"We got our little chickens a week ago last Tuesday and are not having very good luck with them. Have lost 50 out of 459 and they are not quite two weeks old. They with the other work we have to do keeps us busy. We are milking ten cows now and it takes quite a lot of time. I usually help some in the morning after I get Barbara off to school and always in the evening."
--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, March 22, 1942.
Chickens and cows were part of the diversified farm my grandparents operated, which allowed them to produce a great deal of the food they ate (except for a few items like sugar and tea), while also having many different products to sell for income. In the 1940s, their farm had beef cattle, dairy cows, pigs, chickens, grains (including wheat, alfalfa, sorghum, and milo), and garden vegetables. In the postwar years, like most American farmers, they began to specialize more and to buy most food at grocery stores. By the 1970s, they were raising beef cattle and grains and had no pigs, dairy cows, or chickens.
My father wrote the following about the farm’s cows in his memoir. “As a young boy, I heard Leonard's voice very early in the morning telling me that it was time to get up to milk the cows. I can hear that insistent voice yet in memory! We had six to ten milk cows, which required nearly an hour of steady milking by the two of us. The work was arduous, and hand muscles were strengthened only with practice. The task was also confining, for milking was required morning and evening throughout the year. We could not be away for a single day without making arrangements for substitutes.
“Still, the milk cows were indispensable to the farm economy. Regular income kept us in necessities between the sale of annual crops, or farm animals. At first it was the income from cream delivered to the Bloomington store, or the creamery in Augusta, in ten gallon cans every week or two. Finally, in the late 1930s we began to sell milk daily, picked up by Cleo Randall who drove the milk truck. The milk check of about thirty dollars a month kept us going, as Leonard often remarked. The night milking was kept in a can in cold water, and the morning milking often finished just before the milk truck rolled in. Sometimes it was still going through the strainer as Cleo stopped to pick it up. Our sanitation measures were primitive, and milking in the barn without washing the cows would probably not be permitted today. But no complaints ever reached us about the foaming white liquid which came from our herd of cows.
“These cows were a mixed lot, Holsteins, Jerseys, Guernseys, or some mixture thereof. They bore names conferred by the whimsical Leonard: ‘Aunt Violet,’ a petite jersey whose milk was almost yellow, and contained a high content of butterfat, was named for the elegant Aunt Violet Berger; ‘Maudey,’ part Guernsey, the ‘brindle cow,’ was purchased from the Clarks, and bore the name of Clark’s wife, Maude. Another was named Aunt Ethel, for Aunt Ethel Berger, but whether these ladies knew of their namesakes, I never learned. The name of the large Holstein, I have forgotten, but she gave the most milk, and was very easy to milk, in contrast to the Jersey which required stout hand muscles, making instructions to milk rapidly difficult to follow. Cows gave more milk if milked quickly.
“Leonard talked more while milking than at any other time, and from those conversations, I learned that he was a fan of Kansas politics. ‘In 1928 Clyde Reed promised that, if he were elected governor, he would not appoint Henry J. Allen to the U. S. Senate, but he did it anyhow, and was beaten for reelection.’ Leonard was a man of few words, but, while milking, opened up about the things which interested him. When he was not there, I sometimes sang the popular songs of the day, and my cousin Joyce Sooter was vastly amused when he came into the milk place, and heard me singing, ‘Flatfoot Floogie,’ in time to the streams of milk.
“On any given morning my job was to bring in the cows from wherever they had spent the night in the pasture. After the animals were penned up in the barn lot, they were brought into the barn to be secured in the five or six stanchions in the milk area. While their heads were clamped in place, they were fed oats, soy bean cakes, alfalfa hay, or even prairie hay in winter. While the cows chewed on their cud, the milking began, and could be a dangerous enterprise as certain cows were infamous for kicking the milker. These we restrained with hobbles, iron cuffs linked closely by a chain. The work was always done from the right side. Anyone who came in from the city, and tried it from the left side was dispatched with a rousing kick.
“Before the cows became fresh with milk, they produced calves, and these were kept, when weaned and small, in the pen east of the barn. They had their own feeding place in the barn itself, next to the oats bin. Their water came from the well, just south of the pen. Watering the calves was my job, and ten to twelve buckets of water had to be pumped from the well each day, and carried across the lane to be poured into the half metal barrel used for watering. To a little boy that was a tedious job. The cows, by contrast, drank directly from Muddy Creek, whose opaque, gray water justified its name, from the half acre bought in 1881 from the quarter section to the north.” (Source: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 97-99.)
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