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Hard Labor On The Farm

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When it comes to hard labor on the farm I've done my share and I'm sure many of you have. I've picked corn by hand back in the
day, hauled hay, forked manure, but the hardest prolonged labor was growing tobacco. I did that for some 30 years. It was hot
and dirty and required lots of attention in the heat of summer. I will say we always had tractors unlike my granddad who used
mules. I always thought picking cotton by hand might be tougher than tobacco but I've never picked cotton. Or, operating a
dairy but never did that either. What about you? I'd be interested in your replies.
 
I had it pretty easy.

Pitching manure out of an old milking parlor converted to a loafing shed for steers. No way to get machinery in there (not that we had a loader tractor anyway) so it all went out a window a forkful at a time.

Seems like I always wound up on the hot end of the elevator when putting small squares in the haymow too.

Wouldn't have had it any other way tho. Growing up on a farm is the best.
 
We worked hard as kids and all we ever wanted to do was farm. But the money wasnt there for all of us so, I went different directions that lead me back to the farm. Now that Im old, cant believe I wanted to work so hard. But I wouldnt change a thing. It was a great way to grow up.
 
Two terrible dirty jobs I remember.

Scooping milo out of the 3000 bushel grain bins - sometimes by the semi loads - usually by 125 bushel load for grinding feed for cattle and hogs. There would be so much dust in the air you couldn't see across the bin - and you spent the rest of the day coughing and sneezing the dirt up. By the time it was gone it was time to get back into bin and do it again.

The second was cleaning out our farrowing house. The gutters would fill up and you scooped them to the pit then dipped the pit out with 5 gallon buckets into the manure spreader with the endgate. You were hunched over to go under the farrowing pens, putting your face right down in the **** while pushing it with a shovel.


I'd rather throw small square haybales for days on end than those two jobs.
 
Well, the hardest work I done (other than bucking hay bales) was constructing pipe in the ditch for tile terraces. I was young at the time, and not given the opportunity to run the equipment. So, I spent long hour days almost entirely down in the ditch putting pipe together. This was for a contractor of course. So just went from one farm to another. But still kind of farm related. Might not of been so bad, if we wasn't literally doing it from sun up to sun down. When we moved to a new location, we didn't seem to move far. So didn't get much of a break there. By the time you loaded, chained, and boomered everything down just to go a few short miles to unload it all again, you actually dreaded getting done with a job and have to move.
It wasn't fun. I could go on more about it, but I won't.
 
If you have worked in the tobacco fields and you havent heard Stompin Toms tillsonburg song you gotta hear it! I worked on a large vegetable growing operation for 1 year to the day when I was a young lad. Mostly cabbage several hundred acres, but also other stuff, the worst I remember was cutting and tying parsley, on your hands and knees most of the day. Picking hot peppers was a close second especially when you learnt why you wash your hands BEFORE you go to the washroom!
Untitled URL Link
 
When I was a senior in high school, my dad got an off the farm job and turned the farm work over to me. He'd always picked corn by hand and expected me to do the same.

We didn't have horses anymore so I had to pull the wagon with a VAC Case tractor. That meant I could pick for a bit, and then had to get on the tractor and pull the wagon ahead. I lasted about 2 hours. I said, 'This is bulls**t'.

I went into town and toured the machinery dealers. I came home with a used single row pull behind corn picker. I thought I was in heaven.
 
I spent 10 years on a dairy. Went to college after HS and never looked back. Dad sold the dairy the year I went to college.
I had chores to do before and after school....
I missed out on the typical most kids got to go.
 
Guess I have done about everything that could be done on a dairy farm, some jobs arent as pleasant as others, but still need doing. I have been dairy farming for over 41 years now, and still like the job most days. The stable cleaner broke down last October. And between waiting for parts and pouring rain to settle down, I cleaned out the cows with a shovel and wheel barrow for 22 days. 70 cows twice a day. Thats about as hard as its been for me in the last few years.
cvphoto116287.jpg

This picture shows the work on the return slide shoot on the stable cleaner. Doing this work was the easy part, the hard labour was getting the gutters cleaned out. All good now, just push a button.
I never had anything to do with growing tobacco or cotton, but I did grow 4 acres of market garden for about 10 years. Lots of stoop labour pulling weeds, and picking tomatoes, peppers , cucumbers, beans and that sort of thing. But that was while I was still a younger man in my thirties-forties, and had plenty of energy, and not much money.
 
