The Kader’s had a working farm. In fact, they had three of them. I don’t know the total acreage, but it was around 600 acres. We grew all sorts of things, but the biggest deal was the milk cows. Every day, twice a day, we milked between 75 and 100 cows in the big barn at my grandma’s place. One of the jokes (not funny) about farming was that we could never take a vacation because the cows needed to be milked twice a day and they couldn’t wait.
Let me explain the setup. We lived on one farm. It had a barn and a big garage where Floyd would work on stuff like tractors and the car once in a while. There was a long driveway leading from a dirt road up to the house, so you could see people coming a few seconds before they actually got there. I had to walk out to the main road to get picked up by the bus to ride into Belleview for school and to get the mail.
Up the road about 200 yards was Floyd’s father and mother’s place. They were, of course, grandpa and grandma. I can still picture the kitchen and the dining room. Go get a copy of some 50’s TV show that takes place on a farm and you’ll see just what it looked like. They also had a big barn and this was really the center of all the action. This is where we milked and did pretty much everything important. They had pigs and chickens that had eggs that needed collecting everyday. A real, old fashioned working farm. They made their own cheese and of course we had fresh milk from the cows. Have you ever tasted warm milk straight from a cow. Not good. It’s much better out of a bottle after it’s been processed and cooled. We also butchered the cows once in a while to get meat. It was my job to round up the cow (I think I had a dog that helped). Once I got the cow into position, they would tie a rope around his hind legs and then through a pulley system. Then using the tractor, they would pull the rope until the cow was hanging upside side down with his hind legs up in the air and his head down. The cow is bellowing away and Floyd would come up to him with a sledge hammer and swing the hammer and connect with the cow – wak – right between the eyes. It usually only took one blow and the cow was dead. Then they cut his throat and let the blood drain and proceeded with the cutting to get him in pieces small enough to take into town. They had several freezers and we would kill the cows and then gut them and take the sides into town to a professional who would cut them up into the proper sizes and grind the meat for hamburger, etc. Then we’d bring home several hundred pounds of meat to put in the freezers for winter. Everyone at the three farms shared in all the meat. Everything you can get at the grocery store, we produced ourselves. I asked Floyd one day why he didn’t just shoot the cow and he said, in effect, why waste a bullet when the sledge hammer works just fine. Not sure how they do it today, but I’ll bet they use a gun or a needle to kill the cow.
More tomorrow….
Dad
)