A thought on earlier thread, Hard labour on the farm

Most people that commented about the hardest jobs they did in the farm, were jobs from their youth. And also jobs that were only for a short /seasonal duration. And many of those jobs no longer exist.
Does anyone still do any hard or dirty jobs on the farm currently? Or is changing the oil about as dirt as it gets these days ?

Yeah, it's not like they mined coal or worked in a steel mill for 40 plus hours per week 52 weeks per year.

Hand picking stones, I think the glaciers busted up and left behind half of the basin that is Georgian Bay in this south west corner!

When we had cattle, the worst jobs were setting up, servicing and repairing the silo unloaders.....you got covered with hay dust sweating while pulling up 70 feet of heavy unloader cable.....for repairs, you can be sure that every nut was rounded off from the flow of silage and needed a torch to cut it off...then you didn't bring up the right wrench with you....the doors would freeze in the silage and you needed a sledge hammer to get them out, busting up the wood in the process....dragging 50 feet of stable cleaner chain up the chute to put it back on the drive sprocket when a link broke....aaahh, the good old days...

Ben

....but I should add, the worse thing was trying to move a disabled cow that got tangled up in the stabling...at least if it was dead you could hook a chain on it and drag it out or cut it up....

Ben

(quoted from post at 08:40:55 02/02/22) Yeah, it's not like they mined coal or worked in a steel mill for 40 plus hours per week 52 weeks per year.

Click to expand...

986 through the years I have thought along those lines about the jobs some guys have had in factories compared the labor intensive jobs on the farm. Yes we were hot, sweaty and tired out there baling hay under the sun. Or shelling corn in the dust. I never owned a skid loader, I pitched manure for an hour or so every day but that was just for an hour per day. There were factory jobs where guys did that kind of work all day long for six days a week many years ago. Construction jobs requiring labor 8 hours a day go on year round in the south. So yes we had tough jobs on the farm but compared to some non-farm jobs those farm jobs were not all that bad.

True, farm work was never limited to 40 hours per week. Livestock farmers worked 7 days per week, for as many hours a day as were necessary to get the work done. No day off for Christmas, or New Years, Easter, 4th of July or any other day.

I'm so wore out and out of shape I couldn't do the jobs I use to do. I hired a kid to muck out my horse barn a few years ago. I went to check on after about half an hour. Found the shovel laying on the ground, gate wide open and no kid to be found. Took me a few days but I got it done myself.

Keeping 360 acres with cattle on em fenced seems to be an on going labor intensive task. I guess fence repair/replacement is a more accurate description. Since the fencing and corrals we're originally built in the 50s there is always some section to replace or a corral that will no longer hold a rowdy ole cow. Heck my brand new corral I built with rail road ties, power poles, and 2x12s had a angry first year heifer smash thru it. She's a special case though, she also halfway jumped on the hood of my truck and smashed it up with her hoofs. That'll teach me for using my truck to block a weak spot in the loading corral fencing. However, all this being said, fence repair seems to be one of those tasks that helps a guy clear his head...

Power washing equipment before I put it away.... It's not hard but it can be dirty and I hate doing it.

For me the milk cows have been gone for quite a while now.I worked the hardest when I had them as I had a full time job besides and also did well work too.I was the healthest at that time.If there was more money in it I would still be at it.My wife joked and said I smiled alot more back then.

Well, I'm a rarity in my area for not having one single tractor with a cab on it. All of mine are cab-less. That said, I hate mowing prairie hay.
True prairie grass is tuff to mow. You got to have your sickle mower up in good shape to mow prairie hay. And if you got alot of wire grass in it, it mows tuff even if your mower is up in shape. But, that's just how prairie grass is. Back to the no cab thing. Prairie has got to be cut in the heat of the day. So usually 11am to 7pm is when your out there. And on hot days with low humidity. It's just hot & tuff going. And this is on ground that's never been broke out. So all kinds of holes from badgers and rocks that stuck up out of the ground and been dug out over the years.
Feeding cattle on cab-less tractors in temps 10 and under is also not fun. But, that don't take as long per day, so don't seem to stick out in your mind as much as the all day in the heat mowing prairie hay.

As far as dirt the worse three here are power washing equipment, servicing the combine (I like to blow it off every day in small grain and soybeans) and we still use 2 silo unloaders in the summertime. A haylage silo is always dirty and dusty. Tom

Hoof trimming today. Does that count?

Yes indeed. Hoof trimming can be a dirty and physical job. And I have a bunch of cows to do

Been a long time but, turning and pulling a calf was all of the above. Did it several times.

At 70 I still have enough rocks to pick do use the loader on the big ones but pick a bunch of them by hand, although some of the real small ones I leave for seed and push down with the roller.

Unloading the manure spreader with a pitch fork when the chain is broken.

