I was going through some photos on my computer, and I couldn’t resist making a post about this after I found the pictures from last year. Last Summer my soon-to-be in-laws made a trip to our family farm. According to the dates on the picture, it was the last weekend in July 2011. I remember that being a really fun weekend with both families getting together.
My future father in-law, Dan, was in for a treat that weekend when he came to the farm. Dan is a great guy who is always willing to try something new. He does a lot of volunteering and loves to help people. He is involved with Habitat for Humanity, an MS fundraising bike ride and many other fundraising/charity drives. Something he has never done, and expressed an interest in trying, is working on a farm. Well, we don’t milk cows anymore or have thousands of acres of farm land to tend to, but we did have some straw to bale that weekend. My dad was excited that we had an able and willing hand to help with that.
We assigned Dan to the haymow station. He was in charge of stacking the straw bales up in the barn. Dad did some training on what to do, but soon figured out that Dan had the hang of it. I was stationed down on the hay rack to put the bales on the elevator to send up to Dan. We only had 2 wagon loads to do, but it was a hot day to be unloading bales.
Bale unloading was only phase I of his training. We decided to introduce him to phase II on a farm, tractor driving. One of the first things people learn to do when starting off on a tractor is raking hay/straw. That is how I learned, and I think that is how my dad and brother learned. We had the Allis-Chalmers D-15 all ready to run with the rake. I remember Dan was pretty excited about being able to do some farm work in the field. I showed him where to go and what to do. It was pretty self-explanatory, and he caught on right away. He was having fun, we could all tell.
Dan had a lot of fun with the farm work he got to do that weekend. I think he looks forward to doing more. Maybe Dad will have to buy a herd of cows and we can have Dan come up and help with a milking operation. Next time we will get Dan in a bigger tractor with a different piece of equipment to pull behind him. I am sure he will look forward to that.
Austin M. Frederick 