Tag farm

Doers Wanted, Needed

normanjameson Leave a comment
The doer pulls and talker rides while carrying straw to the chicken coop.

In a service economy, how do you find those who will serve?

Remember when the misguided guidance during Covid 19 lockdowns declared that only “essential” workers could go into their jobs? Those declared “essential” weren’t the pencil pushers. Not the multiple degreed, private office, soft hands, computer monitoring, expense account, long lunches crowd. It was the people who really keep society running: the grocers, plumbers, gas pumpers, street maintenance, garbage collectors, furnace fixers and liquor store clerks. 

When my youngest grandson was six he declined to help me shovel wood chips into the tractor bucket, despite the fact that I’d provided him an appropriately sized shovel. Sensing an obvious teaching moment, I paused to deliver an insightful life lesson.

“Corbin,” I said. “In this world nothing gets done without someone doing it, someone actually putting his shoulder to the task, picking up a shovel, swinging a hammer or carrying the load. Some people just want to talk about the job. Others actually do the job.”

With confident aplomb, Corbin said, “Papa, you’re a doer. I’m a talker.”

Growing up in a farming community in southern Wisconsin, I didn’t know many talkers. We were doers or we were not eaters.

Mine was a small town, a tiny town really, 788 people. All the farmers knew which boys were aging up to be useful during summer hay baling, stone picking and corn detasseling seasons. Prime years were age 13 to 15 – 12 if their mama was hefty – strong enough to throw bales, but too young to work for the canning factory. We were ripe and easily enticed by the dollar an hour standard wage.  

My uncle Donnie, the quintessential Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, trained me in most things “farm.” I lived on one side of town, in the country. He lived clear on the other side of town, in the country. We were three miles apart.

I still check the weather frequently, a farm life habit when unreliable forecasts influenced our decisions to cut the alfalfa today, or tomorrow. Will we have three days of sun after we cut it? If it’s going to rain before it’s dried enough to bale, we’ll lose most of the leaves and nutritional value as cow feed.

Now, I check the weather because I want to know if it’s going to be warm enough for a bike ride, dry enough for pickleball or sunny enough for a beach day.

Us hay haulers and stone pickers typically had a main farmer we worked for, someone who would call us first when he needed a hand, someone who asked if we’d be available in three days.

But not everyone cut hay on the same day, so we were glad when the phone rang with work for others. In addition to my uncle Donnie, I liked to work for Bob Manweller or Donovan Selle because they paid $1.25 an hour. Mrs. Selle put on a mean feed, too, and her pretty daughter managed to make herself discreetly visible.

I’ve been a doer my whole life – my wife would say people pleaser – and I swelled with pride when my dad bragged about my work ethic to friends: the way I split wood to feed the basement furnace, or cleaned the stable or mowed the yard. More than the doing, seeing what was done is the source of deep satisfaction for me.

Last year we had to reshingle our roof and put in a new furnace. I couldn’t do either one of those tasks. I did reshingle our first house in 1977, a house so small that when I put in the order, the salesman asked if I was going to cover only part of the house.

But this roofline is much more complicated. And furnaces are huge jobs, and who can fathom the pipes under the kitchen sink and where does the contents of my garbage can go on Thursdays and how does someone in Charlotte restart my modem in Winston-Salem, and when my car tires want to meander how does a guy realign them?

An average of one college a week closes its doors in this country, partly because demographics reveal fewer 18-year-olds, and partly because young people are re-evaluating the benefits of college, realizing that doers can start a career much sooner than talkers and four years later, have no student debt.

Here’s to the doers in the economy. May their tribe increase.

Two Ways To Do It

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I grew up working with and for my Norwegian bachelor farmer uncle Donnie, who made a living milking 19 cows on 80 sandy acres in southern Wisconsin. As a kid I tried to impress him with my strength by carrying 40 pound buckets of milk to the cooling tank when I didn’t weigh much more than twice that. I struggled to make it look easy, but he knew it took all I had.

I get to practice what i learned while young at White Horse Farm in Pennsylvania, where my son’s family lives.

In the ‘60s corn had to be cultivated to keep the weeds down before “poison ready” genetically modified seed became the norm. So I’d sit on the tractor with Don as he drove the little plows through two rows at a time to dig out the weeds. If he hit a stone or lost concentration and the cultivator dug out some corn, I’d hop off, stick it back into the ground, and run to catch up.

Building or repairing barbed wire fence, learning how to drive tractor and truck, milk a cow and slop a pig, being rewarded with a chocolate milk and donut at the Midget Kitchen on Hwy. 16 all were part of my kinetic education – along with learning how to understand the punchline of coarse jokes.

Once I reached about age 13 my services were much in demand by local farmers who needed help detasseling corn, baling hay, picking stones or cleaning out stalls and stables. I was a tall, thin kid who was young Sheldon in the classroom and who saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mirror.

Our local farmers were basically one-man-and-a-son operations, and I replaced the boy who had grown and gone to the city. To make hay while the sun shined, we cut the alfalfa, let it dry for three days and hoped for no rain. Then we raked it into windrows, scooped it up and compacted it into 40-50 pound bales with a tractor pulling a baler pulling a wagon with a kid on the wagon stacking the bales.

