If you want living proof that farming is an art not a science look at me. Any pseudo intellectual Jew (that's me) would always try to sincerely prove that education, reading and intellect can overcome can any genetic generated ignorance. Bronx Jews, milking cows, breeding and feeding hogs and cattle plus buying hay and corn just doesn't work.
So I read everything known to men, women, dogs and children about farming. The Department of Agriculture printed a yearly volume describing procedures to doing everything and anything relating to farming short of having sex with sheep (not my thing). So I scoured years of those volumes.
The net result was that I was a walking disaster as a farmer and as a Mid Westerner. I lost my ass with everything except sheep where I had an expert counseling me. I had 84 Purebred Holstein milk cows and something was happening every day. I bought 25 Black Angus calves at the St. Paul livestock sale. I fed them out and made money. The next year I bought 50 and made money again. Ah, now I was a genius! I bought 200 white face calves for feeding. But I couldn't understand why my feed lot was the only feed lot in the neighborhood with animals in it. Prices went to hell and every day that those animals put on a pound or two, I was losing money per pound. You couldn't move them because they would lose too much weight so I couldn't sell them until they reached 1,100 pounds (from 300). Lost my ass!!!
I bought corn futures for $1.50/bushel and watched the price go to $2.50. But then Eisenhower gets elected and appoints Ezra Taft Benson as Secretary of Agriculture who says that he only believes in price supports in times of disaster and thereby causes a commodity disaster. Corn went off the limit every day, and I barely got out with my 10% margin money. I was the ultimate mullet (a fish that's easy to catch) for those "honest" Iowa farmers who unloaded wet corn (purchased to feed the feeder cattle), wet hay and falsely documented feeder pigs that grew to die on a daily basis. The rendering works loved me.
But I "got even". I had purchased yet another horse (I hate horses. They are for me big, dumb dangerous animals whose latest best friend is anyone that feeds them an apple). This horse was a big black beauty who got into the high protein hog feed. He foundered...hooves and arteries expand to where the horse is immobile and "on fire". We dug a ditch around the son of a bitch and ran a cold water hose on his hooves for a week whereupon he could move pretty well until he stumbled, and he always did. When I had my sale to get out of that awful business, I became an "honest" Iowa farmer and sold him to another schmuck farmer. My next blog will be on how breeding and feeding hogs was a disaster for me to the point where I had 200 pound Red Durocs dying of heart attacks.
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