I had a laught when I saw this on facebook, and I decided to pull Garry's computer out to see if it would upload pictures better than mine- has it may be a browser thing I was thinking.
It made me think of almost thirty years ago when Garry and I started farming on our own. We rented a farm in New Jersey that had not had cows milking on it in about 20 years. The gutter cleaner had not been used in that long, my first job, while we were getting ready to bring our cows over from my father's farm across town, was to paint the old rusted together gutter cleaner chain. I rememeber sitting in the spring sunshine, with baby Matthew on a blanket next to me in what would become the barn yard, covering the rusty links with used oil to loosen it up.
A couple weeks later, Garry had pieced together an bunch of used milking equipment, some of which had been sitting on the farm all those years, and had a milk tank installed (the farm had used milk cans in water cooling when it ceased operations- similiar to how we first cooled milk here in Ukraine.) The first night we ended up milking 17 cows by hand because the vaccuum pump quit working, luckily it was fixed the next day, because we milked three times a day, just the two of us. We put a playpen in the barn for Matthew who turned one a few weeks after we started. Luckily he wasn't in it the night a heifer got loose and jumped in it! Jessica was three, and thought she was older, she had Grandma's phone number memorized and would call her across town to talk.
The day after we sarted milking, it was time to run the gutter cleaner with manure in it for the first time (it had went around empty before the cows came)and Garry wanted my help. It didn't go so well- the manure wouldn't fall off the end of the cleaner into the spreader, and Garry had to watch over the problems with it inside the barn, so I was assigned the job of standing on the manure spreader and using a pitch fork to try to scrape off the manure and straw off the paddles as they raced past me. Garry had started out here, wiith his long legs he had no problem standing with his feet on the top of the sides of the spreader. He helped me up there, but my short legs didn't stay there as I turned and twisted (Garry is 6'5"- I am 5'4") to keep up with the flying manure. By the time the chain had gotten all the way around the barn and Garry shut the motor off (it had been in a shed for the 30 years- and still worked) I was standing with both legs in the manure spreader, up to the top of my boots in the manure. Garry had to use the pitch fork to break the suction holding my boots trapped in the manure.
So I had a different job the next day- standing on the corner wheel (the gutter went around behind the barn in a rectangle with one end extended out a hole in the barn where it went around an end- the manure would drop off into the spreader there) One of the three corner wheels in the barn would jump out of the gutter when it ran, beacause the part to hold it in was broken, so every day for months I stood on top of it everytime the gutter cleaner ran, so it would stay where it belonged.
A new floating corner wheel would cost 180 dollars, if I remember right, and Garry finally decided to buy it when I was so pregnant with Josh that I couldn't see past my belly to my feet to balance on the chain properly. I also got to sleep in for the night milking sometimes, and Garry bought a dumping station for the milk so I didn't have to carry the milker pails all the way to the milkhouse and dump them in the tank (less walking, carrying, and I didn't have to lift so high- wasn't he nice? There's a reason I bowl with 14 pound bowling balls people.)
Sometime farming here reminds me of the good old days!
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