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.