Winter Wonderland on the Farm
Finding joy in snow means finding joy in a whole lot of work.
I awoke early this morning to sleet rattling against my bedroom window. There were several inches of snow when I hit the hay last night, so I was not really surprised. Now it was changing to sleet and rain, landing on very cold ground. I flipped on an outdoor light, and sure enough, icicles are forming on the porch railings while the stairs gleam with a coating of ice.
Winter storms bring conflicting emotions to all adults, but especially farmers. When I was a small child in the 1960s, a snowstorm brought joy at the prospect of school being cancelled. There might be days of sledding and snow forts and snowball fights before winding mountain roads were clear enough for school buses to return. Our county was plowing snow with equipment that was probably antiquated even then -- and half the roads were still unpaved.
Fluffy dry snow was especially fun and not just because it took me longer to get my winter clothes completely soaked. I recall years when the snow drifts were above my head. I have fond memories of hiding from my brothers in deep powdery snow, to ambush them with a carefully crafted pile of snowballs. This did not always end well, as my older brother Albert’s long legs enabled him to move faster in the deep snow than I could. He would usually catch me soon after he figured out where the snowball barrage came from. Unfortunately, Albert would show his appreciation of my ambush craft by shoving a large amount of snow under my shirt and down my jeans, if he could catch me. I’d end up back at the farmhouse to change clothes after that. Sometimes, he did this without my provoking him with snowball barrages. If the snow developed a crust, however, I had a major tactical advantage. I was a little squirt so I could run, skate, or slide very fast on top of the crust while he broke through on every stride and floundered.
No high-tech fabrics in those days: We soaked so many pairs of jeans on a typical snow day that Mom bought stacks of cheap jeans at nearby Wolftown Cash and Carry or Hood Merchantile. A Blue Bell jeans factory was just a few miles away and their “seconds” ended up in local stores. That was before Wrangler bought Blue Bell and moved production to Mexico. The dyes used for jeans in the 1960s weren’t as “fast” as the kids wearing them. We’d leave a faint blue trail in the snow when we parted company with our sleds. Unfortunately, rich city kids were not yet paying more for faded jeans than for new ones. If paying a premium for faded jeans with the knees worn out had been a thing in the 1960s, I would have had enough money selling my cast-offs to buy that new saddle at the co-op!
In Virginia’s Blue Ridge, a farm has lots of options for a child’s winter adventures and ruining jeans. Springs in our mountain ridge fed nine creeks, which cut our land into hilly chunks before they converged into Whetstone Run, a tributary to the Rapid Ann River, now better known as the Rapidan River. Every hill on our farm had a creek or a pond at the bottom. Mom decreed the hills around the pond off-limits for sledding, correctly visualizing what could happen if we lost control of a sled speeding downhill toward that pond. She also forbade skating on the pond ice unless the horses and cattle were taking short-cuts across the ice. Come to think, she forbade all activity on that ice, but we created our own guidelines at times. I mean, that horse outweighed us by an order of magnitude, and their instincts about their footing are legendary. If the horse thought that ice was safe, so did I. Sorry, Mom, you were very busy in the barn when it was really cold, and your children were not saints. And Dear Reader, in case you are visualizing those Currier and Ives or P. Buckley Moss prints of people skating elegantly on the farm pond: natural ice formation on ponds is not smooth unless the freeze occurs very fast on a very calm night. That happens almost never. So, you are quite likely to take a painful nose-dive when you hit a ridge while skating on that ice. Lesson: rinks are much more fun and safer.
The creeks also froze, but less often than the pond did. It has to be really, really cold to freeze fast moving water. The creeks would usually freeze only along the edges, or where a bend in the creek’s path had slowed the water into a deep pool. That ice was never thick enough to hold a sled and a small girl barreling onto it after she lost control of her sled. The “flexible” steering on a Radio Flexible Flyer sled only works when the runners can bite into the snow, which doesn’t happen on top of an icy crust. It also doesn’t work when you are airborne after zooming over a snow mound carefully crafted to make a Radio Flyer actually fly. Of course, you get the best speeds lying flat on the Flyer, headfirst, hands on the steering bar. I suppose there are “safety warnings” somewhere that tell you the proper way to ride the sled is sitting upright and using your feet to steer, but I think we tried that, like, once. The bright idea to wax the runners with a candle stub seemed a little less bright when sitting in an ice-water bath in the creek at the end of a fast run. Friction is not always the enemy!
