I once had a teacher who advised the girls in the class, “don’t marry for the money, just go where the money is.” Well, she had it partly right, “don’t marry for the money.” My dad said, “it’s no disgrace to be poor, but sometimes it’s very unhandy.”
Many of my best friends have said, “you get to be like those you hang around with.” We all know people who are very successful, but sometimes we wonder how many people they took advantage of to get rich.
As a young dairy farmer, which was many years ago, I visited hundreds of very successful dairy farms. The first thing that I looked for was the milk pickup record that hung close to the bulk tank. Every time the milk transport driver picked up milk, he wrote down how much milk was shipped that day. It also told you whether that farm was on every day milk pickup or every second day pickup. Once you walked through the barn and counted the cows that were milked each day and divided that number into the total daily milk shipped you had a pretty good indication of how well the herd was milking.
If the record of milk pickup was nowhere to be found, then from that point on, whatever else the farmer told you was taken with a grain of salt. Everybody on the dairy tour knew that milk was easier to produce when there were lots of fresh cows that had calved recently.
A cow’s production is the highest for the first three months after giving birth but declines gradually for the following months.
It is easier to get cows pregnant in the summer than in the time they are in the barn. All wild animals like deer and moose have their young in the early summer so that there is good grass and feed for mum to produce milk for the young.
After visiting a few dozen successful dairy farms, we learned that honesty and intelligence led to a truly successful farm. This usually applies to all businesses.
Although many of these dairy tours were only a one day trip when two or three farms were visited, some successful dairy farmer groups were formed and those groups regularly organized week long dairy tours or conferences which were also a business vacation when the other half of the farm business also went along.
These tours visited many provinces, states and countries. Not only were the tours and conferences very informative but many lifelong friends from areas far away were made and as much was learned sitting around the pool or at mini parties in a room where ideas and stories were shared after the formal part of the day than just on the farm tours or conferences.
Many of those trips included agricultural engineers, nutritionists, vets, agricultural writers, and other dairy specialists who helped turn the entire trip into a learning session. Not only did we have a great time with like minded friends but the entire trip-vacation could be classed as a write-off as both educational and advertising. If you forgot your bathing suit at home, the first chance you got, you bought a new one. Networking with dairy specialists from other colleges, states or provinces would later turn into a book of knowledge that was opened many times.
Trips through areas that required irrigation to grow crops, learning that the RFV or relative feed value of a bale of hay could determine the value of the bale from $10 to $100 dollars and learning the true value of manure properly used, all helped make the trip much more than just a vacation.
A trip to British Columbia taught us that a cow barn could be flushed clean just as easy as a toilet in your house. Manure flushed out contains more water than manure cleaned out the conventional way, but when that watery manure is spread on hay fields it lets our farm produce four cuts of hay per year if we need it.
No matter where you travel by car, bus, train, or air, every trip is a learning experience. When I was a kid, a Sunday afternoon drive with my parents and grandparents taught me that not everybody had good crops, straight rows or fat cows. Farms with land that sloped toward the sun could warm up sooner in the spring and their crops could be planted earlier. Farms that were a lake bottom hundreds of years ago had millions of sea shells in the soil. Those sea shells would decompose and supply calcium to grow the best alfalfa in the county.
If you don’t take time to smell the flowers or the fresh cut hay, enjoy the country air or just admire this beautiful county that we live in you are missing a lot in life. Take time to enjoy the ride.
