Remember When: Harvest time

Hay Harvest

          From the time you were old enough to help out in the milk barn or able to guide a tractor or old pickup you worked on the family farm. I was nine when dad taught me how to guide the tractor. I drove the small Massey Ferguson tractor pulling the hay rake, or back and forth in the pit silo tamping down the fresh-cut silage for winter. I got good at racking hay and dad said that was my job. My brother Mike drove the hay truck around the field for the boys to stack hay on then to the barn. We had square bales then not the big round ones they have today. It was a rite of passage when you could through a bale from the back of the truck up to the hayloft.  We would work alongside the crew that went from farm to farm during harvest time. As we got older we became part of the crew. We never questioned if the work was fair or not. Farming was a family affair and so we had to do our part. The older we got the more responsibilities we were given. Even though it was harvest time shores had to be done. Cows milked, animals fed, meals fixed, and younger children taken care of.

          Being a girl I was soon put to work in the kitchen cooking for the crew of 10 to 15 men that traveled around from farm to farm harvesting corn or hay. In the 1950’s the neighboring farmers would band together and pool their equipment to get all the farms planted or harvested in the shortest amount of time. We were a small farming community in southwest Missouri called Blackfoot. We would start at 5 am cooking enough food for everyone. We cooked one main meal and a couple of snacks. When you were feeding grown men and teenage boys it took a lot of food. The morning snack was more like breakfast and the afternoon snack had to keep them going sometimes to way after dark. We would load up the morning and afternoon snacks in the back of the pickup and take them out to the fields so the crew didn’t have to stop working and could come to eat in shifts. The noon meal was served at the house so everyone could take a bit of a rest. We would set up tables in the yard and the food would be served buffet style. Certain women had their specialties. Sometimes men would let it be known that they would like a certain dish when they came to that farm. Our neighbor would let my mom know that I made the best biscuits around and that he was getting a craving for my cherry cream pie.

          When the food was done and the kitchen cleaned up the girls had to help outside. When the milking time came around and the men were still in the field the girls did the milking.  If there weren’t enough guys on the crew to stack the hay bales in the barn that was our job, too. There was no distinction between boy jobs and girl jobs; we worked where ever we were needed. That is why my dad used to say he had 4 boys just 2 wore dresses on Sunday. Sometimes the hay crews worked until midnight or later to get the harvest in and go on to the next farm. We would work until we couldn’t stay awake any longer then Dad would let us go to bed. We learned work ethics and community. That your life was not your own, you were put on earth to help where ever you were needed.

          It taught us to work hard where ever we were needed. Dad got paid twice a month from the milk company and we got to go to town and have a burger and fries at the café. If there was a movie playing that was on the A list we could go see it. By the time I was out of high school, I could count the number of movies I had seen on my fingers. My parents had strict Ideas about what we could see. They cared about what kind of adults we would become.

          That type of community spirit isn’t around much anymore. The family farm has pretty much gone to the wayside. Large conglomerate businesses have taken over. Kids don’t stay on the farm as they used to. Society calls it a lost art. But as more and more people are looking into living off-grid and getting back to their roots farms are making a comeback.