Farm Story Friday

Christmas 1976 (Left to right: Eugene, Wayne, Scott, Eldon, Curious George , Roger, Brian, Keith, Ronald) The Amazing Adventures of Curious George Part 1: “The True Hero” (26 July 2019) Hi Greenwood Kids, I am Curious George. I am blowing my “stuffed animal” cover and infiltrating your father’s blog to bring you an extremely important message of injustice and extreme oversight. Your father’s farm stories, while somewhat amusing, lack any depth of understanding. But even more concerning, they do not recognize the true hero of each of the stories… me (Curious George).  Me (Curious George) convincing Megan to take me to Colorado so I could infiltrate your father’s blog! Do not fear dear children, for I will at length release your father.  I will allow him once again to express his simple and mundane farm stories, but only after my story, the true farm story that heralds the true hero (once again, that is me), is told. It all started on December 2...

Visiting the Neil Armstrong statue at Purdue University with cousins (Thanksgiving 2012). Picking Rocks (19 July 2019) Today’s theme song is Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon” in honor of man’s first moon landing. Tomorrow marks the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, that remarkable event on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on the moon to spend a couple hours taking pictures and picking up rocks before returning to the Lunar Module. The next day they returned to join Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 flight crew, in the Command Module. Four days after this rock-picking excursion, 24 July 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts went hypersonic for a short time as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a few minutes later. Picture of a footprint on the moon. Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon was seen on television around the world. This accomplishment was, ...

Thanks to April for today’s cow picture. Notice that these cows are not swimming... Let’s Go Swimming! (12 July 2019) Today’s story is set to the theme of one of our favorite songs, “Let’s Go Swimming” by Laurie Berkner. Unlike the goldfish in that song, and unlike your mother who spent many of her growing up summers swimming in the river, I was not much of a swimmer in my youth. You might remember that I dreamed of turning the manure pit into a swimming pool when it was first constructed. That didn’t happen, but I would occasionally go “swimming” with my brothers in the pond on our property. My mom never liked us swimming in the pond. It may have been the fact that we didn’t know how to swim, or it may have been the plethora of bacteria that I now realize must have been in that pond. There’s probably a reason that people put chlorine in pools… and don’t let cows poop in them…  Nonetheless, one of our favorite things to do in the pond was to wrap the pond moss aroun...

Lyle sitting on a non-bloated cow. Me flexing my muscles. Just a Little Poke (5 July 2019) Happy Independence Day! Hope you’re all having a great week and building lots of good memories! Today’s story is about knives. Turns out that knives are very useful on farms.  I usually had a knife in my pocket while out doing chores, but I remember that my dad had one special knife for certain emergency situations. As I remember, this knife had an off-white handle and a straight blade of approximately 8 inches long. The knife was kept in the barn for ready use, kind of like a first aid kit, except it was a knife… You may be aware that cows have four stomachs. When they first eat grass, or hay, or whatever, they do not chew their food very well. So the mostly-unchewed food goes to the first stomach and waits. At some point, the cow will stop eating and start doing something called chewing cud. If you’ve ever seen a cow laying down and looking like she is lazily chewing gu...

Scaling the Matterhorn during a visit to Disneyland in 2015 (Megan-we see you peeking!) Farms are Better than Disneyland (28 June 2019) My family moved off the farm in February or March 1993, shortly after I turned 17 years old. Farm life was difficult, the number of helping hands was dwindling as my older brothers graduated and left for college, and it was pretty clear that none of them were planning to return to Idaho to join the farming endeavor. My parents had been seriously discussing the option of moving back to Utah for at least 5 years, and they had sold the cows a couple years earlier as a step in that direction.  After the cows were gone, my dad started looking for other options for revenue and we still had plenty of farm work in caring for the crops of alfalfa, wheat, and barley. In early 1993, my dad found a job as a counselor in the Utah Employment Office, working ironically in the same department he had worked in 17 years previously before moving to I...

Thank you for your awesome Happy Fathers Day picture! Since every masterpiece needs a name, I am calling this one “Flying Cow and Baby Cow”. The Cow Who Lived (21 June 2019) While teaching Aeronautics at the Air Force Academy I have told several farm stories to the classes I have taught. In what I am sure is an attempt to delay academic instruction, some students ask quite regularly for farm stories. However, I only have a limited supply of stories, and since I also know that scarcity makes the stories more valuable, I resisted telling them too frequently. Therefore, one of my classes a while back started asking for stories on Fridays, and thereafter, they started calling every Friday, “Farm Story Friday”. And it stuck. Every class thereafter has had someone start asking for farm stories, especially on Fridays (or on Thursdays if we don’t have class on Friday). The title of this story, “The Cow Who Lived” was given by one of my cadets. It all started with a sick cow. My ...

Man versus Beast (14 June 2019) As you can imagine, we definitely didn’t like it when cows swatted us with their manure-soaked tails. A majority of the cows were not malevolent about it and would only occasionally swat, but there were some cows that I am certain knew what they were doing. For one thing, it was almost always the same cows, day after day that did the swatting.  And they got good at it, pretending to have no interest in swatting, then striking at our most vulnerable moments, like at 4:15 and we were still half asleep. The repeat offenders were also often the cows with the dirtiest tails, something I am sure was also on purpose. I even remember watching one of the consistent offenders poop while holding her tail down. It seems to be in a cow’s best self-interest to lift up her tail to poop, and they almost always do, except maybe when they are readying their weapon of choice… We learned quickly that getting angry and hitting the cow would not help. It was more l...