This is a photo looking south from Ed's farmstead. Ed has been here on this farm since the 1950s. Its been a dairy farm and now he raises some beef and a few horses as well as hays quite a few acres on his place and around town.
Ed holds quite a few appointed positions for the town. I don't know how long he has held them, but I bet its been a while. They include: Animal Control Officer, Fence Viewer, Inspector of Lumber/Shingles, and Weigher of Coal. The last two positions are probably obsolete as these are not in use much like they were years ago. Some Vermont towns remove these appointed positions since they are not in use. I suspect ours will when Ed feels like he can no longer serve. Ed says he is 72, but he looks and works like he is in his 50s.
His farm has a wonderful assortment of old farm machinery on it and whenever I think I might need a part or an implement I give Ed a call. That was the case a few weeks ago when I was looking for an old hay wagon to build a moveable chicken coop. So I called Ed and asked if he knew someone who might have an old one for sale. He said "Yup... me". So I hurried on over and he took me back through a maze of machinery and showed me an old wagon frame. Just the ticket. We settled on a price and just the other day I finally got over there to pick it up. The tongue was rusted up a bit so Ed and I heated and lubed it up to unfreeze it. He hitched it to the tractor and ran it around the farm turning it back and forth and finally it loosened up enough for me to drive it 6 miles down the road to the farm.
Tyler and I will be working on getting a coop built on this frame over the next few days. Then we can move their housing around the pasture instead of being locked down to one location.
We younger farmers are fortunate to have the old timers around. I like to visit with them and hear their stories. You can sure learn a lot from them just by listening. And when I visit Ed my ears are wide open.
1 comment:
We have a great old farmer neighbor. Dick retired about 5 years ago, sold his cows, machinery, and farm and built a house about half a mile from the farm. He is also one of these guys who can run circles around people half his age. He is my go to guy for hauling cattle, and I think he spends more time baling my hay every summer than I do. He likes his JD 3020 tractor better than my Oliver, so he usually hooks that to my baler (which he knows inside and out because it used to belong to him). That frees me up to stack bales in the barn and jockey wagons back and forth. He was looking for something to do last week so he built some fence on his ten acres so that I could pasture my horses down there, freeing up more of my pasture for cows. My kids all think of him and his wife Linda as grandparents. And on top of all the help he is a warehouse of information, and he knows everyone, so anything I am ever looking for he can find. I hope he lives forever.
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