My older brother was soon drafted for farm chores and I had a few years for my winter adventures without so many of his ambushes. This included some illicit use of his longer -- and faster -- Radio Flyer sled. I learned that our dogs -- Weimaraners -- were much better at hunting birds than pulling sleds. “Mush” was just not in their doggie vocabulary or genetics. Also, I learned that trying to use a Radio Flyer as a substitute for a horse-drawn sleigh is a good way to ask an untrained pony to kick you.
Sometimes, I wonder how any farm kids survive to adulthood. I knew a few who didn’t. Our farm had an old cemetery overlooking the pond, with tombstones sized by the time spent here on earth. I made up some stories involving wild horses about the smaller tombstones in that old cemetery. But Mom told me that those tombstones had more to do with the lack of medical care for mothers and the lack of vaccines for children in the 1800s than they did with stupid experiments with ponies. She’d noticed that some of the smallest grave markers had death dates matching those on some large grave markers. Perhaps those paired tombstones reminded her of how she nearly died during the stillbirth a couple years before we moved to the farm. Perhaps the children’s grave markers reminded her of her sister’s grave in Louisiana. Little Alice Rose died in 1932 of the Whooping Cough that Mom brought home from school. Mom felt responsible for Alice’s death to her own dying day. I came along when nobody complained about lining kindergarteners up at school for sugar cubes soaked in polio vaccine and no one ever heard of asking a kid to be excused from the Whooping Cough vaccine. No matter: Mom would have hauled us to Timbuktu to get a vaccination even if they weren’t required for school.
Fortunately for my chances of surviving my horsy heroics, Mom’s father lived with us for a time. Grandad had a lot of experience with workhorses at his Louisiana logging and sawmill operation. He taught me a few things about horse training in time to prevent my from equine-assisted suicide. He was as famous for his workhorses as for his mill’s pickle barrels and baseball bats. He had a horse that would drag logs from the logging site to the mill and return to get another all day long without a driver. I found a yellowed New York Times Sunday clipping about that mare in Grandad’s papers after he died. I never could convince my pony to ferry sleds back up the hill without having to lead her. I eventually reconciled myself to the fact that dragging the sled back up the hill by myself was easier than dragging both the pony and sled up there. That slog up the hill is the price I had to pay for the adrenaline hit the downhill slide brings. Good thing adrenaline is addictive.
I finally grew big enough to be drafted for the extra farm chores that blow in with a winter storm, and the sledding and snow forts became fewer. I was conflicted about this: I wanted to help do important things like take care of the animals as badly as I wanted to play in the snow. Winter morning adventures became breaking ice on water troughs and hauling buckets of heated water when the water system froze. There was also a seemingly endless shifting of hay bales out of the barn onto a wagon to feed the cows in the pasture. Those bales were “square” and weighed about 50 pounds each. They were actually rectangular but we called them square after round bales came along. These square bales were still too awkward for me to lift until I was in my teens and actually outweighed them, but I got creative with rolling them along. I think it was almost 1980 before we switched to the half-ton round bales that we moved with forks on tractor loaders. No more illicit “hay forts” constructed illicitly as we tidied up the haystack after winter feeding, because you can’t do that with round bales.
We also fed silage on our feedlot. We stored the silage in open-top concrete-stave silos. Our two largest silos were sixty feet tall. Snow on top of the fermenting silage melted into a wet mess which then froze on top. That gave the automatic silo unloader fits. I don’t remember what make our unloaders were—any labels were long obscured by caked-on silage. Probably Clay. Today I get a kick out of the old Clay silo unloader ad, claiming that a Clay unloader is “GUARANTEED TO HANDLE FROZEN SILAGE!” and “Clay fluffs it up and throws it down, EVEN WHEN IT’S FROZEN.” Ha! We had to get up in the silo to help that unloader with the frozen silage. We’d climb up the wooden silo door handles, as they doubled as ladder rungs. Once in the silo, you’d break up the frozen layer with a 10-tine pitchfork designed to handle silage, then holler down for someone to start the loader. This contraption’s auger assembly rotated slowly in the silo’s interior (Videos at (20+) Video | Facebook and Silo unloader. How it works). We’d circle the silo interior just behind the rotating unloader, forking the chunks into at its augers at a rate its blower could handle, then the wet layer below that, until the unloader reached a dryer layer that it could pick up on its own. At least the fermented silage warmed your feet once you got the frozen layer forked away. I’m pretty sure this activity was not OSHA-approved, especially for child labor. Our definition of safe was working in pairs. Guess how we learned to do this? Watching Dad and Grandad, who probably did not realize all that their “whatever it takes to get the job done” example taught us kids.
