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!

Brrrr! It Was a Cold Day for a Cattle Round-Up

I needed a "defrost" mode for my glasses yesterday morning.
A defrost for my legs wouldn't have hurt either.

The cattle defrosted on their own during their semi ride to Pratt Livestock. Today, we'll sell 70 feeder calves, along with a baby calf whose mother has a cancer eye. 

All of us - humans and animals alike - were seeing our breath during the cold morning roundup before the semi arrived to transport the calves.

After several attempts, the cattle finally decided to go down the lane toward the corrals. Of course, on a cold morning with freezing drizzle sticking to my glasses, they couldn't do it the first time. It was a brisk 4-wheeler ride ... with no time to shoot photos.

In the photo above, you can see a straggling calf struggling through the mud. I looked up last year's post as we prepared to ship cattle. There's quite a contrast.

Last year, we'd had no moisture at all beginning in the fall and continuing until early spring. We were choking on the dust down the lane and in the cattle lots. This year, we are still waterlogged from the 14+ inches of rain that fell in October. There's no way a 4-wheeler could go down the lane.

And it was a whole lot chillier this year, as evidenced by the freezing drizzle that stuck to the cattle's hides.

I guarantee I was colder than they were.

Ours was the second load of the day for Darrel Harner Trucking out of Sylvia.

Once Darrel got the trailer backed up to the loading chute, it was time to send the feeders on their way. These were calves that were born in January and February of last year - 2018. After we weaned them in November, we've been feeding them silage and hay.

On Monday, we sorted off 25 heifers that will become first-time mothers in the County Line herd in 2020. The steers and the remaining heifers went to Pratt Livestock. Cattle buyers will purchase them for feedlots, where they will go until they are big enough to be harvested for meat. Let's hope the sub-zero wind chills and slick roads don't keep the cattle buyers away today!

Loading the truck is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. The trucker tells us how many head of cattle he wants in each group, somewhere between 7 and 12, depending on where they'll go in the cattle trailer. And we send them up the chute and into the truck.

It was a foggy trip to the sale barn.

When it was time our turn to unload, Darrel backed up the semi to the sale barn's chute.

 

An employee there counted the calves as they came off the truck.

Since Darrel started his day in Fredonia and the roads were a little slick, we had a little time between the cattle round-up and the semi's arrival.

I may have needed a defroster on my glasses, but the scenery was undeniably pretty.

 Stark ... but beautiful.

 The CRP grasses caught the icy frost as aptly as the cattle's hide.

 So did a dried flower at Peace Creek Cemetery.

A chain on the working chute provided another canvas for the clinging ice.

Today is even colder, with wind chills below zero. I'm glad the round-up was yesterday and we can spend the day in the relative warmth of the sale barn arena. It's never toasty warm, but it's better than a 4-wheeler ride!

Skipping Light at Quivira

 

On a cold winter evening, it was as if the heavens were "skipping light" instead of "skipping stones" across the surface of the ice at Little Salt Marsh at Quivira National Wildlife Refuge.

After several days of Kansas being in the "deep freeze," ice covered much of the surface of the water. As the sun sank, I watched the scene subtly shift, moment by moment.

We were at the spillway at the Little Salt Marsh, and even though much of the surface was frozen, we could hear the rush of water as it pushed underneath the surface and into another pond.

I thought about working my way down the rocky shore to the water's edge. But I decided that a view from above was better than breaking a bone or my camera. The view was just fine where I was ... even spectacular ... as I watched the colors of the sunset mimicked - though muted - on the icy surface, like fabric left too long in the sun.

As we drove away from that location, I asked Randy to stop a few hundred yards away at a place where I knew I could easily make it to shore.

Friday, January 5, 2018 (this photo and all those above)

But, by that time, the sun had already set, so it was no longer sparkling like diamonds across the ice. Still, it was beautiful in a subtle, less flashy way.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

We went back the next day, but by sunset, the skies were overcast. Again, there was no light skipping across the icy surface, though the beauty was undeniable, all the same.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Sunday night, we decided to test the theory of "third time's the charm." It was.

January 7, 2018 - This photo and all those below

I kept thinking of the Rihanna song which has that line that says, "shine bright like a diamond."

Earlier in the day, Pastor Nate gave an Epiphany message at church. January 6 - Epiphany - marks the end of the Christmas season or Christmastide in Western churches. Epiphany Day marks the observance of the arrival of the wise men and celebrates that the Light of the World - Jesus Christ - came to the Earth to live among us.

During the service, Pastor Nate played a recording of his son, Philip, lyrically reading a piece by poet B. Kevin Smalls:

“Spoken Word” by B. Kevin Smalls

Seemingly, the darkness has been so thick
not quick to trust anything resembling light
Might be a trick...and tricks don't always
lead to a treat, so I retreat in the darkness
hoping, slightly, ever so lightly that
my deepest fears will submit to the changing
of dark gears leading to light years of praise
and adoration.

Then, the light is not found, seemingly,
in the measure of the day but the Way
the voice appeared...it was the light
and life to all people and there was
no equal to its clear and present
demand.  I can, I believed. I can rise
right along with the sun.

Darkness is for lying down, laying down, hanging
around, pretending to be asleep.  All the
while the light slowly creeps between the
cracks in the blinds...which are unsuccessful
in stopping the invitation...to liberation...

arise, shine, the light has come...
arise, shine the light has come…

I remembered the message as the sun sank below the horizon and all that was left were the call of coyotes and the sound of birds as they took cover for the night on refuge waterways.

The warmer day had started the melting process at the refuge, creating a sort of "freeway" of paths across the surface of the waterway. And I thought about how each of us comes from a different place and takes a different path as we work to carry the light of Christ into the world. 

Being in God's beautiful world was the perfect benediction ... and an epiphany.