Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow by Dr. Jan Pol

Author:Dr. Jan Pol
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

On the Road Again, and Again, and Again

I’ve spent my life on farms. There’s no good reason to be a farmer; no matter how hard you work, you have to do it again tomorrow; nature is always fighting you and there’s never been much profit in it. My brother, also named Jan Pol, always said that farmers live poor and die rich. But if it’s in your blood, there’s no other place in the world that makes you feel content. My dad had forty acres; we had thirty cows and several Friesian horses, we were raising pigs, we had chickens for eggs, and we grew our own potatoes. Sometimes we had sugar beets. Those were the cash crops. There was always wheat and oats. When we moved into our area, my dad was considered a progressive farmer, and there were people who resented him. They weren’t looking for change. But he had a milking machine rather than doing the milking by hand, as it had always been done. And then he bought a machine that fluffed up the grass; in the Netherlands it’s hard to make dry hay, and this machine fluffed it up so it would dry faster. That was something people had never used, and there was some controversy about it, but when the other farmers saw how well it worked, they all went out and bought those machines too.

My main chore was milking the cows in the afternoon. After school I was always playing out in the field, so when it was time for me to do my job, we’d unhitch the horses and instead of walking them back to the pasture, I’d jump on the first one, hang on to the other one, and ride bareback as fast as I could to the first gate. Then I’d jump off. I was a kid; I never saw any danger. I started riding when I was six; when no one was looking, I climbed up on a wagon and got on a horse’s back and didn’t fall off. Even today I can’t ride in a saddle; give me a bareback and I’ll be fine.

All of our cows had family names. If they were descendants of Dina, for example, they were Dina 3 or Dina 4. I got to know animals very well, especially cows. I learned that there were some milking cows that wouldn’t mind anything—they didn’t mind being bothered—while other cows were just waiting for me to be in the wrong place so they could lift a leg. I had to be very fast to avoid them. If you have a really good look at my nose, you can see that I wasn’t always fast enough.

While every small farm may look different, the feeling of being in a place like this is always the same. If you’ve been lucky enough to grow up on a farm, there is a feeling of comfort and belonging that you get the instant you step into the barnyard. There’s a language

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