The pastoral life

Sitting in a nice, high tech office in Denmark in an urbanized small city, Aarhus, not so different from where I usually live and work in Austin. Sometimes it seems it a bit remote and dreamlike that I really did grow up on a dairy farm in Idaho. So I have been trying to remember what it looked like. Maybe it was like this. No, that is a Dutch painting from the 1600s, "Young herdsman with cows," by Albert Cuyp, currently at “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Maybe it was like this. No, that seems to be a photo of a long lost Swiss cousin, with his prize bull, that I found on the Web. Nice lederhosen, yes?







Ah, here is the real thing. Back in Kuna, Idaho, one of my main jobs as a kid was feeding the calves, and young steers and heifers, who lived in this shed on our farm. You can just hearing her thinking, inasmuch as cows really did much of that, "Where's dinner"?


A thirty acre dairy farm with 12-15 cows did not make much money, so my Dad had to work six months of the year at a sugar beet processing plant to make ends meet. We both got tired of milking by the time I was in high school, so we got a one ton Hereford bull, which I named Ferdinand. (He really was quite gentle -- I guess nothing scares you when you are that big.) We gradually bred the herd over to beef instead of dairy. No more milking at twelve hour intervals. Here is a mixed Guernsey - Hereford cow and her calf in the main corral of our old farm.