Grandpa’s Cash Crop

As a young boy, growing up on a dairy farm was exciting.  One of my jobs each morning when not in school was to ride my trusty horse, Sunshine, to take the cows to the pasture for a day of grazing after they had been milked.  Each evening I repeated this process in reverse to bring them back from the pasture so they could be milked.  They stayed in the coral overnight.  I loved riding Sunshine.  I rode bareback so I had to lead her to a rail fence in order to get high enough to jump onto her back.  Once aboard, I thought I was in control, but I really wasn’t.  She knew exactly where we were going and what we were doing.  I was along mostly to open and close the gates.  The pasture where the cows would spend their days was almost a mile away from the barnyard.  What Sunshine and I did to move the cows back and forth was important and helpful to my Grandpa and it made me feel older and more important than I really was.  As a boy I never viewed it as work.  As I became a young man it became less an exciting adventure and more like work.  Grandpa had several different kinds of  animals and grew several different crops but his cash crop was milk.  It was the product he sold for the money he needed to buy the things he couldn’t grow, raise, or produce himself.  Each morning a large milk truck would arrive from the city to pick up the milk that he’d stored in a cold water bath in sturdy steel cans until the truck arrived.  For me it was a rite of passage to finally be able to carry a full milk can.  The truck driver would record the amount of milk he’d received and Grandpa would bank another day’s profit.  There were an amazing number of tasks that went into producing the milk he needed to sustain his family.  Most of what Grandpa did was aimed at caring for the cows that produced the milk.  He grew barley and alfalfa for feed.  Each spring he would have to plow, harrow, and level a field for the barley before it could be planted.  Then the field would need to be furrowed to make irrigation easier.  The crops would have to be flood-irrigated with water channeled through a system of ditches that had to be dug and constantly maintained.  The irrigating was done on a rotational basis and the water came when it was your turn, regardless of your circumstances.  The alfalfa had to be cut, raked, baled, hauled, and stacked.  The barley had to be harvested, stored, and ground so the cows could more easily digest it.  Feeding took place twice daily.  The cows had to be milked morning and night.  The milking machines had to be kept clean and functional.  The air compressor that drove the milking machines had to be maintained.  The stalls had to be kept clean.  The health of the cows had to be maintained.  The herd had to be constantly monitored.  Replacements had to be bred or purchased.  All this was done with the object of producing milk, which was his cash crop.  Everything Grandpa did fell into place because he knew what his cash crop was.  I have come to understand that Grandpa had a prioritized focus on the one thing that was most important to him.  I don’t know how Grandpa decided to become a dairy farmer.  I don’t know how any person decides upon their cash crop.  It is so easy to be distracted by things of lesser importance.  These types of things, while not necessarily or inherently bad, can consume time and effort that would be better applied to more important matters.  This has been a hard lesson for me to learn.  It took me a long time to identify my cash crop.  I meandered through that early part of my life with no clear objective.  I was more reactive than proactive.  I didn’t particularly like schoolwork.  I couldn’t see its value.  It just seemed boring.  I looked at my peers and they all seemed far more competent than me in many areas of life and by making the mistake of comparison, I just drifted.  I did manage to graduate from High School, an accomplishment I now realize was due more to my parents’ persistence and the rural environment of the small school I attended.  I attended one quarter of college where I promptly displayed amazing academic inadequacy that prompted me to try another collegiate location.  But alas, at the new school I was met with the same experience and outcome.  Pursuant to my academic failure I decided to get a job instead of pursuing any more educational angst, which I did until leaving to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in western Canada from 1968 to 1970.  It was while serving on that mission that my cash crop began to take shape.  I had the opportunity to teach some Church Institute classes at the University of Lethbridge.  It was like I had come home.  I loved talking about and teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to students.  It was invigorating.  During the course of that class I determined that when I returned home I would give college the “old college try” one more time with designs on qualifying to become a Seminary teacher for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Unbelievably, I was allowed to enroll at Brigham Young University.  BYU was a training ground for future seminary teachers.  I joined a group of about 350 young men and women with whom I shared the same objective.  The very first time we met together we were informed that of those 350 aspiring applicants, only about 20 would be hired.  I faced a daunting winnowing process.  But I knew what I wanted and now I knew exactly how to get it.  I was undeterred by the unlikely possibility of success.  That initial announcement of reality discouraged many and the herd was thinned considerably.  From that point forward I did better academically than ever before.  Studying now became supportive of producing my cash crop and that made all the difference for me.  That I never achieved my objective is a story for another day but identifying and prioritizing my cash crop changed the entire direction of my life and serves me well to this day.