When it gets to early and mid-June, I harken back to my days on the farm, reminiscing about what I was doing on the farm at this time of year. Some of the things I did are not done anymore or very little of it being done. Cultivating corn for instance; I’m thinking it’s done to some extent but not on any of the fields I drive by. I didn’t run the corn planter in the spring until after I had graduated high school. Then I learned the rule that if you plant the corn, you have to cultivate the corn because you know where the rows go and when you have to veer left or right a little. I think that rule was made up when I started running the planter. By then, my dad had cultivated more corn than he ever wanted to cultivate. I was running the cultivator a few years before I did the planting, and it was hard at times to know where the rows went. That’s why in the fall; there were a few skips in some rows. It was not the fault of the planter. It was me not knowing where the rows went.
For many years we had wide row corn, 38-inch rows. This was down from the common 40-inch rows way back when. They had to be that wide to have room for the horses to walk while cultivating the corn. Well, as we know, row width kept getting narrower and narrower. We first started getting narrower on soybeans. My dad and Gale Callister converted an old grain drill to plant soybeans 6 rows at a time. The middle 4 rows were 30” apart and the outside two rows were 24”. At the time, we had to convert the cultivator to fit this 6 row configuration. This is when we purchased a Lilliston cultivator which used rollers that moved the dirt instead of small ‘V’ shaped shovels. This roller type cultivator worked well with one exception. If you got the right size rock stuck in one of the roller wheels, it would cause the wheel to stop spinning and would just drag the ground and throw a lot of dirt on top of the row of soybeans. Again, come fall, we would see skips in the rows that were not the fault of the planter, but that of the inattentive tractor driver.
One year we used the same grain drill that we planted oats with to plant soybeans. This meant soybeans in 7-inch rows. I asked my dad if he had a cultivator in mind for this. He just ignored my question. It was a success though the first year we did this. When the county average yield for soybeans was 35 to 40 bushels per acre we got just over 50 bpa that first year. The average row width today for soybeans across the country is 20 inches, this is up from the national average of 16 inches in the late 1990’s.
The other thing we did in June was cut and bale the first crop of hay. Hay harvesting has changed a lot over the years but back when I was cheap labor on the farm, we did all the baling behind a New Holland model 270 baler. They might be called small bales but when you lift enough of them, they seem to all feel like big bales. I’ve mentioned before that Coach Lorry Gunhus would stop out at the farm to make sure I was baling enough hay to stay in shape for the next basketball season. I had a free membership to my dad’s workout gym, which happened to be an open-air 200 acre farm.
I don’t remember the year but I’m guessing it was around 1970 when one day we were baling 2nd crop hay. It was the hottest day in July that I can recall. I remember for a fact that the high that day in Owatonna was 108 degrees and I was on the hayrack stacking bales in that weather. I was asked years later, when I was a farm broadcaster and all I had to do was look at all that farm work and just talk about it, what do you miss most about being on the farm? I answered there were a few things I missed, and baling hay was among those things. I just don’t miss doing it on a hot July day. One other thing I miss from the farm is the satisfaction of a job done, be it baling hay, harvesting corn or soybeans or just finishing the daily chores.
