Farming, along with the rest of the economy, took a big hit in 2009. As dairy farmers, we saw prices for milk that were identical to those we received in 1980. Feed prices soared, gas and fuel prices were high. The stress levels on farms became explosive resulting in some very tragic events. Farm magazines are full of articles on battling stress. Stan and I read them and nod, yes, these things can be helpful, but we have developed our own methods of stress relief.
I think if you talked to the people around here, they would tell you that Stan and I are good people, steady, helpful, honest. But then, they would probably look to one side and say, “They can be a bit different.” We’ve always marched to a slightly different drummer. Our stress release practices can be used as examples of what I mean.
Take 1995, for instance, a dry, dry year. It didn’t rain for most of the summer. It was dry for so long that when it did rain, our young Border Collie was stunned by the dog looking back at her from a mud puddle, a new experience for her.
There was a lot of time between hay cuttings, time to go over the equipment, catch up on all those chores that wait for down time, but eventually all that gets caught up, and you start looking at how much empty space is waiting in the hay mow, and how hollow the silo still sounds. I’m not sure you could say it was really done as a plan, but on one of those warm dry days, we decided to build some fences along the drive on the east side of the house to plant some of the antique roses we’d found below the barn. Stan got some 4×4 posts, dug the holes and set them, nailed boards to the posts. He got out his ‘lawn tractor’, an old International 268 backhoe and we dug the roses out of the rock pile below the barn. Some of the plants were so old that they had roots like small trees. It was a year of drought, you will recall, and we were transplanting these babies in the middle of the summer. I hadn’t yet acquired a garden hose, so spent the rest of the summer hauling 3 gallon pails full of water from the milk house across the yard, everyday. A definite stress releaser. Over the years since the first fences, we have added three more along the road. Since the second year the roses were out where people could see them (the first year that they bloomed), we have had strangers pull around our drive way or pause along the edge of the road to look at them.
The year after that first fence building, we had a really wet year. There was lots of hay that year, the trick was getting it out of the field dry. As we had gone to more haylage, it was not all bad. You can chop haylage a lot sooner than you can bale dry hay. The silos filled up fast, but there was still a lot of down time. We had hired the son of friends for the summer, and to keep him and Stan busy, Stan decided to build me some rock gardens. This farm is blessed with an ample supply of very large rocks, both in field and wood and in a small rock quarry down along the creek. Most of the big stones that went in the walls of the rock beds came from the area of the quarry. Stan and the hired boy would go down and haul up a trailer load, with one in the bucket on the loader tractor, and then set them and holler to have me come and approve. They built them, and I filled them between showers.
About Kathleen Tenpas: We have a grazing dairy of 55 cows in the rolling hills of western New York State where we raised two daughters who have now blessed us with four grandchildren. I have messy, jungly beds of old roses, (some real antiques left by former owners), perennials, wildflowers and lots and lots of not so ornamental grasses! I have a Masters degree in Creative Writing: Poetry from Antioch University. I am a photographer and fabric artist and I bake a mean loaf of bread.
All photos for this page provided by Kathleen Tenpas.
