Getting Ready For The Fair

One of the very rural aspects of life in Michigan's farm country for children and teens is participating in the summer 4-H and Junior Livestock programs. Kids get to raise an animal and take it to the fair. The kids learn about feeding animals and training them to be around people. They learn how to prepare the animal for the show ring and they come to realize that animals are raised for food.

Our friends, Don and Donna Wheeler, have been involved in guiding students through the animals raising process for many summers. Don is the local agriculture teacher at the Laker Schools. Their daughter, Jenny Wheeler Parker, also a teacher, invited our grandson Finn over to their farm one morning this week. "Bring him over to see the animals," Jenny said. Seeing the animals at Wheeler's Broken Wheel Ranch means that the animals will be let out of their pens for a walk around the yard.

Finn wasn't too sure about the sheep even though Jenny's little niece gave Finn a convincing demonstration of hanging on to the sheep's halter. All three of our now grown up children showed sheep at the fair, and we had a good time talking about how different the showing patterns are for kids now. Twenty years ago, kids did not use a halter on sheep at all. We had lots of run away animals at the fair. Now halters are common and there are far fewer loose sheep running in the barns.

We made sure that Finn stayed back from the big 1100 pound steer that Jenny's stepson James Parker is readying for the show ring. That steer, whose name is Uno, is a beautiful, but very big animal. Usually kids start by showing a small animal and then progress to handling the larger calves and steers.

What Finn really liked, though, was guiding the pigs around the Wheeler's yard. Jenny gave him a few pointers on how to tickle the animals with the show stick so that the pig keeps moving. Finn caught on quickly. He helped give the pigs their daily workout and then helped to herd the three pigs right back into their pen in the barn.

We all fell in love with the playfulness of the Wheeler's one goat. A very agile animal, the goat managed to pull a few green apples from the lower limbs of an apple tree. Donna reminded us that, worldwide, goats are the most common meat animal. Small and easy to feed, these critters provide protein sustenance for many populations across the planet.

Chasing pigs around a back yard is fun. That's true, but time spent with farm animals is so much more. The exposure to farm animals begins the thinking process about the contribution that livestock make to humans. Those hours and days spent training a steer or pigs or sheep or goats become a basic educational experience , part and parcel of rural life in Michigan's Thumb.

Old Dairy Cow

I often comment that I grew up eating "old dairy cow" which would actually be grass fed beef by today's standards. The family mythology has us eating a lot of locker beef, supposedly from dairy cattle that had been culled from my Grandpa and Grandma Luedtke's herd.

A look back at my Dad's slides reminds me that Grandpa Bill raised Herefords for beef and, now that I think about it, there were always 5-10 beef cattle on the farm, probably steers being raised for market and for the locker.

I remember, too, that Grandpa kept a bull because we were always warned not to go near the bullpen and to stay away from the cow yard.

When I was in early elementary there was a favorite little calf in the barn that I took a shine to. Later that year, we were eating hamburger that Grandpa and Grandma had brought along on a visit, the kind that is frozen solid in one pound bricks. The calf was called "Tiny" and I found out that that's what was in the freezer beef, that little calf. I pretty much stopped eating meat for a while.

I had already figured out that if I didn't eat chicken, then I had no responsibility for pulling the feathers out when my folks dressed a bird that was given to Dad on his pastoral rounds. Several parishioners often sent a chicken home with him, minus the head, in a grocery sack, and we would take the carcass out to the garden and pull out the feathers prior to readying it for cooking.

I didn't eat chicken until the summer after my freshman year in college. I was working as a lifeguard at a summer camp and the Wednesday night meal was chicken. I was so hungry after a day in the sun with kids that I learned to eat the baked chicken breast entree that the kitchen cooked. I remember that the chicken was served with mashed potatoes, another favorite of mine, but that's another story.

Anyway, now you know why I like cheese so much. It is dairy protein. It is tasty. And it is an almost perfect food that stores well and lasts long even when it is not efficiently refrigerated. Plus it comes from cows and their milk. And the cows get to live to a ripe old age.

So am I a vegetarian? Well, yes and no. Some weeks I stay away from meat totally, but we did raise sheep at one time on Graywood Farm. At the height of our sheep raising days we lambed out over twenty ewes one spring. And we had a ram named Sam who knocked us down many a time.

