Green Acres: A True Story

By Jean Mosby Rhamy and Lane B. Mosby

Lane Mosby decided to live the life hed always dreamed of. After his retirement, Lane and his wife decided to buy acreage in California to practice farming. They owned animals, planted fruit trees and erected a greenhouse.
In 1979, they headed to Oklahoma and bought 40 acres to become small scale ranchers. What made this even more special is that Lane is a former engineer-turned rancher.
Like the familiar TV show Green Acres, Lane found his new lifestyle unfamiliar. Oklahoma meant starting over making new friends and living at a slower pace. Could he make this dream of his work?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2005
• ISBN: 9781477175231

Jean Mosby Rhamy

Lane B. Mosby was born in Denver, Colorado in 1925. He graduated from Decautur High School and began college at the University of Cincinnati. He finished one semester and decided to enlist in the Air Force. He trained as a weather observer and spent World War II in Paris, France. After the war, he returned to marry his wife, Martha in 1948 and graduate with a B.S. in aeronautical engineering from the University of Cincinnati. Lane spent 20 years as an aeronautical engineer, retired at the age of 55 and began practicing to become a rancher. The rest is history.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

   Introduction   

CHAPTER 1   Don’t Rent A Bull, Buy One

CHAPTER 2   Now and Then I Do Learn Something Useful

CHAPTER 3   The Wind Comes Right Behind The Rain    11

CHAPTER 4   To The Vet

CHAPTER 5   Trim The Grass

CHAPTER 6   You Win A Few, You Lose A Few

CHAPTER 7   Lambs

CHAPTER 8   Planting    24

CHAPTER 9   Buried In Paper

CHAPTER 10   OH! OH! It’s A Bull!

CHAPTER 11   Spring Is Sprung

CHAPTER 12   Stacking Hay

CHAPTER 13   Little Lost Cow Kid

CHAPTER 14   Bridge vs. Lambs    40

CHAPTER 15   Coasting

CHAPTER 16   Buff Orpingtons

CHAPTER 17   They Might Be Mama Rabbits

CHAPTER 18   Weeds and Spinning Wool

CHAPTER 19   Winterizing

CHAPTER 20   OH! OH! FROZEN PIPES!   54

CHAPTER 21   Next Year Has To Be Better   57

CHAPTER 22   Here Come The Cow Kids

CHAPTER 23   Baler

CHAPTER 24   The Zoo

CHAPTER 25   Dottie and Tina

CHAPTER 26   Twelve

CHAPTER 27   SNOW!

CHAPTER 28   Miracle

CHAPTER 29   Everything Comes Off Smoothly?

CHAPTER 30    RECORD!

CHAPTER 31   Sheep Auction

CHAPTER 32   Just An Ordinary Summer

CHAPTER 33   Hair Grows On Calves In October

CHAPTER 34   COLD!

CHAPTER 35   Don’t Let Your Kids Have Kids

CHAPTER 36   Draper Is Still Draping

CHAPTER 37   Everything Comes Out OK

CHAPTER 38   Carry a Big Stick

CHAPTER 39   I’m Good At Getting Cows To Do What They Want To Do

CHAPTER 40   Eleven Degrees

CHAPTER 41   That’s Why People Live In Southern California

CHAPTER 42   Auction

CHAPTER 43   Epidemic! (Of Things Busting)

CHAPTER 44   Snitching Milk

CHAPTER 45   Epilogue - The Beginning (Of Retirement)

INTRODUCTION

I was sitting at the dining room table with books, papers and writer magazines spread out in front of me when my father came in. He stopped short and asked, "Are you planning on writing

a book?"

Right now just short stories. Why, did you have something in mind?

Well, how about reading through some old letters I sent to my mother when we were living at the ranch? My sister, Beebe, read them and she always said they should be published.

OK, I said, Let’s give it a try.

He brought out two manila envelopes full of letters printed on computer printout paper, the kind that has the removable perforated edge, and laid them on the table. As I began shuffling through them, I realized they were entertaining reading. What made it even more special was realizing my father was a former engineer turned rancher.

His hobby had always been building things. He began at the age of ten building model airplanes which continued into adulthood. I remember he would take us out on weekends to a large parking lot where he would put his latest airplane creation on the asphalt, prime the engine, rotate the propeller and start the engine whining. Then he would pick up the lead wire and off the plane would go.

I also remember he was always building something in the garage. Whether it was a new tool bench, a piece of furniture or rehanging the garage doors to accommodate a recreational trailer, he had a saw, hammer and nails as standard equipment in his tool box. Not only that, but he was good! One other hobby that played a dominant role in his life was photography. During his later years in the engineering field, he became a part-time professional wedding photographer. He even photographed my wedding and did an outstanding job.

So, as he contemplated retirement, he wanted to incorporate all his hobbies as well as his practice of eating vegetables grown as naturally as possible into a retirement venture that would be useful for daily living. He would go into ranching.

