As well as having dairy cattle we also grew barley and alfalfa (hay) for the cattle.  While moving a line of irrigation pipe in the hot summer sun you soon realize that you are the only living breathing person around for flies to bother, swarm on, and land on. No matter how hard you swing, jump up and down, yell or cuss, the flies will keep trying to land in your ear. I can only imagine what people thought as they drove by our farm and saw me out in the middle of a hay field throwing punches in the air and screaming at some invisible foe.  Maybe you had to be there.

 

Out in the sticks you often don’t get more than one good radio signal and that’s what you have to live with.  So while you are working in the dairy there’s not much for entertainment except for listening to that one “songs of yesterday” radio station that you get.  So yes I often found myself working alone and singing along.  I have to say that I could have won American Idol with my rendition of Black Velvet by Alannah Myles.

 

There is nothing like being the kid in town with the old beater truck that is easily known by the sound it makes going down the road. I wouldn’t be able to forget the old green and white farm truck that we would drive. With no signals, taillights, power steering, or seatbelts (at least, not ones that we used) it’s amazing we didn’t end up dead or at least in jail for driving it.  It sure was fun though to speed through our little town making everyone’s heads turn as our loud truck drove down the road.

 

On a more serious note there are not many better places to learn good work ethic than on a farm. You learn that now matter what your job is you need to have a little pride in how you do it or you will be miserable while you do it.  I think that even if you are shoveling manure on a farm or working at the local fast food joint you should do your job well and be able to take pride in how it was done.  You might not be proud of the actual job you have but at least you know you did it well.

 

Believe me that on a dairy farm you will learn responsibility. I’m not even going to assume that whoever reads this will understand how a dairy works but I’ll say this much that typically cows need to be milked twice a day around the same time. On that note I’ll say that attending high school while living on a dairy farm was a challenge. No matter what you wanted to do there were always two constants: Getting up early to milk cows, and milking them in the evening right after school. There were almost no exceptions. Everything else came second. Any other activity you wanted to do had to fall into your schedule after the chores were done. If you stayed out late at night there was no sleeping in. That’s just how it was.