Life Lessons From a Dairy Farm: A Cow Patty Story

On this episode of Our American Stories, listener and longtime Our American Stories contributor Katrina Hine shares a personal story from one of her first jobs out of high school, working as a dairy hand in rural Kansas. From whistling cows in from the pasture during brutal winter weather to learning the hard way why you never put your head under a cow’s tail, her story is a reminder that some of life’s most lasting lessons come not from classrooms or corner offices, but from honest work and unexpected moments on the job.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and up next
we have a listener's story from Katrina Hine. Katrina has
contributed to our show in many ways, but this story
is a personal story from one of Katrina's early jobs
out of high school entitled cal Patty. Here she is
with a story.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
As a child, I had the good fortune to have
grandparents that lived on a farm in southeast Kansas near
a little spot in the road called Bartlett. The highlight
of my summer and the best memories I ever had
growing up were on that farm. In fact, some of
my earliest memories were of the old dairy barn behind
the house that was surrounded by colorful hollyhocks and wild roses.

(00:59):
One can explain it to you, but for those of
us who are familiar with dairy barnes, know that one
of the best smells on a farm is in that
dairy barn, besides the recycled grasscourse. I remember walking into
the dairy barn on chilly mornings and being met by
the whorrying of the milking machine, the warmth of a

(01:20):
pot bellied wood stove, and the mixed scent of sweet feed,
milk and bleach. The rhythm of the milkers and the
radio plane Hank Williams in the background could almost rock
you to sleep. My Uncle Vernon, an old bachelor, moved
back to the farm when I was a teenager to
run the dairy, and he named all the cows beautiful

(01:41):
Hollywoods sounding names like Betty and Esther, Dolly and Clara.
We never were quite sure about Uncle Vernon. Each morning
I was met with the sound of a farm report
from the local KGGF radio station, the smell of biscuits
baking and bay popping in the hiss of the old

(02:02):
coffee pot. Granddad bands it was always up before the sun,
and never ate anything less than biscuits and white gravy,
several pieces of bacon, two eggs, and coffee liberally sweetened
with overflowing tablespoons of sugar. By the way, he lived
to be ninety nine years old. First thing each morning,

(02:22):
Uncle Vernon would carry in a bucket of fresh milk,
still warm and straight from the cow. Other than a
little specker dirt and some cow hair. It was wonderful.
Grandma did skim off the dirt and she would blow
the cream back while she poured the milk into a
little pitcher on the dining room table. Jump forward several years.

(02:44):
I was out of high school and somewhat ambivalent about
what I wanted to do. I had worked summers at
the local sonic while I was in school, but I
really preferred to be outside. After graduation, I worked in
Estes Park, Colorado, first on a dude ranch and then
later at the Lazybee Chuck Wagon dinners and show for
that first summer out of school. After those summer jobs

(03:07):
had ended and I headed back to Kansas, I knew
I didn't want to go back to work at the
family hardware store, so I searched the area papers and
found an ad for a female dairy hand near Coffeeville, Kansas.
This is exactly what I wanted to do, because I
loved farming. I got the job on the spot and
started immediately. The dairy was much larger than my grandparents'

(03:30):
little thirty cow operation, and the equipment was state of
the art automatic milkers. The owners had wanted to hire
a woman because the man before had beat the cows
until they were too afraid to come up to the barn,
and when they did, their milk production was low. This
was also the same year that Jim Stafford's song cow

(03:52):
Patty came out on the radio. Little did I know
at that time how cow Patty would apply to my
new job. My first challenge was to get the cows
comfortable with coming up to the barn. I found out
real quick that the pasture where the cows were kept

(04:13):
was huge, and chasing them around every day took a
lot of time. There were one hundred and fifty five
head of Holsteins and about four guernseys to add just
the right amount of butterfat to the milk. So I
decided to try something. I would whistle every day that

(04:34):
I went out to the pasture to bring the cows
up to the barn. I would whistle. I would whistle
the same thing every day until I found out that
they were paying attention. Finally, a few weeks later, I
was able just to stand at the back door of
the barn and whistle as loud as I could, and
here they would come. The winter of that year was

(04:56):
particularly harsh, with below zero temperatures for wind and freezing rain.
The cows would slip and fall on the hard ground,
and sometimes we'd have to use a front end loader
to raise them up. Back on their feet. No one
ever said milking cows was glamorous or easy, but there
were times that it went to the extreme rather quickly.

(05:17):
I hate to admit this, but sometimes I do silly things,
and one very cold day I did a humdinger. We
had just let some fresh heppers into the main herd,
and this was a challenge in itself because they had
never been milked before and their utters were small. The

(05:37):
milk parlor was designed to prevent the cows from kicking
you in the head, with a long piece of sheet
metal running parallel to a raised concrete floor. The cows
would run up the ramp onto the raised concrete and
stop in front of the movable grain trough about four
feet above the main floor. I had all the cows
run in and I noticed that I could not see

(05:59):
that of one of the cows. I had got all
the other cows going and hooked up to the machines,
and then proceeded to try to feel around for the
utter on what I assume was a fresh heifer. I
just remember thinking, this girl is really long legged. I
can't reach her utter. Impulsively, I stuck my head under
the sheet metal to see where to hook the milker

(06:20):
and got two very big surprises. The first was that
it was not a heifer but a young steer, and
the second was a huge hot pile of green, gritty
manure on my head. Normally I wore a ball cap,
but not that day, and the hot mess of green
grass and sunshine almost burned my head. Let me tell

(06:41):
you that stuff was hot. So in a rush, I
grabbed the water hose and tried to get the green
mess that was the consistency of wet sand out of
my long hair. I got part of it out, but
what remained was equal to smelly hair jail. The other
factor I had not concealed was that it was nearly
ten degrees below outside, and I still had to go

(07:05):
get another group of cows, blade the lot, and then
feed the calves. Needless to say, my hair froze solid,
not flat on my head, but partially standing up in
a green, grainy appearance. And of course, of all days,
the boss decides to come in and notices that something
is a miss with my hair. We chat for a
couple minutes, with him staring at my hair the whole time,

(07:28):
but then he finally decides to leave, and then turns
around to me and says, uh, I should ask, but
I don't think I will, and he walks out, just
shaking his head. It took a couple days of hard
scrubbing to get that gritty mess out of my hair,
so it wasn't so stiff anymore and not quite so fragrant.
The lesson I learned that day on the dairy farm

(07:50):
is don't stick your head under a cow's tail to
find it's utter, because you might just come up with
quite a shock and some free hair product.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
And a great job on the production by Faith and
the editing, and a special thanks to Katrina Hine for
sharing her own personal experience with early work life in
rural America. And anyone who's grown up on a farm
is around farms or barns. I spend a lot of
time in barnes, and I have a lot of poop
stories too. You actually get accustomed to it. You don't

(08:24):
even smell it over time, of course, unless it falls
on your head, live and hot. What a story, What
an experience. She will not stick her head underneath the
cow's tail anytime soon. A special thanks to Katrina for
sharing that story. We do dog walker stories in New
York City and well, cowpoop stories on farms, everything here

(08:47):
on Our American Stories to share with you the rich
and varied life of Americans in this great country. The
story of Cow Patty, Katrina Hines's story here on Our
Americans Stories.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
H