RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ONE MILK COW CAN SOUR AN ENTIRE FIELD OF DREAMS

Farm life can be hard work, but there are rewards too -- if you don't count milking every morning and every night.

The other day I passed a field where hay was being baled. The baled hay was being loaded by some strong men onto a wagon. The fellow on the wagon obviously had a system -- and a good one -- for keeping the large load in place. Another fellow in the field tossed bales onto the wagon. And a third fellow drove the tractor that pulled the wagon.

Sound familiar?

If you lived on a farm in the 1950s and 1960s, surely you bucked bales or knew someone who did.

What surprised me was that there are still square bales to be bucked and that some farmers are still using the same system after all these years.

For a long time, it looked like the huge, round hay bales were taking over fields everywhere. The round bales are usually left outdoors rather than being stored in a barn. That eliminates three summer jobs right there.

And some farmers who still use square bales nowadays have sophisticated machines that load the bales without human interference. It's nice to know that some skills you learned when you were a teen-ager are still useful.

Not that I'm looking for work as a bale bucker. But that was my first real paying job. It wasn't steady work -- only a couple of weeks a year, and the pay wasn't great. But the way I looked at it was it was more work than I would have had otherwise, and it was more money than nothing.

Besides, when you're a teen-ager on the farm, you don't always think of farm work as a job. After all, you usually had friends working with you. And you got fed pretty well, as I remember.

Dinnertime on the farm is at noon. Supper is the evening meal. Dinner during the haying season can be quite a spread. I won't go into all the details, except to say you haven't lived until you've come in from stacking bales of hay in a hot, airless barn to eat fried chicken and drink tea sweetened with real sugar followed by a 10-minute nap before riding the wagon back to the fields.

Although helping in the hayfields was a way to earn some cash, youngsters on farms have rarely ever had to worry about summer jobs. There is always something to do -- or needs to be done -- on a farm, even if it doesn't include hourly wages.

Besides the chores that come with having farm animals, it always seemed to me that there were fences that either needed to be built or needed to be mended.

And there was the garden. Although we canned and preserved and stored, the garden always produced enough for most of China in a good year, including okra, which I didn't even like at the time, and I'm convinced the Chinese weren't too crazy about it either.

The biggest chore of all, however, was caused by the milk cow. Just one milk cow. In my age-advantaged years, I've come to the conclusion that if our farm had been a dairy farm, I would have come to understand milk cows.

But just one milk cow was -- and still is, in my mind -- worse than that dead albatross the ancient mariner had to put up with around his neck.

Morning and night, the milk cow demanded and received special treatment. It didn't matter what you wanted to do.

Yes, we drank the milk and made butter with the cream. The milk cow was a good provider.

But I would have hauled hay for free if someone had told me I didn't have to worry about the milk cow any more.

That's the down side.

The up side is this: Anyone who grew up on a farm, particularly one with just one milk cow, is better prepared for life. I think anyone who had this experience would agree with me. We tend to stick together.

Other folks who grew up in town or the big city turn out OK too. But they can't do a lot of things those of us who grew up on the farm can do.

Like write a column about hauling hay and milking cows.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.