The Tapestry of Kansas: Celebrating Kansas Day

Randy and the calving pen in 2010

Earlier this month, we sold the last bit of farming equipment. Though most of our farm equipment and supplies went on the auction block during our sale last August, Randy held onto the calving pen. 

It was at our house, rather than the farm headquarters. He decided to wait to sell it until it was calving season. That time came in mid-January. I put it on Facebook, and we had seven inquiries about it before we went to bed that night. The first one to call was the lucky owner of the new-to-them calving pen.

2020, milking a cow using the breakaway gate, so that we could feed her baby

The calving pen was located in the calving shed we erected in 2016 after the barn we had been using succumbed to gravity. Until I read the old blog post, I had forgotten, but we bought the pen in 2010 from another farmer who was retiring from the cattle business. Originally, it went in the barn. At the time, I wrote that some wives get little blue boxes from Tiffany's for Christmas presents. I got a calving pen.

Here's part of what I wrote:

Maybe you were like me and were initially thinking that the calving pen might have been a gift more suited to Randy. That's OK. I thought it, too. But then I got to thinking: Maybe this big metal box does say love. I remembered last February when Randy was at a meeting, and we had a heifer in trouble. My attempts to get the vet on the phone went unanswered. Jake (our farm employee at the time), a helpful neighbor and I finally got the calf delivered. But a nice calving pen, complete with head gate, would sure have made it easier. A pen with lots of different gates and openings would make it safer for the people and the animals.

From Kim's County Line, December 20, 2010

That blog post turned out to be prophetic. The calving pen with its breakaway gate helped reluctant mothers and their new babies bond. The head gate helped contain mothers who needed some extra help when Mother Nature wasn't yielding a baby calf in a timely manner. (Click HERE for a photo essay of a birth using the calving pen.) Being able to use it saved several babies. The shed provided shelter for mamas and their new babies on particularly brutal winter nights.

 

And, I must admit, I was a little misty-eyed, thinking about it leaving the farmyard. 

But, on the other hand, it will serve another farm family in a similar way. Just like we benefited from buying someone else's equipment, they - and their cow-calf herd - will benefit from the purchase they made from us, too.  

We will celebrate Kansas Day on Sunday, January 29. It will be Kansas' 162nd birthday. Kansas became the 34th state of the union in 1861. My Moore ancestors came to Kansas in 1876, 15 years after Kansas became a state. My Neelly ancestors were a little later, in 1898. I'm sure all of them would be amazed at the changes in Kansas, and especially, in farming. 

I'm thankful that both sides of my family saw beauty and opportunity here. (Click on the links to read more about how the Moores and the Neellys came to Kansas.) Randy, who is a fifth-generation farmer in his family, still owns a pasture that's been in his family since 1900.

This is an undated photo of Randy's Grandpa, Clarence Fritzemeier, with a bull. The back of the photo has written (in Randy's Grandma Ava's handwriting): "He looks like he knew he was going to be sold."

As we near the Kansas Day celebration, I thought again about that calving pen. It was used by our friend, Joe. Then it came to our farm, and now it will serve another farm family in Central Kansas.

Those threads of connection are woven throughout Kansas history and Kansas agriculture. Even back in 1861, the livestock industry was an important aspect of the state's agricultural economy. The state ranked third in the nation in cattle population by 1890, a position it held for several decades. Mixed farming (grain-livestock) has always been the predominant form of agriculture on Kansas family farms, including both the Fritzemeier and Moore agricultural legacies.

Thousands of head of cattle were shipped on trains from rail heads in Kansas to packing plants in Kansas City, Chicago, and other cities to the east.  

A photo I took in 2011 during the Kansas Cattle Drive to commemorate Kansas' 150th birthday

Between 1867 and 1885, towns like Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Newton, Caldwell, and Dodge City became famous for their place in the cattle industry.

Photo from the Kansas State Historical Society, dated between 1891 and 1912

With the closing of the open range, Kansas cattlemen began to place greater emphasis on the breeding of better stock.  Shorthorns and Herefords were popular in the 1890s, according to the Kansas State Historical Society. Herefords are still part of the genetics on our County Line farm, along with Angus.

Generation to generation - the legacy of Kansas and of Kansas agriculture continues. And Kansas farmers are a strong thread in the tapestry of our state.

Let no one say the past is dead. 

The past is all around us and within.

Oodgeroo Noonucal, Aboriginal poet

Happy Birthday, Kansas!

Kinley, Kansas Day, 2019. I shared my Kansas books and sunflower cookies with her first grade class.

If you want to celebrate with special Kansas Day cookies, here's a LINK to the recipe.

Kansas Day: Happy 160th Birthday!

  

She's looking pretty good for 160 years old.

 

 

Everybody knows you need to add a little color and sparkle to your outfit for a special celebration. And Kansas has one of those this Friday: She'll turn the big 1-6-0! 

 

Between 1541 and 1739, the first European explorers from Spain and France arrived in modern day Kansas looking for gold, trade and knowledge. The land was included as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. After 51 years, Kansas became an official territory on May 30, 1854. Kansas was admitted as the 34th state of the Union on January 29, 1861. 

The explorers were likely disappointed they didn't find gold. But Russian immigrants brought gold of another kind to the Kansas Plains. In 1874, Russian Mennonites planted the first crops of Turkey Red Wheat. 

 

June 2020

Thanks to favorable weather conditions for this wheat variety, wheat became the "gold" of Kansas and even the nation, as the state quickly became the leading wheat producer in the U.S. Railroads and cattle, along with crops, became the "trade" for the fledgling state. It was not what Coronado was looking for as he came to the Plains looking for treasures, but my ancestors and Randy's saw these Plains in a different way.

 

Under the Homestead Act, any person 21 or older could choose 160 acres of land on which to farm and ranch. If the homesteader could live and farm on this land for five years, they could own it. Randy and I are the fifth generation in our families to live and work the Kansas plains. We credit those adventurous forefathers who dreamed big dreams under a big Kansas sky. 

 

January 2021

 Here in Central Kansas in January, we're five months away from those golden waves of grain. 

 

Currently, I'm feeling more like Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Little House on the Prairie books were childhood favorites. I remember one in which Pa had to tie a rope from the house to the barn to find his way back in a blizzard. 

It wasn't quite so dramatic for Randy and me on a late-night stroll earlier this week. We had a couple of inches of freshly-fallen snow. Randy found a new baby calf on his patrol of the heifer lot around 11 PM. He carried the baby to the calving shed, while I made my way from the nice, warm house to help him get the mother in with the baby.

Our "lantern" was a flashlight and the moon. A little while and a few tries later, mission accomplished! And I got to go back into a house powered by electricity and heated by a furnace, instead of needing to chop wood, carry it in the house and keep the fire stoked.

My Moore ancestors came to Kansas in 1876, 15 years after Kansas became a state. My Neelly ancestors were a little later, in 1898. I'm sure all of them would be amazed at the changes in Kansas, and especially, in farming. 

 

As we fed on Tuesday, I saw the ice shimmering off the trees in the shelterbelts and thought about the pioneers to this area. Settlers likely planted some of those trees as part of Timber Claims. 

 

After we fed yesterday, I asked Randy to drive over to the bridge over Peace Creek on the Zenith Road. And I thought about his ancestors coming to Stafford County. 

 

His family pioneers found the value of Peace Creek and Rattlesnake Creek for establishing their farms. And our cattle still benefit today.

 

Too often, we Kansans have an inferiority complex. We apologize and somehow buy into the outsiders' image that ours is a flyover state. We know that Oz was in technicolor while Kansas was boring black and white.

But people who believe that have never really opened their eyes ...

... to the beauty of sunrise ...

... and sunset ...

... and the color and variety in between.

 Even in the more sepia tones of wintertime in Kansas, there is beauty.

I'm thankful that both sides of my family saw beauty and opportunity here. (Click on the links to read more about how the Moores and the Neellys came to Kansas.) Randy, who is a fifth-generation farmer in his family, still owns a pasture that's been in his family more than 100 years.

If you're looking for a great pamphlet on Kansas for your grade school kids or grandkids (or even yourself), I found a one to download from the Kansas Secretary of State's office. Click here to view it. 

