Today, silos in Whatcom County stand empty, towering monuments to old practices. Dairy farmers still feed silage, but their modern equipment stores it without a fuss in the giant white plastic wrapped marshmallows stacked in fields and barnyards.
This afternoon, I looked into one of my mother’s diaries and discovered that 54 years ago, instead of fretting over COVID-19 like everyone seems to be doing today, my dad was getting ready to fill the silo with grass silage.
Some farm events, like chicken catching and hog butchering, were almost celebrations; family, friends, and neighbors gathering to enjoy working together. Not silo filling. It meant days of hard heavy work amid howling equipment that shook the ground and pounded ringing ears. During silo filling, the men were on edge, worried about breakdowns and foul weather, trying not to dwell on the how the day could go wrong.
Farming is still a dangerous profession, but in the 50s and 60s, when farmers gathered at the old Hilltop on the Guide Meridian for a cup of coffee on a rainy afternoon, talk began with pleasant banter about milk prices, corn versus grass silage, and the merits of the fresh heifers on the block at the Everson auction. But as often as not, at some point, the conversation took a sober twist toward overturned tractors, hands mangled in spinning power take-off shafts, and falls that broke arms and legs.
In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field chopper and a blower. The machines were expensive, and they were used only for a few weeks each year. By combining their resources, Dad and the others were able to buy equipment they couldn’t afford individually. There was no contract or legal agreement. They just decided to pool their money and work together. I doubt that they even bothered to shake hands on it.
Each farmer supplied and outfitted their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is hauled on trucks or wrapped in plastic in the field, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons to move chopped grass to their silos. The wagons were outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to pull silage to the back of the wagon where it was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyor attached to the blower. I was proud and excited the first time Dad handed me a fork and told me to start pulling grass off the wagons. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the fodder already in the silo.
The largest and most powerful tractor pulled the field chopper. The howl of the chopper was loud enough to be heard from the silo, even when the machine was a half mile away. The chopper cut waist high grass, slashed it into one-inch lengths, and blew it into a silage wagon that trailed behind. When a wagon was full, another tractor dropped off an empty wagon and towed the full wagon to the silo. Driving the tractors hauling wagons between the field and blower was a prime job on a silage crew.
The blower fan was spun by a twenty-foot flat belt driven by a pulley mounted on a stationary tractor running with the throttle wide open. Log chains were attached to the tractor and twisted with a peavey to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor engine traveled for miles. The ground thumped and shook when hundredweight wads of silage hit the blower fan blades and were thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.
Inside the silo tower, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter, leveling the chopped grass, and tramping down air pockets that would spoil the silage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as strenuous as pulling the grass off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required hard fork work, especially when the silage was wet. The silos had to be filled quickly while the milk-producing protein content of the fodder was at its prime; the soaking squalls that come in off the Salish Sea in May, like we had last week in Ferndale, were no excuse to let up, despite the slackers’ grumbles.
As the silo filled, the work got harder as sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section disappeared, the green cascade of blown grass became more difficult to direct and the incoming silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.
About ten feet from the top, the pace became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the engine quickly, the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with silage. When the silage was on the dry side, a nimble and lucky crew could clear the pipe by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage would wedge in tight and the blower pipe had to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to dig out the clog.
Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a slick mud hole by rain and wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.
One sloppy wet year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and crumpled. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to rush him in our car to the emergency room at the county hospital on the corner of Northwest and Smith. They sewed up his wound and he returned to work. One of the other farmers hurried off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide for a replacement section of blower pipe while my dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the undamaged sections.
The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.
COVID-19 is horrible, life has always been hard, but working the farm was heroic in ways it has taken me a long time to recognize.