My Farmer Boy Summers

The smell of freshly cut alfalfa and the sight of huge fields of corn growing so fast they seem taller by the hour always trigger reminders of my long-ago days as a farmer boy.

That could be me driving that tractor, I think to myself as I watch a heaping load of manure being spread on a field. Funny how that was one of my more enjoyable tasks. If you drove the tractor fast enough, the smell stayed behind you. And you had to have the tractor in a high gear when you revved the engine to clear the beaters when finished spreading a load or you would get rained on.

My two summers as a farmer boy were when I was 14 and 15. I worked on the Jerry and Louise Halverson dairy farm just outside Strum, Wisconsin. They are among my many Halverson relatives in that area where my parents grew up, met, and married. There are lots and lots of Norwegians in that area and they have the local dialect to prove it. “Dim dem cous got out again taday. It’s ust a fright!”

I was following in my oldest brother Bruce’s footsteps since he had also worked on this farm around the same age. It gave me a chance to earn some money before I was 16. I earned $12 a week the first summer and $15 a week the next summer. Pretty meager, but the larger draw for me was being able to drive tractors and the pickup around the farm.

I knew it would be a lot of work. I had seen how hard farmers worked and I admired their dedication to a job that never ended and usually paid little. My main tasks were field work, feeding the cows, cleaning the barn, and keeping an eye on young boys Todd and Wade. My tasks did not include milking cows, mainly because, as was explained to me, cows are finicky and it takes a long time to get them comfortable with you. That was fine with me. That way I didn’t have to get up at 5 am and was done before evening milking.

My main work was baling hay, which involved many steps over multiple days. First it was cut and crimped. The next day it was raked into windrows, then baled as soon as possible. I eventually did each of these jobs except running the baler. It all worked well if it didn’t rain. If it rained we went to town for supplies, spare parts, and fresh gossip.

I had gotten a bit of experience baling hay a few years earlier on the Mattison farm owned by my uncle Lorentz and aunt Harriet. I mainly watched as Lorentz neatly stacked each bale on the hayrack. The bales were loaded into the barn with a bale hook device that required someone to press the conjoined hooks into about six adjacent bales. The bales were then pulled up to the loft door via a rope pulley system attached to a tractor. As the tractor pulled ahead, the bales went up. The bales then slid along a rail in the roof peak. When the person in the loft hollered “Pull!”, someone on the ground yanked a rope that released them.

On the Halverson farm, we used a conveyer system which required fewer people (me alone). Jerry would drive the tractor pulling the thrower baler, which randomly filled a high-sided hayrack with bales that ended up in all shapes imaginable. My job was to drive loads back to the barn and run the bales up the conveyer track into the loft (reshaping many of them first), then race back to the field about a mile away to get the next load. Jerry taught me to endure thirst, but it was a welcome break when Louise brought us “a little lunch” about mid-afternoon.

The worst part of haying was stacking those hundreds of bales in the loft the next morning. I started about 7 am when it was supposedly the coolest part of the day, about 85F. The dust was always bad. I had to move bales off the pile and then try to neatly stack them around the edges. I failed miserably at this. There are many good reasons why the process of harvesting hay has been simplified over the years.

The Halversons were Ford people. They had a Ford car, Ford pickup, three Ford tractors, and assorted Ford implements. An old Ford pickup and Ford car were retired to the thistles behind the machine shed. Many evenings I would drive the old 8N tractor we called “Peanut” out to some fields to check my pocket gopher traps. Gophers were despised because they made the fields bumpy with their underground burrowing. The local bounty was $.25 for each pair of front feet.

My “Summer of ‘69” included watching the moon landing on the farm. The picture on the large black and white Zenith was grainy but we still watched in awe. “My, isn’t that something?” Jerry said. That summer I also learned how the Vietnam War affected even remote farming communities when we got the news that a local man was killed in action.

In August, after the second crop of hay, we combined oats. Except for the dust, that was an easier job because all I had to do was drive the pickup out to the combine, get loaded up, and drive it in to the granary where I shoveled the grain into a grain drill hopper.

Those summers went by quickly. When offered a raise to $20 a week for a third summer, I turned it down as Jerry expected I would. I was 16 now and had my driver license. Other doors of opportunity were opening up.

But the sights and smells of a drive through the country in summer still trigger memories in this old farmer boy.