Most of my personal belongings have been in a livestock trailer while Grandpa’s cattle were still grazing the back pasture. Our couch, kitchen table, sock drawer and bath linens a couple times traveled in the vented shelter of a trailer designed to haul pigs and cattle.

One of the coolest things about living or working on a farm is access to stuff. A backhoe to plant trees in our yard. A flatbed trailer to haul lumber for a house project. Farmers are known to give equipment multiple roles on the farm. As a child, Mom swam in a large, round livestock water tank, which served the cattle when she and her brothers were done with it. Old tractor tires became sandboxes. The hayrack was a float in the homecoming parade. We even used the machine shed for our wedding reception.
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My 5-year-old daughter couldn’t wait to get off the bus recently and head to the corn field our family was harvesting. In fact, after a quick hug, she asked me to confirm our evening plans in the field and bounced with joy at the affirmative response.

Specifically, she loves to eat supper in the field. It’s her all-around favorite place to dine, trumping Grandma’s house and the nearby sandwich shop with arcade games. In fact, she will have her sixth birthday party in a corn or soybean field this week.

Greetings from west-central Illinois, where we grow corn and soybeans about a three-hour drive from Chicago. Also on some of my family’s farms you’ll find wheat, hay, cattle, pigs, a few barn cats and farm dogs. Corn and soybeans generate our household farm income and makes a living for my parents and brother.
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I am always happy when my whole family can sit down for dinner at the same the time.  First, it never seems to happen with a college graduate looking for a job and a college sophomore just home for a while before he goes back to school. 

The other thing that makes me happy is when we can eat food that we have grown on our farm.  I take a lot of pride in that.  When my family has a meal that has pork, beef, or lamb as the main course and the sides are grown in our garden, now that is a meal!
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The old saying is that corn should be "knee-high by the 4th of July."That saying should now say "tasseled by the 4th of July."

The reason why farmers can grow enough corn (and other grains like wheat, oats, and soybeans), is that science has helped us have plants with a higher yield. We have eliminated different diseases and things that slow down plant growth. We have better herbicides and insecticides that are safer, better for the environment, and we use less of them to produce more.

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Hello all.  My name is Katie Pratt and welcome to our farm. Literally. Welcoming tour groups to our farm is a family tradition starting back in the early 1970s when my husband’s grandfather hosted students from Chicago-area schools on his dairy farm.
 
Some of my best childhood memories are those that include the people who visited our farm.  There were the formal “industry” groups – farmers from Asia, Europe and Australia – visiting in the 1980s to see how my father was raising mother pigs and their babies indoors sheltered from Mother Nature’s unpredictable mood swings. There were friends and family from the city who brought new playmates and cousins with whom my sister, brother and I had great fun, racing through the rolling wooded pasture that stretched south of our farmstead. 

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