I’ve been ‘cow less’ for over a year now. (Sold the cows March 23, 2003) People ask me if I miss them and I reply just a little too quickly “Nope.” I think I’m supposed to ponder it over for a minute before I answer.
But really, no, I don‘t miss milking cows.
I cleaned the gutters, turned off the water heater, disconnected the water softener – (it was leaking anyway) unhooked the phones and walked away. Been there, done that.
The fact that the barn now smells more like cat poop than cows is kind of discouraging for me…
I miss having the animals around, I miss being outside as much as I used to be, I miss walking from the barn in the evening, I miss the smell of warm milk, I miss how cozy the barn is on a cold winter night with the cows lying on the straw and chewing their cuds. I miss the frost patterns on the barn windows, I miss the sweet smell of a cows breath, I miss seeing baby calves finding their legs and running, I really miss getting a milk check every two weeks.
I do not miss climbing the inside of the silo; it’s dirty and dark and dusty and just a nasty place to be. Now climbing the outside was always fun and it always offered a new view of the place from 50 feet up. I do not miss HAVING to be home for evening milking, I do not miss the higher electric bill, I do not miss wondering if the tractor will start when it’s below zero, I do not miss hoping the silos will work when it’s below zero, I do not miss hoping the barn cleaner chain will not break when it’s below zero, I do not miss hauling manure after an ice storm, I do not miss the sore knees and sore shoulders I always had, I do not miss the constant expenses of feed, vet, breeder, or repairs, I do not miss mud, I do not miss trying to fit milking into a week of tech rehearsals, I do not miss the coating of cow hair I seemed to have on everything nor do I miss the aroma of wet cow that lingered around me. Nor do I miss the flies. Or the mornings I’d go to the barn and find the gutters filled with water because a drinking cup valve stuck and water has been running all night long. That always made a mess no matter what the temperature but it was certainly complicated when it was below freezing.
Something that was always annoying was cold winter nights when one of the outside cows would lay right in front of the barn door and leave a big ol’ cowpie right there and then it would freeze and the next morning I can’t get the door open. I’d have to go find an axe and chop it away. Thought of that as I was digging a snowdrift away from the door one morning.
The thing that amazes me most is how much worry and stress I removed from my life. Tractors starting, bacteria counts, bills to be paid, broken water pipes, broken machinery, somatic cell counts, getting the feed truck here before a snowstorm or long weekend, are the cows bred in a timely manner, will I be done milking in time to get to that meeting or school function or play. A successful dairy farm depends on hundreds of little details and getting them all right. I used individual paper towels, I pre- and post dipped, I wore nitrile gloves while milking, I had the haylage, corn silage and dry hay analyzed and a ration formulated accordingly. But I was using straw for bedding and the experts say I should have been using sand or lime. In the summer when the cows were outside bedding wasn’t an issue but then it was muddy and I didn’t keep the yard clean of manure. ‘Course the giant potholes around the feedbunk didn’t help anything… And I should have had individual pens for the calves. And I coulda had a separate pen for the heifers and dry cows so they could be fed different and then maybe I woulda had a better chance at all this…shoulda, coulda, woulda…
I drive by one particular dairy farm on my way to the theater in Plainview and it’s not unusual to see him doing chores at 10:30 or 11:00 at night. I didn’t want to be doing that either…
It also affected a few more basic things like the water pipe in the barn. I never had to worry about it freezing because the cows kept the barn warm. Now I have to drain all the lines, build a box around the incoming water line and put a heat lamp in there. The heifers can drink from the springs outside – even in winter they don’t freeze up. I sort of planned on raising more calves and I still hope to get some but then I need to water them in the winter. I need to study this further and see if I need to be putting in some hydrants somewhere…
There are little memories tucked away in the back of my mind that need a little reminder to come out… For example I read an article recently about knowing when to assist a cow with calving. I hadn’t forgotten about helping with births, but there were a few details I kind of forget to remember. Like looking at the hooves as the birth starts to see if they are front or back to make sure the calf is presenting correctly. And getting the calf to take it’s first breath and cleaning the gunk out of it’s mouth and nose. Or the comforting grunting noises a good mother cow will make to the calf and checking the pelvic bones on expectant cows to see how soon they might calve or walking down to the barn in the middle of the night to see if they’ve started labor yet or wrestling a cows head around while I give them a tube of calcium gel (Just like a caulking gun and about the same size) or to dose them with a pint of propelyn glycol down their throat or give them some cow aspirin. I did not fully realize is how much this would change my land use. The rolling hills we have are ideally suited to a crop rotation of corn, soybeans, corn, oats and alfalfa (hay). Without the need for so much alfalfa I have more acres of corn or soybeans, which are prone to erosion in a way that oats and alfalfa are not. This concerns me. I’m keeping some acres in alfalfa just not as much as I used too. And we used the oats as a cover crop for the first year of alfalfa. I’m looking at planting oats strictly as a cash crop this year. And that does work if you can sell the straw that comes with it. That’s a marketing issue I’m still working on. I’ve sold some over the years but not the 700 bales that comes from 30 acres of oats. So I’m gonna try it and see what happens for a few years. There is a little guilt and doubt. Not much but a little… I drive by farms that are adding onto their barns or building new buildings and I think maybe I should have tried harder or something. I wonder if I gave up too much? I ended 108 years of milk cows on our farm. I was practically the last dairy farmer in Haverhill Township. The kids won’t have the chance to drink warm milk right from a cow. Or learn the responsibility that comes with milking cows twice a day. Preston had started bringing the cows home but Amelia never did. Will she miss that?
