Growing up on a Farm

Growing up on a farm was all I ever knew. We lived in the country on various farms, as the family moved frequently. My dad's job was working with GLF, later AGWAY, primarily a company that provided feed for local farmers. In his early adult years he took whatever job he could, since it was the Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. Mom said that they moved eleven times in ten years of marriage. The first farm I really remember was outside of Ithaca, NY, where we kept a Gurnsey cow who provided milk and butter, and where we also had an enormous garden for the vegetables. We had to stay out of the barn because someone else raised chickens in it. Two moves later and we were in Newark Valley, NY, on a farm which we owned. All the previous places had been rentals. At the time I was in junior high school.

Being on a real farm meant chores. We continued to have a large garden and at times raised pigs, turkeys, cows, and pheasants. Turkeys are really dumb. They literally do not know enough to come in out of the rain and will stand looking up at the rain with open beaks, drowning. Stupid, huh? I enjoyed raising the pheasants, though. Every spring we would get 35 pheasants for each boy through the county extension program. Maurice didn't want his, so I got 70 to raise. When released as adults into the countryside, they were counted by an extension agent, and I received one dollar for each pheasant released. This provided me with some "hard to come by" cash, and I worked hard to make each of the 70 chicks live to be released. We were restocking the wild pheasant population, which provided additional sport for fall hunters. I like seeing the birds in wild but am unable to hunt them. Pigs are messy, stinky, and, when raised, are slaughtered and then you have to eat them. We would ask out loud at the dinner table, "Is this Sylvester, Porky, or Petunia?" That went over real well.

One of my daily jobs was to take care of the young stock, which in the winter meant cleaning out the manure, as well as feeding them so that they could make more manure. Mom said the I came in each morning after this job saying, "I hate cows and cleaning up after them and am never going to do this again!" However, the next morning I was back in there, cleaning up more manure. Did I want to grow up and be a farmer???? Maurice did, and he finally moved across the road where he had purchased a farm from a cousin. He made a good living from farming. I wanted to get out of Dodge and surely did not want to farm.