Those of you who are more acquainted with grain bins than silos are horrified at the idea of us being in there, but silage doesn’t “bridge” over voids which can turn the grain into deadly quicksand. Corn silage is chopped corn, stalks and ears and all, “ensiled” in a silo. This feed system was inspired by sauerkraut. A few years we did grass silage—we called that “haylage”—but that’s more common in Europe than the US. All that chopped plant matter is blown into the silo a little moist. It settles as it ferments, and it stays moist. Our system unloaded the silo from the top, so there was no chance of voids developing or the material sliding and burying us.
Once we got the silo unloader actually unloading silage on its own, we’d climb back down the door-rungs to where the silage was piling in the middle of a feeding bunker under a long auger carrying it away from the silo. The cattle would be struggling to reach the silage, rearing up onto the bunker with long tongues straining to scoop some up. There would almost always be some smarty who figured out how to jump up on the bunker (about three feet tall and maybe eight feet wide and over a hundred feet long). More than one of these clever bovine souls lost part of their tail in the bunker auger, too.
We would use a shovel to scrape the silage from the bunker’s middle to the edges where the cattle did not have to jump or rear up to reach it. Making our way down the bunker, shovel upside down on the bunker surface, we’d push some silage to the opposite side with the away-stroke and pull some toward our side on the return stroke so the cattle could eat on both sides. We wore a lot shovels down to nubbins on that rough concrete-and-gravel bunker. Silage-warmed feet were soon very cold as the poorly-laid frost-heaved concrete captured puddles of manure and water runoff and ice below the bunker. This job went faster for the taller members of my family with long arms. And if we could convince the cattle with silage-on-the-brain to get out of our way. We had to shout pretty loud to sound intimidating over that rattling bunker auger. The cattle moved out of my way faster if I thumped them on the shoulder or head with the shovel, but I hated to do that and usually settled for poking them in the flanks with the handle.
At the time, I was more concerned about getting trampled or crushed by hungry cows than I was worried about getting hurt by the machinery inside the silo. This may be why I got more time up in the silo dodging the unloader than on bunker duty. Unfortunately, the silo held a hazard that we didn’t know about then: breathing the gases emitted by fermentation of that chopped corn did not help our young lungs. We didn’t think about the air in an open-top silo being bad—in fact, good silage has a nice pungent odor—but if I check the “worked in silos” box on certain medical history forms nowadays, I get an interrogation and extra stethoscope time from the doctor.
The dairies that were doing well in the 1960s and 1970s installed sealed HarveStore silos that unloaded from the bottom. They were kind of a status symbol. They were labor-savers and greatly improved the quality of the silage. Best yet in my humble opinion, they were insulated to keep the silage from freezing! HarveStore’s maker—A.O. Smith, who started out making tanks for brewers—had to do an intensive safety education program to teach farmers raised with open silos to stay out of sealed silos. Those distinctive blue silos with the white tops earned the nickname “Blue Tombstones”—and not just because they could be deathtraps inside. They cost so much that farmers mortgaged the farm to buy them. When the 1980s crash came to farm country, that extra debt load broke a lot of those farms. The Farm Aid concert proceeds were a drop in the family farm bucket. Wild swings in wholesale beef prices in the early 1970s—the result of President Nixon’s experiment in retail price controls on beef—had made my parents wary of big-ticket investments for feed storage. We stayed with our temperamental, labor-intensive silage system. Dad opted to invest in grain bins and a used combine to shell corn instead. It was the better choice: my parents were able to keep the farm through those tough times.
The change from silage to shelled corn was not so popular with the cattle. They loved that fermented winter silage more than ground corn or summer’s green grass. Ever see a cow smile? Hard to imagine, I know, given the rigidity of their faces. But if you’ve ever watched cows stagger off the feedlot after a big meal of fermented corn silage, you will swear that a cow can smile. I’ve seen them so woozy they’d trip on the way out to pasture. They’d take their sweet time getting back up. Moo-la-la-la!
Shouting over that noisy bunker auger and bellowing hungry cows would make me hoarse, but that noisy auger had its advantages. Need to get the cows up in the middle of July for worming? Just turn that auger on and watch them stampede up to the barn. I think the cows told their calves about that silage, because years—cattle generations, really—after we stopped putting up corn silage, you could still call the cows in by running that old auger for a few minutes. Time eventually took its toll on that equipment. When I returned to the farm in 2004, we were 100% grass farmers, running far more sheep than cows. I had a scrap man haul the rusting auger assembly away. I got the bunker bulldozed to make way for a manure composting facility. By then the taller silos were leaning like that fabled tower of Pisa. Turned out the foundations were faulty. Actually, they were almost non-existent. I convinced the tax assessor that they were a huge liability, and it would cost a fortune to take them down so he would lower our tax bill. I really did think it would cost a lot to get rid of them, and I worried that they’d fall before I found the money. Then the prices of concrete and steel went up. I found a bunch of Mennonites who disassembled them in exchange for the staves and the steel bands that held the staves together. They hauled those staves and bands away on several tractor trailers, to reassemble those silos on their farms. For a while, I did a few double takes at not seeing those silos on the horizon, but did I miss being inside that silo after a winter storm? Never.
The extra farm chores coming in with snow changed over the years as our farm operation changed and we gradually improved our infrastructure. Watering system designs that do not freeze are a wonderful innovation. Machines can move large amounts of fodder without the back-breaking labor, but they need maintenance. Hay bales weigh half a ton instead of the fifty pounds of yesteryear, and they are not going anywhere without diesel and hydraulics. It’s no fun to start a diesel engine when someone forgot to plug in the block heater. Or worse, when the block heater is not heating because ice brought trees down on the power line. And ice in fuel lines is the new version of ice in water lines.
Timing the lamb crop to mature in time for high holiday demand for lamb may mean long hours with ewes delivering lambs in freezing, icy conditions ((1) A Modern Shepherd's Christmas - by Kristin Farry). A newborn lamb has to have something in its stomach within its first hour or so to survive sub-freezing temperatures, and ewes having twins and triplets often need help to keep all alive. You have more time with calves, which are almost always single births, but any nursing mother must have water and food to keep making milk for her young. And speaking of milk, I shudder to think of modern dairy farmers milking a few thousand cows during a blizzard or when the power is out. Is that among the reasons that our dairy industry has been migrating to Texas and California? Milking our single dairy cow on top of the other snow-induced challenges was not my favorite farm chore in my younger years. Now, I suspect that even milking robots have temper tantrums in sub-freezing weather.
Here in central Virginia’s poultry country, my neighbors are out in today’s messy, wet snow tending the equipment keeping their birds warm and fed and watered in poultry houses. The folks with greenhouses and high tunnels are worried about their houses and tunnels collapsing under the load of heavy snow. They are also struggling to water plants and keep them from freezing as temperatures this week will be in the teens every night. That’s my future on Farm 2.0, so I am checking snow loads for my future facilities.
The commodity crop farmers may be the only farmers relaxing in this winter weather. Oh, oops, they are busy with equipment maintenance because last year’s harvest went all the way to Thanksgiving and spring planting will be here before we can say Jack Frost three times. Like my father before me, I swore that someday I was going to have a shop with a heated floor to make the winter equipment maintenance easier. We never did get that heated floor. Or even a heated shop. I still hoard big sheets of cardboard, even after I came to understand that commodity crops were not our future and can postpone equipment maintenance for a warmer day. Every time I try to put a big sheet of cardboard into the recycle bin, I think of using it to insulate my back or butt from that frozen ground or icy concrete. I get a chill and stick the cardboard back in the shop. My non-farming friends shake their heads at my huge cardboard stash, but I can’t help myself.
No matter what kind of farming you are doing, when you stagger in for a very late hot lunch after the extra workload that blew in with the snowstorm, you probably don’t have any energy left to play in the snow. You warm your butt leaning on the old radiator and thaw your hands on a mug of hot tea and look out the window at all that cold stuff and suddenly working on your taxes feels like a good après-farm chores idea. So, you send the kids out to play unsupervised. When you hear them screaming in play, you try not to think of the ways you nearly killed yourself when you were that age.
My younger brother—perhaps remembering our adventures all too well—got his boys plastic toboggans to slide down gentler slopes instead of giving them our old Flyers. You sit upright and slide feet first on those. They slide better on light snows than our Flyers did. Light snow seems to be the norm most years nowadays. It was a bittersweet moment a few years ago when I found our Radio Flyers in the farmhouse basement where they had hung, unused, for decades. That sled looked so much smaller than I remembered. I don’t have any memories of careening down a hill on my Flyer after the age of ten or twelve.
During my non-farming years, there have been some pure-play ski trips. On the farm, snow is associated more with work than play. But long-time family friend and sheep farmer Leo Tammi (Shamoka Run Farm) just reminded me of Christopher Robin’s observation (A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh): “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy but still the same amount of snow.”
So, dress warmly and find some joy in the snow. Take it from me, there will someday be a morning when you will miss all that extra work. For about two minutes, maybe!
Next time: How immigration policy fills your dinner plate—or not.
Very enjoyable read, Kristin.
Great memories, Kristin! I especially enjoyed the smiling tipsy cows who stumbled around after imbibing in a bit of silage...