The 141 Acre Classroom

(Published in the Janesville Messenger, 6-8-2014) 

People are often surprised when they find out that I grew up on a dairy farm. Apparently, I just don't seem the agricultural type.

And at times during my childhood, I certainly didn't want to be. A small family farm was a 24/7/365 proposition. Dairy cattle don't take vacations. And when you're a sole proprietor like my father, you can't afford to hire someone to do the milking and the chores for a week. My father's yearly vacation was generally a single day, when someone else milked the cows and he accompanied my uncles to Arlington Park to play the ponies.

We farmed 141 acres, and my adolescence included chores like hauling milk pails, stacking hay bales and shoveling feed. Like the dour farmer in Grant Wood's painting, I used a pitchfork...and once managed to spear my toe with it. And then there was manure, lots and lots of manure. We scraped it, shoveled it, spread it, walked through it, and sometimes wore it.

Of course, there was an aroma that accompanied said product, and that was one of the embarrassments of my youth. I still remember one night that I was out with friends after milking the cows, when they informed me that my hair reeked of barn odor. The horror...the horror.

Those were the things I focused on when I was young. What I didn't appreciate at the time, and didn't realize until years later, were the life lessons I was learning from my parents. In retrospect, they were more valuable than anything I picked up in a classroom.

One lesson was teamwork and dedication. Dad and Mom were a strong team. Dad ran the farm, and my mother was the ultimate farm wife and his full partner. He took care of the physical farm work as well as the business and accounting, and she took care of the meals, the kids and the house, as well as jobs like plucking and cleaning chickens and washing and sanitizing milking machines. When the kids had all left the nest, this woman who never had a driver's license learned to work a tractor so she could help in the fields. It was a beautiful relationship. She was the Oates to his Hall, even when they were haulin' oats.

We also learned about providing for your family through hard work and sacrifice. Dad toiled and labored every day, even when he was sick and hurting. Combing through his tax forms after he died, I was shocked at how little that work actually paid him. He had to be frugal, yet we never wanted for anything. And somehow, he saved and invested so wisely that my mother, widowed at 58, has not had to work a single day in the 29 years since his death.

Dad knew farming was tough, and he could see that the future of family farms was not bright. So he encouraged my brother and I to not follow in his footsteps, and we complied with his wishes. Thus, we are the first Lyke generation in at least two centuries – and possibly more – to not make our living providing food. If he had his own wish, it would have been a generation earlier. Dad wanted to go to college and study ag science. But despite being class valedictorian, a snafu with required high school courses cost him the college scholarship he had earned and desperately needed. He made sure that would not happen with his children; he saved and paid for our college education.

Our farming life is far, far back in the rear view mirror now, but I think about it often. I sometimes wish I could revisit those years and relive them with the wisdom of age. I would whine less, work more, ask a lot. And be much, much more grateful for the examples being set for me.