Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Globe will include the much-anticipated Today’s Farm Century Farm edition.

Well … much anticipated by me and hopefully many of the farm and non-farm readers who subscribe to our newspaper.

The Century Farm edition is my favorite project here at the Daily Globe. It gives me a chance to get out of the office and talk to farm families in southwest Minnesota and northwest Iowa. Most often we sit at the dining room table and look at black and white pictures from long, long ago … and then they share the story of their family’s life and times on the farm.

I am always fascinated by their stories, mostly because I’m a farm girl myself. I can empathize with them when they tell of milking cows by hand (I milked goats by hand), of picking eggs and baling hay.

There are some things about farm life that will never change!

The time I spent these past few weeks on Century Farm stories have been extra special because this year, there is a Century Farm in my family.

Just like every farm family I interviewed this year, my family is also quite proud of its farming tradition … its connection to the land.

You would think that as a writer, I’ve already written a story about my family’s century farm. I guess I’m more like the contractor who never gets the remodeling project done on his own house. I have grand ideas, but when the work day is through I don’t always feel like writing.

I have decided to get the story written this year … in a couple of weeks, in fact.
Our family’s century farm was settled in July 1909 by my maternal great-grandfather, Reinhard Kohls. Reinhard and his family emigrated from Germany and eventually settled in Roseland Township, Kandiyohi County. He purchased a quarter section directly to the north of the farm his mother and step-father settled on.

Reinhard and Alma raised five children on the farm — four daughters, Esther, Viola, and twins Ella and Elsa; and one son, my grandfather, Arthur.

Back in those days, the son was often the one to take over the farming operation. When Arthur married my grandma Elizabeth, they moved into the two-story, five-bedroom farmhouse and Reinhard and Alma eventually moved into Danube.

The farmhouse still stands today, though it hasn’t been lived in for several years. My aunt and uncle live on the acreage, while the farm land has been rented out to a neighbor since my grandpa’s death in the late 1970s.

My 93-year-old grandma spent most of her life on that farm, working alongside her husband with the crops and livestock and raising their three children — daughter Lorna (my mom), and sons Eldon and Orval.

Mom was telling me Sunday night about some of her fondest memories of farm life. I found it quite ironic that the memories she had were so similar to the memories I had of farm life.

She used to dress her cats up in doll clothes until they got tired of it and ran away (I did that too!). She played house in the grove and in the granary (the same places I created little kitchens for baking mud pies in old tin pie pans), and she picked eggs and milked cows.

“I had to sit on one of those T-stools and the cows would slap me in the face with their tails,” Mom said.

It wasn’t tails, but quick feet that I had to worry about when I milked goats by hand.

Mom learned how to drive on Grandpa’s little Ford tractor, and I learned how to drive on Dad’s M Farmall.

Mom also said that they got their drinking water from a pail they lifted from the well, and she and all of her brothers shared the same dipper. My brothers and I, well, we never liked to share much of anything — except for the chicken pox!

There are many more stories, and I hope to get them recorded eventually.

I hope this Today’s Farm edition serves as a keepsake for our region’s Century Farm owners. Congratulations to each and every one of you for working hard to not only keep your farm in the family, but for feeding the world.