It’s been Spring for over a month and the average temperature is now in the 60’s. I’ve been reading Frank James blog how he’s waiting for his fields to dry out and it brought forth several memories of life on our farm when I was still living at home.

Our farm was relatively small as compared to the farms of some of our neighbors. Our largest field was nineteen acres and bordered a small four acre woodlot. We normally planted wheat, soybeans or corn in this field on a rotating basis.

Smack in the middle of this field was a large, very large oak tree next to a well that contained clear, sweet water all year long. I suppose that a house stood there at some point in earlier years, but the only remains were the tree and the well.

Dad bought the farm in 1953 and we never had a clear understanding of the history of the place, who had lived there, when, nor of any structures that had stood on the property. There was ample evidence of habitation with many abandoned buildings, barns, old houses around us, but none on our farm.

It was Spring and Dad still worked days in the mines. That Spring, it was my job when I came home from school, to gas the tractor and begin prepping the fields for planting. I had finished discing a field where we had planted corn the previous year. Discing cut up the remaining stalks, turned the surface and readied the ground cover for plowing. Plowing turned under the vegetation and that vegetation provided nutrients for the coming crop.

On this day, I was to start plowing. The rains had been light for a couple of weeks and the ground had firmed enough to support the tractor and our 2-bottom plow. Like many teenagers, working on the farm after a full day of school was not my idea of a fun time.

I gassed the tractor and drove out to the field. Cutting straight farrows is almost an art form. You can start at the edges of the field and work your way to the center. This approach will leave a hump in the middle after a few years and will affect water drainage. Or, you can start in the middle of the field and plow a loop that shifts from one edge of the field until it reaches the initial farrow. If it’s done right, you’ll also reach the far edge of the field at the same time. That is much harder but it affects the topology and drainage of the field much less that the other method.

I drove to the spot were we’d previously marked for the center, took an eye-ball lock on a tree on the opposite end lowered the plow and started off. In road gear.

Tractors have multiple gears to provide power to the driving wheels as needed. The lower gears provided more power and were also slower. In road gear, the tractor would speed along at 25-35 miles an hour depending on the load. A tractor, even in road gear still provides much more power than a car or pickup. (We did have a neighbor that attached a plow to his WW2 era jeep and it worked well while his tractor was out of commission but that’s another story.)

With both eyes on the distant mark, I was tearing across the field at quite a clip. I was throwing dirt for several yards from the farrow. I’d do anything to get the job over. I started around 3:30 in the afternoon and by supper-time had about a third of the field plowed.

Everything was going well—until the plow hit the pipeline.

At some time past, a 6″ steel pipeline was laid across the field. No one knows who, nor what it carried. Dad later guessed that it was a private water line fed from the well in the field. In any case, I was tooling across the field in road gear, dirt clods and dust flying until I hit the pipeline and the tractor stopped dead. It stopped so suddenly, the engine died.

I was standing while steering the tractor. It was a common practice while moving over rough ground and allowed your knees to take up the shock of rugged surface. When the tractor hit, it stopped dead in place and I went flying. Over the steering wheel. Over the hood of the tractor. Over the freshly plowed ground from the previous circuit, flying through the air, not touching down until I’d traveled about twenty feet in front of the tractor. On landing, I did a little plowing of my own, scooping a farrow through the dirt for another yard after touchdown.

I had dirt on my face along with numerous scraps and scratches. Dirt in my hair. Dirt in my shirt, in my jeans, in my shorts. Dirt everywhere. After impact, I just laid there for a time while inhaling about a quart of dirt.

When I decided that I was still alive, I raised up to see Dad running across the field. He’d come out to call me in for supper and had seen the whole thing. “Are you all right?” he hollered.

I just nodded and probed with my tongue to see if I still had all my teeth.

Anyone who knew Dad also knew that he was a bit lacking of a sense of humor. He kept trying to ask if I was hurt while trying not to laugh at the same time. The two actions were not complimentary. Finally, he just gave up and laughed. He laughed so much he had to kneel down to keep from falling over.

Farmers have weird ideas on what is funny. I remembered how he laughed when I was charged by the sow and had jumped a 6′ 2×4 fence to get away. He also laughed when, during hay season, I missed a hay-bale thrown into the loft and had fallen out into 10″ of mud.

He told me, while I limped back to the house, how I’d traveled in a perfect parabolic arc over the front of the tractor, over the plowed ground and had plowed a rut into the fresh dirt. Later, he told our neighbor across the road, our neighbor down the road, and all his friends at the mine. Years later when I graduated from high-school, he told the same story to all our relatives.

