Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, by enlisting in the Army and leaving Barron County haunts as a teenager, missed out on the revolution of county agricultural from cows to turkeys, and he is happy about that.
A recent visit showed vast former fields and pastures supporting huge turkey sheds and spreading an offensive turkey odor around the farm where Grandpa Helgeland’s Holsteins once roamed. The keeper can still hear the cowbell ringing from the wooded pasture and see the steam engine chugging up the driveway to set up for making cow feed out of the field of grain shocks.
The land, once broken into family farms with personal relationships to every field and with every neighbor is largely gone from Grandpa’s old vicinity. Huge turkey warehouses—currently mostly vacant, dominate with the charm of warehouses and taking a deep breath is not a pleasant experience.
The keeper may not try to go home again “until the cows come home.”
