Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2020 i Farm and Ranch Living

When I’m working, I spend a lot of time indoors, so your stories and photos offer a welcome window to the outside world. Often I wish I were out there, too, and certainly I’m grateful for those who are. I feel thankful when I read ag diaries like the one starting on page 22, by Louisiana sugar cane grower Gene Adolph. Gene and his awesome crew work such long days in heat so sweltering it’s hard to imagine, even up here in the muggy Midwest. At the moment, the summer weather is perfect for working on the porch, where the day’s quiet is punctuated only by birdsong and the sound of a neighbor mowing his grass. As it happens, other more agricultural varieties of grass figure prominently in this issue.…

DRESSED IN HIS BIRTHDAY BEST Our grandson is a John Deere kid who loves to spin the wheels on his toy tractors and play “farming.” He had a great time visiting our farm on his first birthday. BECKY DECKER NEW HARTFORD, IOWA 1. BIG LOVE FOR A LITTLE PONY My miniature pony Cinnamon is as sweet as can be. I am an EMT and a volunteer firefighter, but we also have a small hobby farm, Tiny Hooves Ranch. I love animals; they’re my therapy after a hard day at work. TRACI RITTER SUGAR CAMP, WISCONSIN 2. FOUR IN A ROW After helping Mom throw hay to the horses, twins Reed and Reese took a well-deserved break alongside their trusty sidekicks, Gertie and Tripp. AMBER BROMLEY DEER LODGE, MONTANA 3. KIDS…

Mayghan Watson’s CSA box program provides 10 weeks of fresh produce. Offerings from The Garden at the Farm include: • Beans • Bell peppers • Cantaloupe: Athena • Cucumbers for pickles • Eggplant • Green beans: white half-runner • Greens, including lettuce • Okra • Peas, including Crowder • Peppers, including jalapenos • Potatoes • Squash: acorn, butternut, spaghetti and yellow • Sweet corn • Tomatoes, red and yellow • Tomatoes, heirloom: Cherokee Purple, German Johnson and Mr. Stripey • Watermelon: Allsweet and Sugar Baby • Zucchini…

After hand-harvesting, wild rice has to be processed, a job that can be just as challenging as harvesting. The traditional method consists of three stages. PARCHING: First, the rice is roasted to reduce its water content and loosen its outer hulls. This was traditionally done by placing the rice in a large pot over an open fire and stirring it continually with a canoe paddle. THRESHING: Also called “dancing the rice” by the Ojibwe people, the second step removes the outer hull from the rice kernel. The parched rice is placed in a shallow hole and stepped on with moccasins. WINNOWING: Threshed rice is placed in a tray and tossed in the air. The wind blows the chaff away from the cleaned kernels. Once all the chaff is removed, the…

Readers like you are the heart of this magazine, so we are very excited to launch our volunteer Field Editors program. WHAT DO VOLUNTEER FIELD EDITORS DO? ➜ Submit great photos and stories of farm and ranch life, and tell us if there’s a story you want us to cover. ➜ Join and participate in our Facebook Field Editors’ group. ➜ Spread the word! As a thank-you, your Field Editor status will be noted on any of your stories or photos that we run. You’ll also get a free subscription to Farm & Ranch Living. Visit us online to apply: farmandranchliving .com/fieldeditors .…

Gene prepares fields using a row-opening tool to carve 3-to 4-inch-deep furrows. Next he uses a whole-stalk cutting machine to cut 8-foot-long pieces of cane to use as seed. Driving whole-stalk planters, workers drop pieces of cane on their sides into prepared furrows. Others walk behind and straighten the stalks as needed. Gene covers the cane with several inches of soil, and later, his crew sprays the covered rows with herbicide to control weeds. Sugar cane that grows in the fall will freeze, but since cane is a grass, the roots germinate again in spring. In about a year, the new plants will be 12-15 feet tall. Every year’s sugar cane crop is divided into plant cane, first stubble and second stubble. When the plant cane is harvested, Gene’s crew…

The oats nodded rhythmically in the breeze as my father greased up machinery for the harvest. Dad, along with my uncles and brothers, would swathe the grain into rows, then combine the oats until dark. These were the dog days of summer on our Minnesota farm. Back at home, Mom and I, then 15, were in charge of morning milking. When we were finished, we’d cook a huge hot meal, ready for whenever the men came in from the field. A typical supper included a canner full of corn on the cob with boiled potatoes, and dishes of red beets, green beans, spinach, cucumber salad, pork chops (smothered in heavy gravy) and homemade blueberry pie for dessert. As was common back then, the men ate first and then lollygagged, cleaning…

Submission Guidelines SEND US YOUR STORY Share stories and photos with us using the online form at farmandranchliving.com/submit. HELP US SORT THINGS OUT Include the name of the department your submission is for (Prettiest Place, Tractor Talk, etc.). For any photos you submit, please identify the people, city, state and year the photo was taken. We reserve the right to use submissions in any section of our magazine, or elsewhere. WHAT YOU’LL GET If we print your submission in the magazine, we will send you a complimentary copy of the issue in which it appears. PHOTOS We accept high-resolution digital images. Digital images should be about 4 x 6 inches at a minimum resolution of 300 dots per inch, or about 1200 x 1800 pixels. Photos must be in focus…

ANSWERS GALORE Wow! We were overwhelmed by the volume of feedback we got regarding Diana Johnson’s mystery tool, which ran in our April/May issue. Several said it was a tool for agitating laundry; one, like Diana, thought it could be a butter churn. Still others said it was used to mix concrete or crush grapes to make wine. The most common response, though, was that it’s a sauerkraut stomper: Perhaps the judges in Lima, Ohio, were youngsters. What Diana has is a sauerkraut stomper. I stomped a lot of cabbage in my youth, 70-plus years ago in Wausau, Wisconsin. RODNEY ST. CLAIR MADISON, NEW YORK The mystery tool is is a sauerkraut masher. You layer sliced cabbage and salt in a crock and then mash to break down the cabbage.…

The combines were all lined up, ready to go. It was to be the first harvest of cultivated wild rice for Joel Rohde and his crew. They had planted a small crop, 150 acres, but the rice was growing better than expected. The plan was to harvest that afternoon, but on a final pass they determined the rice was a bit too green, so they decided to wait a few more days. Hours later, dark clouds rolled in and a tornado touched down on a neighboring hayfield. “It took the hay bales, laid them out into our rice field and flattened the entire crop right to the ground,” Joel says. “The next morning, we put everything away and never harvested a pound.” Joel went to his then-boss, Lawrence Bedeau, to…

We hid a drawing of a horseshoe like the one above on page 37 of the June/July issue. Then we drew names at random from all the readers who found it. Each winner received a year’s subscription to Farm & Ranch Living. We hid another one in this issue. It could be hidden anywhere, so keep a sharp eye out. Enter the contest on our website at farmandranchliving.com if you find it. From those submissions, we’ll draw additional names and send those readers a year’s subscription or subscription extension to Farm & Ranch Living. No purchase necessary to enter to win. Purchase will not improve your chances of winning. The sweepstakes is open to legal residents age 18 years or older of the U.S., its territories and possessions, or of…