranaki a deep purple. (Google it - it is a
more perfect cone than is Fuji in Japan and doesn't have the heaps of
consumer rubbish up its flanks). Even now, when I hear the Rock group
"Deep Purple", I visualise that mountain. - I mentioned that N.Z. was
God's Own country didn't I?

You're right of course. Most of the brighter farm raised kids left for
either education or jobs elsewhere. It was the town kids who packed
the agricultural classes at high school. Tried to tell about to
dropout University friends of the Hippie era that farming, and in
particular subsistance farming, was damned hard work, but they had too
many stars in their eyes and thought they would sit back and watch
everthing grow while they lay in hammocks under a verandah smoking
good ol' Coromandel Green. Couldn't afford to drop out myself. I was
trying desperately to drop in.

Oh yes! The rules. On one farm I biult a stringers over plywood framed
and canvas and enamel paint 12 foot canoe from a magazine at school -
can't remember it but it was American - "Practical something or
other". The hardest part of building the BOAT was in the translation
of the text to English.

My God, I must be old. All of this was so long ago.

cheers
Peter

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


Larry
--

"Larry" wrote in message
...


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel.
snip.............
Larry
--


Yeah, yeah...and you walked 20 miles to school...uphill both ways!

"Don White" wrote in news:escZh.29371$PV3.313547
@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca:

Yeah, yeah...and you walked 20 miles to school...uphill both ways!



Nope. I lived behind the school property for most of high school. The
elementary school was the old one about a half mile away. The farm was on
the edge of the town.

Larry
--

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.

Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.

cheers
Jerry Attrick


Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,

I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


Larry

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.

NZ sounds like South Carolina. We rarely get any snow at all and only
once or twice in a lifetime is there snow to close the place down. In
1973, the last snow storm in SC, the state was shut down for nearly a
week! Some trees shed in the fall here. Others shed in the spring with
the new growth pushing the very hard Southern Oak leaves out of their
sockets just in time for the flowers to bloom, then fall out in massive
flower storms to clog every port on every car they blow into...a real
mess.

SC farmers are, mostly, way too lazy to dairy farm. There are few dairy
farms across the state. They raise cash crops like soybeans, tobacco,
stuff that is nearly plant-and-forget-until-harvest, except for a few bug
sprayings, mostly from airplanes. The rich outer sea islands have very
fertile ground for vegetable crops, melons, we even have a historic TEA
plantation, the only one inside the USA, right here in Charleston. We
used to be famous, back in the plantation days, for rice. The place is
covered with abandoned rice paddies, now grown over with weeds just
itching to clog a prop if you get out of the channel.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.

When I was young, in the 1950's, NY state had terrible snow storms from
the Great Lakes "Lake Effect" snows. It was frigid cold and the local
lake, Owasco Lake, ring finger of the upstate Finger Lakes region, froze
so solid you could drive a snowplow-equipped dump truck out in the middle
of it and plow the snow off the ice to make a car/motorcycle race
track...right in the middle of the lake. I spent many days with my
grandfather, sitting in his gas mantle lantern-heated ice fishing shack
on skis we towed out at 3AM to clean out the ice fishing holes and set
the "tip ups", an automatic snatching rig, spring loaded to set the hooks
of any fish that bit the little minnow wiggling on the hook below. The
holes were augered into the ice with a special gasoline powered auger
drill and the ice was about 1-2 ft thick, where the fish wintered in
warmer water on the bottom. That same lake, now that the sun has
increased in intensity in one of its pulsating cycles, hardly freezes
over and certainly not hard enough to drive on, any more. My time in the
1950's is during the 1940-1975 cooling period the Global Warming Business
has amnesia about....right when Americans drove these awful gasoline
beasts, heated their houses with gun oil furnaces and lit the lights with
coal-fired huge electric plants. So much for man-made global warming
nonsense. It was DEATHLY COLD! Of course, that wouldn't create massive
government grants to fight global warming, which is caused by the big
thermonuclear star 93M miles away....(sigh). Man can't stand it when HE
doesn't control everything.


Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.

Not exactly. What would happen some time is the powerlines were simply
bowled over by shifting snow several feet thick, sort of like a mini
glacier. At other times, overzealous snowplow crews put too much snow up
against them and they broke off at the base. Cars drove in snow canyons,
especially after the invention of the snow blowers mounted on heavy
trucks. In grade school (primary school) we got Mimeographed handouts
from the power company, New York State Electric and Gouge, warning us NOT
to touch any high voltage overhead power lines we could reach with a
stick if we stood on top of the snow banks the plows had piled up after a
big storm. The banks were THAT high! My grandparents had a lake house,
where they lived most of the time. It had a back door on the first
floor, for summer, and on the second floor, for sometimes in winter when
the first floor was "undersnow".

This snow mass, near the edges of spring, would also melt during the day,
freeze hard again at night, creating a layered cake of solid ice over
snow over solid ice over snow by spring. Any warm spell made a new ice
sheet of the snow piled up everywhere....great for walking or hunting
until it got unstable and you fell through it on every step, ripping your
skin open on the jagged ice edges of the hole your boot made.

Every spring, of course, there would be a sudden warm period, melting
vast fields of deep snow quite quickly. This caused every stream to
become a torrent, every river to flood like hell and the lake to
overflow, flooding the whole valley even with the flood gates running
wide open. My grandparents' lake house, of course, took this into
consideration. It was on pilings, as were all the others, to allow the
lake to just run under it at will until it drained away. You parked way
up the road where it was out of the water and rode the aluminum fishing
boat with 7.5hp Evinrude Sportwin outboard to the house. There were
cleats by the back door and all the neighbors would help each other move
their lake docks up to the back doors of the houses during floods to tie
boats up to...creating each house as an island...complete with power,
heat, water, etc....an inconvenience, not a catastrophy like New Orleans.
The flood waters were 0.01C so we didn't do much diving off the roof into
the lake water covering up the road....(c; You had two choices to visit
the neighbors...take the boat or use your waders...your choice.

As this melt subsided, a wonderful little silver fish called "S'melt"
started running up every creek out of the lake to spawn. You were only
allowed 4 buckets of S'melt per day catch limit with your dipnets. There
were MILLIONS of them in every little creek for a couple of weeks until
the eggs were laid for next year. S'melt are amazingly easy to cook and
eat, being just bigger than a minnow. Their entire body was what you
ate. All their organs were contained right below the head just forward
of their gills. You simply cut them behind the gills and threw them into
the deep fat fryer you'd find us kids staring into waiting to see them
float (done) a few seconds later. To eat them, you simply put them into
your mouth, tail sticking out, lightly bit down just ahead of the tail
and pull the tail out....complete with all their bones....too easy! I
could still eat a hundred....(c; A little lemon sauce to dip them in is
nice. I'm not sure if they still run like that, now. The old lake is so
polluted by the damned sewage plants the Federal bureaucrats forced on
all the little towns there are huge algae blooms and lots of lake
pollution. When I lived there, you could drink the lake water, and we
did! Not any more. Everyone used to have cesspools and septic tanks
with drainage fields in the fast draining gravel soils of the valley.
How stupid to change what worked for 300 years.

It was a fantastic place to grow up. When I call my old friends I grew
up with who never left the town, I always ask them, "What day was Summer
this year?"....(c;

When I was young, in the 1950's, NY state had terrible snow storms from
the Great Lakes "Lake Effect" snows.