And if you want to celebrate with sunflower cookies, here's my tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe. A couple of years ago, I shared them with Kinley's first grade class, and I got to tell them about farming in our great state. 

Kansas Day celebrations will look different across elementary schools this year. But I'm glad to hear they are still celebrating.  

Happy Birthday, Kansas! 160 looks good on you!

And So It Begins Again: Class of 2020

There's no hiding from it: Calving season 2020 has begun. With more snow on the way today, we'll see if the expectant mamas respond to that old wives' tale that says births happen when there are changes in the weather.

We didn't get off to a momentous start. Last Tuesday, a baby was born 3 weeks early to a cow on Peace Creek. It was just too small to survive.

Our 25 heifers began calving last Thursday. While the projected due date was today (January 28), the heifers who are calving are delivering full-term babies. We schedule our heifers to begin calving a couple of weeks prior to the whole cow herd, since the first-time moms require more frequent checking.

This little white-faced guy was the first one to join the Class of 2020. However, the ear tag doesn't support that claim.

Even though this black calf was born second, he got the 000 ear tag.

 

Location, location, location: He was closer to the gate when we arrived with the ear tags the next morning. And, contrary to the triple-zero moniker, it doesn't mean this calf is worth nothing ... nada ... zip. In our herd, the first number signifies the year that the baby was born. In this case, the year 2020 meant our numbers begin with "0" for this calving season.

We have the heifers in a corral near our house. The mamas were born on The County Line in 2018, and Randy chose 25 of them to retain for our own herd.

The too-early arrival wasn't the only challenge we've already faced. This little guy's mama was not interested in claiming it.

Randy moved the calf into the calving shed to warm it up. Then, we tried to corral the mother and put it in the calving shed with the calf. She jumped the fence twice, leading a few of her compatriots astray as they all tried out for the heifer version of the Olympic high jump trials.

After the second time, I told Randy, "We need to find some higher panels." So we added three more panels to the corral right outside the calving shed. (I can testify that my muscles could feel the "burn" the next morning after lifting the panels into the back of the pickup, taking them out and helping to position them.)

We ran a group of the heifers into the corral again. And the mom (No. 849, for the record) tried to jump the fence again. The taller fence prevailed, and we finally got it into the shed. But then she burst through the head gate. And Randy decided it wasn't worth getting either of us hurt.

We mixed up some colostrum and fed the calf with a tube feeder. (Yes, the photo is blurry. It's not easy to do a job and take photos at the same time. That's why there are no photos of the round-up itself, and this one is blurry. Someone asked me the other day how I can work and take photos at the same time. The answer is this: Sometimes I can't.)

After we fed the calf, we left it in the calving shed, figuring we'd have to continue to tube feed it or bottle feed it.

 

Then Randy had a brainstorm. Another heifer had lost a calf the same day. We would attempt to graft that heifer and the orphaned baby calf.

This heifer is much calmer and more cooperative. At first, Randy milked the heifer.

She wasn't sold on the idea at first.

But, as the song from "Fiddler on the Roof" says, "Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles" the two have found each other.

As you can see in the top two photos, it took awhile for the calf to figure out which end of the mother yielded the warm treat.  Success!

That makes the farmer happy. (And the farmer's wife, too!)

Tomorrow - January 29 - is Kansas Day, and our state celebrates its 159th birthday. Kansas was admitted as a state of the Union in 1861. Even back in those days, the livestock industry was an important aspect of the state's agricultural economy. The state ranked third in the nation in cattle population by 1890, a position it held for several decades. Mixed farming (grain-livestock) has always been the predominant form of agriculture on Kansas family farms, including both the Fritzemeier and Moore agricultural legacies.

Thousands of head of cattle were shipped on trains from rail heads in Kansas to packing plants in Kansas City, Chicago, and other cities to the east.  Between 1867 and 1885, towns like Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Newton, Caldwell, and Dodge City became famous for their place in the cattle industry.