Yep, we ate him. And tanned his hide. And one of my spinning friends made soap from his fat. So there. That's the end of the Old Dairy Cow story.

Beet Harvest Album

A familiar sight in Huron County and all of the Thumb, a beet truck slows to turn north toward the piling station just off of M-142, east of Verona. This truck's load is piled high.

Farmers work late into the night, quitting when the frost and dew prevent safe harvesting, and then begin again before first light. Here's a tractor with a beater that flails the leaves off of the beets before a conventional harvester lifts the beets from the ground. This photo was taken before dawn.

It's usual to see headlights in strange places during harvest as the equipment moves up and down and around in the fields.

Here's another view of the giant Ropa loading equipment at work along Atwater Road this week. I have to admit that I liked the sharpness of the yellow against the sky so much that I heightened the color. Artistic license!

We Saw the Euro Maus 3 Today

Sugar beet harvest is vastly different from what it used to be. My grandsons and I stopped along Helena Road today to watch the Maus in action. The Euro Maus 3 is a self propelled cleaning and loading machine that is being used to move sugar beets once they have been lifted and piled along the edge of a field.

The machine moves fairly slowly, picking up the beets and moving them through a roller cleaning system and then up on to a conveyor that loads a nearby truck.

The beets are then ready to be taken directly to the plant and are ready for processing. During early harvest, the goal is direct delivery of as many beets as possible, thus avoiding costs of piling and moving the beets.

Max and Finn and I were quite impressed by the robotic nature of this machine. It is a picker upper, a cleaner, and a stacker. Plus, the operator of the machine waved to us when he saw us watching and taking photos.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Storm Clouds on Geiger Road

Giant rolls of storm clouds laid like a thick covering on the western side of Michigan's Thumb last weekend. The corn harvest is just starting so this image, taken Sunday evening on Geiger Road east of Pigeon, with the contrast of dark clouds, dusty gravel and long, stately rows of cornstalks, is a typical scene in Huron County this fall.

The sugar beet harvest is underway, dry beans are coming off the fields, and on some farms, the corn fields have been opened so that the large multi-row equipment can easily move into the fields.

There's a certain drama to the harvest season and, I do admit, this photo looks more like the late days of harvest in early November than the fair-weather-blue-skies days of September.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Grain Bins

Out on the far east end of Helena Road there is this collection of cylindrical grain bins that are linked together with all of the pipes and chutes that make up the drying and storage system for this site.

I like the industrial look of these collections of structures. Everything is in its place. The system works. Things have a purpose.

It's kind of like a Great lakes freighter with a mast and a headhouse and huge cargo bins. Things go in a certain place. Stuff happens. And at the end of the harvest season (or at the end of a trip for a freighter), there is a product to sell or transport.

It's all a very orderly and prescribed part of the economy, unlike some parts of life that are pretty unorganized and have no tangible result.

Buildings get me to thinking about things like that. Maybe that's why I like buildings.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Yellowing Bean Fields

The dry beans are ripening in Huron County. Fields are marbled with golden yellow and soft green as the plants move their energy to the bean pods that will soon be harvested.

On a sunny day, with puffy clouds floating in an azure sky, you turn a corner and are entranced with colors that are not quite fall. There are no oranges or reds yet. Green predominates for a week or so.

Still, in Huron County, the magnificence of a fall field can take your breath away with its color and promise of bins of beans yet to come.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Petunia Wagon

My Dad and his big brother, my Uncle Marvin, good Wisconsin dairymen that they were, would have called this a perfume wagon, but I'm going to label the manure spreader that this vintage John Deere tractor is pulling as a "petunia wagon."

Photographed at the Van Camp House in Port Sanilac, this unlikely floral tribute adds a wonderful touch of rural flavor to the restaurant's front lawn.

The tractor has the name of Grant Geiger of Bischer Farms, Ruth, Michigan, painted on the chassis. I'm sure that there is a story to Grant's tractor and how it got on Andy and Pam Fabian's restaurant's front lawn, but I didn't ask about that tale when we had dinner there this week.

