Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living Dirty, or dusty farm work?

Shelling corn, or baling hay gets my vote.

Yours?

baling and putting up wheat straw

Cleaning out the inside of the grinder/mixer.

Anything with grain dust absolutely kills me. Allergy induced asthma really sucked as a kid, had to sit up and try to sleep in a chair on really bad nights. The 'discovery' of prescribed inhalers was a literal lifesaver. Thank God for Ventolin...


So my vote goes for cleaning out grains bins.



Trailing a bunch of cows into the wind can be dusty and dirty if the ground is dry. Cough up dirt balls and blow brown junk outta your snout after a day of that fun...



Baling isn't so bad because we have tractors with cabs, same for grinding hay.



All that whining aside could you imagine being an old school coal miner?!


No thanks!

I remember seeing farmers combining soybeans on combines before there were cabs. Talk about dusty. My first combine was a 300 MF, with no A/C. It had a fan to blow some air on you, and a mouse had built a nest in it. I turned the thing on, and I swear I'd rather chocked on the bean dust, than smelled that odor. After that, that was the first thing I'd check before using it.

being under a chopper coming down on dry ground is not fun either, coal mining wins

square bales in a closed in barn or dumping
a bunch of sacks of feed in a closed in barn
stall. i can be sneezing that out for a week

3M makes some pretty good dust masks. I have to wear one when bucking bales or I hork some big greenies for a week.

it's dusty here, even when I don't work.....

The desert gets pretty dusty.

No matter where you are in it, or what you're doing.

It was nice to take a trip once in awhile and get away from the dust.

Running the rotary mower on the back of the old Oliver. You have to wear a ball cap backwards, a dust mask, and goggles. When you quit you're covered with dirt and pieces of weeds. You look like Jack Nicholson in the movie Going South when he was in the mine.

Digging the silo unloader out from under three loads of silage after the tripod collapsed. At least it was only 90 degrees. Thank God for help that works for beer. Barry

Working summer fallow after no rain for a month or so. You can see the dust cloud 10 miles away.

Harvesting peas was a dirty dusty SOB. Dried up and almost flat on the ground, the combine picked up about as much dirt as peas.

It pretty much sucks when you are pulling an air drill and the wheat field is so dry and dusty that depending on the wind you can't see where you're at.
(with the drill leaving skips, no autosteer, etc..)


And all the while you know you're gonna need a GOOD rain to get things going.

I would shell for five days before I would bale for one. I am on record as despising baling.
For dirty, there was the time that we tore down an old machine shed. Lloyd sheared sheep for some firm in Kansas City. He stored the fleece in the attic of the shed until he had enough to truck to KC. Over the years, the attic became rather filled with wool and blown-in dirt that the lanolin mated with to create a nice greasy mixture. Removing the floor of the attic involved the hired help (yours truly) throwing a 4X4 up from below to dislodge the nails. This, of course, was done during the hottest part of the year and resulted in a nice, steady rain of the aforementioned crap down onto the hired help.

Why I have cabs on my tractors.

I can't imagine the allergy mess I'd be if all the dust, pollen, grass and other fragments all found their way into my body.

As far as general "misery" factor our (milo) around here is pure skin eating misery! Not sure if western guys contend with it or not??

Dust and dirt are just part of the job of ranching, I can tell you the schiest job I ever encountered was tearing down old chicken houses on a farm I bought, there ain't nothing in the whole world that as nasty as chicken schit when your covered with sweat,don't do it with out a good mask, You can't wash the smell off. Rio7