The Farm Girls On Fourth Floor

The weather is starting to get colder. The leaves have started to change. Decorated pumpkins can be found on people’s porches. On the weekends you can always count on someone to give you updates on a football game. Also, whenever you go to drive somewhere you can always spot a farmer in the field. You can spot the dust flying from the field miles away. However, for me, my October is still filled with cool weather, pumpkins, and football, but I miss seeing the farmers in the fields.

In Ames, I live in a dorm on an all Ag floor, meaning all 54 of the girls on my floor are majoring in agriculture. All of us girls are missing home and harvest time, especially harvest dinners in the fields with our families. So we decided to have a little harvest of our own! We relate things in our daily lives on campus into things that happen on a farm during harvest.

During harvest, farmers’ grain bins get full and they have to haul grain out of them. While at college our grain bins act as our dirty laundry baskets. Every day we have to check to see if they are full or near the top rim. If they are full we have to haul a load down to the laundry room on the ground floor of our dormitory. The only downfall is when we haul our load we get charged, not a paycheck like with grain.

While at college sometimes our classes run through the lunch hour meaning sometimes you get a field lunch. Just like farmers in the fall, we college students either have friends deliver us food or we have to pack lunch. However, even with a college education, we are still not smart enough to save our packed lunch for lunchtime, it all gets eaten before 10 am.

Last but not least, even when I am over three hours away from the farm I am still going on “parts” runs. These parts though are a little different and actually fit in my car. Just like how my family would always call me to quickly go drive to John Deere to get parts. My friends call me to have me go quickly to get something from the store because most of them do not have vehicles at college.

We farm girls on the fourth floor of Maple in Ames sure do miss being in the fields and we are trying our hardest to make the campus a little like harvest season. We hope you have a fun and safe harvest!

~ Kesley Holdgrafer and the 4th-floor gals