A Way of Life

This essay I wrote for my Expositoy Writing and Reading class. The assignment was to write a concept essay. I wrote this essay about farming.

Farming is not a job, it’s a life style. There are many different types of farming. You have dairy farming, goat farming, fantastic farming and many other kinds of farming. My favorite is fantastic farming. It’s where you do a lot of different things. But the thing with this kind is, there are so many little concepts inside the big concept. There are concepts like haying, milling wood, processing wood, firewood deliveries, cow chores, and maple sugaring. All of these make up the overall concept of fantastic farming.
Cow chores is the basic part of the day of going to the barn and taking care of the cows. Chores are done twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. The routine of cow chores may change based on the time of year. Like in the summer you may let the cows out onto the pasture during the day and bring them back in at night and in the winter, the cows may stay in the barn for the day. When you do cow chores you first want to clean the area where the cows from outside are going to be so you don’t have to deal with them being in the way after they have come in. You then want to put down clean fresh saw dust where you just cleaned so the cows have something nice to lay down on; not that they don’t mess it up the second they come in. You then want to give the cows their first round of hay in front of them, just a few flakes each. While they are eating the hay you then start up the milk machine and begin milking the dairy cows. While the cows are being milked, they then get their grain. You just get a scoop of grain out of the bin and place it in front of each cow. When the cows are eating you switch the milk machine from cow to cow according to if they are done milking. The milk from the cow then goes in a bucket and is fed to the calves. Once all the cows have been milked and the calves have been fed, the cows get their second round of hay and then cow chores are done.
Haying on the farm is one of the greatest things to do. The days that you hay are always the best. It’s a day where you get the entire family together and just hay all day. The concept of haying all depends on which job in the process you get. You have the tractor work, which consists of mowing, tedding, raking and baling. The other jobs are driving the hay truck, stacking the hay and picking up the hay to put it into the truck. Mowing the field is a couple of days before the actual hay day. This is where you go out in the field with the tractor and mow down the grass. The next couple of days, you want to ted the hay so that it can dry out. This fluffs up the hay so that more air can circle through and dry it out. The rest of the steps of haying takes place on hay day. You first go through and rake the hay into nice rows for when the baler comes through. You have to plan by day too because if it is a windy day outside, then you want the baler to be right behind the rake so that the hay doesn’t have time to blow away. While the baler is baling the hay, the rest of us will start to pick up the hay. The person driving the truck will drive back and forth in the field so that the people picking up the bales don’t have to walk a long way. The people picking up the bales will throw the bales into the back of the truck, where the person stacking will stack them in an efficient order as to fit more bales. Once all the hay has been picked up and the trucks are full, you may chose to empty them into the barn and stack them there, or you can leave the hay in the truck but put it under cover so that it does not get rained on because that would ruin the hay.
Milling wood is where you take a tree and create it into boards and beams. You put the tree onto the mill and secure it so that it doesn’t move while the saw is cutting through it and mess up your cut. You first want to cut off the bark around the tree, unless you want the bark on, by skimming the saw right under the bark trying to save as much of the main part of the tree as possible. After you take the bark off the tree, you then begin to cut the tree into the boards and beams that you want. There is math involved in milling wood. You have to add and subtract to get the right width of the boards that you want.
Processing wood is where you take a tree that has been cut down and split them into eight, four foot wood logs. The amount of wood logs that you get out of the tree though, depends on how big the tree is in width. You take the tree and put it onto the processor. The tree is then moved onto the conveyer belt which conveys it forward. When it is conveyed four feet past the saw or at your desired length, you then turn on the saw to cut the tree. That part then falls to where it then gets pushed into the blade where it is then made into eight four foot logs ready to be made into fire wood.
Wood deliveries are a lot of fun to go on. First though you have to get ready to deliver the wood. This includes cutting the wood and filling the truck. The customer gets to pick whether they want twelve inch, sixteen inch or two foot firewood. This is usually determined on how big the customer’s wood stove is. The wood is cut into length on a table saw and then is put onto a conveyer that moves it into the back of the truck. To make a wood delivery, you have to know who the person is, where they live and how much wood they want. You then drive to their house and drop the wood off to where they want it.
One of the greatest times of the year is maple sugar season. These are the days where it’s nice and cold at night and warms up in the morning. You need this kind of weather so that at night the sap in the maple trees freezes, but in the morning when the sun hits the tree, the sap warms up and runs good. This season usually starts about mid-February to mid- March. To begin collecting the sap, you need to tap some trees. You drill a hole that is at the right height to where it is going to be easy for you to collect the sap. Once you have drilled your hole in the maple tree and made sure that it is clean, you place your splie in the hole and then hang your bucket under it so that the sap can run into it. Another way that you can collect sap from a tree is use a lateral line which would go from tree to tree and would eventually stop and be collected in a barrel at the end of the line. After about a day, if the weather was really good and the sap was flowing, you go around to the taps that you made and collect the sap by emptying the buckets all into one big tank. To make the syrup, you boil the sap in what is called an evaporator. When you get the syrup out of the evaporator, you then filter it to get the sugar sand out. It then goes into a canner where it is kept at a constant temperature. You can then take the syrup out of the canner and put it into maple syrup bottles. Last you want to be sure to label the bottles accordingly. If it is Grade A light amber, Grade A medium amber, Grade A dark amber or Grade B. Then you’re ready to sell it.
It takes a lot to run a farm. You have early mornings and late nights. There is a lot of mental and physical strengths involved. You have to be physically able to do things that put a lot of stress on your muscles, bones and limbs. You have grain, hay and equipment that all can have some weight to them. Your body does take a beating on the farm. Mentally you want to be prepared. With a big farm, big equipment, lots of animals, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to handle the stress. A lot of the mental stress comes from the cost of the farm. It’s not cheap at all. Taking care of the animals, paying for their food, bedding and anything else that they require takes a lot of money. With a farm that does a lot of wood, the equipment is really expensive. Managing a farm is not something you can go into right away. It is a lot of hard work in running a farm, but it is fun.

