Cleaning up

I don’t know which is worse — cleaning up little kids or cleaning up big cows? It doesn’t seem to matter how hard you work to get them both clean, they always seem to find a way to get dirty again before company arrives. Either by splashing in a big mud puddle or slopping their tails in the gutter, you just can’t keep everyone clean all the time.

Ask the hosts of any June Dairy Month breakfast on the farm. They will tell you that it is impossible to keep everything spotless and clean. But I think we are more critical of our own place. We were at Mark and Shelly Czech’s for Benton County’s Breakfast on the Farm. Even with all the rain and mud, it still looked spotless. They did such a great job of presenting a positive image to the general public. They were planning to let people walk around and explore the farm, but with all the rain, they changed plans. They threw some straw bales on a couple of flat racks and gave tractor tours around the yard with a personal guide on every round to tell the story of how they make milk.

I’m trying to keep in mind the most important thing about hosting a farm tour is not how spotless everything is, but the new people that you meet. We are one of three farm tours in central Minnesota for delegates to the 2010 National Holstein Convention this weekend. Our tour is for those people who just love to see cows every day.

We still want things to look nice around the farm. Katie, Becca and Janine spent yesterday painting the chipped spots in the barn where the feed cart “bangs” into the door jamb as you swing around the corners or “bumps” up against the wall as you maneuver over the piles of feed in the manger. It looked great last night to see solid white walls before milking time.

By the end of the evening, it was a different story. Since cows can’t cover their mouths when they cough, everything flies forward until it hits the wall. (I think this is how a familiar phrase was started.) I was trying to brush off the dried remnants of feed as I threw dry hay to the cows when I realized that the visitors won’t be studying how clean the walls are. I’ll just sweep them down on Saturday morning. I’m trying to maintain my sanity.

Now the windows on the other hand are a different story. There are five windows per window opening and 15 window openings. That means I’m washing windows all day. At least we’ll be able to enjoy sunrises and sunsets more clearly after the tour or until a cow coughs. I think that I wash windows in the barn more than I wash windows in the house. Of course, we spend more time in the barn than in the house during daylight hours. At night, you can’t “see” dirty windows.

While we’re getting ready for the tour with all the extra jobs, daily life continues to march forward. The neighbors already have their second cutting alfalfa up. We’re hoping the skies dry out before the Fourth of July to get our hay up. Jonathon was down at the University of Minnesota registering for classes this week. I guess this means he really did graduate last month. He is ready to start now and I’m sure that by the end of summer, I’ll be ready to send him off too. The rhythm of the house will surely be different.

The rhythm around our house is adding a few new beats this summer. We added a new daughter to our family. Katie and I picked up Janine from the airport this week. She is an 18-year-old dairy farmer’s daughter from Germany. She will be staying with us for the summer learning about life on a family dairy farm in the United States before she heads off to her university this fall. Her English is very good, and my German is only as good as “Hogan’s Heroes.” We are still able to communicate, and she is jumping right in to help with getting things ready for the rest of the company coming this weekend. You have to love farm kids in any language. They all know how to get things done.

Right now, it seems like we were crazy to say yes to hosting this tour the same month we celebrated Jonathon’s graduation, Dairy Day Show and the state Holstein show, but it will all work out. I am marveling at all the odd little jobs that finally moved to the top of the to-do list. Maybe we should have done a tour a couple of years earlier.

As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark Schmitt started an adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota.