Growing Up on a Nebraska Farm

This book documents all the segments in the transition from dryland farming to irrigated farming with gated pipe. It starts with a dirt ditch with cuts made in the side of the ditch to wooden lathe nailed together to form a tunnel from the ditch to the field. It also documents the use of siphon tubes and irrigation ditches laid out on a gradient. Land leveling was introduced to the fields and to the irrigation ditches. Later, gated pipe replaced the siphon tubes.

The book documents one family’s transition from about 1938 to about 1967. The farm grew from 320 acres to more than one thousand acres with corn yields more than quadrupling in that period in some fields. It documents a community barn dance during one winter’s blizzard and attending a one room country schoolhouse with twenty-five students in the entire school. Later, during school consolidation, the country school was transferred to the local town school where each class had twenty-five students. We had access to school buses and a hot lunch program.

Machinery evolved from John Deere B’s with about fifteen horsepower pulling two-row equipment to John Deere 4020’s.with eighty or more horsepower pulled eight-row equipment plus harvest was done with self-propelled combines with four to eight row heads. The change in farm production was dramatic. As the old corn picker was replaced with the self-propelled combine, so were the corn sheds replaced with grain bins.