Grandpa Paul’s farm in New York didn’t use an incubator to hatch the first chickens that lived here. The little granddaughter that asked about the chooks has long ago lost her Australian accent. Now she speaks with her hands, trained in sign language, which I understand is actually different in Australia. The first chickens we had on the farm came in the mail.

The mailman in our tiny post office knows everybody and called us one morning asking if we were expecting a noisy package. We were. The chicks came in a specially constructed box, and they were certainly noisy. I had placed a minimum order on line, to the Murry McMurray hatchery in Indiana. They had been in their little box, prisoners without food or water for a couple of days and now wanted to eat. They all survived, even the extra one, so I had chickens on my farm. I had also purchased some calves from my neighbor and they were growing rapidly.

When is a farm not a farm? My son kidded me saying “I was just playing around and it wasn’t really a farm.” A neighbor, who prepares tax returns, said I didn’t need to report my farm income as there was so little.

Maybe farms just lose money, even though they have an income from selling animals, hay, and the regular milk check. They also have feed expenses, fuel expenses, payments on loans for machinery and all the maintenance expenses. The mortgage on the farm will never be paid off. They do, however, qualify to be registered as a farm and must comply with all the relevant government regulations. Farmers earn less than minimum wage and are basically working for the banks.

Real farms have tax free numbers and don’t pay taxes on all the parts they buy at Springers, Tractor Supply, Agway or other farm stores. They don’t pay tax on farm fuel either.

I never did try to register Grandpa’s Farm, and obtain a tax free number, since the farm was not our primary source of income and I just enjoyed the work. I guess I agreed with my son that it was something like a hobby farm.

I decided, however, to establish accounts for my farm, since I was required to report any earnings over $600 to the IRS. I doubted the earnings would ever exceed the expenses, but I faithfully reported the calculated net gain or loss as determined by my simple accounting. When I sold off the last of my cows, including Chai, about six years later, my farm finally realized its first profit, increasing my taxable income by about $600 that year.

I was finally in total agreement with my son, admitting it was just a hobby farm after all, and I quit doing the accounting and reporting the net gain or loss. It was just Grandpa’s farm, a wonderful place to share life when family members come home.

The grandkids named the cows, and I especially remember Chai, Curly Ginger, Poppy, a couple lazy fat steers, and the free-range heifer that refused to be caught when we wanted to give her to our neighbor.

Curly Ginger got her name from one of the grandkids. Every family farmer knows which calf came out of which cow and names every cow, but I can’t be sure of Curly Ginger’s mother. I think it was Chai, the placid Holstein-Angus cross that grew into a gentle cow that I could even milk by hand.

The darker red curly hair on the top of her head and her ginger color were no doubt the reason for her name. She was a cute calf, loved by the kids, and very friendly. She nursed her mother, and grew quickly.

I had several cows and half grown calves which grazed freely in the large pasture behind the house coming down the hill to the water tank and feeding trough whenever I called them. A small amount of grain was their reward for coming. They usually licked the mineral block and drank deeply from the tank before returning to the shade of the thorn trees up the hill. They had their own schedule, and would come down to drink at about the same time every day, even if I didn’t call them.

When the animals mingled in the farmyard I especially looked for signs of the cows being in heat. With no bull on Grandpa’s farm I needed to get my neighbor’s help to inseminate them when they were ready. When a cow is ready to breed she will not try to get away from the bull, but will stand for him. If there is no bull in the herd, she will act the same way if another cow tries to mount her.

Farmers watch for any cow that is seen to be in standing heat and care for inseminating her as soon as possible. If they don’t let their herd out for daily exercise they monitor their cows, keeping records to know when each cow can be bred. He will breed her the month he chooses, to get the maximum amount of milk and have the calf be born the best time of the year.

On my hobby farm I didn’t keep records for each animal but when Curly Ginger was grown, I wanted to have her bred so she would calve in the Spring.

That summer, when she was in standing heat, she proved to be cooperative and followed me into the horse stall in the barn. After my neighbor had completed inseminating her, he peeled off the arm-length gloves and broke the long plastic tube he had used, throwing it all in the trash. He said, “She ought to calve late May, if she takes.”

After the rains, it was a balmy Spring day and Ellen and I were going for our walk around the country block. I counted my animals as usual, but was one short. Curly Ginger was missing; no doubt she had left the herd to go off somewhere to have her calf. Ellen spotted her under the thorn trees. She was licking a wobbly brown calf trying to make its way to her bulging bag. We always marveled at the wonder of a new life come to live on our farm.