May be about time to treat yourself. To a handy front wheel assist with directional reverser joy stick loader quick change bucket. And a quiet climate controlled cab. Got one in 08.life is good. Bu

Growing burley tobacco should be mentioned. In this part of Kentucky, it is still grown, although it's a lot less than it was just a few years ago. The plants are started in March in greenhouses on float trays. After they are about 6-8 they are 'mowed off' and each succeeding time they are mowed a little taller. Meanwhile the ground is plowed and later drug and then disced. Sometimes the cover crop wheat is baled off first as haylage. It is fertilized and ready for the plants to be set. A 2 row setter takes about 6 people: a driver, 4 on the setter, and usually someone following the setter hand planting 'misses'. The setter water tank has to be filled every so often, so there is a nurse tank and a wagon with plant trays that has to be moved near the row ends. After the tobacco takes off it is cultivated, usually with a 1 or 2 row cultivator, at least 3 times, and sometimes more. Usually it gets hoed by hand once or so. When it starts blooming it has to be hand topped and sprayed with sucker 'dope'. Then sticks have to be dropped end to end, every other row, ahead of cutting and housing. It is hand cut, each stalk individually, and 5-6 stalks are 'speared' onto the stick, which is picked up off the ground and jabbed into the dirt at 45* angle. A good fast cutter stays bent over most of the time, and can cut close to 100 sticks in an hour. After letting it wilt down for a day or 2, it is loaded up on wagons and taken to the barn and 'hung'-the stick with plants on it between 2 rails. Usually you have a guy in the top rail and 1 below hanging and shaking the plants out-in other words spreading them apart so they cure better. Someone hands off from the wagon, and another guy carries the stick over and hands it up. If you have enough crop, you might fill the last barn in time for the first barn to be taken down, plants pulled off the sticks, and stripped: hand pulling leaves off each stalk. Then it is baled and stored and then loaded and taken to the warehouse/sale facility. Stripping can last most of winter, and the tobacco can only be stripped when it is in 'case', usually on a rainy day, so the dry leaves don't shatter. Most of this is done by hand although there are machines that can do some of these jobs.
As you can guess, labor is very hard to get, with the majority being Mexican coming thru the H-2A program. Oh yeah, you also have to take a class to sign up for these workers. Here lately the past few years, cigar wrapper tobacco is being grown. It is much the same except it is sprayed weekly for bugs (so no holes in the leaves), and is cut one day and speared the next, because the leaves are very brittle. After that everything is similar. Very dirty work. Mark.

[I own a commercial vineyard, on harvest day, I carry loaded buckets of grapes up and down the hill to the trailer, for all the women pickers. That is usually a 8-10 hour day. It is flat out exhausting. I pay their young children to do it if they can handle it, but usually, if they are that capable, they are picking too.

About a third of the crew are women, and they make very good money on picking day.
Men do their own carrying. It takes me a few days to get my legs back under me afterward.

Made my back start hurting just reading this. Actually been giving me problems since I was fourteen when we had an unusually heavy crop.

No farm work anymore besides unloading a few hay wagons a year. I will tell you that framing houses is no picnic in the summer or winter. On a hot summer day with the sun out framing walls on a first floor deck temperature was 120 degrees. Winter at 10 degrees was bone chilling. Due that 8 hours a day . Farm work isnt all that tough these days with all the modern equipment. Dairy on a flat floor is probably no joy.

Vito

We still do as much labor as ever here. My wife and I grow 15 acres of produce for our produce stand and wholesale too. The rest of the home place is rotated soybeans and corn. We have irrigation for the produce but its all ground set pipe with guns. We pick everything by hand. Our main crop is sweet corn, usually around 5 acres. The rest is split with patches of melons,lopes,squash,cucumbers etc. The sweet corn is staggered with 8 plantings to last all summer. The other stuff is usually 2 plantings to last as well. Last year we planted a thousand sweet potato slips and sold every potato we had so this year were gonna do 2500 or 3000. We have 5 kids from 3 to 16 and they all help.

I used to put in 2000 tomatoes and 1,000 peppers. I lived riding the transplanter .

kstp.com/associated-press/ap-us-news/farmers-alarmed-as-ny-looks-at-expanded-overtime-for-workers/

(quoted from post at 09:57:22 02/02/22) I'm so wore out and out of shape I couldn't do the jobs I use to do. I hired a kid to muck out my horse barn a few years ago. I went to check on after about half an hour. Found the shovel laying on the ground, gate wide open and no kid to be found. Took me a few days but I got it done myself.

Click to expand...

Decided it wasn't worth that shiny silver dollar you offered him eh?

Seriously, how much were you paying him? $5? $10? $20? Would you have done it for that much?

Kids these days can earn $11 an hour hanging out with their friends behind the counter of a fast food restaurant.