Most generally it was me and the farmer – baling, loading, unloading onto an elevator and stacking in the barn. There were two kinds of farmers when it came to engaging my services on a hot summer day. One I’ll call Uncle Donnie’s way, on account of it’s about my Uncle Donnie. The other I could call “the efficient way,” on account of it’s the opposite of my Uncle Donnie.

When Uncle Don picked me up in the morning, we’d get to the farm and have to gas up the tractor, grease the baler and put in baling twine, hook the baler to the tractor, connect the power takeoff shaft and move the elevator into position to carry the bales up into the hay mow. It wasn’t unusual for us to have round up a wagon or two that a neighbor farmer had borrowed.

All the while I’m looking at all that hay, laying expectantly in windrows in the field, itching to get out there and get started, knowing it was going to be a long day. And it was threatening to rain.

Farmers committed to “the efficient way” and to getting all the work out of me they could, completed all the preliminaries before I got there. The baler was greased and hooked to the tractor, which was gassed and ready. The elevator was in place, all the necessary wagons were lined up, and mother had lunch in the oven.

We got twice as much done in half the time. And there are few things as satisfying as looking over a freshly harvested field, seeing it cut and clean and all the hay is in the barn before the rain comes.

That, and the fact that the more efficient farmers tended to pay $1.25 an hour, rather than $1.00.

Readiness makes the difference. Many of you work with non-profit organizations. Respect the time of your volunteers. Don’t let them show up on a work day or at a fund raising event and have to stand around and twiddle their thumbs. If they are volunteer tutors, have a student already selected and matched.

Then, let it rain.

Beautiful killer

normanjameson 2 Comments

This morning I saw the most beautiful fox ever. Larger than typical, with bright red fur, tail long and bushy, not matted by thorns. It looked fresh from a spa: fluffed, puffed, tufted, shampooed and blow dried. Eyes intense, intelligent, confident and controlled. Lithe, nimbly athletic, light of foot like a dancer. 

And I wanted to kill it.

Coming back from her sunrise walk, my wife heard the terrorized shrieking of chickens in the open range pasture just behind the cottage where we stay on my son’s property. She stepped quickly to the pasture where she saw a fox with a chicken in its jaws. When she shouted and clapped, the fox sprinted away. The chicken didn’t.

Granddaughter helped to bury the first two victims of the carnage.

As Sue Ellen told me what happened, she asked what to do with the carcass. “Make nuggets” seemed an inappropriate suggestion. 

Before we could fully get our minds around what had just happened, we heard the terrified squawking again. I rushed to the door and this time I saw the fox…with another chicken in its mouth. I threw open the door and for an instant was shocked silent by the fox’s beauty.   

But my anger at its audacity quickly overcame my admiration and I stepped out the door and shouted. It understood my threat and I was pleased to see it run away, leaping the fence as if the rails were a padded obstacle in tumbling class.

I grabbed my shotgun and followed the fox’s trail, knowing it would never show its head to me while I stumbled and tripped through its habitat. I felt better somehow, though, knowing I was “doing” something, at least dropping some “man scent” around so the fox would know who it was messin’ with.

The second chicken was still breathing, its legs twitching, eyes registering a resigned acceptance of fate. I dispatched it, then tossed it into the garden while I went to get a shovel. 

My seven-year-old granddaughter watched wide eyed the entire proceedings, dressed in the “farmer girl” overalls we’d given her for an early Christmas present the day before. 

Uncowed, she helped me dig a hole, her sudden awareness of the life cycle presenting her a sad, but not devastating new insight. 

The life cycle as presented on a National Geographic special sees the fastest lion chasing down the slowest antelope, and it all seems natural and normal, almost pristine, except for the dust. Eating a hamburger never makes me think of the feed lot on which the donor was raised. 

Yet, somehow, because we fed and cared for these chickens, tucked them in at night and gave them special treats from our vegetable shavings, it became a personal insult. 

Yes, they’re free range and hawks circle constantly overhead. Yes, the fox has to eat and yes, the prey/predator cycle is natural. But, the fox invaded my space with impunity, looking at me as if I was an inconvenient interruption at his meal, like a waiter who informed him he had an urgent phone call and he had to leave the cordon bleu to cool.

It was a sad morning, but only a prelude. 

Worse, we came home after dark that night and I went out to check on the chickens, to make sure they had put themselves up in the coop, where safety lay behind a closed door. I looked inside and there was not a single chicken in the coop. 

With a sickening dread, I cast my light over the field and the beam fell on multiple carcasses, each with the head and neck gone. The goats huddled in their own shed, witness to the horror. I followed my flashlight beam around the pasture, accounting for all the chickens but one. 

I found her in the far corner, shaken and shivering. She didn’t protest a bit when I picked her up and put her in the coop, behind closed doors. I don’t know what killed the chickens and I don’t know how this one survived.

We named her Lucky.