Changes on the farm that saved hard manual labor were very memorable to farmers.
Cleaning out the stables was the most labor-intensive job for all animal farms. The old horse barn where the bull and some dry cows were kept, we always cleaned it out by hand with a fork and shovel because it was only thirty feet long. Across the yard was the cow barn where the milk cows and baby calves were kept. That barn was longer, and the milk cow manure was much looser, so that barn got a litter-carrier track installed which went around inside both sides of the barn just over the manure alley, and the manure from the gutters was forked by hand into the new litter carrier, a big fifty-gallon water tight bucket which was suspended from that track. It could also be lifted or lowered with a crank and chain. It could hang just a few inches off the floor to make it easy to fork or shovel into, and would be raised to about four feet off the floor so it could be pushed easily. It rode on steel wheels along a track, around the barn and out through two small doors outside. The bucket was dumped by pulling a lever that unlatched the bucket which was top-heavy, so it would quickly flip over, emptying it’s contents onto the outside manure pile. The suspended track went about twenty feet outside so when the pile got longer than twenty feet, it had to be moved either by hand onto a horse-drawn manure sleigh to a close-by field where it had to be forked onto another bigger pile where it sat until spring when it was loaded again by hand into a little horse-drawn manure spreader for application on that field.
In the early 1950s, dad bought a little manure loader for the Ferguson tractor and he used it to move that little manure pile across the yard until it was spread in the spring after the snow melted. When the loose housing barn was built in 1950, it was just one big 36’ x 80’ box stall. By spring, after housing the entire milking herd all winter, with bedding of both straw and pine shavings, there was four feet of very well-packed manure in the entire barn. That was when dad bought the loader for the little Ferguson tractor. It was a long tedious task to load that tight packed manure onto a little fifty-bushel spreader and spread it over a hundred acres of land.
By the mid ‘50s, free stalls had replaced loose housing. Although milking parlors had improved in both design and with better cleaning of milk lines with better detergents and larger capacity milking parlours, they were still in the improvement stage. After more than a decade of using loose housing and that little two-stall milking parlour, dad and grandpa decided to remodel the barn and tie up the cows using a dumping station, a portable stainless-steel bucket that transferred the milk from the barn to the milk house and into the bulk milk tank via a flexible clear plastic hose. That tie-stall barn had a barn cleaner installed to clean the gutters behind the milk cows.
After using several models of barn cleaners, and switching from dry manure to liquid manure, we began visiting hundreds of modern milking facilities both on freezing days in Nova Scotia and on very hot days in Texas before deciding to build a new milking facility in 2003. During the fifteen-year period before we began construction on a new milking facility, we visited not only successful milking facilities but also some not-so-successful barns, and every winter attended dairy symposiums in both the US and Canada. We learned as much by visiting facilities that didn’t work as we learned visiting the best ones. An engineer at one of those symposiums told us, “It’s a lot easier and less expensive to make changes to the milking facility on paper than after the cement is poured.” Whether building a Tim Hortons or a milk barn, ‘location, location, location’ is the primary consideration. Liquid manure allowed farmers to capture and return to the land all unused nutrients that the cow didn’t need. That saved the farmer thousands of dollars purchasing chemical fertilizers needed for efficient crop production. That manure also fed the life in the soil that could turn minerals and organic matter into plant food.
When Jeannie and I were attending dairy symposiums and traveling on “dairy-vacations”, the top dairy nutritionist, agriculture engineer, ag ventilation expert and dairy facility planner for Ontario accompanied us, as well as many veterinarians who were observing how poor-quality nutrition was the main cause of cattle sickness. We were taught to ask lots of questions about feeding, feed storage, and nutrition. We also learned that it didn’t matter whether forage was stored in a blue upright silo, a cement upright silo, or a well-designed cement bunk silo, as long as you put only the best quality feed into it and that there was no spoilage ever fed to an animal. We also learned that the bacteria in a cow’s digestive tract expected every bite of feed to be consistent with her needs and what she was used to. The T.M.R. feed mixer was a necessity to help deliver that consistency. We also learned that only feed testing by reputable labs can allow you to computer-design the ration needed by the cow to produce the milk needed to make a profit and keep that cow healthy. Balancing for DECAD can prevent milk fever in fresh cows and unnecessary veterinarian visits.
Farmers grew with technology too. Grandpa and dad carried a pocket notebook to save information that the mind might forget over time. We progressed from a pocket calculator beside that notebook to a cell phone as big as a curling iron, to a flip phone. Now a smart phone replaces the notebook, the old flip phone, and has a camera that can be used to take a picture of a weed and upload that picture to an app that figures out what weed that is. When that new robotic milker in the dairy barn isn’t working, it can call your cell phone, day or night. My phone delivers information about dairying each morning from all over the world. Up-to-the minute market prices and futures of grain prices and feed commodities can be delivered to your cell phone as you want.
Farmers used to gather on Monday nights at different neighbours’ for a farm forum meeting to talk over local problems, as well as a major problem that was sent out by Ag. Canada for every forum to discuss and report on after the meeting. TV became more entertaining than farm forum, and in the English Quebec farming community, Farm Forum morphed into the QFA (Quebec Farmers Association) in 1966. This kept farmers in the Quebec community and farmers in other provinces (members of the CFA – the Canadian Federation of Agriculture) together on topics and problems that needed provincial or federal attention. Ten years ago, the QFA brought back virtual Farmers Forum on “zoom” on one Wednesday evening each month. Now that program is used more for cutting edge information that helps keep our farmers above average. Because it’s virtual, specialists from anywhere can speak about dozens of subjects to any farmer who is signed in.
We have come from the time when grandpa used no chemical fertilizer or spray, to using tons of chemical fertilizer and dozens of different sprays, to better use of our manure and organic matter and cover crops that prevent erosion and allow us to greatly reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and sprays, allowing the billions of micro-organisms in the soil to return to their work of making plant food from minerals and organic matter in the soil. Our farmers are now leading the world in reducing gas emissions and some have already promised to be carbon neutral by 2050. Our grandkids tell us that we are just starting.