The mothers know how to care for their young, except maybe the hens. They didn’t even know how to set on their own eggs. They have been carefully bred by men to lay eggs to the point that they no longer had the inclination to be “fruitful and multiply” as instructed by their Creator.

One of the chickens, that was included in my second batch of chicks, turned out to be quite different from the others. It grew almost twice as fast as the other chicks did, and was always by the feeding pan eating continuously.

When I moved the growing chicks to the outside chicken pen, all, except the eater, began exploring the weed filled yard as soon as they were let out of the coop. They searched under the brambles to find the bugs they preferred over the pelleted chicken feed from the Van-Hornesville Co-Op. Eater fell as he stumbled down from the chicken house entry, staggered over to the feed pan he recognized as the source of food, and settled down beside it, to begin eating enthusiastically. I hoped he had the energy to climb back into the coop if it rained.

It had been raining that day and there was a lot of mud under the thorn trees where Curly had calved. I found she had already eaten her afterbirth and was licking the calf. Ellen was quite sure she had seen a second calf and I found it laying in the mud. Curly showed no interest in the second calf even when I brought it to her and tried to get her to lick it. The other calve was sucking greedily and Curly was standing there contentedly.

I brought the muddy calf to Curly’s other side and held him as I pushed his head under her udder. Miraculously he started feebly, trying to suck, seeking life where God had intended him to find it. His mother eventually realized there were two calves tugging at her, and reached back around to begin cleaning off the back-side of her second calf, with her long pink tongue.

One morning, after the rain, I went out to feed the chickens. Before I even got the pen door open, they came running, some jumping down from the door of their house, and others suddenly appearing from beneath the sheltering weeds where they had been searching for bugs. They ignored the sodden feather covered lump that had been Eater. He hadn’t been bred for anything but eating and making chicken meat as fast as possible. He had been designed by man to grow up in a chicken meat factory. There may be range fed chicken meat available but it will never be as tasty as the guinea fowl meat I had in the Congo as a child.

Curly finally accepted both of her calves and they followed her everywhere. They were fun to watch grow up. I can’t recall exactly what we did with them, but they thrived in the pasture through the summer and were probably sold for meat. Generally, farmers don’t want to keep twin calves because they may not be able to reproduce and they are generally fairly small when they are born. The market for small twin calves doesn’t exist.

The next time Curley was bred she again had twin calves in the pasture not far from the barn. The grass was lush and I anticipated her raising both of them as she had the two little brown ones. I found both calves to be clean and dry. She had licked off all the fluids that cover the calf when it slips into the world, just the way God designed her to do. She was a good mother cow. I worried not at all about the calves. The black and white one was so tame I could easily pet it as it lay in the grass near the fence. The brown one was more skittish and quickly got up to run to its mother when I came to check on them.

I was rather pleased with my little farm. With poles from the Cedar swamp, boards and tin from the old barn we had taken down, my son and I made an open shelter for the cows that faced south. It was a place where I could feed them through the winter and pump water, using the truck, into their water tub not far from the well in the marsh.

Things would be a little more difficult when winter came because I had also added a beautiful Half-Arabian horse whose name was registered as “Asil Exactly That” born July 14, 2004. He was a very special addition to my farm and lived in the red horse barn near the house. His nick name, Zack, was also painted on the sign above his big box stall.

All seemed to be going smoothly on my farm but since I was the owner and manager, I had no one else to blame for what I discovered. When I went to check on Curly Ginger to see how her twins were doing, I found her nursing the brown calf, blissfully fulfilling her motherly duties. I looked for the little black and white calf that had let me pet him. I found him in the same place where I had pet him just a couple days earlier. He was no longer warm and soft, but stiff and cold.

Was I really to blame, because that calf died? I didn’t even know it was dying. Hadn’t Curly just forgotten her calf? I had seen no evidence of the calf being sick. Maybe it just starved to death because his mother forgot him and didn’t bother to feed him; after all she had another calf. If a mother cow isn’t nursed she can become uncomfortable and go find her calf. Curly had no need to find the twin. Maybe that calf had never tasted the source of life and never tried to nurse his mother.

The calf easily fit into the bucket of the old Ford, and I took it to the top of the hill, leaving it in the far corner of the woods. I disposed of it naturally.

Since God had given me my little farm, I did have responsibility for the animals living there, something like Adam was assigned to have dominion over creation. Even after Adam and Eve sinned, He still didn’t forget them, but sought them out where they had hidden.

We may think we have been forsaken and forgotten by the Lord, but the Lord himself replies in His Word, “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” (Isaiah 49:15)

Curly forgot her second calf and I didn’t help her at all.

What is our responsibility to those people who aren’t even seeking God, laying in the sun, dying in their sin?

Jesus said: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”