Word: dales
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sidewalk farmers, who suppose that a ridgeling is the peak in a barn roof and a freemartin a species of swallow,*some of Gus's outbuildings and his hog runs might well give the jimjams. But Gus and Dale Kuester are among the best and most prosperous of Cass County farmers. Gus's homely barns and sheds are decisive outworks in the battle for food...
Every winter the Kuesters carry over as breeders about 40 of .the likeliest looking gilts (young females) and sows. Some are at Dale's, more than half at Gus's. In early April, at evening feeding, the Kuesters begin to sidle up to these elite pigs and delicately strip their swelling teats. If a drop of milk shows, the sow will probably farrow during the night. So she is rushed into the farrowing barn, which, jauntily topped by a weather vane in the form of a pig, has pens for 16 expectant gilts and sows...
...first crop in is oats. Oats cannot tolerate hot weather. As fast as the ground dries in March, it must be ploughed-usually in a race between rains. Up at 4 or half-past, Dale Kuester turns on the lights of his Massey-Harris "101" Senior tractor, rockets out to the gang plough and buzzes off for a working day that often ends, as it began, in darkness. Last March Dale Kuester ploughed 20 acres of oat land in 18 hours-something like making a 500-mile automobile trip in ten hours. By the second week in April the Kuesters...
Corn is planted (with a horse-drawn planter) about the second week in May. As soon as the green spikes pierce the black soil, it is cultivated with a rotary hoe. Dale Kuester claims that, when in form, he can hoe 80 acres between sunup and sundown. After three hoeings, there are two more complete cultivations with regular corn cultivators...
After corn-cultivating comes hay harvest and oat harvest (oats are threshed). Corn harvest begins in October with a mechanical picker owned in common by Dale and two of Gus's brothers. The Kuesters heave the corn from the first ripe field into Gus's barnlike crib, the next field into Dale's, and turn & turn about until the job is done. It is usually done in time for the strenuous work of loading the first finished pigs for market...