Right Out of the Bible: Happy Farm Memories and Heartaches

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

My recent column, “Farewell to Our Family Farm,” struck a chord with many readers who grew up in rural America and have experienced some of the same sadness I described upon visiting our home place for the last time. People shared fond memories of growing up on farms and the mystical bond that still connects them to the land.

One old farm kid wrote, “…when you grow up on a farm it never leaves your blood, you can’t just shake it off or forget about it…” Another, like me, remembered making tunnels in the haymow. She said, “Our tunnels in the new sweet smelling hay were equipped with a garden hose for talking through from one fort to another, and a five gallon pail of water for filling the squirt guns.”  

Darla Wagner Karasek, whose farm family was active in the church I pastored in Blue River, Wisconsin, in the early 1970s, told me that though she has been off the farm for over forty years, she still gets tears in her eyes when she stops “at the top of the hill and looks over what used to be.”

Marilyn Ballweg of Lodi, Wisconsin was reminded of the “….aromas that last time I walked through our buildings when I was moving. I still get choked up thinking of it all these years later.”

I wrote: “Pigs were Dad’s joy, something I, as a lover of cows, never fully understood. And how, except for breakfast bacon and honey baked ham at Christmas, I could easily get along without pigs.” Michael H. Nee of Richland Center, Wisconsin disagreed. “Pigs have personalities; cows are just plain vanilla. Sorry, I have to side with your father on this one.”

My distant cousin, Shawn McDonough Trinko, now from Middleton, Wisconsin, remembers Dad’s pigs and helping him pick green beans. “… what a back breaking chore that was! And that boar he had was the most massive pig I’d ever seen! I can still see him coming over to get his back scratched and Leonard obliging.”

As a girl, Jean Lewis, of Muskogee, Oklahoma, helped her parents milk fifteen Holsteins twice a day on the family farm near Luck, Wisconsin: “Thanks for reminding me of great memories of playing in the haymow, making tunnels, finding baby kittens, baby pigs, and the smell of fresh hay.”

Anthony Hengst of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, still goes back to the farm near Rib Lake where his parents live and looks at “…all the empty stalls where cows once stood. Then in my mind I recite their names all down the line. Frieda stood at one end and all the way down to Carolyn on the other.”

David Kronwall of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, remembers working summers for an uncle on the 80-acre dairy farm in Walworth County, where his grandparents raised four boys in the 1920s, '30s and '40s:  “All the buildings are gone now, and the entire farm is part of a larger corn field. But I have memories. And memories. And memories.”

Carol Cate from Ripon, Wisconsin speaks for many of us who yearn for our good old farm days: “In the middle of winter I would love to walk into a dairy barn with cows in stanchions, along with a few calf pens, and have that freshly-bedded barn smell hit me once again.”

Chris Wagner, whose family farm, about an hour south of Hershey, Pennsylvania, was established in 1865, wrote of the dilemma faced by families who would like to keep the farm, but circumstances make it difficult if not impossible:

"My grandpa gave up farming about thirty years ago, in the 1990s. Sad thing in America farming doesn't pay what it should. My grandpa and dad talked about my dad getting the farm before my grandpa retired. They did the math. If they planted the farm entirely to corn, they would have made only about thirty grand a year. Not much to raise a family on, even back then. My grandpa ran stuff into the ground, equipment-wise, so a lot of stuff would have needed to be replaced.

“Going through pictures of what the farm use to be, it's sad it got the way it is today. It's worth more as houses than a farm. Walmart came in and the area went downhill since. The house and barn are still there, but I, along with the rest of the family, can't afford it. It's being rented out to someone else. My grandma is 94, so the day of someone else owning it is getting closer.”

G.B., from Central Wisconsin, tells of the heartaches and struggle that come with trying to keep the family farm in the family:

 “Grandfather started our farm in 1905; I and my son have run it for the last twenty-five years using old tractors and equipment. Now the price of things like taxes and INSURANCE are killing us. We can’t irrigate because there are too many wells on the big farms around us; the state won’t let me put one in. The big guys got them, but not us little guys. Water is becoming scarce and polluted.

“I am 75 and have walked our small fields since I was a boy. We have two hundred acres, half woods because we enjoy hunting.  We are surrounded by corporate potato fields. All of my neighbors are gone. We cannot afford fertilizer. The hay was grassy this year, so that is not selling. What is a man to do? We don’t want to sell!

We still have the old, white two-story house, granary, and barn, all built by my granddad. Now the insurance company wants me to bulldoze some buildings; I have kept the roofs up. I don’t know where to turn. It seems like NO ONE CARES. We will try one more year if tractors and machinery hold up.” 

One wise farm woman wrote, “The family farm that I grew up on was bought out by the highway department to put in a four lane highway. After the shed was taken down, the barn was taken down and the house was moved, I drove into that driveway and saw that big hole in the ground and I said to myself “do not store up treasures on earth. Right out of the Bible, I really got that passage loud and clear.”

The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and an old farm kid. Four of his books, the Lectionary Stories series and Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit from CSS Publishing Company and available from Amazon Books, include farm stories.