digitS'
Garden Master
I recently flew over Minnesota, the Dakotas & Montana. In the farming areas, a century and more of change is easy to see from the air.
Roads appear, intersect, and disappear off into the distance. Here and there, farmsteads show up with shiny roofs, machinery and plenty of recent activity. Between these loci of farm work are smudges.
The smudges look a little like the farmsteads except they are smaller and there's no asphalt and no beaten ground from the passage of equipment, no shiny roofs. But, the windbreaks of trees and often a lines of an orchard and convergence of fields tell you these, too, were once farmsteads.
I tried to get an idea of how many smudges there were to how many active farms. It looked to me like there were at least 4 and sometimes as many as 6 or 7.
The people that used to live in these smudges are long gone. The evidence of their existence on the land hasn't been quite rubbed out.
Like some others here, I grew up on a small farm. Dad never quite pulled it off - being a dairyman. He always worked off the farm. I too can remember how the price of bread for our school sandwiches was an issue. We ate potatoes at home. Were we going to take a potato to school for lunch? I can remember how strange it seemed to me when I first saw my mother, working behind the counters of the elementary school cafeteria. She was there so I could afford to go to classes.
Dad's dairy evolved to a less labor intensive cow calf, beef operation. I went to work for other farmers. When I finally left agriculture, during the last few of working years, my income immediately jumped 30%. Absent problems with my health, including hearing-loss partly from operating machinery so many years, my income could have grown steadily over the course of a few short years . . . I think.
Steve
edited to change it to hearing-loss. I suppose I could have just written, deafyness.
Roads appear, intersect, and disappear off into the distance. Here and there, farmsteads show up with shiny roofs, machinery and plenty of recent activity. Between these loci of farm work are smudges.
The smudges look a little like the farmsteads except they are smaller and there's no asphalt and no beaten ground from the passage of equipment, no shiny roofs. But, the windbreaks of trees and often a lines of an orchard and convergence of fields tell you these, too, were once farmsteads.
I tried to get an idea of how many smudges there were to how many active farms. It looked to me like there were at least 4 and sometimes as many as 6 or 7.
The people that used to live in these smudges are long gone. The evidence of their existence on the land hasn't been quite rubbed out.
Like some others here, I grew up on a small farm. Dad never quite pulled it off - being a dairyman. He always worked off the farm. I too can remember how the price of bread for our school sandwiches was an issue. We ate potatoes at home. Were we going to take a potato to school for lunch? I can remember how strange it seemed to me when I first saw my mother, working behind the counters of the elementary school cafeteria. She was there so I could afford to go to classes.
Dad's dairy evolved to a less labor intensive cow calf, beef operation. I went to work for other farmers. When I finally left agriculture, during the last few of working years, my income immediately jumped 30%. Absent problems with my health, including hearing-loss partly from operating machinery so many years, my income could have grown steadily over the course of a few short years . . . I think.
Steve
edited to change it to hearing-loss. I suppose I could have just written, deafyness.
.
).
