Word: kuesters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week, at Gus Kuester's, that battle was in full swing and its center was the farrowing shed. For food comes off Gus Kuester's farm on four trotters and squealing like a buzz saw. Poland China and Spotted Poland China hogs are the crop to which his whole farm economy is geared. The acres of corn, the acres of oats, the acres of hay exist chiefly to cram the maws of pigs and finish about 200 hogs a year as efficiently (that is, as quickly and cheaply) as possible to meet the exigencies of marketing...
Maternity Ward. There begin long, sleepless nights during which Gus Kuester may pace the center aisle of the farrowing barn like an expectant father. Often he beds down wakefully in an unoccupied farrowing pen. Most pig births are normal, but sometimes a little pig needs to be helped into the hungry world. Sometimes one is born in a covering caul which has to be ripped off by a profit-motivated finger. Sometimes the heaving, grunting sows, from weakness, clumsiness or distress, lie or roll on their farrow. Sometimes they try to eat them. Sweeter to a pig farmer...
...also an art and a mystery. The art consists chiefly in knowing what to do and how much; the mystery, in knowing when. That knowledge, largely intuitive, can be acquired only by a lifetime of handling animals. But Gus Kuester claims, and few pig farmers would deny, that a pig's future depends chiefly on how he is brought up in the first months...
...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...
After the oats are in, there is time out for the farrowing. Then it is high time to plough for corn. On the Kuester farm every kernel of corn is used for feed. Of the thousands of bushels he has grown over the years, Gus claims that he has marketed not more than 150 bushels. He has sometimes had to buy more corn...