So, we will have to return for another photo and storytelling session with Chef Andy. Oh, and we'll have dinner, too.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Crop Duster

I spotted a crop duster working over a corn field south of Port Hope on my way home from golf in Port Austin on Tuesday. It was a a few minutes before sunset and this guy must have been hoping to get done before he couldn't see where he was dusting.

The plane, a biplane, was a taildragger and it was a thrill to watch how close it came to the tassels on the corn. The plane swooped up at the end of the field, after spraying the corn, and then came around to dive into yet another low, graceful pass over the field.

I was in the right place at the right time to get some photos, but was too dull after an afternoon of golf to get the settings any better for sharper photos. Anyway, it was fun to see the very acrobatic plane at work.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Sturdy Windmill

Lots of Wisconsin farms in the Fond du Lac area still have a windmill. This one, at my Mom's home farm near Lomira, turns and creaks and spins, just like it always did when I was a child visiting my grandparents.

The mechanism that linked the apparatus at the top to the well below is gone. There was a piece that could be fixed to the tall cast iron hand pump at the base so that the windmill would pump the water from the well. As a child, I remember that linkage still working, although we mostly used the hand pump.

Grandma Rose kept flowers growing around the concrete base where the pump sat. Probably petunias and marigolds. Maybe some four o'clocks. I remember some kind of vine growing up the tower, maybe morning glories. She always had Heavenly Blue morning glories trained up twine ladders on the side of the chicken house and might have planted their big, pea-like seeds under the windmill.

There was an old broom handle, about feet tall, that was pounded into the flower bed right at the base of the tower. An aluminum tumbler, upside down on top of the broom handle, got pulled into use when you pumped the water. A drink of water on a summer day was slightly metallic from the aluminum, but so cold and refreshing.

I'm 65 and my Dad is 92. His home place is right around the corner from this farm. We both have known this windmill all of our lives. Think how old (and sturdy) this windmill is!

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

1950's Kids In The Tulips

I look at this photo from the early 1950's that my Dad took and I just am amazed. The little girls are my sister Carla and me. Carla would have been five or six, so I would be three or four.

We are standing in the orchard in front of the machine shed on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin. The apple trees are in bloom and so are the tulips.

How my grandparents had the foresight to create such beauty on a Wisconsin dairy farm where they had 20 milk cows and farmed 57 acres I will never know. I look at that line of tulips and know that either Grandpa Bill or Grandma Rose had an eye for color and a green thumb.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Old Birches

My Dad says that the mystery trees from Wednesday's blog post are birches. "Those trees have been there longer than the barn," he said as he reminisced about how old the barn on Mom's home farm could be.

Lately I've been watching in the Midwest for sycamores or Planetrees. There are large, old specimens of Planetrees on the campus at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. I learned to identify them last summer after seeing them in Oxford and Cambridge in the UK in spring. I realized that the trees in England resembled some trees at Michigan State. The connection was made and I added another tree to my "identified" list.

I didn't consider that the "mystery tree" on the farm in Wisconsin might be a birch because I'm used to seeing much smaller specimens with very white bark, often peeling, that are used as landscape accents on lawns. These guys on the farm are big, maybe 75-100 feet tall, and there are a lot of them in one grove, almost like they are protecting each other.

Could they have been young trees when my grandparents worked this farm as young people? Or are they older than that?  Did these trees see me as a child, walking along with the stone wagon, helping my grandparents pick stones after supper during one of those long northern summer evenings?

Now the next thing is to identify what kind of birch they could be. I'll be thinking lots of things -- my grandparents, the big trees, childhood days on the farm -- when I walk back to see and photograph them again this week.

NOTE: If you want to learn more about trees and their growth habits, read "The Trees In My Forest," by Bernd Heinrich. His book puts me in touch with tree characteristics that I had never thought about.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

In It Together

It had to be a full moon last night. I didn't check the almanac but I did drive my Chevy Volt back up the lane at Mom and Dad's Wisconsin farm to see if I could get an image of Grandpa Bill Luedtke's barn with the full moon rising.

Bingo. Thanks to the magic of digital photography and some darkroom (in my computer) work, that Wisconsin full moon drifted clear and comforting over the late spring landscape. (And, dear blog readers, you may have to click on the image to see it in its entirety.)