‘Course I don’t know how to hook up a draft horse or make a shock of oats and I never used a scythe or hand cranked a car or tractor so…hmmm…
Preston’s kinda like me; he misses the cows but not the chores he had to do with them. When he was around during the weekends he would throw down hay and straw. He liked to feed the baby calves and give them their buckets of milk. And that’s another thing gone; teaching a baby calf how to drink from a bucket. Sometimes they could be so stupid! Instinct tells them the milk comes from ‘up’ and I’m trying to teach them it’s ‘down’ in the bucket. I’d have them backed into a corner braced with my knee and their sharp little teeth are cutting up my fingertips while I’m trying to get them to suck up the milk and they’re snorting it into their noses and blowing it out all over my pants. Meanwhile two other baby calves are sucking on the back of my knees and ‘butting’ me… aggravating to say the least…
I still have heifers so there is still the opportunity for chores and responsibilities, but with chores only taking me 5 minutes in the morning to carry a bucket of feed out to the heifers and feed the cats and open the chicken coop it’s easy to imagine sliding into not having any animals… Less animals means less manure which is a good thing in not having to deal with it, however it also means less manure as fertilizer on crops which means buying more commercial fertilizer which goes back to that money thing again. And you know what else; since I’m gone during the day so much now, our dogs have started wandering off to find some excitement of their own. Oh, they’re home at 3:00 when I get home with Preston after school, but if I surprise them by coming home at 1:00, they’re not here… and they’ve been dragging the odd bit of dead animal home with them. Not good…
(We had to put down our old shaggy brown dog, Zack last fall. He couldn’t walk very well anymore, couldn’t hear or see and winter was going to be hard on him…Kelly and I got him as a puppy in 1992 and he was the best cow dog I’ve had in a while.)
And this wasn’t all about money. Yeah, a lot of it was, but not totally… Do I have more money now than I was milking cows? Well, define ‘more’. Milking cows always bought a milk check every two weeks, but after I paid the electric bill and feed bill and breeder and sometimes the feed man got paid and sometimes the vet got paid and I went to Fleet Farm and bought parts or supplies and I paid the insurance man and had to buy more parts for whatever I broke that day… well I didn’t have any money left anyway.
In this, ‘My New Life’ as I call it, the money doesn’t come in as regularly (still working on that,) I have a whole lot less bills, there’s still some repair, there’s still the unexpected car repair or tractor breakdown or home appliance emergency, but my knees and shoulders feel better!
And we all know and we’ve all been told, money doesn’t buy happiness nor does it make a rich man, so I think I’m doing OK.
I suppose some would call it my midlife crisis minus the red sportscar. I was two months from 40. But I don’t think that had anything to do with it. Usually I can’t remember my age anyway. I was at the doctors office one day and she’s writing a prescription for me and I notice it says “…age 40…” and I think “Forty? Who’s 40? What is she talking about?” Recently there was much news about the 25th anniversary of the ‘Miracle on ice’ and I thought to myself, “I was five when that happen? How do I remember it that well if I was only five?” Of course I wasn’t five, I was fifteen…I just can’t remember that…
Some would argue I’m in denial about it all but I really don’t think so…I did get a new car in July—a ‘Sonic Blue’ Ford Escape.
I miss listening to the radio as much as I used too. Also I had a lot of thinking time doing chores and milking cows because I’ve said before it doesn’t take an entire mind to do those things; about a quarter of it will suffice and the rest is free to wander. It’s tough to actually ‘make’ time to think about things…we’re all used to multi-tasking and talking on the phone while we drive to the next meeting and eat lunch in the car so we can skip going home cause we left early to get the kid to school so we can hit the post office before we go to place ‘A’ to do job ‘B’ and make money ‘C’ so we can buy thing ‘D’ to save us time doing thing ‘E’ so we can get home to meet the school bus and go to place ‘F’!!
