“I Would rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.”---George Washington
“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.”---Thomas Jefferson
There are all kinds of artists in the world. Some people paint, others play the bassoon, create giant quilts or tape bananas to a canvas. Some mow. I am a mower.
I know painters who crave a new brush, others who work with the same one for years, and there’s something to be said for both. Same with tractors. Noone likes to part with the trusty old tractors which have served them well for years, even decades. The driver knows their habits, their assets and shortcomings, their moody behavior over certain terrain, their hatred of hidden rocks poking up at their unwary blades. If you have to hook your water cup on the accelerator handle, so be it. If your tractor develops a few small rust holes, no problem. But then one day your best friend peters out in the middle of the paddock and a reckoning must be made.
Your first thought is that there must be a carburetor problem or a blocked gas line, but nope, they’re just fine. You revive your pal, get it back going, wheeze over to the barn on wobbly wheels and gloomily consider the possibility of a burgeoning heart condition. The tractor repair man comes by and confirms your worst fears…it’s an engine problem. “Almost as expensive to fix this mess as to get a new tractor,” he exaggerates. But there are other minor problems with this 20-year-old Kubota and hard choices have to be made. The salesman comes out from the Kubota dealer and offers a very reasonable trade-in price, and you accept. You cheerlessly drive your old friend down the long driveway to the rear of the tractor hauler and wave goodbye. Now the hard work of learning all the confusing ins and outs of a newborn tractor is at hand. Harumph, the bucket adjuster is a little flighty and it’s slow as molasses backing up…but ooh, look at that nifty drink cup holder!
Olden Times
In days of yore, I had a fine John Deere tractor with a bush hog to mow my 40 acres in Orange Lake. A bush hog is a rotary cutter towed behind the tractor to cut dense grass and clear vegetation. It does not generally deliver as finished-looking a cut as the Kubota’s belly mower but neither is it as temperamental as its orange alternative, which whines at the hint of hidden tree roots and unsuspected holes in the ground. You could go to war with the bush hog, you go to church with the belly mower.
Originally, we had a young neighbor boy come to mow the fields in Orange Lake, but those weekly bills pile up. “We need a tractor,” advised my wife, Harolyn, who was always eager for new farm equipment. “Who’s going to drive it?” I asked naively. “I will,” she said, boldly. That lasted for about four slow spins around the farm, after which she found more pressing work to do. Guess who inherited the mowing job?
Fortunately for me, the experienced Mr. Carl Johnson lived right down the road and he was the ultimate tractor expert. He had even built his own from scratch with a Volkswagen engine, assorted truck parts and a living room chair. Mr. Johnson told me he would teach me all the tractor arts he knew plus keep my John Deere in fine fettle if I leased him an acre of land to grow his melons. You don’t get an offer like this every day, so of course I accepted. At the time, I didn’t realize this meant the old codger would hide in the underbrush for nights on end firing his shotgun at small critters invading his garden, but a deal’s a deal.
Thanks to the handy Mr. Johnson, I learned everything I needed to know about tractors, including how to clean out the carburetor and occasionally suck gunk out of the gas lines. When I got tired of mowing in boring straight lines one afternoon and started going in ever-expanding circles, he flew over in a dither and told me what I was doing was a breach of tractor etiquette and bad for the bush hog. “You boys who grew up in the city don’t have proper respect for equipment,” he told me. To Mr. Johnson, everyplace north of the Mason-Dixon line was New York. Mr. J. also had an eye for Harolyn, making suggestive comments every now and then. “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s harmless.” Since becoming an old man myself, I now realize that Mr. Johnson was probably not as harmless as she thought.
The Art Of The Wheel
There are many jobs which offer little visual satisfaction, even when you know you are doing them well. The idea man puts the germ of a brilliant plan into action and knows that somewhere in the clouds his idea is churning away. The traveling salesman takes orders, reports them to headquarters and moves on to the next town, satisfied his commission is forthcoming. But there is nothing standing at the side of their roads exclaiming “Joe Schmoe accomplished this!”
A painter creates a lasting monument to his labors. A kazoo player leaves parade-watchers with brilliant smiles all along the route. A chicken farmer ambles through the henhouse every morning collecting eggs. A pasture mower of some proficiency leaves row after row of perfectly cut lanes, none dissimilar from the others, creating a pastoral scene the equal of any landscape painter. What was once a shaggy, disheveled heap of acreage is now a field of dreams. The mower smiles, clears his charge of the remnants of his work and goes home whistling a happy tune. This almost never happens to stockbrokers or psychiatrists or those odd people who work in coin laundries.
In addition to mowing, of course, there are other important things you can do with your tractor. You can dig big holes to bury sizeable critters. You can pull clumsy people out of ditches. You can tow various farm equipment hither and yon…things like seeders and fertilizer dispensers and manure spreaders. Wait, you ask--manure spreaders? Where is this manure coming from?
