Farming is in the Blood

Farming runs deep in my ancestral line. Both on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side. If I wanted to write a book, I would start at the very beginning of my ancestry line! But to make this more reader friendly, I will stick to the most recent generation.

My Grandpa on my father’s side, owned a barley farm, and raised his five kids on the land. Growing up, my grandparents raised their five kids in a “bomb shelter.” As my uncle puts it, “It probably wouldn’t have withstood a bomb, but was more of a basement.” It later on would be added on to, and the ground level added much needed room and comfort. As kids, we loved playing in the basement of that house. It had its own kitchen and so many little crooks and crannies to hide in. Perhaps my most memorable feature of that basement, was the blue, green and brown carpet in the bathroom. A typical early era design, which my dad swears was the same carpet he grew up with.

Along with a new addition to the house, my grandpa installed an irrigation pivot on his farm. As my uncle says, “It was the first one in that area of Idaho. All of the neighbors showed up from miles around to see it run the first time.” Pivots, are a system of pipes and support terraces on wheels. Hooked up to a well, the pivots allowed for more crops to be watered, creating greater crop yields. Even though the pivot my grandpa installed was the newest design, it still had a long way to go before it could be as efficient as the pivots seen today.

Let me expound on what I mean here. The first center pivot was created in 1938, by a man named Frank Zybach. His invention started out with a lot of flaws and not many farmers saw any potential in the design. But in the course of 25 years, there was over 10,000 center pivot systems in Northwest Nebraska alone. Because of the increase in water, U.S. Astronauts could see the lush, green crop circles in Nebraska from 270 miles in space. In 1976, Scientific American magazine called center pivot irrigation systems “perhaps the most significant mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animal by the tractor.” Pivots created higher crop yields, less manual labor, and more acreage of land available to water. The first pivots, consisted of a series of Rain Bird sprinklers lined up in a row. A great invention for the time, but as my dad put it, “Those Rain Birds, sat so far up on the pivot that when the water hit the ground, it packed the soil down until it was as hard as a rock.” Great for not letting the top soil blow away, but not so ideal for plants trying to push through the top layer of soil. Today, center pivots have sprinkler heads that allow low pressure water to spray uniformly across plants.

As well as the center pivot did, tragedy still struck the farm. A hail storm pounded the barley. The crop was ruined, and because it happened the year my Grandpa decided to not buy crop insurance, he had to take out loans to keep his operation going. Debt came crashing through the roof, and the farm was sold while my dad was in college. And there you have it. Farming is not for the faint of heart, and is a constant gamble, but once you are a farmer by heart, you are always a farmer.

Ganzel, Bill. Wessels Living History Farm. Living in the 1950s & 1960s. York, Nebraska 2006. Web. 9 Sep.      2015