If I could tell you living on a farm is blissful, life would be perfect. Everything would work as it should, animals would live forever, and I would have a clean home; free of mud and sometimes, chicken feathers. But we know this isn’t the case and although we wanted this life, we were really unprepared for the tragedies to come, sometimes, on a weekly basis.
Coming home from work to mutilated chickens wasn’t something I thought about. And now it has happened twice; one of the two being our son’s beloved Crazy Feather. Yes, I had the luxury of arriving home to find our flock scattered and hiding, a hawk sitting on top of a beheaded chicken. Upon further inspection, I realized who the chicken was. And then came the part of telling my son, as he was walking up the drive from the bus, his buddy was gone.
Two of our guineas lost their lives to foxes. The hawk has now taken a total of three. Something, we think maybe a dog or fox partially ate one of our hens. And left it for me to clean up before the kids came home from school (why me?). It is just a part of what farm life is supposed to be, right? Something we will get used to?
In December we decided a calf was something we would take on before the coldest days of the year. Only to find he was sick with scours and pneumonia. I sat many of those nights, crying, telling the little guy “I’m sorry you got stuck with the inexperienced.” Needless to say, we had a crash course on taking care of a sick calf. We learned how to stick a needle in the hindquarter, administer pills, and lose sleep.
But – the chickens keep on going. They’ve learned to hide. We’ve moved the coop and made shelters for them to run under in case the hawks decide today is a good day to do some fly-bys. We bought an owl bobble head we move every three days. Sometimes if we are home, we yell at the hawks. To this day, we have kept our numbers at 13.
And Oscar lived. He rams his head into my body daily to tell me he’s alive and hungry. He runs in circles, side kicks the air, and sucks on any piece of clothing milk replacer might of landed on. He is the epitome of what made us feel stupid and successful at the same time. He reminds me experience isn’t always in one’s favor. Sometimes the motherly instinct works with animals too.
Friends of ours, who live and lived on farms their whole lives, recently witnessed a horrible birth with their family’s sow. The mom decided to turn on her own babies, killing some, causing the family to bottle-feed what was a litter of 20+ piglets. Each day, she and her father would feed those babes every three hours. Watching as one after another would die. In all, only four would make it. When I saw her one Sunday at church, she was shaken and tired. She was sad. She told me it was nothing she had ever seen. Nothing. And even though she had dealt with death on a farm her whole life, it was something she was never used to. Watching something you’ve cared for, die.
No one likes to see an animal suffer. We try our hardest to do what we humanly can to get them past the hurdle. And sometimes there is nothing we can do. For those who could care less about animals, you don’t know what I am talking about. This is going right over your head. But for those of you who get it, you know a chicken and a little calf are more than just animals for some of us.
So no, farm life is not blissful. It is hard work everyday on top of our full-time jobs, three children, and everything else. But is it worth it?
Yes. A big YES. With all the mud and poop in between.
I’m enjoying your blog immensely and I get a real feeling of experience reading yours. My mom was raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. I’m reliving some of her stories through you. Keep them coming and Merry Christmas.
Paul Harvey, 1978
And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.
“I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife’s done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon — and mean it.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain’n from ‘tractor back,’ put in another seventy-two hours.” So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor’s place. So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church.
“Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.'” So God made a farmer.