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My mom could have written one of the most poignant passages in Doreen Frick’s bittersweet farm auction story on page 22. A lot of farmers’ wives could have. “Dairy cows were never my dream,” Doreen wrote. “I was never in that deep, because I didn’t totally believe in it. But I believed in him…” Mom grew up on the wrong side of Washington Street in a little central Illinois railroad town. Like Doreen, she didn’t dream of chopping weeds under the summer sun, calving in spring blizzards or chipping ice out of hog waterers. Dad did. And like most kids who grew during in the Great Depression and World War II, she made the best of what life gave her. Through their first 40 years of marriage, Mom cooked three…
More FarmHers Please! I enjoyed your article on FarmHers in the August/September issue. Please print more articles about women in agriculture, how they got started and what they do every day. Thanks! J.R. BOWMAN PENNINGTON, TEXAS Memories of Jenny I have taken Farm & Ranch Living for many years, and I enjoy every issue, reading them from cover to cover. But the story about the two little girls and their horse in the August/September issue (“The Flower of Compassion”) really took me back in time. I am 88 years old, and I still remember the morning in the spring of 1932 when I was told about a new arrival. I went down to the barn to see the new foal. We named her Jenny. We grew up together,…
My great-great-grandfather Kord Herman Schwarze came to the United States in 1856 from northwest Germany and married Louise Puls two years later. In 1865, they settled on this farm between Mayville and Horicon, Wisconsin, and built their homestead adjacent to the Horicon Marsh. At the time, the marsh had been flooded to create Lake Horicon, which was billed as the world’s largest man-made lake. The dam was removed in 1869, restoring the area as marshland. Then, in the early 1900s, the marsh was drained for farming. The dried peat made poor farmland, though, and sometimes caught fire! The marsh was restored again in the 1920s. My Grandma Lucy used to tell me stories about trading with Native Americans who resided near the marsh. The family grew wheat, rutabagas and other…
Our Max is a working pony. One of his jobs is to help clean pens in the sheds during calving season. Because he has to make such sharp turns, we hitch him to a midsize poly calf sled using traces and a singletree rather than shafts. This way he can step back over the tongue of the sled to turn. If he gets tangled up, we just pick up his hind feet and set them back inside the traces. He is broke to drive, but we lead him because it’s easier to get him to the right place. When we clean a pen, we tie him to a panel, and he stands there patiently eating his hay. Max is also really smart. Once he knows the routine, he’ll do it…
Charlotte and I were born and raised in North Dakota, but we didn’t meet until high school, when I was on a boxing team with her brother, Darrel. When Charlotte and her parents went to see Darrel box, she noticed me. I learned that she worked at the Lake Theater in Devils Lake. One night, I asked if I could take her home, and that’s how it all began. We dated throughout our senior year, after which I moved to California to look for work. Charlotte came out a little later, and we were married in Oakland on Feb. 2, 1951. We’ve had 65 good years together since. I was drafted into the Army in 1952. When I returned from my time in the service, we moved back to Charlotte’s…
Every morning we gather eggs from about 25 laying hens. My two older brothers, Seth and Nathaniel, and I save our money to buy more chicks each spring. We used to sell the eggs to family and friends, but now we sell them to one customer who shares them with the people in his office. My brothers pay me 25 cents for each carton of eggs I wash, and we split the money from the eggs we sell. My favorite chickens are Fuzzy, Lovey, Mohawk, Dodger, Hungry Girl and Boots. Mohawk is our oldest and best rooster. He’s a beautiful bantam, and he’s really friendly. He’s small, but he’s the boss. My brothers rebuilt our fencing last July to keep out the predators. We like to call it Fort Chicken.…
