I grew up on a farm, 320 acres in a beautiful valley with a running creek, a pond, trees and greenest pastures I’ve ever seen. My father, a veteran of WW 2, was trained to do Veteran’s On the Farm training, to help train young (and older) men in new farm techniques developed in the 4 to 5 years that they had been away from their family farms.
Father was thus by nature and by training skilled in many fields…. He could give injections to the sheep (and my allergy shots to me!!), he could take apart a bulldozer and repair its internal problems, and he introduced new crops for hay that others had never used (Johnson grass). I think one of his favorite hay grasses to use was a sudan-sourgum blend, which seemed to make great hay for the winter. Before I was fully conscious, I’m told we had pigs. In the early years, we had goats and sheep. Later the high maintenance sheep were replaced by chickens and dairy cows.
The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, and the University of Georgia came to our farm for interviews, pictures of the pastures and our family, documentation of procedures, and farm life in Georgia. At one time, we had the largest sheep farm in the state. Later, my father’s chicken house was the FIRST fully automated one with temperature controls that triggered the coal-fired furnace to generate its hot water for heating. The watering troughs were automatically refilled when the water level dropped, and the grain feeding hopper and trough system (that was mostly welded together by dad) came on by timer several times a day, and moved the chickens feed through 2 large loops of troughs, at the low level the chickens needed. It was a show-place, and became at state-wide model. But you have to be careful around chickens… loud noises will frighten them, they will run together in piles, and can suffocate themselves by the thousands… that’s a horrible sight to see. Thunderstorms meant chicken house watch detail….
When the dairy barn was constructed, it was from the latest designs, to allow safest entrance and exit for the cows, most comfortable access for the vacuum milking machines, etc. My dad had a radio playing in the milking barn, because he understood that the music soothed the animals. And father could tell each cow apart, by their personality, and by the brass number tag hanging from their neck! Each cow got a different amount of feed, and there was a list in the barn of what that amount was, cow by cow… and my sister as a teenager was called by my dad, “the best helper I’ve ever had with the cows!”
We had 3 John Deere tractors… one was gas-powered, one had a diesel engine that was started by a gasoline engine (the 70A was unique… 2 fuel tanks!) And that powerful 3020, which was the first diesel design that could start its own engine with 2 tandem 12 volt batteries!! Thousands of dollars we had in equipment, Thousands of hours of training for father and from him to us children, Thousands of hours of tending….. for one purpose: to take good care of the animals on our farm.
During lambing time, my parents would get up at midnight in the winter to act as mid-wives for the sheep. Sheep have to be moved every 2 weeks to a new pasture or the parasites they are prone to will take up residence in the group, and continually plague them. Sheep had to have regular oral injections of medication with a large syringe…. 500 sheep is a lot of shots to give!! They regularly can develop foot diseases, so father built a walk-through concrete wading pool, 5” deep, so that he could put the medication in the water, and have the sheep walk through it!
When I was about 6, and my sister 8, we were full-fledged farm helpers. Sheep are interesting… I was always anxious around the large herd of 500, especially when my dad would have us move them to the south pasture. This required moving them out of one pasture, down a road, making a right turn at a Y, then making a left turn off the road into another pasture…the sheep were tracing the outline of a capital M. If cars were coming, they had to wait! What was so amazing, is that terrifying as it was to have the first of 500 sheep come running at you… if you just gently waved your arms, and turned the first 5, the rest would follow!! You could actually left your place in the open road, run ahead of the sheep to the next turn, wave gently there, and turn them again into the next leg of their journey!! Amazing!!
The dairy cows had calves, and they were kept with their moms in a separate pasture for a while. Each night I and the hired man’s son refilled the half of a half 55 gallon drum my dad had cut to make a watering trough. There was a hose run 100 feet for refilling, but it was quicker to also fill 5 gallon buckets and carry them to help fill the tank. Once I came to the trough with full water buckets, and the boy was throwing rocks at the calves, to drive them away!! “What are you doing?” “As soon as we get any water in the trough, they drink it up! We’ll never get it filled!!”
I don’t remember being kind as a 10 year old telling him: “The goal is not to fill the tank… the goal is to water the calves… and whatever time and water it takes to get them to be satisfied, and the trough THEN to be full for later, that is what we must and will do.” I was so upset with him…. I sent him home. Throwing rocks at those precious little calves, hitting them in the head, and sometimes on their tender sides, and they hadn’t done anything wrong, they were just coming for a drink because they were thirsty!! There was no place else for them to get the water they needed to survive in that particular pasture.
The stress and hours of the farm schedule finally became too much for my dad and our family, especially with my mom so sick from depression many months of the year, that he sold the farm when I was about 12. That was very painful for all of our family in many ways…. We gave up our beautiful home site, our natural recreation area of woods, creek, ponds, and rolling pastures…. I simply loved it there, though we later learned that I was allergic to every tree, grass, and animal on the farm!
So, some lessons I learned from animal husbandry…. You don’t yell and make loud threatening noises in the chicken house, NEVER, EVER…. You gently guide the sheep (dim-witted and poor-sighted as they are!)… It can all be done with a calm voice…..and you don’t EVER, EVER throw rocks at ANY of the animals. In fact, a good shepherd of animals provides food, water, medicine, medical care (animals need an onsite doctor like dad when you have hundreds of them), and preventive, protective measures. And, unfortunately, the farm doctor has to be on call 24/7….. But the farm owner, at least from my study of materials and my dad in action on the farm, is the VERY BEST FRIEND, and the VERY BEST THING, for every animal in his care.
© Tom B. Bandy, 6/22/13
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