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Keeping
busy on her 800-acre farm is almost a 24-hour-a-day job. Joyce has 200 head of cattle – all of them she calls “my girls.”
“I started calling them ‘girls’ a long time ago,” she said. “We kept some cows over across two creeks and DeKalb would send me over there to feed them. They were all heifers so I just started calling them ‘girls.’ Now, I call all of them ‘girls.’”
And when she calls “Guuuurls!
Guuuurls!’ they come running.
With about 400 acres of good pastureland, the “girls” have got more than they can eat right now, but Joyce likes to treat them with some sweet feed every now and then.
As the sun was setting, she made her way to the pasture at the back of her house, calling “Guuuurls! Guuuurls” and they came running. She then cranked her truck and drove 90-to-nothing across the road to the pasture over there.
“I’ve got 50 ‘girls’ over here and they are the sweetest things you ever saw,” she said, with a big smile.
She reached inside the truck, blew the horn and called, “Guuuurls!
Guuuurls! Come on, let me see you!”
In no time flat, she was right in the middle of the herd and then singled out her lead cow, Super.
“She was born on the day of the Super Bowl in 1996 and she’s just about the sweetest cow I’ve ever seen,” Joyce said, giving Super a super pat on the back. “I’ve just about finished bush hogging all of this. Lack about an hour, but I’ll get that tomorrow. Got to keep the weeds down and the rain has got them growing.”
For Joyce, driving a tractor is second nature. She’s as comfortable on a tractor as she is in the truck and more comfortable than in a car.
“I’m a farm gal,” she said, with a smile.
Back at the house, she picked a few tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden and checked on the squash, okra and pepper – three kinds, bell, cayenne and “hot, hot, hot.”
“I don’t have a big garden this year,” she said. “After I lost DeKalb I didn’t have the time or the heart to get started. But, I’ll have a big fall garden — cabbage, turnips, mustard, a lot of good things.”
Joyce has fig, pear and peach trees and a scuppernong arbor that she tends. She fills eight large freezers with produce from her farm and a side of beef from her own herd.
“I stay busy and I do as much of the work around here as I can,” she said. “But when you get to be 80 years old, you need a little help from time to time.”
That help comes from her son, Joe, and a friend, Charlie Green.
“I don’t know what I would do without them,” she said. “Charlie helped me so much when DeKalb wasn’t able to work the last four years. His wife, Betty, would come and sit with DeKalb while Charlie and I got out and worked the farm. And, he still comes to help me do the things I can’t do by myself, like fixing fences and getting up the cows to sell. I could do it by myself if I had to. It would be hard.”
And, Joyce said she depends a great deal on her “friends” at the Dale Farmers Co-op in
Ariton.
“Robert Peters and all of those at the Co-op are always so helpful,” she said. “I depend on them a lot. They deliver pellets and sweet feed, fertilizer, chemicals — all the big things, but I go in to buy the smaller things like the fly repellant that I put on the back rubbers. They would bring them, too, but I don’t like to impose on folks.”
Joyce recently bought 20 posts from the Dale Farmers Co-op and she went and picked them up.
“I wasn’t going to ask them to deliver 20 posts that I could go get myself,” she said. “I take my soil samples to the Co-op and I went back the other day and got me one of their calendars. The numbers are big enough that I can see them when I hang the calendar on the door. I keep a lot of notes on the calendar so I’ll know what to do and when.”
Going
to the Co-op is like going to town on Saturday used to be.
“I
enjoy going to the Co-op because folks there are so nice and friendly and
they like to talk about things that I like to talk about – cows and
gardens and the weather,” she said, with a smile, “ …and, they knew
DeKalb.”
Jaine
Treadwell is a freelance writer from Brundidge.
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