These Farm Kids Had the Best School Absent Note Excuse
Being a farm kid means that you rise with the sun and head out to the barn to help with chores before school starts. It also means returning home after school to help with evening chores. This is especially true if the farm kid lives on a dairy farm. After all, dairies operate 24/7, 365 days a year.
When kids headed off to school earlier this year, many farm owners quickly realized how much extra help their farm children were. With harvest approaching, the to-do list grows longer and finding extra farm hands is easier said than done.
This was the scenario the ten Hoeve family found themselves in during last year’s silage harvest. Gerben and Julie ten Hoeve’s oldest son, Ian, begged to miss a few days of school to help chop corn on his family’s 650-cow dairy farm earlier this week.
“It is something he looks forward to all year long,” Julie says.
So, when Julie called her son’s high school to report Ian being absent, she worried about what the school would say. The school’s response eased her mind.
“I will mark Ian absent tomorrow for farm work. Thank you for all you do to keep the U.S. running. I appreciate it,” is what the school secretary wrote.
Ian has his own YouTube channel, Automated Farmer (www.youtube.com/c/AutomatedFarmer), where he highlights videos of working on the family’s dairy farm in Waverly, Iowa. From mowing alfalfa and hauling manure to showcasing their newly complete dairy calf barn, the eager teenager lives and breathes everything farming.
It truly is great when school administration and teachers not only understand, but appreciate all the work farm kids do away from the classroom. Students often can miss school for sports, which teaches valuable lessons. But truthfully, it is hard to duplicate the life lessons learned working side-by-side with older generations on a family farm.
This is why I smiled big when my 16-year-old daughter, Cassie, told her basketball coach earlier this spring that she needed to miss practice/conditioning because “the guys needed her help with chopping rye.”
Despite living in the home of John Deere, with thousands of acres of corn all around us, my kids are the only farm kids that attend their school. So, it delighted us when Coach Pav told Cassie this was the best excuse he’d ever heard and excused her from missing basketball practice.
So, here is to the farm kids whose learning goes far beyond the classroom, it stretches to the corn field and to the dairy barns. Thank you to those teachers and staff who realize to feed a nation takes a team. And often farm kids are a huge part of that team.