Larry,
You paint a wonderful picture of growing up in such a completely
different environment that experienced in more temperate New Zealand
which is 1,000 miles or so long but which has temperate weather
inducing surrouinding seas. The original name for N.Z. was the Maori
one - Aotearoa - essentially "the land of the long white cloud" As I
read your writing I became aware that the mental imagery your words
provoked were from the movies that I had seen since childhood. They,
usually from the Disney studios, of course portrayed idyllic
situations with the ideal stereotype American (white of course) family
of the time. America was apparently a heaven on earth where everyone
had large cars, large houses, toboggans, ice skates, drive in movies
and every other desirable feature of modern life. The kitchens of
these houses were very middle class with all the conveniences and the
mothers never worked and were always supoportive and understanding
while the fathers had good jobs but sort of hovered within the
periphery of the family. Looking back, it seemed that American Mothers
were very much in control as were the young girl children of the boys.
I remember at eight years old when I lived in a Boy's home, when we
were in bed at night after seeing such a family at the 'pictures'. We
talked half into the night about how we were going to be fathers just
like that; we'd take our children fishing, camping in the woods and on
holidays around the country. I can't recall any thoughts of a wife in
the picture at all. Needless to say, I later acquired one, or rather,
she acquired me or took me off the streets depending upon who she is
talking with at the time.

We have in some of New Zealand's central North Island lakes, such as
lake Taupo, a small variety of smelt which is not fished (apart from
by poachers) as it provides food for Rainbow and Brown trout.

What used to be prolific was a small 25 - 30 mm (sorry inch to inch
and a quarter - tedious to say and to write) long young of a species
of primitive native trout - the galaxids, of which we have about 6 or
7 species. This fish spawns in the estuaries and the sea and migrates
en mass up the rivers as fry. They are eaten entire, being too small
to scale, fillet, gut and behead; normally mixed with a little beaten
egg to bind them into pattiies that are quickly fried in butter in a
hot skillet. Delicious with freshly squeezed lemon.

As young kids we would meet up to go fishing from the commercial
wharves of the capital, Wellington in the days before containers and
when kids and others could walk the wharves in the weekends. Try it
now and you will be stopped by security at the gate. . Depending upon
the season, we could catch fast running sea trout - the Kahawai, with
a spinner on the end of a piece of nylon - didn't have rods, couldn't
afford them. Most of the time we would use squeezed pieces of bread on
tiny hooks to catch sardines and pilchards which we would either cook
ourselves in an old frypan we kept hidden beneath the wooden wharf
structure or, if it was raining, take them to 'Charlie's' - an elderly
Chinese shopkeeper who sold Chinese dry goods and whose wife would
cook them for us out back while they told stories of old China. He was
a Kuomintang officer before the war. The way to clean and cook them I
taught my wife and son in Turkey a few years ago where these fish are
US$1 or 2 dollars a kilo in the markets and very fresh.

You should try it sometime. it is simple and they taste delicious.
Such simple expertise also impresses the women - almost as good as
dragging a wooly mammoth back to the cave.

NOTE: This is a tip for CRUISING BOAT people who may espy these small
fish in a foreign or not so foreign fish market and ponder the cooking
of them. Got it in there Larry.

Take the fish in one hand, grasp the head with the other and pull down
and towards the stomach. This will rip off the head and eviscerate the
poor creature in one motion. Then, hold the fish in one hand, ventral
surface up and push the thumbnail of the other hand beneath the
backbone from the now headless end until it has lifted off completely
and you are left with two fillets held together by the caudal peduncle
(forgive me - the biologist you know) - the base of the tail. Stack
them on a plate and when you have sufficient - half a dozen fish will
suffice for an entree portion, wash them gently, dredge them lightly
in seasoned (salt and pepper and a little chilli if you wish) flour
and lay in hot olive oil. Cook several at a time - quickly - and turn
them over when golden. Again (damn, I am copiously salivating doglike
at the moment) serve with a little sprig of parsley and squeezed
lemon.

Sounds more difficult than it is but the results are more than worth
it. Your are not required to beat your chest when you present them to
your woman, but.... if it helps.

It is sometimes not good to revisit your childhood haunts. They always
change and get smaller. They exist far better as memories.