The Makings Of a Farm Girl

This is an essay that I had to write for my Expository Writing & Reading class. The assignment was to write a narrative essay about a day that has changed or affected your life in some way. I wrote about my first day on the Torsey Farm. For those of you that know me best, this is my favorite place to hang out. While reading this essay please keep in mind that this day was almost a year ago, so I couldn't remember everything that we did that day, I did remember how the morning went, but from lunch until cow chores I couldn't remember what we did. So I wrote about one of my favorite things on the farm. Hope you like it.

It was February 26th, 2010 on a cold and snowy Friday, which I started my farmers’ education at the Torsey Farm. I had made plans earlier in the week to go up to the farm and hang out. The plan was that I would go meet my farm dad Terry up at his house at eight o’clock in the morning and come Friday morning I was there. It had been snowing hard all night long and there was still a linger of snow in the air. Terry walked into the house and said,
“I don’t know what I can have you do today on the farm. For most of the morning we are going to be moving the snow that has fallen over night.”
“That’s fine with me. I would be happy standing back and seeing how you remove snow with your trucks and tractors,” I quickly replied.
At my house we use the old method of a shovel and a small snow blower. I knew that up at the farm they had a different way of removing snow and I was excited to find out.
The first thing we had to do before we went up to the farm, was to drop little baby Emma off at her babysitter’s house. Emma is the daughter of Terry and my farm mom Whatleigh. The sitters house wasn’t far from the farm and because of the snow the night before, the trees along the road were gorgeous. The road however was not that great. It was slippery and it got narrower the closer you got to the sitter’s house. We dropped off Emma and made our way to the farm.
When you get to the farm you drive up into the driveway. To your left is the house and straight ahead is the part of the garage. The garage extends to the right and then turns into the building where the pigs are kept. The drive way goes in a circle around another garage that is in the middle. The cow and hay barn is behind the garage in the middle and to the left of the barn is the holding area where some bulls and cows are usually kept depending on the time of year. To get to the lower part of the farm, you take the first left right as you start to go into the driveway. As you pull into this part of the farm, to your left you find a long building where a lot of the tractor equipment is located and the saw for cutting firewood. If you follow the driveway around you come to another very tall building where a lot of the trucks are and also the saw mill. If you keep going past that building and stay to the left you will come to find the place where they have started to build the sugar house. Around the farm are a lot of big hay fields where sometimes you might see some cows grazing depending on the time of year.
When we arrived at the farm, Travis came outside ready to start work. He got in a truck with a plow and Terry got into the skid steer to start to remove snow. As for me, I made sure that I stayed plenty out of their way. It didn’t take long for them to remove the snow from the drive ways and when that was all done, it was time to move on to the next thing.
At this point Ryan had come up and Terry said to him and Travis,
“Why don’t you guys get out the maple buckets and coves and Katie and Alisha can clean them up and get them ready for the season.”
So Travis and Ryan brought out the buckets and covers to the buckets and placed them in the back of the truck. I stood on the side of the truck and watched, then decided that I would help and count them as they brought them out. There was well over a hundred buckets that Alisha and I had to wash.
Alisha backed the truck up to the barn where we were going to be washing the buckets and covers.
“Why don’t we take all the buckets out of the truck and put them in the barn before we start. That way we don’t have to keep going outside to get them,” said Alisha
“Sounds good to me,” I said
We took the buckets out of the back of the truck, with little Katie’s help, and put them into the barn. We filled the two sinks, one with clean water and the other with soapy water. I had set up a little place for little Katie to stand so she could help us. She loved putting her hands in the soapy water handing me the covers to the buckets and occasionally she would just splash the water around. She is a strong little girl and when it came time to wash the buckets, she had fun bringing us over at least three at a time.
“Here you go Katie,” she would say.
“Thank you Katie,” I would reply.