I pulled corn by hand, picked cotton by hand cleaned out cow barn by hand--worst was when grandfather decided to grow soybeans for hay in the corn. Come springtime to clean out barn, the stalks had to be chopped up with what we called a grubbinhoe--a sharp piece of steel with a handle on it. Also cut firewood with a crosscut saw since wood was our only source of heat and cooking until the mid fifties. Daddy did not own a tractor until after I finished high school in 1960, then bought a Ford 2N with disc and cultivator then gradually retired the mules.
 
My parents purchased a section of land...
Northern Alberta Canada....
Quarters were cleared pilled and broke with the neighbours D9....

After working the fresh breaking down, our father and us three sons picked the ROCKS, and Roots by Hand.
After the next pass with a cultivator same story as above...
After the third pas with the cultivator same as above...

All land was seeded to a Hay mix as we now had 200 head of cows to calf out...
Calves were born in February, as they had to weight 1000 LBS in September....
Each pile of Bales had 10,000 baled 60 LBS each...

One quarter was Oats and Barley...every Sundy we ran an OAT/Barley mix through the McCormick grinder...

20 cords of wood was cut and split in Feb / March.....

At 18 I left for collage, returned, purchased two quarters of land, left the farm for the next 40 years.
Returned only for family get to gathers...

Retired in 2012 and returned to my Two quarters....

Neighbour's writes me a cheque on the first of October of each year for the rent....:)

Bob..

cvphoto116288.jpg
 
When I was a kid on grandpas farm every thing was loaded on the flat bed wagon. Cob corn , corn silage chopped hay and oats bundles. They were all unloaded by hand. The corn crib was filled without an elevator
 
X 2, it was worse when it was frozen.
When I was young dad would combine oats and unload it into the pick up truck, he will back the truck onto the barn floor and have us shovel the oats into bushel tubs and carry it into the grainary garners. The grainary was built with a 6 foot or less ceiling height so you had to bend over carrying the tubs or you would hit your head, throw it into the bins creating a cloud of dust. Itchy, itchy!
Another horrible job dad mowed a field of hay and before he raked it he had us walk through and pick out the dock plants.
 
I have farmed for over fifty years now, and the most distasteful job I ever did was for a buddie's parents. They had a layer operation, and every few months they changed birds. The birds had to be pulled out of their cage and put into a pen, then loaded onto a truck on the way to Campbell's for soup. We were paid great, but that was one dirty, stinkin job that took the best part of a weekend...
 
Yes frozen was bad, not to mention the winter wind blowing up the enclosed silo ladder and blowing silage particles all over you,
 
I guess hard labor never really bothered me because it probably wasnt to tough. I remember my Dad who was born in 1923 always said the hardest job he ever did was picking potatoes in North Dakota.
 
Working on a vegetable farm when I was in grade school. Lots of hand planting, hoeing and picking. Sure does make you appreciate easier work.

Vito
 
This isn't farm related but I'm gonna barge in here anyways. Any of you who worked on or saw big-inch pipeline construction before the factory pipe coatings came into play will remember the on-site hot tar paper-wrapped process (using wrapping machines) they used to wrap the pipe with before putting it into the ground. The pipeline tar kettles (big versions of a roofer's tar kettle) were huge, as big as a small military tank and would hold and keep melted several 45-gallon drums of tar. It would solidify when cooled and could be reheated again and made liquid. BUT if you cooked it too hot, it turned to cinder (un-meltable) and there was only one way to deal with it. Crawl in and chop it out by hand once it cooled using an axe, crow bar, hammer and chisel, pick your poison. After a day inside in the hot sun (well the lid on the top was open anyways), you were thinking about going back to school come fall time. This was in the mid-60's for me.
 
I did some of that work but never anything to do with tobacco or cotton. The transition of muscle power to mechanical power has to be one of the great revolutions in agriculture. A tribute to all that toiled in those jobs.
 
Sugar beets stopped around her in '68 so to keep kids busy Dad grew pickles. That wasn't fun at all. They are the same colour as the vine and of course you get the most money for the smallest cukes. It left a black resin on your hands that had to wear off. I went from that to an iron foundry working on a mould line as my first off farm make money foe school job. Black sand and hot, 90 degrees outside, it was quite a bit higher inside. Same thing with the sand making your hands discoloured. Girl friend at the time wasn't impressed. Sitting with my oldest brother on a steel wheeled ground drive spreader on a cold Saturday, he put it in gear from the seat, Dad was driving the tractor and we'd get are back bombed with the soup of the day. I don't thing they were designed to be pulled by something as fast as a tractor. I'm 6th in a family of 9 children so we all had our turn, I wasn't alone.
 