Where as I used to get up, get Kelly and the kids to school and work, wander down to the barn and do the same old routine… look for birds, look out the window on the East, start the milkers washing, turn on the feed bunk, feed the cows, scratch the favorites on the head, pet the cats, sit on the front step if it wasn’t too cold or too wet, check the heifers, clean manure off the grates. Gee, kinda sounds relaxing…like a nice way to spend a few hours in the morning…at least that’s the way it was supposed to go, when everything was ‘flowing’.
My days now, when I’m not actually farming (don’t forget, I’m still planting the crops and running the farm land) involve several home remodeling projects that we have going on (Kelly would like me to point out that they’ve been *ONGOING* for several years now and I REALLY SHOULD GET THEM DONE) but when I’m not working on them I am working at the Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview or the college theater where I light all the music department concerts and my good friend Paul and I work on plays. I work as a stagehand at the Mayo Civic Center, I am employed by the Rochester School District as ‘Auditorium Supervisor’ meaning when they have outside events in a school theater I run lights or sound as needed. I do some ‘grunt’ work at Theater de la Juene Lune (2005 winner of the Tony Award for Regional Theater) in Minneapolis striking lights and cable from whatever show just closed and hanging lights and cable for the next show.
What I had projected when I sold the cows was to continue doing some theater, to continue working as a stagehand but also branching out into the home handyman business or walking dogs or washing cars. But I have been very fortunate at the myriad theater jobs that have come up out of nowhere. It must have been fate at some level; doors closing and opening and all…I have been able to do some things that I couldn’t do around a milking schedule.
I take Amelia to school every morning and talk with the teachers and helpers. I’m friends with some of her classmates and I’m even considered the “King” by some of them. And recently I was promoted to “Pharaoh”! Ya know, their lockers these days are 6” wide and Amelia’s is in a cluster of about 44 lockers and there’s a period of about 5 minutes in the mornings where that little cluster is just INSANE!! It’s all bodies and elbows and backpacks and snacks and shoes…Life as a third grader is tougher than we give them credit for…
I meet Preston from the school bus in the afternoons and take him to his Korean weaponry class or Taekwondo class or soccer. Some days I take him along to whatever theater project I’m working on and he’s my assistant. He likes the places with high-speed internet access.
I’m having a hard time figuring out what to call myself now. I mean what, exactly, am I now days? I’m still a farmer but hardly full time anymore…The majority of people don’t know what a ‘lighting designer’ is. ‘Theater Guy’ sounds more like a hobby than a career… And again, I have to explain what it is. ‘Free Lance Theater Technician’ is also a real mouthful but that’s probably closest to what I am. Sometimes I’m building a set, sometimes I’m lighting it, and sometimes I’m just doing grunt work. I made up some business cards -- actually a couple different versions depending on who and where and what they want to hire me for. The cards cover everything; lighting, farming, technical theater knowledge, personality traits…
I tell my parents I’m an ‘Artist with Light’ and the only license I need is an artistic one. I’ve noticed a few of the more progressive theaters call their lighting designers ‘Lighting Visonaries’ which may be a more accurate description of what a lighting designer does. We have these visions of what a show a show could look like and then we pick the appropriate lighting instruments and put just the right color in the light and put them in just the right place and point them just the right way and plug them in a special way and turn them on to just the right intensity at just the right time. And if we’ve done it right maybe we come close to achieving that vision.
One thing about milking cows and doing theater, the two were a good diversion from each other. A bad day in the theater could be a good day on the farm and a bad day on the farm could be a good day in the theater. It didn’t take long to figure out that 15 hours straight in a dark theater wasn’t going to make me a better person. The 3 hour break I used to get when I went home to milk and do chores was a nice break. Yeah, it was stressful trying to fit it in sometimes and all the running back and forth from the theater to home and back to the theater got old, but I learned I do have to take a break every now and then and go sit on the loading dock or walk around the block or take a catnap. Lighting in the theater tends to happen after everybody else has left (because to focus the lights and primarily to program cues I want all the other lights off. And no jokes about me being in the dark thank-you-very-much. So it’s late nights and it’s not unusual for me to work until midnight or 1:00 AM. Then by the time I get home and wind down I go to bed about 1:30 or 2:00 AM and it’s easy to get into that routine and then I tend to stay up late even when all around me have gone to sleep. As a side note I had an eye exam recently and the Doctor of optometry said I seemed to have better night vision than most people. Must be a reason I’m in lighting. Or is that a kind of inverse logic? I can see in the dark so I work in the light? I know what it is; I work in shades of darkness. Do I miss the cows? Yeah, kinda.
Do I miss milking cows and all that would entail? No, not at all. There is life after cows…
6/20/2005
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Write me: ben@farmerben.com |