I'm always taken by the moon. The moon that I see at 8 pm Central time in Wisconsin was visible a bit earlier to Ed in Michigan in Eastern time at our farm south of Pigeon.

Later, my sister Penny would see the full moon rise over the Rockies in Montana. Friends Lindsie and Prateek could watch that moon in San Francisco. Tom and Daniel and Adam in London saw it rise over the Thames.  Marye in The Netherlands might have photographed it silhouetted against a wooden windmill in her part of the world. The same moon rose full all across the planet.

Occupants of Earth, we humans are united by our sight of our orbiting neighbor. On full moon nights the drifting silver orb is a clear and wondrous reminder that we're all in this thing together.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

The Neighbor's Horses

There is a bench halfway up the lane that leads to the back fields and marsh at my Mom and Dad's farm in Wisconsin. I'm visiting my Dad this week, so I get to walk the lane every day.

Yesterday I took my lane walk late in the afternoon. A breeze whistled through the pine grove along the fence line. The two track lane is showing signs of drying after last month's snow and rain. The neighbor's horses were taking in the warm spring sunshine.

I showed the images that I took to Dad when we were having our cheese and crackers before supper.

"Your mom and I used to walk up the lane and take a cob of corn for the horses. They would sniff the cob and back away. Then, you'd break the cob, pull of a few kernels, and hold out your hand." Dad smiled, remembering Mom and how much she loved walking up the lane on the farm where she was born and raised.

He continued. "Then the horses would come back and eat from your hand." A pause, a smile. "You know what they would do? Paw the ground. They say thanks that way," he said, remembering a time when horses pulled plows and wagons and maybe even took you to town.

They ground might be dry enough to drive my Chevy Volt up the lane this week, just so he can see the land. The horses should be out. That would be good.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

March Thaw

The cold March wind cuts through my winter jacket like a sharp knife. An evening walk turns into a bone chilling adventure, but the sight of water moving in a neighbor's corn field is encouraging.

In spite of the cold daytime temperatures, the snow pack is dwindling. Field tiles are opening. Water rushes across the fields and into the ditches, on its way to creeks and rivers, and, eventually, to Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron.

Even though late March days are cold, winter is facing defeat. When the field tiles run in Huron County, spring is coming.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Storm Over Green Bay

I travelled up and down two states yesterday, from one farm to another, a journey of about 550 miles. I left Sunnyside Stock Farm (my mother's home place) just after lunch. Drove US-41 north through Wisconsin, along Green Bay, and into Michigan. It is a route that is commonplace in my adult life, this trek from my birth state Wisconsin to my home in Michigan.

I followed US-2 along the Lake Michigan shoreline to The Straits of Mackinac where Ed was waiting for me at the Shepler ferry docks in Mackinaw City. Ed drove the rest of the way -- downstate on Interstate 75 and then up M-25 into Michigan's Thumb -- to our farm south of Pigeon where we arrived around 1 am.

Today's photo is of a summer storm moving out over Green Bay into Lake Michigan. This image was taken north of Menominee, Michigan, along M-35. I drove through five swaths of rain -- some driving rains, some scattered sprinkles -- as I headed north in eastern Wisconsin yesterday.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Pinnebog Road Barn

A barn on the corner of Pinnebog Road and M-142 caught my eye. I like the contrast of the white metal roof with the gray wood siding and the red doors. The horizontal lines of the white rails above the doors punctuate the barn's shape. A stone foundation completes the look.

Huron County has many fine old barns like this one. The county is a good place to drive the back roads and see these structures built years ago. Built to house and feed a small herd of cattle with hay mows above, the barns are now basically used for storage.

Ed and I are uniquely rural people in that the home farms of all four of our parents still have barns. Both my mother and father came from farms south of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin where the barns are both in use. Here in Huron County, the barns on Ed's mother's side and his father's side still stand on the home farms. One of Ed's goals is the restoration of the barn at Graywood Farm which is where his mother grew up.

These barns now stand as tributes to the farm families who worked the land. That land and those farms produced people like our parents who, in many cases, went off to college and found careers in the professions. All of that milk and hay and those beans and eggs turned into educations for a generation born on the farms of the Midwest.

More barns:
The New Red, White and Blue
Haying 1991
Second Cutting


Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler