Saying Goodbye to the Old Homestead

You'd think there would be photos of a place where so much life was lived. 

But it was a different time. There wasn't a phone in everyone's pocket with a camera embedded inside. You had to roll film inside the camera, catching it in the spool before advancing. I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't get film inserted quite right a time or two and then finally figured out that I hadn't been taking photos for awhile.

You had to send the film off to be developed. There was no such thing as looking through a phone gallery to see what you got and immediately deleting the photo of Grandpa with his head cut off.

So I suppose it's not all that surprising that I couldn't find a single photo of the house where Randy's parents made a home after Melvin came back from serving in the Korean War. 

On this coming Saturday, June 4, we'll begin the process of turning that farmstead over to a new family. There will be an auction to sell Melvin & Marie's house and some acreage. 

As is usual in a small town, the rumor mill has been churning out information. For the record, Randy and I are not selling our own home. We are not moving away from Stafford. We do plan to close the chapter at the farmstead that has served as a Fritzemeier farming home base since the 1940s.

 

After wheat harvest, we'll have a farm sale of our equipment. Since Melvin & Marie's old house serves as the farm base, the house won't be available for the new family until after August 13, when our farm sale is scheduled.

Yes, there is some nostalgia. Yes, there are some mixed feelings. But it's also a feeling of relief not to be responsible for another house. After Melvin's death, we've used it for employee housing. And every time there was employee turnover, we put more money into that house. And, we've spent more money at that house, repairing damages, than we've spent in the house where we've personally lived for almost 37 years. 

So it's time. But it's also been a time to think about what the farmstead has meant to our family. As I said, I couldn't find a single photo of the old white farmhouse where Melvin and Marie built a farm and raised three children - Randy, Lyle and Kathy. 

 They brought each of their babies home to the white farm house, including Randy, their firstborn.

Lyle & Randy by the old house front door - Undated photo

There were a few pictures by the door or in the yard.

There were family Christmases.

Randy, Lyle, Kathy - Christmas 1969

Randy & Lyle, undated Christmas

And Marie and Melvin often hosted the extended Fritzemeier family Thanksgiving and Christmas parties, where Marie served her frozen banana punch and Melvin was responsible for the mashed potatoes. Those extended family gatherings fell by the wayside as that generation passed away. 

There were birthday parties. Those parties evolved into pizza parties in the basement for Randy's and his siblings' friends.

And there were plenty of parties among friends. Melvin and Marie hosted many a card party or Modern Homemakers EHU party at their house. 

I shared a few of those photos with a family who was planning a memorial service for one of those friends. 

 She wrote:

"These photos of our parents ... made me laugh.  They show a side of our parents that I never knew, hidden as it was in their past.  I’m somewhat envious of their lifelong friendships."

It's true: People don't take entertain like they used to do. 

But for the first time since the 1940s, Fritzemeiers won't have ownership at that place. Melvin's parents, Clarence and Ava, purchased an old farm house and some acreage back when Melvin and his sister, Gloria, were children. Before that, they'd rented several other places. But this new-to-them home was the first they'd owned. It also included a barn, a tin hay shed and some other outbuildings. 

 Eventually, they added a granary and some grain bins. They did take a photo of a new upright silo when it went into the farm yard. 

I used this comparison back in 2018 for a blog post of Randy's grandpa on the left and Randy on the right.

It's always been the farm's home base. The guys pulled the combines and tractors and discs in front of the shop to work on the inevitable broken parts. Sometimes, they pulled under the shade of big old trees, hoping to find a little relief from the summer sun for those repairs. Maybe those trees helped them avoid a little of the stereotypical "farmer's tan" - but not for long.

Big helpers - Randy & Lyle, undated photo in the old farm house kitchen

When Randy was a child, he remembers the sand pile by the wash house, where he and Lyle built many a road and "farmed" many an imaginary field. They climbed the trees. They batted balls. Randy remembers his dad trying to teach him to kick a football. Evidently, Melvin was a good kicker and punter for the Stafford Trojans. Randy says he must not have gotten that gene. 

This photo was taken in Stafford (not the house that's for sale)

Randy remembers playing with his Hornbaker cousins, who lived just down the road, and with his Ritts cousins, who sometimes visited from Ohio in the summer. When Gary, Ron & Marna came to visit, they built bike paths and played a board game called Tripoley. 

He learned to ride a bike on that dirt driveway, doing his share of daredevil tricks. He wasn't the only bike rider in the family. Randy's grandma Ava is on the bicycle in the far left of the photo. (If anyone can ID the other people, we'd love to know!)

 

Randy thinks he may be the "victim" in this photo below, where the silo is again in the background.

Randy remembers putting up hay in little square bales and then driving it into the farm yard, where they filled a couple of sheds for the winter. It was a great muscle builder for junior high and high school boys. 

Melvin with a calf in the farm yard

The corrals were the backdrop for years of feeding and working cattle and the scrapes and bruises that go with that.  

Clarence

Marie and cattle - I'm pretty sure this was taken to send to Melvin when he was in Korea. She definitely didn't dress up this much for her normal day on the farm!

The homestead welcomed a menagerie of dogs and cats throughout the years.

Grandma Ava and dog Tiny

Marie & "old Fuzzy" cat - as it says on the back of the photo

After Randy's sophomore year in college, Melvin and Marie moved a modular home onto the site, replacing the old farm house. That brick split level was one where they welcomed me as a new member of the family 41 years ago. 

And, honestly, I don't have many photos of that house either. There are photos of the people who lived there and the life that was lived. Honestly, I didn't dig through my tubs of photos in the basement to see if I could find photos of my kids playing, with the house in the background. No time for that with other things to do. (We did have a wedding last weekend. I can't wait for the official photos! And, if I'm honest, the packed-to-the-brim tubs from my kids' lives are overwhelming, and I have plenty of other spots to declutter first!)

Visiting Grandma & Grandpa at Halloween. Of course, Grandpa had a surprise for them, too!

Since Melvin and Marie's house was only two miles away from ours, Jill and Brent were frequent visitors. They stood on chairs and helped Marie cook. They pulled pots and pans out of the cupboards. They played with the toys that had been put away in the closet from Randy's and his siblings' childhoods.

Marie would hide plastic Easter eggs for the kids year 'round. Other than at Easter time, they didn't have anything special in them, but it was the thrill of the hunt, I guess. 

We gathered around a pickup bed to shuck corn. Jill and Brent would wield their own washrag from Grandma Marie, using her method to try and remove the silks from the corn cobs.  After their attention span waned, they'd run around the yard, playing where their ancestors had played before them.  

Randy says he remembers when the new house was moved in. He remembers watching it come down the road, toward the farm. I can't believe they didn't take photos. If they did, I don't know where they are.

Not all that long ago, both of us got tears in our eyes as we watched the semi depart from that farmstead with the final group of feeder calves that we'd raise and feed from the time they were babies to watching them go through the sale barn. 

November 2021

 (We're still involved and retain ownership. We're just not responsible for the day-to-day tasks.)

Yes, there are more memories than I can list. 

 

And we hope that will be true for the new family who will live there, too.

Our Littlest Consumers: Sharing the Message

This littlest consumer is what agricultural education is about.  Hadley was her mommy Erica's tagalong during a blogger gathering I went to last week. Like me, Erica's Whimsical September blog is a mishmash of who she is - a Mommy, a military wife, a woman of faith, a closet fashionista, a recipe experimenter and a workout advocate.

There are some overlaps on our interest lists and favorite blog topics, but there are differences, too.  We both came to Baldwin Farms in McPherson County to learn and to connect with other bloggers for a farm tour and sweet corn picking. It was Erica's first time at a Kansas farm. She grew up in Alabama and lives in Manhattan while her husband is stationed at Fort Riley.

For me, farming is an integral part of who and what I am, the very fabric of my life as a fifth-generation Kansas farm from both my family and Randy's family.

But, for both of us, family is of utmost importance. Just like me, Erica wants what is best for her family, including what we put on their dinner plates.

Giving consumers accurate information is what I most appreciate about what Kim and Adam Baldwin (along with his parents, Dwight and Cindy) are doing through farm tours. Kim also is a volunteer for Common Ground, whose slogan is "Make food choices based on facts, not fear." With so many food choices available, Common Ground serves as a resource to help consumers sort through the myths and misinformation surrounding food. Volunteers help consumers discover that America's farmers produce food that is safe, affordable, accessible and nutritious - whether it's from conventional or organic farms, whether the seeds used are GMO or non-GMO, and the myriad of other choices U.S. consumers are privileged enough to make.

The sweet corn is the shorter plant. This human treat was nestled in a circle of field corn, which will be used for livestock feed and other commercial uses.

Kim and Adam spend a lot of time giving farming a "face." Kim shares information through her blog, Alive and Well in Kansas. They show snapshots of farm life through Instagram and Twitter. They're active with Farm Bureau and state and national producer organizations.

 

During the Baldwin Farms tour, I watched as Hadley stood next to corn that was more than triple her height. She pulled back the husk and silks and sunk her baby teeth into corn that had just been plucked from the field. The sweet corn seed was Seminis produced by Monsanto. It was right next to field corn also raised with Monsanto seed.

Hadley's mom got the same handouts I did. Kim, who is an educator at Inman High School, gave us a Farm Vocabulary Cheat Sheet in true teacher form. I'm sure the terms like "no-till" and "dryland" and "double crop" were new to Erica, while they are second nature to me.

She got to see that terminology in action when we walked into a non-irrigated field where the Baldwins had no-till planted milo after wheat harvest. 

But I figure what spoke most fluently to Erica was seeing Kim's and Adam's son, Banks, in that field with his Mom and his new puppy, Milo.

He was with his Grandpa Dwight in the sweet corn field, picking corn.

And he and his Daddy had a conversation in the soybean field just across from the corn field while they waited on all of us to pick as much sweet corn as we wanted.

The Baldwins' 2 year old was out in the fields with his parents and grandparents. He will be eating the GMO sweet corn that his parents raised. As he sinks his teeth into corn on the cob in the coming years, they'll discover whether he's a methodical typewriter-carriage-type of corn eater or someone who prefers the hunt-and-peck method.

The Baldwins put a name to a face for consumers. They open their farmstead to visitors from China and Japan through Adam's efforts with the Sorghum Checkoff. Their littlest ambassador - their 2-year-old son - charmed a recent trade delegation from China with his skills on his Strider bike, tooling around the machine shed.

Connecting with consumers is what I try to do when I take crop photos and share them along with other photos in the "family album" of Kim's County Line." It's why I do step-by-step photo posts of alfalfa production or show the 9-month life cycle of wheat.

Bloggers from left: Jenny Burgess, Kim Baldwin, Kerry Wiebe, me and Erica DeSpain.

It's what other Kansas farm bloggers are doing. Some 99 percent of the people who grow food in the U.S. are family farmers. At the blogger event, I loved meeting a few people from my social media network. I shook hands with first-generation farmer Jenny instead of interacting through the Farmer's Wives Facebook group and learned more about her blog, Farm Wife Transparency.  I met some new-to-me bloggers, Kerry, from I Married A Milkman, who, with her husband owns and operates Keriel Dairy near Whitewater, the last remaining dairy in Butler County.

There was another Kim blogger. (We had a lot of Kims at this event, but Kim Fee is not pictured above.) Kim Fee runs Sunflower Supper Club in Hutchinson with her friend and business partner, Julie Kimmel, (and there are lots of recipes on her site that I'm anxious to peruse and try)!

The machinery that Adam showed us was familiar to me. But we can always learn something new. They have cameras hooked up on their equipment, helping them see the back of the sprayer to make sure it's working or helping them see any vehicle traffic jams they are creating as they travel from field to field. (Dwight told us farm wives that if our farmers are wanting to add the cameras that it's a good investment, both for safety and efficiency. Perhaps for chiropractor bills, too, to prevent some of that constant neck strain from turning around to look at what's going on behind you.)

I also learned about drip system irrigation. While we are dryland farmers, my parents and brother use center pivots for irrigation, and, back when my Dad was just getting started, my sister and I rotated wheels on the system to move it from one pivot to the other. Drip system irrigation uses sub-surface tape to apply water and nutrients to a crop. Through technology and sensors, specific amounts of water can be applied to crops throughout the growing cycle. Technology is making a difference in conserving water - one of our most precious resources.

At the Baldwin Farm, just like on the County Line, plants are nourished with fertilizer and sprayed with herbicide to combat weeds and insecticides to combat infects (as needed). The Baldwins, like us and other farmers, observe the regulations for application and the time restrictions before harvest. It costs money to apply these "extras" and to use quality seed. But it's part of our commitment to producing quality and safe products for human and livestock consumption.

 

We want it to be: For consumers like Hadley and Banks, our own families and the rest of the world. 

Disclaimer: My meal and a portion of my travel expenses were paid for by Monsanto.  I also received promotional items from Kansas Farm Bureau, Common Ground, Kansas Wheat and the Soybean Checkoff. And we are thoroughly enjoying our free sweet corn from Baldwin Farms. However, all opinions expressed are my own.

Get a Mooo-ve On by Kinley Marie

Hello! It's Kinley Marie, getting a "moo-ve" on at my Grandpa's and Grandma's farm.

I was there with my family to celebrate Thanksgiving and an early Christmas. We were going to have our own feast for the second day in a row! But the cattle needed their breakfast first. I learned that a farmer has to make sure his animals are fed, even when there are important things to do - like open presents!

Grandpa wanted me to ride with him in their big, big, BIG feed truck. I said, "No, no, NO!" It was much too big and much too loud. So Grandma and I followed behind him in the pickup.

Once Grandpa got to Peace Creek, he turned the big truck around and went through the gate to the silo.

Jake was in the tractor and got silage in his tractor scoop. (Click on the silage link to learn more about silage on my Grandpa's and Grandma's farm. I am not the only writer in the family.)

He dumped scoops into Grandpa's feed truck. I counted them, "1, 2, 3!"

Then Grandpa drove down the road into another lot and unloaded silage into the bunks.

Jake brought two bales of hay on the back of the tractor.

Soon, the cattle came running! I guess they were hungry.

I watched them eat. Silage must taste better than it looks and smells.

There was a calf looking in the mirror at me while I was looking at his friends!

Once we got back to the farmyard, Grandpa picked up a handful of silage and showed it to me. I was glad I was getting homemade pizza for lunch instead of silage.

Feeding cattle was quite an adventure. I had plenty to tell my fellow preschoolers when I got back home. They know all about Old MacDonald. But I know a real farmer, and he's my Grandpa!

But, I have to be honest (since my Mommy and Daddy say that's important). I liked swinging even better than feeding the calves and the kitty cats. I know I can swing at home, too, but I really do like Grandma and Grandpa's swing in their backyard.

Until next time,
Kinley Marie

P.S. My sister did not get to go on the expedition to feed the calves. She also did not get to swing. Sorry, Brooke. Maybe next time.