Lincoln -- Another memoir post, this time about agriculture.
I sometimes write about rural policy, as agriculture has been an important part of my life. I started out on a farm and am still a farmer. Our prairie grows hay; we try to take a crop from it every year. We just applied to participate in the USDA Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), a program for working farms.
In the upper photo below, which dates from 1962, is the farm of my younger days, three miles east of the village of Davey. Many of the buildings are still intact, although the house burned down a few years ago and has since been replaced. The corncrib at the end of the driveway was built in 1947 and also served as our garage. The machine shed behind it was built shortly thereafter. Two tractors are visible in the shed: the red Farmall M and the orange Allis-Chalmers D-17. The barn is visible behind the house. It's where my father and mother milked cows, and where I raised my 4-H beef projects.
In the lower photo below, which also dates from 1962, my father Howard (facing) is directing the milo (grain sorghum) harvest. His brother Walt has brought his truck to help. The harvester is a Gleaner-Baldwin combine, operated (if memory serves) by Vernon McMullen, a cousin.
I was not of much help that year, although I came home from college on weekends to work. Probably I planted the milo with our four-row Allis planter, and may have cultivated it, too, before going off for six weeks that summer for Navy training. My mind was on my studies when I snapped that picture, as I was taking what I considered tough courses in physics and French as part of a full academic load.
This would have been about the ninth year we raised milo instead of corn. The prices and yields were nearly the same. Milo was somewhat easier to grow as it was more drought resistant and its shorter height allowed later cultivation.
My parents left the farm two years later when I was a senior in college and it was clear that I would be going into the Navy rather than returning to the farm. It would be a few years before my younger brother and sister could help, and our father already had a good job in town, which had been sustaining us more than the farm in any case. Our mother then finished the last two years of her BA degree. She had finished two years of college in the 1930s (studying botany and Latin) before becoming a country school teacher.
Farm economics was a part of everyday life for me on the farm of my youth. We listened every morning to KFAB radio to get corn, wheat, and cattle prices, even those for canners and cutters and, for a couple of years when we raised hogs, barrows and gilts. The corncrib was a part of the Ever-Normal granary system of the USDA. We followed the Soil Bank program of Ezra Taft Benson. We knew the programs of the SCS and the ASCS. My father served on local farmer committees of the ASCS and FmHA, and on the state Wheat Commission. We were proud of our awards for soil conservation practices. One picture of our farm's contour terraces was displayed at the Nebraska State Fair.
All part of farm life.