A thought occurred to me as I read through the letters. To go from an engineer to a rancher was a stretch for my way of thinking, so I asked, Why did you decided on ranching?

Well, we liked that way of life. We had more acreage and sheep and cows are easy to come by in Oklahoma.

OK, that makes sense.

He and my mother, Martha, had previously owned a rundown cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains next to Palm Springs as a real estate venture. They decided to practice rebuilding the structure and remodeling the interior. Their success brought in some extra cash and gave them valuable experience in upscaling property. As retirement neared, they bought 3.5 acres in California to practice farming.

My mother had been raised on a farm and, even though it had been a while, remembered

what to do. They chose to dabble in pigs, sheep, cows, growing alfalfa (hay), gardening, and planting an orchard (which by definition is 10 trees), and my father even erected a greenhouse which was very successful. They packed as much self sufficiency on the land as it would support and practiced, practiced, practiced. With the lessons they learned, they felt it was time to

go bigger.

They decided to leave California and, with a tidy profit on the sale of their farm, headed for the Midwest. To get the most for their money, they bought 40 green acres (green that is during the spring) in Oklahoma and settled in to become small scale ranchers.

Their property came equipped with a three-sided barn and chicken coop, both in rundown condition; an orchard with apple and pear trees; grape vines; two bodies of water (one of them known as The Fish Pond which, of course, had fish); and a three-bedroom house. Since the property was bought in an as-is condition, my father was soon rebuilding the structures and adding a shed near the chicken coop. Later, he would bring in contractors to erect a windmill to pump well water and install solar panels to cut energy costs. It was about 5 miles from town by way of a dirt road, which turned to mud whenever it rained. They moved in 1979 and by 1984 felt pretty sure they knew the ropes.

As I continued reading the letters, I noticed my father’s sense of humor surfaced quite often. He had incorporated his own unique terminology for things on the ranch such as girls for chickens and cows, cow kids for calves, faucets for udders, getting married for mating and many others. On top of his customized phrases, he apparently began to think and talk like an Oklahoma native. He also made references to the fact that for the past 40 years, he’s remained 39 years old. He and Jack Benny knew a good age when they reached it.

I was further impressed by his remarkable talent for solving the problems that surface whenever animals, crops and weather don’t behave. My father wrote quite often about the seasons changes and weather because as a rancher, the weather plays an important part in scheduling births, planting crops and estimating the amount of rainfall during a particular time of year. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had been a weather adviser in his Air Force days during WWII. It was a daily ritual to listen to the highs and lows of the day and check the rain gauge to record the day’s rainfall.

My father was very faithful about writing my grandmother as she had been raised on a farm and could easily relate to the ranching trials and tribulations. Then, when he began to raise rabbits, she knew he would appreciate stories about the wild rabbits in her retirement community eating the resident’s flowers. The letters were my father’s way of imparting rabbit advice and keeping his mother updated on the latest ranch happenings. They have been retyped exactly from my father’s original computer letters. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

Chapter 1

DON’T RENT A BULL, BUY ONE

Dear Mom,

No, we didn’t get any snow here, or cold temperatures either. Except for those two weeks in December, it has been almost like California weather, you know, sunny and seventy-two. Your forecasters must be as bad as ours.

Because it’s been so nice, the little calves haven’t had to try to keep warm. All four of them did get sick, though, at about the same time. We’ve never had that happen before. Maybe one would get sick out of two or three years, but never all of them at once. Maybe it was the flu bug or something like that. Whatever it was, I had to give them all medicine. And would you believe it, they didn’t want to take their medicine. They reacted just like kids, so we went around and around. I should have shot a movie of it. I’d win one round, and then they’d win one round. I lost about an inch of skin off one elbow, and they managed to kick me in the shin once, but they finally did get all their pills, and got well again.

To administer these pills is quite a bothersome technique. What you give them is a pill about the size of my thumb. But you can’t just walk up to a calf and say, Open wide. Well, you can, but it won’t do any good. They know they can outrun me any day of the week and are not the least bit afraid of me. So the only way to administer it, is to get them to put their head in a head-gate. To get them to do that, you have to get them in the corral. But before they go in there, their mama has to go in the corral. And to get her to go in, you have to feed her in there, and it had better be something good, like candy. What I use for candy is their vitamin and mineral supplement, called cubes, because they are little cylinders about 2-3 inches long. I throw cubes out on the ground in the corral and they come running to eat them. I closed the gate so no

one could leave, then chased them around and around until I got the calves in the chute that has the head-gate at one end. But then, things slowed down. They all said, "No way we’re going to stick our heads

in that thing!"

The head-gate has two vertical bars on levers so you can swing them open and closed like a barn door. The bars can be spaced wide for cows and closer together for calves. I make it just far enough apart for their necks to fit in. Their shoulders are too wide to go on through and the heads, with those ears mounted on each side, are too big to back out. Ours is the cheap kind and requires two people. One chases them down the chute to what looks like an open door, and when the head goes through, the other person slams the gate shut on them. Well, with only one person, you can see the problem immediately.

