2nd Place Winner Ag Heritage Essay Contest
My Farm ExperiencesMy dad lived in downtown Ripley growing up as a kid, but he always enjoyed working on his uncle’s farm and these are some of his fondest memories.
I don’t know how old I was at the time but one of the earliest memories of being on a farm was in the milk house with my Dad and Uncle. I remember seeing the cows hooked to the milker and then my Uncle would pour the milk from the small can into a big tank at the end of the milk house. I remember my aunt giving me a big glass of milk at the house that tasted like a milkshake. I liked being around the newborn calves and the horses on the farm.
I remember the day my Dad brought home a pony he had bought from a man in Mason County. I thought it was the greatest day in my life. I had no idea my Dad knew anything about horses. I later found out that he didn’t know anything about horses. But the little painted pony named Maybell, looked so friendly, and was easy to pet, and loved to be fed. There was only one thing we found out quick that Maybell didn’t like, and that was someone on her back. She would let you get on her and get settled, and then away she would go heading to the barn to try and scrape you off the saddle, as she would go into her stall.
Since the pony was too little for my Dad to ride I guess he decided he needed a horse to ride with me. Well, he came home with the prettiest black mare Quarterhorse I had ever seen. My mom was not happy and asked him if he could ride it. Once again, I had never seen my Dad ride a horse, and didn’t know if he had ever ridden a horse. He put a saddle on what I considered the biggest horse I had ever seen. My Dad climbed right up on her and walked her through the field. I was really impressed. When my Dad and the horse came back he proceeded to nudge her a little into a gallop, and things were going fine until he laid the reins to the right side and the horse immediately turned sharply to the right, and my Dad was flying off the horse to the left. My Dad had bought a horse that had been trained to run barrels that had power steering. That horse could turn on a dime. All you had to do was move the reins right or left and that horse would cut in that direction. He never did master this with the horse but he did learn to stay on her when she turned.
Our years with horses were more work than fun, but I experienced several things with horses that I will never do again. I will never ride a horse in a parade that has fighter jets flying over very low to start the parade. I won’t go into the problems you have when spectators light firecrackers along the parade route.
Growing up and working on the farm took on new part of my life. I was making money and I liked what I was doing. Working on a farm can be very hard, especially in the summer time in the hayfield. These were long hot days. I would feed the cows in the morning, then grease all of the equipment. My Uncle would hire some local boys down the road that had arms on them as big around as their legs. I would have to use both arms to swing a bale of hay onto the wagon ,and they could pick up one in each hand and throw it as far as they needed to. We had one older guy on the farm, Otis, who lived in an old house on the farm and didn’t like to work. My Uncle would let him stay rent-free in the house if he would work on the farm. He wasn’t much help in the hayfield but he did teach me to carry a small pocketknife so when a bale of hay felt a little heavier than the previous one you would cut the strings and say it busted. This would make my Uncle mad and he would stop the baler and either tighten up or loosen something under the hood. At the end of the day all of the hay had to go to the barn. That’s when I first got to drive the tractor. That made the whole hot and miserable day worthwhile to jump up on that tractor and pull the hay wagons back to the barn. The field that we got the hay from was on the other side of the interstate. To get to it you had to go through a huge concrete culvert that had about 2 to 3 feet of water running through it. The hired hay hands for the day had gone ahead of me and all I had to do was pull the wagons through the culvert and get on the road back to the barn. Everything was going fine until I felt the wagon jerk and when I looked back I saw the top row of hay bales falling off the sides into the water. I continued through the culvert and stopped the tractor, and ran back to the culvert to see how much hay was in the water. At first I was glad that my Uncle wasn’t around to holler at me but I knew he would be around soon if I didn’t show up. I was going to get back on the tractor and act like nothing had happened and head back to the barn when I heard someone cussing and hollering at me. I didn’t know that Otis was riding on the top of the wagon for his ride back to the barn. Well, he wasn’t very happy getting wet and being covered up with 20 bales of hay. He told my Uncle all about the incident and I got the normal lecture from him.
My farm experiences were a lot like my childhood horse experiences. I learned the hard way about the things I will never do again.
I will never ride the tractor through the bull lot even though it is a shortcut.
I will never work on an electric fence with Otis.
I will never wear bellbottom jeans near a hay elevator.
I will never haul a cow in a 1/2ton pickup with a six-cylinder motor and three speed on the column shift.
I will never pull the ring in a bulls nose unless I get better in my carpentry skills.
I will always look straight ahead when cutting hay to avoid hitting a power pole.
These are the life lessons that I learned and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Parker Winters
FFA Ripley High School
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