By Kim Baldwin, McPherson County farmer and rancher
Growing up on a small farm in central New Mexico allowed me the opportunity to experience many things that the majority of my classmates did not. Several of those experiences are core memories that I now associate with summertime on the farm.
I vividly remember once having friends over for a slumber party that morphed into an unplanned biology lesson while we all peeked through a fence to watch one of my heifers give birth.
I remember riding down the ditch banks during irrigation seasons and monitoring water levels during our allotted irrigation times.
I remember driving a tractor in the alfalfa fields as small square bales were tossed and stacked on the trailer I was pulling.
I remember watching as those bales were added to a massive hay stack that just kept getting bigger and bigger with every subsequent cutting.
I loved climbing to the top of that summer haystack. It was the ultimate climbing course for a kid. My brother, sister and I would conduct races to see who could get to the top the fastest.
When we’d have friends over, summiting the haystack was always part of our day.
Add in the barn cats that would hide their litters of kittens within the massive stack and you had some happy little kids entertaining themselves for hours during the summers.
And even though my eyes would itch, my nose would run and my skin would revolt anytime I got close to the alfalfa hay, that haystack continued to call me.
While we primarily grow grains on our central Kansas farm, we do raise some alfalfa as well.
This summer is my son’s second year of stacking hay on the farm and since we get multiple cuttings throughout the summer, we have been able to create an impressive haystack that is tapped into throughout the year to feed our sheep.
In June, he and a friend were tasked with beginning to build this year’s stack with this summer’s first alfalfa crop. Fast forward to last week when my son and a few of his buddies went out into the alfalfa field to bring the second cutting in. It was a two day process of loading the bales onto a trailer in the field, bringing them to the shed and then adding them to the large stack that had already begun.
They enjoyed the work and reveled in the massive structure they had created — making sure to show me the work they had accomplished.
After driving his friends home, my son asked me to drive him back to the stack so he could show it to me again. As we got out of the car and walked over to inspect it, my son sprang into a sprint and climbed to the top of the pile before standing tall above me, proud of the work they had accomplished.
There are days where I think my kids are missing the childhood farm experiences I had because of all of the other distractions in the world today. But then there’s days when I see my teenage boy scrambling to the top of an alfalfa haystack and I think we’re still doing OK.
Not every kid gets to experience this kind of summer, but I sure am glad mine can. And maybe, some of these experiences will become some of their core memories from summers on the farm.
“Insight” is a weekly column published by Kansas Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization whose mission is to strengthen agriculture and the lives of Kansans through advocacy, education and service.