I helped neighbor farmers and kin when growing up with their tobacco to make spending money. Five years after college I left my job to return home to the farm where my dad grew up. It has been in our family for five generations. We grew flue-cured tobacco from 1978 through 2004. It was hard work, but I enjoyed it. Tobacco paid the bills.
 
Ah, - we all have a story here. Probably picking sweet corn for our store with the black guys. My uncle said, Get out there with them at 4:00 am and get 100 bushels in by 8:00 am. Also, thinning peaches. Ninety-eight in the shade and you're panting like a tired, pooped pup and there's 2,000 trees to go!
 
I was raised on a Flue Cured tobacco farm and have been a participant in it at some compacity since I could walk good. It's payed a many of a bill and mostly continues to. There have been good times and bad, but probably the most depressing and tiring times are like the year where all 60 acres would blow down flat on the ground from a storm that would always come every Friday lunchtime. That would put us having to get all of it stood back up before Monday morning to prevent the stalk getting a crook in it. That will do anyone in slopping through calf deep mud one row at a time over 60 acres. Finally gave up on being able to spray it ourselves that year and had to hire an airplane to do it. When we started cropping it, it usually would take 2 harvesters and 4 one row Farmalls to have enough un-stuck stuff to finish a small barn. Oh the good times...
 
There was a labor study done back in the 60's? that found it took 30 hours of work to grow an acre of corn, tobacco(burley) took 300, that was well before machinery was involved in harvesting tobacco and before no-till corn was the norm. I grew up milking a dozen cows by hand and raising several acres of tobacco, besides the corn and hay crops with my Dad, one brother and one uncle. Our largest crop was over 20 acres before I finished college and left for the military. There is no other job I've ever done that compares to cutting and housing tobacco, all done by hand, day after day, until you finally get it in the barn. But, as mentioned, tobacco paid the bills, but you paid a price for the process.
 
Had hold in a building the maure pit under it. Someway a slate broke and the hogs rooted a few others out and soon there were 75 fat hogs swimming in 10 foot of crap. The barn had 6 pens in with all using the pit so some of the hogs swam to other end of building. Guess who had to get in pit with a leaky Jon boat and wrangle 100 pound pigs and strap them so tge backhoe to lift them out. I was a freshman in high school and can remember the smell coming out of my skin setting in class on hot days.
 
Back in the early 1980s there was a drama show on tv
called the thorn birds, starred Richard Chamberlain
portraying a priest in the Australian Outback, who came
to be enthralled with a young woman named Meggie,
Who wound up married to a character named Luke who
would go to coastal areas of Australia to work in the sugar
cane fields. In the book, there was plenty said about
chopping sugar cane by hand, sunup to sundown.
Meager wages, grueling work for weeks on end.
After reading the book, I didnt want to get roped into
what sounded like back breaking work to me. So, I
wound up working at Diesel engine shops, which back in
those days were filthy, nasty places to work.
 
Not going into the details, sounds like a lot of the same. Bottom line is that many of us grew up in the last era where there were large family's, really for the labor pool. One thing for certain, we sometimes seem to forget, is that what we learned above all, was how to work. Which in all honesty, was not such a bad thing. The respect for our elders and work ethic's we learned, has treated most of right through the years, something no so easily found in so many younger people today.
 
I always thought helping dad with farming was hard. He raised Lima beans, and Oat hay. That work wasn't really bad just a lot of it. One time a friend of mine, and myself, were paid to clean the chicken crap from under chicken cages for a chicken ranch. Helping Dad was a vacation, compared to shoveling chicken crap into a wheel borrow and pushing it out between the cages. Stan
 
This wasn't on a farm, but at a pasta factory I used to work for.

I did not personally experience this but heard many of the old times tell of it.

The flour came in 100 lb cloth bags, racked into rail box cars. The car was spotted at the dock between buildings, a draw bridge was lowered, and the bags were hand unloaded onto hand carts.

They were then rolled to the press room, hand carried up a set of stairs, opened and dumped into the mixer on top of the extruder press.

This was a 12-14 hour day, 6 days a week, never ending process. The flour used is Semolina, more like fine sand, very abrasive and would wear the skin off your hands and back from carrying the bags.