It’s coming from your horse stalls. You can’t just leave it there and get the Good Horsekeeping Seal of Approval, you have to move it--thus, the manure spreader, which tucks up to the stall and waits for you to shovel the subject matter into its waiting maw. Once loaded, the spreader is connected to your tractor and driven across the fields. As the tractor moves, its PTO powers the spreader’s components. A conveyor belt moves the manure to the beaters or nozzles, which then spread it evenly across the field. Horse manure, you’ll be pleased to know, is a natural source of valuable nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, which can be used as a substitute for expensive commercial fertilizers. Manure also contributes to soil structure, aeration and water-holding capacity. It also has unexpected side benefits. According to the original Hank Williams, you have to smell a lot of horse manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.
Horse Country
The best way to get horse manure, of course, is to buy a few horses and feed them. Pretty soon, your inventory will pile up. In the meantime, you have to tend to them and avoid killing them or yourself in the process, which is not as easy as you think. Equines, especially thoroughbreds, have devised endless imaginative ways of offing themselves and a few clever tricks to nail you, as well. They run through fences. They contract laminitis. But mostly they resort to colic, which can spell doom in no time flat.
Horses develop colic in a variety of ways, including gas buildup, impaction (often from hay) or displacement of the intestines. When you see those cute red buckets all in a row along a fenceline, you’re looking at a playground for colic. First, without individual pens, there is no way to insure how much feed a horse is getting, be it too much or too little, Either way, you’ve got colic potential. Second, horses will spill feed on the ground under those buckets and scarf it up along with plenty of dirt. Grass doesn’t last long under fenceline buckets. Every day, there’s a veterinarian somewhere checking a horse’s poop in a long plastic glove full of water, watching the fingers fill up with sand. Horses should be fed in individual stalls or at least in separate pens from which they’re released shortly after they finish eating.
An injection of Banamine will usually give horses quick relief from colic, but without further attention to the problem it’s like putting a bandaid on a serious wound. One practice that relieves many colics is feeding alfalfa year-round, an expensive proposition. When I met Siobhan Ellison, like the preponderance of horse owners, I fed alfalfa only in the winter when there was little grass. It was her feeling that making alfalfa a permanent part of their regular diet would prevent colic in most horses. After fifty years in the horse business, I have no doubt this is true. We have almost never had a colic on Siobhan’s farm and there were years when we housed a dozen horses on ten acres. If money is tight, it’s a good idea not to have horses.
A Country Boy Can Survive
Keeping your horse alive and happy is one thing, keeping yourself vertical is another. We have seen people get off their motorcycles, stash their helmets and jump on a horse. Here’s a news flash--you likely have far more control over your bike than you do your horse, which can be spooked by any number of things. Wear your damn helmet and pay attention. If you’re around horses long enough, it’s inevitable you’ll be hurt, just try to minimize the catastrophe.
They tell you to stay away from the back end of a horse but that’s hard to do when you’re foaling a mare. Even your trustiest sweetheart can kick you across a stall when in labor, as I unfortunately found out one night. Joining hands with another horseman to load a yearling into a van might seem like jolly fun until one kicks a dent in your thigh and sends you rolling down a loading ramp, another fun moment. Even on the front end, there’s danger. A normally sensible young horse can rear up at the sound of a backfire and come down with a hoof on your forehead, leaving you looking like Jesus that day he was crowned with thorns. They say there’s no accounting for some people’s tastes and there’s little accounting for the predilections of folks who keep horses; we’re victims of a certain kind of lunacy usually reserved for skydivers and bank robbers. But hey, what’s a farm without a couple of horses?
We’re down to a stolid pair, Zip, a happy stallion and Dot, a curmudgeonly mare, both in their twenties and looking like they’ll live forever. They spend their days in different fields, just in case Zip gets any latter-day ideas. Zip greets me each morning with a paragraph of neighing and snorting as he charges into his stall for breakfast. He politely tips his cap when I bring his carrots at night. Dot, on the other hand, often arrives for breakfast late and wouldn’t give me the time of day if I brought her a carrot souffle. She generally waits for me to leave so she won’t have to give a smile or answer any of my foolish questions.
Everyone has his own idea of the ideal place to spend his days. Younger people often choose the bustle of the city. Pirates inevitably choose the coast. Grandmothers feel an irresistible pull from the vicinity of their grandchildren. Poets like Walden Pond. Siobhan, Roxy the Rottweiler and I walk down our quiet laneway at night, look at the starry skies and survey the many pleasures of the simple farm. Speaking for myself, however, unlike George Washington, I would rather be the emperor of the world than a mere horse farmer. But not by much.
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| Older farmers seek to pass their secrets down to younger generations, like this guy. |
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