But, I’m gonna get revenge. Someday, I’m going to tell the story about how Dad shot the car and blew out the windshield.

I’ll get even. Heh, heh!
(h/t to John Smith for the Ford Tractor photo.)

Among the livestock on the farm, Dad raised hogs. Specifically, Yorkshires and Chester Whites. At any one time we’d have half a dozen or so sows and a couple of boars. We kept the two breeds segregated because they were all registered pure-breeds.

A full grown sow could measure six or seven feet long and weigh up to six or seven hundred pounds. Depending on the feed some could weigh more. The boars were larger. Chester Whites were, on average, longer than Yorkshires. Both breeds were white and looked very much alike unless you knew the differences. For instance, a Yorkshire’s back was more curved and the ears stood up. A Chester White was longer and the ears flopped forward as in the picture above.

Hogs cannot be trusted. They are omnivorous and cannibalistic. A sow will eat her young if too many are born. Sometimes just because the sow was hungry and a piglet was close. We built the birthing stalls with the corners boarded with slots to give the piglets a refuge from the sow.

Boars are worse. They will eat you if given half a chance. We always went armed with a club of some kind. Dad usually carried a piece of 2X4 with a handle on one end that he’d carved. I carried a small baseball bat. If a hog looked as if they were thinking of make a snap at your leg, we’d give them a whack across the nose.

Dad and I built the fences around the hog lots out of rail-road ties for the posts and 2X4s for the horizontal rails. The fences were six feet high around the barn and the pens. We still had to be careful because a hog can climb a board fence—not easily, but they can do it.

We had one Chester White boar that liked to get among the Yorkshire sows and have some fun. That messed up the breeding records and registered breed brought more at auction and at the market. We got rid of any mixed breeds quickly. More than one was kept for our table rather than being sold.

One day during the early Spring, I went out to tend the hogs. The weather had thawed and the sows were pregnant. We had four pens. One for Yorkshire sows, one for Chester White sows, one for the boars, and the fourth for neutered feeder pigs (that’s another story.) All four pens had a common central post with pipes to each pen’s water trough.

I had flushed out and filled the water troughs on the two sow pens but I couldn’t get the water to flow for the boars’ trough. The water outlet was clogged. There were no hogs nearby so I climbed the fence into the pen leaving my baseball bat behind. The water pipe had been filled with mud. The hogs liked to use the pipe to scratch themselves. I knelt next to the pipe and ran a welding rod up the pipe to break down the mud.

I’d been there for a few minutes, kneeling in the mud, when I heard “Whooff!” behind me. I looked around and our largest boar, over seven feet long and a thousand pounds, was running towards me. The next thing I know is that I’m in the sows’ pen and the boar had broken two of the 2X4 fence rails and had his head through the fence trying to get at me. I picked up the baseball bat and hit the boar flat across his forehead as hard as I could. He stopped, shook his head a bit and sorta staggered off toward the other end of his pen. I think it took at least a half hour for my heart rate to slow down.

Dad had seen the whole thing from the loft of the barn. He said that I’d jumped the six foot fence flat-footed when the boar charged me. I don’t know. I don’t remember at all how I got back into the sows’ pen. All I remember was picking up the bat and swinging at the boar. I would have killed it given a chance, but it backed off and went away.

I didn’t trust any of our hogs, but most specifically, I didn’t trust that boar. Thereafter, I never went into a pen without that baseball bat in my hand. For insurance, I drilled a 1″ hole six inches into the head of the bat and filled it with lead. If Dad would have let me carry a pistol, I’d have done that too. But, ammo was scare for Dad’s thirty-eight, and he was afraid, rightfully too, that I’d kill the boar if given any reason.

But, I didn’t. Livestock are farm assets and hogs were running about $0.20/lb at that time. I did get a form of revenge the following winter. That boar wandered out on our frozen pond, broke through the ice and drowned. We knew the boar was missing, but didn’t know what happened until the pond thawed. We weighed the carcase before we buried it. The boar weighed a little over 1200lbs.

Dad told the story of me jumping the fence for a number of years. He stopped after a sow knocked him down while he was working on the fence replacing a rail. He hit the sow in the head with his hammer and killed it.

Farming is dangerous. Raising livestock, especially hogs, is more so. We never had much trouble with cattle or horses, but we could never turn our back on a hog.