Dairy Farming Essay Example

my grandpa came my grandma. They made for tons of great memories on the farm. When they needed to stay overnight at our place due to something going on very late or very early, they stayed in a camper type trailer parked behind our shed.

My brother Cody and I could always count on pudding snack packs being stowed away in the cupboards in that trailer and we spent a lot of afternoons eating them. My grandma, along with my mom fed the young calves morning and night. One job that I can remember from when I was very young was mixing up the milk replacer with my brother for my mom and my grandma. My uncle Alan was also a milker and when he wasn’t, it was either me or my brother filling in his spot. All these people came together to help make things run smoothly and everyone played a big role in the farm.

Other than milking, which was a huge job in itself, there were also many other jobs to be done throughout the year on a dairy farm. Starting in the spring of the year, you having to work the field over with a digger, followed by planting and eventually, spraying and cultivating. Digging makes the ground more easy to work with while the planting itself is pretty self explanatory. Spraying and cultivating are just two different methods of dealing with weeds that might pop up in your corn or bean field. As the spring turns into summer, you have to take care of the alfalfa fields which includes first cutting it.

After a time, the hay

is raked, and after it is dried a good amount, it is square baled. Square baling is probably one of the hardest jobs on a farm. There were summers where over 3,500 bales were made, all of them having to be taken off of the hay rack and put onto a conveyor which took them up into the top part of the barn where they were stored. My grandma always drove the baler, my uncle Alan drove loads along with my grandpa, and my dad, my brother, and I unloaded and occasionally stacked when we had to. It was probably the time of the year when everyone had to pitch in most.

It was an all day event and we usually baled three to four times during the summer. I always had a good time but I can still remember my dad telling me, you won’t like this so much when you get to be my age. Then, in the fall of the year was harvest time, when you had to combine beans and corn, dry them to make sure they were safe to be put away into bins. My uncle Alan drove the combine while everyone else drove loads. After all of that, the cornfields needed to be chopped to get rid of the bottom of the corn stalk.

When all of that had been done, sometimes corn stalks were baled into round bales to be used as bedding. Finally, the fields were all plowed to get them ready for the next year of planting and harvest. The cycle was never ending. I spent a good chunk of my childhood on a

dairy farm having a fun time working, talking, and laughing with my family members. I’ve never had such a good time as I had in those years. After my family decided it was time to sell the cows, I was crushed. I had a very rough time accepting the fact that so many things in my life were going to change forever.

We still raise beef cattle and have cropland, but it most certainly isn’t the same. It took me a long time to get over the cows being gone. However, I can remember the day when I stopped feeling so badly about it. It was a couple of months after the cows were gone; I was sitting in the living room watching television. I saw a quote that not only helped me in the situation at hand but also in many situations later in my life. It was something that Theodor Seuss Geisel once said, whom you may know by the pen name Dr. Seuss. “Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. ” Amen good doctor, amen.