Photo from the Kansas State Historical Society, dated between 1891 and 1912

With the closing of the open range, Kansas cattlemen began to place greater emphasis on the breeding of better stock.  Shorthorns and Herefords were popular in the 1890s, according to the Kansas State Historical Society. Herefords are still part of the genetics on our County Line farm, along with Angus.

 

Happy Birthday, Kansas! Maybe we'll increase our party attendance with a few more calves.

For more on my family's arrival in Kansas, check out this blog post from Kansas Day 2016. More information about the Fritzemeier's history in the Kansas cattle industry can be found here.

Prairie Poet: A Kansas Day Tribute

Kansas celebrates her 158th birthday today, January 29. Unlike me, Kansas doesn't seem to mind counting each of her years.

Kansas poet May Williams Ward captured the essence of this state I call home with her poem, Sky Mountain. While I'm not usually a poetry fan, her poem spoke to my appreciation for Kansas, where I've lived my entire life. I illustrated her words with my photos in an earlier blog post. After harvest, I used the same poem for an entry in the Stafford County Fair's computer-manipulated division (see the photo at the top of this post). 

Ward lived for a time in Belpre in Edwards County, our neighbor to the west. Belpre isn't exactly a thriving metropolis.

May Williams Ward

Even though I'm sure it had more businesses and people a hundred years ago, I was even more intrigued by this young poet who harvested words in a small Kansas town, while her husband Merle collected the harvests of area farmers at the grain elevator his family owned.

While living in Belpre, Ward became editor of The Harp, a national poetry magazine. Last year, I discovered that the Hutchinson Public Library had added a book about Ward to its shelves. I get a weekly email from the Hutch library, which summarizes some of the new books in their collection. I couldn't believe the timing. I think I was probably the first patron to check it out.

Prairie Rhythms: The Life and Poetry of May Williams Ward was written by Lana Wirt Myers and published by Mammoth Publications in Lawrence.

William Allen White had this to say about Ward:

This Kansas poetress ... contributes to the most important magazines of verse and is easily the champion poet of Kansas. Her verse is beautiful, poignant, understanding. She excels because she is of the prairie. She takes her music out of her environment, winds, birds, the rhythm of the windmill, the Kansas scene. ...

 Literary correspondent Dorothy Brown Thompson wrote:

Why shouldn't more poets write about their own background instead of the isle of Capri sort of thing - especially an almost untouched field like our middle west? Probably because they don't see a sky mountain or the monstrous horn of a unicorn. You and William Allen White and John Stewart Curry give a three-faceted view of Kansas - utterly different but all true.

As I was reading her work, another of her poems struck a chord with me, and I remembered it again during wheat harvest.  Song Cycle: Farmer and Wheat placed fourth in a Kansas Authors Club poetry competition in 1921.

On this Kansas Day, here are more of Ward's words, with my photo illustrations, celebrating our Wheat State:

Wheat Farmer  (A Sequence)

I. Scene 

My valley is covered with riches

Gold wheat in the soft breeze blown;

More golden than gold itself for it blends

Two golds, the sun's and its own.

II. Action

I worked and I sweat and somehow

The complex rhythms of toil

Made contact that brought forth the beaded wheat

From the wedding of seed and soil.

It was magic. Moreover, provided

By the cunning planning of men

There was a miracle machine

For the working of magic again

The intricate harvester-thresher.

It slid though the yellowed field

Cut and winnowed and threshed and cleaned

And weighed and measured the yield

 Tons of my wheat at the market

Enough to cargo a ship

Has its bulk compressed (by magic again)

To a narrow paper slip

And so I pocketed my wheat crop.

With power to transmute it at will

Into heat and clothing and food and books

And a new white house on the hill;

But a part I shall change into solid coin

For something heavy to hold

A tangible weight to remind me

Of my labor turned into gold.

III. Gift

Wife, do you know what I dreamed last night?

I dreamed I sweat drops like dew

And they turned into gold and I gathered them up

And gave them to you.

Happy 158th birthday, Kansas! You sure look good to me!

Today, I get to spend part of my day reading my farm counting book to Kinley's first grade class in Manhattan and sharing these Kansas sunflower cookies I made. (Recipe to come in a future blog.)  It sounds like the perfect way to celebrate!