PEA RIDGE — Farm chores have motivated many a farm boy to leave the farm for good.

Although I had my times early on when I might have preferred to stay at the house and listen to the radio, I never really minded doing farm work, including the morning and evening routine of milking the cows Working with dairy cows always involves regular routines, tasks needing doing every day, maybe more than once a day. We call them “chores” because they can be monotonous, and because they don’t stay “done.”

I spent many years as a pastor in eastern Arkansas, where one sees expansive croplands - wide, flat fields of corn, cotton, rice, wheat, maize and soybeans; very different from our Ozark hills with our cattle and poultry farms. When I told my farmer friends that I grew up on a dairy farm innorthwest Arkansas, they were likely to say, “Man, that milking twice a day every day is too confining for me!” Of course, if one is thinking about monotony, east Arkansas crop farming can have its share. You drive the tractor this way, then you come back the other way, then you go that way again, and so on. It lies largely in how you think, whether you find things to be monotonous or interesting; whether depressive or as offering opportunity for creativity and accomplishment.

Our own farming changed through the years, especially in the 1950s. Before 1954, we still farmed in many ofthe “old time ways.” We still relied on horses, on gardens to supply food, and still milked the cows by hand. Our big barn, built new in the early 1940s, had two stalls for horses, but it was primarily a cow barn, designed to milk cows, store and feed hay and grain, raise the little calves, and so on. After 1954, we modernized and expanded the dairy operation, with milking machines, a milking parlor, bulk milk coolers, mechanically augured grain feeding and 70 or more milking cows. But when I was a small boy we were handling things the old-time way.

To me, getting old enough and big enough to milk a cow was a kind of rite of passage. I was moving from being a little boy to being a big boy. I guess I hadn’t learned to think of the work as something unpleasant or tiresome. To me then it was something to showthat I was big enough to do. Learning to milk was a skill to be proud of. For a little while I could show my brother Ben that I knew how to do something he couldn’t do, because he was too little. Of course that didn’t last long. Ben soon learned to milk, too. We learned by milking Old Red. Old Red was the gentlest cow in our milking herd in 1946, the one Dad trusted us with, the one thought least likely to kick. At the time, we were milking about a dozen or 15 cows, selling milk to Carnation Milk Company of Rogers to be made into cheese.

When we boys were really small, Mom used to help with the milking. But after our brother John was born in 1945 and our sister Donna in 1948, our mom retired from the milking, and we boys worked into that job. Dad had to milk a dozen or more cows by himself,but we boys soon were able to milk one or two each, so we thought we were really helping. Dad normally used a three-gallon tinned milk bucket. We didn’t see stainless steel in those days.

Most of our cows then were not large producers, so if a cow gave two or three gallons per milking, that was pretty good. When we finished milking a cow, we would carry the bucket of milk to the front of the barn, where a 10-gallon milk can stood with a strainer sitting in its top. The strainer was like a large tinned bowl, with a mesh bottom opening, and a provision in the bottom for a white cotton strainer pad, wedged in place by a screen. The strainer pad “strained out” any flecks of lint or straw that had found their way into the milk.

As we were learning to milk, we boys at first used a one-gallon Karo Syrupbucket. I don’t think anyone sells syrup in a bucket any more; everything comes in plastic now. Plastics were just being invented back then, and we hadn’t seen them yet. I suppose plastic was progress; but sometimes I’m not so sure about that.

For lighting in the barn at night, in those days before rural electricity, we used a coal oil lantern. Every nighttime milking was kind of Halloweenish in the barn with that lantern light. The light it gave off was a dim, flickering, yellow, shadowy light. The walkway behind the cows would have this wavering light, and everywhere else would be shadows. But it was light enough; and making our way to the house by lantern light was not a bad way to end a day.

Contact Jerry Nichols by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 10/21/2009