Looking back now, there were usually the three of us who were also
friends at school; me a Greek Moslem, Michael an Italian Catholic who
later joined the Jesuits and another Peter who was Chinese and a pagan
who used chopsticks at that. I can't remember it ever mattering then
and we are still close friends over 50 years later. Perhaps life was
simpler then. Michael's Dad was a commercial fisherman who taught us
to caulk boats - his, and to repair nets - his. He made me promise
that if I ever went to Italy I would light a candle for him in the
church on the island of Stromboli - his origin. We made a long detour
from the Straits of Messina to the Aeolian Islands just to do so. I
sought the assistance of the young priest who gave me a candle
(normally two Euros), explained how to light it and place it in the
sand box, and left to wait with my owner and son, not before advising
that I could pray in any manner I wished and advising the general
direction of Mecca without my asking. Afterwards, we were invited into
his home for lunch. I shall never forget that priest.

cheers
Peter

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

Larry,
You paint a wonderful picture of growing up in such a completely
different environment that experienced in more temperate New Zealand
which is 1,000 miles or so long but which has temperate weather
inducing surrouinding seas. The original name for N.Z. was the Maori
one - Aotearoa - essentially "the land of the long white cloud" As I
read your writing I became aware that the mental imagery your words
provoked were from the movies that I had seen since childhood. They,
usually from the Disney studios, of course portrayed idyllic
situations with the ideal stereotype American (white of course) family
of the time. America was apparently a heaven on earth where everyone
had large cars, large houses, toboggans, ice skates, drive in movies
and every other desirable feature of modern life. The kitchens of
these houses were very middle class with all the conveniences and the
mothers never worked and were always supoportive and understanding
while the fathers had good jobs but sort of hovered within the
periphery of the family. Looking back, it seemed that American Mothers
were very much in control as were the young girl children of the boys.
I remember at eight years old when I lived in a Boy's home, when we
were in bed at night after seeing such a family at the 'pictures'. We


If you want to see a little piece of that world in the USA, you need look
no further than the Lustron Corporation, who created those middle class
American homes of enameled steel around 1950 for several years. Lustron
homes have a real cult following, today, and are still as nice a house as
they were in 1949.
http://lustron.org/

Returning GIs met very short housing markets unable to sell them a home
on their new GI Bill guarantees. Lustron built whole tracts of houses,
almost overnight with their prefabricated cities.

The people pictured in the Lustron movie and ads are just the people you
are talking about...(c; Mom stayed at HOME and ran the household and
children. Dad worked and his meager salary supported them all, in their
new $7000 Lustron home. His $900 new Chevy sedan got him to work just
fine....

Then, the money mongers decided to ruin my country......
Moms all work, now trying to make ends meet. The US Dollar is WORTHLESS.
It's all gone and won't ever return....

Larry
--

On 2007-04-29 21:37:56 -0400, Larry said:

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

Ah yes, cold winter mornings. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin --
didn't have electric milkers so we milked by hand. When it's 30 or 40
below zero, it's really hard to get the fingers working to strip a cow!
And mucked out the milking parlor with pitchforks and shovels . . .
piled the manure on the "manure pile" which was frozen solid until
springtime. (Oh the smell of a Wisconsin farm in the springtime!)

We'd park the tractor (and the cars) on a hill so that we could start
it in the morning by rolling it down the hill and popping the clutch.
The tractor usually started, but the cars didn't, so after Dad started
the tractor we'd be towing the cars down the road with the tractor and
a log chain to start them. I was 38 before I'd buy a car with an
automatic transmission -- how was one to start THAT in the wintertime?
I remember driving the milk to the cheese factory in back of the old
pick-up in those old fashioned cans . . . I was 12 and wasn't allowed
to drive on the highway. But farm kids driving milk to the cheese
factory in the morning was evidently allowed. I never got stopped,
anyway.


If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

We never worried about the power going down because we didn't have
power. We lived on Great-Granddad's farm, and he grew up without
electricity and didn't figure he needed it in his 80s! Didn't believe
in indoor plumbing, either. When GGD died, my folks put in plumbing
and electricity before the next winter, but I was in college by then.


I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;

I'm 51 -- I left the farm the minute I graduated from high school, and
haven't looked back. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Ruby
--
Ruby Vee

Focusing on the negative only gives it more power -- Chinese fortune cookie