What I tried to do was close the gate, shoo them up close, grab hold of the tail with one hand and the gate lever with the other. Then I opened the gate slowly and pulled the tail to get them to move toward the opening. The problem is, the chute was built for cows and is narrow so they can’t turn around and go back the way they came. But, the calves were small enough to turn around, so they did and went back to the other end of the chute, dragging me along with them. Not only can they run faster than I can, they’re stronger than I am, and they’re only three months old… and sick. I’d really have trouble if they were healthy. Well, they might be stronger, but I was more stubborn.

Next, you take a tube about 10 inches long with a plunger in it, put the pill in the end of the tube and push it down their throat. Then push the plunger so the pill comes out of the tube and stays in their throat. Then quickly pull the tube out of the mouth before they bite it in half. It works! The pill is so far down they can’t spit it out. It doesn’t work on the sheep though. Somehow, they’d always manage to spit it out, so we have liquid medicine for them. So, eventually all three of the big ones got three pills shoved down their throat. The fourth one was no problem. He’s our miracle calf. He was only a little over a week old, and at that age they still don’t distrust people. You can walk right up and grab him. Besides, he was probably the sickest one of the group.

The reason I know he was the sickest is that morning, when I put hay out, everyone came running to eat, except his mother, Blackie. She came about half way toward the hay and stopped. She called him to come along, but he wouldn’t get up. He just laid there. She called and called some more and wouldn’t eat, so I went to see what the problem was. He didn’t move. Just the day before, he had been running all over

the place.

So I started scratching and massaging him, rubbing him good all over. Finally he opened one eye and said, Go away! So I scratched and massaged some more, more vigorously this time, and he finally tried to get up but fell over on his nose. More scratching and massaging. Eventually he did get up and wandered over to the dining room so his mother could eat breakfast. I literally ran to the vet store to get the pills.

I’ll bet you’re wondering why he’s our miracle calf. Last winter when it was time for our cows to get married again, we invited the neighbor’s bull over to join the ceremony. He was here for over a month and had quit showing any interest in our cows, so we send him home. Well all summer long, about once a month he would come up to the fence and bellow at our cows. He was obviously saying one of them was not pregnant. But they all said they were. Well, who are you going to believe? He’s the expert. It’s his business to know those things. So the neighbor and I tried a couple of times to bring him to the gate to let him through to our side, but he wouldn’t cooperate. Therefore, I had given up on all four of our cows having calves this year. Three out of four wasn’t bad when we didn’t have our own bull. So I wasn’t real surprised when we only got three, AND ON THE VERY SAME DAY! The one that didn’t produce was Blackie. She looked fat enough to be pregnant, but she was eating with the mamas and I overfed them when they have babies to make milk for. So, Blackie was getting far more hay than she needed.

Then one morning when I went out to feed them, she wasn’t fat anymore and had a brand new shiny black and white baby with her. THREE MONTHS LATE! I know that bull hadn’t been over here all summer long. It had to be a miracle! The only other way to explain the miracle it is that Blackie is our smartest cow. She’s the leader of the bunch. She’s the only one that is able to get herself on the other side of the electric fence to the improved pasture. They’re not allowed over there unless I say so, but she’s learned to wade around the end of the electric fence where it sticks out into the pond. When she’s full of the better grass over on that side, she wades back again. Also she can jump fences if she wants to. Recently, when I penned the four cow-girls in the barn yard while the neighbor’s bull was visiting this year, she thought they were getting better hay than she was. Her solution was to mash the fence down some and hop over it. It might be that she wadded around the electric fence, crossed the improved pasture to the neighbor’s fence, hopped over it and talked their bull into going on a honeymoon with her. Then she came back by the same route and didn’t even tell anyone she’d been gone. However, miracles DO happen.

So, let that be a lesson to you, don’t rent a bull, buy one. It’s much less trouble.

Love, Lane

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Chapter 2

NOW AND THEN I DO LEARN SOMETHING USEFUL

Dear Mom,

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the next installment of the Reader’s Digest. That’s the sort of thing we need around here these days because there’s nothing else to do because the weather is

so bad.

We just went through a period where it snowed a couple inches one day, then the sun came out and turned it to slush. That night, the next day, and half the day after, the temperature never got above freezing with the north wind was blowing about 30 mph. Without fail, the sun came out and started melting some of the snow and once again, the next day, the wind blew out of the north at 25 mph and freezing.

I decided I would finally let the sheep out anyway. They were getting barn fever and weren’t sure about that white stuff. It didn’t taste very good, so they went around it to the bare patches where it had melted off and looked for grass to eat. At least they got some exercise. Like everybody else, they get nervous when cooped up too long. Their boyfriend has been here since December 28. It took me all day to drive way down by the Texas border to get him. All the ladies seem to like him. He has a really handsome set of horns, and is about their