Heat was also a big factor, the box car was in the sun, the upper level of the machine room was hot year round, the presses were steam powered and the leaky drying ovens contributed greatly!

Oh, the good ol' days!
 
When I was ten years old we started a fence post business. We used lodgepole pine and treated the posts with pentachlorophenol. The work in the timber was the worst part, next worse was peeling using a homemade post peeler. Youtube has many videos of those machines. One brand name is Morbark. Treating (cold soak butt treat) which was putting posts in the tank and then soaking for 24 hours and then sizing and sorting was the easiest part. The season lasted from as soon as we could get around in the snow until bitter cold or too much snow. We also were ranching so feeding, calving, and so on meant there was very little time off. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years day were close to days off since feeding only took until about noon. By the time I was an adult the work became a lot less miserable to do. I ended up off the place at about 27 years of age. Pretty much everything after that was much easier in comparison.
 
(quoted from post at 16:21:54 02/01/22) Working on a vegetable farm when I was in grade school. Lots of hand planting, hoeing and picking. Sure does make you appreciate easier work.

Vito
Click to expand...
Obviously no one here has picked green beans....
 
You have not itched till you work threshing velvet beans in June. It did not seem like the water could remove the sting of the fuzz on your skin. Bagging oats on a 12-A John Deere sacker combine was not thrilling either! It really made you appreciate the nickel per bag pay at the end of the say.
 
We pitched a Kelly wagon full of silage every morning in the winter before we went to school so dad wouldn't have to start the 560 diesel that had the loader on it. The gas 656 was OK to start to feed silage but it never had a loader on it,
 
My wife and daughter love them. I
quickly grew tired of coming home
and picking them after barning
baccer all day on about the 5th
bathtub full this year. Trying to
devise a creeper gear / picking set
up to put on the tractor to give
some relief.
 
Its the same in a upright silo here freezes lik concrete,this was at my friends farm he did dairy for a long time then switch to raising beef, Loren the ACG guy sold him some equipment sadly, my friend passed this past December like Loren,
cvphoto116378.jpg
 
I think youve got me beat on the tobacco! I grew up on a dairy farm in the 80s. We had a 40 stall tie barn. In 89 we put up a silo and everything was forked and fed with a wheelbarrow, shovelled wheeled and grained with a scoop, forked up the leftovers then did it again. Not to mention chopping ice off the silo There were 8 cows tied up in a back area with no stable cleaner wed fork shovel and wheel the manure and all the calves under 4 months old were in pens we forked. I think that was a pretty good life. The more we made things easier on our bodies the more debt that came with it haha.
 
Well said, Cash. It worries me that kids today are not getting these experiences. I have worked in cotton fields, hoeing and pulling bolls. Listening all-day-long to the grown-ups talk about how much easier it was to pull bolls than to have to pick the lint out of the boll when they were young. For me, the heat was the most disagreeable part of any kind of field work, whether in a cotton patch or gathering corn.

Butch
 
we plant a commercial variety that seems to get a lot of beans at once then pull the plant and pick off the beans in the shade.
 
When I was a kid I thought hoeing peanuts was as bad as it got. Set the water jug at one end of the field and you could get a sip after a trip up and back, 1 mile round trip.
 
Not the hardest probably, but AI 200 white turkey hens after removing the semen from the toms. Boss got a dollar a dozen more for the eggs at the hatchery. all done with homemade equipment. I'll let you guess what my nick name was!!!!!
 
Pouring concrete was the worst job on the farm. Cleaning hog barns with a shovel was better.
 
I cant think which one might be the hardest but stomping nasty wool in a bag taller than me and pulling tags may have been the nastiest. That may have had to with a little to much celebrating the night before. Thank God we only shared one or two days a year.
 
I grew up on a tobacco farm we had 32 acres. The hardest part of tobacco was hanging it and you were on the bottom tier. Right out of high school I went and work in a whiskey barrel factory in the shipping department, it's just as hard as working in tobacco. After two years I decided it was time to go to college.
 
My mother told of riding on her dad horsey back style while he weeded the vegetable garden on his hands and knees. That's a hard nob made harder.
Dave
 
It sure does Bruce, we did a job last fall for a farm around 100 cows . They put in a new James-way alley scraper and manure pump. We wired up the chain drive and ran a cable through the barn from the dairy to the manure pump, big 4/0 aluminum tec cable big enough for 200A . I dont think theyd have a lot left of a hundred thousand from that project. Were doing another one this spring 2 Delaval V-300s, big expense.
 
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