alfalfa

(entry for 11/20/2024)

I love alfalfa.  No, I don’t mean the character of that name on Little Rascals. I mean the actual stuff, the green stuff, that grows in fields, is harvested and made into bales, and then fed to cattle or horses or sometimes even goats.  The lower case item, alfalfa, not the Capitalized one.

I love the smell, when it is being mowed, or raked.  It's like a cross between raw green peas and a freshly-mown lawn.  It loses its smell, and its color, and its weight, if you leave it in the field too long before baling.  (It's amazingly heavy when it's first cut.  A good field that has been well watered during growth can yield ten tons an acre when baled green.)

In 1956 we bought the farm. (No, I don’t mean anybody died. I mean my dad bought—as in paid for—a farm. An alfalfa farm, in fact. Forty acres thereof.)

I had no idea how he paid for it, as we were very poor, barely making ‘ends meet,’ as they say. I found out years later that he borrowed the money from an acquaintance of his who had no family but plenty of money. Some guy he had met at work. Not a fellow-employee. Just some guy who was hanging around hoping to cash in on the uranium craze that was sweeping western Colorado at the time. After we bought the farm, he ended up living in a shack on the back end of the property, ‘a mile from’ the house, as they say, although you can’t be a mile away on only forty acres. I never made the connection. Strange rich guy living on property. We are ‘owners’ of said property. Hmm? Nope. I was very naive and didn’t catch on. (I also didn’t find out till many years later that my dad declared bankruptcy at the end of this farming adventure and that the strange guy never got his money back. But that’s another story. Maybe.)

I had never lived on an actual farm before. Well, that’s not quite true. When I was age three, we had lived briefly on a strawberry farm which had formerly been a chicken farm, which we rented, and in which we lived in the converted chicken coop. But that doesn’t count, because we hadn’t farmed the strawberries. The owner of the property had done that. (Although we did get to eat some of the strawberries. Whether the owner knew about this is another question.) We just lived in the chicken coop, and that was our only connection to the ‘farm.’

This farm, this time, now that I was sixteen, was where we actually lived. There was a farm house. We lived in it. There was a large barn with attached storage shed. We stored our stuff in the shed and parked the tractor (which came with the farm) in the barn. There was a lot of ‘stuff’ and it was a large tractor. Well, it seemed large to me. As farming tractors went, it was actually pretty small. (An International Harvester Farmall Cub.). But it was big enough to pull the seed planter that planted the alfalfa seeds, and the plow the broke the soil before planting, and the disc and harrow that broke up the clods, and the mower that cut the hay when it was ready to harvest, and, most of all, in my case, the rake that raked the hay into windrows so that the baler could come and scoop it up and make it into bales. We didn’t own the baler. We paid someone to bring it onto the property to create the bales. Our tractor could never have pulled it. But it pulled everything else.

(There's a picture of a very similar tractor at the head of this post.)

I was not at home at the time of the plowing and discing and harrowing and all of that. I was not home at the time of the seed-planting. I was off at Laurelwood for my 11^th grade year in high school while all of those things were going on. But when I got home for the summer, the harvesting and raking and baling had yet to begin. So I got to be involved in those. Well, one of those. The raking.

My dad wouldn’t let me pull the mower, feeling it was too dangerous. And of course, as already mentioned, none of us were involved in the baling. That left the raking. I had been driving the family pickup for two years now already, though not on roads, as I didn’t have a license yet. So I knew how to operate a vehicle. I had never touched a tractor before, however. It turned out not to be that much different from the pickup, as far as actual operating method was concerned. 

There was a clutch. There were two brake pedals— one for each of the two rear wheels. You could put a connector into place to control both brakes at once, using only one foot, if you wanted to, or you could swivel the connector out of the way, and use one brake at a time (or both, if you used both feet). The throttle was a hand-operated lever, rather that another pedal, which was a good thing, since two brakes and a clutch were plenty for a person having only two feet, such as myself.

The two brake pedals came in handy when you needed to make a really tight turn at the end of the row, as you could stop one rear wheel while the other kept going, helping to make the turn good and tight! I learned to do this quickly, on about the fourth try.

What I couldn’t learn to do quickly, and never really did learn well, was to look backwards while driving.

You read that right. When you’re pulling a farm implement with a tractor, you have to pay a lot more attention to where you have been than to where you are going. Why? The ruts in the field will almost do your steering for you, if your front wheels are small enough, which ours were, but all kinds of mayhem can break out behind you if you’re not paying attention.

If you’re pulling a mower, a huge and cumbersome weed-vine can get caught in the mechanism and destroy the blades in seconds. When you’re pulling a harrow, a boulder-size lump of hard earth that the discs missed can get caught in the teeth and turn the entire harrow over in a heartbeat.

When you are pulling a rake, an overly-tall or thick clump of alfalfa can get caught between the huge raking wheels and suddenly the entire windrow is pulled out of line, which means you have to start the whole row over again.

So you look backward, not forward.

It occurs to me that this is a good metaphor for this blog. In this series of posts (of which this is the 26th!), I have been reviewing the past, trying to learn something from it. To do so, I have had to ignore the forward view and learn to look backwards, at where I have already been. The ruts are already in place. The front wheels, if they’re in good condition, can almost do the steering for me. At this point the future can more or less take care of itself. It’s the past that matters.

In this case, the past consists of the fact that we mowed three harvests that year.  The first two went without a hitch, and we were actually getting rich for the first time in the last ten years.  But then disaster struck.  After the last cutting had been mowed and raked, a huge thunderstorm came by and dumped about a foot of water on our alfalfa field.  By the time the hay had dried out enough to bale, it had lost 90% of its weight to evaporation.  The baler created the usual number of bales, but each one weighed about twenty pounds, and was a very pale brown, not green.  We had contracted to deliver the whole crop, all three harvestings, at the going rate for green hay, which I don't remember precisely, but which was somewhere in the range of twenty dollars a ton.  That third harvest should have weighed in at about four hundred tons, worth about eight thousand dollars.  Instead, it weighed about forty tons, and brought in about eight hundred dollars.  It cost almost that much to pay off the balers.  Hence the bankruptcy.  My dad sold the farm, at a loss, and we moved back into town, back to Orchard Mesa.  An older and larger home than the first Mesa house but with no converted garage for Grandma and Aunt Eda to live in.  (Grandma Emma had died by then anyway, and Aunt Eda had moved to Oregon, to be closer to me at Laurelwood.)

The adventure was over.  None of us ever lived on an alfalfa farm ever again.

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