There's an old saying that you can take a farm boy off the farm but you can never take the farm out of the farm boy. That saying is very true in my case. There's just something about growing up on a farm that never leaves you. I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it was watching the rich, black Illinois soil roll off a mirror-polished plow moldboard. Maybe it was watching as individual kernels of corn planted in rows grew almost overnight into fields of tall green corn stalks bearing ears that would end up becoming somebody's morning cornflakes. Maybe it was walking out to the cattle on a spring morning and watching a newborn calf struggle to get to its feet so it could nurse.
My dad quit farming when I was thirteen and I went on to a career in engineering, but I still watch what the farmers are doing every year. Things have changed a lot. Nobody plows anymore. Farmers all use what they call "no-till" methods. They'll run a field cultivator through a field in the spring to break up the soil, then disk down the top and then plant. Leaving what farmers used to plow under in the fall, the stalks and roots from last year's crop, holds the soil in place over the winter so the wind doesn't blow it away. I've seen enough topsoil blown off fields to make drifts of dust along the roads, so that's a good thing.
Another thing that's changed is most farmers used to raise some livestock as well as field crops. Farmers get paid when they sell their crop, so having some livestock to take to the sale barn every few months was a source of immediate cash. It also gave them a steer to slaughter in the fall for meat for the year. If the farmer had a few hogs, he'd have ham for Christmas and bacon for breakfast too.
Farmers also had big gardens and farm wives canned or froze a whole year's worth of vegetables, fruits, and jam over the summer. Nowadays, you either raise crops or you raise cattle or hogs. You might keep a few chickens around for eggs and a steer for meat, but that's about it. Either way, a lot of farm wives buy most of their groceries just like city wives. That's probably a good thing for farm wives because it saves them a lot of work.
When a farmer doesn't have a herd of cattle, he doesn't need to set aside part of his acreage for hay and feed corn. That land gets planted in corn or wheat or soybeans that bring in money in the fall. Even if he does raise a steer for beef, it's cheaper to buy hay and cattle feed than to use land to grow them.
There are farmers who raise hay for sale rather than for their own livestock, but that's changed too. When my dad raised hay, he mowed it and raked it into rows, but he didn't own a hay baler. He paid a few cents a bale to a man who did have a baler to pick up the hay and process it into bales.
The hay baler picked up the hay and compressed it into blocks of hay about a foot and a half square by three feet long that weighed about fifty pounds each and then tied that block together with two lengths of binder twine. The bale then came out of the back end of the baler on a chute and was grabbed by a man on a rack wagon pulled behind the baler.
Sometimes the baler dropped the bales on the ground and guys walked beside the rack wagon, picked up each bale and swung it up to the guys on the wagon who stacked it.
When the rack wagon was full, it was pulled to the barn and unloaded into the second story "haymow" of the barn. That was done by a man on the wagon putting the bales onto a conveyor called a corn dump. A corn dump was a steel trough with a chain on each side and the chains were connected by a flat piece of metal called a "flight". A corn dump was normally used to convey ear corn into a slatted building where it could finish drying over the winter, hence the name, but it worked for hay bales too. The corn dump went from the ground up to the haymow and more men inside the haymow carried each bale from the corn dump and stacked it for the winter.
Usually, the guys doing all that lifting and carrying in the field and at the barn were young guys between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Putting up hay took a lot of manual labor and young guys were strong, had a lot of stamina, and most importantly, didn't have a wife and kids to support so they'd work for a dollar an hour plus lunch at the local diner. They also usually couldn't find any other kind of job during the summer.
The last hay field I drove by on my way to work didn't have square bales sitting on the ground with young guys tossing them onto a rack wagon where other young guys stacked them up. Instead, there were huge round bales sitting there, bales that weigh about six hundred pounds each. A man on a tractor with a long spike on the front-end loader stabbed each bale and then loaded it onto a fifth-wheel trailer pulled by his pickup that he'd later drive to his farm. There, he'd use another tractor with a spike to unload the bales.
Those round bales were more economical to produce, but they ended an income stream for guys who could only work from June through August because they were in school the rest of the year.
That left the only other job opportunity for young guys - hand weeding soybeans, though every farmer I knew called it "walking beans". Soybeans are planted in rows just like corn, and once they were about six inches tall, the farmer would make a pass through them with a cultivator mounted on a tractor. After that first pass, the bean plants would grow pretty fast and would turn into bushes about waist high and would almost cover the space between the rows. A tractor and cultivator would have damaged a lot of bean plants, so the weeding was done by young guys walking through the field with a hoe.
The hoe was just for show. I never once weeded beans for any farmer who didn't say, "Don't go cutting off those weed with the hoe. They'll just grow back. You pull every weed out by the roots."
Well, that's gone today too, replaced by herbicides that kill weeds but not beans. It's a shame really, because baling hay and walking beans were the ways most young guys got introduced to what a job was all about. If you worked hard, you'd get called back every day until the field was finished. Farmers also told each other which boys did an honest day's work and which didn't. It wasn't unusual for me to get a call from a farmer when he had hay to bale or beans to walk.
It also gave young boys the opportunity to earn a little money and then learn about being careful how you spent that money. It was the first step in understanding budgeting. It was also a first step in learning what an employer expected of an employee and how to contend with what life threw at you.
If I was baling hay, I'd show up at the farm at seven, climb on a rack wagon and ride to the field, and then spend the next five hours throwing bales from the ground to the rack wagon or stacking them on the wagon. Then we'd all pile into the back of a pickup truck and go to town for lunch. At one, we'd be back at it, though most farmers would let us switch from the field to the barn if we wanted to and vice versa.
Quitting time was usually five, but if there were just a few bales left or if there was rain in the forecast, those bales had to be in the barn or they'd start to rot. It might be six before the field was empty and then another hour before all the hay was in the barn. If you finished early, you just went home. There was no getting paid for eight hours when you only worked six and no saying that you had to leave right at five unless you were going to be paid time and a half for the extra hours.
If I was walking beans, the day still started at seven. Usually four of us and the farmer would get in his pickup and he'd take us to the field. We'd each weed four rows at a time, half a mile from the start of the rows to the end, then turn around and weed four rows coming back. That could take an hour or better. Once we got back to the truck, we'd get a drink from the big cooler filled with half ice and half water, rest a few minutes and then start back on another four rows.
Just like with baling hay, at noon we'd ride the truck to the local diner for lunch, and then be back at it at one. Quitting time was usually five unless one more pass would finish the field.
I baled hay and walked soybeans from the time I was fifteen until the summer I graduated from high school. I was eighteen and could have gone to work in a local factory if I'd wanted that as a career, but nobody was interested in hiring me for just three months before I started college. Instead, I kept doing farm work just like the summers before.
Starting in June, I worked baling hay for several different farmers. Most of those jobs lasted just a couple days, but there were enough farmers with livestock I still worked baling hay for a couple weeks. After that, the grass and clover needed time to grow before it could be cut again. That worked out fine most years because after that first cutting, there would be some soybeans ready to walk.