Alisha and I had to switch jobs of washing and rinsing once and a whie because washing was a lot warmer than rinsing and because it was the beginning of February, it was still really cold out. It took a long time to clean all of them, though we were done by lunch time. We left the buckets and their covers in the barn to dry and went to meet the boys for lunch.
We went up to Whatliegh’s house to have lunch. On the menu was warm corn chowder and bread and butter. It was really good and it warmed me up. After about a half hour of lunch, it was time to go back to work.
As my job of washing the maple buckets with Alisha was finished, I didn’t have anything to do. So I went down to the lower part of the farm to hang out with the boys. They were down in the saw mill. This is my second favorite place on the farm to be. I love to noise of the saw and the sight of it cutting wood. It was just Ryan and Terry as Travis was off doing something else on the farm. In the mill, they were cutting wood for the sugar house that they were building. My job was to sit back and look pretty while watching the saw.
At three o’clock it was time to feed and take care of the cows. Being in the barn with the cows is my number one favorite part of the farm. This is where I met my favorite cow.
“Does this cow have a name?” I asked Terry.
“I named her Dot,” Terry replied.
Dot at the time was only about a week old. She was the cutest cow in the barn and still is today. Cow chores take about forty-five to sixty minutes to do. You have to start with cleaning out the cow area and putting new sawdust down. Then you give all the cows hay. Terry starts milking while Travis grains the cows and then lets down more hay for the next day so Terry doesn’t have to get it in the morning. Dot gets moved over to her mother so she can eat and the rest of the calves in the barn get milk in a bucket after Terry is done milking their mothers. After the cows were done eating their grain, they get a second round of hay. Once all the cows are done being milked and have eaten, the chores in the barn are done.
After the cow chores were done, we were all done farming for the day. Terry dropped me off at my house and that was the end of my first day on the Torsey Farm. It hasn’t been a year yet and I already feel like part of the family. I hang out on the farm whenever I can weather it’s hiking through the woods to repair the fence, going on long trips to get parts for the saw mill, just watching the boys work, delivering fire wood to people, haying fifteen bails shy of a thousand or just sitting around drinking a mountain dew with good conversation. The Torsey Farms is my farm family and I love them very much.

Types of Milk 101

In dairy lab the other day, we had to try different types of milk, cheese and butter or margarine. We had 11 different types of milk that we had to try. This consisted of 1%, 2%, organic milk, skim milk, 1/2 & 1/2, whipping cream, whole milk and many other kinds of milk. For cheeses we had Swiss, Cheddar, sharp Cheddar and other kinds. For butter and margarine, we just had to tell between the 2. With the milk, we had to try them, tell if it was dairy or not, tell what kind of milk it was and grade it on a scale of 1-10. With the cheese we had to do the same thing. Lets just say that some of the products were not something that you wanted to try. especially the whipping cream :( Some of use came out of that lab not feeling our best. But at least we now know what types of milk and cheese we like best.

Dorm Room (my home away from home)

A day in college

I made it to UNH! My days consist of long hours and a lot of homework and class work. This semester I have 5 classes: Anatomy and Physiology of Demestic Animals, Intro to Dairy Management, Intro of Animals Science, Environment and Society and Expository Writing and Reading. My favorite class is Dairy class. Here we learn everything about Dairy Cattle and how the dairy industry works. We have our lecture class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and to end a week, we have our lab class Friday afternoon. In lab we go to the barn and do stuff like judging cows and looking at how the milking parlor works and how everything gets processed. When I'm not in any of my classes or labs, I enjoy hanging out down in the barn watching the cows or going down when milking and chores are going on. Next year I will be a CREAM student and I will get the chance to manage the dairy cows like the CREAM student are now. I will have to get up early some days and go to the barn and feed and milk the cows and sometimes also in the aftrenoon. The time in which you go down to do chore always changes. Im am so excited for this. Though I am not real excited for the 3 o'clock mornings. Thank goodness it is not everyday. But for this year I'm just learning on how everything works and so I will be better prepared for next year.