Not many farm kids today know the phrase “walking the beans”. Certainly, no town kids do...
Not many farm kids today know the phrase “walking the beans”. Certainly, no town kids do...
Walking the Beans
Not many farm kids today know the phrase “walking the beans”. Certainly, no town kids do. I’m of that age to remember it well. “Walking the beans” predates the widespread use of chemical herbicides on soybean crops when farm kids walked soybean rows to cut corn and weeds out by hand. The corn grew from the last year’s crop that had fallen on the ground and not been gleaned.
Let me tell you my memories of walking the beans. My maternal grandfather was a tenant farmer. He owned no ground. He owned some old equipment, all used, and a 1954 International pickup truck. Six-cylinder, four speed manual transmission, with a grannie gear. The grannie gear was only used in the field or with a very heavy load. Ugly green, no power windows, no power steering and no radio. Designed and used to haul feed, seed and tools, not for city fools.
After a pre-dawn breakfast of eggs, bacon, pancakes, biscuits with homemade apple butter and many cups of hot tea with honey (my brother and I weren’t old enough to drink coffee), we’d load up that green pickup with tools, water jugs and a picnic basket with sandwiches for a 10 am snack.
Dressed in jeans, t-shirts, ankle topping work boots, and completed with broad brimmed hats to keep the beating Central Illinois sun off our heads, my brother, then 10, and I, 12, stacked our hoes and other implements of destruction to errant corn stalks, button weeds and noxious plants on the well-worn pickup truck bed. Grandpa Dallas, short but sturdy, dressed in bib overalls and slouch hat ensured a sharp edge on the tools with a trusty file.
Into the cab of the pickup, Granpa wrestling the wheel, David in the middle…I was older and bigger, so I got the pick of the window seat while he had to contend with the lack of a breeze and the towering gear shift bumping his leg as he sat in the middle. The cool breeze at 6 in the morning raised goosebumps on my bare arms, but I knew that by 10 or 11 the sweat would be running in my eyes and down my back.
A half a mile or so down the tarred country road Granpa would ease the pickup over into a field entrance. Out of the pickup we piled. Tailgate down, grab the same hoe I used yesterday. We always used the same hoe. Your hands grew used to the feel. A different hoe gives you blisters under the calluses. Get the one that feels right. Forty acres of soybeans, thigh high to a grade school boy, stretching before us in rows straight as the yard stick Gramma kept in the kitchen for potential, though seldom used, disciplinary purposes.
Grampa didn’t think much of farmers who couldn’t plow or plant a straight furrow. Whether living his life or planting a field Granpa believed in plowing a straight furrow.
With the sun fully up and not a shade tree in sight, we lined up with near military precision. Grandpa took the first four rows, David the next four rows and I the next. Two rows of soybeans is as far as you can reach with a hoe, so we each had two rows to the right and two rows to the left. Commencing at the east end of the field, we marched three abreast pausing only to decapitate any and all green invaders of the bean field.
Slow, steady work. The only sounds that of buzzing insects or the occasional crow. No Sony Walkman, no Apple I-phone, no Beats headphone to distract from the work at hand. Those are all decades in the future. Step, swing hoe and chop. Step, swing hoe and chop. Wipe sweat. Step, swing hoe and chop. End of row. Wheel formation about. Head back to the east. Pickup truck a small silhouette against the sheen of the glistening round corn bins.
The only break in the monotonous step, step, swing, cut, step, step, swipe sweat, the pause at the pickup for a cup of cold water from the gallon Coleman jug.
Grampa explained the importance of not missing a single stalk of corn or button weed. “The grain elevator will send a man out to inspect our fields and if there’s corn or weeds in the beans, they’ll dock the price we get.” He went on to tell us that it could cost ten cents a bushel or more. Now ten cents doesn’t sound like much today but in 1961 dollars that works out to about eighty-three cents per bushel. Still doesn’t sound like much until it’s multiplied times thousands of bushels, now we’re starting to talk some money. It means the difference between plenty of fuel oil for the winter or keeping the thermostat down to 60 and wearing a sweater all the time. It means the difference between having money to pay for next year’s seed and fuel or going to the bank to borrow for that seed and fuel.
Step, swing, chop. Step, swing, chop. Step swing, chop until Grandpa pulls his chrome plated pocket watch from the top pocket of his faded, blue denim bib overalls. Ten o’clock. Time for a sandwich. The clock in my belly could have told him that. Break in the shade of the corn bin to wolf down the cold sandwich. Back at it until one pm. Time for a break until the sun fades a bit.
Back to the white farmhouse and the shade of the porch. Doze until four, then back to walking the beans.
Our pay? Fifty cents an acre. My mom didn’t think we should be paid at all, but Grandpa insisted, “we earned it ,” he said. Again that doesn’t sound like much, but a Snickers or a Milky Way was a nickel then, so we were pretty doggone wealthy.
My brother and I walked the beans from the time we were big enough to handle a hoe until we were old enough to get paying jobs off the farm. We weren’t the first of the grandkids to walk the beans. My grandparents had twelve kids. Most of them stayed around Tuscola and had kids. Grandkids before me walked the beans. Grandkids after me walked the beans. The hoes wore down from the file. Younger grandkids got new hoes and blisters. I got an Air Force uniform. My brother an Army uniform. Grampa still had the old green International the day he died. Nobody walks the bean any more.