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Most of the farm was planted in alfalfa (or Lucerne, an important legume), because the deep roots allow this crop to thrive in a desert climate. This was one of the first crops to be domesticated in Iran, possibly as early as 3,500 B.C.3.172 We rotated the fields with grain and corn. There were large wheat storage bins, and a steam roller for breaking the wheat and making rolled oats for the cattle we fed out. Corn was stored in silage pits, and fed to the 50-100 cattle in the feed yard twice a day, along with some grain, and hay. The hay was baled and stacked in the feed yard. I have very bad allergic reactions to hay, to pollens, and to molds, and this became the primary reason I became a geophysicist instead of remaining a farmer in Southern Utah.
During the summers we had crickets and grasshoppers, ants and beetles, caterpillars and butterflies, maggots and flies, and lots of other insects. I loved to listen to the meadowlarks and the pheasants sing while changing the irrigation water, or working out in the fields. While I was growing up, Grandma Nelson raised hundreds of chickens in a chicken coop in back of her house. We used to have incubators to keep the eggs warm. There would be lots of little chickens in the spring. I remember learning chickens do not have teeth. They have a gizzard where their food gets ground up. They need to have little rocks in their gizzard to grind up their food. Grandma Nelson would go to the big red ant piles and get buckets of well sorted tiny rocks the ants had collected and put these in the chicken coops for the chickens to eat. These rocks would end up in their gizzard so they could grind up their food. Then when the chickens got old enough they either were layers, who would lay eggs for breakfast, or fryers, who were boiled and plucked for dinner. It was quite an operation when it was time to kill, boil, pluck, and freeze the fryers.
Once I caught a baby great horned owl, which I named George, and kept in one of Grandma Nelson's unused chicken coops. It could not digest the raw meat from the meat packing plant, and so I ended up catching mice and killing birds to feed it. As the owl got bigger, it became harder and harder to provide enough food, and so I turned it loose after a few months. Of course, there were horses and dogs and cats. Dad also experimented with mink, guinea fowl, and free range chickens. We dug up earthworms for fishing. There are a dozen trout reservoirs and streams within an hour drive of the farm, with is great fly fishing. We had to keep the Prairie Dog population down because of the problems their burrows caused when irrigating fields. Because Prairie Dogs are an endangered species, this became a problem for Dad in the years after I left home.
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paradoxes