April 28, 2003, cont'd
"The smell?" said Cliff. "You could smell it but it got so you didn't notice it."
"Cleanliness," Bud said. "Cliff insisted we keep a clean plant. When the day's work was done, we'd scrub down the floors with a tough soap. Cliff bought brooms twenty-four at a time. We'd clean everything off the floor, scrub it down with soap, we'd let the soap sit for a while, then we'd rinse it off with our hot water hoses, we'd run water and steam from the cookers together through our hoses to wash off the soap."
The state, too, was concerned about cleanliness and disease and at one point sent an inspector to check the plant. "What do you scrub up with?" the fellow wanted to know. Bud showed him the barrel of the caustic soap. "Open the barrel," the inspector said, and Bud did, and the fellow was going to put his hand down into the barrel. Bud stopped him. "You don't want to do that," he'd said. "If you put your hand in there you won't have a hand to pull back out." At that point, just the vapors rising from the barrel were enough to convince the inspector that the West Point rendering plant ran a clean ship.
It was not all grim reality at the rendering plant. The fellows enjoyed working with each other. Cliff had a sense of humor; Bud tells a story on him. A call came in from a farmer. He had a mule down that wouldn't get up. Would Cliff send a fellow out to shoot the mule and haul away the carcass? The fellow who went out for the mule came back without it. "When I send you out for a mule, I expect you to bring a mule back," Cliff berated the fellow. The driver tried to explain. He said sure enough the mule was down. He had backed his truck up to the mule, he'd dumped the end-gate of the truck down for loading, and the noise of the chain on metal spooked the mule which got up and ran away before the fellow could shoot it. "Next time," Cliff had said with mock sternness, "shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."
That's probably good advice for life as well as for the rendering business: "Shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."
*
In the evening I confirmed with Wisner Rendering that I'll be riding in a rendering truck on Thursday. We'll see just how much stink of this honorable work I can stand.
***
April 29, 2003
Harry Knobbe is sixty-three years old, he's the youngest of the third generation of a Cuming County farm family. His older brother farms the place his grandfather established. In 1939, Harry's father bought a farm a few miles west of West Point, and a mile south - that's the place that Harry farms. It's likely Harry's father wouldn't recognize the place.
Harry runs a large beef feedlot, he runs an office that buys and sells livestock, he is licensed to trade in commodities and he does just that like the big boys in the big city, except he has lower overhead.
I mean, the office for the Harry Knobbe Feed Yards and Knobbe Livestock and Knobbe Commodities looks like an office. There are - what did Harry tell me - nine people who work in the office, including two sons. Harry was in a meeting when I arrived ten minutes early for my 8:30 a.m. interview. It was a stand-up meeting, I could see that because the walls of the office are mostly glass, and I could view Harry and the others standing in a room at the far end of the lobby. They were deep in discussion. Right as scheduled, the meeting broke up and the tall, assured man in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a dress shirt stepped out, nodded in my direction, and waved me into his office.
You don't usually expect a fellow who runs a large feedlot and who trades commodities to talk to you about stewardship of the land, about stewardship in all your business dealings, about faith and community and the need to lend a hand in the community for projects as well as donating money. But Harry Knobbe is such a man. He believes in raising beef in preference to raising crops or feeding other kinds of animals. He believes livestock operations provide on-going, continuous employment throughout the year, rather than just in season as is the case with field crops like corn. He thinks a beef operation like his provides more employment for rural America than does crop farming. He believes it is better to be working than not working. He is fortunate that his work is what he loves, his hobby as well as his job.
To be continued....
"He believes livestock operations provide on-going, continuous employment throughout the year, rather than just in season as is the case with field crops like corn." I'm not sure that's such a good argument for raising livestock, you know.
Posted by: Dave | July 16, 2005 at 07:18 PM
It would be interesting to see you and Harry Knobbe argue that point. My usual bias is against feedlot operations with 40,000 head of cattle; even so, Harry almost made me a believer.
Posted by: Tom Montag | July 16, 2005 at 10:42 PM