- Oct 8, 2023

Ag Innovation

Group of people with new technology on the background

Through many hours of holding a flashlight for my dad, I learned that some issues require an out of the ordinary fix. If that fix doesn’t cost a lot of money, then it is even better and one to be told about for generations.

Down the street from me there lives an older couple in their mid-80s. They welcome me into their home for a visit whenever I have time. We talk about a wide variety of things but one afternoon we started talking about how their families adopted new technology and we went all the way back to when television first came about.

The husband had grown up on a farm with his second-generation German parents and his younger brother.

When the family bought their first television, they also fashioned a tall tower next to the house to mount the antenna to. This meant they also needed a hole to run the cord from the antenna mounted on the tower to the television inside the house. Nothing doing, a .22-caliber rifle was loaded, aimed, and fired producing a hole through the side of the house to run the cord. Maybe not the best example of German engineering but it got the job done.

Farm kids learn to just get the job done in many ways. When my children were younger, they had sheep in our backyard for their 4-H projects. One year we had a ewe lamb that just wouldn’t put on any weight. I worried we would find her hooves up one morning, but she survived. It finally came to the point where we needed to sell her instead of paying to keep feeding her. Logistics were discussed and sale day just happened to land on a day when my husband needed to be out of town for a meeting. That meant the job fell to me.

My dad may have trusted me to hold the flashlight for him but he didn’t let me anywhere near his 30-foot stock trailer, so I have little to no trailer experience. Just forget about me backing it up too. Our stock trailer was nowhere near that big but I was not about to risk metal fenders and tires for a 50-pound lamb. Luckily, I drove a Chevy Tahoe at that time. A couple of cheap plastic tablecloths from the dollar store and a borrowed dog kennel later, I had my rig set up to haul a lamb to the sale. I got the job done and bought a new car air-freshener after I dropped her off at the sale barn. I also threw away the tablecloths. It was a cheap fix to expensive problem that will be told about for generations to come.